Level 81, big noob here. In arena battles I'm consistently finding that I'm wildly outsped by my opponents.
I'm using Geonosians and regardless of what comp I'm against I am significantly slower than my opponents.
I put a Speed Mod set on Poggle and it made a big difference, but he's still massively slower than all of my enemies. I've checked and no, they aren't using speed sets. Sometimes their power level is lower than mine so surely it can just be that they have higher gear levels, can it?
Am I missing something? It's a bit frustrating to start an arena match just to watch the enemy troops take 2 turns before I can move and kill one of my troops. And god forbid they have turn meter manipulating abilities, in which case I will just sit and watch them attack me over and over and over until all my units are dead before I've attacked even once.
Also, while I'm here why are 90% of my arena candidates significantly higher level than me? I'm level 81, highest gear level is 9 I think? I might have 1 level 10 maybe. No zetas. And most of my targets are level 85 with multiple zetas and some fancy colours around their unit icons.

Hello fellow Clovtards,
Happy Saturday. I have been invested in CLOV for three years now. I initially invested when it was at 17 dollars a share and have now lowered my average cost to 1.66. I currently have 23k shares and my goal is to get to 30k by the end of the year.
Just a little background on me. I work as an Occupational Therapist in home health care. For those that do not know, my job is to ensure the patient (often the geriatric population) is functioning as safely and independently as possible within their home. I work on fall prevention, medication compliance and strategies for medication management as well as fall prevention and balance. I also recommend and order adaptive equipment and other durable medical equipment to enhance a patient's accessibility to their home. Furthermore, I establish home exercise programs for patients to enhance strength and complete caregiver training to enhance the safety and quality of life of patients and caregivers.
When I first heard of what Clover Assistant does I knew it was a brilliant idea. I am constantly on the phone with primary physician offices discussing concerns I have over medications, falls, equipment needs and updating doctors and their staff on patient's function. I have been doing this for 6 years and it is obvious how overwhelmed many of these primary physicians are.
When looking at the healthcare ecosystem it is patently obvious how expensive it is for not only patients but payers as well. Clov has demonstrated an industry leading MCR rate with the use of Clover Assistant.
When looking at competitors, Humana stock is currently down 30% on the year. This looks like it is due to fear of cutting reimbursement rates leading to them having to cut benefits as well as rising member costs. Imagine there was a software technology that has proven ability to lower medical costs, diagnose diseases early for better outcomes leading to less money spent on each patient. Imagine there was software technology that enhances medication compliance leading to less hospitalizations and issues with patients. That technology is Clover Assistant/Counterpart Assistant.
Humana has their back against the wall along with other companies who are going to be looking for ways to reduce MCR and cost in their business. Currently, Humana has nearly 17 million lives under management. They also posted over a 500 million dollar loss in Q4 of 2023 due to "raising medicare advantage costs."
Currently, there are 24 million people with MA plans in the United States. That number is expected to reach 38 million people by 2030. As the United States geriatric population continues to grow it will open up a larger market for CLOV to offer services to on both a MA insurance plan as well as SAAS through other MA plans.
As Clover Assistant/Counterpart Assistant continues to gain members its technology ability will only compound and become greater as the AI technology continues to develop and identify new trends and preventative measures. What I find so important about Clover Assistant/Counterpart Assistant is that it is proactive and not reactive to patient's needs.
Now here is whee I begin to speculate as the SAAS announcement was just made.... From listening to the call with Toy and the CFO Peter it sounds like CLOV is looking to offer counterpart assistant as a PMPM (per member per month) service. This would be a subscription type of revenue. With MA plans currently being held by 24 million Americans what if CLOV was able to tap SAAS revenue from only 5% of the market? That would be 1.2 million members that could be collected for SAAS PMPM subscription revenue. Having millions of members on PMPM basis would bring in some nice revenue with SAAS pricing from wall street. The potential is huge as I see Clover Health a true market disrupter with a unique skill set and service offered.
This is getting long so I'll end it here. But what we have with CLOV right now is a technology desperately needed by MA plans to assist with cost. This could be the perfect storm for CLOV to bring in a lot of revenue on the SAAS side of the business as companies right now are looking for answers to increasing member costs.
I'm a fuckin' degenerate moron though so this is not financial advice but I will continue to go balls deep on this shit.
(edited for spelling errors because I'm a clovtard)

I (23f) am just out of a relationship (1 year and a half) with a 22m. I highly suspect that he was neurodivergent/autistic but he never had a diagnosis or came into contact with any mental health professionals. This relationship has left me feeling slightly traumatised and I just want my own answers. A bit about his character: He was obsessed with music, particularly the guitar, and if I wanted his attention when he was playing I might as well just forget it. Even if I came over for the sole purpose to spend time with him, if he just wanted to play then that’s what I would have to accept. He knew everything about it and I would ask him about this in order to make conversation but he would never, ever take much to any interest in things i liked. If i bought this up, he would be defensive and say that’s not true, I ask you about a lot of things. This is how most arguments felt; my feelings completely diminished. He needed to be alone a lot of the time, but not at the beginning. At the beginning, we both clung to each other spending multiple nights and days with each other but over time, he would say how he needed time alone more often and he just wouldn’t do anything. He had no concept of time. He would constantly ask me what time it is, I asked his parent about this and they said he could never grasp the time. He was highly disorganised and every time he had to work he would be running around chaotically before work organising something on a table, running from room to room in a panic dazed state and in these times, I knew not to speak to him as he would be highly irritable about needing to get organised for work. There were a lot of frustrations for me that I just would let slide as I knew he just wouldn’t understand my point of view. For example, we were on a day out (I had to organise every day out and trip) and he said that we needed to come back as he needed to put the washing on, I honestly just complied as if I protested it would be made to be my problem, and we would come back early from a nice day out so he could put a wash on. I would ask for reassurance, just a good morning or good night text, he would only send them if he remembered and I was not to take it personally. He was obsessed with what other people thought about him to an alarming degree, he cared more about what my friends thought about him if i expressed to them “Yeah, he has ignored me all day, my anxiety is up the left”. He wouldn’t want to address this - just he would be more concerned about them hating him. Anytime I tried to discuss something with him at depth, like how the relationship and he was making me feel, he would ask “What do you mean?” and I would go around in a loop feeling like I was going insane as I’m communicating clearly what I mean. I struggle with anxiety and depression, and while I was going through an intense depressive episode were I was very suicidal, he told me he distanced himself from me as his friend had committed suicide and this has affected him so he had to put himself first. If I decided to take a solo trip, he would respond with “Aw good!” and the only time the relationship would run smoothly was if i didn’t bring up my feelings, emotions, we made small talk, for example, I would tell him if I tried a new Iced coffee place as he would respond well. The relationship ultimately left me feeling completely drained, I loved him and I felt I couldn’t leave him; this was my own problem though. I struggle to leave relationships even if they no longer serve me. He ended up leaving me because I asked to be more included in his life instead of being kept so separate. He told me that I ask for too much. I would be so jealous of his friends relationship, and wonder why ours couldn’t be like that, why I would have to plan everything, feeling it was so one sided all the time and how it just felt like impossible to work. I will not miss the anxiety levels that he gave me. The feeling like I was literally going insane. I felt bad for him and I wanted to take care of him because he was so lost in his life. He would change his mind on whether he was in love with me or not when I asked. Man, I gave so much of myself to try and make it work with him. So much of myself. And I need to get it back.

(I WILL POST A WORD DOCUMENT IN THE COMMENTS WITH THE FULL EXPLANATIONS + GENERAL BUILDS)
Strategy to Clear the Doom Warzone (World Conqueror 4)
Setup:
The generals used, refer below to the build for each general below.
Order of explanation:
Strategy for each mission along with the builds:
1 (Navy Mission):
Generals used: Darlan, Donitz, Horton.
Strategy:
Put excellence medal on Darlan (or the best navy general you have). Put Darlan on the super battleship, Donitz on the other super battleship and Horton on the submarine.

1. Destroy the ship on the top port and lure the other ship from the bottom port. Then you attack both cities to lure out the troops from them and allow new troops to spawn.
2. Destroy all the generals (prioritize this as it gives the most points), Bring down all the fortresses down to 1 hit and hit all of the mines. Do not capture any ports or cities as this can decrease the number of points you receive.
3. While waiting for the time to pass, destroy any unit being spawned. Use the carriers for clean-up and make sure that your generals deal the most possible damage.
4. On the last turn, destroy the fortresses. This mission should be a pretty easy 100% as navy generals are not used in any other mission.
   
5. Infantry mission
   

Generals used: Konev, Schmidhuber, Yamashita.
Strategy:

1. Put excellence medal on Konev as he will be the main damage dealer for this mission. Konev goes on the triple stacked Rocket artillery. Schmidhuber goes on the tank and Yamashita on a spawned Hawkeye force (can put him on special forces as well). Use the laser on the ship far from the shore as it will not approach the shore.
2. With Konev take out the closest general in the first turn, use the tank to clear up low hp units. Then attack the fortress and tank general in the top right corner of the map, kill the general and leave the fortress on low hp. Use the special forces and Yamashita to clear up any units which spawn from the top fortress. Step on any mines (that gives you points)
3. With Konev and the tank, attack the large fortress and other enemy tank general, after one attack to each, attack the ships in the port to allow the next one to spawn. After that go back to attacking the enemy tank general.
4. On the last round, kill any remaining units (you will need to use air force to destroy the ship in the bottom left corner) and try to destroy the fortresses.
   
5. Artilery mission
   

Generals used: Rokossovsky, Leeb and Wainwright.
Strategy:

1. Put excellence medal on Rokossovsky. Transfer all possible medals to the generals you are using. Roko goes on the trip stacked Heavy tank, Leeb on the star level super arty and Wainwright on the mechanized infantry.
2. Use the single rocket arty to attack the bottom left city to lure the enemy infantry forwards. The generals will attack to the right towards the top right city. Destroy the general inside the city and use the mechanized infantry to deal some damage to the fortress. Make a single assault infantry and trigger the mines.
3. After the top right city, attack the bottom left city and destroy the general (do not capture the city itself). After, attack the bottom right city and destroy the general there.
4. Deal damage to the fortresses and kill any units which are spawned (remember to use the nukes that you spawn with, I recommend putting the Airforce medal on Wainwright because of the extra damage).
   
5. Tank Mission
   

Generals used: Brooke, List, Pavlov and Chennault.
Strategy:

1. Excellence medal on List and Airforce on Chennault. The rest of the medals transfer as best as possible. List on the Super tank, Pavlov on the other super tank, Chennault on the triple stacked heavy. Brooke on the super arty.
2. First attack the bottom left city, trigger the mines and then destroy the general. Use Chennault to attack as well.
3. Attack the top right city and destroy the general, keep Chennault close enough that he can go into the city in 1 turn worth of movement. The rest of the generals clear out any troops being spawned and then attack the top left city to destroy the general.
4. Deal as much damage as possible to the fortresses. (You need to attack each one 10 times to bring down their armor value to 0, you can do this over multiple turns).
5. On the last turn, use all the nukes on the fortress which has 0 armor and try to destroy both fortresses if possible.

5 Air force Mission:
Generals: Rommel, Dowding, Helfrich and Tito.
Strategy:

1. Excellence medal on Rommel and Airforce on Dowding. Dowding on the rocket arty, Rommel on the Super tank, Helfrich on the other super thank. Tito on the mechanized inf.
2. With Rommel and Dowding attack the bottom right city, destroy the general and then all of the troops around it. Use Helfrich to defend the city you have and Tito to deal damage to the fortress.
3. After, Rommel and Dowding attack the bottom left city and destroy the general. Bring down the armor of the fortress to 0 and then use all of the nukes on it (remember to keep the general with the airforce medal the one to drop them). With the Tanks defending the city, attack one of the fortresses or troops to deal additional damage.
4. Do your best to clear any units spawned and step on all the mines. Prioritize units over the destruction of fortresses.

6 Final Mission
Generals: Guderian
Build:
Strategy:

1. All the best medals on Guderian. Spawn an elite tank (Lvl 5 super Pershing used by me) and put Guderian on it. Use any remaining generals on the surrounding troops.
2. Attacks the city to the right, destroy the general and deal damage to the fortress, with Guderian go down and attack and destroy Colson and all the troops surrounding him. Destroy the ship in the port.
3. The rest of your units should destroy any troops that spawn at the top fortress and slowly wittle down its hp, but not destroy it completely. You should spawn an assault infantry to step on all the landmines for extra points.
4. Guderian then attacks the bottom left city and damages the fortress. Destroy all the units around and then simply wait for the last round before the end, then destroy the remaining HP of the fortresses. (Using this method I got 2133 points on this mission, while the game says I can only get 1953).

All this combined should be enough to win the Warzone.
Remarks:
Remember to transfer all the medals between missions.
The generals used can be upgraded or changed out for different ones.
This is mostly F2P, the one P2W thing I have is the excellence medal (admittedly very busted for Warzones).

Disclaimer: I do not speak Korean. This is purely translated by machine with a lot of cleanup afterward. With that in mind, I am open to criticism to improve these translations. Enjoy!
​
Chapter 424
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Kwaaaaah!
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Engulfed in searing blue flames, the vortex devoured everything in its path,
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Buildings crumbled - their concrete skeletons exposed and steel frames twisted grotesquely. The ground was littered with the scattered bodies of humans and monsters alike, casualties of the relentless destruction.
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The ultra-high heat obliterated nearly everything, reducing it all to ash and molten remnants.
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Except for one.
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- Blink.
​
Everything but him.
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Beep.
​
​
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- Skill, [One Strike] has been activated!
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- [Qi] has been completely exhausted!
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- Everything comes with a price. Despite serious injuries, you have overexerted your power.
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- Status abnormality, [Exhaustion] has been applied!
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- [Strength], [Stamina], [Agility] have temporarily plummeted!
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​
​
My strength ebbed away, leaving me hollow. The alerts from the System rang incessantly in my ears, while the distant cries of the Skeleton Warlord in my inventory faded to mere whispers.
​
My body felt leaden, as though submerged in icy water. In the frigid solitude of my mind, one thought spun relentlessly:
​
'This was my last chance.'
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Why hadn’t I seen it coming? Why hadn’t I guessed?
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The Arch Lich had warned me; he had been observing me through his network of familiars scattered across the battlefield.
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I should have suspected he'd seen my earlier uses of [One Strike] on the Liches and Death Knights.
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I should have questioned it, even without certainty.
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‘Idiot.’
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A laugh, bitter and mocking, broke from my lips. I had promised myself never to let down my guard, yet here I was, caught in the most critical of errors.
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The lack of options was no excuse. In battle, it is the outcome that counts, not the intent. This was the bitter fruit of my negligence.
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Thud!
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The iron bar I clutched fell from my weakening grasp, clanging loudly as it hit the ground. My legs buckled, forcing me to kneel.
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Head bowed, I was enveloped by a suffocating darkness.
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- You, human. How does it feel to pay the price for your reckless courage?
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Struggling to lift my head, I locked eyes with his fiery red gaze. A hoarse whisper clawed its way through my parched throat.
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"Of course it feels shitty, you damn bastard."
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- It was a fearsome strike. I'll give you that much praise.
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The Arch Lich’s voice dripped with triumph.
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Despite his use of teleportation magic, he couldn’t entirely evade One Strike, resulting in the loss of his left arm. Yet, there he stood, a grim victor amidst the chaos of the battlefield.
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His eyes, a sinister red, gleamed with a cruel joy as he gazed down at me, kneeling like a penitent sinner.
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- I waited until the end. Despite the humiliation suffered at the hands of a human, I endured and persevered. And finally... this body claims victory.
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His cunning was undeniable.
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As I had feared, he had been anticipating One Strike from the outset.
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Previously, I had obliterated Liches and Death Knights with One Strike, replenishing my stamina through leveling up, but he had keenly observed the moment I depleted all my strength.
​
- Do you understand now? This is your limit - the limit of a human.
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Limit.
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That word burrowed deeply into my chest.
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Despite all my struggles, the label of F-rank haunted me. It was a limit I had strived to surpass every day since acquiring the System.
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'Is this really the end?'
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I had fought desperately, for myself and for those I loved, pushing through peril after peril. This was my life: a relentless challenge of transcending my own boundaries.
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"It's not over... not yet."
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The words fell from my lips, hollow and lifeless, as if spoken by another.
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My vision blurred as I raised my eyes to meet the Arch Lich’s gaze.
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- What?
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"It's not over yet."
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A battle to the death concludes only when one side falls and the other stands victorious.
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Until then, the struggle persists.
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As death loomed close, I whispered to myself.
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'Inventory open. Summon.'
​
I thought I had secured one of the spears from my inventory in my grasp.
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But then, I dropped it.
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Clang!
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In that moment, I realized my strength had waned too far to wield a spear, let alone swing it.
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- Hahahaha!
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The Arch Lich’s laughter was grotesque, reveling in my plight.
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Yet, surrender was not an option for me. I would not, could not give up.
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'Open Inventory. Summon.'
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Weapon after weapon appeared in my hands.
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Thud!
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And one by one, I dropped them.
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'Open Inventory. Summon.'
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Thud!
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- Oh, you foolish, stupid human!
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The Arch Lich's mockery rang out.
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Yet I persisted, undeterred.
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Is it courageous to humbly accept one's end? If that is courage, then label me a coward.
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I must survive — I believed this was the highest respect I could pay to the life I had fought so hard to live.
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'Open Inventory. Summon.'
​
It was at that very moment.
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Ding.
​
​
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- [Endurance] greatly increases.
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- The attribute, [Endurance], transforms into [Will]!
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- Those with strong will are not easily broken; they do not fall. They will fight with all their might until the very end.
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- A strong will, at times, can give you the power to overcome your limits!
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- Special effect, [Indomitable], has been activated. Temporarily, all attributes slightly increase, and fatigue is reduced!
​
​
​
A surge of warmth spread through my core, faint yet fiercer than any force I had known.
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It wasn't just a burst of power.
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It was a beacon of hope kindled by my desperation and given by the System.
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With hands shaking, I clasped the cold spear shaft firmly.
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- You...
​
The Arch Lich had noticed the shift too.
​
His gaze, previously dismissive as if I was merely an exhibit, now widened in alarm. Seizing the moment, I mustered all my remaining strength and lunged forward.
​
Time seemed to stretch, elongating the seconds as I thrust the spear towards his looming figure.
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Screeeeech!
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As the spear tore through the air with a sonic boom, I saw it clearly — the Arch Lich’s eyes, twisted into a crescent of scorn.
​
It was a sneer.
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- Blood Explosion.
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Boom!
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The force of the explosion reverberated through my body, sending shockwaves pulsing through every fiber.
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With the last of my strength spent, my muscles seized up. The spear slipped from my weakened grip and impaled the ground at an awkward angle.
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I blinked through eyes filled with blood. In a world now painted a visceral red, something warm and sticky splattered onto my face.
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Drip, drip-drip.
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'...Ah.'
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It was blood.
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My own blood, spurting forth like a gruesome fountain, showered down in a macabre rain.
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As I raised my trembling hands, quivering like aspen leaves in a storm, the ghastly sight of my shredded flesh and starkly exposed bones confronted me.
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Blood Explosion. A literal explosion of blood.
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From the edges of my dimming consciousness, the cries of the Skeleton Warlord pierced the air.
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- ...Human, human!
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How long had he been shouting?
​
I tried to answer, but all that escaped my lips was a grotesque mix of blood and fragments of my organs.
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"Cough."
​
The world spun chaotically before my eyes.
​
I reached out toward the Arch Lich, now just a blur through the blood-smeared lens of my vision, but my hand grasped only air.
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Perhaps it always would.
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- Snap out of it! Aren't you supposed to live?
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Is that supposed to be encouragement?
​
I knew I had to survive, defeat him, and return home.
​
But...
​
'Can I really?'
​
Slowly, the world seemed to tilt.
​
No, the world was stable; it was I who was faltering. My body, ravaged by relentless bleeding and grievous injuries, used the last vestiges of its strength just to keep from collapsing.
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'No. If I fall, it's all over.'
​
I propped myself up on a broken ankle.
​
The faint, thorn-like pain was a grim reminder that I was dying, yet the intermittent shouts from the Skeleton Warlord, sounding through the haze like a broken radio, affirmed that I was still somehow alive.
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- ...Do it, human! Hurry!
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Do it? Do what?
​
- Summon me now...!
​
My eardrums were ruptured, my consciousness slipping; the Skeleton Warlord's shouts were just muffled echoes in my shattered senses.
​
Even if I could have made out his words, there was nothing I could do to intercept the Arch Lich's next move.
​
- You have some interesting possessions.
​
Suddenly, in the Arch Lich's hand was a familiar object.
​
My cherished weapon, White Flames, which had weathered many battles at my side, now blazed in the hands of this usurper. He laughed, his skeletal frame aglow within the dancing flames.
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- I have received a gift far too extravagant. I suppose it should be returned to its owner.
​
The Arch Lich drew back his arm. A potent magic dampened the inferno of White Flames and surged along the spear’s blade.
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- Farewell, noble adversary — or perhaps just a fool who might have been something more.
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Screech!
​
The sonic boom was fleeting, yet the moment stretched into an eternity.
​
I watched, mute, as White Flames hurtled towards me like a meteor. A whirlwind of thoughts raced through my mind, leading me to an inevitable conclusion.
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'I can't avoid it.'
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Then the only end left for me was death.
​
I had survived countless battles over the past seven years, but never had the specter of death loomed so palpably.
​
All I could do was witness its relentless advance.
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'Yes, this is the end.'
​
I repeated the thought with eerie calm.
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Crack!
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The blade of White Flames cleaved through bone as it impaled me squarely in the chest.
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I froze, eyes wide in shock — not pain.
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"...You."
​
- Why, what?
​
Words failed me as I stared into the flickering blue eyes just inches from my face.
​
From a skull no larger than a soccer ball, the Skeleton Warlord had morphed into a towering figure over two meters tall, his voice blunt and confounding.
​
- Don't ask how I was able to get out on my own. Even this commander doesn't understand why.
​
"But why? ...Why?"
​
I asked, facing him.
​
The blade of the spear, protruding from the Skeleton Warlord's back to his chest, halted just a whisper away from piercing me.
​
If no one had intervened, I would have surely died.
​
He had just thrown himself to save my life.
​
- ...I don't know anymore. Damn it. I don't know anything now. Maybe I was enchanted by this sword.
​
Only then did I recognize the identity of the sword in the Skeleton Warlord's hand.
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"Hero's Soul."
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The only relic of Lei Fei, a sword that cannot be wielded by those who are not qualified to be heroes.
​
Yet here it was.
​
Held not by a hero, but by a Named Monster — the Skeleton Warlord.
​
- Hero's Soul, huh? For something made by humans, that's a pretty decent name. No, honestly, it's cool. Although it's too late to swing it properly now...
​
His voice trailed off, and the intense blue light in his eyes began to fade.
​
I understood what was happening to him.
​
'Extinction.'
​
Undoubtedly. Even now, the magical force of the Arch Lich, carried by the blade of White Flames, was devouring the Skeleton Warlord.
​
"You."
​
- Don't say any more. I'm already regretting this as it is.
​
I doubted his sincerity, especially given the soft chuckle that seemed at odds with his typically gruff demeanor.
​
- Human. There's something I'm curious about.
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As the Arch Lich approached and the shoulders of the Skeleton Warlord crumbled, I gave a silent nod.
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"Anything."
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He hesitated for a moment then asked in a soft voice.
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- About what you said last time. Was it sincere?
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"Last time, what... Oh."
​
I suddenly remembered. The way he had been right after Lei Fei's death, pondering his forgotten past.
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And the casual remark I had made.
​
​
​
'Well, I think he was probably a pretty good guy.'
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'...Huh? Are you talking about me?'
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'No. I'm just talking to myself.'
​
'Oh, yes. Right.'
​
​
​
So that's what it is.
​
For the Skeleton Warlord, who had awakened with power from a spirit that had lost all its memories, I might have been the closest thing to a friend he ever had.
​
The simple words I had spoken were like a pebble tossed into the still waters of his heart, causing ripples to spread outward.
​
'What an idiot.'
​
What was that all about? Why go this far over such a trivial thing?
​
A surge of emotion welled up within me, heat flushing my face, but I reined it in. I barely managed to muster my voice.
​
"Of course it was sincere."
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- Yes, I see.
​
At that moment, as the blue light in his eyes flickered feebly, a cold voice cut through the air, heralding the end.
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- Are you finished with your farewells?
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"…!"
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- Bone Explosion.
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Boom!
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Instinctively, I shielded my face with my arms, but the force of the explosion hurled me backward, sending shockwaves pulsating through me.
​
As I staggered to my feet, I witnessed a skull catapulted into the sky, bones splintering and scattering like brittle ice.
​
And then… silence.
​
The Skeleton Warlord had vanished.
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Whoosh!
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[Hero's Soul] plummeted from the heavens, its blade burying itself deep into the earth, gripped by a hand that had not relinquished it until the very end.
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My wife 43F I 45M have been married 23 years and have 4 kid together(all older now). She is a teacher at a tough school and has teacher friends she hangs out with after work on Fridays from 4pm until past midnight even 1am. She hangs out with them this year now 3-4x a week after school. They are mix of singles and married M and F friends. I am always invited to come hang out and her friends know me. I came out one night and had fun.
The next Friday I was planning to go again to hang out with my wife, and she said not this week, that right was a red flag for me right there. She said she wanted alone time w her friends, ok no problem.
Well fast forward to this last night, it was getting late, past midnight, and i was checking in life 360(like find my phone app) to see where my wife was at to see if she was coming home. It was 1:30am and noticed it looked like she was in the parking lot. I was worried she was too drunk to get home and gave her a call.
We have a Tesla and she accidentally answered and i could hear her talking to someone. It was a guy, I could faintly hear what they were talking about. Then I could hear a voice I recognized, a guy S and was one of his friends. I could hear bits and pieces of the conversation. Things i could hear were … “this something you want..” “you can’t compare me with your husband “ i could hear her say “he is great but..” I heard about 8 minutes worth of chatter and going back and forth.
I Immediately ran out the door and started driving in her direction 20 minutes out. I could hear kissing , and moaning and kissing. I was like oh hell no! Then I went off mute and I said you know i can hear you! You answered the phone! She was like “you don’t know what heard” .. “we aren’t doing anything” something like that. I was like, is that F Sean? She said she is coming home let’s talk about this at home. Ok I hung up and went home.
She took an hour to get home, even dropped off S, smh. Got home and I got the “what do you think you hear?” I told her everything. She said she was drunk and didn’t really know what she was doing. It didn’t mean anything, she loves our life, loves me, wants to be with me. That they only kissed and didn’t have sex. That she never has cheated in me before. She said what do you want to do? How do we move forward? I was basically assured it wouldn’t happen again and we kissed and made up as i tried to be calm about it. We even had quick sex(I didn’t want her throwing up on me). After we were done she passed out and slept like a baby.
Well I did not sleep a wink and it’s 6am here , my heart rate has been pumping as i go through the events of tonight. I have looking online on how move forward and if I can forgive and trust her again? I plan to have a calm conversation with her later today. I will also need to see a shrink to talk to someone, because my son just got in a car accident, my dad getting Alzheimer’s and we are moving my parents out of our childhood home. Lots going on. She didn’t have sex w that person, he is gross by the way. She did admit to kissing him. I initially chalked it up as she got drunk and didn’t know what she was doing. But my mind has been spinning.
Is there hope? I still love her. I want to make this work. We have a family. Will I be able to sleep? Will I be able to trust her?

May got out to a lightning start for me, continuing the torrid April pace for a while before cooling off a bit in the back end of the month. That's partially by design, as I jumped into a pair of longer games (one enormously so) which I won't finish until deeper into June, but I've also noticed I'm slowly bleeding gaming time from my evenings. As my kids get incrementally older and the days grow incrementally longer entering summer, an hour that would previously be my own is now deferred to them, and that adds up over the course of an entire month.
Not that I'd trade my kids, you understand.
(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)
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#27 - Contra: Hard Corps - GEN - 8/10 (Great)
It's been fascinating to watch the Contra series evolve over time, and Hard Corps on the Sega Genesis is no different. With no Mode 7 (the SNES' proprietary isometric viewpoint mode) available on the system, necessarily some of the top down content from Contra III would need to be altered or removed, and that begged the question of what would take its place: after all, a return to basic sidescrolling action might feel like a big step down, and we can't have that. So I think I expected Hard Corps to throw in a new wrinkle to keep the formula a bit more fresh. What I did not expect was for it to make three enormous changes.
For one, Hard Corps has four different characters to choose from, and each is actually unique. It's not just the look - where else can you play a cybernetic wolfman? - but they've got different sizes and hurtboxes as well. And while each starts with the same basic low power machine gun, each has a completely different loadout of possible weapon upgrades, ensuring that all four play very differently from one another outside of the fundamentals of movement. To that end, the two weapon toggle of Contra III is expanded in Hard Corps, allowing you to hold all four of your upgraded weapons simultaneously and switch between them at will, which adds a new layer of depth and strategy to the action. Building upon this notion of enhanced player choice even further, the second big change is that the game has branching paths. After the first stage you make a choice that determines where you head for the second level, and then later on you make another choice that creates further divergence, such that the game has four main endings (and a secret fifth!), all with their own dedicated unique stages. It's for that reason possibly the most replayable game so far in the franchise; I myself did a run through of each ending using a different character per run to get a feel for them all.
This leads to the final big change, which is the only one I don't regard a resounding success: the entire game is basically a boss rush. Let's zero in on the main path that I followed on my primary playthrough and add up all mini-bosses and full boss phases. What number might you expect that to come out as? A dozen or so? Well, sorry about your naiveté, but the answer is 43: it's bosses all the way down. This is a MUCH more mentally taxing load than previous Contra games where you could kind of skate through the non-boss sections with good fundamentals. And that's just one of four possible paths through the game! It's absurd! It's also way more fun than it sounds it would be from the description, but I've heard people say Hard Corps is the toughest Contra game and now I know why. I do miss just running and gunning and dropping dudes in one hit before a thrilling finale; it's hard to be properly wowed by a boss fight when that's all you ever see. But nevertheless Contra: Hard Corps is lives up to the legacy of greatness the franchise had up until that point established...just steel yourself mentally for the extensive memorization it requires of you.
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#28 - Ancient Enemy - PC - 5.5/10 (Semi-Competent)
Solitaire is one of those games that nobody really wants to play. It’s a game of convenience and opportunity, only attractive in the absence of something better, which is to say “nearly anything else at all.” Slightly more entertaining are variations on the form, such as Mahjong Solitaire or Free Cell, where certain cards/tiles are locked until the ones above them have been cleared away. These are still just time wasting games for people with nothing else to do, but when presented as a discrete set of challenges there’s a bit more appeal. Do you know they say that every one of the 32,000 numbered games of FreeCell on classic Windows operating systems was supposedly beatable? Did you know a very bored teenage me once decided to see if I could prove it by playing and beating every single unique game of FreeCell in order? I got into the low 30s or so before I questioned what the hell I was doing with my life and wisely moved on.
Well, Ancient Enemy is a game for people with nothing better to do, masquerading as a game that would qualify as "something better to do." It’s an RPG, I guess, but the gameplay revolves entirely around a solitaire variant. You have a deck of “stock cards” numbered 0-9 and start each encounter (“hand”) by flipping the top one. Then on the board you have to collect a card with a number adjacent to the one you’re displaying - 0 serving as a bridge between 1 and 9. Getting a card reveals any card trapped immediately below it and enables that card to be collected as well. If you can’t make a move, you can flip a new stock card over to get a random new number until your deck runs out. Some levels are simple puzzles in this vein, trying to clear all the cards from the board. Most encounters though are battles, where you do the exact same thing, except the color of the card you collect enables you to attack, defend, or cast a spell. So it’s turn-based combat, except each turn is you basically clearing as many cards as you can from the board to juice up your attack or bolster your defense, and that’s about it.
Now, at first, this is actually way more fun than I’m making it sound. I mean, I like solitaire type games for what they are, and the extra mechanics definitely do enrich the experience. You get consumable wild cards, battle boards have bonus cards with instant benefits, you get powers that manipulate the board, new types of cards appear, all good stuff. The problem is that the game completely runs out of these new ideas about a quarter of the way through, at which point you’re just going through the motions until the end, accompanied by a complete nothing of a story that I was confident I had figured out, only to find that the ending was somehow worse than the cliche I’d been anticipating. Thus, the game sadly settled into that exact same niche of games it was supposed to improve upon and supplant. Which I suppose is ok…if you’ve got nothing better to do.
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#29 - Snakebird Primer - PC - 7/10 (Good)
I follow a general rule of always playing game franchises in order, but Snakebird Primer is a unique case wherein the developers of the original Snakebird decided that it was too off-putting to new players, and so they made a sequel that they explicitly wanted newcomers to play first. A "primer" in truth to ease you into the overall Snakebird challenge, as it were. So when I decided to check out Snakebird, I thought all right: just this once I'll do it your way.
So how does Snakebird Primer shake out? Well...it's fine. It's a jaunty kind of puzzle game, with bright colors, friendly art and music, and general good vibes. In each stage you control one or more segmented "snakebirds" and have to get them all to the rainbow portal to complete the level. Sometimes you need to eat fruit to open the portal as well, but that's the entire game in a nutshell. It's a very simple concept, complicated only by the fact that a snakebird that has no body segments touching the ground will fall, and so each stage is a kind of pathing challenge, tasking you to figure out the right order of operations to reach the end. The levels are very well paced and designed if you just go in order: there aren't any hand-holdy tutorials, but new ideas are introduced organically at various intervals, and the challenge always feels reasonable, especially because you can undo any number of moves at will, like stepping through code to find an error.
There is, however, a significant difficulty spike for the last couple levels, which is pretty jarring. And when you add to that the fact that the designer of Baba Is You said he built a lot of his design philosophy around the original Snakebird, I've got to admit I'm a lot less keen on checking that one out. It's in that same realm of "enter these six dozen commands in precisely the right order" that made Baba Is You eventually feel more tedious and frustrating to me than anything else, so I think for now I'm happy to have just played the "lite" version instead.
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#30 - It Takes Two - PS4 - 8.5/10 (Excellent)
When trying to write down a genre for It Takes Two in my tracking spreadsheet, I wanted to put "Yes". It's as though the developers wanted to make a bunch of different kinds of games and, rather than accepting any limitations (self-imposed or otherwise), they just found a way to do it all at once. It Takes Two is a platformer. It's a third-person shooter. It's a puzzle game. It's a rhythm game. It's a racing game. It's a stealth game. It's a boss battling action adventure. It's a minigame collection. It's a romantic comedy. It's an exploration playground. One minute you're flying around on a jetpack chucking Captain America shields at devils and the next you're literally playing a timed game of chess. None of the things that It Takes Two does would be characterized as masterpiece forms of their respective genres, but that's not the point. There's sufficient depth and development of each mechanic that it never feels like a lazy tack-on to check a box - and that in itself is beyond impressive - but it's the sheer number of different ideas tossed into this package that make it truly special.
It's hard for me to even review this game, frankly. Part of that is because I feel a strong bias towards the game for the audaciousness of what it tries to achieve, and for the way it inspires me to keep stretching myself in new ways however I can. But it's also hard because I don't remember the whole thing. It Takes Two is both fresh in memory, having just finished it, and yet far away and mingled in my mind with similar bits of similar other adventures (Tearaway foremost among them). Why is that? Well, I first booted up It Takes Two in May of 2022 as a co-op experience to share with my wife - quite fitting, as it turns out, given the nature of the game's plot of trying to reconcile an embattled couple. We'd only play in smaller bursts of 1-2 hours at a time, but every session we played it felt like we were playing a new, different game. Music to my ears, but much harder on my gaming-challenged wife, who took longer to adjust to each mechanical shift. Pretty soon we were playing less and less often, even as I was playing a game like Tearaway early on that occupied some similar design space in my head. Soon we stopped playing at all. When I tried to suggest resuming this title over the past year, I was repeatedly rebuffed until finally a month ago I managed to wear her down enough that we picked it up again for about an hour a week. So it is that the first half of the game is fuzzy and nebulous to me, even as I recall that I loved playing, whereas the back half is much fresher, and it's nigh impossible for me to separate my wife's frequent frustrations from my own experience - especially since I've been playing on a controller experiencing heavy stick drift, so managing the camera was a nightmare through no fault of the game's.
All that said, how could I not recommend this game? It's best played with two experienced gamers, but the story only fully lands if you play as a couple, so there's a bit of potential for a disconnect there, as I experienced. It's not a perfect game. But it is an incredibly ambitious one that had me routinely grinning from ear to ear, despite the grumblings on the couch next to me. When I pointed out to my wife that we finished the game in May 2024, almost to the day when we started back in '22, she said "They should've called it It Takes Two Years." We're both glad it's over, but I think for very different reasons.
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#31 - Rogue Legacy 2 - PS5 - 7/10 (Good)
Some game sequels try to really shake things up and try something different from the one before. Final Fantasy is probably the biggest and most obvious example of this, but you can also see it in virtually every Super Mario Bros. game, in the Castlevania series, and the list goes on extensively from there. On the other hand, some game sequels treat their predecessors like rough drafts to be perfected. With these, the idea is to take the vision for the previous game, use the increase in time/budget/developer expertise now available, and try to execute on it more completely than was possible before. When a game like this is successful, there becomes almost zero reason to ever play the original game (other than possibly its story), because the new version has replaced it entirely as the definitive experience.
Rogue Legacy 2 is one of these latter types of games. Everything from the first game is pretty much still there (bosses excepted): enemies, basic combat and room design, character classes, traits, progression, etc. It immediately feels like "Hey, I've played this before," yet a cursory look reveals a huge wealth of additional content over the first game. Classes are better differentiated, you get new weapons, more spells, special abilities, new items, new upgrades, new explorable regions, new mechanics, new new new. It truly is a total replacement for Rogue Legacy 1 in this regard, a "go ahead and uninstall that thing forever because we've got it all right here and then some" type of mission statement. I was amazed at how I kept finding ever more avenues of progression and discovery, even many hours into the game, In fact, I never did manage to play as every class, and each class has a variant form as well, most of which I didn't even unlock. It's overflowing with stuff.
And I think that's why it didn't work quite as well for me as the first game: it's all too much. Now there are four different types of currency, all acquired in different ways, all for different upgrade paths. You're always competing with yourself on what to level up between runs because there are too many choices and all of them seem pretty good, but as you're finding your early groove the game throws a big wrench in there: labor costs. While each upgrade has a set gold cost that increases as you level it up, early on the game adds a universal tax mechanic to the entire upgrade tree, making it increasingly prohibitive to spend your money on stuff, and it feels awful. Rogue Legacy 1 had a similar system where each upgrade cost 10g more than the previous, but in the sequel these escalate far more rapidly, to the point where you'll complete a huge run and still feel like you can only afford one or two upgrades that barely move the needle. It's a pure inflationary grinding system meant to pad playtime, and I'm not about that. I played RL1 through multiple New Game + levels, but I was thrilled to beat RL2's final boss and move on because the economy is so frustrating. Other than that though, it's got quite a lot going for it.
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#32 - Undertale - PS4 - 7/10 (Good)
When is some information too much information? Undertale is notorious for its rabid fan community insisting that there is only one "right" way to play the game, and so if you've ever heard of Undertale there's a good chance you already know what that preferred method is: pacifism. Undertale takes a unique approach to the JRPG in two primary ways: first, that defending against enemy attacks is an active system pretty much akin to dodging in a bullet hell game, and second that you almost never actually need to choose the "Fight" command from the battle menu in order to succeed in an encounter. The argument from the community is that you must play in this fully pacifist manner, largely because of a design decision that thoroughly punishes players who do not, only revealed after the game's conclusion. Thus, these players are "helping" curious newcomers by saving them from falling victim to a fairly vindictive design choice that would create a lot of frustration.
The problem with that approach is that Undertale makes it abundantly clear from the outset that you have the option for these alternative combat approaches, trains you on how to use them, and then gives you a positive feedback loop for choosing that direction with your gameplay. Which means the discourse surrounding this game effectively undermines not only the game's own ability to surprise and educate you, but also the authorial intent of that same design decision, which in context is a conscious player decision to go against the grain and suffer the possible consequences of doing so. In short, I wish I'd never heard of Undertale before I played it, as I'm sure I would've had a much better time.
As it stands, Undertale is still a highly creative take on the genre that, despite an aesthetic I didn't care for and writing that leaned a bit too hard at times into "lol I'm so random" territory for my tastes, still managed to get me invested with some of its characters and even make me laugh aloud at times. I was particularly impressed with that aforementioned approach to combat, as each enemy introduced unique hazards to avoid, so fighting a new monster was far more exciting here than in a standard turn-based RPG where the only meaningful question is "How much damage did this whatever move do to me?" So for those reasons I applaud Undertale. Even still, there's a lot of walking back and forth with no major purpose beyond "it was decided the game should be a little bit inconvenient here," adding some unnecessary tedium to the mix. In short, Undertale's a generally good time, but if you want it to be even better, just pretend you haven't read anything I just said.
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#33 - Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales - PS5 - 7.5/10 (Solid)
2018 was a big year for Miles Morales. In the fall he showed up in the PS4 title Marvel's Spider-Man as a major supporting character, and by the end of the year he was stunning cinema audiences in the fantastic Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as the primary protagonist. It's no surprise then that by 2020, with his brand so hot, Sony and Insomniac Games would cash in with a follow-up title to the hit PS4 game with Miles front and center. And for the most part, the game is what you'd expect it to be from that basic pitch: more of the same from 2018, only focusing on Miles' family, his new home of Harlem and its people, and his path to becoming a fully fledged hero in his own right. That's all fine, but here's the problem: all of it has been done better before, and recently to boot. Miles' story of personal growth and family drama was handled better in the Spider-Verse series, even though MSM:MM wisely walks chooses to walk some different beats along the way. "Superhero of Harlem" was done masterfully by Netflix with the Luke Cage series (the first season, at least) back in 2016, and MSM:MM doesn't even try to address any issues beyond the most surface level. And the "more of the same" gameplay?
Well, admittedly that's still pretty good. Web swinging is as fun as ever to the point that there's an XP challenge to web swing at high speed for a full cumulative hour of real time and I caught myself thinking, "Hmm, maybe..." There are fast travel points that unlock relatively early on, but the joy of traversal feels like the main point of the game, so why would you bother? Miles also gets some new Spidey moves related to his bio-electric powers, and these are really fun and impactful to pull off, such that "more of the same" isn't in this case a damning phrase. And yet, it's also distinctly not "more, but better." In order to emphasize your new powers, the goons you fight (now including women for the first time I can recall ever seeing in a superhero game like this) have upgraded their own abilities as well, which means the simple pleasure of chaining big combos is a bit diminished. Maybe this enemy just blocks all your basic attacks and stops you cold. Maybe this one turns the tables to dodge and counter you. Or maybe you're just constantly surrounded by a flood of dudes with guns and rocket launchers and you feel like you never get a chance to press "punch" without being thoroughly punished.
Now add to that the game's relatively brief length and general lack of meaningful activities compared to its predecessor, as well as its truly awful villains and the ho-hum plot that they service, and you've got a title that's decidedly a step back from what came before. Of course, what came before was excellent, so even a step back still lands you in territory that's quite fun to play around with. My 6-year-old summed it up best when he came downstairs to ask me a question one day and caught me playing: "Whoa...how are you Spider-Man?!" Which is to say that Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a game that really makes you feel like a wannabe Spider-Man who hasn't gotten it all figured out just yet. And I guess that's all right.
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Coming in June:

• I've had less time for PC gaming lately for a couple of different reasons, but I'm expecting that to be a temporary thing, and I don't think I'm in danger of failing to finish Mass Effect 3 by the end of June. I didn't realize the version of the game I had included all the DLC. Nor did I actually know what any of the DLC was. So I was quite a ways into the game and feeling great about my progress when I got suspicious that the section I was playing wasn't actually base game content. I looked it up and found that, in fact, about 90% of what I'd played to date was DLC and I'd barely actually started the base game itself. That explains why the main story was taking a while to get off the ground, at any rate.
• Speaking of getting off the ground, my journey through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom began impatiently a few months after release, but I took an extended break from the game and have now spent pretty much all of May continuing my thorough trek through the game world. I'm well over 200 hours into the game and am only several days away from having explored the entirety of the game's map. At which point I believe I'll finally advance the main quest past its initial stage.
• In my review for Rogue Legacy 2 above I mentioned the Castlevania franchise, which I feel I can speak to as a whole given that I've finished nearly every game in the series to date. Unsurprisingly I felt most drawn to the metroidvania style games, so there was a layer of disappointment in exhausting the last of those to discover. Disappointment that will soon be temporarily eradicated when I boot up Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, produced by that same creative mind.
• And more...

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Hi all I recently completed giving my GMAT FE first attempt and scored 665 (V81,Q86 , DI 82) When I had given my first mock I had scored a 475 and was quite disappointed , especially with my Quant score but then decided to power through it and realised I probably needed some mentoring / coaching / test preparation course
I realised while I wanted to be done with the exam quickly, I also had to invest a certain amount of time in order to make right decisions for myself and to address the gaps. I’m outlining my entire journey here and I hope it can help someone else in their prep as well.
Firstly I took a couple of trials of different courses available to see what fits best for me and I actually found the second company that I tried checked all the boxes I was looking for. They had a self paced course , a good question bank and plenty of mocks to practice and I really found their content very helpful and detailed.
For verbal , I realised through both the course and practice that, what was integral for me was to be able to visualise the argument in case of CR and the passage in case of RC. When I started immersing myself in the scenario and imagining what would happen, it became easier to understand what was the assumption or what could explain a paradox or strengthen a scenario. This is especially important for Hard / Medium- Hard questions because it feels like the answer choices are very close and a lot of times we are able to narrow down to last two answer choices but still not get the correct one. In the beginning i wasn’t too concerned with the time , I was more worried about understanding the logic and getting my answer correct and sometimes it took me lot longer to solve the question but ultimately i think that’s what helped me get the accuracy as well. Once I was comfortable with the visualisation, it became second nature and naturally the speed also improved .
Coming to quant, I am from a tech background so it wasn’t the concepts that were a challenge or even the actual problem solving. Common faltering point for me was missing to read what the GMAT question language was actually asking. I would miss on Must be True / Could be True , if there was a hidden constraint saying the given number is a positive integer and I would take 0 also in the solution… common things like that and once I started paying attention to the question language and not be in a rush to solve , it greatly made a difference in accuracy. Maintaining an error log helped me greatly here.
Lastly Data Insights , this was the most dreaded section for me but I think once I was done mastering verbal and quant , DI is actually pretty easy , because the level of difficulty for the math part is much easier and same goes for non math question also. I would say that the calculator is tempting and initially I was using it very often to solve but this was leading to me spending 7-8 minutes on a question sometimes. I realised that the GMAT isn’t testing calculations so I need to be vary of using calculator , instead most questions test your inference skill , so I tried to formulate an approach and infer what I could from the data given. This helped me solve the question correctly in the prescribed amount of time. Paying attention to the data and the question stem and drawing inferences from data helps a lot before just jumping into solving.
I attempted 3 mocks in the 10 days before giving my final exam and my scores were as follows Mock 1 : 615 ( prep company ) Mock 2: 565 ( prep company ) Mock 3: 605 ( official mock 2)
With the mock scores it did not seem very likely that I would be able to get 90 percentile but here are my three biggest learning’s which I think is crucial for anyone going to give the exam and wants to see an improvement from mock scores

1. Make an error log and use that to see patterns. I was extremely detailed while making my error log and I used that to derive a check list of things where i commonly falter and which I should revise day before the exam
   
2. There is no point in revising till the last moment or doing questions till the last day. It is more important that you are able to get rest and go with a calm peaceful mind so you can process information while giving exam. A lot of people giving the exam are out of the student phase and it has been years since you sat and gave an exam for 3 hours , so go with a well rested mind and body.
   
3. Work on building mental resilience and strategy to attempt the paper through your mocks. Start with strongest section first so you feel comfortable while giving the paper. Take it one question at a time , one section at a time. I had started with verbal but I was unable to complete it due to nerves, and normally that would send me into panic and jitters but I learnt through my mocks to stay focused and calm and just put all my attention to next section , this helped me finish both DI and Quant with a couple of extra minutes to spare.
   

My entire journey took me around 5 months and it was filled with ups and downs. With a full work schedule and household responsibilities to manage , it does feel overwhelming at times. Especially when your mock scores doesn’t improve , it is very easy to get discouraged but I kept reminding myself why I was doing it. The day of the exam , I just went with the mindset that this score will tell me where all I need to put more effort in and I wasn’t focused on getting a score , rather my focus was on solving the question to the best of my ability. I think this change in my mentality also contributed to my score and I would recommend the same to anyone who is attempting the exam.
To anyone who read till the end of the, thanks a lot and I hope you were able to gain some helpful insight.
Good luck to anyone who’s giving the paper. I know it’s hard , but you can do it 😊

Guys... I found a phone on the ground it has 3 cracks with some black liquid coming out. I'm hoping to find meg employees on this subreddit that can help me. I'm on level 1 stuck in a room with a skin stealer outside. I hope it's not a real person because then the real skin stealer would kil# th## # h##e y## f### m# s##n ##################################

(Skip to the end to see the informal poll and avoid the anxious ramble)
My first year of teaching was a disaster from beginning to end. I know most teachers’ first year is the worst and you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing bc you don’t know what you’re doing and there’s so much pressure. Etc.
Even beyond the more typical misery was a lot of personal life tumult and turmoil and trauma and chaos going on, including a debilitating (somewhat unofficial but more or less confirmed based on symptoms) diagnosis I have to live with now without having much insight as to prognosis. And a lot more discomfort involving loved ones.
Reflecting on this year is almost as traumatic as the experience itself. I had next to zero support, with the exception of about 2 weeks under the guidance of an amazing master teacher. But that was it. The morale at the school was beneath rock bottom. Every single day was worse than the day before. I tried to go in positive. But with very few exceptions, everyone was miserable and no one tried to hide it. People were directly rude to me, condescending, sarcastic, openly comtemptful, angry, hated the kids and cursed about them and screamed at them (“shut UP!!!!” “MORON! GET OUT!” “You’re STUPID, I should have LET that student hit you!” “I woulda hit you in the face too if you’d done something like that to me!” Just a few quotes off the top of my head, not to mention one slamming the door on my sped teacher’s face along with our sped students, which the principal did absolutely nothing about despite his friendship with the sped teacher). Discipline/behavior was an absolute JOKE. I think I’ve painted an accurate picture of how awful it was.
I guessed my way through everything but did my absolute best and figured everything out. A bit of productive struggle and hey, by the end of the year I was an expert in a lot of things I knew nothing about months earlier. My rapport with my students was great, to give myself some credit. They loved me. Albeit too much—they thought of my softness as a doormat. They felt free and liberated in my classroom bc I seldom raised my voice. Unfortunately what they’re accustomed to is only listening when yelled at, and as a new teacher, I did not have better tools to manage classroom behavior, beyond building relationships, and my class was a bit out of control. It became all about getting through the curriculum through the 3rd quarter.
My benchmark scores went up, which was pretty amazing considering everything. However at the very beginning of the 4th quarter my principal informed me that he wasn’t renewing my contract and that he would never let me teach 4th grade again, that “I don’t know if I would ever let you teach any grade level, maybe try pre-k—you get nap time and someone is always with you.” So he wrote off my career as an elementary teacher after just a few months of teaching. I could go in about how he had covertly brought in his very own former student (who had only recently began prepping to take the Praxis) as my replacement, unofficially “employed” but “technically not.” But I don’t want to get into that, as furious as it made me. I just stopped writing lesson plans bc no way was I gonna train her for free when they gave me zero support through the year.
I had way more bad days than good—the kids and my para got me through it! I was grateful for that. They were wonderful and I miss them. But I was made to feel incompetent. I slowly started to realize that him booting me was a blessing in disguise, especially after learning how many students I’d have had next year. And some other changes that won’t be helpful.
There’s also a lot of BS going on in our state regarding education. So things are not exactly going to get easier. Alas, I need a paycheck and I went to school and passed praxis to be a teacher. I’m 44 so it’s not like I have many options.
But I did actually finally get an interview at a library last week! I’d applied for 6 years and never got so much as a phone call. Unfortunately it’s part time and drastically less pay (which is honestly pitiful). And it would take me years to make close to what I make now. And I was just getting into certification so as a teacher I’d get a $10k raise. Buuut I really don’t want to miss a rare opportunity to get my foot in the door at the library!
I’ve got dozens of job offers in my district. I had 6 principals call me and email me yesterday alone! I know I could make decent money. But I don’t want to turn down the library job, which absolutely would not cut it financially.
I forgot to mention a key component of this dilemma: Teaching is extremely overstimulating to me. I’m autistic/adhd. This was part of my misery. Between my loud a/c units in my classroom and the kids noises desks constantly clanking and kids constantly talking over me etc etc etc, and the awful attitudes of most coworkers and all the other stuff, I barely made it to the end of the year. I know most of us actually feel that way, but my day to day in the classroom is beyond awful. I cried constantly, I had panic attacks going in every single morning during the 4th quarter after years of reduced panic attacks, most days I felt frustrated, and some days I even had moments where I could not even talk anymore and had to go home (these days where at least one kid told me to “Shut the f- - k up b-tch!” or fought or both plus admin treated me like crap and I had enough). Not to mention spending entire weekends and weeknights writing lesson plans, creating lessons, grading, entering grades, etc etc etc. All I could think about every day was how much I wished I could get a library job!! I even had a student tell me I would make a better librarian than teacher. She was excited when I got the call about the interview lol.
But what if my next school is better? What if I go in knowing expectations and having a better idea of how to do things and how to establish classroom procedures, what if it’s better? What if it’s stupid to give up on a better paying job? I’d love to get my MLIS but realistically, there aren’t very many librarian jobs and moving isn’t an option. The day to day would almost be worth the paycut. I’ve contemplated doing both, just for one year. I know that sounds nuts, and it’s risky, but what’s more important? My paycheck, or my mental health?! I honestly don’t know! I need the money. But I also need a peaceful environment.
Here are my options:
A) Substitute w library for almost the same money as I made uncertified, which was barely enough
B) Library + teaching full time bc you’re insane and unrealistic
C) Library only + MLIS bc it’s your dream & short term paycut is worth long term happiness.
D) Girl, are you insane?! Teaching only bc it’s the smart move!

1. Divide and Conquer - 4/5 (Slapper intro. Pretty good for a pilot episode, but it felt like they rushed into character drama a little too quickly. Like, I only JUST now met Robin and Cyborg for the first time, so this big breakup doesn't really hit as hard as I imagine it could had it been a later episode. The animation of this show is very fun and different from typical action cartoons, though. Stuff like the characters turning into chibis and going horrendeously off-model for gags is great stuff.)
2. Sisters - 3/5 (Immediately more character conflict and drama. I'd say this one works a little better, but again, I only really now just met Starfire, so there's not a hugely established friendship between her and the Titans enough yet. On the other hand, perhaps that's for this episode's benefit, as it's about her feeling replacable, which would not be very realistic after having been established as BFFs for several seasons. And I did think her and Robin's chat was really sweet, so whatever. Also, Blackfire is just a color swap of Starfire. Sunny Tennyson much?)
3. Final Exam - 4/5 (So this episode was the first to air, but is not the "real" pilot. Strangely enough, it would almost have worked better as a pilot, since it introduces the characters in their HQ immediately followed by showing how they work as a team. The H.I.V.E. aren't the most interesting villains but Gizmo was pretty amusing. What was with the lighting in the scene where they get out of the water though? Looked strange.)
4. Forces of Nature - 4/5 (Thunder's Sonic eyes is freaking me out. Please separate them... Anyway, decent episode, even if it's mostly just Thunder and Lightning wreaking havoc and getting moral lessons from Beast Boy.)
5. The Sum of His Parts - 5/5 (Fixit. Wow, clever name. Sarcasm aside, pretty great episode. It's interesting to see Cyborg's abilities explored, and the eerieniess of Fixit about to forcibly make him a full robot was highly engaging. Although while that IS the main story, the majority of this episode is spent with the other Titans fighting Mumbo Jumbo for some reason. Not that it's back, since I liked the zany wackiness of it. But it definitely didn't need take up that much time. Also, he briefly became a Canadian from South Park.)
6. Nevermore - 4/5 (Thunder and Lightning, Mumbo Jumbo, and now Doctor Light? So far this show has had really lame villains. Not that it's a huge detriment, because unlike other superhero cartoons, the focus in most episodes seem to be more on the inner workings of the Titans themselves as opposed to whatever villain they're facing, so I guess they just pick goofy ones to jumpstart the actual plots. Which in this episode was pretty amusing. Raven's a lot more mellow than her appearance would let on. I thought she would nearly murder Cyborg and Beast Boy for breaking into her room, but she was just slightly upset. Oh and, uh, what was up with intro being in Japanese?)
7. Switched - 4/5 (Just as I mentioned the villains being "lame" in the last episode, I thought Puppet King was pretty interesting. He's not like, compelling as a character or anything, but I found the puppet schtick fairly amusing to watch. As for the actual story, while "body swap" is not the most original idea for these kinds of shows, I still found it endearing how Raven and Starfire learned about one another. But the fact that they still keep their voices makes me go grrr.)
8. Deep Six - 3/5 (There's that Japanese intro again! Apparently it's used for episodes that are more comedic, while the English is for the "serious" ones. Guess I'll see if that assessment holds up under scrutiny. So this is mostly an underwater episode, which, while not a bad setting by default, feels pretty uninspired when it's nothing but blue backgrounds and rocks. Raven horning for Aqualad sure was a sight to behold, though. Felt a bit out of character.)
9. Masks - 4/5 (Wow, Red X was Robin? No way. It's not like they had the exact same voice or anything. Anyway, as good as this episode might be, it's really just some setup for Slade's schemes, which is really only vaguely hinted at whatever it is. As a result, I don't really have much to say. Starfire's lecture about Robin not trusting them was a bit "wha" though, because, yeah, if they knew Red X was Robin, they would've held back, and it would not be convincing.)
10. Mad Mod - 3/5 (Sheesh, this episode hurts my eyes. It's a funny one, though. And it has the Japanese intro, so I guess that fact about it was true. It's nothing but the Titans chasing some Brit for the entire episode. 20 minutes of pure zaniness. And Mad Mod was a pretty amusing gag villain. I also really liked the song "K2G" that played during that Scooby-Doo parody montage.)
11. Car Trouble - 3/5 (Gizmo drove away with Cyborg's car JUST as he arrived to confront the guys who initially stole it. He would have been right in the vicinity of it, how did he not notice it driving away? LOL. Also why do the two crooks calmly tiptoe around and vaguely say they "lost it" instead of just "some guy drove away with it right behind you like 10 seconds ago!".)
12/13. Apprentice - 5/5 (Slade merely wanting an apprentice is a bit of a confusing motivation. Like, for what purpose? Once he's fully molded Robin, what does he intend to do next? Take over the world? Not that it matters, since the conflict of Robin having to betray his friends to save their lives was thrilling enough. Although part 2 is obviously the better half, because the first is mostly just setup for that. Robin also makes a sick Batman reference, but can't directly mention him because of the Bat-embargo. LOL. Side note, the effect of the probes being the characters becoming...orange with a buncha circles wiggling around them was odd.)
14. How Long is Forever? - 5/5 (Robin just brooding in front of the speakers was funny. LOL. Anyway, the way time travel is handled here is confusing. I suppose it always is, but here it seems to function so that during the period Starfire was travelling 20 years, she simply did not exist during them. But she came back to the past in the end, meaning historically, she always returned. So instead of time travel looping around itself, I guess in this series when you travel, you're just gone. And if you return, the timeline you go back to will be a completely different one. That aside, it was neat to see the future Titans, although sheesh my guy Beast Boy aged horribly. And I find it hard to believe the entire city would become a dystopia like this, considering the Titans aren't the only heroes around.)
15. Every Dog Has His Day - 5/5 (Pretty solid for a zany comedy episode. Beast Boy becoming a dog to get bitches (pun intended) was funny. And the whole schtick of the Titans mistaking an actual green dog for him lent itself to a lot of good comedy. The reveal that that the dog is actually intelligent and can speak sort of "ruins" what made that aspect funny in the first place, but it doesn't affect the episode's quality or anything, so that's just a nitpick. Soto was pretty freaky though. Reminded me of Tiny from Ben 10.)
16. Terra - 4/5 (Yikes, Terra is scrawny. She's like a walking stick. I guess she has earth powers, although it's not really explored how or why. Though, at this point in the show, I've obviously learned that stuff is not something it prioritizes. Anyway, this episode is very good, but it's mostly just introduction to Terra and then a teaser that she is Slade's new apprentice victim. I'm interested for where that goes, but I don't have much else to say about this one specifically.)
17. Only Human - 4/5 (Not to go all Facts & Logic:tm:, but humans also have a limit to which they can use their muscles, so on a technical sense, Cyborg's conflict in this episode doesn't make much sense. Especially since he exceeds 100% by the end anyway, showing it was always possible. Not to diminish the story or anything, because I did find his conflict around it genuinely engaging. And the moment when he rises up to the challenge to actually beat Atlas is obviously very cathartic and rewarding. But also LOL that Atlas picked a beef with Cyborg over losing in a video game.)
18. Fear Itself - 4/5 (Here I spent the entire episode expecting the "obvious" reveal that everything scary that happened was a prank by the Titans to prove to Raven that she can be scared. Guess I was a little overconfident in that since it turns out she was just accidentally doing it herself.)
19. Date with Destiny - 4/5 (Hey, it's Spider-Man. I mean, Fang. That was a pretty freaky character design. Just a guy with a huge spider as his entire head. This episode felt like it ramped up the wacky animation to 11, particularly with nearly every motion Kitten makes. And that bit with Starfire's mouth falling into the punch stuck out, too. That aside, pretty cute episode. Starfire's jealousy is amusing.)
20. Transformation - 3/5 (Does the Titan Tower only have bathroom? That's ridiculous. It's huge! Anyway, not to complain about power inconsistency or whatever, but Starfire being able to instantly fly several hundred thousand kilometers away from Earth pretty much instantly, not to mention be able to breathe in space is a bit excessive. She's not Green Lantern... That aside, this was alright. It's neat to find out more about Tamaranians, but Starfire has already learned the "my friends will like me no matter what" lesson before.)
21. Titan Rising - 4/5 (Why is Raven so pissy at Terra? Like, I know she's moody and has a low temper, but raging at someone just trying their best? A bit out of character. That said, I still enjoyed the rivarly. I like Terra on the team. It's fun that they're expanding the roster.)
22. Winner Take All - 3/5 (Why does the Master of Games need people to lose a battle before he can absorb them and their powers? Why doesn't he just do it to all of them on the spot? I found it funny that Beast Boy lost the first round. When the episode began I was expecting some epic final battle between the three main characters. But nope, he just loses and is gone for the rest of the episode.)
23. Betrayal - 4/5 (That was a bit of a rushed betrayal. Terra is introduced in one episode, instantly leaves within the same one, makes a big comeback 4 episodes later, and betrays them in the very next while it's treated like some devastating loss to the team. Well, there is the game episode in between. But also she isn't even in that save for a silent cameo in one shot in the end, so that barely counts! That said I still liked the emotional beats of the story from Beast Boy's perspective and such, so I'm not hating on how this was done. I just think this could've meant more if she actually was a member of the Titans for the episodes leading up to this betrayal. On a lighter note, I liked Beast Boy's theatrical scenarios of how he should have asked her out.)
24. Fractured - 3/5 (So in-between the previous, serious, dramatic episode, and the upcoming 2-part finale which will obviously be about Terra, they felt they needed an episode about some annoying imp doing zany nonsense. Not that the show is a stranger to that stuff, but this wasn't nearly as charming as Mad Mod.)
25/26. Aftershock - 4/5 (Pretty standard "epic finale" fare, but obviously it's good because I liked this Terra arc, as rushed as it may have been. Her turning on Slade and even being the one who ends up killing him was pretty thrilling stuff. I didn't think they'd actually go that far, considering he's like the main villain of the series. But while that final battle between Beast Boy and Terra was pretty great due to the resonance and such it contains, I feel like the episode took up a lot of time having the Titans fight various miscellaneous characters leading up to it, that just wasn't as interesting. Side note, Raven and Terra just being colored completely brown to simulate being muddy stuck out to me. I don't know why. Mainly because most shows would draw wiggly lines to simulate the muddiness, not just one blank color.)
27. Deception - 4/5 (I know this show is episodic so stuff like this is bound to happen, but it is a bit eyerolling that characters seem to just learn the same lessons over and over. Like in this episode, Cyborg is beating himself up over being a cyborg, but by the end he accepts himself the way he is. A lesson he has learned in 2 episodes prior to this already. Not that I didn't think it was well done. His chat with Starfire was sweet, and the whole thing about him being undercover was entertaining too, so it's not much of an issue.)
28. X - 4/5 (So some guy steals Robin's Red X costume and takes up the mantle... But he also conveniently sounds exactly like Robin? Sure, because THAT makes sense. For the most part this episode is just baiting you into wanting to know who Red X is, but then NEVER answers it. Pretty rude. Nevertheless, it was still interesting. Also Professor Chang's design reminds me of Inspector 13 from Ben 10.)
29. Betrothed - 3/5 (Titans just casually flying to another planet like it's a mere road trip. OK. Is The Batman funding this or what? Also, that scene of Robin outside the spaceship made me LOL. Anyway it's interesting to see Tamaran thoroughly explored upon and such, but it's a bit absurd that every single person on the planet wears basically the exact same outfit.)
30. Crash - 4/5 (Cyborg's cybernetic features are confusing. Firstly, how could a digital virus affect his brain, which is clearly a biological component? Second, how and why are there red blood cells flowing in the "veins" of his mechanical parts? Nitpicking logic in a goofy joke episode aside, this was great stuff. I liked that they had to reluctantly get Gizmo to help, and Cyborg going nuts was just entertaining in its own right. I think the interior of his cybernetic parts were interestingly designed, and Beast Boy as an amoeba is just absurd but fun. Although it's inconsistent that he's able to talk while in that form, since he can't when he's any other animal.)
31. Haunted - 5/5 (This was pretty grim, but very thrilling. Given Slade was established as like the main villain of the show, even though it seemed obvious he was imaginary, I kept asking myself if he was actually real or not to come capacity, since I doubt the series would get rid of its main villain that easily. And well, they DID imply somebody else activated the hallucination chemical from the mask, so, like, yeah, he's clearly coming back. That said, if it was all in Robin's head, how did he get all those bruises and rips in his clothes? By punching the air? And why did Beast Boy have a cold in this episode? I guess they needed some comedic relief so it wouldn't be too grim for Cartoon Network.)
32. Spellbound - 4/5 ("Kardiak, you're under arrest". I get it. Because he is a heart. Pretty amusing. Anyway, yikes, Beast Boy sure was mean for NO reason. But the way they made up in the end with Raven even joining him and Cyborg's game of "stankball" was cute. As for Malchior, well, I thought he was a girl until he spoke.)
33. Revolution - 3/5 (Pretty much a rehash of the first Mad Mod episode. He has the Titans trapped in a maze of illusions and they chase him around and defeat him. Which I get is the whole gimmick since he's just a joke villain, so yeah. This was good, but not AS good. The pop-art backgrounds were pretty cool, and I liked how the British flag was the sky in the background the entire time. Plus, British Beast Boy was funny. The "message" about patriotism, democracy or whatever, felt a but muddled.)
34. Wavelength - 3/5 (I guess Brother Blood is growing to be Cyborg's arch nemesis or something. This was pretty average, so I barely got anything to say. Aqualad asks for help, so they take down Blood's underwater weapon and...Yeah. But I liked Bumblebee, and her fight scene with Cyborg had a lot of funny visuals. The bit where he shuts the door on her was amusing too.)
35. The Beast Within - 5/5 (This was great. You'd think it would be fairly predictable to tell a werewolf story with Beast Boy, but the execution really makes it work. Yeah, it's obvious he's acting strange because of the chemicals from the beginning. But his gradual shift from acting macho, to asshole, to picking a physical fight with Raven for NO reason was interesting because of how bizarrely out of character it is. Especially when his "beast" form took the Raven beef to the next level. But on top of that I especially enjoyed the twist that the Adonis guy from the beginning was a second werewolf, and the actual culprit. Robin seemed awfully quick to immediately lock Beast Boy away or straight up murder him though. For a guy who himself was blackmailed into being evil, you'd think he would be more considerate to other possibilities.)
36. Can I Keep Him? - 3/5 (This was alright. Pretty simple concept for a comedy episode is all. Beast Boy fosters a giant maggot and then it becomes bigger and dangerous. Kind of amusing how Starfire got more attached to it in like a day than Beast Boy did while hiding it for months. As a sode note, I liked the design of Rancids robot dog and dinosaur.)
37. Bunny Raven... or ...How to Make A Titananimal Disappear - 3/5 (Pretty good for a zany episode. The Titans as animals were amusing designs, and Beast Boy becoming a lamp instead was funny. Mumbo's song was catchy.)
38/39. Titans East - 4/5 (I like the concept of Titans East, although the only member I find particularly interesting is Bumblebee. I'm always fond of shrinking abilities for the potential practical uses that often go unacknowledged. She never really does anything with it besides shoot some lasers in the bad guys face, though. Speedy and Aqualad are kind of generic, and Más y Menos are just gag characters, so yeah. Cyborg's conflict here was pretty interesting, but the way he gets decapitated piece by piece was pretty brutal. But him sticking it to Brother Blood was pretty awesome, and I liked the sweet ending where he decides to stick with the Titans.)
40. Episode 257-494 - 3/5 (Steve Irwin gets mauled by a bear. Anyway, this episode is decent, but it's just an endless stream of references to other things, many of which I am not familiar with, so even as a comedy episode, a lot of the jokes don't work very well. That woman from the lame soap opera was still with Cyborg in the real world by the end because THAT makes sense. But it was funny.)
41. The Quest - 4/5 (Yeah, it was pretty obvious the old lady was the great master. Robin going through challenges was pretty entertaining though, but that snake one... He won by merely grabbing the snake? Sure, okay. The rest of the team dressing up as and pretending to be Robin was probably the best part, especially even Raven joining in.)
42. Birthmark - 4/5 (Welcome back, Slade. This was a very thrilling episode. Really just has you asking tons of questions. Like how is Slade back, why is he targeting Raven now, etc. But also, it was interesting how this potrays Robin and Raven as having a very close friendship. I mean I guess all the Titans are good friends, but these two haven't been explored as a duo at all, so it was interesting, if not a bit awkward.)
43. Cyborg the Barbarian - 4/5 (Silly concept, but I like it. Though given how time travel has been established in this show, Cyborg can't really do anything to affect the future, because everything he will do has already happened in the past. I like the design of the demon... Thingies)
44. Employee of the Month - 4/5 (I found it interesting how this acknowledges Beast Boy a physical task, as opposed to Raven or Starfire's breezy levitating. Beast Boy working at a meat shop itself was pretty funny, and the Tofu villain in the end sells the whole thing for me. LOL.)
45. Troq - 3/5 (The racism episode. The fact that we know what word "troq" is supposed to represent makes it very weird how often we see it used. I mean imagine an episode where they used the actual word this much... Yeah. I think this is pretty well done and what not in terms of being sweet and emotional, especially Cyborg's talk with Starfire and Robin instantly changing his mind on Val-Yor once he finds out. But the action plot they wrapped all this around didn't really have me hooked, and it's a pretty big chunk of the episode.)
46. The Prophecy - 3/5 (This is neat and all, but for the most part it really feels like nothing but setup for a grander plot than something to stand on its own. So while I'm sure the context of this will make the season finale more rewarding, this is just okay. I did get a kick out of Raven pulling up Slade as he was trying to leave just to jerk him around a little.)
47. Stranded - 4/5 (This is a fun episode, but it has one of the worst common TV tropes of all time; Character refusing to explain an easily explainable situation this creating conflict because of misunderstanding. I mean, yeah, Starfire DID describe what a "girlfriend" was, but then she just described what could also be platonic. Robin could have easily explained to her that there's a difference between platonic and romantic.)
48. Overdrive - 3/5 (I like the Billy Numerous theme music, but that's about it really.)
49. Mother Mae-Eye - 3/5 (Well, funny at times, I'll give it that. But ehhhh. Yeah, I don't know, there isn't much to be said here. Liked the scene where Robin spiked up his hair.)
50/51/52. The End - 5/5 (Yeah, pretty epic. The Titans using Raven's power was also cool. I was hoping to finally see Slade's face when his mask was knocked off, but I suppose a creepy half decomposed skeleton is also interesting... Don't really understand Trigon's motivation for, well, all of this though. He wants to take over the Earth and get rid of all life on it, just so he can sit in a giant chair and relax? I mean, the real story here is supposed to be about Raven, so I know it doesn't matter, but that's pretty thin for what's supposed to be the most threatening villain of the show to date.)
53/54. Homecoming - 3/5 (I love specific character focused episode where we see something more personal to them, but Beast Boy's background isn't that interesting and most of the team besides Elastigirl weren't very interesting. But I do find Negative Man's powers cool. Brain is a pretty cool villain too, I love his voice, really intimidating vibes. How are any of the Doom Patrol alive after what happened though? Never explained)
55. Trust - 4/5 (An entire Hot Spot episode? Interesting, since I always find it fun when shows divert from the main cast. Overall fun, but that ending was pretty frustrating though. Hot Spot was so obviously Madame Rouge!)
56. For Real - 3/5 (I do like the Titans East, but this was disappointing. I was hoping for more of a genuine episode in their own town, seeing their feats as a team and friends, as opposed to goofing off with Control Freak. Also one of the villains Brain had lined up two episodes ago is in jail here?? Were Más y Menos permanently translated to English for the audience to understand them? I mean I guess I prefer it, since having them two speaking what sounds like gibberish to the rest of the team makes it hard for them to appear as genuine friends, especially since they're mostly attached to each other as opposed to the whole team.)
57. Snowblind - 4/5 (Already loved Red Star and then he's immediately killed before my eyes!! Whyyyy! I was hoping he would gain control of his powers and aid the Titans. How has he still been getting tanks to fill up with radioactive liquid for so many decades though? And that's a pretty small room for two tanks a day over the span of decades.)
58. Kole - 3/5 (This entire season so far the Titans have just been around the world, given last time they were in what appears to be Russia, and now it's somewhere in Scandinavia. It's been an interesting change of pace, sure, but this episode wasn't terribly interesting. They meet some caveman with a little girl, Dr. Light is up to no good, etc.)
59. Hide and Seek - 3/5 (Bobby turning out to be real was a pretty fun "twist". Got dragged out for a while though.)
60. Lightspeed - 4/5 (Another non-Titan focused episode. Kid Flash is randomly horning on Jinx because why not, I guess? This Jinx redemption came out of absolutely nowhere, given how little we've seen of her prior. But Kid Flash is fun, so whatever.)
61. Revved Up - 3/5 (This episode is neat, but given how they are racing for the entirety of it, the constant action was pretty exhausting to sit through. Why did Raven sneezing and Starfire saying the Tamaranean equivalent of "bless you" inform all the villains they are Titans though? Also, infuriating we never got to see what's in the briefcase.)
62. Go! - 5/5 (Love seeing the origins of the team, though it's pretty oddly convenient that these 5 superpowered people (well 4 with powers) just so happened to stumble upon each other, same day, same time, same situation. I imagine shortly after this they occasionally stumbled upon each other trying to fight the same bad guy every so often and decided to start a team. Which would have been more realistic for their first interactions, not all 5 meeting at once. Pretty on the nose Batman reference but they still absolutely refuse to mention Batman.)
63/64. Calling All Titans!/Titans Together - 5/5 (Why is Beast Boy climbing up the mountain as a goat instead of just... Flying? This was quite the epic episode, I enjoyted the intensity of seeing nearly every hero be ambushed separately by different villains. It's a bit strange for the final part to mostly be from Beast Boy's perspective, and with the strange heroes he ends up meeting. I was expecting to see how the rest of the Titans made it to the Brotherhood of Evil base, but it's probably better this way, since it leaves it up to imagination, and it doesn't really matter. Seeing the brain finally defeated when all heroes went into battle was satisfying. Jericho's powers were pretty cool.)
65. Things Change - 4/5 (The amount of quiet and awkward scenes with that sad music was... Well, very strange. The whole Terra thing is a bit weird like, sure, if someone you don't know jumps up to you, acts as if they know you and tells you you've gotten amnesia, you'd think they were insane. But Beast Boy surely has photo proof? Or if not, he could get testimony from the rest of his team?? No??? It doesn't have to jog her memory back, but at the very least she'd realize the truth and know who she was instead of just being so vague and saying cryptic things. Some things she said implied perhaps she did know, because any real person would just yell out the weirdo stalking them, not give emotional speeches about the girl you once knew being gone etc. But all that aside, why did Slade send a robot out just to tell Beast Boy that he had nothing to do with what's happened to Terra? Also, that creatures ability to turn himself into any matter he touches is really cool.)
Movie: Trouble in Tokyo - 3/5 (This has pretty much one of the things I dislike most about movies based on TV shows; Instead of actually focusing on the iconic aspects of the series in question, it goes out of it's way to be as far removed from it as possible by setting it in a whole other country. Bummer, because an ideal Titans movie would really focus on the whole team, and THEIR city. Instead, they're just in Tokyo stopping a corrupt commander (who I knew was gonna be the bad guy from the get-go) who's creating crimes to be a hero. And the thing is with these kind of movies is, perhaps if they actually did focus on the characters relationships, it would be good. But instead they are mostly separated the entire time, just goofing off. And cue the obligatory relationship between Robin and Starfire. I mean, it was obviously going to happen, so it's not as if I mind it, but the drama feels pretty forced. They're heroes, yes, but they lounge around and take time off all the time when criminals aren't around. There really isn't much more to say about this. High-tier average. Although, admittedly, I was finding myself ready to close my eyes and fall asleep nearing the hour mark.)
-The Lost Episode - 3/5 (It's half the length of a normal episode, so it's hard to judge it, given it's not even serious at all. A fun little watch, for sure. Beast Boy walking around with a boombox on his shoulders was funny because of how dated it is.)
-New Teen Titans Shorts (Can't really rate them since they're just shorts, but here's a few throwaway thoughts: I like the artstyle. The lowercase T tower is a funny visual gag. Was Blackfire just killed? So, they finally actually showed Batman on screen (technically)? The hell was up with Cyborg's voice in one of these?)

I have been applying to consultant roles like crazy and I'm not making any headway. Can anyone think of ways I can improve what I have below or what other career avenues I should pursue?
EXPERIENCE
Homecare Homebase, LLC, Dallas, TX Implementation Training Consultant, Jan 2022 - Present
Provide quality implementations and ensure the adoption of products within health agencies across the country,
Guide customers and internal training teams through the deployment of the software for multi-site locations across the United States, Lead clients through training of the software and support clients throughout onsite and remote deployment,
Assist in making customizations to clinical content (i.e., visit types, pathways, and assessments) to ensure the environment is ready for testing and training,
Collaborate with internal staff on training preparations for assigned projects, including completing preparation of training database prior to customer deployment,
Communicate effectively and understand the customer's needs, goals, and strategies, as well as communicate those needs to the internal HCHB project team for action and/or resolution,
Independently researching customer inquiries and determining sources of issues. Independently researching data functionality and reporting problems to the customer support team with needed steps for customer resolution,
Maintaining product knowledge as new enhancements and functionality are released in the application,
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS, DIVISION OF ADVANCEMENT, Denton, Texas Student Assistant, May 2019 - Aug 2020
Operate office equipment such as fax machines, copiers, and phone systems, and use computers for spreadsheets, word processing, database management, and other applications,
Answer telephones and give information to callers, take messages, or transfer calls to appropriate individuals,
Set up and maintain paper and electronic filing systems for records, correspondence, and other material,
Maintained scheduling and event calendars, Operate electronic mail systems and coordinate the flow of information, internally or with other organizations,
CORELOGIC, Irving, TX Operations Specialist, Jul 2014 - Jul 2018
Conducts research of data, perform factual analyses of loan histories to assess appropriate resolution and compile all corresponding supporting documentation for review,
Leverage all available resources such as existing databases, third-party sources, and/or public information on the internet,
Utilize tools to analyze, query, and manipulate data according to defined business procedures,
Extract and enter appropriate data onto application, other form, or database, Process payments that may require preparing, balancing, and submitting complex wire disbursements for mass manual payments,
Proofread documents for grammatical, mathematical, typographical, and composition errors adhering to standards and guidelines, Perform root cause analyses of all discovered errors in order to identify areas requiring development or enhancement of training, policy, or procedures,
Adhere to all required company and client driven Service Level Agreements, Perform duties such as maintaining all levels of files, searching and investigating information contained in files, processing departmental documents requiring more specific knowledge of functional operations, and entering report results into tracking systems,
Track progress and provide status report to management on achievement of daily and weekly team goals,
Act as Subject Matter Expert on internal and client projects, making recommendations to these processes,
Able to develop and maintain business relationships with individuals representing other departments and/or representing outside organizations,
Maintain detailed and comprehensive records for all complaints, including error findings, during the complaint investigation process and document corrective actions taken,
EDUCATION
University of North Texas Denton, TX
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) History (Apr 2021) GPA: 3.2
University of North Texas Denton, TX
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Digital and Print Journalism (Apr 2021) GPA: 3.2
Relevant Coursework: Strategic Social Media, Principles of Public Relations, Applied Design for Advertising and Public Relations,
ADDITIONAL SKILLS Microsoft Office MSP Fiserve Black Knight HTML Search Engine Optimization Adobe Suite Oracle ERP BlackLine

Does anyone know how VSV students are scaled or how they alter the curriculum? Are their SACs and study scores scaled down? Has anyone here gotten a 95+ ATAR with fully or mostly online units? Currently stressing out for my entire future! 🤗
I have been doing 2 of my 5 1/2 units via VSV and I'm getting a bit worried! Both are subjects that my school isn't running this year due to numbers. However, I developed a health condition mid last year that's doing anything but improving, + i'm extra busy/stressed from commitments outside of school (working and caregiving responsibilities.) Right now it's looking pretty likely that, due to all these factors, I'll have to go fully online for 3/4. When I enrolled I was assured by my school and VSV that as long as I keep my focus I'll get the same standard + amount of work as I would currently. I was a bit worried because of how secretive they are with their study scores ect but I didn't have much choice.
However... Both subjects are clearly easier than the standard that friends from other 'in person' schools receive. I'm always getting 97-100% on SACs for both subjects, even though I don't go to their glorified powerpoint reading online classes and typically complete all my weekly work for the subjects in a few hours. The marking + feedback for weekly work is useless too. You don't get a grade, only a 'satisfactory' or not, and you can resubmit if you don't pass. My feedback is always "This is far above VCE level, well done! Keep it up!"... It's really not. What I'm submitting is the level that I would do on campus if I want mid 80's. Oh and just to clarify, I'm obviously not some child genius so hopefully this doesn't sound as absolutely pretentious as it does to me. Sorry everyone. I'm always good with Lit, but I usually need to put some elbow grease into the other ones if I want to achieve high marks. At my private, but by no means academic school, I've always done well (ok apart from GM; lets just say my emotional support calculator and I have clawed our way to 'firmly unremarkable' status) but I have to study hard and push myself to stay up there in marks. Essentially I'm just not used to getting full marks on a silver platter for a SAC that I submitted at 4am, after 1 hour of sleep-deprived and unmotivated work. I submitted that fully prepared for my average grade to drop pretty dramatically. Very much a 'fuck it, fuck this' submission. When I saw my mark I was honestly offended(?). That mark at my current school would've been the result of a week in self isolation and a rapidly approaching vitamin D deficiency. I really don't deserve it at all! I almost want them to take it back!!! It doesn't mean anything like this.
I always have to email them to ask for useful feedback (I BEG them to tell me areas I can improve on.) Even then I get the same response, or a very surface level message that doesn't seem to have much thought put into it. All very generalised stuff. The SACs aren't even well regulated. My submission didn't load properly once so I ended up submitting two days late; they didn't even mention it!? Once I was told I didn't have to worry about proper referencing for an essay. I have started going through the standard text books (VSV told me I wouldn't need one because the content is "all found in the weekly work" yea nah ) + doing all the work that a friend from another school gets. All because I'm terrified that they aren't teaching me the level they should be. I've even started trying to do double the effort that they ask for so I'm not stressing about getting behind without knowing it. It's getting tempting to submit crap without even editing it first, but I'm trying so hard not to fall into that rabbit hole... Yet.
Not to be dramatic but that chic, sultry 99.95 ATAR™ 😮‍💨🤩 has been tantalising me since my little brain could intellectualise it, so I'm really scared for my results if I have to go fully online next year. I don't have family pressure for results, but my self worth and academic results venn diagram is a circle. Before you ask, I'm not willing to move to a local-ish school with all my subjects because it will make things harder for my family. The one good thing about vsv subjects is that I have more time at home for those responsibilities + I can stop working so much because it's a public school. Sorry for this mini breakdown that nobody ever asked for or needed, but please please please, if anyone has ANY info on how it will effect my results or experience with getting a good ATAR at vsv, let me know. Or confirm my fears that my life is over.

Welcome, everyone, to Day 1 of the 2021 in K-Pop rate! We are traveling back in time to a monumental year, both for K-Pop and for the entire world. We will be revealing the bottom 40 songs today.
Day 1 will begin at 9 AM Pacific, about ~3 hours from when this post goes up. For those following the song rate live during this time, we highly encourage you to follow both this post and the live chat on our community Discord: https://discord.gg/FquKMgz9EU, as we will be using both for chatting/communication.
If you are here after the live results-reveal watch session, we would encourage you to avoid spoilers by going through the comments section one-by-one, as the comments will be sorted by Old after the live watch session so you can simulate the ranking reveal for yourself.

STATS

Participants: 64 participants
Average score: 7.013
Average controversy score: 2.090 (Any song with a controversy score higher than this is considered to be divisive)

SONG LIST:

.

January:

(G)I-DLE - Hwaa
Epik High - Rosario
Cherry Bullet - Love So Sweet
Dreamcatcher - Odd Eye
IU - Celebrity

February:

SHINee - Don't Call Me
Sunmi - Tail
ONF - Beautiful Beautiful

March:

Rosé - On The Ground
Pentagon - Do or Not
WOODZ - Feel Like
Weeekly - After School
IU - Lilac
Baekhyun - Bambi
WJSN - Unnatural

April:

Hoshi - Spider
STAYC - ASAP
SHINee - Atlantis
Enhypen - Drunk-Dazed
ITZY - In The Morning

May:

NCT Dream - Hot Sauce
Oh My Girl - Dun Dun Dance
WJSN The Black - Easy
Yuqi - Bonnie & Clyde
aespa - Next Level
fromis_9 - We Go
Taemin - Advice
Enhypen - Fever
BTS - Butter
Everglow - First
TXT - Lovesong

June:

Monsta X - Gambler
Lightsum - Vanilla
ONEWE - Rain To Be
LOONA - PTT (Paint The Town)
NCT Dream - Hello Future

July:

Taeyeon - Weekend
AKMU (with IU) - Nakka
Dreamcatcher - BEcause

August:

Jeon Somi - Dumb Dumb
TXT - Loser=Lover
Brave Girls - After We Ride
Stray Kids - Thunderous

September:

STAYC - Stereotype
Purple Kiss - Zombie
NCT 127 - Sticker
Lisa - Money
ITZY - Loco
KEY - Bad Love

October:

Twice - The Feels
aespa - Savage
Jo Yuri - Glassy
TRI.BE - Would You Run
Seventeen - Rock With You

November:

The Boyz - Maverick
Billlie - Ring X Ring
Chungha - Killing Me

December:

IVE - Eleven
Xdinary Heroes - Happy Death Day
ATEEZ - The Real
.

Bonus Rate:

Treasure - Beautiful
The Boyz - Kingdom Come
Joy - Hello
BDC - Moonlight
Golden Child - Ddara
Weki Meki - Siesta
Everglow - Pirate
.

Hej guys, I'm planning to move to Norway this summer but I've got a few question that I can't find any current answers on. This sub seems to be very helpful so I hope you could help me out!

1. How "full" is Oslo right now and is trying to find an appartment or room any easier during the winter? Afaik the semester in Norway starts in september and I don't want to steal any affordable accomodations from the students. But even if I wanted to gentrify the students out of my future appartment, I'm wondering how good my chances are right now at even finding anything on finn.no or hybel.no when I arrive in late august, or if I should delay my search.

1.1 On the same note. I'm used to housing market being very beaurocratic in Germany. If I see a fitting appartment, lets say on finn, do I just text them with some details? Do I not have to fill in any forms before they even dare to bless me with taking a look at my request? I'm so not used to that haha
1.2 Are my chances better with housing companies or private individuals renting out their appartments?

1. Is owning a car a disadavantage and are there any free parking spots when I'm not living in the city center? I'm all for public transport but I've got to transport my stuff somehow.
   
2. Hearing "Norway is dying to find IT staff" every where (like probably in every western country) but how true is that statement really, especially for English speakers? I've got a remote job in IT so I'll be fine for now. Though I couldn't really find any job offerings that are not requiring/implying norsk on a C1 level. But planning long term I might need a proper Norwegian wage and my Norsk skills are around "ordering a coffee"-level right now.
   

That's all for now. I'm happy for any and all advice. And any Osloians/Norwegians who are in Berlin right now, dm me and I can hook you up with the best beer you'll ever have. Takk!

What is Bhagwa Atheism ?

A hypocritical and privileged form of atheism that is critical against any religion (particularly Islam), but harbours sympathy for his religion in which they were born i.e. Hinduism.

Why is this sympathy?

The answer is simple ...casteism, we shall discuss this later on how this is deeply rooted in caste based privileges that facilitates such thinking. To understand this let me explain from my point of view:

According Marxism, in a feudalist/semi-feudalist/capitalist society there are two types of classes mostly, namely: the Bourgeois (the ruling class who controls the means of production and generates profit from the exploitation of working classes labour power) and The Workers (or Proletariats) (who do not own any means of production and has no power to purchase labour power of others, and they survive solely by selling their own labour power).
These classes emerge only at a certain stage in the development of the productive forces and the social division of labour, when there exists a social surplus of production, which makes it possible for one class to benefit by the expropriation of another. The conflict between classes there begins, founded in the division of the social surplus, and constitutes the fundamental antagonism in all class.

This holds true in case of several capitalist nations such as US, Canada, South Korea, etc. But however in case of India this classification becomes complicated due to yet another form of classification which effectively nullified any form of possible class conflict, 'Casteism'.

What is Casteism in Hinduism ?

Hindu Casteism (from material basis) is a form of hereditary class based on hierarchal order which ensures the flow the capital to the top most caste order and control over modes of production with the help of religious decrees itself.
It's a classification which sets 'permanent classes' based on their 'assigned' modes of production and their position within it's societal superstructures according to their hierarchy set by the 'permanent' ruling classes.
Once you take birth in one of these castes (hereditary classes), you'll be automatically assigned to the forces of production according to the 'order', which you'll do for the rest of your life.
Unlike Class, Casteism severally restricted upward mobility of people belonging to the lower strata of the Caste order, exception being a few handpicked intermediate 'gate keeping' castes loyal to this system. Who were sometimes rewarded by promotion, to become ruling classes itself.

So what changed this ?

Pre-arrival of British colonisation, caste and class were very much indistinguishable. Apart from ruling class there were hand picked bourgeois intermediate classes (vaishya) who were in direct service to the upper caste (sometimes the roles were reversed). The proletarian class (shudra and pariahs) were pretty much same as their european counterparts, lacked capital and hence no control over their means of production, in addition to that they also faced inhumane discrimination because of the caste in which they were born in. Thus were looked down upon as inferior subhumans.
This discriminatory system ensured poverty of the lower caste and prosperity of the top order, despite the lower caste comprising 90% of the population, as well as guaranteed cheap labour and exploitation of the working class 'caste'.
However with the introduction of colonial capitalism by Britishers the modes of production of old feudal order 'fused' with it to become a semi-industrial semi-feudal economy. This is when for the first time the European styled working classes began to take shape in India, parallel to hereditary classes that is casteism. This also introduced new bougeois classes within every community irrespective of their caste, but it's topic for another discussion.
Irrespective of the changes the older hereditary classes still affected this new order, those belonging to upper caste still had access to privileged jobs, better positions and capitals, hence were comparatively in better & prosperous position to that of those belonging to the lower strata of the older caste based order. With the introduction of 'English Education Act 1835' and later 'Macaulay Committee 1854' by Britishers, it further cemented caste order within this new colonial administration, ensuring the hierarchy of the upper caste and exploitation of oppressed castes.

Privileged classes and Caste blind class struggle

In words of Thomas Babington Macaulay:

"We (Britishers) should try to create a class of people, who would work as translators between the people who we are ruling and us, even though they may look like Indians by color; but their likes and dislikes, morals and thinking will be like an Englishman"

As, we can see the British were ok with the casteism as long as it ensured their hold and smooth management of their empire. Sure they helped abolishing the gut wrenching misogynistic practices such as 'Sati' but made almost zero effort to abolish caste system and untouchability (as this would mean they'll loose insubordination of intermediate 'gate keeping' classes that were in service to the British crown.
This new Intermediate urban classes had privileges to several rights within colonial administration in comparison to ordinary classes, however as we have mentioned earlier that with the introduction of colonial capitalism majority of castes further split into binary classes, economically forward and backward classes (note : this was only in case of upper and intermediate castes, majority of oppressed castes were still under poverty). The economically forward classes were infact the privileged classes and the economically backward classes began to fall in the borderline category between Upper-intermediate castes and Lower castes.
And this where 'caste blind' atheism, secularism, and socialism originates from. Who saw capitalism as well as colonialism as cruel system/occupation with respect to their material conditions but failed to emancipate and recognise inhumane treatment faced by those below their classes.
But does this mean that they were barred same as oppressed communities in upward mobility within this colonial capitalism?
No, They still had access to capitalist progress and upward mobility within the society. Simply put,

Casteism filtered oppressed castes from upward mobility within this new capitalist order while capitalism ensured that there will be limited progressiveness within the upper caste friendly circles.

So, whenever an economically backward class member transitioned into economically forward class they carried out his former progressive social ideas to their new found social position within society, while simultaneously giving up their resistance to capitalism. This new default ideology was known liberalism.
British colonial administration in India had many parallels with Apartheid system, but that is debate for another topic.

Consequences of Caste blindness in other '–isms'

With important positions still in access to powerful 'caste blind' and 'casteist' members of the society, they began to clash for power struggle. But they all had one commonality, they didn't gave up their caste identity.
During independence this power struggle began to materialise in two types of ideologies basically – 'caste blind' Leftism and 'meritocracy' based liberalism/conservativism but non of them were seriously against at each others throat as they were getting equal opportunities for their personal betterment.
But, what did the oppressed caste proletariats gain from this? Nothing.
They only got a chance at betterment when Dr. Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule, Savitri Bai Phule,etc began to make efforts at upliftment of them. However their efforts lacked anti-capitalist approach which emphasized less on capitalist oppression more on caste based emancipation. Which later proved detrimental in their efforts.

Modern day India and caste based wealth inequality

After the ( ½) implementation of Mandal Commission and Naxal Uprising, it began to perturb this harmonic 'clash' between conservatives and progressive left-liberal dynamics as it began to inject more and more political conciousness within the oppressed communities for reservations and political participation.
This is where the concept of savarna meritocracy, comes forth.

Illusion of Meritocracy

Meritocracy is a belief that affirmative actions results in positive results and vise versa in reality is a capitalist hypothesis, a fallacy which fuels the illusion that we are in a merit-based system.

Meritocracies tend to stratify over time. Successful people will pass on their wealth and privileges to their children and can perpetuate a widening inequality of opportunities. It can lead to the misplaced belief that only their talents and hard work account for their success, neglecting the support they have received. — Chan Chun Sing, Min. of Education, Singapore

This meritocratic illusion began to impose predetermined conditions which were biased and opaque on underprivileged candidates, missing to match their criterion in fixed amount of time means ruining of candidate's dreams. In other words it was an underhand tactics to filter out 'representation based/unfavourable candidates' and simply stereotyping them as 'unworthy', disregarding the unequal support the competing candidates got due to their material conditions and pretends that they 'reward the best of the best,' also overlooking the possibility of discrimination faced by oppressed caste students at hands of Upper caste dominant faculties.

After 1960 more and more population of the United States spent more than one-fourth of their entire lifetime in schools, from ages two to twenty-two. As on so many other levels and ways of mass democracy, inflation had set in, diminishing drastically the content and the quality of learning: more and more young people, after twenty years in schools, could not read or write without difficulty. Schools are overcrowded, including colleges and universities. In this increasingly bureaucratized world little more than the possession of various diplomas mattered. Since admission to certain schools-rather than the consequently almost automatic acquisition of degrees-depended on increasingly competitive examinations, the word “ meritocracy“ was coined, meaning that the rising positions to be acquired in society depended on the category of the degree and on the category of the college or university where from one graduate. In reality the term “meritocracy“ was misleading. As in so many of these spheres of life, the rules that govern the practices and functions of schools and universities were bureaucratic rather than meritocratic. It is bureaucracy, not meritocracy, the categorizes the employment of people by their academic degrees. The number and the variation of degrees awarded by higher institutions grew to a fantastic, and nonsensical, extent. Besides being custodial, the purpose of institutional education was now the granting of degrees to provide instant employment. – John Lukacs (At the End of an Age)

Final Conclusion

Provided all factors what we can conclude that Bhagwa Atheism, is form of Hindu upper caste exceptionalism (Agonistic Atheism) which believes in:
•the illusionary meritocracy that their material conditions is due to the (upper) caste in which they were born in.
•hating all religious dogma belonging to all faiths (including hinduism) but still hold dear to their caste based identity, hence the sympathy for hinduism.
•merit based order, refuses to acknowledge caste discrimination and caste wealth gap, sees it as inherited inability.
•convenient switching between Atheism and minimal Hinduism.
•convenient switching between liberalism and conservativism.
Thus, it's a type of agonistic atheism which does more & more damage to gnostic atheist beliefs and their critical thinking potential, making them more and more susceptible towards theism. In case of ex-hindus it's hinduism.