I (F20) have a close friend (34) and I'm struggling to make a decision about my friendship. The part I'm struggling with the most is keeping to my decision. Her and I have been in a pretty tumultuous friendship for the last year, a lot of good but a lot of decently large arguments as well. I used to stay with her quite often, sometimes weeks at a time. Very suddenly about last week she essentially put a stop to that all together. Now she keeps insisting I can come to her place or we hang out at least (she stressed that a lot) once a month. Now being a creature of habit I don't respond to change well so I'm taking this very sudden change not the best. I feel betrayed and abandoned by her because now she rarely messages me if it's not something she needs help with or us discussing what happened last week between us. I really dislike the way she treats me when it comes to texting, she's the type who is always on her phone and that's a self admitted addiction made by her. Sometimes she will go hours or days without responding and when I do get a response it's a 3-4 word response. No matter how hard I try to get her to watch party or something with me she's always busy or tired which is making me further disappointed with her because she can make time for group events but when it's solo with me she doest have time. I'm supposed to go to her house for the night tomorrow because I have an appointment close to her house and it makes more sense to go from her place. I was hoping we could spend more than a few hours together and when I tell her that she has no reaction as if she doesn't care about me there at all. I'm getting tired of being thrown around when she knows how I am and we have discussed time and time again how I feel about the way she treats me in our friendship. I'm disappointed in the way she behaves towards me and I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to dislike her. But I don't want that, but I don't want to stay in a toxic relationship if that's what has to happen. I'm so fed up and we only ever do things when it's convienient for her or if I don't stay with her for more than a few hours. I'm hurt and don't know if I should stay friends and find a way to keep myself from being hurt or cut her off and find a better way to stay firm in my decision. Thank you and I can answer questions if needed.

Have an upcoming trip to Royal Curaçao, my wife and I, and another couple. My wife and I are doing butler service with our room, but the other couple was too late in reserving their room to also get butler service.
Best case scenario, we’d have our other friends also benefit from butler service, within reason. Obviously wouldn’t expect all the same perks (making up beds/rooms, preparing a romantic bath that’s not our room, etc.). But would it be unreasonable for some requests (bringing drinks/snacks for 4, reserve a cabana/dinner for 4, etc.)?
I would want to be very upfront with our butler(s) at the beginning to ask their feelings, and make it very clear that we would tip accordingly. We’ve used the butler service before and appreciate just how hard working and deserving they are of every thank you and every dollar of tip money.
Has anyone encountered this situation before or have any feedback?

Context:
I’m rewriting my WIP for the fifth (and hopefully last) time to make the story more character driven and make my characters motivations stronger. I’ve changed the first three chapters so many times I have no idea what’s good anymore. It’s a portal fantasy Reverse Harem with fated mates. You only meet two love interests in the intro (and one of them only shows up towards the very end of the set up), but I am just looking to see if my FMC's motivations make sense, or if I have made the Set Up too convoluted and given her too many goals.
**Please note the scenes I am posting have been written as an outline, and is not intended to read line by line like a finished manuscript. I will be writing it in First person POV when I finish plotting.**
Backstory (TLDR; Character A needs to gain access to the Other World so she can make a bargain to trade her Father's life for hers, we open on the 6th anniversary of him being taken, her 24th birthday. I ramble on for quite a bit so if you would like to get right into it please skip to Intro/Set Up)
Motivation:
Character A’s Father was stolen by otherworldly creatures 6 years ago and taken to their lands. Character A harbours guilt and blames herself because she disobeyed her Fathers rules and snuck into the woods with her friends on her 18th birthday to go swimming. Her Father came looking for her and that is when she witnessed him being taken.
In the area they live in, disappearances around the full moon were common, with many losing their loved ones over the last 50 years with no explanation. There were a lot of theories of aliens, bigfoot, cougars, werewolves, and only her Father claimed that magic wielding creatures were responsible.
Character A grew up being told stories about these lands, how the creatures enslaved humans to play in their games until they died for entertainment. Her Father told her magic was real but it was to be feared and to run from any sign of the unusual, forbade her from leaving her house after sunset or from ever going into the woods, and he always tried to keep her close to him.
He had a hard time holding down a job due to the grief he felt from losing Character A’s mother during childbirth and when he would drink he would make it known that he resented Character A for derailing his life, because now he was burdened with protecting her instead of living as a family. Her mother was buried there and her father refused to move away from her body. Character A internalized this, feeling guilty for being the reason he struggled so much, and spent her life caring for her father the way she would a child. Cooking, cleaning, paying bills, etc. She would even get revenge on his bosses for firing him. Her Father always claimed it was never his fault, that they were abusing their power and couldn’t handle somebody smarter than them, and losing his job would send him into an alcoholic depression.
Character A heard her Fathers words, and combined with the way out-of town business men had turned her small mountain town into their own personal resort, developed a deep hatred for anyone that held power. She would find little ways to get revenge on her Fathers bosses, and when she was older, spent her spare time getting revenge on the trust fund kids who didn’t care if their actions had consequences for the people living there.
She had a big dream of leaving her small town and exploring the world, but she felt responsible for her Father. She took care of him, and she was afraid of what would happen to him if she left, but she knew she was suffocating under him. Although her guilt and love for her father prevented her from seeing the full truth of what he was, narcissistic and abusive, deep down she knew and she became restless under his restriction.
When she was young she believed his stories but as she got older and never saw any evidence to back up his claims, the more she chaffed against his rules and started sneaking out. She wasn’t dumb, she always carried a knife and bear spray. She read up on what to do if you encountered a predator in the forest, and she begun stealing what little freedom she could for herself. She didn’t believe in magic, wolves and mountain lions were the only things that made sense to her.
Wound:
After her Father is taken Character A is broken. Everything her Father said was true, all he was trying to do was keep her safe, but she disobeyed him and now he was taken to a magical land to be tortured by never ending games. She is distraught and depressed. She begins sleeping in the woods, hoping to be taken too so her pain can end.
A few months later, at the end of summer, her best friend and boyfriend, the only people her father approved of her spending time with, tell her that they still plan to leave for the year long trip they were all going on. They want to start their lives, they think Character A has become delusional in the wake of her Fathers disappearance, they can’t be stuck there taking care of her, they can’t handle her emotions, they need a fresh start. She realizes they have been having an affair, she internalizes them telling her she is too much to handle and that she is unlovable. She was a burden on her father and then a burden on them. She doesn’t see them again for six years.
Present Day:
Character A has spent the last six years trying to get to the other world during the full moon. The weeks in between she spends physically training, researching anything she can, working just enough to cover her bills for the month, and distracting herself with casual flings or sleeping with the trust fund kids in order to gain access to something she wants to steal from them as payback for something they have done. She never lets herself get too close to anyone, knowing that she plans to disappear, but she partied with whoever is willing to distract herself until the next full moon.
Every passing year on her birthday she grows more and more desperate. She begins researching magic spells and rituals that might show her the entrance to the otherworld. She finds a newly discovered mushroom being sold that claims to help you see what is hidden from human eyes.
Character B:
A month ago Character B was sent from the other wolrld to retrieve Character A. She is the descendant of a lost royal line and they have received a vision from the goddess that she is her Heir, the key to defeating the darkness and restoring balance to the land. Character B does not live a good life in the other world, he is nothing but a glorified prisoner in his own life, and all he’s ever wanted was a family of his own, but because of the queen and his father, he cannot have that. He avoids confrontation, always choosing to run from his problems instead of fight. He first lays eyes on Character A as she is driving a motorcycle into a lake.
He is unsure if the vehicle is supposed to drive under water, so he waits a moment before trying to do a rescue. He doesn’t know it’s her until she swims up into the shore, and begins gathering weeds from the lakebed. he thinks she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and can’t imagine dragging her back to his world where she could be in danger. He wants to watch the curious human for a bit longer to see what she does
He silently follows her and watches her climb into a window and place the weeds around a man sleeping in a bed, then creep down the hallway to an office where she unlocks a safe and pulls out a stack of papers. She then meets up with somebody, hands over the papers with a hug, then walks into the forest.
She walks and walks and he realizes she heading towards the portal and gets nervous, until she reaches a tree with five different coloured ribbons tied around one branch. She takes a new yellow ribbon , adds it to the branch and continues walking until she reaches another tree with ribbons where she adds another ribbon, then walks to the very centre of both trees and sits down. She softly hums a tune to herself.
She seems relaxed, strong and confident, he thinks this must be some new human ritual he hadn’t heard of yet and her humming is soothing to him, but he notices a shiver. He feels a strong need. To wrap her up in a blanket and make her warm. He decides right then that he cannot take her back and ruin her peace, that he himself would not go back, that he would befriend her and they would hide together her in her world and they would be safe and happy. It was pointless trying to fight anyway, they were never going to win and it would be better for them both to be safe and far away from the evil queen.
The next morning he follows her to her favourite coffee shop, glamoured to look more human and remove his pointy ears, and introduces himself as a man trying to get away from his overbearing parents and family he doesn’t get along with.
Intro/Set Up
Chapter 1
-Character A is thinking about how she has to get laid tonight, because it will be her last chance before she disappears and probably dies. Character A is stealing some documents and a bunch of cash from a safe in The Guys home office, she pulls a bag out of her pocket and with it, a card for the bookstore she works at flutters under his desk. She puts the documents and money in the bag and bends down to pick it up when she notices the family photo on the desk and she stops.
It is a picture of The Guy, His Son that she stole and crashed his bike into a lake last month, and The Other Son that she may have killed nine months ago when she burned his cabin down. She is filled with rage when she looks at the photo and thinks she doesn’t regret what she’s done. Character B calling her phone snaps her out of it and when she hears someone come home, she leaves, but she forgets the card.
-She stops at the bookstore to give Coworker 1 the documents and money. Coworker 1 says she will never be able to thank her, that this was the last thing she needed she could get out of town. Character A tells her good luck and to give them hell. Coworker 1 is leaving town tomorrow, she connected with a journalist who can help her expose The Guy and once she does she won’t be able to come back. Coworker 1 is very grateful to her, and Character A makes sure to tell herself that they aren't friends, because friendship requires a level of vulnerability that Olivia could not give her, but she knew Coworker 1 was a good person and deserved so much more than what she got when The Other Son sexually assaulted her at work while His Son filmed it. How when she received a payout in exchange for her silence they knew it wasn’t the first time. They were determined to find further evidence, and they did. Signed NDA’s from all of the employees they had paid off in the past.
Character B joins them at the store. Character A is petting her beloved bookstore cat and goes to pull some treats out of her bag. Her hand brushes against a vial of red and white mushrooms and Character A hopes that they are the key she has been searching for. For six years she has felt like she has been brushing up against the edge of something, but has never been able to get herself to the other side. She was deep in a witchcraft discussion forum when somebody posted about a new discovery of mushrooms, one that allowed the ingestor to see through the Veil, to show them all the magic they cannot see. The poster was pretty insistent that it wasn’t just a trip, that they were able to see threads of magic. After years of failed meditating, drinking teas, burning herbs,and chanting spells around the ley line conversion and not finding anything, what did she have to lose with some magic mushrooms?
Character B calls her name, startling her from her thoughts and she knocks over a box of alien and bigfoot merch. Coworker 1 cracks a joke about being careful with the product or else the alien truthers will riot, Character A rolls her eyes at the people who flocked there in search of the wrong thing. Character B apologizes for startling her and says he was just admiring one of her new Boxwood Topiaries, three trees of varying height that ended with hearts on top, and she says she finished it yesterday.
She loves plants but, like a cat, she can’t commit to having them because she doesn’t plan to be around long, so she does topiary art as a compromise, and the extra money she earns goes towards buying her herbs and mushrooms. Her Father never managed to save much money and she wasn’t left with much after he was taken. She had to use her savings replacing the furnace in her home shortly after her Father was taken, and now she only worked enough to keep her living until the next paycheck. She spent the rest of her time training and researching. Preparing to go to Wonderland in search of her Father.
Character B is making friends with the cat, having charmed it onto its belly, and Coworker 1 gives Character A a knowing look. Character A shakes her head, says they are just hanging out, nothing serious. Coworker 1 says he could be good for her. She knew they had been hanging out, that Character A had let him stay at her house for the last two weeks. She wasn’t judging though, Character A seemed lighter around him, and he was so nice. She had seen him helping Mrs. Smith with her groceries the other day.
Character A thinks that was what initially warmed her up to him. Coworker 1 was right, she never brought guys home, but the first week that he was here he had never failed to notice when people needed help and always offered to lend a hand. Plus he was fun, and fun to look at, and he was always looking for a new adventure. He took her mind off of what a failure she was for not saving her Father yet, and he seemed relatively harmless. So when he said he had never seen her favorite comedy movie she just HAD to take him home to watch it. And he hadn’t left, she hadn’t asked him to. It was becoming a problem. Because she was going to disappear tonight, and a small part of her was beginning to feel sad she would never see him again. It was why she hadn’t slept with him yet, she knew she enjoyed his company just a little too much and wouldn’t risk any further attachment. Character A agreed that he was a good person but emphasized that it was just casual. Coworker 1 says alright, she will back off, and she will let them get to the party. She needs to finish packing and wants to leave as soon as possible. Character A says she understand, they hug and say goodbye.
Chapter 2
-Character A and Character B are walking to the Board Game party. They are dressed as Clue characters, she is Miss. Scarlet and Character B is Mr. Green. They had played every board game she owned, which was a lot of them, in order to decide what to dress up as for the Your Favorite Board Game Party. He turned out to be a good competitor and got way more into the games than she expected him to.
He hands her a cinnamon bun, her favorite, and tells her he had made a whole batch for her, claiming that he knew she hadn’t gotten one since they were hiking that morning, and all she had eaten that day was trail mix and beef jerky and he refuses to let her party on an empty stomach. She happily takes a huge bite, grateful for this one thing she loved before she left this world forever.
He says he’s been thinking and asks her to go traveling with him. She almost chokes on her food. His words rush out and he assures her he has money and can pay for everything and they can go anywhere she wants. Her heart sinks into her stomach. Before her Father went missing, an offer like that from a hot guy would have been her dream, but she couldn’t now, or ever. She looks at the half eaten cinnamon bun, thinks how he had made them because he had gotten coffee with her every morning for the last three weeks, and he saw how every Saturday and Sunday morning she would get a cinnamon bun the size of her face and eat it. She looks at the Green jacket he wore and remembers laughing in the thrift shop as he tried on a full leather catsuit while they searched for the perfect outfit for the party. He was too good. She begins to think that in another life, they could go. They could adopt an adventure cat and take it with them on their world travels, but that wasn’t possible for her. She wasn’t staying in this world, and even if she was, she was too messed up. Too broken. Too much of a burden. And she could never give all of herself to one person ever again, she did it twice, and was broken by both of them because she was too much.
She decides he’s gotten too close and she needs to push him away, so in the hopes that it will scare him, she explains that she can’t leave because her Father was stolen by a magical creature and taken to the Other World. She tells him the entire story her father told her, of creatures luring people to the Other World and keeping them for the Queen's entertainment, forced to be pawns in her games. They are ruthless and obsessed with games and everything reeks of roses. She tells him its her fault that he got taken and she can’t live with herself until she either gets him back or gets revenge for his death.
Character B begins pleading with her, telling her she shouldn't go. She is surprised he doesn’t balk or think she is crazy. He isn’t looking at her the way Ex-Bestfriend and Ex-Boyfriend did, like they feared she would infect them with her crazy, no, he looks at her with genuine terror in his eyes. She stops walking, they are just outside the party house. What do you know? She says. He inhales and steps forward, desperation etched into hs features, and says that he knows that everything she said was true, and that it is much worse than she even thinks. That if she goes, she will not make it back here. It’s too dangerous, and he just wants to keep her safe. She is flabbergasted, and checks over his features for signs. No pointed ears, no animalistic features such as scales or a tail, no strange eyes. How do you know all this? He doesn’t answer, his mouth works like he’s trying to come up with something and betrayal starts to roil in her gut.
Before he has the chance to lie, two men throw their arms around their shoulders. It is the couple that Character A hooks up with on occasion. They start walking them into the house and the one with Character A asks if she wants to come over later for a joint and to hook up. She tries to muster up a yes, it is what she wanted after all, but she can’t think straight after her conversation with Character B. She turns back to see he’s been steered into a conversation with a few other people and thinks she needs a drink to calm herself and give her some courage.
-She walks into the kitchen for a glass and bumps into her Ex-Boyfriend. She is thrown for a loop again. He says Happy Birthday and remarks that he didn’t think he would find her at a party today, since he knows how much she hates her birthday. Character A is surprised to see him and momentarily forgets about Character B, and asks what they’re doing back in town. He says its because Ex-Bestfriends mom is still missing. Character A says, oh, right. And feels stupid for thinking she wouldn’t run into them. She was devastated to hear Ex-BFFs Mom had been taken, she was like a second mother to her, but after Ex-BFF left she couldn’t stand to look at her Mom anymore and remember what she had lost.
He mentions something about the baby coming soon and Ex-BFF wanting to be as close to her mom as she can. Character A questions the baby and he tells her they are pregnant. Character A flashes back to both of them telling her they were leaving and couldn’t stay in contact with her anymore, that she had become too much for them to handle on the horizon of their new lives. She noted the way they looked at each other and how their knees pressed together, and that was when she knew they had been having an affair. She comes back to the present when he leans in close and says he actually wants to ask her some questions about her dad. She sees a familiar head with a mop of blonde hair moving through the crowd towards them. Seeing Ex-Boyfriend was bad enough, she cannot see Ex-Bestfriend. See her pregnant. And now he wants to hear what she has to say about the disappearances? You can go fuck yourself, she spits and walks away before he can say anything else, and thankfully, before Ex-Bestfriend reaches her. She thinks his betrayal hurt her, but her betrayal broke her.
-She is fleeing the kitchen, heading for the back door, desperate to get away from them, when she bumps into an attractive man in a red velvet sport coat with a red velvet top hat. They are both imprinted with roses. He apologizes for bumping into her and her heart skips a beat, thinking of the Queen's obsession with roses. She asks him who he's supposed to be and he smiles but pauses before saying his name is Character C, he’s friends with Character B, and her heart stops all together. A chill runs through her and Character B interrupts and asks him what he’s doing here. Character C hugs him and says its good to see him and says he thought he was dead. Character C turns to Character A and says that he took off for a month without saying anything, could she even believe it? And they had an important event that the three of them needed to attend tonight. Character B starts to argue with Character C when Character A hears her name called. The Guy she stole from is there, he holds up the card to the bookstore that fell under his desk and said he wants the contents of his safe back, and maybe the sheriff will go easy on her if she returns it, or maybe he won't since he will also be investigating his cabin burning down and one of his sons going missing. Character A plays dumb but he grabs her around the neck and says he knows it was her, she’s a pathetic bum just like her father. Character B punches him, forcing him to release her and they begin fighting. The other partygoers jump to Character A’s defense and start fighting the other guys that came with him. Character C picks up Character A after she was knocked over to keep her from being trampled, and Character B breaks away when The Guy starts fighting with someone else. So they turn and head for the door, but The Guy's Son, the same one from last month who she stole the bike from, blocked the back door.
-Character A turns and together they run into the basement, locking the door behind them. They run down the stairs and into a bedroom where she locks the door again. She whips out her knives and points one at Character C. “Why do you want me to go to the Other World?” He holds up his hands and smiles, “I need your help finding a weapon that will help me defeat the Queen .” “Why me?” “The Goddess showed me in a dream that it is you. I will pay you in gold and return you back here, unharmed, once you find it.” Character A hears them break through the basement door and descend the stairs. “Fine, I’ll help you do it.” Character B protests and steps forward but she gestures the knife at him and he stops. “But first, you will help me find my Father and send him back here. Alive. And healthy.” All she knows about the Other World is what she could glean from her Fathers stories and what she was able to research about lore, but she had no idea what was accurate and what was not. She would be a fool to think she should turn away help if she could bargain for it. “I will help you find you Father, but it won’t be until after tonight, we must attend the Queens party so you can search for the weapon, this is the best opportunity we will have for another year.” The Guy begins banging on the door. She took it back, she was being a fool, she had very little hope that she would be able to fulfill her end of the bargain, but she was out of time, and she may never have a chance to get to the Other World again. “Deal.” She says as she steps forward to shake his hand. Character C grasps it and an electrical charge runs up her arm. He pulls a small vial out of his pocket. He dumps some black sparkly powder on his tongue and a hole appears in the floor. Grabbing Character B’s hand as well they jump through it just as the door breaks open.
If you have read this far, seriously thank you so much and I love you and if you want feedback on anything please direct me to where I can provide it!
I wanted to note that the mention about her potentially killing The Other Son is relevant to the plot because he did not die in the fire, he was lured to the Other World and will be there as an antagonist when Character A shows up. Also, the mushrooms become relevant to her finding the weapon in book 2. She gets sidetracked this book by finding her father and bargaining to take his place in the game (the party they are attending is to watch this game take place) and having to fight her way out of them. The entire first book takes place over the course of one single night.

I come back having done some more research! Not sure why this was not allowed on JPTravel, but let's try this forum.
Here is my tentative itinerary. I intend for it to be relatively fast paced since we are a small group of fairly young individuals. However, this is my first time going and I have no idea how reasonable or unreasonable these timetables are. The time attached is when we depart from each activity.
Please let me know if you have any feedback or tips for traveling to these places. As of yet, I'm also not quite sure which of them need to have pre-arranged tickets or registration, so if anyone would be kind enough to share their opinions I would be very grateful. Thank you so much!
Day 1 - Minato

• Arrive at Tokyo-Narita at 2:30PM
• Clear customs at Narita, 3:30PM
• Acquire JR-Pass, 4:00-4:30PM
• Arrange transportation to Sheraton Miyako Hotel, est. 1hr, 5:00-5:30PM
• Check-in, place belongings, 6:15PM
• Dinner (see options), 7:30PM
  • Transportation: taxi/Uber
• Tokyo Tower, 9:00PM

Day 2 - Shibuya, Shinjuku

• Wake up, 8:15AM
• Breakfast, 9:00AM
• *Rush hour* transportation: Namboku Line > Marunouchi Line, est. 35min; 9:40AM
• Shinjuku Gyo-en, 11:00AM
• Lunch, 11:50AM
• Meiji Shrine, 3:30PM
• **Check out, keep luggage with concierge**
• Various options, 5:30PM
  • Shop, visit in the vicinity of Shinjuku
  • Yoyogi Park
  • Tokyo Government Building, including free observation decks (although will have another later in the day)
• Dinner, ideally at Shibuya SKY
• Shibuya SKY (order tickets for c. 6:30PM), 8:30PM
• Various options, 10:00PM
• Shopping near Shibuya
• Visit Shibuya Center Gai
• Collect baggage from hotel
• Arrive at Shinagawa Sta. (momentary stop at hotel to collect baggage), 10:20PM
• Take Ueno-Tokyo Line OR Yokosuka Line to Yokohama Sta., 10:10-10:40PM
• Check-in to Yokohama hotel

Day 3 - Yokohama, Kamakura

• Wake up, 6:00AM
• Breakfast, 7:00AM
• Yokosuka Line (about 1hr) to Kamakura, 8:20AM
• Sasuke Inari Shrine, 11:30AM
• Lunch, 12:30PM - consider seafood
• Kamakura Hasedera, 1:00PM
• Enoden Line to Enoshima Station, 1:30PM
• Shonan Monorail to Ofuna, 2:00PM
• Shonan-Shinjuku Line, 3:00PM
• Odawara Castle, 5:30PM
• Dinner, 6:20PM
• *LONG transport times, 80 mins to Lake Kawaguchi by car, 7:30PM
• Lake Kawaguchi (biking recommended), 10:00PM
• *LONG transport times, about 100 mins back to hotel
• Return to hotel, 11:40PM

Day 4 - Yokohama, Kyoto

• Wake up, 9:00AM
• Breakfast, 10:00AM
• Various options
• Yokohama Landmark Tower
• Cosmo Clock 21 Ferris Wheel
• Kishamichi Promenade
• Lunch, 12:30PM
• Check-out, 1:00PM
• Taxi to Shin-Yokohama Sta., 1:25PM
• Shinkansen to Kyoto Sta. (trains depart every 10 minutes), 2:07PM-4:00PM
• Taxi to Chapter Kyoto, 4:20PM
• Check-in, 4:50PM
• Dinner, 6:00PM
• Yasaka Shrine, 8:00PM
• Unscheduled time, 8-9:00PM
• Return to hotel, 9:30PM

Day 5 - Kyoto

• Wake up, 8:40AM
• Breakfast, 9:20AM
• Kyoto Imperial Palace, 9:45AM
• **Kyoto Imperial Palace Guided Tour** starting at 10, ends 11:00AM
• Lunch, 11:45AM
• Nijo Castle, 2:15PM
• Heian Shrine, 4:00PM
• Kiyomizu-dera starting at 4:20, closes 5:00PM
• Dinner, 6:00PM
• Hiking Mount Ushio, 8:30PM
• Unscheduled time, 8:30-9:30PM
• Return to hotel, 10:00PM

Day 6 - Osaka

• Wake up, 8:40AM
• Breakfast, 9:30AM
• Walk to Sanjo Sta., 10:00AM
• Take Keihan Main Line (not covered in JR Pass) to Temmabashi Station, 10:07AM-11:10AM
• Lunch, 11:40AM
• Walk to Osaka Castle, 12:01PM
• **Osaka Castle**, 1:35PM
• Walk to Temmabashi Station, 2:00PM
• Take Keihan Main Line to Sanjo Sta., 2:03PM-3:01PM
• Check-out, 4:00PM
• Taxi to Kyoto Sta., 4:40PM
• Take Tokaido Shinkansen to Tokyo Sta., 7:38PM
• Check-in, 8:30PM
• Walk around the Imperial Palace, 10:00PM
• Return to hotel, 10:40PM

Day 7 - Ginza, Nikko

• Wake up, 8:40AM
• Breakfast, 9:30AM
• Arrange transportation to Nikko Sta. (日光), 12:20PM - lunch on train, pack dinner
• **Nikko Toshogu**, 2:30PM
• Hike in and around Nikko, 8:30PM - will probably adhere to Internet recommendations while there
• Arrange transportation to Ginza, 11:45PM
• Return to hotel, 11:50PM

Day 8 - Departure to Narita

Product warranty. 1. Purchsed power standup recliner that broke

1. Retailer agreed was broken but time frame could be 6 months wait part.
   
2. I complained sought replacement via BBB.
   
3. Retailer capitulated and ordered replacement but stated would be no warranty.
   
4. I also have a purchased warranty from 3rd party for original chair.
   
5. Can retailer refuse honor implied or Express manufacturer warranty just because it was a replacement made under original warranty?
   
6. What about the purchased extended warranty contract?
   

Thank you

Earlier today we had the final session of my first ever level 1-20 campaign (I was the DM but it was my first 1-20 as player or DM). It took almost exactly 18 months. It was the second longest running RPG campaign of my life overall (I played as a PC in a werewolf campaign once that ran longer, I believe ~3 years). I thought I would make a post about the campaign and my high level learnings DMing from 1-20. The entire game was played on Roll20 w/ Discord for voice. Feel free to AMA.

Campaign Overview:

BBEG: Vecna (Canon Vecna based on the Dossier; yes I wrapped a 1-20 Vecna campaign 2 days before the release of Eye of Ruin).
Setting: Faerun with “home point” as Candlekeep.
Official Material Usage: Homebrew but I drew from the following official materials for various dungeons/arcs: Candlekeep Mysteries (The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces), Tales of the Yawning Portal (The Sunless Citadel), Ghost of Saltmarsh (Isle of the Abbey), and Keys from the Golden Vault (Prisoner 13). I also wrote 1 arc based fully on the official Mordent setting in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.
Plot Overview: I asked the PCs to each submit their own backstory to build a story around. The only requirement was for some reason to be seeking information in Candlekeep. The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces was used to bring the party together. They then used Candlekeep’s resources to progress their individual goals based on the backstories they wrote. I wrote a “piece” of Vecna into every character’s backstory as explained below. As they progressed through their various Arcs it became obvious that Vecna was returning and was going to have to be dealt with.
I also had one of the character’s moms be former adventurers that defeated Vecna ~100 years prior (not known the the character who just knew her moms were a bard and wizard but didn’t know they were level 20). This was mostly to have accessible NPCs that knew about Vecna as things started to unfold.

Player Characters:

Zellie - A Elf Archfey warlock. Who was “chosen” by her patron for greatness. In reality her patron was trying to exploit her (unknown to her at the start of the campaign) heritage to dismantle the fae courts and return the faewild to chaos. Her patron had torn a critical page from the Book of Vile Darkness that he was only willing to give up if Zellie did as he wished (in the end he was the penultimate boss since the party didn’t want to dismantle the fae courts).
Gaz - A goblin exterminator (swarm ranger) from Waterdeep. His brother, dad, and him worked the family business together. Eventually his brother decided he wanted something more and traded his dad’s freedom for entry into Xanathar’s Guild. The leader of the crew within Xanathar’s guild his brother ended up on had The Eye of Vecna.
Synthrin - A Noble dragonborn from Baldur’s Gate (swashbuckler rogue). Their mother and father did not play nice with the Guild. The Hand (a homebrew, not Nine Fingers) sought to have them assassinated but only managed to get their father. The Hand possessed the Hand of Vecna.
Luthien - An half-elf Cleric of Aerdrie Faenya looking for her estranged father. Her father was being held captive by Kas the Bloody Handed who was trying to use his storm sorcerer powers to help him ascend to godhood.
Matteo - A Human Monster Hunter (monster hunter homebrew fighter subclass and kensai monk) whose parents ran a monster hunting dojo/orphanage near The High Moor that protects a town constantly under threat of monsters. Various orphans/fellow monster hunters from his dojo had taken an experimental potion his mother brewed before setting off as adventurers. The potion was met to give them special powers but was known to have risks (they were given the option to drink it). Matteo was the only one who said no and now his friends have not been heard from for 2 years. The potion was tampered with by an evil paladin using information from the Book of Vile Darkness.
At one point (pretty late in the campaign actually) Gaz drew an unlucky card from the deck of many things and got trapped in the Sword of Kas. That led us to Gerrymander who was a gnome artificer just trying to make some gold to send his daughter to college.

Reflections/Learnings:

• If I could do one thing differently it would be to think through the end game story more. I knew roughly what was going on with each character's backstories from the start. I did not have a good plan about what would happen once that was all resolved other than “now they kill Vecna”. So levels 18-20 were more or less made up once we got there. I don’t feel like this made Vecna as threatening as I had wanted him to be.
  
• I found interesting combat that isn’t a slog to be really challenging to put together at Tier 4. Building “dungeons” to drain adventure day resources also felt like setting the players up for a long mechanic fest without cheap shortcuts like “that trap takes away half your ki points”. I think in the future I would put more thought into how to put together a story day that is interesting and could run across multiple sessions.
  
• The “drop in” official materials like yawning portal, saltmarsh, & candlekeep mysteries work really well at lower levels but the high levels I struggled to find ways to use them effectively past tier 2. Once a story gets going rethemeing moduals seemed like more work than home brewing one. I tried maybe twice and scrapped the work because it wasn’t fitting together nicely. If you want to pull high level “anthology” materials into a campaign I suggest deciding which ones in advance so you can make them fit nicely without too much lifting.
  
• The hardest thing overall about DMing a homebrew campaign is narrative consistency. I would come up with good ideas / reactions to unexpected moves by the players but recording and remembering all that while you’re trying to improvise is challenging for me. Additionally, remembering all the various NPCs and what their deals were over 1.5 years was really hard. I’m not somebody who has 5+ hours of freetime to prep every week so I did a lot of my prep 1-2 hours before or 1-2 hours after our Sunday morning session time. There was always a 6 day gap in my memory in one direction or the other.
  

Overall I had so much fun and am really grateful to my PCs for such a great 1.5 years. Thank you to my players if you see this!

Let's start by saying that I am in a group of friends in which there are several boys and several girls. I live on a university campus and so we often meet up just to smoke a cigarette or study together. Every month or so, they organize a party here where there are always a lot of people and usually my group of friends and I have fun together. In September 2023, a friend (who is the closest to me in the group and who we will call by the name of "Stella") introduces me to a girl, with whom I talk all evening, we have the same interests and in general we get along well talking, but nothing much happens that party night. To shorten it, we get together after a few days. For the first few days I was hesitant and then I completely fell in love with it. Months pass, the university session arrives and I can't pass any of the exams I had to pass. Small aside, since I live on campus with a scholarship, by July 2024 I have to pass all the first year exams with an average of 24/30, I have four to go. In that period I don't know what came over me but I tightened my hands around her neck almost to drown her, and then removed my grip and apologized for the gesture I had made. What I did doesn't make logical sense, but I attribute it now thanks to a therapy I'm following, which was associated with the study. The first time we "underestimated" it, or rather she had nightmares and difficulty sleeping at night but we had never had a serious discussion about this thing, also, and here I admit it, because I hadn't started talking seriously about this either. Some time passes and classes start again, I felt like sometimes I wasn't focused on studying, I had difficulty studying and I took refuge from her. Well this frustration was repeated a second time with the same gesture towards her. This time we talked about it, and seriously considered starting therapy because it was clear I needed help. A week goes by, in which I don't notice anything special, and she writes me a message: "I don't feel well, I want to sleep alone tonight", thinking that she might have a stomach ache or a headache, I decide to go up to her and see how are This time we talked about it, and seriously considered starting therapy because it was clear I needed help. A week goes by, in which I don't notice anything special, and she writes me a message: "I don't feel well, I want to sleep alone tonight", thinking that she might have a stomach ache or a headache, I decide to go up to her and see how she was doing. She opens the door for me, I ask her how she is, and she replies with "everything is fine but I have to talk to you". She tells me that she no longer has feelings towards me and that she can't continue, I tell her that we can always help each other but she, undaunted, decides to end it anyway. Days go by in which I try to "win her back" without success, I go to talk to her and tell her that I would move on. The problem is that often when I'm with my friends, she's there too and after talking to her, seeing her often gave unwanted results. I felt bad again, and I couldn't stop thinking about what I did. I decide to go and talk to her, this time asking her to try again. I get a categorical no. He tells me he's getting scared and wants his space, and I rightly agreed. Let's get to the point, what happened yesterday. After the last time we spoke, I didn't write to her anymore and at most I said hello when we passed each other around campus, nothing more. Obviously we take into account the group dinners where we were both there or during the study. Last night, it was Stella's boyfriend's birthday, and both my ex and I were there. Towards the end of the evening the girls, talking to each other, raise the topic of dating and, since I was literally half a meter away from them, I hear my ex say that she is dating a boy off campus and that it's nothing special though. serious and that there was only something "carnal". I stare into space for 20 seconds to say I feel sleepy and go home. Needless to say, I cried late into the night because deep down I still have feelings for her and knowing that she was able to move on from our relationship in less than a month pretty much killed me. In the end that's all. I would like your opinion and you are free to tell me anything that comes to mind.

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Title captures the request. Looking for couch coops to play with fiance who's a novice gamer. She likes easier games to grasp, especially games that you only control movement, not camera (2d, side scroller, top down etc)
Games we've enjoyed together:
Overcooked (albeit a little stressful) Unravel 2 Heavenly bodies Super Mario party Stardew valley Human fall flat (the one exception to 3d movement games it seems, so far)
Thanks!!!
Edit: guess I should mention platforms. We've got ps4 and the switch

Last night I posted how I was on episode 8 and did watch the next 2 episodes right after that. Episode 8 shit hits the fan and while I was expecting Nates death I didn’t expect it to happen when it did. They kinda pulled a fast one with him waking up from the coma so quickly. Then the shared dream with Nate and David was truly a gag with David waking up to the flatline.
I mentioned how I hoped Russel didn’t get any more screen time and he was literally in the next episode… for the last time thank goodness but yeah he was obnoxious.
Today I watched the last two episodes.
No mention of Gabe, ultimately he’s dead to Claire, who did in a way get her big break.
The incest scene was actually disgusting. Mostly because of how gross Billy is but the fact it didn’t seem like a dream at first was what made it realllllly weird.
Did anyone else think Brenda’s baby was dead when Nate and Nate Sr. were holding Willa?
The ending was quite nice, I’m talking about the real ending and not the last scene; with Claire leaving, Ruth moving in with her sister, and David and Keith moving into the funeral home and the name going back to Fisher and Sons. All that is very satisfying. The dinner scene was very touching and even though a lot of shows can bring back characters on screen after they die (this show never being an exception from the very first episode), which in ways lessens the impact of their death, Nate really felt dead. Any time we see apparitions of dead characters it’s really just the hallucinators projection and not really their ghost, and that rule applied to Nate. Good job.
Okay so one thing not sitting right with me is everyone else’s death. I appreciated it at first, seeing Ruth’s end… but when the next one was Keith who got shot and killed… it didn’t feel right and was like the least offensive bury your gays moment to ever happen in media. I’m not a fan of the way they leave the current timeline and handled the non-question of how everyone dies. Not quite sure if it was unearned but for me it was unfulfilling.
Brenda dying to Billy babbling… like how terrible for her??? Where was her new man? Where were Maya and Willa then?
David remarrying then collapsing and dying to a vision of Keith…. K. Also how David finally “healed” his fear of his attacker by hugging himself? I get the message I just don’t think it works after 20 episodes of him going back and forth with the trauma. No therapy just dreams and hallucinations…. Like “bam here’s another uncontrollable thing happening to you but this time David you’re gonna be healed” kinda rushed after being dragged for so long.
Claire dying at 102 in her bedroom with a hospice nurse… where’s her family? Like anyone? Even if she didn’t have kids where’s the nieces and nephews?
Ultimately I enjoyed the show very much. If anyone feels different to how I do about anything I said please say why, I’ll be reading them while rewatching the pilot.

I've never done this before as in I've never made a post on reddit. I'm a pretty private individual and I think previous trauma in my life has made it difficult for me to want to reach out/trust people. This may be one of the reasons I'm where I'm at now. Onto the vent...
I (27F) am in a relationship with BF (32M). We have been together for almost 4 years.... I moved in with him close to the end of 2021. We met during the start of the pandemic as coworkers, and he had just moved from a very conservative, southern state. I also moved from a state with similar.. views and social standards? as he did but this was almost 8 years ago for me at the time. We both live on the west coast now. Just for context here.
When I first met this guy I was about 5 months out of a very long, abusive relationship. I spent almost 7 years with my high-school sweetheart and it was very tumultuous, long story short I finally realized I needed to leave that when after a suicide attempt (at the hand of being broken down by my ex and truly thinking I would be doing those in my life a favor) and when he (luckily) called our friends - because even tho he constantly told me I should kill myself i guess actually trying was "crazy" of me to do... my friends showed up and gave me the intervention I needed and I started going to therapy. Over time with all the realizations through getting help, making adjustments in my life, and still undergoing abuse I finally snapped out of it and realized I wasn't the problem, and I needed to leave the relationship.
So needless to say, I was vulnerable when I met BF, and while he didn't know the extent of things, he definetly knew how fresh my breakup was. This didn't seem to deter him at all. I did my best to tell him I needed to take my time in a lot of ways, and he gave the impression he was being patient, but really I just think he did a good job of dressing up his impatience with love bombing, so he did a good job of making me feel loved and cared for and safe, I think I gave into a lot of things too early.
We started dating a few months into me meeting him, and he seemed wonderful. Patient, open minded, he really gave me this idea that where he was from he knew he stood out, and moved where he moved to fit in with people that he could vibe with better. This meant in my eyes we shouldn't have too many issues agreeing on a lot of views. To put it simply. I'm not very political, but I do find that some people with the extreme side of conservative values tend to take issue with ME, just existing with tattoos and being a strong willed woman who likes her independence and not being told that im supposed to stay in the kitchen or whatever.... but let me be clear. I've always been the "mom friend" and I tend to take a caregiver role a lot. I think he liked that about me. He also always told me how cool it was that I was against the grain, cool that im closer to vegetarian than not, cool i dye my hair, ect.
Well fast forward to almost a year in and im realizing this dude is very clingy. He wants one of us to be at eachothers house every night. He's getting jelous all the time over me having to work with men for BUSINESS REASONS. literally one night he saw me post a snapchat story inside my house and he saw I still had shoes on and I had to spend like an hour convincing him that just because it was late and I still had shoes on that doesn't mean there's someone in my house that I'm lying about??? Anyways, the accusations of me cheating finally did die down when I blew up on him one day and told him I've never cheated on anyone in my life and I won't put up with this.
But yet I just took it as him really liking me, because hey the last guy told me no one would ever love someone as difficult as me and I was lucky he put up with me...
So this turned into him convincing me that i had to move in with him because the 30 minute drive to my house every night was too much and sleeping alone without me was too much to handle. I had the cheaper rent, bigger house... but that's not what he wanted. He didn't like the area, whatever, I tell him this isn't gonna work. I have 2 dogs. He lives in a 900sq ft box. He's convinced he can handle it. Did I mention this guy has insane cleanliness standards? The place needs to look show room quality at all times. Just remember that detail.
Btw, im very very clean, always referred to by my friends as the uptight show room house. Boy, I thought I was bad but im realistic. BF doesn't seem to have patience for the extra mess that dogs include. I also am in the midst of starting my own business. I'm apologizing every day, doing my best, but there are still boxes taking up space because WE LIVE IN A BOX.
I quickly learn that BF has a violent streak and alcoholism. Not towards me, but objects. One day he's drunk and screams in my face that I'm a bitch and I don't care about him because I tell him that maybe he's being too hard on his boss at work (I was just trying to be honest with him, he seems to have really high standards for a lot of situations). Another time he comes home and im on my period (forgot this, but I have endometriosis, and it often makes me feel like it's ruining my life by how badly it puts me down for 3-4 days at a time sometimes) so I wasn't able to clean up some of the boxes he asked me too that morning. (Knowing I was on my period, with me having explained several times that i can't physically get much done around that time) and when he came in the door he threw such a fit that he kicked a box with expensive items (equipment for my business) across the room and broke things.
He would always apologize profusely, tell me I didn't deserve it, but his violent tendencies kept stacking. I'm not always easy to argue with, im one of those "actually" people but its because I'm f**king honest and real and I only argue with facts instead of point fingers/name calling. He on the other hand, is a name caller and spiteful. This kept leading to major blowups. I mean literally one day he almost wrecked his car( swears he had total control of the car the whole time) because he was talking over me while I was on the phone and I got off the phone and was like "dude I couldn't hear her" and he flew off the handle saying "I was trying to include important information!!!" When I explained that it was okay and his information wasn't going to help, he got angry, said I was being a bitch to him, I got an attitude about that, he ended up driving like a maniac and screaming at me until I literally almost threw myself out of the car because I was having a panic attack (I have ptsd from getting abused, and sexually assaulted in the past).
One good thing I can give him is he did decide to go sober started in 2022 and has remained sober since, so know that much. Half of these things are done out of him being drunk, it's literally just his temper.
Another example of a time my view of who he was changed was when I finally decided to confide in him that I was coerced into getting drunk and then raped when I was 14. And his response was to tell me "that was high-school stuff though, you're really still not over it?" I don't think I felt the same about him afterwards but again, I took it as a me problem, maybe i expected too much.
Fast forward again to he can't live like this anymore, he can't live in a house this small with these dogs, he can't have my business mess around any longer, but the rental market has been shit, I can't find any rent that we can afford, and hes being picky about finding a new job, since he quit his last 2 while having a temper tantrum about something. Not saying he didn't need to leave them, but he didn't line anything up before leaving. And I'm having to help cover bills, try to run my business, cook dinner every night because that's what he expects, and ive also got an inflammatory disease that makes me suffer most days so I'm not always the fastest, most productive person. Another thing, this is the kind of guy who wakes up in the morning and is already zooming at 1000mph and "beast moding" while I'm shuffling around in the morning waiting for some of my inflammation to subside while I get ready.
So I apply for part time job to work alongside starting my business, I find another opportunity where if I work part time at another place, I can then use the property to conduct my business, what are the chances! I find a solution to making more money and getting the business out of the house? Now we just need a bigger place to live! And hopefully this means BF can be left to find a decent job right?
Well he eventually did, and that's nice. But he's still short tempered. He's always upset because I don't thank him for "washing a weeks worth of dishes" even tho... they were only the dishes from us eating dinner the night before. I've washed dishes every day that week without a single thank you, which I didn't care for, because I knew that it was a team effort. That was when it was clear that everything I do is unnoticed, but god forbid he does somthing without his accolades afterwards.
We finally find a 2 bedroom house that solves a lot of issues. I thought well part of the problem is we are just on top of eachother. It will get easier. If we both have personal space right? Well it's just different now.
We've passed the point where I told him if he calls me names or breaks somthing again then I'm leaving him. I told him he has to go to therapy for his issues. No more violence. Instead he just doesn't even kiss me goodbye before he walks out the door and if I ask him too, he gives me a side hug and mashes his lips against me for a couple seconds and says "bye" before shutting the door in my face. Every nice thing I do to try and spark up a good time I get looked at and asked "why I'm acting like I actually care".
Everything is always on me, I need to find him a therapist, he doesn't know how, I need to help him with his temper, it's not his fault, he's like his dad, he can't help cook dinner, he doesn't know how, it's not his fault, so these are all things I'm expected to do.
At this point all I do is work. I work all day every day. Even weekends. Sometimes I enforce a day off, but it means all I do is lay around and think about what I'm getting behind on. And he resents me for everything.
He gets off at 3 or earlier most days, he has a ton of freedom in his job because he works sales, but im the one who isn't trying hard enough because I won't cook dinner with him or spend time with him. I don't have sex with him anymore because i have so much resentment, and he blames me for that too. "Well maybe I would be in a better mood if you actually had sex with me" and when we do and it's short lived "well maybe if you maintained me better I wouldn't finish so fast"
The way that I have to sit here and listen to him talk about cars and fishing for hours, and I do it just to be supportive, and yet I can't get him to stop looking at his phone anytime I want to talk. If I do vent about my day he just tries to tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I need to fix.
I just finally sat him down and told him how I felt. How I think he doesn't realize how selfish he can be, how everything I've done that he hates about me now has been for him, how I've watched him essentially ask me to be his mom(that woman literally will still buy him clothes and handle life things for him and he's a grown ass man, she often thanks me for "putting up with her bratty son and he loves you girls so much") which almost feels like she's known he's a brat this whole time.... and anyways what's his response?
"Well im not happy either. You're a slob and all you do is work and when you don't work you just lay around and complain, you never have sex with me and you're not fun"
To say that I'm so lost is an understatement. We live in a time where it's not easy to afford living alone. I like my house but I don't think I can afford it alone. I haven't been able to grow my own business because of everything I've just been doing for years to try and make BF happy and yet I'm sitting here and feeling like I've just once again wasted my life for a man who doesn't respect me for who I am, and only loves me conditionally. I just feel so stupid, that I've let it get this far. I literally contributed to breaking myself down into someone that he can't respect and now it's easy for him to say it's all my fault and he cannot understand the idea that im a shell of myself because of how much I've put into this. He thinks I'm wrong, he says I'm his everything and he's put everything into us, and I know he has, but it's always been on his terms, where as for my needs it's still also always been on his..... I'm sorry. I'm sure it's been difficult for anyone to read this long. I am just going to leave it here.
Yall can let me have it in the comments. I'd love the honesty....

We are a late 20s/early 30s couple eloping in Oahu and will be staying in the north shore area this Sept. Any ideas for what to do directly after the elopement ceremony and/or dinner ideas?
We will be staying at turtle bay resort so that's the ultimate fall back is to just have dinner there. Any suggestions would be awesome. Thank you!!

The barrowlands were a vast expanse, unforgiving and empty. Hills undulated and rolled, carved by the winds and time and the hands of the First Men. Dust that had once been kings’ bones sat in the thousands of slopes that defined the landscape, their blatant artificiality only occasionally marred by collapses and uncontrolled treelines.
It was in one of these barrows that the Locke party had taken shelter. The edges of a spring storm had reached them, darkening the sky before its time and blanketing the land with misty rain.
The barrow was unmarked to their eyes, any runes long since worn away by time. Even Valena did not know to whom the tomb had belonged, and to Harwin’s mind, that meant nobody knew. Now, night had fallen in truth, and a small cookfire crackled fitfully, smoke curling out of the doorframe to be lost in the mist. Their meal was strips of salted venison, the finest gift of the Manderlys’ court, and a small celebration that they had set out on their way.
They had spent two weeks in White Harbour, in the end, and the memory left him glad to be free. Bella Woolfield was a busy woman, distracted and superior in equal measures. Harwin had felt exposed, especially when their hosts toasted the memory of Lord Barthogan and Marlon Locke.
Sylas sat against the far side of the dark barrow, eyes straining at that book he had brought from Oldcastle. He’d so far evaded any questions about it, and the well-worn leather binding gave little clue. The space was crowded by the rest of their retinue, quiet men intent on their food, tired from a day’s travel and disheartened by the weather. Only Valena seemed energised, scanning the roof of the barrow, a sketchbook open on her knees, charcoal staining her fingers as she scraped it across the pages.
“What are you drawing?” Harwin asked, finding her easiest to engage with. The question drew several pairs of eyes. Only three of their number weren’t present. Frenken was out checking on the horses, Jorah had insisted on standing guard, and Benjicot had not yet returned.
“Ceiling,” Valena said, pointing. “See how the way the stones are stacked makes an alternating pattern? Sort of back and forth here by the entrance? Spiralling in the burial chamber?”
Harwin nodded, though in truth it took him a moment to parse what she meant.
“That allows them to stack into an arch without mortar. The weight of the soil on top keeps everything tight, and it’ll more or less stand forever.”
“Why not build castles like that?”
“Because–” Valena flicked the stick of charcoal in that way that meant she had caught herself before giving an inadequate answer. She took a moment.
“They did build fortifications. I guess you wouldn’t call them castles, and honestly this all depends on which maester you read. In any case, though, it doesn’t scale. You couldn’t build something the size of the Wolf’s Den or Oldcastle like this.”
Harwin nodded. There was a fragility in expansion, he knew. He had seen some small glimpse of it in the pulls on Bella Woolfield’s time. So many things that could go wrong. It didn’t discourage him as much as it probably should have.
“Who goes there?” came a voice. In the muffling of the wind and the barrow, it took a moment for Harwin to identify Jorah. The voice that answered was too far away for Harwin to make out the words, but he knew its sound. He was on his feet before he knew it, striding out of the ancient tomb.
“Benji!” he called, grinning unexpectedly. The soaked knight smiled in return. One hand held the reins of his horse, the other rose in greeting. Harwin ran in, clasping a hand to Ser Benjicot’s shoulder.
“My lord, it’s good to see you again,” Benji said.
“And you - I was worried you would pass us by, in truth.” Harwin took the reins from him, and Benjicot hesitated only slightly at the unexpected courtesy.
“I did,” he admitted. “I passed by here, oh, four hours ago, when the storm was worse. I figured I must’ve missed you and turned back.”
“Glad you did, ser.” Harwin brought the horse over to the others, and thanked Frenken when he took a blanket from one of the carriages, throwing it over Benji’s steed and tying it down.
“How was your visit to White Harbour?” Benjicot asked, wiping the rain from his brow uselessly.
“Uneventful, in truth. We didn’t mean to stay so long, but the Woolfield-Manderlys were having a feast to celebrate a nameday. Insisted we stay.”
“Sounds luxurious, my lord.”
Harwin shrugged. “If I ever eat another lamprey pie, it will be too soon.”
Benjicot chuckled, and then made a little oh noise at the back of his throat, and fumbled for the saddlebags of his horse. “That reminds me, my lord. I have something you may enjoy, hold one moment-” Whatever he sought had been packed low, but eventually Benjicot pulled out a small satchel, opening it to reveal what initially seemed like so many mottled bones.
“King crab legs. Salted, from Sweetsister. Care to try one?”
He handed the leg over, and Harwin followed his lead as he split the shell with a press of his thumbs, pulling the pale meat out from within with his teeth. The meat was softer than he expected, sweetness mixing with the salt of its preservation. He made a satisfied grunt as he swallowed.
“Gods, that is good. Sweetsister, you said?”
“Aye, my lord.”
“I must visit some day. Is everything there that delicious?”
Benji chuckled. “I couldn’t say, honestly.”
“And this,” Harwin gestured to the food as Benjicot stowed it again, “should I take it as an indication your visit also went well?”
“I believe so, my lord.” Benjicot pulled a different, familiar satchel from the saddlebag, and gestured ahead of them in a question, shall we step out of earshot for this part? Harwin nodded, and they began walking in a wide orbit around the barrow. Harwin blinked into the mist, trying to clear the rain from his lashes to no avail. Benjicot took a moment before he spoke again.
“I wasn’t perfectly successful, my lord. The captains I spoke to were – I think understandably – mistrustful of an unproven town like Shackleton. Not to say there was no interest, mind. There was one captain from Widow’s Watch who seemed to take pleasure in the idea of undermining the Manderlys.”
Harwin couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Well, it’s one way to make an ally.”
“Indeed, my lord. Once I realised I should emphasise that Shackleton is a lumber town, I got some more interest. The Sisters have a great demand for wood these days, as I understand, and Braavos’ Arsenal is always hungry. In all, I think I convinced seven captains to make some trade, with another four or so on the fence.”
He handed over the satchel, and Harwin opened it. He didn’t bother counting the coins within, merely shifting them from side to side to get an impression. A bit over half remained from the allowance that Harwin had given.
“Thank you,” Harwin said. “I hope you didn’t run into any trouble?”
“Thankfully not. I met a man I had known as a squire, but he did not think to suspect me of anything.”
The near miss sent a small stab of fear through Harwin’s heart, but he tried to put it aside. It was days or weeks past now, and not worth worrying about, especially if Benjicot was discussing it so offhandedly.
“No other news from the New Castle?” Benji asked. “I know you had some concerns about the possibility of a marriage being suggested.”
Harwin laughed. “No, it never came up. Sylas tried to flirt with Bella’s cousin, but I don’t think it went well. He’s been unusually quiet since, though he was quite happy to spend my money to distract himself at the time.”
“My sympathies to him,” Benji grinned. “And your sister?”
“Oh, she spent much of the trip in the Wolf’s Den. I went with her a few times, stopped by the weirwood there. She took notes on the construction of the Den, I’m sure she’ll tell you everything you might want to know about Eyronic columns.”
“I have no doubt, my lord.”
Harwin stopped walking for a moment, looking out into the darkness of the barrowlands. The shadows were impenetrable, the rain oppressive. And yet he felt warmer than he had in weeks.
“I have missed you,” he said, turning to his knight. “More than I had expected to.”
Benjicot’s hair was windswept, auburn darkened to almost brown with the damp, and his beard was growing in stronger than he had let it before. It did not hide the smile that crept up his cheeks.
“And I you, my lord.”
“Thank you, again, for everything. We should probably go inside, get you warm.”
“I would appreciate that, my lord.”
They completed their lap of the barrow, returning to the small room with too many people, and the warmth of their greeting was greater than that of their fire. A plate of venison was pressed into Benjicot’s hands, and an energy filled the space anew as everyone asked after the knight’s health and of his news. Sylas retrieved wine from one of the carriages, and laughter rang through the tomb. The secrecy of Benjicot’s purpose in White Harbour was maintained, but gently mocked by all involved.
Harwin watched them all, trying not to focus too much on Benjicot. One would not think to look at the knight that he had risked his honour and freedom for Harwin. The merchants that he bribed would, Harwin hoped, prove profitable to Shackleton and Oldcastle for years to come. It was impossible to know just yet.
He was just glad to have Benjicot back amongst them. He had almost forgotten how close he had come to rely on the man in their weeks apart. Now, his household felt complete again. And it was his household, after all. The thought warmed him more than it once might have.
Sylas’ voice cut through the din of conversation. “Harwin, what’s our next stop?”
It took Harwin a moment to understand the context of the question, and so he barely avoided stammering when he answered, “Greywater Watch. Wanted to meet with the Reeds.”
Sylas nodded, curiosity satisfied, and returned to his conversation with Frenken. Their destination seemed to be helping him prove some point in a friendly argument. Benjicot was speaking with Jorah and his men, laughing over some dockside tale, pushing crab legs into the protesting guardsmen’s hands. Finally, Valena caught Harwin’s eye, smiling knowingly.
“Are we making friends all over the North?” she asked, half-mocking and half-sincere.
Harwin laughed, and didn’t answer.
Gods, he hoped so.

I remember a book from my childhood it was a Christian book it was hardcover and rectangular and the cover had a tree with children climbing/or sitting on the branches or it could have been a garden or bush. I think and each page was a story or lesson. There were bears along with the children in the stories/scenarios and verses accompanying the scenario for example so and so Wakes up early she is very quiet not to disturb her family and it shows a picture of a little girl sitting on bed with book and there would be a verse on each page as well "those who make a loud noise in the morning it will be counted as a curse" I also remember a sledding hill scenario where a little girl wanted to go first or had to wait turns and another page where children were having a tea party with the bear children.and there might have been bear twins as well. I think it might have been something like childrens book of lessons or children's book of proverbs or fruits of the spirit lessons for children or 99 proverbs for children but I can't find it with those titles so I'm probably wrong. It also was written before 2005 I believe it may be a 80s or 90s book but I'm not sure. I especially loved the artwork in the book. Thank you so much!!

Axstrom's Notes

1. The list is here: big jump list
2. The draw (1-5548) is 877, 1520, 4754, 5265, 1478
   1. Drawing 5 so there are backups in case of issues, but the jumper gets to choose among 4
   2. 877 is Earth Final Conflict - A TV show whewre aliens come and uplift Earth but have a hidden agenda
   3. 1520 is Investiture of the Gods - A fantasy tale in Zhou Dynasty
   4. 4754 is Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep - a Disney mashup videogame
   5. 5265 is The Fountain - A film about contuinity across time, grief, death, and growth
   6. Jumper chooses The Fountain
      1. Jump Doc
      2. Reddit discussion
   7. Jumper buys access to The Biosphere Supplement
      1. Supplement Doc

Build Notes

1. Drawbacks - None - Part of the point is that you can't have everything
2. Companions - None - This is the journey of an individual soul
3. Origin
   1. Past: Noble - setting the stage for grander thigns
   2. Present: Inventor - striving for progress
   3. Future: Witness - seeing what has become of the world
4. Perks
   1. Noble Thought - free for Noble, stay connected to the people who are affected by your actions
   2. Noble Deed - free for Noble, your actions have greater impact and are remembered and recorded
   3. Inventor's Vision - free for inventor, studying a problem gives increasing insight in how to improve it
   4. Inventor's Intent - free for inventor, your creations are harder to misuse
   5. Improved POV - free for witness, observe / remember events from multiple perspectives
   6. Bystander - free for witness, events can unfold around you leaving you unharmed
   7. All Together Now - merge all your past origins into a complex mind
   8. 500 Years of Practice (Teaching) - mastery beyond mastery of the chosen skill
   9. Soothing Presence - calm strong emotions and suffering
   10. Absolution - If someone genuinely repents, you can allow them to move
5. Items
   1. Meditation Garden - self-explanatory warehouse attachment
   2. Biosphere - Full purchase activates the Biosphere Supplement
   3. Tree of Life Sapling - Grows six immortality fruits per decade, which can (over very long time) grow more trees

Jump Notes

1. I wake up in my room in the warehouse apartments, after shutting myself in without even checking the Benefactor's Lounge the night before
   1. I'm still lingering on the frustration of not cracking the riddle of Allabar, and not being able to solve the problem permanently
   2. But there's no going back, so I commit to facing forward for the rest of the week, and head to the Benefactor room
      1. Once again, there are four envelopes with me, and my big chart of jumps up on the wall, like something from a Kindergarten classroom
      2. As I affix a sticker saying "The Fountain (2006)" to the big chart, a small round outline appears next to it: "Biosphere Supplement available"
   3. On my way to call a team meeting, I catch a surprise outside the apartments
      1. Three of our bard graduates are slowly exploring the area
   4. At the team meeting, I announce my intention to go solo on the next jump
      1. The decision isn't popular, but most of them have waited while I've done gauntlets before, so it's not a big shock
   5. We set up the entertainment room to watch the movie, even though I don't expect that meta knowledge will be much help
      1. For the first time, we don't all fit in the Entertainment room
      2. By count, there are eleven of us (me and ten companions), the Halflings are now up to fifteen after two recent births, and we have nine new bards with us, so we set up a second showing in the evening
   6. Finally, before heading in to the jump, I make one last check of the Benefactor's office to see if there's more information on the biosphere supplement, but though my note has been removed, there is no response, and nothing on the tablet
2. I awake from a deep sleep in a luxurious bed, it is early morning and the sun is still rising
   1. I can feel the absence of my abilities; I am reduced below even bodymod, to the level of a baseline middle-aged man in a world with primitive medicine
      1. Nevertheless, I can feel a gift reaching back in time to me - and as I accept it, I am calmed, no longer distressed by what I have lost
   2. In this time, I have duties, both in the mundane sense of the tasks those around me expect me to perform, as well as a greater sense in which I must try to make this world better
   3. My new gift becomes invaluable in due time
      1. All manner of petitioners and officers come to me with grievances, and each of them are a storm of emotions - no one comes before their Count to declare how satisfied they are with things
      2. In short time, word of my wisdom spreads, and my council is sought by King Ferdinand
   4. I lobby my King with an eye to improving the lives of all involved
      1. It is the lives of ordinary Spaniards that are the measure of his ability as a King, not the mass of his treasury
      2. Colonialism brings with it dangers beyond the obvious, and responsibilities for ages to come
      3. Allowing the priests to destroy artifacts of other cultures does not increase our glory, but diminishes it
   5. Despite my ability to make my case clearly and seemingly overcome all objections, my guidance is rarely heeded when I leave the room
   6. And before long, it seems I have made enemies of those who stand to gain by plundering the New World
      1. They do not discuss the matter with me, or make their displeasure known by facing me down in violence
      2. But as the breath leaves my lungs over dinner, my last thought is that I have been poisoned by a coward
3. I awake from a fitful sleep in a large bed, my wife still asleep beside me despite the chirping of my alarm clock
   1. My first throught is of the date - It is September 7, 1999 - the first day of fall semester
      1. This will not be my first time teaching CS 101, but this time will be different, I can feel the power in my body, my mind, and my soul
   2. I arrive at my office early, of course, and make sure everything is in order - the syllabus handouts are ready, my slides are in order and proof-read, and my TAs have confirmed their preparedness
      1. The lecure hall is large - so many students sign up for CS 101 without any prior programming knowledge, just to see what it's like, or convinced that they will be a natural
      2. As the students file in, they sparsely occupy the massive auditorium, afraid to sit near people they don't know, not fully understanding that for the vast majority of them, this is their first class on campus, their first opportunity to get to know eachother
      3. I exhort them to move towards the front so they can hear and see better, and a few oblige
      4. The first lecture flows like a breeze, the students hanging on my words as I understand what each one needs to hear to understand what the rest of this semester will hold
   3. By semester's end, the students and TAs are in awe, the CS department chair has asked for my materials and told me that spring registrations for CS102 are higher than ever, both of the student papers have run articles praising my class, and the dean of Arts and Sciences has interceded to clear my spring schedule to prioritize my research work on the condition that I teach 101 again next year
      1. I appreciate my grad students and TAs, but I don't have a real family in this life, so I head into the warehouse for winter break
4. I awaken rested and enthusiastic on a beautiful spring day
   1. It is graduation day for the first group of freshman I taught after coming to this jump, nearly four years ago
      1. They have come so far, and I'm fortunate that some of the best have continued to work with me, and three of them will be graduate students working under me starting in the fall
   2. It is also the first day of human trials for the drug, a new anti-inflammatory
      1. We were hoping it would treat chronic inflammatory diseases, but early testing suggests that it may significantly reduce hay fever, which would be great if we can mass produce it cheaply
   3. My reputation at the school has skyrocketed thanks to the combination of my groundbreaking research plus my teaching perks ensuring high instructor reviews as well as students learning and retaining more
      1. My tenure process has been fast-tracked, since the dean is rightly concerned about losing me to another institution
5. I awaken slowly, and awkwardly, as if from a coma, as a cocktail of drugs is released into my body, still restrained on my cryobed
   1. Our vessel, the Cyllene, is essentially a large asteroid with a hole carved in the middle, stuffed with propellent, equipment, supplies, expansive aquaponics facilities, and a relatively tiny living area
      1. Cyllene was said to have nursed and protected Hermes, as this vessel must nurture and protect us, the first observers, and hopefully, colonists,
   2. As my body and mind resume normal function over the course of 90 minutes, I get a slow trickle of updates on the status of the Cyllene and our mission
      1. The mission clock says it's 202 years since we left Earth, but thanks to time dilation, Earth has experienced 221
      2. Computer Block 5 (of 8) is currently undergoing automated reconstruction as the block with the highest error correction rate at the time the last automated reconstruction completed
      3. 1575 individuals are currently in cryosleep, and 25 (including me) are active, all sufficiently healthy
      4. I am still Dr. John Axstrom, revered teacher and groundbreaking computational pharmacologist, but my consciousness seems to have jumped forward a few hundred years, skipping past the development of miracle cures, life extension medications, and cryogenic preservation of humans
   3. As I realign with my memories and identity, I remember why I'm here
      1. If colonization proceeds, the coming generations are going to need exceptional teachers if they are to learn their place in the universe, and I'm one of the best there ever was
      2. Our mission is expected to take about 750 years from departure to arrival, and though the vast majority of that time is spent in cryosleep, we take shifts being "awake" to ensure systems are functioning and keep eachother mentally and physically healthy
   4. Since the monitoring systems will throw a fit if I straight up disappear from the vessel, I take a long ride out to the external "observation" check, out of the range of most of the sensor systems
      1. There's not really much to observe in deep space - it's like the night sky, as the ancients saw it with no light pollution, but from a different perspective
      2. Here I quickly form a stunt double duplicate, hand over my electronics, and duck into the warehouse
   5. The warehouse clock confirms my suspicions - I'm nearly seven years into the jump
      1. Since it looks like this isn't going to take nearly 1000 years, the team hasn't been going full-stasis mode
      2. The bards have been poring over J-Borg's personal library as well as the impressive collection of the warehouse media room
      3. But the reason I came is the Tablet of the Free - I'm stuck on a large but still confined deep-space vessel until my scheduled return to cryosleep - how is that supposed to entertain the boss?
      4. After confirming nothing interesting is in the warehouse, I head back to the observation deck, and stash the portable door I've been using back into hammer-space before re-merging with my stunt double, and taking the long trip back to the living area
6. I wake up to an unfamiliar synthetic beep - apparently the Cyllene's version of a doorbell
   1. When I open the door, one of my crewmates tells me that our directional antennas have picked up some unusual RF activity that seems to be coming from our destination system, and they want me (as the on-shift programmer) to help the astronomer, comms, and operations staff to help make sense of it, and ensure we're not about to get nuked by a magnetar or something
   2. Initial findings were sparse and inconclusive - just occasional pulses of a signal that must have been very strong and highly directional at the time of transmission, to reach us so far away
   3. But I had access to diagnostic tools that the astrophysicists and comms staff didn't, for all their training and equipment: a series of perks specifically for teasing out the needles of relevance from the haystack of noise
      1. And as I looked at what we were seeing, and what we weren't, the answer became clear: these radio bursts looked just like a primitive form of RADAR
      2. At first my colleagues on the Cyllene were skeptical, but the evidence kept mounting, with 4 additional series of "pings" being detected in the next six weeks
   4. With the spectre of extraterrestrial intelligence hanging over the Cyllene, our XO followed protocol, and ordered the full complement to be wakened from cryosleep to assist in the work to come
   5. Within six months, we had fabricated and installed a much larger purpose-built directional antenna array on the surface of our asteroid hull, and reports of different signals were coming in almost daily
      1. We needed all the extra hands, even our mining and terraforming experts were lending a hand with signal analysis and attempts to form patterns
      2. The whole crew felt the urgency and wondered at the situation - temporally, it would mean that their early experiments with RADAR and initial RF broadcasts would have happened at about the same time as humans did those things on earth, and if they developed at the same rate as us (a big if), they would likely be more advanced when we arrivedd than humans were when we left (and thus the technology of our vessel), and would almost certainly see us coming
   6. The coming months flew past, each bringing further confirmation of suspicious, but with it frustration, as we had been unable to extract a coherent signal - the broadcasts we could pick up didn't appear to be using either amplitude or frequency modulation
      1. More than once I brought signal samples to the warehouse team, but they were just as stumped as us
      2. Even more "esoteric" means didn't work - we tried every variation of "Tongues" and "Comprehend Language" spells on printed, audioized, and even engraved versions of the RF signals we caught, but they all failed and the representations seemed full of too many discontinuities
   7. I could feel my new Inventor's Vision working on the task of how to decode these signals, and about two years after the first pulse was detected, I had my breakthrough
      1. The signals didn't represent continuous audio (like human radio) or even piece-by-piece visuals (like rasterized video), but something of each, and a little weirder
      2. They were composed of many (from seven to three hundred, and not consistent at all) micro-audio clips
      3. It was like making an ultra-low bitrate recordding of the voice of every singer in a chorus individually, and transmitting fifty milliseconds of one, then fifty milliseconds of the next, and so one, in serial, and then starting back again with the first voice
      4. We couldn't figure out why they did this, but once I was able to identify the break points between each "voice", I could layer them on top of eachother to make a composite audio version
      5. And that composite audio could be played, and was a viable candidate for magic translation
   8. The entire vessel went wild when I demonstrated the isolation and recombination of the signals to produce audio
      1. The sound of the thing was somewhat like the sound of multiple birds, frogs, and crickets in a forest, in very brief clips
      2. Of course, I didn't reveal that I had access to magic translation - I figured the comms and signals staff (and the one cryptographer) should have to earn their pay
   9. The remaining year and a half was spent in intense research, for them, while I mostly slacked off and tried to make conversation with the people doing important work on this front, since my actual mission here was to "observe" as humans of this universe underwent a sort of assymmetrical first contact
7. I awaken in my weird little pod bed in my weird little capsule room for the last time, perfectly aware of the remaining hours in this jump
   1. After the initial excitement died down, the majority of the colonists were put back into cryosleep, with only the decoding specialists and those "on shift" like me staying active
      1. There has been a lot of anxiety around the Cyllene for the last few months - we are clearly a colony ship and the intelligent inhabitants of that system probably do not want to be colonized, and may well be easily capable of destroying us
      2. There were discussions about trying to reverse course and head back to Earth, but we could do that any time, and the closer we get, the more information we can gather about the system and its inhabitants
   2. It would be cruel to try to skim supplies from this vessel even if there were something I wanted aboard, so I just wait my time out, helping where I can and secretly translating any communications we receive when time permits
      1. So far it has all been rather uninspiring, which makes me even more curious what kind of species would develop radio technology but not transmit any fiction or speeches or poetry
   3. When it's almost time, I once again make the long trek out to the Cyllene's observation deck alone, and split off a Stunt Double, who can at least stay here for a month, while I slip into the warehouse
      1. When I enter, J-Borg greets me and informs me of a message at the Benefactor's lounge
      2. The note on the door says "Supplement Pending - please attend as soon as possible", so I go in to check it out
      3. With the choices all locked in, the door unlocks and I head out to meet with the team
   4. With the memories of my time in Spain finally restored, I realize how I had been trying to communicate with myself all along, but failing
      1. The need for calm communcation and education will never end - among our closest neighbors or with a civilization 300 light years away
   5. We have the traditional group dinner in the commons, and discuss what's going on
      1. The team did end up spending most of the time in stasis, and the formerly-newborn halflings are a little over a year now biologically, learning to speak and walk
      2. When I mention the Biosphere supplement and how I wasn't allowed to consult them, they naturally asked when it would apply, but it hadn't even occurred to me that there were now definitely too many of us to wait out warehouse changes in the entrance hall, so I checked with the central control
   6. Afterward, no one was complaining when the doors finally unlocked and we were able to leave the commons hall, only to find that the door led to an outdoor path with a natural-looking sunset on the horizon
      1. I didn't want to spoil the whole setup yet, so I said we could tour in the morning, and turned off a number of the facilities and systems for the night, to give me some time to understand what options were available before letting my companions go wild with them
      2. Fortunately, the obvious items like the tree of life and factory complex were on other islands, that would be difficult to reach without the transport disks running
   7. And then I went to sleep again, wondering what the next awakening had in store for me

Notes on the Fountain Jump Doc

1. Honestly this doc has been on my to-try list since I saw it - I really enjoyed the movie and gladly rewatched it again when it came up in my random draw.
2. The author took some liberties with the source material, which makes sense because of how focused on Thomas the story is, and the extensions largely make sense
3. There were a few confusing things in the jump, such as how you get essences and what powers you bring with you into each phase of the jump, but a close reading makes them clear enough
4. The jump has a few really standout purchase
   1. the inventor's intention is the answer to a lot of concers that "do-gooder" jumpers are likely to have in their careers
   2. the full tree of life is an amazing item - the ability to grant perfect health and immunity to aging within a regrowing item solves a lot of problems
   3. 500 years of practice is amazing if you have a particular skill or art in mind - literally centuries better than the "10 years of practice" equivalents that you find din many other jumps, and has a lot of potential to synergize with other perks that scale off your skill in a particular area
   4. Biosphere is super cool if you want your fiat-backed warehouse to grow into something more
   5. The Dagger of the Path is a great example of a conceptual weapon, and something I probably would have picked up if I had a bunch more points
5. How you're supposed to interleave the three eras is a little unclear, and maybe I'm not a creative enough author to pull it off. I don't believe SJ Chan ever got around to writing a fictionalized account of jumping to it, unfortunately
   1. If anyone else has done a good jump fiction of this jump, please let me know
6. Overall absolutely a fantastic jump. Obviously a great option for anyone who likes the movie or wants to solve one of the specific problems available
   1. I'd especially recommend it for an early-chain jumper because of the generally low danger level and great variety of rewards

Notes on the Biosphere Supplement Doc

1. I knew this was something I wanted to pick up when I first read the fountain jumpdoc several months ago
2. I use the "Personal Reality" warehouse which was co-authored by SJ Chan, and this supplement feels perfectly tailored to supplement that
3. There are lots of good pickups for people with various interests, or those who just want to keep their options open
   1. Observation Deck seems like the real must-have since a lot of the other buys are controllable through it
4. The structure of the biosphere was a little confusing at first - I thought that there was an island, a void around the island, and a hard shell, and wasn't sure why you'd want to increase the shell thickness, but further reading cleared that up
5. On the whole, a good pick up, especially considering it only cost 400 CP in the jump, and normally buying warehouse upgrades with CP has a very unfavorable conversion, but in this case, the biosphere purchases all seemed cheaper than they ought to be.

(Builds to come in a separate post due to length restrictions)

We’ve been exclusive for four months now and it’s been close to six months since our first date. My gf hosted a breakfast for her friends when her sister was in town. Her sister had hinted me that my gf’s friends are a lot to handle. I didn’t really had the context so I didn’t give it much thought. At the breakfast there were 8-10 people and other than introducing each other anyone barely talked to me and tried to have a conversation. Out of these 10 people two were her best friends and all her friends have known each other for 10-12 years. I felt very insecure after and I did discuss this with my gf. She said it might be a one off situation but they’re not like this. Met them all again at a birthday dinner party and the birthday person didn’t even make an eye contact with me neither her husband who hosted the dinner. Other than exchanges of hi how are you nothing more. I’m very hurt by this and to top this my gf asked to go out for a pool day with the same group and I said I’m not going cause I feel unwelcomed which hurts my self respect. She was okay with it but she still ended up going. Idk for some reason this action by her is making me overthink she doesn’t validate my feelings. I’ve made her meet my friends and they’ve been nothing but sweet to her. Having genuine conversations and getting to know her so they can give their opinion on stuff I might not be noticing. I feel this is important for your friends to do at least subtly. Her friends doesn’t seem to be interested in her partner at all and me being asked to go to things with her where I know I’ll not be acknowledged seems very demanding. And when she still ends up going my ego is getting hurt.
What am I missing here? Or am I overthinking and making this too big of a deal? If someone disrespects my partner I’d seriously evaluate my friendship with them. If my friends don’t want the best for me why even go out with them.

Got new app before dinner party an did not test. What a fiasco. Guests arrived and I had a freaking nightmare and no music.
Ended up BT streaming from Apple music and tunneled in that way. But no controls or rooms and laggy volume control. Got through it,but really sucked just like you Sonos.
Please give back old APP until you get this hot mess squared away, like now!

Hi! Dealing with some feelings as I prepare to plan my own wedding. My boyfriend is going to propose soon, and we’ve started laying the groundwork for a wedding next year, but I dont even want to tell my BFF about our plans because of how she treated me when I was her maid of honor.
Last year, my best friend got married and I was her MOH. The bridal party was just MOH/best man, no other bridesmaids or groomsmen. The wedding was in her in-laws’ backyard and to be honest, it was a nightmare. A beautiful wedding, but zero consideration for the guests.
I live out of state and I went to stay with her for a week before the wedding, so we could get our nails done, finish DIY projects, prep the venue space, etc. Honestly she seemed MISERABLE all week. Was short with everyone. I heard her say “thank you” maybe twice the whole time I was there. This is usually not like her! So I figured hmm…we’ll wait til the wedding day is over and see if she feels happier.
I was so excited to spend the actual wedding DAY with her but we barely saw each other. We got her ready for photos (I did her hair and makeup) but she left me alone in her apartment to get ready solo. I had no one to zip my dress, put my hairpiece in, etc. I had to walk to the venue myself, carrying buckets of flowers she’d forgotten to make arrangements for.
During the cocktail hour and reception, I missed group photos because I was working. There was NO WATER or other nonalcoholic beverages out for the guests, so I prepped those and got them into the coolers/dispensers. I barely had time to sit and eat because I was the designated “go to” person for questions, so guests would find me if they needed directions to town, help finding the bathroom, etc.
Here’s the part that really hurts my feelings: when I was shopping for my bestie’s bridal shower, I found thank-you cards that matched her invites EXACTLY. It was incredible! I sent a pic and said “hey — want me to buy these???” She responded with a huge yes. They were on clearance at TJ MAXX so ~100 cards for $10. Not a huge expense at all. But…
It’s been a year and I haven’t received a thank-you card. No one has. And I get that, no one wants to do thank-you cards! But I haven’t received ANY acknowledgment for my efforts. And it really hurts. The day before the wedding, her now-husband was excitedly showing me the thank-you gift package he had chosen and assembled for his best man. I know the best man received his thank-you gift the day after the wedding because he posted about it in his wedding photo dump.
It’s been a year and I haven’t received a single thank you from my “bestie.” Her husband has shown more gratitude to me than she did. And now that I’m planning to get engaged…I don’t know if I should bring this up ahead of time and clear the air, or if I should leave it be. Our friendship feeeeels pretty normal and we talk regularly, but every time I think about this, it makes me want to NOT invite her to the wedding. I don’t even care if it’s not as elaborate as what the best man received, I just want SOME acknowledgement of my effort. There’s definitely some added bitterness because she is a stay-at-home wife and lives off her husband’s income, so I feel jealous she has time for craft projects and creative/leisure activities that I have to fit into my demanding career…but she can’t find time to send me a thank you? Ugh. I feel so dumb but after 15 years of friendship, I just want my effort to be acknowledged in SOME way. :(

Your cheering got me through some tough moments this morning. Thank you! Also, some of the houses around OHS go HARD. I loved the party atmosphere in that stretch.
Congratulations to all the racers today. It sure was a beautiful day for a run.

Hello everyone. I posted this in the INTJ community and very much and need some help in deciding if I am INTJ or not. I edited the post a bit for the INTP community. I am a 35 yo male, married, one toddler with another on the way. Like most of you, I have read countless articles, columns, descriptions, a couple of books on MBTI and the cognitive functions. Taking many MBTI tests and my first test I scored as an ISTP, but I am not good with my hands, not athletic, don't like fighting, working with cars, etc. So I kept testing and got INTP.
But if I am being honest, I don't like reading all that much. Im not that nerdy and I have pretty good fashion sense. I like nice things. I skim over reading until I find what I deem is what I am looking for and use it. Not trying to be offensive with stereotypes just honest. lol When building furniture, I like to follow instructions until I have done something several times. Then I will build by memory and/or my gut. I research topics all the time such as the best restaurants in a city I am visiting. I am into checking out historical places to visit or places of prestige, importance over just going to were people are amassed and partying/socializing.
I don't really have any friends at them moment. I feel like people have let me down in the past. In the past, the only way I feel I could get friends was to fake being more extroverted, easy going, funny and a lover of drinking. But this has attracted a bunch of sensors which I spent most of my energy on rather quickly and need to retreat. When I retreat, I usually watch tv shows/movies, play my videos games or go for a drive and listen to podcasts like Joe rogan. Other leisure time is spent on reddit/internet.
I am always looking on improving my lifestyle, my status quo. I am not satisfied for too long. For instance, when I purchase a car, I am immediately within months thinking of what is the next best car I can get. It has to be a little sportier, a little more prestiges, and definitely has to be faster than the last.
I don't like small talk, and drama and gossip is infuriating and annoying to me. I constantly get upset when my loved ones don't heed my advice or what it is I am saying. I tell my wife, sister and Mom all the time that they should be careful and prepare for their futures by investing money more and spending less. My senior mother is a recent victim of catfishing and I felt immediately I had to step in and help clean up the mess and build her back up. My father passed away and my sister isn't of much help with this so I help my Mom. I have gone on quite a bit and understand that I need more detail but thanks for reading some of this. Appreciate the help. What made you decide you were INTP?
TL/DR
I am questioning my MBTI type, initially testing as ISTP and INTP, but not fully identifying with either. I prefer practical research over extensive reading, enjoy solitary activities, and value self-improvement and status. I dislike small talk and drama, and often advise loved ones on financial matters. Im confused on my type. What made you decide you were INTP?