Dear god, I need to see this skit. It was Jon Stewart and some of the OG’s smoking weed awkwardly to try to deter kids/youth from smoking weed because what parents/adults do are automatically uncool.
There was even a crushed up soda can to smoke out of. Help!

In the bustling world of social media, where trends change in the blink of an eye and new influencers emerge daily, some individuals manage to stand out and captivate the masses with their unique charm and talent. One such rising star is Sanchita Basu, a name that has become synonymous with creativity, authenticity, and youthful exuberance. With her engaging content and relatable personality, Sanchita has carved a niche for herself in the digital space, becoming a beacon of inspiration for many young aspirants.

Early Life and Background

Sanchita Basu was born on March 24, 2003, in Bhagalpur, Bihar, India. Growing up in a middle-class family, she had a relatively modest upbringing. However, her passion for dance, acting, and creating content was evident from a young age. Sanchita's early exposure to the performing arts, coupled with her innate talent, set the stage for her future endeavors in the digital arena.

The Journey to Fame

Sanchita's rise to fame can be attributed to her presence on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. She began her social media journey by sharing dance videos, lip-sync performances, and short skits, which quickly resonated with audiences. Her vibrant energy, coupled with her ability to connect with viewers, garnered her a substantial following in a short period.
When TikTok was banned in India in 2020, many influencers faced the challenge of losing their primary platform. However, Sanchita seamlessly transitioned to Instagram and other Indian short-video platforms like Moj and MX TakaTak, where she continued to thrive. Her adaptability and resilience during this period demonstrated her dedication to her craft and her ability to navigate the ever-changing landscape of social media.

Content and Influence

Sanchita Basu's content is a delightful mix of dance, fashion, lifestyle, and motivational videos. She often collaborates with other influencers and brands, bringing a fresh and dynamic approach to her content. Her dance videos, in particular, have struck a chord with viewers, showcasing her talent and passion for the art form.
What sets Sanchita apart is her authenticity. She frequently shares glimpses of her personal life, family, and behind-the-scenes moments with her followers, creating a genuine connection with her audience. This transparency has helped her build a loyal fan base that appreciates her for who she is, both on and off the screen.

Challenges and Triumphs

Like any social media influencer, Sanchita has faced her share of challenges. From dealing with the sudden ban of TikTok to navigating the pressures of constant content creation, her journey has not been without obstacles. However, her ability to overcome these challenges and continue to grow is a testament to her resilience and determination.
Sanchita's success has also opened doors to various opportunities in the entertainment industry. She has been approached for acting roles in web series and regional films, indicating a promising future beyond social media. Her versatility and willingness to explore new avenues have positioned her as a multifaceted talent to watch out for.

Impact and Future Prospects

Sanchita Basu's impact extends beyond her social media presence. She serves as an inspiration to countless young individuals who aspire to make a mark in the digital world. Her story underscores the importance of passion, perseverance, and authenticity in achieving success.
Looking ahead, Sanchita shows no signs of slowing down. With her growing influence and expanding opportunities, she is poised to become a prominent figure in the Indian entertainment industry. Whether through acting, dancing, or content creation, Sanchita Basu is set to leave an indelible mark on the hearts of her followers and the broader cultural landscape.

Conclusion

Sanchita Basu's journey from a small-town girl to a social media sensation is a compelling narrative of talent, hard work, and authenticity. Her ability to connect with audiences and her relentless pursuit of her passions have made her a standout figure in the digital world. As she continues to evolve and explore new horizons, Sanchita Basu exemplifies the potential of social media to transform lives and create stars who shine beyond the virtual realm.

You know how it is, sometimes you’re just window shopping to pass the time. I’ve actually gotten really into Knights of the Old Republic recently after it being on my backlog forever, and find it absolutely amazing.
I had previously once downloaded the Pikman 4 demo, and played like a single hot minute of it, after having never played the series before and found it real charming with the art style of the cute chubby little round yellow dog, and being these tiny alien creatures on Earth.
I have a big wish list. There’s games that I dream about and long for and can’t wait until I get the chance to play em’ except I ain’t got a whole lot of money right now.
I was quite delighted to see a few games on my wishlist had demoes available to download on the eshop. I’m very excited to dip my toes into Unicorn Overlord, Pikman 3 & 4, Mario VS Donkey Kong, Another Code Recollection, the new Prince of Persia, the new Contra, Kakarot (RIP Toriyama), Big Brain Academy, Cadence of Hyrule, Monster Hunter Rise, Pocket Card Jockey, the new Princess Peach game, Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, Sushi Strikers, Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope, that new game that looks like Wario Land Antonblast, Dr Fetus’s puzzle game from Super Meat Boy fame, Clubhouse Games 51, and what I am most excited to dip my toes into— Nintendo’s Game Builder Garage.
In my own routine and backlog completion— I have just almost 100% Super Mario Wonder for the second time since I played and beat it shortly after it initially came out in October. I’m on the final badge test, and I just have to get the last three flower coins and the wonder seeds, and hit the top of the flag pole and it’ll be 100%ed for a second time, except this time around I don’t have Nintendo Switch Online service so I won’t be getting help from any good samaritans this time around.
I also just finally got around to beating the first Advanced Wars game in the Advanced Wars Bootcamp collection. And in Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, I reached the three star level quests after not skipping any of the ones below it.
But here’s what I wanted to share… I gave a dip of the toe into the Clubhouse Games demo. There are four out of fifty one available for the demo.
There’s Connect Four, Dominioes, President, and Slot Cars.
The thing about Clubhouse Games is that when the original game came out on the Nintendo DS, I remember my reaction was oh great a video game based on all those boring card and board games that you play when for some strange reason you can’t play video games instead.
But the thing is as I’ve been gettting older, and growing to appreciate a slower quieter way of life than the cable television filled days of my youth.
I am quite smitten with the idea of playing card games or board games around a table, maybe there are libations like booze involved, cigarettes smoked, maybe beer maybe cofffee instead maybe tea, maybe instead of cigarettes there’s a hookah and maybe it’s a small group of friends or maybe it’s an awesome house party with lots of people.
Anyways, I played Dominoes first and I loved the interface of this software with the little skit and then the brief essential rules down to a bullet point, and even accounting for house rules and variations.
At first I was not quite sure I grasped the rules, but like playing chess on the computer the software will guide you and won’t let you make an illegal move, so essentially you learn as you play.
With dominoes, I thought I kinda knew how to play but the basic rules of Dominoes are so basic to me it sounded as fun as shoots and ladders.
But with the five up scoring variation where you get points for the numbers on the edge adding up to be a multiple of 5, then I saw some sort of tactics to the game, strategy and imagined those scenes I’ve seen of old men enthusiastically slapping down a dominos onto a winding line of them on a table.
Then I tried the card game President, and man that is a funny game with some odd rules that is deceptively simple, but there is more going on than what’s on the surface. I felt like the split personality artificial intelligence play acting as several different people around the table was playing mind games with me.
Anyways, this has been a blog post.

This post may toe the line between fun and horrifying. Maybe we can all laugh at our trauma? I've heard some wild stories about active attacker "skits", hell houses, and wacky purity culture things. In comparison my youth group experience was pretty benign, but I'm very curious about what some of you experienced in youth group. Particularly if you were in youth group in the 90s or 00s.
My story isn't too crazy, but it's certainly weird. In late 2008 we had a guest speaker in our youth group who talked to us about how bad Obama was and what a "sign of the times" it was that he was elected. My youth group was in Canada...
Can I request that this post be an exception to Rule 2 ? If you're an atheist or of any other faith, you still may have had past experiences in Christian youth groups.

Tldr; I was suggested a “mother of two” reel on instagram and it brought up all of the feels. For once I think mom life could allow me to have youthful energy, be pretty, and have fun, three things my narc/enabler mother vehemently prevented me from expressing.
The rest of the post (for those interested, or who can relate): Now, I usually skip past these or hide them. I do NOT enjoy family/mom content and I also resent that it is suggested to me. But, something about this account in particular got to me. For once, I felt like this was a glimpse of what mother life could look like for me, and it seemed fun, genuinely full of love, and also in a non-pretentious, not-preachy way. There were barely any moody, diary style videos, mostly just fun little 10 second skits, either entirely featuring the mom or sometimes her smiling kids and husband in the second half of the skit. (In other words, I got the vibe that they were happy participants in mom’s shenanigans, if involved. I did not see tired looks like it was their fourth, fifth, twentieth take.)
I am an adult child of a narc/enabler mother and uBPD father. My whole family has issues. I never really wanted kids, and yet I also have also given myself permission to occasionally explore what a happy life with a husband and kids could potentially look like. I usually quickly end up I tears and I stop.
Well, this mother was one of those “looks like she could be in her 20’s still” moms who is in her mid-thirties, and she is from my culture. Her husband is not some mediocre middle aged okay-looking-but-has-a-good-job guy (sorry), no he was from the same culture as her and they met “early” so have already been together for like 15-20 years and now have two cute adolescent kids. They are the same age and both are conventionally pretty/handsome. I love that and I honestly want that for myself and yet women all around me are on their high horse telling me that looks do not matter, yet they are the same people who will switch to jealousy and comparison if a handsome man is flirty with another woman in their view. I resent this sexist concept that I am only deemed as valuable as the partner who picked me. Anyways.
I never find toddlers or babies cute, but seeing this young and pretty woman who genuinely looked happy felt different. It is starkly different from my graying mother with a chopped short hairdo (no offense, she just complained of hairloss from pregnancy often, and never allowed ME to grow my hair long).
Of course some content creators are narcs/uBPD queens but it was a smaller account and also I’m mainly referencing the feelings it brought up in me. Thank you if you read some/all of this I have a hard time discussing this with most in my circle. It feels entirely new that being a mother could be one big element of life that doesnt highjack selfcare, beauty routine, a creative hobby, having a partner that is more than just functional(??), not feeling jealous of my kids, and other narc/uBPD stuff that was my reality.

Tldr; I was suggested a “mother of two” reel on instagram and it brought up all of the feels. For once I think mom life could allow me to have youthful energy, be pretty, and have fun, three things my narc mother vehemently prevented me from expressing.
The rest of the post (for those interested, or who can relate): Now, I usually skip past these or hide them. I do NOT enjoy family/mom content and I also resent that it is suggested to me. But, something about this account in particular got to me. For once, I felt like this was a glimpse of what mother life could look like for me, and it seemed fun, genuinely full of love, and also in a non-pretentious nor preachy way. There were barely any moody, diary style videos, mostly just fun little 10 second skits, either entirely featuring the mom or sometimes her smiling kids and husband in the second half of the skit. (In other words, I got the vibe that they were happy participants in mom’s shenanigans, if involved. I did not see tired looks like it was their fourth, fifth, twentieth take.)
I am an adult child of a narc/enabler mother and borderline father. My whole family has issues. I never really wanted kids, and yet I also have also given myself permission to occasionally explore what a happy life with a husband and kids could potentially look like. I usually quickly end up I tears and I stop.
Well, this mother was one of those “looks like she could be in her 20’s still” moms who is in her mid-thirties, and she is from my culture. Her husband is not some mediocre middle aged okay-looking-but-has-a-good-job guy (sorry), no he was from the same culture as her and they met “early” so have already been together for like 15-20 years and now have two cute adolescent kids. They are the same age and both are conventionally pretty/handsome. I love that and I honestly want that for myself and yet women all around me are on their high horse telling me that looks do not matter, yet they are the same people who will switch to jealousy and comparison if a handsome man is flirty with another woman in their view. I resent this narcissistic concept that I am only deemed as valuable as the partner who picked me. Anyways.
I never find toddlers or babies cute, but seeing this young and pretty woman who genuinely looked happy felt different. It is starkly different from my graying mother with a chopped short hairdo (no offense, she just complained of hairloss from pregnancy often, and never allowed ME to grow my hair long).
Of course some content creators are narcs but it was a smaller account and also I’m mainly referencing the feelings it brought up in me. Thank you if you read some/all of this I have a hard time discussing this with most in my circle. It feels entirely new that being a mother could be one big element of life that doesnt highjack selfcare, beauty routine, a creative hobby, having a partner that is more than just functional(??), not feeling jealous of my kids, and other narc stuff that was my reality.

🫖 Welcome back to the Asylum write-up. This is where you live now. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
In this installment, we finally take a closer look at how Emilie Autumn's hyper-loyal fanbase gradually started losing faith in her as, among other things, it became more and more apparent that she... wasn't exactly a reliable narrator – in her semi-autobiographical book, or in general.

HOW IT STARTED: A WOMAN OF MYSTERY

Willow, weep for me Don't think I don't see This life I'm living in two But still it's something I must do I'm not unique in this Nor am I special, sweet, or kind I court a thousand smiles Yet I keep my own to hide behind (“Willow”, 2004 🎵)

I've previously referred to EA as an “expert vagueposter”, and this is relevant here.
For an artist who built her brand on a pledge of raw, rats-and-all honesty, EA has always been quite guarded about the specifics of her personal life. (Until her current partner, for instance, she always danced around calling anyone a boyfriend, even when the nature of the relationship was pretty obvious.) Her whole angle is telling “the truth”, but through whimsical fantasy. As early as the fairy-themed Enchant era, she had her own world, her own vernacular; she spoke in metaphors, in-jokes, and quirky anachronisms. Taxis were carriages, her electric keyboard was a harpsichord, she always capitalized Time and Art like Shakespeare does. On the Asylum forum, automatic word filters would change “fan” to “muffin”, “fairy” to “faerie”, “bra” to “teacup holder”, and “responsibility” to “ratsponsibility”.
She's a chatterbox who loves to share memories and funny anecdotes, but she usually keeps them short and sweet, Snapple-facts style. 📝 She's great at painting by touches in her storytelling, revealing just enough to let your imagination auto-complete the rest. 🔍 Even the most banal tidbits are very artfully told, very “on brand”, often dense with symbolism and foreshadowing – but also very abstracted.
She is especially elusive when it comes to her background and formative years. See the way she catches herself in this interview 📺📝 while describing her “favorite scar”, which is from an eel bite: “My – well, someone I knew... [gasp-laugh] had it as a pet, and...” (She was about to say “my sister”.)
In short, the way EA talks about her life is often very personal, but not all that candid – and sounds more like it's meant to provide a curated, coherent backstory for Emilie Autumn the character, rather than Emilie Autumn the person.

I'll tell the truth, all my songs Are pretty much the fucking same I'm not a fairy but I need More than this life, so I became This creature representing more to you Than just another girl... (“Swallow”, 2006 🎵)

In the beginning, this guardedness naturally contributed to the mystique. It made it all the more special when, once in a while, she would briefly drop the theatrics to share something earnest and relatively unfiltered. Like this composed, but vulnerable post from 2004 📝 about her father losing his battle to cancer, and her attempts at closure over their tense relationship. Or this 2012 anti-bullying campaign thing 📺 in which she opens up about being a target of intense physical bullying in elementary school, to a point that contributed to her being homeschooled at 9.
Fans in the early years were curious about her backstory, of course – but not too prodding or invasive, to my knowledge. I think there was an understanding that EA, like many performers, wanted to come across as human and approachable, while still cultivating an “aura” and retaining some privacy. But obviously, when she announced that she was writing a Tell-All Memoir in 2007, everyone was dying to read it. TEA TIME!

HOW IT'S GOING: A WOMAN OF... MALARKEY???

LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! (“Liar”, 2006 🎵)

As we've learned, the original 2009 release of EA's book was highly anticipated, but somewhat tainted by a bunch of shipping delays and unfulfilled promises. From the start of her career, EA had always cultivated a close parasocial involvement with her audience; many fans had as deep an attachment to her, personally, as they did to her art. So, for instance, when EA tweeted about all the personal dedications she was lovingly writing in overdue books, only for the books to arrive many months later and unsigned with no tangible explanation, it wasn't simply frustrating: it was betrayal amongst kin!
Really, it wasn't so much about fans not getting what they paid for – it was about the lack of clear communication or genuine accountability. This is pure speculation on my part, but the poppycock that EA tweeted about signing the books strikes me as the panic-lie of someone who hadn't realized just how many heartfelt, personalized dedications she would actually have to write when she came home from tour. And then she just couldn't do it, because she was overworked, paralyzed, distracted, depressed, procrastinating, whatever. Which... you know... is unfortunate, but probably not unforgivable. Especially for a touring performer who is open and vocal about their mental health issues.
I'm confident that most fans would have been happy to tell her that her well-being meant more to them than an autograph, or something along those lines. Instead, EA's cagey and avoidant demeanor around this issue left fans very salty – and newly suspicious of their favorite artist's word.
Which was regrettable timing for EA, because they had just received their copies of her memoir.
Here's a cursory look at some key biographical points that didn't hold up to scrutiny when more and more vexed fans, over the years, started looking into them.
Content warning until end of post: family estrangement, death by fire, worsening physical health issues, mention of disordered eating / weight loss / thinspiration, and LIES! LIES! LIIIIIES!

“EMILIE AUTUMN LIDDELL (BORN SEPTEMBER 22, 1979) IS AN AMERICAN SINGER-SONGWRITER...” (Wikipedia)

Every fandom has its Holy Grail. Because a number of EA's early releases were limited pressings put out through now-defunct record labels, the EA fandom in its heyday was a collector's wonderland. 📝🦠 At the height of her popularity, the original Enchant jewelcase (the one with the puzzle-poster) could easily fetch around $500 dollars on eBay, unsigned. The handwritten lyrics of an Opheliac B-side went for $940 in 2009. Don't even ask me about the hard copies of her two poetry books: those never even popped up over the five or six years that I had various alerts set up for all EA-related listings.
But the true crown jewel of EA rarities is the untitled promo version of her (also virtually unfindable) 2001 instrumental debut On a Day... No one knows how many copies exist. The darn thing is so rare that it's not even listed on Discogs. For a while, the only picture of the elusive “Violin” promo CD that was circulated online was this one.🪞 Go ahead, click the link. Notice anything odd? That black box where one composer's birth year should be?
I'm not sure why the notorious hyper-fan who originally shared this picture on the forum in the early 2010s took it upon himself to censor it before posting. I wasn't able to pinpoint when or why people started questioning EA's age, but clearly, something had already transpired to let him know that not redacting said birth year might, uh... cause an upset. In any case: at some point, people started digging – and eventually, the unredacted version of the “Violin” tracklist (as well as public records and literal receipts from eBay auctions) would be brandished as one more piece of damning evidence that EA was indeed (gasp!) two years older than she claimed to be.
“Okay, and?” you shrug. “What's the big deal?” I'm shrugging too! What can I say? People don't like realizing they've been fooled, even about something stupid. I will note that EA's fall equinox birthday (hence her middle name “Autumn”, yes) had been somewhat significant in the fandom. Over the years, EA's birthdays had been marked by online release parties, Q&A's, community events, special merch sales... A number of fans liked donning her trademark cheek heart on September 22. It felt a bit uncanny to realize that she had been announcing a false age on those occasions. It wasn't “a big deal” so much as it was incredibly odd.
Other than being appalled that Self-Proclaimed Staunch Feminist EA would give in to the cult of youth and not cop up to her real age, many fans were just plain bewildered: who would commit so stubbornly to such an inconsequential lie? What was even the point of lying by two years only? Why did she think anyone would care that she was 28 rather than 26 when Opheliac came out? What was she possibly getting out of this...??
My completely speculative theory is that, whether it was her idea or her then-manager's, the lie originated as a marketing strategy early on in her career. The “Violin” demo was recorded in 1997, when EA was 19-going-on-20. Per the liner notes of On a Day... 📝, which came out when she was 22, the demo's purpose was to be “a sort of calling card in the classical music industry”. Evidently, that didn't work out; EA claims, in the same paragraph, to have walked out on a classical recording deal at 18 because they wouldn't give her enough creative control.
Talented and unique as she was, she was trying to break out in a notoriously elitist and innovation-resistant milieu – and unlike her, most of the 22-year-old classical violinists she was in competition with had actually graduated from their prestigious music schools. But you know what sells better than an ambitious college dropout in her early twenties? Tweaking the truth just so to market yourself as an unconventional wunderkind, barely out of her teens! Any rendition of a complex, learnèd musical piece sounds more intriguing and impressive if you think it was played by an especially young (and beautiful) person. 20 was plausible, close enough to her real age, barely a lie at all, and such a nice, round number for a debut album.
Notice how much of the On a Day... liner notes, linked above, center on her precociousness, her uniqueness, and her savant-like dedication to her craft – a focus that seems absent from the promo version (from what I can decipher in those potato-quality pictures, anyway). These talking points would provide the basis for a lot of her early self-promotion and budding stage persona in the Enchant years. Even though the EP failed to make EA a household name in the classical world, the wunderkind narrative was her “in” to grab the attention and heart of a broader audience.
And I guess she's been running with it ever since.

“MY ANCESTRY IS POSITIVELY LITTERED WITH LUNATICS AND GIRLS WHO FALL DOWN RABBIT HOLES ... MY NAME IS EMILIE AUTUMN LIDDELL. YES, THAT LIDDELL.”

Oh, come on. Much as a fan may want to believe, isn't that a little on the nose? The anglophile with an obsession for tea, clocks, and madness... is literally related to Alice in Wonderland? 🔍 Curiouser and curiouser indeed.
EA came out as Emilie Autumn Liddell in The Book – of course – in a passage where she describes an interaction with a nurse. 📝 Note how she stresses the authenticity of her name, and how not-chosen it is (and the Alice connection, which just comes up organically) by disclosing it in a scene where she's filling out paperwork.
I'm pointing this out, because it would be tempting to allow room for creative license (and the slightest cringe) in a work of creative fiction based on personal experience. Buuut... TAFWG was not marketed as fiction. The main narrative in TAFWG, according to EA, is an actual fac-simile of the journals she kept during a harrowing stay at a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. This is something that EA has stressed from the inception of the book (and throughout all subsequents re-issues, even as the main narrative was altered and reworked), even claiming that a legal team had advised her to redact some names to avoid potential lawsuits. So, no, she's not doing a bit there.
When, after it made the rounds a few times, it became apparent that the claim didn't really make sense 📝🔍, reactions were mixed. Some older, diplomatic fans downplayed it as a somewhat embarrassing, but harmless self-mythologizing – similar in nature to her insistence on calling her electric keyboard a “harpsichord”. Devout EA apologists (commonly referred to as “bootlickers” in an increasingly polarized fandom – oh, don't worry, we're getting to that!) invoked the “life as performance art” defense: when she said it was literally her first name, she meant it metaphorically, duh! And either way, she probably had her reasons.
But others took offense at the boldness of the lie, or simply became curious. Was Liddell even her name at all?
If you've checked the link just above, you already know the answer. Per the public California birth log (a somewhat demented invasion of privacy that could well have been avoided by... not repeatedly drawing attention to a name that someone in the book calls “right out of a movie”?) : yes, no, kind of.
EA was born Emily Autumn Fischkopf* on September 22, 1977. The name came from her father, a first-generation immigrant from Germany. Her maternal grandmother's maiden name was Liddell (but no, not that Liddell, or so remotely that it doesn't matter). EA may have had it legally changed at some point in the last decade, but as of 2012, based on the public log of foreign visitors to Brazil (where she toured that year), her passport still bore the name “Emily Autumn Fischkopf”.
*No, EA's birth name is not literally “Fischkopf”. It's a non-silly German name that begins with an F. I know that it's ridiculous to clutch my pearls about EA's peace of mind now, but triggering new and disquieting Google alerts for a name she clearly wants nothing to do with (and that you don't care about) just feels... distasteful? I don't know. That info has been floating around long enough, the point has been made; this write-up is not about EA's last name, but about the fiends we made along the way! So Fischkopf it is.
Let's track the evolution here! It appears that she went by “Autumn Fischkopf” for at least part of her formative years, if we are to believe the credits from Mark Ruffalo's middling film debut 📺 (she was the child actor's violin-playing body double) and this random article about a Nigel Kennedy performance in 1997. 🔍 (That last link – possibly her first ever mention in the press? – is a niche favorite of mine. Violin superstar Nigel Kennedy calls her a “talented fiddler”, which suggests that she did have some cred and promise in the classical milieu at a young age, and that there is at least some truth to her claims of being a wunderkind. It also cracks me up that, out of all the things she's reiterated over the years, “I was born in '79” was a lie, but “I was attacked by a pet eel” was fact-checked by Nigel Kennedy.)
At some point in her late teens, she dropped the Teutonic surname and adopted the French ending of her given name (she made it a “LIE”! how poetic) to form the moniker “Emilie Autumn”. I assume that's also when she started privately going by Emilie / EA for short.
So there you have it. The damning evidence. A performing artist... changed her name. To her grandmother's name. Riveting stuff!
And to think that her fans could have carried on naively believing “Autumn” was her last name, or assuming it was a romantic nom de scène she picked during her Ren Fair phase. Or perhaps, even, not thinking much about her name at all, like normal people.
But nooo, she just had to poke the hornet's nest by making a whole thing out of it.

“MY ENTIRE FAMILY DIED IN A FIRE.”

If you've never encountered a method-acting con artist or a person who struggles with pathological lying (I'll let you decide for yourself which of these, if either, applies to EA), you probably believe that you'd spot them a mile away. And in my experience, that's exactly why you wouldn't! Whether it's compulsion or calculated strategy, successful fibbers rely on people's natural social cues (like their assumption of good faith, their confirmation bias, their empathy, their desire for validation, their fear of awkwardness, ...) to subtly direct the flow and tone of the conversation. This allows them to short-circuit potential questioning of their claims.
One such strategy, for instance, I call the “I-will-not-further-speak-about-the-incident maneuver”. Out of the blue, you drop a graphic and incisive one-liner about something horrific that happened to you, in a curt or flippant tone that throws the listener off and usually shuts them up – thus sparing you from having to back up your claim with any convincing specifics. I'm not saying that every person who does this is a liar. Horrific stuff does happen to people, and I'm not here to police how they're supposed to disclose it. I'm just saying that if you wanted to fabricate an obvious Tragic Backstory™ and smuggle it past otherwise rational, discerning and reasonably intelligent people, that would be one way to do it. Full disclosure: it does work better in person than it does over the internet, especially when you've kept a blog.
When EA curtly dropped this bomb on Twitter (in response to an innocuous fan question that mentioned her parents – the receipt has sadly been X'd out of existence), and every subsequent time a new fan found out about her family's tragic demise (“I had no idea!”), the response was typically one of shock and sadness – and, in a few heartbreaking cases, commiseration from other survivors of family-annihilating events.
Many fans already had a hunch that something was up with her family, of course. She hinted at neglect and possible abuse in her book and lyrics. A number of her fans also came from dysfunctional households, so her not wishing to elaborate on the topic would probably have been a non-issue. But now she's saying they're dead? All of them? In a FIRE?! Holy macaroni! And you know it must have been awful, because EA – the same woman who got a dozen bangers out of a three-month-long toxic relationship, and based over a decade of her work on one bad hospital stay – had never, not once, felt called to share a song or poem about how it might affect a person to... lose all of their entire immediate family to a fire. Hmm. Meanwhile, the handful of older fans who had been following her since Enchant and remembered her dad passing in 2004 gritted their teeth and rolled their eyes. “Do your research. That's all I can say.” (We'll get into the culture of censorship free speech regulation on the Asylum forum in due time.)
Before more and more embittered ex-fans started compiling and circulating the receipts in the early-mid-2010s, investigating the whole “dead family” thing was a lonely journey – a coming-of-age expedition for the critical-minded Plague Rat, trawling through free background check websites and old Wayback Machine archives, until you went “Welp, there it is, I guess” and suddenly felt older, stupider, and a little bit hollow inside.
Although I don't remember how I personally made my way to The Truth (lol) back in the day, I still have a vivid memory of the moment I found the Facebook profile of EA's Very Much Non-Deceased Mother. It was mostly posts about her costume design work. A few candid pictures with EA's siblings and their kids. Christmas, birthdays, a wedding. Just... aggressively normal stuff. It was bizarre, looking in on this family of cheerful strangers with familiar cheekbones. Knowing that, somewhere out there, was an estranged eldest daughter, who had run off years ago to become a fiddle-wielding rockstar – and was now passing them off as having all died a gruesome death, while her fans secretly stalked their family photos. (Because I know you'll be asking in the comments: yes, EA's family is aware. Her mother once posted a picture of young EA and her siblings on Pinterest, sarcastically captioned “After most of us were killed in the fire.” 📝)
Again, it's tempting to discount EA's remark as a metaphor for family estrangement, taken too literally by neurodivergent minors who just didn't understand performance art. Well. First of all, even as a metaphor... let's admit, once again, that that 2000s edginess has aged like fine milk. It's a little crass to make a “metaphor” out of a plausible, life-shattering trauma that other people actually have to live with. (Veronica lost a beloved house to a literal fire 🔍 during her tenure as a Crumpet, for instance; no one died, but that alone seemed pretty rough.)
But, more to the point, evidence suggests that EA also told this to real people in her real, off-stage life – such as her Trisol manager, who backed the claim on the official Asylum Forum in 2007. 📝 When questioned about this post on a renegade forum in 2013, he had this to say:

I was the fool in this case. EA made that up of course. It’s just one thing on a long list of things she made up. Let’s agree she’s very creative with facts if she wants people to believe a story. (...) I once had a short chat with [EA's mom] and I got the strong impression she wasn’t dead at the time. Haha.

(OK, dude, but did you or did you not sell fake EA tickets on a scammy website in 2008? Because we never did get the skinny on that.)
Fifteens years on, EA continues to insist, unprompted, that “the fire” destroyed her childhood drawings and baby pictures. 📝 This more recent Instagram post is like a Greatest Hits of her most notorious yarns, to a degree that's either premeditated trolling or a subconscious call for help. She casually, yet pointedly mentions her age in relation to a specific year... and specifically draws attention to the signature, one that she used well into the Enchant era. In doing so, she made me notice, for the first time, that the A blends into an F. As one could expect from an artsy, Renaissance-obsessed teenager, her OG signature was a freaking monogram for Emily Autumn Fischkopf. It's like “The Tell-Tale Heart” for the digital age! AM I THE ONLY ONE SEEING THIS?? 🦠

A BIT O' THIS & THAT: MISCELLANEOUS CLAIMS

Just for fun, here are other sundry “citation needed” facts that EA has claimed over the years. All are originally from the book unless sourced otherwise. Some of them may have been jokes, some of them might even be true! Whatever that word still means!

• She suffered near-fatal leukemia at age 2, but miraculously recovered. Doctors were baffled.
• She has perfect pitch and tone-color synesthesia. 🔍
• She also had a photographic memory before Ativan ruined it. That's how she remembers what the sky looked like on the day she came out of the hospital leukemia-free.
• It is well-known and well-established, among the bipolar community, that bipolar people all over the world will regularly and inexplicably wake up at 4 in the morning. 🎵 On the dot. No one knows why, but they do. Doctors are baffled.
• She can play the violin on horseback!
• The traumatic hospital stay happened before Opheliac until it happened after. 🔍 Doctors are time lords.
• TAFWVG “has been cited in text-books used as part of the psychology curriculum at Oxford University in London.” 📝 I would have intuited Oxford University to be in Oxford, but then again, I didn't go to Oxford.

ELECTRIC VIOLIN: UNPLUGGED

You know how whenever a musician starts behaving obnoxiously, old sages will come down from Mount Wisdom to advise disgruntled fans to “simply ignore [behavior]” and “just focus on the music”? Well, in the Asylum, “just focusing on the music” won't always preserve you from EA's shenanigans. This “claim” is a little different, but I've decided to include it because it is so odd, emblematic, and ultimately tragic. I also count it as “biographical”, because it involves a key tenet of EA's character sheet: the violin.
Being a kickass fiddler is one of EA's trademarks, and has always been central to her narrative; as of 2024, “world-class violinist” is still the first claim to fame she lists in the “Story” section of her official website. Which beggars the question: why won't she play it? And why won't she acknowledge that she's not playing it?
We got our hopes up in 2020, with that one post 📝 about her iconic 1885 Gand & Bernardel getting refurbished by a luthier – a thoughtful birthday surprise from her boyfriend – but despite the promising “More to come...” at the end of the caption, that turned out to be a false alarm. In truth, it may well have been over a decade since anyone has witnessed EA draw a single note from her cherished instrument.
The fact that Lord Autumn was able to sneak it out during lockdown without the Lady noticing tends to confirm that she hadn't been playing much behind the scenes. She seems to be under the impression that e-violin manufacturer Zeta is no longer in business (they did close down in 2010 🔍, but reopened under new management in 2012), which suggests that she hasn't been keeping up with the violin scene for a while. Besides, the fingernails don't lie. 🐀
As the live shows veered more theatrical with the release of Opheliac, the extended violin features from the Enchant era were cut to two main appearances per concert: “Face the Wall”, a seven-minute-short, Hendrixesque take on Arcangelo Corelli's “La Folia” – and “Unlaced”, an arpeggio-ed frenzy that was originally paired with a stilt-walking and ballet performance by the Crumpets. These two instrumental tracks remained a fixture on four successive tours. And on four successive tours, “Unlaced” was... well... clearly dubbed. 📺 She was holding her e-violin, her hands were playing the notes, but what was coming out of the speakers was indubitably the studio version.
There were possible explanations, of course. Some sound buffs pointed out that “Unlaced” has multiple violin layers, and that a live violin solo would have sounded harsh and unbalanced over the supporting tracks 🔍 – but then, why pick an unplayable song as a staple of the show?
The violin-miming wasn't even very hush-hush, she didn't try that hard to hide it – it was just never addressed or acknowledged. On “Unlaced”, Veronica was usually summoned to “play” the keyboard – and we knew that was make-believe, they had a whole skit about it. 📺 Ditto when EA would play the intro to a song, then get up from the keyboard as she started singing, and the harpsichord track just kept going. It was part of the theatrics, the suspension of disbelief; live playing just wasn't the focus.
Still, because playing two songs should have been in her wheelhouse, EA's choice to stand on stage and mime along with her own world-class violin skills was puzzling. We knew EA was capable of playing “Unlaced”: “Face the Wall” was proof enough that she could still shred like nobody's business, and some lucky fans got to hear her nerd out about pitch standards and rock some Bach at VIP showcases in 2011 (though it was always the same piece, and reportedly not always on point: “she made beginner mistakes, like weird jaw, wrist, elbow placement and tension...” 🐀). And sure, “Face the Wall” was an intense piece, but... it was one of two in the show. The same two, always. She was supposed to be classically trained...!
As EA's fabrications became more common knowledge among the fanbase, people took increasing issue with this odd staging choice – particularly after “Face the Wall” was retired partway through the 2011 tour, leaving only the pantomime, with nothing else happening on stage to distract from it. 📺 People started fixating on her constant and inexplicable tweaking of the truth. Fake name, fake age, fake promises, and now she was fake-fiddling and making a grand show of it? Was she outright mocking her audience, daring them to call her out? Milking a skill she had grown bored with, in the lowest-effort way possible, knowing that goo-goo-eyed fans would still pay to see it? Playing them the world's saddest song on the world's quietest e-violin?
The release of new album Fight Like a Girl in 2012 did little to soothe the Plague Rats' fiddle blues. The violin was much less prominent on FLAG than it had been on Opheliac and Enchant. There were almost no solos, which provided fewer opportunities for playing or miming on stage. “Unlaced” was retired from the touring setlist. One night in Texas during the 2012 tour, due to being on vocal rest, EA played the melody line of “Liar” on the violin. 📺 And that was pretty much the last time world-class violinist Emilie Autumn was heard playing her instrument, on stage or in recording – to the dismay of many fans who had loved her for it.

Can someone please grab this woman by her hand, lead her across her livingroom/bedroom/study, and point at that lonely forgotten dusty violin in a corner of hers so she remembers that she actually owns it? (🐀)

It was yet another bizarre, glaring inconsistency in EA's narrative that fans seemed expected to ignore. Another elephant in the padded room. (Personal anecdote that I don't have a receipt for: in early 2012, when I asked if there was a possibility of EA playing another baroque set for the VIP events on the upcoming tour, her then-manager responded that that wouldn't be possible because venues didn't have the proper acoustics.)
Through some her posts over the years , attentive fans pieced together the likely truth of EA's effective retirement as a violinist. It's actually quite sad, and may cast a different light on EA's artistic shift.
The 2011 tour was initially scheduled for late 2010. It was postponed because EA had been neglecting a jaw injury for years, and needed emergency surgery to avoid “serious and irreversible damage” to her one violin-holding jaw. 📝 She had the surgery early in September; in late November, she performed all over Latin America for six nights straight, and by January, she was back on tour. The same tour during which she made “beginner's mistakes” on the Bach partita, and retired “Face the Wall” for good after a few shows.
She underwent jaw surgery again in 2018, after three years of orthodontic treatment which she said had “prevented [her] from performing”. It was the first anyone was hearing of this (she said she hadn't been touring because she was writing the musical!), and it's as far as EA ever got in terms of half-addressing the obvious: that after dedicating a third of her time on Earth to her craft, after years of pushing through the pain night after night, rushing through recovery periods, and making compromises so the show could go on... she may not be physically able to play concert-level violin anymore.
Once again, something that should (and would) have elicited empathy and support from most fans turned into a point of frustration, speculation and mockery, for years – because EA continued to favor pretend-play and fantasy over the sobering, unglamorous truth. Well, at least everyone's unhappy.

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

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Granted, I don't recall everything about the events. I don't remember a lot of what was said, or the video dramas or skits they did. I have a very poor memory due to meds I have to take for epilepsy; all I really recall is loud worship music in a stadium with thousands of other kids worshiping with me, and thinking it was super awesome that all of us teenagers were worshiping God together. I thought it was so cool (I was 17 at the time; I am 38 now). It's been more than 20 years since then, and I've just recently learned that the Teen Mania Ministries that ran the Acquire the Fire events has been labeled a cult. I don't know if it really was one, or if it was run like one, or what the whole story is there because I didn't research deeper nor was I involved in anything other than attending two ATF events as a guest.
Thing is, I did meet Jesus at those events. He did absolutely show up for me. I know emotionalism played a part, but I've always cried during worship. It's my physical response to the presence of God; I can't help myself. I have an emotional disorder so it doesn't help much. I always look like it's just my emotions and not a real connection to Him. But it was real. I felt Him touch my heart, and I have followed Him faithfully ever since. I've gone to Christian college, gotten two degrees, and written a blog for a Christian women's organization. I've devoted myself to Him. My faith is absolute and real. I guess I just am disappointed to find that my memories of something I once held dear aren't really special after all. I hate the idea that I might have bought into a cult-like way of thinking, but looking back, it kind of was in a way. I remember everyone involved seemed kind of feverishly militant about Christianity. Maybe I just misinterpreted what I was hearing or what was presented to me.
I had wanted to go to the ATF events because I thought it would be cool to worship God in a stadium with thousands of other teens like me. Literally didn't think any deeper about it. And for years, that's really what stood out to me in my memory the most; the sensation of that many people all in worship, all at the same time, it's heady and it's a beautiful thing. It's something I can't wait to see in heaven one day; all of us worshiping God together. What a beautiful sound that will be, right? So I was excited to get to hear even a fraction of that at a youth conference.
But now years later, finding out more kind of gives me that "ick" feeling. I'm disappointed and saddened but also kind of confused because my faith was real, my faith is still very much intact. My relationship with Jesus is solid and unchanged. It's just like the veil has been lifted, you know? And I care now because I don't have a whole lot of great memories from my youth, and these were among the good ones. Now I question them too and it hurts. Has anyone else been through this or something similar? Just wondering.

That diss track being: https://open.spotify.com/track/626jlYCUCqQZZeZ82vLveN?si=dRavyx8xTRK1kCgAv1Bf7g
(MODS THIS THAT HIGH KWALITY EFFORT POST. DON'T YOU DARE)
Disclaimer: Just before I get into this. A few things that I will clarify:

1. This is NOT a comparison of the 2 disstracks
   
2. Every accusation and incidents on the "dissed" artists that I'll put forward is just to convey what the creators of the track claimed. I'm in no position neither do I intend, to imply any of these are true since we don't have any credible evidence in favour of these apparently.
   
3. I love Young Stunners and Rap Demon (lol). But on a serious note, I don't intend to spread any hatred against them through this. Just want to use the current situations to shed some light on and break down the Intricacies of this particular track that didn't get its deserved recognition and attention at the time it was released cos of how incredibly ahead of it's time, this horrorcore diss track was.
   

About Rohani Ilaaj: Firstly decoding the name of the track itself, the term literally translates to "the healing of the soul" which pretty much explains what this track tries to achieve basically.
What makes "meet the grahams" and "Rohani Ilaaj" stand out is how both these tracks are not only very different from what a conventional rap diss track would be like but also the makers of both these tracks portray themselves as some sort of well wishers of their opponents trying to help them out from the addictions and behavorial issues they suffer from, despite of them going wayy below the belt to the point it seems just straight up evil lol.
One of them seems like a letter while the other is a skit with very detailed scenes making vivid pictures in your head through the use of the eerie disturbing production, different voice effects, skits and vocal tones.
Back to the track itself, this diss track by chen and skd can be divided into segments.
The very first segment starts with an intro skit where you hear 2-3 news headlines about serious incidents followed by a few voicenotes of some young guys speaking on how some particular diss track by YS has completely "destroyed" Chen k and how he can never make a comeback. A very interestingly subtle way of showing how the youth is distracted from the more important stuff due to the disses. A cliche yet understandable dig since chen's and skd's music for the most part has been some conscious stuff, raising awareness towards a wide range of societal issues.
Moving further in the same segment, chen starts off the song using his poetic lyrical prowess to paint the picture of a scene with him and YS being in a room of his own house consuming charas - possibly referring to the times when he was friendly with the rap duo and also used to consume drugs.
The storyline further progresses with chen's sudden realization that his current action doesn't fall in line with his set of morals and values and he chooses to go at his then partners in crime trying to make them realize the gravity and seriousness of this addiction while also the bad influence it can have on the vulnerable youth to start committing such acts in public to which a drugged up braggadocious Talha Anjum, who is being mimicked very comically over here btw, replies with stuff similar to the narratives YS came up with, after Chen K's criticism against them during his meet and greet.
Easter Egg: With this only making me realize that this made up scene painted by Chen K of him doing drugs with YS and then trying to stop them from doing it was his way of referring to the time they were friendly and then the events that unfolded after his statements during the meet and greet. Crazy. A slight glimpse of Chen's lyrical ability for you.
Anyways this segment progresses further with references to YS songs and things that they have said with Chen's reply to them. Some of them are witty you can listen to them for yourself. I won't expand on them since they don't really contribute to the point I'm trying to make here
PS: Except this one thing that Chen pointed out, Anjum flexed about making a track on the young girl, Zainab who was r@ped in Pakistan and the news being all around in Pakistan at the time, as if TA only made the track for the credit that would come with it. Chen takes a step further trying to portray TA as a hypocrite for writing lyrics sexualising women himself and then make a protest song against a r@pe case. Quite exaggerated but still counts as it's a major dig at TA's character.
Anyways after the exceptionally written and delivered, goosebumps inducing hook by SKD. We move towards his verse, being the second segment of the song which contains the major meat - the part that made me think of this track while listening to kdot's diss. It is also this time it would be revealed that this diss track is also a sequel to SKD's song "Afsana-e-Dehshat" which was a diss on a bunch of pakistani rappers for some things that happened at the time in PHH. Two of the guys who caught some strays were obviously TA and TY.
On that song, SKD had a decent bar "Gaadhun maa ke qadmo me" for one of those rappers that he was dissing (can't remember who it was) . Many fans along with YS criticized it for SKD crossing the line bringing up Yunus' dead mother misunderstanding that bar to be for Yunus. It was also this misunderstanding that made SKD discover the unfortunate early fate of Yunus' mother - KEEP THIS IN MIND.
Moving on, SKD proceeds to put forward the most serious allegation of this whole feud. A major narrative that TY came up with while going at Chen was that he's doing it to protect the dignity and respect for women - since obviously, Chen K has been called a misogynist quite some times because of his views, at that time, for his then viral song - Ladki.
SKD reveals that Yunus has a friend who is an alcoholic and habitually beats up women and Yunus is aware of it as well. Do note that this bar seems to be SKD trying to question Yunus' own conscience with this fact rather than trying to expose him in the public eye since he doesn't come up with any credible evidence to support the claim. Nevertheless, this does play on to both these guys' major narratives against YS i.e, they're being hypocritical for taking the moral high ground over here and just want an excuse to diss for publicity.
Now before we move further, let's take a moment so i can summarize the very track that brought us here in the first place - meet the grahams, so you can start connecting the similarities for yourself:
This particular track has Kendrick writing a letter to each one of Drake's family members and Drake. Blaming Drake's father since he believes drake has inherited some addictions from him, empathizing with Drake's mother, going at Drake for the wrongs that he has done. But the darkest part lies when he addresses his son and his allegedly hidden daughter. Politely teaching them values and telling them how their father isn't good enough. I mean imagine growing up and listening some random ass man tell you shit about your father and how he hasn't done enough for you. Some heavy shit there.
To tell your opponent's loved one how their flaws are too much for them to be respected, claim to be taking the responsibility that you're the one who can help your opponent "recover" and make this more about your opponent going through something serious rather than you just having a rap battle with them. Guess who else, other than kendrick, did it before him wayyy back in 2019.
Nevermind, y'all already know by now lol, I'm just yet to tie things up. It's a long 8 minute diss track, will keep it till here for now.
To be continued.

For context, my kids ask me regularly about "Dad-Lore" where I tell them about my childhood and they stand there with mouths agape and ask "how are you so normal?"
I grew up in a cult.
Think of that wild evangelical friend/uncle/cousin. Got them in mind? This was crazier. Like a lot.
I grew up in (what I thought was) a perfectly normal white, suburban, Canadian, Christian family. We were fairly happy. It was me, my brother, sister, mom, and dad.
We went to church every week. Church was a fairly "high priority" in our life.
You know, like everyone goes to church. Once on Sunday morning (for 3-4 hours), once on Sunday evening (evening service is where Pastor Len gets into the real issues - another 2-3 hours).
Oh, and small group on Wednesday evening (25-30 of our closest friends singing along with an acoustic guitar and half a dozen tambourines - anywhere between 3-5 hours).
And then there's the "Intercessory prayer" meeting on Thursday (a group of mostly women gather together to pray for all of their friends and family - each kept a spiral notebook as a prayer journal to make sure that all of the specific details of the friends' needs can be brought before almighty God that He might do a MIGHTY WORK IN THIS SITUATION!!!!!) (this was usually 3 hours or so)
Pant. Pant. Pant.....
I may have gotten carried away there for a moment.
Apologies.
To continue. Friday night was Youth Group (where your parents would encourage you to spend as much time as possible with THESE FRIENDS - in the hopes that we might meet a nice Christian girl who is deeply aligned with Purity Culture) (Friday nights were 4-6 hours)
Saturday morning was usually volunteering to help - so as to be "servant leaders" in our community - to help point the way to Jesus. This could be helping a family in our small group as they move, or shoveling other peoples' driveways ( 3ish hours )
Saturday night was often a second youth group event. Sometimes, it would be a fun "party type" event. Occasionally, this would involve "outreach", where we might do any number of things to advance God's heavenly kingdom here on Earth. (anywhere from 3-8 hours)
We may:

• Go swimming at a community pool (Girls must wear a one piece bathing suit with swim shorts. Boys must not be naked.)
• Have a "praise and worship" night where we would sing contemporary Christian music as a group following words projected onto any convenient wall with a transparency projector (a box with a lightbulb inside, a glass top, and a large magnifying lens like a periscope above - a piece of "transparency paper" with song lyrics would be placed on the glass and the light would project the words onto the wall)

These nights were considered some of the best youth events. We would sing and dance for hours. We would "pray in Tongues" at the top of our lungs. We waved flags with embroidered phrases like "Prince of Peace, Mighy God, Holy One".
In short, these were good nights because we felt like we could feel God right here among us.

• We might do a night of "witnessing". This could be anything from handing out (frankly hilarious) religious tracts at a local mall. Or, we might knock on doors to tell people about Jesus. We might talk with the unhoused about how Jesus could turn their life around. (This was generally done during the summer months as you don't get too many kids showing up to wander downtown streets on winter evenings)
• The roller rink was super fun. We would rent the whole place out and we could listen to only our music!!! We know all the words! (cue hours of Stephen Curtis Chapman, Amy Grant - before her affair, and if things were really crazy we might even bust out Petra "Beyond Belief")
• The Arts as a whole were considered a spiritual fom of expression, so we would often have slightly less intense outreach nights by going to other like minded churches and each group could show the other some songs or skits or an interesting story using a fanciful flannelgraph.

This is where I get to call out something that I am particularly proud of: I have memorized the lines, blocking, and movement of every single character in Carmen's "The Champion". (for context, this is allegorical retelling of the Passion Story in the form of a boxing match. It features such characters as the old testament names Jeremiah, Enoch, and Job. Along with Hitler and Napoleon just to balance things out. This song is every bit as weird as it sounds and we would act this out in real-time with a ghetto-blaster belting this rock opera out in the background)
Then Sunday would start it all over again.
Now, not every week was like this. Sometimes, there might be an itinerant Apostle or Prophet in town. It would be the job of one family in our church congregation to host this individual at their home. It was considered an honour. And it wasn't super expensive, they usually only ate breakfast (and maybe a packed lunch) at your house.
In any case, if there was a prophet visiting, there would certainly be an additional evening or two where everyone could come to get a "word from the Lord".
This would involve getting up from your chair (in a revival tent style, there would be musicians playing on the stage to crank up or down the emotional tension as needed). You would then make your way to the front of the room - just in front of the stage. I say stage, I mean "platform raised 12 inches and covered in a thick carpet". You would face forward with your arms raised to about nipples height (think, carrying a flat screen and trying to raise it onto a counter. Take away the TV and you've got the position perfectly. If you want to be particularly demonstrative in your spirituality, you'd shift your hands out like it was a widescreen so that the whole congregation behind you could see your hands waiting to receive good things from God).
And then you would stand there.
Your hands held up in gentle supplication, your head bowed respectfully in patience. If the spirit moves you, you could quietly speak in tongues (it's your heavenly prayer language - a direct line of communication with the Holy Spirit - too bad you have no idea what's being said in either direction)
The prophet would eventually work his way down the line of penitents. He would place his hands on your shoulders, or gesticulate with them as if to punctuate the words and phrases of his glossolalia. Then he would pause.
He might say something like, "The Lord is looking at you child. He is waiting....... He waits for you."
Then he would pause.
His eyes, though shut, would squeeze tighter. His face would become pained (imagine a guitar soloist picking out a particularly high lick - that facial expression)
He, might then open his eyes and touch your face to look into yours. He would smile. He would say, "your heavenly father is so proud of you. While he hasn't told me the specifics, he wants me to tell you 'I'm here. With you. Tonight.' He has a plan for you. One to prosper you, and keep you in health. His eye seeks all across this land and his eye is on YOU. Let me pray for you"
Then, you would once more close your eyes. He would place his hand on your forehead (often with some scented "anointing oil" - this could be purchased in the shoppe in the lobby alongside more tracts). He would begin to speak loudly and with authority.
"I declare THIS DAY that God's hand of BLESSING be upon this child. I BIND all powers of darkness with regards to this child of God, and I LOOSE heaven's blessings upon him"
This would often wrap up with a "thank you JESUS" and a small push.
Now.
This was the point were people would be "slain in the spirit".
It was never really explained to me. It was kind of, just, part of what happened at church.
Presumably, when the PastoProphet/Healespeaker gave that small push, God's Holy Spirit would overwhelm you and you would collapse. Generally backwards. Generally, into the waiting arms of a couple of burly ushers who would the gently lay you on the ground. If you were wearing a skirt a small cotton sheet would be layed over your legs to preserve your modesty.
After several minutes of laying on the carpet (more than 2 less than 5), you would sit up, feeling the joy of the lord as your strength. You would stand up, thank the usher, and go sit in your seat once more.
This is a light taste of the weirdness I grew up in. I will say, for anyone concerned, I was never physically or sexually abused. I am also no longer in that world, though some of my family still is.
I have more and weirder stories, but I've been tapping on my tiny keyboard for way too long, so I'll wrap up my rambling summary of a relatively typical week growing up in a cult.

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Episode 92: Broken Roads

Bell’s Hells, after making contact with The Volition, agreed to aid them in a number of their current simultaneous goals against the dark leaders of Kreviris, in hopes of gaining information and aiding the revolution against the Ruidian tyrants. Upon these missions, much information was gained, some dangerous circumstances occurred, and yet you survived and endured and began to flee the city as chaos began to erupt from within. During this time, after calling towards your mother and sending her into a personal crisis about what’s right and who to align with, she scattered off into the dark shadows of the caverns. As you fled towards the surface through some of these winding rock tunnels, you were hunted by Otohan Thul, the Legend of the Peaks. During this fight (in which your terrifying foe unleashed her true capabilities) many of you fell and barely scraped back from the edge, but one of you did not, Fresh Cut Grass. A friend and ally who had recently come to truly realize his worth sacrificed himself to save the rest of you and to fell for good the foe that had long hunted you. In that fugue numbness of realization, you grabbed what you could, what remained of him (and what you could from what remained of Otohan Thull) continued to flee to the surface where you emerged. There amongst the red Ruidian landscape, the distant storms roiling, Liliana descended from above, and seeing the hurt on your face (on all of your faces), realized what had likely transpired. It was here, still not truly grasping or processing what has happened and what is next, you stare upon the alien landscape and partially obscured horizon. Glancing around as best you can, and it’s fairly clear in the area you are now, the dust storms currently sit at least a number of miles off, though you’re uncertain how fast they’re moving at a quick glance, you do not see any other figures immediately present. Where you’ve pushed out from here, one of these side caverns, you took a look behind you and you can see the base of the mountain range that encircles Kreviris and continues past it. So you are just outside the city itself. You do not see any immediate outposts, but you figure if you were to leave a little further out, you would be essentially out in the open, visible from many of the outposts that encircle the crown-like mountainscape that surrounds the valley at the top of the city. You can very easily see the Bloody Bridge, the single red beam of energy that sits in a direction which helps you orient yourself and your location right now from where you came. If you get really close to the base of the mountain, there’s probably some little alcoves that you can pull in to stay out of any immediate sight. Any larger dips or cracks in the ground where you could hide from sight are a good 500 or more feet out and would probably put you out in the open before you reach them. Ashton says, “I’m gonna see what’s below us.” and inhales deeply. You grind through the ground and vanish below. While you’re currently looking, Liliana is still gliding about a foot off the ground, her hair drifting. You can feel, almost taste the energy that sparks in the air around her. She’s still just locked in on you (Imogen), her face still sad. You can see the streaks of (not sure if they’re of sadness or anger) tears that have since dried and smeared what dirt was along her face and as she looks towards you for guidance before she looks away. “I don’t know what’s going on Imogen. I don’t know what to do.” “I don’t either.” “Well, y’all can’t stay here. Going to have to…you cant stay here.” “Are you staying?” “If I go, they’ll know. What’s more useful? If I leave they’ll…I mean the rest of them already have been tough enough to get them to trust me. Am I more useful here to what you’re doing, or am I more useful leaving it behind?”

♪Episode Song References♪

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• 00:28:00 Cindy Lauper - True Colors
• 00:56:08 Iron Maiden - Moonchild
• 01:02:35 Laura ♪(waggles tongue) ♪ Werner Thomas - Der Ententanz (the Chicken Dance)
• 01:18:00 hip hop inhale exhale sample
• 02:08:58 Eric Carmen - All By Myself
• 02:09:45 “everyboody” Backstreet Boys - Backstreet’s Back
• 02:20:25 Thin Lizzy - The Boys Are Back in Town
• 02:25:00 Dashboard Confessional - Vindicated
• 03:11:28 Aerosmith - Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing
• 03:18:28 Taylor Swift - Shake It Off
• 03:36:45 “together” (unknown song)
• 04:19:16 Robbie sings an unknown song

Highlights
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• 00:19:17 Liliana explains the containment of Predathos and the plan to breach it. “We’re supposed to be what can break the final boundary. We have somethin’ within us, somethin’ that the gods can’t stop. Only we can truly reach it. From what he (Ludinus) said, in order to get it beyond and back into our realm, it needs a vessel, somethin’ to carry it past that threshold.”
• 00:20:19 The darting eyes of Travis
• 00:22:55 Laudna:“You say it doesn’t care about us. What makes you think apathy is any better than disdain to a God Eater?” Liliana:“…It’s real tired of bein’ here and it’s real angry at those who put it there, and it’s real hungry.”
• 00:24:56 Marisha thanking Liam for the fancy notebook
• 00:33:54 Liliana:“Do you think, should we stop all this from happening and re-seal or maintain Predathos’ endless slumber, that those of us who know this, those of us who are designed to be part of its freedom are just going to be allowed to walk free? What, you think the great temples of your world aren’t going to hunt us down one-by-one til there’s no possibility of this plan ever coming to fruition?You don’t think every great politician of our world that isn’t tied into this truth isn’t going to try and bury each and every one of us for what we’re part of?” Orym:“Cold comfort for my family in the ground.”
• 00:40:58 Teleport to the Bloody Bridge. Imogen:“What do we do when we get to the other side?” Liliana:“Find those who you can trust and find me when you need my guidance. I’ll see you in your dreams.”
• 00:42:20 Travis:“Whoa! Her flex on 'em! (regarding Liliana’s time stop spell) I mean, fuck her.”
• 00:48:04 Laura rolls a 1 for a critical (heh) group deception check at the Malleus Key back on Exandria. Liam follows with a 3 and Taliesin with a 4. Travis:“That’s so fitting. I just said it.” All right, as you all emerge and begin to descend the staircase that leads down from the top of the Malleus Key, you coasted down amongst the various ruins and the large military tents and gathered bits of materials. You can also see other war beasts from Ruidus have begun to make their transition to Exandria. The military defense of the Malleus Key is growing larger. You can see the edges of the actual Tishtan site. There are signs of massive battle. While you were gone, it looks like either a major scuffle happened and a section of one of the inner walls of it is blown open and there’s a massive cave-in landslide that happened there. So it looks like the escalation of might and assaults on this space (or at least defense as well) shows violence is increasing. As you’re taking these in and you begin to maneuver, you, Orym, notice that two Reilorans are gliding by. Not walking, gliding. What you see are two mystics that take attention as you come down the steps and begin to pursue. Orym:(to Imogen)“We got a tail.”
• 00:51:00 Laura:“I get it, Travis! I rolled a one!” (revenge from last episode)
• 00:52:48 Matt:“Ah, Natural Six.” Travis and Marisha celebrate successfully avoiding a Reiloran army.
• 00:54:15 Liam:“That’s a tall drink of warder.”
• 00:54:28 Laura:“If we look around, do we see Planerider Ryn? Do we see an armless statue anywhere?” Travis:“Just as a hat rack.” Liam:“A potted plant. Just decor outside a tent.” Matt:“While this is where she was turned to stone, you get the immediate sense that she’s been relocated.”
• 00:55:26 Orym:“Why is that woman dressed as a hot dog?” Matt:“Orym rolls high enough to see into the real dimension. Why do thy have dice? What does that mean?” Laura references The Neverending Story)
• 00:58:30 You see different temple-themed armor sets, pauldrons and chestplates that are adorned with the symbol of the Moonweaver. You can see the holy symbols that are hung on the edge of iron spikes that are jammed into the ground that hang and dangle, where at the end of the chain, you see swinging a medallion of the Duskmaven. You can see all manner of captured holy imagery that now is set upon the outskirts of this site as a warning and as a a sign of pride that any who steps beyond stops here…you see the familiar sight of what looks to be a cloak that, as it hangs tattered and torn, as it flows with the occasional breeze, you can see the familiar symbol of the Changebringer, her face still standing there from the side, looking off to some unknown horizon.
• 01:00:50 Marisha:“40 years using this spell and still don’t fucking got it. Aw fuck, That’s right. Ah, fuck.”
• 01:01:48 Travis:“Sure you don’t wanna just use a deception check to try and get around?” Laura:“Hey, fuck off…It doesn’t matter and Marisha saved the day and it’s fiinnee.”
• 01:02:38 Travis, hit by a karma truck, rolls a 1 on the next stealth check. Liam:“That’s just right!” (callback to Mary Elizabeth McGlynn)
• 01:03:20 Marisha’s Fan is a tribute with “R.I.P.F.C.G.” on it
• 01:04:11 As the shadows to enswirl your troop and you peel off from what was the feigned perimeter walk of your group from the site, you begin to make a western beeline in the direction where you hope you’ll be able to see the encampment. The tension begins to fade after about five or so minutes when you do not see any of the other perimeter guards following suit or taking note of your divergence from the site. Now as you all quietly walk under the stars of the Exandrian sky in silence, looking across the distant rocky barren horizons of theHellcatch, really the first moment hits in where you get to begin to process what you’ve lost.
• 01:10:47 Ashton:“I hope she’s right. Really do. I hope her ends are fucking great because these means are just not forgivable.”
• 01:13:25 Evoroa becomes the first Bormodo on Exandria. The first to experience “The Blue Promise”
• 01:15:15 Imogen:“He said you knew where Ludinus was. Do you have a city name? A location?” Evoroa:“Yeah. I don’t know where it is, but he’s referred to it a few times. It’s called Aeor. It’s where he’s getting all these things and where…I don’t know where else he’d be.” Travis:“Motherfucking Matt Mercer. MFMM” Marisha:“The Cerberus Assembly has been obsessed with that Aeor shit.”

Evoroa:“Well, so a lot of this tech was being brought in there. We were able to combine it with some of our initial designs of shifting and changing up our developments for various war implements here on Ruidus. They had developed a lot of things based around this thing, this Malleus Key he was talking about. So part of my thing was to help originally to design tools that were used to burrow through the outer layers of the glass pillar where Kreviris was. It’s an impossiblly thick layer of glass, but the Exaltants, when they came in here and began to consult with us alongside Ludinus, they began to speak as they communed with the being of the planet, moon, i guess, to you. There are multiple layers to this glass. The outer layers were simple enough to get through with some of this tech we designed, but the secondary layer that we got through was like adamantine. It seemed like it had some sort of divine magical origin in its construction. You know our standard designs were too slow in trying to get through there, given the rapid timeline of what was going on and mounting opposition from Exandria. As you said, across the bridge was starting to grow tension, so Ludinus was going to go back to seek out what tech was available. There’s supposed ot be a continued source of it being excavated from his troop, his Vanguard, his allies, but there was a problem there. Something called, he called it the Dominox. It had begun to take up root there, was causing struggles with their excavation, and so he was going to take care of it himself. That was just a few days ago. From what we were understanding, there were certain implementations of magical synergies and the technology that was being presented as part of our study group, that the tech had a unique understanding of the weave of godly magics, divine-type magics, and how to unravel them on a very base core point. So this was the basis of our project, a means to penetrate the secondary glass shell that contains Predathos within. So, taking inspiration from the, what’s it called the Malleus Factorum and the other trickles of nearby tech and essentially develop it in a smaller scale that we’d be able to go through these additional layers of the divine glass. So, apparently the glass veins that run through the planet are the remnants of Predathos’ last form when it was locked within its prison, so that’s the theory. So, we’ve been unable to map deeply without the help of the Exaltants, and when they’re able to connect with the aid of the Weave Mind to deeply bind with the essence of Predathos, they were able to feel out the extent of the vein network. We were uncertain of the source. Just knew they were resonant with The One Who Sleeps, but from what we’re gathering, that was likely a reflection of its form when it was sealed away, so the glass is what its body once was then turned to be its own prison. So whatever it is sleeping within is within its own glass prison and the layers between, and that’s where the tech and the Exaltants, that’s where all of this is supposed to come together is to break past these boundaries and then free it from its prison shell of what it once was. Yeah!”
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• 01:32:10 Orym uses the sending stone to attempt to contact Dorian.
• 01:34:00 Aabria:“You know what? I think I’ll take it from here. I think it’s time to see the other half of the story.” INTERMISSION *So, my lovely Crown Keepers. Kymal. After the events of our interlude those long long weeks ago, you all moved north past the Silvercut Crossroads to lay low in the Wildwood Valley. The settlements you dares stay at for more than a few days are more village than town, but the narrow edge of your escape from Poska and the Nameless Ones has you cagey. What’s the true distance of her reach? How far would your sister go to find you? And what do you think, Fy’ra Rai, she would do if she found you again? It’s been almost a month of low living. The six of you, Cyrus included, have a small cache of brumestone that you all harvested from your slow moving getaway platform. Yeah, honestly, like the first three weeks was you just slowly drifting. Yeah, you guys were able to harvest the brumestone from your platform. You have it secreted across the six of you, so in the event that you have to scatter, you all have access to an incredible amount of money, were you able to find a place to fence it. You are not too far from Kraghammer. Westruun is a little farther away, but those are big hubs. Poska’s reach might get there. The Myriad, the Clasp, the people that were pushed out in Kymal. You are some of the few survivors of whatever went down there, and a big city isn’t safe. But two weeks ago, something new began. Whispers reached even your remote ears. A solstice, the Moon of Ill omen, the Blightstar lost from the skies of TalDorei, trapped over Marquet. Disenchantment of old and powerful magic. No sending, no teleportation, no resurrection. Those of you with connections to the gods of this world, the Wildmother, the Spider Queen, the Matron of Ravens, and even the Observer. You have felt a pressingg on the threads of your connections with them, from the Prime and Betrayer Gods, your first inkling of fear, and even from the Observer, a new bit of interest, curiosity about the goings on in this world. And then a message from Orym. Desperate. So sad. Halfway around the world, he bade you find the Tempest in a tone that pushed your group from hiding to haste. So you find yourselves on the road once more headed south, then east towards the Summit Peaks and Zephrah. This time has been dark and difficult for you all not just because you have had to settle for living and hiding; no longer around the glitz and glamour of Kymal. The standard of living that you were all adjusted to. Even Cyrus has been showing signs of getting a little antsy, a curiosity, a need to move in a new direction. Then, again, Opal’s been getting pretty dark lately. Aimee gives the camera a stare
• 01:58:53 Aabria:"I like that you said dreams because I think your dreams were the thing that went first. It is not that you go to sleep and have nightmares, but I think in your youth you would go to sleep and dream or have a nightmare and have some memory of it upon waking, even if it slips away across the day. But every night now, for two weeks, you go to sleep and you wake up exhausted as though your body has been tense, moving. Recovery is difficult and whatever happens from when you close your eyes and give yourself over to sleep and waking is a void and lost. Any time you reach within yourself towards Ted, towards whatever that connection is for clarity or understanding, the first thing you notice is that every dawn, if you reach for Ted, she is exhausted. If you ask her, if you press, she tells you little and less. She doesn’t want to worry you. It’s not your fight. And that’s the important thing. You know there is a fight happening and you have no recollection of it. Two weeks, and now you’re on the road again, traveling long days down the road, exhausted. It is at some point, just a few days into your journey towards Zephrah, towards purpose or adventure or whatever comes next after your last big quest, you feel it. Something inside you breaks. Too tired. Too much holding it together. Your mind is yours and Ted’s and hers, and she has been whispering to you. You feel that fear, that concern oppressing, a hastening, and it all becomes too much. You all walk down the road, and Opal stops. Frozen, she’s looking a thousand yards away in a direction as if she’s listening, trying to hear, trying to understand, but she is stock still.*
• 02:03:21 Aabria:“We gotta get these chuckles out now. I’m so excited.” Robbie seems to be the only one terrified by that statement and looks around incredulously.
• 02:05:35 Aabria:“What did it feel like for Morrighan when she made her deal with the Matron of Ravens, when she committed herself to becoming a paladin of her cause?”
• 02:07:37 Erica:“Whatever curdles the stomach of death incarnate, that’s pretty scary.” You turn towards that feeling of gravity and you look at Opal, trying so hard to shake off whatever this is. You see it in a flash, in a caw, a birdsong, before it hits, and Opal, it’s not that she raises or levitates off the ground, but she seems to grow massive and then she explodes out in every direction.
• 02:09:50 Matt gets to live the dream and does the ad read for the Wizkids Battle Cam in Sam’s absence.
• 02:12:01 Spider Queen:“It means I need you to come with me and I need to sever the ties that keep you with them.”
• 02:12:46 Neat spider web FX in the background! Opal:“Wait. Where’s Ted?”
• 02:14:39 Telepathic group chat by Rary’s Telepathic Bond is granted by Aabria
• 02:15:17 Mic Drop Moment Aabria:“Let me be so clear. Aimee Carrero, love of my life. If you pull a punch, I will know, and I’ll make it worse. So I need you to swing.”
• 02:16:54 Fan Art Moment You see Opal, a crown, and then a pink crown below it, eyes dripping black, a set of arms reaching out, a second set of arms reaching down.
• 02:19:36 Amy:“My ass is sweating.” (callback to Aabria in Calamity?)
• 02:20:03 Matt begins the dance of Dariax rolling low.
• 02:20:38 Two plus two is four
• 02:22:45 The gems strewn about are fragments from Opal’s explosion
• 02:23:35 Aabria:“I will Venmo you $20 RIGHT NOW if you cast haste on Opal.”
• 02:25:35 Aabria:“You stand by a weird dick of gemstones.”
• 02:29:12 Aabria:“You can certainly try.”
• 02:30:50 We Meet Ted! Aabria:"If Opal did CrossFit for three years and was pure raw red meat diet. This is meat beat bandersnatch Opal. (Meat Beat Manifesto?)
• 02:32:38 Erica:“Fuck you, Ted.”
• 02:32:56 Aimee breaks
• 02:34:40 Erica:“I’d like to go to a Denny’s.” Aabria:“You get a giant hot dog that looks like a pussy. We haven’t forgotten that.” Matt:“I’ll never forget it…”
• 02:36:10 Erica:“As fur back as I can get without doing that thing you said.”
• 02:36:22 Under your feet, you see an arrangement of those opalescent gems. It’s a little pattern of four. No perception check, it just sort of looks like a dick… Erica:“Wow, it’s so big.” (callback to Kymal) Anjali:“There it is! Everybody drink!” Aimee:“There’s an ash hole right next to it.” Aabria:“No!”
• 02:37:50 Robbie:“Dorian was up front, tooting a little tune on his flute, okay in his own zone. Then in that amount of time, Opal levitated, burst forth spiderwebs and gems, shot a bolt, and nearly killed one of our friends…” Aabria:“It really popped off.”
• 02:38:47 Dorian:“Better get your head in the game, Bossy Genassi.” casts Bardic Inspiration on Fy’ra
• 02:40:54 Robbie makes a funny noise of confusion.
• 02:42:08 Aimee donates her failed pinky nail to Matt while Robbie says “doo doo” repeatedly about his stats.
• 02:42:30 Dorian:“Hey, buddy. You wanna tell me what’s going on?” Opal/SQ:“She doesn’t know.” Dorian:“Who’s she? You’re she.” Opal/SQ:“Am I?” Dorian:“Are you?” Opal/SQ:"Are you?
• 02:46:00 Matt:“That’s the password on my luggage.” (Spaceballs reference)
• 02:52:27 Robbie decides to touch the bunny ears. Henry Crabgrass is disappointed.
• 02:53:35 Aabria:“You feel the dick under your feet.” Matt:“If I had a nickel…”
• 02:55:12 Robbie:“Don’t get Jumanji-ed!” (SNL Jumanji Skit)
• 02:56:03 Spider Queen:“You won’t stop me from making her mine without killing her, so what are you all prepared to do? Because I will not die to that.” (likely referencing the ongoing Predathos threat)
• 02:57:47 One of the spiders crushes one of the dick gems. There’s a word, Aevilux, a splinter group. She tells a story, looking at you with shining eyes, mismatched color. A long time ago, a group of people found something called a beacon. They learned from it some great entity or god, a concept that sought to know itself, to understand via experience in the world of Exandria, it split itself apart. This one found far away. These people that worshiped the Luxon, found, created magics within themselves to split their own souls apart so that they could learn who they were via observation. As a child, town in two, you observe yourself, you learn who you are, what you like, what you want, what you need, your purpose, and then rejoin, find unity once more. Your mother was one of these people. So, Ted, Opal, Georgina, are you. You and Ted found each other again, reunited to something stronger than your wholes. (hehe) You understand yourself because you understand Ted. Ted wants to protect you because she is protecting herself. She’s not lost to you, she is you. You are something rare and magical in the world of Exandria, and the memory of that is gone forever, in the moment of knowing it.
• 03:03:23 Aabria:“You did get a sense of Submissive and Crushable from these.”
• 03:04:30 Matt opens with a casting of Bless much to Aabria’s displeasure, since it was so effective during battle in Kymal.
• 03:04:50 Aimee:“After all the handies, Cyrus?” rolls a 7 on a “performance” check for the handjob. Aimee then does a happy rodeo dance.
• 03:07:25 Dariax grants bardic inspiration to Dorian, who has been training him as a bard up until now.
• 03:09:18 Aimee pulls no punches and plunges everyone into darkness in which only Opal can see.
• 03:11:53 Erica:(Barbie voice)“The dick gems are sentient!”
• 03:12:57 Spider Squirrel!
• 03:19:40 Aimee:“The candles were wet all the time.” Erica:“The candles were so wet!” (giggety)
• 03:25:05 Grab those sticky dick gems!
• 03:28:14 Aimee:“You’re so confident. I mean, not in this moment…”
• 03:31:23 Erica:“I actually think I’m good, question mark?”
• 03:32:31 Erica:(Barbie voice)“Grab as many jewels as you can!” Fy’ra:“That’s what I said!..Bossy Genasi is apparently my name now.”
• 03:35:35 Dorian flies out of the darkness, but fails his dispel cast and lets out a small fart. “Aw, damn!”
• 03:35:56 The Dorian/Dariax confuses finally catches Aabria.
• 03:38:20 Erica:“oh they really are dick gems…” Matt:“She tends to rub off on ya.”
• 03:45:03 Opal:“This isn’t about you, Ted.” Ted:“You’re literally talking about me.” Opal:“(okay)shut up”
• 03:46:29 Rent-A-Sister
• 03:47:12 Fire Genasi and perfume callback
• 03:51:21 Fy’ra:“Dodge, dash, disengage, what the fuck?”
• 03:57:24 Dariax is struck by three eldritch blasts in the darkness.
• 04:00:34 Dimension Door escape Matt:“…I know because I’ve had people Dimension Door into dragons before.”
• 04:02:53 Bardy Party
• 04:03:33 Fan Art Moment Dariax doing the Van Damme splits
• 04:13:51 Corrupted memory
• 04:17:47 Forbidden Gushers
• 04:24:35 Opal’s new 6’5" form with extra arms

So I'm a now - thankfully - recovered addict, and as someone who uses humor to deal with stuff things like the old "This is your brain on drugs" commercials, McGruff the Crime Dog, and D.A.R.E. have been common frequently involved in jokes over the years. To get to my point, I was joking with my wife a minute ago and had a realization and it led to a pretty good joke at the time. The joke? "You ever notice how they really stopped putting effort into keeping the kids off drugs? They started with McGruff The Crime Dog and shortly after there were these masterpieces of advert gold like the "This is your brain on drugs!" and " I learned it from YOU, Dad! ". But then they just kinda said "Fuck them kids!" And we got D.A.R.E. and that wack ass Lion?? The Lion didn't even have a name! What was he, Tony the Tigers' super lame youth pastor cousin??? " And I'm not saying any of this shit worked, but they at least used to try! Now all I see is ads where some chick asks an obviously pretending and uninvested girl if she can name any drug that fentanyl has been found in, and when the girls like "Any drug?" then the chick is like "Exactly!" and it's just like.. I've seen more effort in a "Right way to respond" skit in a drug class where the addicts were forced to be the actors in a fuckin class designed for second graders!". So I guess what I'm saying is, do you guys have any funny opinions on the topic, or funny stories about these terrible attempts at abstinence training for kids? Lol

Hello everyone. Long time lurker, first time contributor here. I've wanted to write something like this out for a while but never felt sure about it until now. I grew up in the evangelical bubble and have been in therapy for several years now, working my way through it and trying to work toward a new phase in my life that I think I'm finally comfortably settling into.
My family raised me in a very devout, Baptist church where we were at the center of everything. My dad was actually raised by his parents in the same exact church and so he passed it on to my siblings and I (lucky me). So this place and world was all I knew from birth. My dad was a deacon in the church and my mom was a Sunday school teacher. We were there every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night, every Saturday afternoon/evening for choir practice, and attended every single event. My mom and dad were both on the women's and men's church baseball teams respectively and I and my sisters played on the church kids' teams. I participated in every holiday cantata, every skit, every children's choir event, every VBS, etc. We were heavily involved and it was my whole world. We had family friends who were so close to us that I referred to them as "Aunt" and "Uncle", and I had two best friends, one male and one female (I'm male), who were closer than any friends I had at school. I have a strange sort of disconnect with so much of it now because when I reflect back on it there are so many really genuinely happy memories that cause my heart to ache over the eventual loss. The rupture that eventually tore this whole world down around me ripped apart everything that made me feel like me and that's why I'm here now.
What I should say before going any further is that there was always a part of me that struggled to believe and was filled with constant doubt. I remember in fourth grade when the kids on the playground at school were teasing me because they knew I was a religious "goodie two shoes" and were goading me into saying a swear word. As the pressure mounted I finally let it out and yelled out the F word, the first time I'd ever sworn, and they all stared at me in shock and then started laughing and slapped me on the back like "yeah, this kid's alright after all." I remember waiting for the punishment to fall out of the sky but then...nothing. It was totally fine and no one cared. So I started letting it fly all the time at school while hiding it from the rest of my family. I mention this because that's when I started really compartmentalizing my life and I got pretty good at it until eventually I wasn't. I'd go to church on Sundays and hear the pastor say that if we weren't going out into the world on Monday and evangelizing to our friends then we weren't being good stewards of the faith because those people were lost souls in need of our guidance. Then I'd go to school on Monday again, see my friends there, and think "...but they're fine." I would then spend the next week feeling guilty and ashamed of myself only to have it reaffirmed the following Sunday once again that I was being a bad Christian. I was plagued with thoughts of dying and meeting God only to be told I was never a true believer and then being sent to hell for all of eternity. I got "saved" more times than I care to count. And then I'd go to school on Monday again and think "but my friends are fine" and so lather, rinse, repeat.
The real change started happening, however, when I was in sixth grade. The year prior my grandmother had died a few days before my birthday and that was the beginning of something I didn't quite understand. See, on Sundays after church my mom and dad would take my sisters and I to our grandparents for the afternoon since they lived down the road from the church and we'd hang there all afternoon with my aunts, uncles, and cousins until the evening service started. That was our routine every single Sunday, week in, week out. When my grandma died, it started to unravel. I never knew how much of a matriarch she was and after she passed the family dynamic immediately shifted and my aunts and uncles stopped showing up. My grandpa grew very quiet and depressed and eventually developed Parkinson's. Sundays suddenly started feeling a little strange and so - it quickly became apparent - did my parents. My mom began spending a lot of time with my sixth grade Sunday school teacher, who was a male, and she referred to him often as her best friend. My sisters and I used to say that everything that happened later took us by complete surprise, but I think that's how we chose to cope because looking back...it seems obvious. There were several moments over the course of that year that made my sisters and I uncomfortable each in our own way, but one stands out in my mind for me specifically.
We were at my dad's church baseball game on a night in July and my dad was standing at the pitcher's mound. The church had two separate men's teams and my dad was on one while my Sunday school teacher was on the other. My dad was having a rough night and had just walked the previous batter after a series of fouls when said Sunday school teacher approached the plate. He jokingly yelled out for my dad to "go easy on me" while some of the guys laughed in response. What I remember about this is how still my dad was. He was always very athletic and sure of himself, but his body language told a different story on this night. I remember that the catcher was signaling the pitch to my dad, but my dad was just standing there, unresponsive. Sunday school teacher took his batting stance and then my dad wound up for the pitch and let it fly, hitting his intended target and shattering the man's cheek bone instantly. I can still hear the man's screams of agony as he fell to the ground, but what I remember more is that amidst the men running to his side was my mother. She was right there with him and my dad...just stood there at the plate and watched. I was standing behind the fence and everything inside of me was screaming "something is wrong." My mom went to the hospital to go be with the man and when I asked my dad that night if it was an accident he let out a deflated "mhm." I would later find out that Sunday School Teacher had a metal plate put in his face and to this day that thought fills me with a weirdly spiteful sense of joy; a constant reminder he'll carry with him for the rest of his life. Sometimes I find myself hoping that something will remind him of the metal plate and that he thinks of us.
I remember that my mom started behaving very strangely whenever she was around this guy. We went on a family camping trip that summer with another family and Sunday School Teacher also went with all of us. I watched my mom interacting with him, thinking that she was acting like a teenage girl and how odd that was. My dad...just silently watched. My sister told my dad at one point "I don't like the way that man touches mommy" and my dad...said nothing. I started seventh grade and the feeling never went away.
For my part, I was somewhat distracted. You see, that female friend I mentioned above had become my best friend and I was secretly head over heels for her. I found out through a mutual friend that she felt the same way about me and I was on cloud nine. My sisters and other kids in the youth group picked up on the tension between us and would pick on us, calling us boyfriend and girlfriend while we denied it. The truth was, however, that even at a young age I just knew this girl was my first love. We connected in a profound way and there was a quiet understanding between the two of us that we were on the same wavelength on a number of issues. My male friend was like a brother to me and we'd have sleepovers and hang together on Wednesday nights when the other boys were running around playing sports. Neither of us were athletes so he'd run around wreaking havoc much to the chagrin of the adults in the room, and I'd gleefully follow. The three of us together were thick as thieves and it apparently caused the adults a lot of grief because they tried, on more than one occasion, to split us up to no avail. It was that whole quote at the end of Stand By Me about never again having friends like you did at twelve years old. Jesus, does anyone?
It all came tumbling down the first week of January in 1999. We'd just gotten back from our family Christmas vacation and had settled in on a Saturday night to watch a movie we'd rented from Blockbuster, My Giant. We didn't end up watching the movie until the following day because of what my parents had to tell us that night and I remember sitting there on the couch while it played as if through some fogged up window from very far away. To this day I irrationally hate the movie though I remember little to nothing about it. We were sitting on the couch in our basement when my mom said that they needed to tell us something. Things were going to be changing, she said. We went wide eyed, worried she was going to say someone had died again. Instead, she told us "your father and I are getting a divorce." This is a moment that has replayed over and over and over again in my head ever since and I wish so badly that I could make it go away. I've told other people that I vividly remember hearing or feeling glass breaking inside of my brain and thinking for about two seconds that this was some cruel, weird joke before reality set in and my sisters began sobbing. I followed suit and begged my father "why?!?" to which he responded angrily, "I don't want it, your mother does!"
Pro tip: never start off a divorce by telling your children this.
They informed us that not only would this be happening, but that we were also leaving the church. I immediately begged them no, please don't do this to me, as my thoughts drifted to my two best friends who meant the absolute world to me. And that's when they told me the thing that broke my brain and forever altered the rest of my life:
We couldn't stay at the church, you see, because we were no longer welcome. It turns out that my father, having been utterly crushed by the news my mother had apparently given him two months prior (we have this old video of my dad standing on the stage behind the pastor during that two month period as the pastor is talking about certain members of the church "suffering quietly" right now and my dad looks absolutely defeated), had reached out to my grandpa for support. My grandpa, being devastated for my dad, decided to reach out to one of his very best friends for some moral support of his own. The man he contacted, unfortunately, was one of the Church Elders. This man then took it upon himself to call the pastor, the other Elders, the Deacons, and members of the church to inform them of what was transpiring between my parents. Discussions were had and the decision was simple: my parents (and subsequently my entire family) were to be excommunicated by the church for living in sin. Unless my parents agreed to stand before the congregation to be judged, counted, and to then agree to work on fixing the marriage to stay together, we would not be welcome. A group of men attempted to confront the Sunday School Teacher about his relationship with my mother, as it was painfully obvious to anyone with eyes that something was going on there. Sunday School Teacher, the coward that he was/is I guess, tucked his tail between his legs and insisted they had it all wrong and that he was the innocent in all of this. My mom, they had to know, seduced him and he was just a little choir boy. The men, having given it the proper, rational amount of consideration, decided he must be telling the truth and walked away, referring to my mother as a jezebel. My parents then decided it was time for us to go. So in the end, Sunday School Teacher got to stay, and we were forced out. We were allowed one last Sunday service to see our friends, but we couldn't tell anyone that we were leaving. We sat down in the pew in our normal spot and the family that usually sat with us got up and moved away. These were some of the family friends I referred to as "aunt" and "uncle". I remember playing a game with my friends after the service wherein we were vampires and the daylight would turn us to stone. When it was time for me to leave, we were standing outside and they'd just "frozen" in place due to the sunlight and I kept repeating "goodbye" until my mom told me we needed to go. I climbed into the car and watched out the back window as they got further and further away until, I remember thinking, they looked like stick figures waving in the wind.
I had my first panic attack that afternoon when we got home, though at the time I had no idea what the hell it was. My family had all gone inside and I refused to join because I was devastated and just wanted to be alone. So I sat there in the car, banging on the back of the driver's seat and sobbing until my hands started to feel "fuzzy" and numb. My fingers had curled up into my fists until I couldn't move them and I suddenly was finding it very hard to breathe. That only made me panic more because I didn't understand what was happening to me and my whole body was shaking. I sat there out in the driveway with not a soul in sight, fearing that I was about to die. When it finally ended I sat there in a sort of stunned silence, terrified that something was physically wrong with me, and so I got out of the car, went inside the house, walked past my family members, and went to my room where I closed the door behind me. Sort of how I lived my life for a while after that actually.
I was eventually allowed to call one friend, I was told, to inform them that I wouldn't be returning. So I chose the girl and very cautiously explained to her that I wouldn't be seeing her again. She was confused, naturally, and repeated to me over and over again how sorry she was. Around Valentines Day, I went upstairs to my mom's room where she kept tons of various holiday cards and found a series of Valentines cards. I picked one that had a dog on the front and wrote a secret admirer letter to the girl, telling her how beautiful and kind she was. I put it in an envelope and sent it in the mail with no return address, forever wondering if it ever made it to its destination. I lost all contact with my male friend and never again replaced him. No one I ever met after that measured up.
I became quiet, barely spoke anymore, stopped taking care of myself, started failing classes where previously I'd been a straight A student, was bullied mercilessly, and eventually became suicidal. It just always felt like there was darkness lurking around every corner where once it felt like all I'd known was light. God was nowhere to be found. He wasn't saving me from this, from any of it. I was on my own. My mom's best friend from our old church, a woman I also referred to as "aunt" and who also lived down the street from us with her family, whose children I walked to school with every single day, came strolling down to our home one afternoon with a letter in her hand. My mom walked out the front door to greet her and she was handed the letter instead. The woman said a few words I couldn't hear and then turned around and left.
What I remember most about that moment is how long it seemed like my mom stood there with her back to us while we watched out the window. I remember how long it seemed like the woman was walking down the street, never to return. My mom looked down at the letter and read for a while. When she was finished, she stood a while longer and then came inside. We asked if she was okay and she didn't respond. She had tears in her eyes and, without saying a word, walked upstairs to her bedroom where it felt like the mother I knew never came back down from. She spiraled into a depression that left her lying in bed most days to the point that it became routine for my grandma (my mother's mom) to call in the morning to make sure my sisters and I were getting ready for school and to then have us hand the phone off to my mom in bed. I would later find out that my grandma would painstakingly walk my mom through getting out of bed, getting some clothes, taking a shower, eating some food, and so on and so forth. Former church "friends" began repeatedly calling our house and leaving hateful messages on our answering machine, telling my mother she was a sinner and needed to repent. They sent us letters that my dad would try to get to before we could and he'd rip them up and throw them away, telling us we needed to "just ignore it." My grandpa got too sick to take care of himself so he came to live with us for the last few months of his life. He slept in my bed while I was moved to the basement where I spent many, many long, lonely nights crying myself to sleep and trying not to let the panic attacks become unbearable. My grandfather passed that summer and very few from our old church said a single word to any of us at the funeral. My dad eventually moved out and on the day he said goodbye to us at the door I begged him to stay and he cried, telling me he had to go. I chased him down the street on my bike, but he was gone.
Eventually we moved to a new church with my dad (my mom stopped going for a while until she found one of her own where she could get a new start) and I settled in as well as I could. I found out through the grapevine that our old pastor had been arrested for running a bogus investment scheme involving a fake electronics company and was sent to prison for defrauding congregants out of thousands of dollars. One of the Deacons involved had fled from the FBI and was eventually found where he was tried for skimming $1.7 million in investments. At my new church, within the first year, our new pastor (who just so happened to be the former youth pastor from our old church) stood up before the congregation one Sunday morning and said that he'd done something bad and that the Elders were going to allow the church to put it to a vote as to whether he could stay or needed to leave. They didn't tell us, of course, what he'd done, but we were going to vote on it nevertheless. It would later be revealed that he a.) cheated on his wife with an underage teen and b.) was also secretly molesting his own daughter. And the Elders had us put it to a vote.
Over the years I'd also find out that certain men in the church were sexually assaulting women and children and getting away with it because "God forgives, people can change, etc." and these were men who'd been in my home. One of them was also a deacon and had been exposing himself to underage girls. When it was brought to the pastor's attention by parents of the girls, the pastor told them that he would take care of it and then he'd sweep it under the rug, giving them all the same old song and dance about forgiveness. Another man, someone I'd grown up with, was physically abusing his wife and kids. She would show up to church wearing sunglasses to cover up a black eye and everyone knew what was really going on, but nothing was ever done about it. She eventually divorced him, won her kids in the custody battle, and left...but he stayed there, in the church.
My parents both eventually remarried, which was its own deeply traumatic experience as they'd both started dating other people within a year of their separation. My sisters and I, being young preteens and teens, responded poorly and my father apparently spent his time telling members of the church how mean we were to his girlfriend and they judged us accordingly. I just sort of...coasted through all of it until I could get out. I was constantly at war with myself and was an absolute mess. I hid my suicidal tendencies from the rest of my family and hid my pain as well as I could.
At the end of my junior year of high school I attended a Christian summer camp with the youth group and one night during the altar call they were pushing heavily for us to commit our college years to a Christian university. The lights were dimmed, that old familiar emotionally manipulative music had been playing, the speaker got all emotional, the room was full of somewhere around a thousand crying teens, and I felt compelled to go forward and do it. So I made the stupid mistake of going to the front and making the commitment. At the end of my senior year I realized all too late what a mistake I'd made. All of my friends were excitedly discussing their futures and what state they were moving away to, and I...had nowhere to go. I had been accepted a to a small Christian college here in Michigan (Tyndale, which, ironically enough, closed down like a year later), but no longer wanted to go so I settled on a local community college where I'd commute to from home.
Feeling very low, I decided to go to my youth pastor at the time to ask if I could borrow his mini DV tapes he had of our youth group at a variety of events over the years. I had some of my own as well (I desperately wanted to go to film school) and wanted to edit a video together for my senior class. So he said yes and I went home and watched every tape. Every single one. You can probably guess where this is going. I stumbled on one tape that had been filmed by his brother, a guy who assisted in the youth group and played the guitar, in which he was zooming in on girls in the youth group...inappropriately, and was filming from all sorts of angles he shouldn't have been if you catch my drift. I sat there at my computer in this old, familiar, stunned silence. I started shaking like crazy and shut the camera off, having no idea what to do. I was eighteen. I was a kid. A week or so later I returned the tapes to the youth pastor's office where his brother saw me and asked what I was doing with those tapes. Youth pastor informed him what I was doing and the look on the guy's face said everything. Youth pastor asked if I got everything I needed and all I said was "Yeah...you have some interesting footage," and then I left. The following Wednesday I played the video for the youth group, and after the service the youth pastor approached me. His brother was standing behind him sort of looking off in the distance like he didn't know exactly what this was about, and the youth pastor asked me if there was anything more I felt like I needed to say because, you know, this is the end and next fall you're not coming back. Just making sure all you seniors are good, you know? Just making sure everyone here is happy. I was looking at him but just off in the distance I could see friends, my younger sister, other leaders...and they did look...happy. I felt sick to my stomach and said "no, all good." He slapped me on the shoulder and said "Great. Thank you." And that was it. I was out. My dad remarried that summer and, promptly, walked out of our lives. My sister was still in high school, but weekends with dad just stopped being a thing and that was that.
That fall I found out that there was no college leader at the church so the seniors from my class were just going back to the high school youth group each week to hang out together and I knew my presence would be potentially problematic, "this is the end and next fall you're not coming back" and all that, so instead I just sort of...went away. I disappeared for a long time. I'd hear about my old friends getting together for parties and bonfires and going on trips together and I...disappeared. The phone never rang. Everything got real quiet. I quit my job, and then started working at a Christian bookstore thinking "well I'll just replace those friends with the young people working here. I've done it before, I'll just do it again." My depression worsened and I went to some very dark places during that period of my life. The customers were awful. I met some of the worst people I've ever met in my life. The days were long and I skipped classes constantly, finding myself driving to nowhere and wishing I could just disappear. The youth pastor and his brother eventually moved to another church overseas and I was so...angry. And relieved. Had I known what it was called back then I would know that I was already deconstructing and I was doing it all alone.
Two long years went by and the girl from my childhood, my best friend, returned. She and her family were attending the church now and she got a job with me at the bookstore. We reignited the friendship and the flirting started not long after that. One night she and I went out to Starbucks where she told me that long ago when she was a kid she'd received this strange love letter from a secret admirer and she'd always wondered who it was from. I felt my tongue roll back and drop into my stomach and my heart stopped and everything felt very blurry. I then played stupid and said "oh really?" She offered to take me back to her place to show me. I said sure and then spent the drive there absolutely freaking out because I knew there was only one reason she wanted to show me this and that was because obviously she knew it was me. When she brought it out to me I had the most bizarre out of body experience and froze on the spot. Eventually I told her, "...You know what my handwriting looks like." She smiled at me and said yes, that she'd always known. I admitted how I felt about her and she said she felt the same way, that she'd always hoped.
We dated for almost five years before we got married. We have two kids together now, and we've been through hell and back. God I love her so much. The last few years she's been on a deconstruction journey of her own and it's only brought us closer. We're raising our kids without church (haven't stepped foot in one in about five years now) and their lives are already much different than my own. All those years, all that pain, all those people who walked away from me and my family. None of it is ever coming back and I just have to be okay with that now. I think that I am finally learning how to make a home in myself. Therapy has been so healing and I'm grateful every day that I get to choose to make this change, that I get to be the one to stand in the face of generational trauma and say "no more. This stops here with me."
This is a random tangent I guess, but I get frustrated about it every now and then. A while back my son asked out of the blue, “why do some people have two mommies?” My wife and I tell him “well some women just love women, buddy.” He says “oh” and then asks “but then they won’t have a daddy?” So we tell him “well no, but that’s not a bad thing, bud. Families all look different and all that really matters is that they love each other, right?” He thinks about it for like maybe half a second and then goes “Yeah. Okay.” Then he went back to drawing.
I’m frustrated because it’s just so simple. It’s so simple to love. When I was a kid, this unfortunately is not how I was raised. I lived in the evangelical bubble and was told from an early age that homosexuality was a sin and the people “practicing it” (like a job or preparing to play a baseball game or something) were living in sin. One of my uncles on my father’s side has a brother who is gay and if he ever happened to show up to an event with his husband, everyone would get all hush hush and my uncle would tell us that his brother was living in sin and that we needed to pray for him. Church members would come out or be outed and then they’d disappear. My father strictly taught me to believe that anyone in the LGBTQ community were living in hate because if they actively reject “God’s word” then they must also hate God and should be viewed as an infection. He believed in praying the gay away. He took me to a Promise Keepers rally as a little kid where I sat through countless speeches from men on the pulpit claiming to have “overcome” their desires while my father cheered. He has a step daughter now who is gay and the friction between them is palpable. I was raised to live in fear of the LGBTQ community, but the only fear I wound up living in was fear of myself because the truth was I never believed any of it.
I went to church, I memorized the verses and books of the bible, I sat through the sermons and choir practices, went to Wednesday night youth group with a bunch of male teachers who all taught me the same things, I prayed the words I knew my parents wanted to hear. But I didn’t believe any of it. Deep down I just knew I didn’t and that what I was being told was wrong. I privately believed to myself that if there was a God then that God would have to truly be merciful and just and loving and that there wasn’t some eternal hellfire waiting for anyone who refused to believe the same thing and live the same way. It just didn’t make sense to me.
When I got into junior high I met a kid that everyone would whisper about because there were “rumors” that he was gay and he was very quiet and, you could see it on his face, nervous and terribly lonely. When he did come out he began pushing back and took pride in himself and we became friends and I felt so ashamed inside that if he ever found out about my upbringing then he’d stop being my friend. That’s the fear I lived with when it came to just about everyone; that they would not only think I was weird but a symbol of hate. So I did live in fear, not of God but of literally everything else. It fucked with my head and impacted my relationships. It went on that way for years and years; just desperately trying to separate and compartmentalize parts of myself in the fear of being found out by my family and excommunicated, and in the fear of being labeled something I wasn’t by the rest of the world. I look back now on my teen years especially, during deep periods of depression, and regret so much of what didn’t have to be.
And so here I am, all these years later, sitting in the kitchen with my son as he asks about kids having two mommies and I tell him yes, and that’s okay. Everyone deserves love. And he just looks at me and says “okay” and goes back to coloring and I just get so furious inside over what my parents and their generation did to me and so many others like me. It’s this complexity my son will never have to grapple with as he grows up and that’s because the solution is so god damned simple. A life of handwringing, angst, fear, and hate or a space for everyone where there is love. I’m so fucking angry and I’m crying writing this and I’m sorry to make you all sit through all of this long novel of a post if you did.
There was this moment a couple summers ago when my son was sitting next to me on the beach. My wife was out in the water with our little girl and our family members were at a picnic table nearby. He had his beach towel over his head and he was just staring out at the water looking a little lost. I asked him if he was okay and he told me he was scared to go spend the night at my dad’s (a planned sleepover event with all of the cousins). I asked him if it was because of what “papa” says about hell (we’d had this problem before). My son nodded his head and told me he was afraid. He didn’t want God to send him to hell and didn’t know how to stop it. So I’m sitting there in my swimsuit and t-shirt in the warm sand, and an incredibly comforting silence I’ll never forget, next to my little boy with the towel over his head so scared of the future. I remembered what it was like to be in his position, looking for something no one would ever give me. I scooched closer to him and said out loud, for the first time in my life to any blood relative of mine, “Buddy…I don’t believe that.” He turned and looked at me to ask “you don’t?” and I shook my head no. I told him that I really tried when I was his age, but something about it just didn’t sit right with me. I asked him if he felt that way and he said yes. I asked him what it made him feel and he said it made him feel sick and he pointed to his stomach. I told him “me too, but if there is a God, and I don’t know for sure because I don’t think anyone really does, then if God is love a place like hell cannot exist.” I told him to look around at all the people in the park and how happy they were. “I don’t believe they deserve hell and so I don’t believe in hell.” I will never in my life forget the moment his face relaxed and he smiled up at me and said “I think I believe that too.”
God, what could be. It fucking breaks me.

Demographics
Gender: Female
Race/Ethnicity: Asian
Residence: West Coast
Income Bracket: 200k+
Type of School: Medium public (2500 kids)
Hooks: Single parent household(?)
Intended Major(s): Architecture!**
**or a combination of Biology/Business/Art dual degree programs (if they didn't offer arch) and ICAM for UCSD!
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Academics
GPA (UW/W): 3.96/4.54
Rank (or percentile): 35/390 (reg) 30/200 (magnet)
# of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment: 8/6/7/7 respectively
Senior Year Course Load: AP Comp Sci, IB Visual Arts HL, H Humanities, IB English HL, IB Mandarin SL, IB Math Analysis and Approaches SL, IB Biology SL, IB History of the Americas HL
SAT I: 1450 (710RW, 740M)
AP/IB: (only reported calc) Calc BC 4, Calc AB (sub) 4, Bio 3, Calc AB (reg) 3, World History 2, Chem 2 (More info on bad test scores in additional info section)
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Extracurriculars/Activities
Spent a LOT of time on these. Most of these I've done for 8-15 hours per week for 30-40 weeks and 3+ years.
1) Head Commentator for Church Services. Announces/translates church news.Commentates mass and a lector for 150-250 people. Mentors kids interested in liturgical services.
2) Co-Lead Vocalist of Church Music Ministry (band of young adults/youth who perform during service). Hosts practices with other youth in preparation for English mass, trains new-comers, communicates with clergy/church community, organizes singing schedule.
3) President and Origami Teacher of Non-Profit's High School Branch. Facilitated 30 volunteers in teaching extracurricular classes: origami, reading, etc. 4-10 students per class. Teaches origami. Hosted bonding events with high school volunteers.
4) Vice-President of club that connects 7th-8th grade students to 11th-12th grade mentors. Leads bonding events/lessons (approx. 30-60 attendees). Delegates tasks and organizes shifts for mentors. Works with club sponsors for event funding.
5) Track and field Girls' Varsity Track Captain. Leads warm-ups/strength training for 20-40 varsity athletes. Works with alumni/coaches for workout plans. Long jump league finalist.
6) (kinda regret putting this one) Volleyball Varsity Middle 2 Player (in-game position)Arranges clinics/open gyms outside of school for teammates, missed 4 year-round practices until senior season. Recognized as "most improved player".
7) Vocalist for audition-based choir club, not affiliated with my high school's choir. Collaborates to arrange parts and harmonies. Performs for school and city shows. Last performance was for ~100 people in collaboration with FFA (Future Farmers of America).
8) Lead Role in school spirit skit. Performed as 1 of 2 main characters, skit for 2200 students/faculty, seniors' skit voted best, directed set-up and co-choreographed my part of dance.
9) Flag Football Starting Line Backer for high school fundraiser (11th and 12th grade girls play flag football). Starter for the event, trains with 40 other girls, 450 spectators, won for junior year (occurs in march), raised $2500 from event for school.
10) Elected Class TreasureFundraising Commissioner (student government, voted by senior class through election campaigning). Raised $30,000 through partnerships w/ restaurants, major local organizations, event ticket sales. Connects school with organizations via digital/in-person communication, delegated shifts, organized expenses.
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Awards/Honors
1) Award for Scholarship and Citizenship for Track 11, 12
2) Award for Scholarship and Citizenship for volleyball 10, 11, 12
3) AutoCad 2024 certification from community college
4) Dean's High Honor Roll 9, 10, 11, 12
5) Scholar Athlete Award for Scholarship and Citizenship for Cross Country 12
​
Letters of Recommendation
#1) Art teacher (10/10): Awesome teacher and we have an amazing bond. Really helped me navigate my artistic progress and encouraged me throughout all extracurricular activities. Letters of rec from this teacher are reputable at my school.
#2) Club Sponsor of Mentoring Club (10/10): Known him since 7th grade. Amazing teacher and super nice. Knows me very well so it wasn't an issue. Also heard this teacher's letters of recs were amazing too.
#3) Nun (6/10): Had to translate letter of rec. I don't think she had ever done this before so the letter was kind of vague and short. Had to talk with her numerous times. Said good things but were a little vague. She was the only one that supervised all the activities I did at church though 🥲. Did not want to obvi push her so just submitted what was translated.
#4) Math Teacher (10/10): His past letters of rec got me into Johns Hopkins GHLC! Helped me build confidence in math and was very encouraging. Said I was one of his strongest students.
​
Interviews (Only did them upon their request. Didn't apply to any schools that reached out via interview.)
Macalester: 9/10, connected really well. Interviewer was also from my area!
Bennington: 10/10, Very easy-going and flowed smoothly. We talked about the facets of architecture and art. Felt like we had a lot in common. Tied the features of the school into my interests very well.
​
Essays (9/10)
Wrote about navigating tone deafness as a musician on my common app essay. Communicated my growth mindset and how anything is achievable with discipline and investment.
​
PORTFOLIO
Definitely the strongest thing in my application. Showed work throughout high school and starting putting my entire soul into it since 9th. BUT I SUBMITTED THE INCORRECT REVISIONS TO UMICH AND UCLA. UNSUPRISINGLY, I WAS REJECTED FROM THEM. I DID NOT INCLUDE DESCRIPTIONS FOR 7/9 PIECES I SUBMITTED. For the schools I submitted the correct file to, I was given scholarships and accepted.
​
Decisions ALL RD
​
Acceptances (all with 60k-240k scholarships except UCD, SLO, and UCSD):
University of San Francisco
RIT
California College of the Arts
Tulane (RD is crazy)
UC Davis
Cal Poly Pomona
Sacramento State
Duquesne University 👽
Clarkson University 👽
SMU Meadows School of the Arts and Cox School of Business
Bennington College
Syracuse University
Oberlin College of Arts and Sciences
Fordham University
Trinity University
Reed College
University of California San Diego
Cal Poly SLO
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor for Urban Technology
​
​
Waitlists:
Virginia Tech (I can't even contextualize how bad my supplementals for this school was. I did not take it seriously and it just did not make sense)
Baylor University
Macalester
Carleton College
Colorado College
​
Rejections:
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor for Architecture
University of California - Los Angeles
Dickinson College Additional Information:
I SUBMITTED THE INCORRECT PORTFOLIO REVISIONS TO UMICH AND UCLA. UNSUPRISINGLY, I WAS REJECTED. I did not include MANDATORY descriptions for 7/9 pieces on the portfolio (what inspired it, where was it made, what is it depicting, etc.). For the schools I submitted the correct file to, I was given scholarships and accepted. My ecs were heavily influenced by friends. I DIDN'T REALLY GET TO DO WHAT I WANTED TO DO. Did a lot of sports, clubs, hangouts for no reason. Wish I stuck to things I actually liked doing.
I've never slacked off so hard during school. MY GRADES SUCK. I'm worried for college lmao. I'm not "naturally smart". I have to work really really hard for the academic accomplishments I obtain. I also want to join a sorority and IM sports, but am also interested in architecture. LMFAO idek.

https://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=18148
"If you're tired of not being heard, or being overlooked, this is the place for you." With these words, a member of Chicago's YWEP (Young Women's Empowerment Project), and the emcee and host for the evening, opened the evening's speak-out. The event, which took place at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Latino Cultural Center, 750 S. Halsted, was part of the first National Week of Action for Reproductive Justice, launched by the Third Wave Foundation, a feminist organization that focuses on young women and transgender youth. YWEP works with female street-based youth 12-23 involved with the sex trade, whether by choice or for survival.
Approximately 50 youth and a few adults attended the entirely youth-led and -created program, which began with a presentation about the issues facing participants. A YWEP member spoke about the "poor and shitty health care" that street-based youth endure, compounded by medical professionals who either provide little access to contraception or coerce them into having unwanted abortions. In addition, these youth are particularly affected by the combination of parental notification laws and increased criminalization of young people in the sex trade, which doubles their chances of homelessness.
According to Cindy Ibarra, communications coordinator for YWEP, the aim of events like the speak-out was to foster leadership skills in street-based youth who are multiply disenfranchised for their actions, their gender and sexual identities, and their class background. They are also disenfranchised by mainstream organizing around reproductive rights because of structural issues, such as activist meetings are held at times when youth are unable to attend. Performances included short skits by the Empowered Fe-Fes, a group focused on the needs of young girls with disabilities. Others read pieces that ranged from the personal—one youth read a poem to a boyfriend—to spoken word performances about child sexual abuse and being kicked out of homes. Also on hand were youth representatives from groups like Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, who urged the audience to lobby against abstinence-only programs; and youth who had experienced abuse in incarceration and/or the mental health system.
See www.youarepriceless.org for more.

There was this post earlier today about how the first day debuts on Spotify Global were looking this year so I decided to take a look back on the top 20 debuts per year since 2017.

	2017			2018			2019			2020			2021			2022			2023
	Act	Song	Streams	Act	Song	Streams	Act	Song	Streams	Act	Song	Streams	Act	Song	Streams	Act	Song	Streams	Act	Song	Streams
1	BTS	DNA	1,188,119	BLACKPINK	Kiss and Make Up	2,216,989	BTS	Boy With Luv (feat. Halsey)	4,541,312	BTS	Dynamite	7,778,950	BTS	Butter	11,042,335	BLACKPINK	Pink Venom	7,937,046	Jung Kook	Seven (feat. Latto) (Explicit Ver.)	15,995,378
2	BTS	Best Of Me	987,319	BTS	FAKE LOVE	2,187,668	BTS	Mikrokosmos	2,695,389	BTS	Life Goes On	6,450,392	BTS	Permission to Dance	7,339,385	BTS	Yet To Come	7,178,605	BTS	Take Two	7,279,978
3	BTS	MIC Drop (feat. Desiigner) [Steve Aoki Remix]	903,137	BTS	IDOL	1,573,462	BTS	Make It Right	2,600,135	BLACKPINK	Ice Cream (with Selena Gomez)	5,060,036	BTS	My Universe	6,768,788	Jung Kook	Left and Right (Feat. Jung Kook of BTS)	6,792,908	Jimin	Like Crazy (English Version)	6,634,838
4	BTS	dimple	865,109	BTS	The Truth Untold (feat. Steve Aoki)	1,369,542	BTS	HOME	2,462,001	BLACKPINK	Lovesick Girls	4,880,132	BTS	Butter - Megan Thee Stallion Remix	3,796,033	BLACKPINK	Shut Down	6,601,921	Jung Kook	Standing Next to You	6,472,019
5	BTS	Pied Piper	818,497	BTS	IDOL	1,345,471	BTS	Dionysus	2,281,412	BLACKPINK	Bet You Wanna (feat. Cardi B)	4,712,901	ROSÉ	On The Ground	3,262,615	BTS	Run BTS	5,477,304	Jung Kook	3D (feat. Jack Harlow)	6,328,084
6	BTS	Intro: Serendipity	807,159	BTS	Airplane pt.2	1,203,487	BTS	Jamais Vu	2,270,674	BTS	Fly To My Room	4,568,625	LISA	LALISA	3,253,193	Jung Kook	Dreamers [Music from the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Official Soundtrack]	4,887,791	Jimin	Set Me Free Pt.2	4,820,096
7	BTS	MIC Drop	767,599	BTS	134340	1,120,047	BTS	Dream Glow (BTS World Original Soundtrack) - Pt. 1	2,016,564	BTS	Blue & Grey	4,522,564	BTS	Girl Of My Dreams (with SUGA of BTS)	3,226,251	BLACKPINK	Typa Girl	4,356,002	V	Slow Dancing	4,743,367
8	BTS	Go Go	748,348	BTS	Paradise	1,097,523	BTS	Intro : Persona	1,859,481	BTS	Telepathy	4,137,202	ROSÉ	Gone	2,945,783	Jung Kook	Stay Alive (Prod. SUGA of BTS)	4,273,772	JISOO	FLOWER	4,674,337
9	BTS	Outro: Her	607,517	BLACKPINK	DDU-DU DDU-DU	1,094,259	BTS	SUGA's Interlude	1,629,008	BLACKPINK	How You Like That	4,073,352	LISA	SG (with Ozuna, Megan Thee Stallion & LISA of BLACKPINK)	2,326,750	BTS	Bad Decisions (with BTS & Snoop Dogg)	4,157,585	JENNIE	You & Me (Coachella ver.)	4,660,153
10	BTS	Spring Day	529,199	BTS	Love Maze	1,067,957	BTS	A Brand New Day (BTS World Original Soundtrack) [Pt. 2]	1,451,505	BLACKPINK	Pretty Savage	4,007,555	LISA	MONEY	2,310,081	JIN	The Astronaut	4,146,790	Jung Kook	TOO MUCH	4,361,378
11	BTS	Skit: Billboard Music Awards Speech	471,506	BTS	Magic Shop	1,061,446	BLACKPINK	Kill This Love	1,425,912	BTS	Dis-ease	3,893,115	BTS	Butter - Instrumental	1,883,004	j-hope	MORE	3,870,017	Agust D	Haegeum	3,937,168
12	EXO	Ko Ko Bop - Chinese Version	438,302	BTS	Euphoria	1,052,019	BTS	Make It Right (feat. Lauv)	1,330,146	BTS	Stay	3,873,899	BTS	Film out	1,578,757	BTS	For Youth	3,675,718	V	Love Me Again	3,773,666
13	BTS	Not Today	390,448	BTS	Anpanman	1,045,107	BTS	All Night (BTS World Original Soundtrack) [Pt. 3]	1,248,857	BLACKPINK	Sour Candy (with BLACKPINK)	3,676,176	V	Christmas Tree	1,461,650	BLACKPINK	Hard to Love	3,636,906	V	Rainy Days	3,576,108
14				BTS	I'm Fine	1,029,959	j-hope	Chicken Noodle Soup (feat. Becky G)	1,063,286	BLACKPINK	Crazy Over You	3,398,836	JIN	Yours	1,402,458	RM	Wild Flower (with youjeen)	3,604,749	Jimin	VIBE (feat. Jimin of BTS)	3,562,808
15				BTS	Waste It On Me	1,028,460	BLACKPINK	Don't Know What To Do	1,044,473	BTS	Black Swan	3,236,742	TWICE	The Feels	1,331,640	BLACKPINK	Yeah Yeah Yeah	3,557,573	Jung Kook	Hate You	3,457,155
16				BTS	Trivia 起 : Just Dance	1,022,188	BLACKPINK	Kick It	878,655	BLACKPINK	Love To Hate Me	3,195,428	ITZY	In the morning	1,171,269	BLACKPINK	The Happiest Girl	3,488,920	Agust D	People Pt.2 (feat. IU)	3,404,828
17				BTS	So What	945,888	BTS	Old Town Road (feat. RM of BTS) - Seoul Town Road Remix	873,284	BLACKPINK	You Never Know	2,847,863	TOMORROW X TOGETHER	0X1=LOVESONG (I Know I Love You) feat. Seori	1,048,823	BTS	Born Singer	3,434,880	Jung Kook	Yes or No	3,310,212
18				BTS	Intro: Singularity	921,446	TWICE	Feel Special	856,775	BTS	Skit	2,623,585	BTS	Butter - Hotter Remix	1,010,235	BLACKPINK	Tally	3,126,725	j-hope	on the street (with J. Cole)	3,294,403
19				BTS	Serendipity - Full Length Edition	911,862	Red Velvet	Psycho	826,203	BTS	ON	2,467,528	BTS	Permission to Dance - Instrumental	999,771	j-hope	Arson	2,805,439	JISOO	All Eyes On Me	3,104,156
20				BTS	Trivia 轉 : Seesaw	882,963	TOMORROW X TOGETHER	CROWN	814,613	BTS	ON (Feat. Sia)	2,444,125	ITZY	LOCO - English Ver.	971,069	BLACKPINK	Ready For Love	2,661,402	Jimin	Closer Than This	3,086,233
	Act			Act			Act			Act			Act			Act			Act
	BTS	12		BTS	18		BTS	13		BTS	11		BTS	9		BLACKPINK	8		Jung Kook	6
	EXO	1		BLACKPINK	2		BLACKPINK	3		BLACKPINK	9		LISA	3		BTS	5		Jimin	4
							j-hope	1					ROSÉ	2		j-hope	2		V	3
							TWICE	1					ITZY	2		JIN	1		JISOO	2
							Red Velvet	1					TWICE	1		Jung Kook	3		Agust D	2
							TOMORROW X TOGETHER	1					TOMORROW X TOGETHER	1		RM	1		BTS	1
													V	1					j-hope	1
													JIN	1					JENNIE	1
	BTS + solos	12		BTS + solos	18		BTS + solos	14		BTS + solos	11		BTS + solos	11		BTS + solos	12		BTS + solos	17
	BP + solos	0		BP + solos	2		BP + solos	3		BP + solos	9		BP + solos	5		BP + solos	8		BP + solos	3

Overall	Appearances
BTS	69
BLACKPINK	22
Jung Kook	9
j-hope	4
V	4
Jimin	4
LISA	3
TWICE	2
TOMORROW X TOGETHER	2
ROSÉ	2
JIN	2
ITZY	2
JISOO	2
Agust D	2
Red Velvet	1
EXO	1
RM	1
JENNIE	1

BTS + solos	95
BP + solos	30

So I have been posting consistently now for about three or four days maybe even a week at this point and today March 12 I broke the 200 to 300 views and the first two videos I posted this morning had over six and 700 views. Is this something I should be expecting now .. did I make it into a new category or mean I’m doing well and I should continue making the exact same content that I’m making and not veer from it. I mostly make relatable funny and storylines/skits geared toward lgbtq youth and allies I guess I’m apart of that community and think there’s lots of space in it especially starting out with 30-60 videos. Any insight and advice would be lovely

EDITED
​
Demographics
Gender: Female
Race/Ethnicity: Asian
Residence: West Coast
Income Bracket: 200k+
Type of School: Medium public (2500 kids)*
Hooks: Single parent household(?)
Intended Major(s): Architecture!**
*competitive gifted magnet program around 300 kids**or a combination of Biology/Business/Art dual degree programs (if they didn't offer arch)
​
Academics
GPA (UW/W): 3.96/4.54
Rank (or percentile): 35/390 (reg) 30/200 (magnet)
# of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment: 8/6/7/7 respectively
Senior Year Course Load: AP Comp Sci, IB Visual Arts HL, H Humanities, IB English HL, IB Mandarin SL, IB Math Analysis and Approaches SL, IB Biology SL, IB History of the Americas HL
SAT I: 1450 (710RW, 740M)AP/IB: (only reported calc) Calc BC 4, Calc AB (sub) 4, Bio 3, Calc AB (reg) 3, World History 2, Chem 2(More info on bad test scores in additional info section)
Other (ex. IELTS, TOEFL, etc.): None
​
Extracurriculars/Activities
Spent a LOT of time on these. Most of these I've done for 8-15 hours per week for 30-40 weeks and 3+ years.

1. Head Commentator for Church Services. Announces/translates church news.Commentates mass and a lector for 150-250 people. Mentors kids interested in liturgical services.
2. Co-Lead Vocalist of Church Music Ministry (band of young adults/youth who perform during service). Hosts practices with other youth in preparation for English mass, trains new-comers, communicates with clergy/church community, organizes singing schedule.
3. President and Origami Teacher of Non-Profit's High School Branch. Facilitated 30 volunteers in teaching extracurricular classes: origami, reading, etc. 4-10 students per class. Teaches origami. Hosted bonding events with high school volunteers.
4. Vice-President of club that connects 7th-8th grade students to 11th-12th grade mentors. Leads bonding events/lessons (approx. 30-60 attendees). Delegates tasks and organizes shifts for mentors. Works with club sponsors for event funding.
5. Track and field Girls' Varsity Track Captain. Leads warm-ups/strength training for 20-40 varsity athletes. Works with alumni/coaches for workout plans. Long jump league finalist.
6. (kinda regret putting this one) Volleyball Varsity Middle 2 Player (in-game position)Arranges clinics/open gyms outside of school for teammates, missed 4 year-round practices until senior season. Recognized as "most improved player".
7. Vocalist for audition-based choir club, not affiliated with my high school's choir. Collaborates to arrange parts and harmonies. Performs for school and city shows. Last performance was for ~100 people in collaboration with FFA (Future Farmers of America).
8. Lead Role in school spirit skit. Performed as 1 of 2 main characters, skit for 2200 students/faculty, seniors' skit voted best, directed set-up and co-choreographed my part of dance.
9. Flag Football Starting Line Backer for high school fundraiser (11th and 12th grade girls play flag football). Starter for the event, trains with 40 other girls, 450 spectators, won for junior year (occurs in march), raised $2500 from event for school.
10. Elected Class TreasureFundraising Commissioner (student government, voted by senior class through election campaigning). Raised $30,000 through partnerships w/ restaurants, major local organizations, event ticket sales. Connects school with organizations via digital/in-person communication, delegated shifts, organized expenses.

​
Awards/Honors

1. Award for Scholarship and Citizenship for Track11, 12
2. Award for Scholarship and Citizenship for volleyball10, 11, 12
3. AutoCad 2024 certification from community college
4. Dean's High Honor Roll9, 10, 11, 12
5. Scholar Athlete Award for Scholarship and Citizenship for Cross Country12

​
Letters of Recommendation
#1) Art teacher (10/10): Awesome teacher and we have an amazing bond. Really helped me navigate my artistic progress and encouraged me throughout all extracurricular activities. Letters of rec from this teacher are reputable at my school.
#2) Club Sponsor of Mentoring Club (10/10): Known him since 7th grade. Amazing teacher and super nice. Knows me very well so it wasn't an issue. Also heard this teacher's letters of recs were amazing too.
#3) Nun (6/10): Had to translate letter of rec. I don't think she had ever done this before so the letter was kind of vague and short. Had to talk with her numerous times. Said good things but were a little vague. She was the only one that supervised all the activities I did at church though 🥲. Did not want to obvi push her so just submitted what was translated.
#4) Math Teacher (10/10): His past letters of rec got me into Johns Hopkins GHLC! Helped me build confidence in math and was very encouraging. Said I was one of his strongest students.
​
Interviews (Only did them upon request. Didn't apply to any schools that reached out via interview.)
Macalester: 9/10, connected really well. Interviewer was also from my area!
Bennington: 10/10, Very easy-going and flowed smoothly. We talked about the facets of architecture and art. Felt like we had a lot in common. Tied the features of the school into my interests very well.
​
Essays (9/10)
Wrote about navigating tone deafness as a musician on my common app essay. Communicated my growth mindset and how anything is achievable with discipline and investment.
​
PORTFOLIO
Definitely the strongest thing in my application. Showed work throughout high school and starting putting my entire soul into it since 9th.
​
​
Decisions ALL RD
​
Acceptances (all with 15k-35k scholarships except Davis):
University of San Francisco
RIT
California College of the Arts
Tulane (RD is crazy)
UC Davis
Cal Poly Pomona
Sacramento State
Duquesne University 👽
Clarkson University 👽
SMU Meadows School of the Arts
Bennington College
Syracuse University
Oberlin College of Arts and Sciences
Fordham University
Trinity University
Reed College
University of California San Diego
Cal Poly SLO
​
Waitlists:
Virginia Tech (I can't even contextualize how bad my supplementals for this school was. I did not take it seriously and it just did not make sense)
Baylor University
Macalester
Carleton College
Colorado College
​
Rejections:
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
University of California - Los Angeles
Dickinson College
​
Waiting:
None
​
Additional Information:
So I struggled a lot with mental health after quarantine. DEF better now but I just didn't know how to apply myself. I lacked a lot of discipline and physical/mental strength. Sports, clubs, people, places def helped a lot, but it momentarily tanked my grades and test scores. Was worth it. Getting back on that academic grind again. Feel a lot stronger as a person now.

[TOMT][SONG][2000s] Old Christian Rap mixtape/song!
I’m not sure if this one can ever be found because I never realized how niche it was before attempting to search for it.
Basically the story goes like this:
My dad was (and still is) a pastor at a small church in my hometown, and before he became head pastor he was the youth pastor. I don’t remember him ever being horrifically cheesy like I know some youth pastors can be, but I do specifically remember growing up on untraditional Christian music. I’m talking Christian rap, rock, metal, etc. My dad didn’t become a Christian until his early 20s and he always struggled to constantly listen to Contemporary Christian music. So, all of my music taste growing up was some level of Christian rap or pop or whatever.
That leads me to one certain song that my dad played a pretty fair amount that I cannot find anywhere.
I know the chorus and the bridge but somehow cannot find it anywhere. I’ve searched multiple different lyric searching sites to no avail. I don’t remember the artist or the name of the song, but the chorus goes like this:
"Spy versus spy, Eye for eye, If they come from the land they will come from the sky ???? One thing you'll never hear, Abort the mission"
Also this terrible bridge:
"spies. Us agents. Outrageous (?). No stranger! To Danger!”
At first I genuinely thought I had imagined the song until I asked my family about it and my sister said that she remembered those exact same lyrics and my dad playing the song but she couldn’t find it either. However, my brother said he had never heard of it.
Finally, my dad stated that he remembered the song and the album it came off of. He stated that the artist was an independent Christian rap artist who was trying to get his name out and he had given my dad a copy of his mixtape. The mixtape had a few songs as well as a skit about a squirrel (I know, it’s random). However my dad cannot remember the name of the guy. He did say that the mixtape CD he used was ripped to his computer on iTunes but he deleted that iTunes account ages ago.
Has anyone ever heard of this artist/song/mixtape/anything? I’ve scoured the internet looking for this guy and this song specifically to no avail.

https://minimalfreaks.co/2024/02/best-new-house-deep-house-releases-23-02-2024/

4DELUXE - Live Without Me (Extended Mix) Aazure - Break A Leg (Original Mix) Aazure - Do You Want Me (Original Mix) Aberton - Please (Original Mix) Afrojack, DubVision - Underwater (Extended Mix) Alba Kras, Jason Weiss - Now or Never (Laurent Simeca Extended Remix) Aldo Cadiz, Léo Franco - Beat Trip (Original Mix) Aldo Cadiz, Léo Franco - Caluro Trip (Original Mix) Aldo Cadiz, Léo Franco - Focus (Original Mix) Aldo Cadiz, Léo Franco - Fuel (Original Mix) Aldo Cadiz, Léo Franco - Propicia (Original Mix) Aldo Cadiz, Léo Franco - TAAA TAAA Bones (Original Mix) Alex Moiss - Mushroom Jazz (Original Mix) Alle Farben, Maurice Lessing, Emma Wells - Dreams (feat. Emma Wells) (Extended Mix) Andre Espeut, ColorJaxx - Sound Of My Life (Original Mix) Andromeda Orchestra - Do It (Like You Mean It) (Instrumental) Andromeda Orchestra - Do It (Like You Mean It) (Original Mix) Antonin - Antonino (Yuksek remix) August Norr - Coming To An End (Original Mix) August Norr - Desert Walk (Original Mix) August Norr - Haunted By You (Original Mix) August Norr - Trust Me (Original Mix) Axx (NL) - Chocolate (Original Mix) Axx (NL) - Snug (Original Mix) Barkhan - Afterwhat (Acapella) Barkhan - Afterwhat (Extended Mix) Barkhan - Afterwhat (Instrumental Mix) Barkhan - Afterwhat (Radio Edit) Below Bangkok, Wade Watts - Something in the Walls (Kiano's Dub) Below Bangkok, Wade Watts - Something in the Walls (Original Mix) Black Fan - Deep rotation (Original Mix) Black Fan - I know I am (Original Mix) Black Fan - TE2 (Blackburn Warehouse Mix) Blaze, Alexander Hope - How Deep Is Your Love feat. Alexander Hope (DJ Spinna Extended Remix) Block & Crown - Comin' Out (Original Mix) Block & Crown - Feel So Real (Original Mix) Block & Crown - Get Up Stand Up (Original Mix) Block & Crown - September Murder Feat. Culum Frea (Original Mix) Block & Crown - Shout (Original Mix) Block & Crown - We Love You Ladies (Original Mix) Block & Crown, Fedor Michael- - Pump It Phenomenal (Original Mix) Block & Crown, Mike Ferullo - A.C.I.D (Club Mix) Block & Crown, Mike Ferullo - A.C.I.D (Original Mix) Block & Crown, Mike Ferullo - Jump Up & Get Down (Club Mix) Block & Crown, Mike Ferullo - Jump Up & Get Down (Original Mix) Bolier, Penny F. - Try (Leandro Da Silva Extended Remix) Bondax, Mysie - Journey (feat. Mysie) (Kareem Ali Remix) Bondax, Mysie - Journey (feat. Mysie) (Original Mix) Brothers in Arts - You Know Where The Door Is (Original Mix) Brothers in Arts - You Know Where The Door Is (Romy Black Remix) Carlos Salas - Come On Bass (Original Mix) Chaney, Mryn - The Escape feat. MRYN (Extended Mix) Charly Angelz - Movin' On (Dub Jam) Charly Angelz - Movin' On (Original Jam) Cheesecake Boys - Kiss me more (Texcoco Mix) Chesster - Dance Mania (Original Mix) Chesster - Hot & Lost (Original Mix) Chesster - Tribute (Original Mix) Chesster - Tribute (Prunk Remix) Chewy Rubs - Chunky But Funky (Original Mix) Chewy Rubs - Dance To It (Chewy Rubs Tuff Gruff Dub) Chewy Rubs - Disko Evo (Original Mix) Chewy Rubs - Feed Your Soul (Chewy Rubs Dub) Chrissy - You Don't Have To Worry (Big Ang Garage Remix) Chrissy - You Don't Have To Worry (Big Ang Rave Remix) Chrissy - You Don't Have To Worry (Paul & Shark Remix) Coeo - Kawasaki Racing Club (Original Mix) Coeo - Nina's Theme (The Berlin Skit) (Original Mix) Coeo - Planet Earth (Original Mix) Coeo - Rush Hour (Original Mix) Coeo - Satellite Bay (Original Mix) Coeo - The Stage Is Yours (Original Mix) Crazibiza - My Lips (Adrian Villaverde Edit) D.P.V. - Heavenly (Original Mix) Damian Rausch - All I Want (Original Mix) Damian Rausch - Late (Original Mix) Damian Rausch - Right For Me (Original Mix) Damian Rausch - Two Of Us (Original Mix) Danism, Heidi Vogel, Train (UK) - Right for You (Eric Kupper Extended Remix) Danism, Heidi Vogel, Train (UK) - Right for You (Moplen Extended Remix) Danou P - To Get Over You (Extended Mix) Dario Baldasari - For A While (Alex Bohemien Remix) Dario Baldasari - For A While (Original Mix) David Britton - Chicago Comes Alive (Original Mix) Deorro, Clave N - Tussi Lvd (Original Mix) Dion's House Kitchen - Come On Home (Original Mix) DJ Mystery - Control the Night (Original Mix) DJ Psychiatre - Lost In The New (Original Mix) DJ Rendo - Eyes Melting For Love (Deyart Remix) DJ Rendo - Eyes Melting For Love (Original Mix) DJ Rendo - Secret Lites (Original Mix) DJ Sneak - Body Slangin (Original Mix) DJ Sneak - Can You Dance (Club Dub) DJ Sneak - Deep Undercover (Original Mix) DJ Sneak - This One (Original Mix) DJ Sneak - You're Mine (Dub) DJ Sneak - You're Mine (Original Mix) Dr Packer - Ain't No Fool (Angelo Ferreri Extended Remix) Eddy P, Kipper G - Dom Diggity (Original Mix) Einmusik, Zoot Woman - I Feel Magic (Original Mix) Eran Hersh, The NGHBRS, Anorre - 3 Sense (Hoax BE Remix) (Extended Mix) Erik Bo - Italian Sax (Original Mix) Erik Bo - Marijane (Original Mix) Fabio Vela - Wait (Original Mix) FDTD, Otuawan - Even On The Bad Days (Josh Butler Remix) FDTD, Otuawan - Even On The Bad Days (Original Mix) Filta Freqz - Nothin' Less (Original Mix) Flowzhaker, Jackin' Keys - Happy Valley (Instrumental Mix) Flowzhaker, Jackin' Keys - Happy Valley (Original Mix) Franky Rizardo, Cara Melín - Make My Body Move (Original Mix) Gally Vant - Fantasy (Original Mix) GhostMasters - All The Children Say (Club Mix) GhostMasters - Reggae Knight (Club Mix) Gius - No Limit (Club Mix) Gius - No Limit (Original Mix) Gius - With Me (Original Mix) Glass Slipper, col lawton, Discosteps - Let Me in Your Heart (Dub) Glass Slipper, col lawton, Discosteps - Let Me in Your Heart (Original Mix) Glennny - Let's Go (Original Mix) Glennny - Now You Know (Jon Delerious Remix) Glennny - Now You Know (Original) Glennny - Passionate (Original Mix) Glennny - Serene (Original Mix) Glennny - Thunderstorms (Original Mix) Guy Gerber - Turkish Delight (Extended Mix) Guy Gerber - Turkish Delight (Gerber’s Palmettos Extended Mix) Guy Gerber - Turkish Delight (Gerber's Palmitos Mix) Guy Gerber - Turkish Delight (Original Mix) Guy Gerber - Turkish Delight (Volkoder Edit) Hagop Tchaparian - GL (Chloe Robinson + DJ ADHD Remix) Horsemen - Familiar Sensation (Original Mix) Horsemen - Time to Love Again (Original Mix) Horsemen - Without U (Original Mix) Hotmood - Never Gonna Let You Go (Extended Mix) Ian Daniels - Life Transponder (Original Mix) Ian Daniels - Like It (Deephope Remix) Ian Daniels - Like It (Original Mix) Inaya Day, HiFi Sean, DeVonde - The Redemption (Original Mix) Jackmaster, Kid Enigma - Nitro feat. Kid Enigma (Edit) Jackmaster, Kid Enigma - Nitro feat. Kid Enigma (Instrumental) Jackmaster, Kid Enigma - Nitro feat. Kid Enigma (Original Mix) James Curd - Walk with Me (Cee Elassaad Remix) James Curd - Walk with Me (Original Mix) James Curd - Walk with Me (Rick Wade Remix) James Curd - Walk with Me (Tree Threes Jazz Re-Work) Jamie 3:26, Danou P - Fly (Extended Mix) Jason Rivas, Hotel of Souls - House Party (Original Mix) Jazz Mango - Bang Bang Boogie (Original Mix) Jazz Mango - Mahe (Original Mix) Jesse Perez - That's Real Muthaf**kin' Talk (DJ Sneak's Big Boss Grinnin' Dub) Jesse Perez - That's Real Muthaf**kin' Talk (Jesse's Bump N' Grind Version) Johan S - Just 4 U (Extended Mix) Jonasclean - Slm (Original Mix) Jose Nunez, DJ Gomi, Bianca Kinane - Distance (Electronic Youth Extended Mix) Jose Nunez, DJ Gomi, Bianca Kinane - Distance (Jesus Pablo, Pixel8 Remix) Josh Butler - Become Clear (Original Mix) Josh Butler, Shyam P - Find You Again (Audiojack Remix) Josh Butler, Shyam P - Find You Again (Original Mix) Julio Bashmore - Sprungboard (Extended Mix) Ken@Work - If It Takes All Nite (Original Mix) Klubbheads, Mark Van Dale - Raise Your Hands (Full Club Mix) Laurent Flaoh - Luyten B (Original Mix) Laurent Flaoh - Zebra Lov (Original Mix) Lavern - In My Mind (Extended Mix) Le Chev - Orange (Extended Mix) Lem Springsteen, Vocalzbyjamelle - Falling (DJ Spen & Gary Hudgins Instrumental) Lem Springsteen, Vocalzbyjamelle - Falling (DJ Spen & Gary Hudgins Remix Edit) Lem Springsteen, Vocalzbyjamelle - Falling (DJ Spen & Gary Hudgins Remix) LF SYSTEM - All I've Got (Original Mix) Lubelski - Synth City (DJ Minx Extended Remix) Lubelski - Synth City (Original Mix) Lubelski - Tear the Roof Off (Extended Mix) Luca Debonaire - Don't Leave Me This Way (Original Mix) Luca Guerrieri, Cappella - U Got 2 Let The Music (Luca Guerrieri Extended Remix) Luttrell - Space (Extended Mix) Luxo, SADYOUTH - Rudeboi (Original Mix) Mafu - A Blancket And Pillow (Original Mix) MAIRI, Sultana (RU) - No Worries (Original Mix) Makree - Be Mine (Extended Mix) Marc Brauner - Falling (Original Mix) Marc Brauner - Hiking On Acid (Original Mix) Marc Brauner - Push It (Original Mix) Marc Brauner - Wrecked But Recovered (Original Mix) Marc Cotterell - Bass In Space (Original Mix) Mark Broom - HIGHNRG P (Original Mix) Mark Broom - Jazz Ting (Original Mix) Mark Broom - Klashjamz (Original Mix) Mark Broom - Showtime (Original Mix) Mat Spiaggi - Are You Ready (Original Mix) Mat Spiaggi - Are You Ready (Tommaso Pizzelli Remix) Mat Spiaggi - Gativideo (Original Mix) Mat Spiaggi - N.A.C.H (Original Mix) Mat Spiaggi - Open Proyect (Andrey Djackonda Remix) Mat Spiaggi - Open Proyect (Original Mix) Matheo Velez - Conversation (Original Mix) Matheo Velez - Dance With You (Original Mix) Matur - Chatlane (Original Mix) MAXJAX - Awoken (Original Mix) MAXJAX - Dubby Roller (Original Mix) MAXJAX - Expansions of House Music (Original Mix) MAXJAX - Way You Move (Original Mix) Michel De Hey - Fertist (Extended Mix) Michel De Hey - Let's Make Love (Extended Mix) Michel De Hey - Let's Make Love (St. David Space Funk Mix) Miguel Migs - The Bump Joint (Deep Feels Dub) Miguel Migs - The Bump Joint (Salty Classic Dub) Miguel Migs, Lisa Shaw - Waterfall (Migs Deposit Box Dub) Mika Olson - Lite (Extended Mix) Mike Dunn, Adrianne Archie, Saison - Non Stop feat. Mike Dunn feat. Adrianne Archie (Extended Mix) Mistier - Headspace (OFFAIAH Remix) MKLA - Running (Extended) Moby, Anfisa Letyago - You & Me (Deetron Extended Remix) Moby, Anfisa Letyago - You & Me (Extended Mix) Moby, Anfisa Letyago - You & Me (Girls Of The Internet Extended Remix) Moby, Anfisa Letyago - You & Me (Moby Extended Remix) Mood - Crucial (Original Mix) Moreno Pezzolato, Octahvia - U Want Me Feat. Octahvia (Qubiko Remix) Mute, Gerd Janson - Bensono (Gerd Janson Edit) Mute, Gerd Janson - Direct Cut (Gerd Janson Edit) Mute, Gerd Janson - Never (Gerd Janson Edit) Mute, Gerd Janson - Ocha (Gerd Janson Edit) Nari - That's The Way, I Like It (Original Mix) Nic Vesperi, Juan Cuestas - Megan (Original Mix) Noha, Black Arkipelago - H Music Is For Everyone (Original Mix) Oscar Barila - Feels Right (Extended Mix) Pagany, Roby Arduini, Gabry Sangineto - Everyday A New Day (Vocal Mix) Peacey, Rona Ray - Playground (Dub Mix) Peacey, Rona Ray - Playground (Original Mix) Peacey, Rona Ray - Playground (Peacey's Acid Dub) Peacey, Rona Ray - Playground (Peacey's Acid Mix) Peter Mac - Ven Conmigo (Instrumental Mix) Peter Mac - Ven Conmigo (Original Mix) Punky Wash - Origin Of A Beat (Original Mix) Punky Wash - Spinning Your Mind (Original Mix) Punky Wash - The Lesson (Original Mix) Raw Silk - Do It To The Music (Michael Gray Extended Dub Mix) Raw Silk - Do It To The Music (Michael Gray Extended Mix) Reel People, Kaidi Tatham, Mica Paris - I Want To Thank You (Kaidi Tatham Instrumental Remix) Reel People, Kaidi Tatham, Mica Paris - I Want To Thank You (Kaidi Tatham Remix) Reflekt, Delline Bass - Need To Feel Loved feat. Delline Bass (Rose Ringed Extended Remix) Right To Life - Give It Up (Micky More & Andy Tee Extended) Robbie Rivera, David Tort - House (David Tort Extended Mix) Romain Villeroy - Dreams Come True (Original Mix) Ross Couch - Moonlight Mood (Original Mix) Saliva Commandos - No Puedo Ver Por Las Luces (Extended Mix) Saliva Commandos - To Los Dia Te Imagino (Extended Mix) Sammy Deuce - Love I've Found (Original Mix) Sammy Deuce - Next To You (Original Mix) Sander Kleinenberg - Frog Dancing (Way Down In My Soul) (Extended Mix) Satore - Jakarta Vibes (Original Mix) Satore - Jimbaran Market (Original Mix) Savvas - Rise (Original Mix) Sergio Mendes, Oliver Heldens, Ian Asher - Mas Que Nada (Oli's Carnival Mix) Some Too Suspect - Dark Jackin Venture (Original Mix) Some Too Suspect - Garra (60s Mix) Sonaba, Henry Chris - Sun is Dark (Extended Mix) Sowel - Cook It Up (Original Mix) Steve Bug, Cle - Crew Thing (Original Mix) Steve Bug, Cle - House Music Transcends (Original Mix) Steve Bug, Cle - It Just Happened (Original Mix) Steve Robinson (UK) - Nobody (Original Mix) Steve Robinson (UK) - Set Up A Foundation (Original Mix) Steve Robinson (UK) - Sit Back (Original Mix) Storm Mollison - U Got The Flava (Original Mix) Sudden Moves - Lemonade (Original Mix) Sudden Moves - Why Don't You Dance (Original Mix) The All Purpose - I Feel It (Original Mix) The Blessed Madonna, Ariana Grande - yes, and? (The Blessed Madonna's Godsquad Mix) The Trammps - I've Gotta Stand Up (Brand New Man) (Dave Lee Garage City Dub) The Trammps - I've Gotta Stand Up (Brand New Man) (Dave Lee Garage City Mix) Till Von Sein - June Too (Original Mix) Timothee Milton - Time To Go Up (Original Mix) Tiptoes - Baby Don't Trip It (Original Mix) Tom & Jame - Ooh Yeah! (Extended Mix) Tom Trago - All Right (Original Mix) Tom Trago - Hotballs FM (Original Mix) Tom Trago - Take a Chance (Original Mix) Transmission, Wim Hof, Gavin Koolmon - LOVE (Schak Remix) VNSSA - Giving You (Extended Mix) (Original Mix) Wally Lopez - Habibi (Faucon Remix) Walterino - Wonder (The Dukes Main Mix) Wawda & Mulo - Avtocesta (Original Mix) Wh0, Anelisa Lamola - The Power feat. Anelisa Lamola (Extended Mix) Wh0, Anelisa Lamola - The Power feat. Anelisa Lamola (Wh0's Church Dub) Will Taylor (UK) - 2NIGHT (Original Mix) Yona Marie, Chesster - Sound of Bliss (Original Mix) 

The Cult of inCharacter School of Ministry
Getting right to the point, inCharacter School of Ministry, or iC, is a cult and is headed by a charismatic cult leader. Do not attend this “ministry school.” Take your money and time to an accredited educational institution. The accreditation that inCharacter has is not sufficient for any kind of legitimate degree you might be looking for. In addition to that statement, the classes provided at iC are not intellectually challenging and will not help you in academia. You are better off going to your local pastor and getting instruction from them. If your goal is to pursue an academic degree in ministry, again, go to an institution that will teach you these things properly. If they approach your church to do ministry, do not let them into your congregation.
The above paragraph serves as the synopsis for what is to follow. It is to the point and is written to deter anyone from enrolling in iC. Below I will provide my experience at iC to further explain the above paragraph. Below are labeled sections. Feel free to skip a section if it does not interest you. The sections will be the following:
1. History (501 Words)
2. My Personal Experience (1771 Words)
3. Links
1. History
First, some history. inCharacter started out as a young adult program form the Assemblies of God called Master’s Commission or MC for short. MC was a way to train young people in ministry out of local churches. The idea was that these young people would learn ministry by doing ministry. They would also go off and live in dorms or be welcomed into the houses of church members’ houses. While enrolled at a MC, students would attend classes taught by the MC leader. They would also serve in the church by doing anything from cleaning toilets to preaching sermons. inCharacter began as one of these Master’s Commission programs. It was called Master’s Commission Mid-Atlantic and operated out of Hagerstown, Maryland. I do not recall the name of the church it started in.
The leader of this group was/is a man named Brian, or PB for Pastor Brian. PB is a charismatic and likable person. He has a love for theatre and implemented that into his program. MC Mid-Atlantic became known for their human videos, skits, and full production shows. They would travel to different churches in the area and perform for congregations. These performances always had a message in them. Depending on the set, people would either be doubled over in laughter or on their faces in tears, moved by the message based on the gospel. However, after many years, PB and the church MC Mid-Atlantic was based out of had a falling out, a trend that continues to this day. They then moved and took over a MC program in Lafayette, Louisiana. I do not recall the name they went by in Louisiana, but they were only there for a year before moving to Mobile, Alabama. In mobile, they went by the name of Sunbelt Master’s Commission. I do not recall how long they were there, but they soon moved again to Marianna, Florida.
With the move to Florida came both a name and organizational change. PB and his inner circle leadership felt that Master’s Commission had lost its passion and original mission. They decided to leave MC and create their own organization, a 501(c) they called inCharacter School of Ministry. iC still operated the same way PB had run his previous organizations, however this time with complete control and no oversight. iC made its home on the West Florida District Assembly of God Campgrounds. This site served as the headquarters of the West Florida District where district leaders lived and worked. This site was purchased by a local Assemblies of God church, Evangel Worship Center, after Marianna suffered significant damage from Hurricane Michael in 2018. PB saw this as a sign from God that it was time to move again. They moved to Punta Gorda, Florida to a church called Deep Creek Community Center Church or DC3 for short. To the best of my memory, I believe they were only there for three years before leaving and as of 02/19/2024 are still based out of Port Charlotte Methodist Church.
2. My Personal Story with iC
I was enrolled in iC for two years. At the time, it was still an immersive, on-campus experience. Students lived in dorms on the West Florida AG Campgrounds. (In the summer, these dorms would be used to house youth groups from around the district for Youth Camp.) We lived, ate, studied, and worked on this campus. A typical day would be breakfast, then class. After class we would rehearsal our set list that we would travel to churches with. In between would be lunch and dinner. We would also have prayer and all the typical church kind of things. However, it wasn’t typical. All the students were told that we were training to become elite Christians. Christians who thought creativity, outside the box of the status quo Christian. The rehearsals usually left everyone teary eyed as we looked within ourselves and realized how destitute we were without Jesus. We were taught to harness that raw emotion and pour it into our set list. It truly was some powerful stuff. But then again, the arts are powerful.
The leadership at that time was structured like this: PB and wife, ‘R’, were the leaders. PB was the main face while ‘R’ was rarely seen or heard from and worked mostly in the background. Then there was ‘J’ who was PB’s right hand man. ‘J’ had been a student in Master’s Commission under PB many years ago and had stuck with him ever since. PB was the founder and leader, but ‘J’ ran more of iC than PB did. Next to PB and ‘R’, ‘J’s’ authority was second, but he was still very much subservient to PB. Then there was ‘N’. ‘N’ was on the bottom and really had no power. However, she was still a leader and would help develop our sets and dances and such. I quickly gained the respect and trust of PB and the rest of iC leadership and was brought into the inner circle. I made my own opportunities to be close to leadership. I would be invited to PB’s house because I would purposely follow him there, all the while my fellow students would walk away without an invitation. If the team, (the ‘team’ is what the students were collectively call) was invited to come over to watch the game, I stayed behind while others left. I essentially brown nosed for the first year I was there. As funny as that is now, it was nonetheless true. But that is what PB would teach us to do. We were taught that the disciples of Jesus were his closest companions. They knew him better than the crowds. Yet Jesus even had an inner circle. It was this backdrop that we were immersed in every day. Everyone fought to win the approval of iC leadership. And the ones who got that approval got more attention.
For example, we would travel to churches on Sundays and Wednesdays to preach by performing. Before, the entire team would go. By the time I got there, only a handful of people got to go. The people with the best grades, who could act the best, and of course, the people who were closest to leadership or seemed the most ‘sold out.’ This team was called Travel Team. It was said at the beginning of each year that members of the Travel Team would be traded out often. But that did not happen. Once you were on the Travel Team, you were on it. And the people on the Travel Team got to spend even more time with leadership. The only time people traded hands on the Travel Team was when they were kicked off. One guy was kicked off because of his attitude. Another was kicked off because he was getting too close to one of the girls on the team. iC had a strict policy against dating. They claimed this was so that students could focus solely on Jesus, since that was the reason we all came to inCharacter. Leadership had instructed ‘E’ to stop his relationship with this girl. When he didn’t, he was “reassigned” to the newly developed, and less prestigious, Kid’s Ministry team. I had started to become good friends with ‘E’ during my first year. However, PB had a private conversation with me that ‘E’ was not a good influence because he was blinded by his carnal relationship.
To speak more on relationships, leadership would call the team in for a “Family Meeting” from time to time when someone really messed up. On two separate occasions a family meeting was called to discuss how a female member was campused. Campused meant that a student was on probation either due to a moral failing or an academic one. When someone was campused, they could not leave the campus unless on official iC business. Our off days were Fridays. We could do anything we liked within reason on Fridays but could not leave the city unless we had previously received permission. For someone who was campused, they could still go nowhere. If it was an academic campusing, they would spend most of their time studying. If it were a moral failing campusing, I really don’t know what they did. I just know they were regulated to the campus property and treated like scarlet letters.
In addition to our studying and rehearsing, Thursdays were our workdays. As part of the agreement between iC and the West Florida District, iC oversaw lawn care and cleaning of buildings on campus. iC was also obligated to help with District events to include set up, break down, ushering, and even as servers if there were a banquet. This served as payment for room and board on top of the $6,500 tuition each student paid to attend iC. (The school year was from August to May).
Getting back to me. After my first year, PB saw how committed I was to him (not only had I reduced my friendship with ‘E’, but I also gave iC $20,000 as a tithe. This money came from my father who died before I was born. I had been taught my whole life that not tithing on the money you have was a sin against God. So, I gave my tithe to the one thing I really believed in). PB, seeing that my money was where my mouth was, invited me to go on vacation with him, his family, and iC leadership to Disneyworld. He also secured for me an internship at DC3 that summer with their Youth Pastor ‘D’. ‘D’ was a Master’s Commission Alumni and one of PB’s inner circle, and He even served on the iC board. I later found out from ‘E’ that he was supposed to go to DC3, but because he kept pursuing that girl, the internship was given to me. ‘E’ is now happily married to that girl and they have a beautiful child together.
This was the beginning of my introduction to the iC inner circle. I was told a year and half before anyone else that iC was planning on moving to DC3. I would be the only student present when iC leadership would talk bad about other students. It was not surprising. iC leadership would talk bad about the West Florida District leadership directly to the team. iC leadership talked unfavorably about pastors in the region or how no one in the West Florida District did things right.
The leadership was also not to be questioned. When PB or his wife, ’R’, spoke, it was law. Even the other two iC leaders, ‘J’ and ‘N’, had to constantly check in with PB or ‘R’. I witnessed ‘J’ and ‘N’ being treated like children, berated, and belittled. They also were alumni who were chosen and accepted leadership positions in iC. They did all the work and received no compensation. ‘J’ most of all. ‘J’ was and is PB’s right hand man. He is incredibly loyal to PB. ‘J’ has forfeited his entire life to PB and his vision. ‘J’s’ entire adult life has been to serve PB, oh and Jesus.
I saw a lot of these red flags while I was brown nosing my way to the inner circle. But I was certain, like all the other students, that God had called me to inCharacter. I was slated to begin my third year at iC. But in April of my second year, my whole world changed. My stepfather was a pastor, so I grew up in church leadership. My life was the church. But that April, the truth came out about the man who for 20 years I called father. Without much more detail, it made me pause and really think about all the red flags I had stored away about iC. I decided not to come back for my third year. When I informed PB and his wife, they were livid. Surprisingly, ‘R’ did more talking and belittling to me while PB just sat there. I had seen her treat ‘J’ and ‘N’ this way as well. ‘R’ was hardly seen by anyone. She handled the money of the organization, taught their daughter, and cared for her dying mother. But this woman, who I really had no relationship with, talked to me as if she were God himself. I left that conversation fuming. I packed my bags that day and left.
Even though I left irate, we still had a friendly manner between us. I came back with supplies when they were trapped in Marianna from hurricane Michael. I would still go to their full productions and seek their approval. But what happened to me is exactly what happened to all other alumni who left, nothing. PB would tell us that we were family. That we should get close to leadership and depend on them, solely on them. But when I left, I realized that if you were not willing to be their subordinate, they would cast you aside. Once I realized this, I started to rid myself of their influence. After I married, they tried to contact me and send me marriage gifts. I declined the gift from them and made it clear that I wanted nothing to do with them.
I realize this is a long post. Thanks for sticking with me. There obviously is more, but I feel it is unnecessary to post it. However, I will reiterate my original thought: Do not attend this institution. In addition, if you found this post because you want iC or its leadership to come to your church, run. Cut all ties you have with them and save yourself the hassle.
3. Links
This section will have a few links to include: the inCharacter website, the Sunbelt MC website, and reddit post about this group.
inCharacter Link:
https://www.getincharacter.org/
Please only go here for research. Again, do not apply here.
Sunbelt Master’s Commission Link:
http://www.sunbeltmc.org/index.html
reddit Link:
LetMeBeADamnMedic’s post is what is relevant in this case. They were a part of inCharacter when it was in Mobile, Alabama and went by the name Sunbelt Master’s Commission.
https://www.reddit.com/exchristian/comments/imskn2/masters_commission/