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#hopefully 2023 has lots of good things in store for us all
guardian-angle22 · 1 year
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vitaminseetarot · 5 months
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PAC Pick a Fruit: Something To Look Forward to in 2024 ❄🎁🎊
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Sup y'all, I'm finally back again! I have not been as active on this blog as I've wanted to be these past two months, but hopefully that will change a little bit as the year settles to a close for winter.
I'm also excited to use my Tarotwave deck which just arrived in the mail this past week. I'm grateful to have backed it on Kickstarter! I know this is gonna be one deck of cards I'll be very amped to use on this blog. It's like an early Xmas gift ^^
2023 has been a bumpy ride for many people (and yours truly), and the biggest thing most of us want to know is how our next year is going to be, and if there's anything good in store. So I made sure to focus on asking for only the most positive and beneficial things that will bless you in this reading, because I want 2024 to be exciting for you and I wanna hype you up.
Pick one of the squishable fruits below to find out a hint or two about what you have to look forward to in 2024.
1 - Strawberry 2 - Orange 3 - Banana
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Pile 1: Strawberry
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Queen of Cups + VI The Lovers, IX The Hermit, Eight of Wands; Trillion, Anything is Possible, Guidance
For you, pile 1, 2024 is gonna be filled with pleasant little surprises that could appear out of nowhere. The Trillion card is connected to Aquarius and talks about living by ones own truth, but the zodiac is also connected to Uranian forces, helping us receive out-of-the-box insights to whatever challenge we're facing.
I think this pile has spent a great amount of time working on themselves. I don't know if you relate to the word "shadow work" or not, but this feels like you're in the tail end of that cycle. You've grown a lot in emotional maturity over the past months, and perhaps have released some form of major karmic or generational baggage that was weighing on you emotionally. Now it's going to become easier for you to express who you are because the extra emotional burden will not be there as before.
I'm sensing a vast expansiveness to this pile as a result, a willingness to be open to life. It's a calm and steady feeling. This is "come whatever may" energy. 2024 will be a chance for you to settle into the quiet, because that's where the miracles will appear. I feel like this is a quiet that's been anticipated, more relieving than boring. This is a space of being in the flow with life and being ready for whatever comes next without mental resistance.
For some, this could be a romantic reading. I tend to think of strawberries as a rather flirtatious fruit! And we have the Lovers here too. Typically the Lovers talks about decisions, but I don't feel here like you're in a position to be making some kind of clear cut choice at the moment. This is more emphasizing on loving the feeling of love itself. This is a carefree disposition to allowing your heart to guide you when things look overwhelming on the surface.
There's no need or pressure to rush into any kind of decision even if there's an eagerness to do so. You're being encouraged to fully take time out and explore your feelings so you can create a better alignment with the type of person you desire in your life. You're allowing yourself to be curious and open minded without the unnecessary input that others may give you unsolicited. The Hermit is in an empowered position here.
I think 2024 will give you time to lean back rather than pursue, which is not the same as being avoidant. We have the eight of wands here; when the opportunity strikes, it can strike hot! But the key is that you're taking in this energy rather than chasing it. In the meanwhile, you're filling up your cup and learning how to be fulfilled with this peaceful space, and you'll find it easier to be patient when it comes to finding whatever you've been seeking.
You're learning that you have all the time you need to stay in this calm state, and that rushing with everything doesn't always speed up fate. The sense of having more time to sleep and nurture yourself will greatly benefit you when the time comes to receive this incredible spiritual insight, love, or blessings in the material world.
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Pile 2: Orange
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XI Justice + 2 of Cups, 4 of Cups, 5 of Swords; Single, What You Seek is Seeking You, Stories
For pile 2, the biggest keyword here is Clarity. If you've been in the fog about something for a while, that may start to clear up in 2024. Something that seemed difficult to tackle before will be greatly simplified for you. The Single card is Mercury energy and talks about beginnings in a conventional sense. So you'll look forward to starting over with something next year, perhaps from scratch, so it'll be better than before. You can deal with issues with a fresher mindset.
This is a specific message for a few, but if lately you feel like you've been involved in rumors, gossip, or some form of negativity spread through word of mouth, I see this dissolving in 2024. It will swing back around. Perhaps whoever is spreading the rumor will receive one in return. No hexing done here, but it looks like karma will put in the work to show that you or someone you know is innocent. If someone you know is gaslighting or spreading lies, they will feel the brunt of this. Any negativity sent to you will simply spin around and cancel itself out. So don't worry about other peoples' perceptions in 2024, they will undergo a big shift.
For others in this pile, you may have had some disagreements with your love or even business partner. Either one large disagreement that's been on the back burner for a while, or it's little ones that add up. It'll be different amongst you. But in 2024 these tiny issues will be more easily resolved. Things won't seem to complicated to untangle once any given situation is figured out.
Your energy is spent a lot more here on moving forward and looking for something new next year than dealing with conflicting relationships. With the four of cups, you're ready to move past whatever company or crowd is messing with your mood because you know better shit is on the way and you don't want to waste your emotional currency on anything draining or inherently unsatisfying.
You would rather move into what is right for you than deal with the drama, though I think there will be times when it circles back around and you may have to confront it again… It won't be as difficult as it was in the past, however. You're not dealing with so much confrontation in 2024, especially if you're actively prioritizing healthy relationships and practice healthy boundaries with others.
This may look to be the year where the art of setting mental boundaries is perfected. Mental boundaries means choosing what you'd rather think about than let your mind run loose. No longer trapped in the undertow of other peoples' nonsense, you're starting to get your life fully together. This will spill outwards into the outer world, and this will greatly help ease off the kind of bothersome encounters with people that may have popped up in 2023.
Some of you may identify as people pleasing, which is something that I see less of for you next year. It's almost like the vibe of seeing a kid watch a bunch of other children bully each other during recess, only for that lone kid to decide to go their own way and read a book. He might even make a new friend that way, who knows? 2024 will give you the chance to shrug certain expected worries off your back like water off of duck's feathers. Citrus is clean and refreshing. You can expect only the simplest and cleanest interactions moving forward (yes, I have Simple and Clean inside my head now, oof). It's all about keeping your eye on the prize that awaits ahead.
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Pile 3: Banana
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9 of Cups + XIV Temperance, XVIII The Moon, 7 of Wands, Prism, Projections, Power
Wow, so much lunar energy in pile 3's cards! I see bananas as lunar because they're shaped like crescents (and to go bananas is to be a lunatic!). Then you got two different version of moon cards on top of one another!
In this deck, the Moon has a softer and more subtle approach than the RWS. There's a greater emphasis on dreams and intuition with this card. Have you been connected to or manifesting with the lunar cycles? Or creating a dream journal to track your visions? If you've been interested in doing so, now would be a good time to look into it, as a confirmation. You're in alignment to receive!
This pile is really feeling the buzz of desires fulfilled and is pushing beautiful energy out into 2024. I'm not seeing specific desires listed here, just the overall potency of manifestation magic. This could possibly be a big year for you even. Just try not to get too carried away with the need to make 2024 into a particular kind of good year. Even if great things are lined up, allow room for the uncertainties to occur. These moments will happen to test you, and you'll need to stand your ground and be firm with what you want without your worries getting the best of you.
Pile 3, with Projections and Power? You are gonna look forward to 2024 being like a canvas for you to paint on. You can decide to paint whatever you wish, for a window of time as brief as the full moon. That's why your other three tarot cards are trying to slow you down a little bit, lol. Even if great luck is offered to you, be careful with how it factors into your life. You're being asked to have modesty, which must mean you're set to achieve or receive something very nice. But yeah, a sense of humbleness and gratitude will really help you here.
You're being reminded with the Moon that you don't have all the answers right now, and it's okay. Oftentimes the wish doesn't get granted until we lose our attachment to it or get sidetracked with life, then it's able to come in more easily. When we try to act resistant and overly arrogant with the seven of wands, it can bite back against us.
I'm also getting a message here about being humble with your blessings so to not attract unwanted attention from people. You could end up in a position where some may throw a lot of projections on you, but you will need to remind yourself of your Prism qualities. Prism is like pure spirit, it's the card of being spiritually aligned with one's self. You will be reminded that beyond good and bad fortunes, the pure spirit of self doesn't change. That is your power source.
Another thing you may look forward to are psychic upgrades. If you've been working on your psychic talent, you could receive a major boost this year. You may experience more clairsenses or messages in your dreams. These experiences and abilities will allow you to find the right time to act or wait on certain choices in your life. Your intuition is being greatly sharpened and amplified in 2024. Use this power with great care.
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This reading has not been evaluated by the FDA to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any disease or infection. Please ask your physician before going online.
2023, @VitaminseeTarot ™
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lilyginnyblackv2 · 1 year
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Upcoming Anime That I’m Going to Check Out:
Dog Signal: Fall 2023
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It’s an anime adaptation of a josei manga series.
Synopsis from MAL:
A dog trainer's job is to bring dogs and people together. Miyu Samura, an indecisive young man, meets Shinichiro Niwa, a miracle-working dog trainer, while walking the dog forced on him by his ex-girlfriend. The chance encounter will greatly change Miyu's life! Thus begins the story about the growth of a new dog trainer!
I love dogs, so I am here for this. I am also just a continuous sucker for “bubbly blond and emotionless dark haired” character dynamic. I’ll always eat that shit up. Seems like a generally cute premise with a lot of potential. 
Mr. Villain’s Day Off: No release date yet.
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ANOTHER JOSEI ANIME!?🤩 At least according to Wikipedia, so I don’t know how accurate that really is, lol. 
This one is supposed to be comedy based and seems to have very short chapters, maybe it will be a short anime (like 5 - 10 minutes instead of full length, or maybe they’ll do something like some North American cartoons used to do in the 90s and such, with two short stories in one episode). 
Here is the teaser trailer that just came out:
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I like the moe gap dichotomy of evil villain and cute stuff. I always love things like that. Here is the synopsis over on MAL:
As a member of a malevolent organization, the General is tasked with invading Earth and wiping out humanity. Even an extraterrestrial being like him, however, needs a chance to rest. Not even the Rangers—a team solely dedicated to defeating the General and his colleagues—will stand in the way of him visiting pandas at the zoo, buying ice cream at the convenience store, and enjoying his well-deserved day off from committing evil deeds.
I like comedies, but full blown comedy only in small doses. So if this is a short running anime (5 - 15 min episodes) then that would work well for me. If not, then I hope there ends up being some other elements brought in, otherwise I’ll eventually grown bored with the humor. BUT! I’m still excited to at least check it out. :D
Undead Girl Murder Farce: Summer 2023
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This is based off of a shonen manga (iirc). I don’t really engage much with shonen anymore (the most recent shonen series I’ve read/watched has been Vanitas no Carte, because Jun Mochizuki and my love for Pandora Hearts, but I’ve fallen behind on both the anime and manga of that and need to catch up). This series is giving me similar vibes.
Here is the synopsis from MAL:
The end of the 19th century—a vampire's wife is murdered, and the detective known as the "cage user" is called in to solve the crime. But there's more to the detective and the curtained birdcage he carries...after all, when solving a case involving a monster, it might just take one to know one!
Here is the trailer for it:
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I like the music and visuals, and the macabre aspects to it definitely reel me in. I’ll likely check out the manga versions of all of these above (if I can) to get a better idea of them. Hopefully, I’ll like them, and these animated adaptations will be good too. 
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redscorpiocat · 4 months
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Thank you all for such a journey this year
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2023 had a fun beginning the first five months, before then things got out of control.
Ever since my uncle died in June of this year, things went downhill from there... I tried to stay positive, but the negativity keeps hurting... But... At least I have people who are there for me... And I know how much this shit hurts... This year was not going well for me... It started out nice and chill at the beginning of the year... But then it slowly descended into a painful downward spiral of pain, heartbreak, tears, despair, and most of all, a whole lot of suffering... I wanted to have a good year, but... Apparently we don't always get what we want... And everything will always happen...
But maybe this year will end on a good note and 2024 will hopefully begin better
At least I have you guys^^ Everyone that I have ever met in my life, online and in real life ^v^
And our journey is reeeaallyyy far from over! So get ready for more artwork, more characters, more fan art, and a whole bunch more!
It may take a moment, but I'm sure we'll all pull it through if we stick together
Let's see what 2024 has in store for us all! :3
We'll see you there!! ^w^🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
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destinyc1020 · 1 year
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This interview was just released but it took place roughly after the Met Gala in 2022 (since he talks about Tom recently going to dinner with a famous race car driver) here are some quick highlights
How do you managed fame By staying normal. Tom speaks to his family four to five times a week and no one in the family defers to him. "If our family is involved in his life and can tell him off when needs be he is much more likely to remain normal." Dom belilves this since acolytes are less likely to tell Tom the truth since they fear being fired. They accomodate Tom's fame really easily because in their world Tom is not famous.  It is only when Dom goes online he is reminded that Tom is famous
Do you worry about losing him to Hollywood? "I don't think I do because he wants to live in Britain he is in America at the moment but he hankers to be in Britain. I think Britain is much more grounding for him because all his friends and family are here.....I don't think he's of that disposition to embrace it but I do have concerns though. I don't want his window getting any bigger on his life. I want him to diminish his window now. He's going to work for the rest of his life whenever he wants to work he has enough traction now such that he will be cast and hopefully he will choose good projects that he will do well in but now he needs to manage his fame to diminish that concentration of attention on him. Cillian Murphy doesn't do chat shows for example and I think that is a good thing. Do Peaky Blinders be well paid be well regarded but don't give anything of yourself that you don't need to and I think that is a good way to be a famous person….  It's been tremendous to watch but  there is a cost to fame and the cost is that the love for Tom by so many people can be a little bit overwhelming"
Benefits of Fame Tom contributed a lot of money towards the family's trip to Namibia to make the holiday viable. He also arranged for the family to join him at the Sony golf event in Hawaii a day after they returned from Nambia
Nepotism He believes that instead of his other kids being worried about being in Tom's shadow they should use it to their advantage since they can't get away from it.  They have to perform on their own merits to prevail.  He gave an example of Harry being a must hired to now a great hire because he worked hard and proved himself to the studio
How do you make it in Show Business?  "you have to understand  that the fates are either with you or against you and you can take your opportunities only if they are presented to you. Tom took all the opportunities presented to him and smashed them."  Dom doesn't like talking about Tom's talent because it seems like parental pride but he has no problem discussing his extraordinary work ethic and professionalism.  He  gave the example of the angry dance.  When Tom was playing Billy, he was known as the kid that smashes the angry dance and the teachers use Tom's angry dance as an example for the kids coming afterwards because the teachers knew that some of the other kids pretended to be exerting themselves and they didn't max out on the dance.  Tom didn't know what the future had in store for him but he exerted himself so much on the angry dance because that is what the role required.  He used to dread it but he did it every show while other kids told Tom they weren't tired because they pretended to be tired.
SELF BELIEF It is extraordinary to Dom and Nikki that Tom has so much self confidence in himself since  both his parents lack it and Tom is more confident than his brothers
Jo Elvin - Fame
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/with-dom-holland/id1659062309?i=1000595094999
Thank you Anon! I haven't heard this podcast interview yet.
It seems (from what you summarized) that what we've been suspecting about Tom and fame is pretty much on the nose.
I think it's overwhelming for him sometimes, and it seems his dad is confirming that.
Was it just me, or does it also seem like Dom was hinting that Tom has kind of declined attending certain events, or even taking certain roles because he kind of wants to reel in the massive-ness of his fame right now? 🤔🤔
Maybe it's just me, but that's the impression I was getting....
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lil-melody-moon · 23 days
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Okay, so (I love starting to talk like that in posts, I've noticed that just now). I wouldn't make this public, because @hammill-goes-fogwalking wanted my opinion about "The Who Sell Out" but I want to talk about one tiny thing so I think I can write all of that in a post. Hopefully that won't be too long.
I bought this album today. I saw it at the record store three times already, there was nothing else worth of spending money on, so I left with "The Who Sell Out" in my bag. Now the thing is that I didn't want to buy it, heck, I didn't even want to listen to it in the first place - sorry, Sarah, I know it's your favorite, but hear me out on this one.
The cover was always putting me off, I didn't like the concept idea for this one and just something was telling me to not listen to it. I really couldn't explain all of that, but I think I can now, after giving it a try.
Sure, I consider it the least good from the albums up to 1978 - opinion might change, I listened through it only once by now - but the concept ain't that bad as I thought. Felt like listening to the radio, some songs are very good, some are just okay. There were tons and I mean tons of melodies later used in "Tommy" - I could hear four songs max at first listen - and I love how it evolved, because in reality you can hear a melody used in one of the songs in "Tommy" in "A Quick One While He's Away" and you know, it was nice to actually experience this shift from simple chord to something much more bigger, but other than that I have one thing to say and it's about that one song called "Girl's Eyes" by Keith Moon.
It's nothing special, musically it's just okay, chaotic at the very end - love that instrumental part and the speed up - but here's the thing. Something made me listen to the lyrics instead of melody this time and that almost doesn't happen and for those who don't know them, here they are, simple, nothing too big:
"Girl's eyes, butterflies, how she cries, can't get through to you She knows all the charts, breaks her heart, thinks a lot of you Each time you play a melody, it means the earth to this little girl Can you be cruel and break her heart, tear her small world apart?
She's there, eyes aglow, very front row, don't throw sticks at her Please don't look her way, see her way, don't care anyway
It's you who led her on, I see Just leave her down in her misery She don't want help from you and me Can't tell a note from a symphony"
Just a story about a girl who is so in love with the drummer that if he looks at her he will probably break her heart in the end.
Her cries can't reach him, still she keeps thinking about him probably 24/7, his playing is the thing that keeps the little girl alive and well, his playing is the whole world for her and because of all of this, there's that tiny world she had created for herself (and probably him as well) in her imagination, which makes her happy for most of the time, when she's not crying.
The little girl got on a concert, she can see the love of her life, but there's a plea to the drummer to not interact with her. No throwing sticks in her direction, to not acknowledge her, to not notice her, to not look at her, to not see the way she sees him and the world around her because that will lead to a heartbreak.
But all of that happens, that's why there are tears in the end and no one to help her.
Now to what I want to say... This is of course my interpretation to a very simple lyrics, so that has to be taken into consideration, but like, listen. This tiny song is such a mirror image of what my situation is with this guy that it's beyond me. I will sound delusional and I probably am because how it's possible for lyrics written in 1967 to mirror a situation in 2023 mostly? Well, like this:
The drummer appeared in the tiny girl's life when she was young, but he didn't show himself. The girl only heard his playing and fell in love with his drumming. Whenever she heard at least a bit of it somewhere, she started to feel happy, but she didn't search for him, until last year when she walked into old music world and felt like she has to find someone. And then he showed himself to her, in all his glory. He looked at her, made a contact through what he left, causing the girl to create a tiny world in her tiny brain for them both to avoid loneliness and sadness, greatly succeeding at that, falling in love with him, being heartbroken since the day she learned how he died, her cries not heard by him, but still whenever she hears him, her day is bright again and she's happy.
All of that is a nutshell version of my situation and infatuation with Keith. It's insane that this was written in 1967 and that it mirrors all of that started in September of 2023 and carries on to this day. I have no words for this, other than that it's weird and it creeps me out. Here's that song though:
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ughscara · 4 months
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end of the year post.
heads up. if i sound sappy in some parts, i'm not sorry 🤍
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as of me writing this, it's but a mere 20 minutes before it is officially the start of a new year.
it's a little surreal to believe that 2023 is coming to an end. a year that admittedly, was more emotionally and physically hectic for me. but i pushed through, and here i am going into 2024 as hopefully a better me.
to be honest, this year has been nothing but self reflection, realization and a lot of acceptance as well as embracing parts of myself that i thought i'd never return to. hobbies of mine like writing and drawing were ones i strayed away from for so, so long in 2023. but it more or so lead back into the tribulations i was facing then and still recovering from now.
it's a little surreal to me that months after months of doing nothing but reflection and getting back into what i love doing most just months before the year ended resulted into the me who decided to step into tumblr again and share my kuni ideas for the fun of it. that halloween fic i posted? just for shits and giggles at the time. but the fun i had writing it was a fun i wasn't able to feel throughout the entirety of 2023, and i admit the motivation boost i got from posting the fic afterwards, alongside checking in on the authors i used to follow just made something inside me click. and i went for it.
a bit more off topic but i still remember how i came back to genshin after a good five months or so in version 3.6 and doing the main event without knowledge of the sumeru quest line because i was avoiding spoilers. that day, i just finished taking an entrance exam for college and was exhausted from both the exam and from wearing myself out. midway into the introduction of the contestants; i was greeted with wanderer, or kuni in my vocabulary, being in the event and i was just smiling from ear to ear at the mere sight of him. feeling that same overflow of good emotions just take me whole to be honest, i was simply beyond happy. the way he spoke about writing about inazuma's societal issues because he was bored genuinely had me laughing for the first time that day.
i guess it's that simple little moment that hit me hard. it's silly, i'm aware, but it meant everything to me in a way. since that day in june; i was determined and full of creative drive to hopefully share at least one thing before the end of this year. look at me now, i have a series published that's yet to be finished so i can start on the next one in spring ( hopefully ), a one-shot to share for a moot and lastly... just a lot. i have a lot in store.
i have no right to say such things regarding my immense gratitude for the support i received from the few things i published, but the support i ended up getting on said few things — big and small — has made me realize that maybe i still feel very passionate about writing. that maybe i want to pursue the desire to publish all i have for that one fictional character that had my heart swoon the moment i saw him in a promotional trailer three years ago.
the ending note to 2023, starting october 31st when i published my first fic was a day that i'll always hold dear to me, my mutuals as well as the wonderful authors i follow made these past three months an absolute joy, and i cannot wait to make the most of my journey supporting each one of them ~
honestly i'm just rambling. but i am a professional yapper and to be honest i am writing all this on one cup of tea and like, six something hours of sleep i am absolutely not in the right headspace lmao. regardless! i am so so very glad to be here, to have survived an emotionally draining bitch of a year that was still an eventful year regardless to me, and starting the second of january... i shall be the bane of the scaranation's existence <3
we don't talk about how being that is actually a goal of mine because i think it'd be funny but i digress... 2024 will hopefully be just as much of an eventful year for me, for you, and everyone too. i believe that this year will be at least a little kinder to those who got absolutely shat on by 2023 ( pleek no more physical torment for me ) and if you're reading this, remember that this random stranger on the internet who's attempting to spread the kuni agenda is cheering you on for the year <3
i have a lot of stuff to share going forward. december was initially gonna be the month for all that but i had stuff going on that i ended prioritizing ( mainly my health ) so those initial plans will now move to the first month of a new year. mundanities with kabukimono will be finished in january, january 2nd will be interlocked eternities and lastly a late winter special that's actually a birthday gift for a mutual of mine ( mochi i am coming for you /menacingly )
oh it's 12 a.m. now, happy january first and happy 2024 everyone 🤍 may you be blessed with many wonderful days ahead. i shall see you on the second and third of january ~
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Crowdfunding Fulfillment at IPR
I already talked about becoming a publisher at IPR in this post, and now, as promised, here is the post outlining IPR’s Crowdfunding Fulfillment services!
The first important thing to note is that IPR only offers fulfillment services for IPR publishers, so you’ll have to get signed up as a publisher and agree to send us at least 50 extra copies of your game to sell after the fulfillment is completed.
So, what are the benefits of fulfilling with IPR?
We ship anywhere on the globe, via USPS, UPS, or FedEx
Handling expenses are as low as $2.30 per shipment ($1.90 per shipment plus 0.40/item as of 2023-01-01)
We charge $17/hour for miscellaneous labor (loading and unloading trucks, filling out forms, assembly, shrink wrapping, and other services)
Our storage rates are as inexpensive as $22.00 per pallet per month, or free if you’ve got less than a pallet’s worth of product!
After the fulfillment is complete, your game will immediately be available to a wide range of customers and retailers.
Cool! What do the steps of crowdfunding fulfillment look like with IPR?
First, you reach out to us and let us know you’ve got a project that you would like us to fulfill. This works a lot like applying to be a publisher, so please include a PDF of your game(s) as well, so we can look through them and make sure they’re something we would like to have at IPR.
Then, if you’re not already an IPR Publisher, we’ll get you signed up as one! This involves all the steps I talked about in the previous post, like signing the IPR Sales Rep contract and getting you an IPR Publishers account.
After that it’s a bit of a waiting game. If you have accurate weights and sizes for all the products of your fulfillment, we can find you estimates for domestic and international shipping, but they will just be estimates. 
Shipping prices, especially international ones, fluctuate constantly. This is why I always recommend charging for shipping after your campaign has ended, and as close to the actual shipping dates as possible.
But other than that, you just run your campaign and get back to us once your backer surveys have been filled out! We’ll then take your backer info and use it to create a cost estimate for the fulfillment. This is, again, just an estimate, and it accounts for the costs of shipping, handling, packing material, miscellaneous labor, and a 5% surcharge on the packing and shipping costs.
That 5% is to account for unexpected charges, for example shipping prices can absolutely change in the week between us calculating the estimate, and us actually receiving and starting to ship out your game. It just gives us a bit of wiggle room.
Then we’ll send the estimate to you, you send your product to us, and once the estimate has been paid we’ll start boxing up and shipping out orders!
With the shipping service we use, we’re able to email tracking numbers to each individual backer automatically, to hopefully help curb all those “where is my reward?” emails. Still, we’ll also send you a spreadsheet of all the tracking numbers for your own reference.
Once the fulfillment is complete, we’ll draw up the actual cost of the project, and bill you for the difference between the actual cost and the estimate. Once that’s been paid, we’ll take your game live on the IPR website and promote it on our front page, social media accounts, and monthly newsletter!
Essentially, we offer fulfillment services at cost, with the main benefit to us being that we get copies of your game in our store before anyone else.
This all sounds good but I’ve still got questions!
Check out our Crowdfunding Fulfillment FAQ!
I read through the FAQ and I still have questions!
You can always send us questions on tumblr, or email me! [email protected]. As always I am happy to answer questions of any sort, as long as they have to do with TTRPGs.
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garden-with-squid · 3 months
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Yearly Garden Review - 2023
1/11/2024
The garden has improved so much over the past year.  I grew, harvested, and learned so much more than I did last year.  And that’s despite the weird weather - this was a very wet, gloomy year in SoCal, even into June and July.  
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Highlights:
We loved the tulips this year and plan to plant out more chilled bulbs soon.
Surprise potato harvest in bed 2
Bed 3 was so incredibly beautiful in the spring - purple alyssum beneath fresh, green growth.  The alyssum also helped with water retention and attracting beneficial insects.  The soil in bed 3 felt loose and healthy compared to other beds that time of year.
Larger harvests of peppers, eggplants, and so so many tomatoes.  I couldn’t believe how tall the tomato plants grew!  We ate them all the time and they were delicious, especially the Black Cherry.
We cooked and ate more of our harvests.  Delicious omelettes, pasta, soups, and stuffed peppers on Halloween.
Installed ollas - extremely helpful!  Really helps keep water more consistent.
Grew delicious broccoli.  There are side shoots still growing too.  I didn’t realize how big broccoli plants actually get.  Bed 2 looks great still.
Ordered a tea plant.  It’s pretty dead now, but it was nice having a camellia for a bit.
The jasmine bounced back and bloomed a bit!
Got local compost and made my own potting mix
The dragonfruit is still alive, and hopefully will grow more this spring.
Notes for improvement:
I struggled to germinate seeds, both direct sown and started indoors.  The care/watering is hard for me to do consistently.  It was a real shame to kill all the shallot seedlings in particular - I was really hoping to grow some since they’re harder to find in store.
Lots of dead plants.  If I stopped talking about any particular plant in the logbook, it’s because it died.  The rosemary and lavender plants in bed 4 will probably need to be replaced this spring.  A lot of flowers and container plants didn’t make it.  For some reason, sunflowers struggled a lot too.
Aphids, cabbage worms, and rodents.  Barrier protection would probably help a lot, plus more consistent watering.  I did see a good number of ladybugs and larva this year.
Garden fatigue hit at different points in the year, usually when work was stressful or it felt like my garden wasn’t as good as it should have been.  But it helped to remind myself how much better I’ve become since last year, and that it will continue to get better as I gain more experience.  
Looking forward to the year ahead, I want to harvest many things in the summer/fall - okra and watermelon for my uncle, more nightshades, onions, pumpkins, and flowers.  I want to try growing on the trellis (I plan to install one more).  Most of the work will happen in March/April - that’s when the cover crops in beds 1 and 3 will be ready to turn in and transplant time for all the summer crops.
I’m currently using the wintertime to take a break, only checking the garden once a week or so.  While I could grow a winter garden in my zone, I find I’m very lazy on cold mornings, and having a season of rest is important to me symbolically.  
I think I have a solid foundation of skill and experience to build on, so I hope to have a very productive garden this year.  We’re also supposed to have another wet season coming up. So we’ll see how that affects things.  Very fitting for Year of the Dragon!
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aevyk-ing · 4 months
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2023 review stuff
Here we go again. Gotta keep up with the tradition because it's always interesting to go back and reflect on a whole year. While things have improved ever so slightly, my life isn't good yet. But hey, I'm doing my best to keep on fighting until I get there.
2020, 2021, 2022
Health (mixed)
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I started out this year with a surprise: I'm autistic! And while it's not a bad nor good surprise, it has changed completely the way I treat myself. I used to feel useless and an idiot but now there's an explanation for most of my quirks and I can use my newly discovered "superpowers" to make me feel better. But hey, it's still a secret. I'd like to get a formal diagnosis (I mean on paper) before talking to my parents and family.
That being said, I've used this new knowledge to fight the many bumps I've encountered this year. There's still a long way to go, but I feel like I know myself way better now.
2. Writing (freaking good)
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I started the year finishing a book, then I wrote another one, translated three, wrote four short stories, a full comic strip and lots of stuff more. I've created a whole new continent for Gingaria and new places for the next books. I had a great presentation for my book Kylkos and lots of people have praised Legends of Gingaria, which makes me so happy! It all gives me the strength to go on the days I feel bad. And I can't wait to show you what's in store! Also, shout-out to all my AO3 readers.
3. Art (quite good)
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I'm getting the hang of Clip Studio Paint and I think you can see the leveling up. I'm trying to improve with more character, creatures and places designs. I've drawn more comics and some illustrations I'm really proud of. While I sometimes have bad days when nothing seems to work, I can just go back when I feel better.
4. Cosplay (eh...)
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Believe it of not, I've managed to keep on sewing some new stuff. I can't share it for now, but hopefully next year. I've done some clean-up and while I'll use most of my time to fix stuff next year (once I can get it out of the boxes), I'm planning to do more photoshoots.
Now I'm going to talk about the stuff that has helped me go through this year. But first...
I'm sure nobody cares, but this year has been worse because we've had some problems regarding the documents so they can demolish our house and pay us. The thing is some... baddies have been meddling with the process and we were in the middle, so that's why our case is getting longer to resolve. Hopefully, now that we've got the papers we need, things will start going on more smoothly.
Movies & series
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I've watched a lot of stuff this year. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse was so good, I loved Suzume and The Boy and the Heron and, about series, Over the Garden Wall and The Blue Eyed Samurai.
2. Gingaria
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While writing is not always easy, I've had so much fun making this world even bigger. And I made a doll maker! There's a lot to come and I hope it keeps on growing.
3. Webtoons & reading
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I still struggle with reading but my mind is calmer this year. I've read some books from a public place where you put one and get one (left one of my Zem copies just because). I'm currently following some Webtoons and my favorites are The Blind Prince and Your Smile is a Trap.
4. Side projects
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I was commissioned to make 35 fabric cubes and a replica of Gladys from F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Also made some props for cosplay and fixed other stuff.
5. Therapy
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I'm so lucky to have found someone who gets me and understands what I'm going through. Sometimes is hard because she makes me rethink everything but I've improved so much this year thanks to her.
Someone asked me recently about my New Year's resolutions and turns out I don't want to have any, I'm going to rely on my projects. I've had an interesting idea recently and I'm going to search for someone to make it come true, I have more stories to tell (currently writing yet another book) and more surprises along the way.
Thank you so much for being there. I hope you all have a happy New Year. Keep on shining!
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twobigears · 1 year
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2023 New Year Goals and Reviews and Stuff
I usually do goal and review posts every year just like everyone else, but if I did this for 2022 I sure can’t find it. Maybe I was too lazy, which would surprise no one.
2022
This felt like a fairly chill year overall, which is probably a good thing.
We did some hiking and camping. As always, we could have done more.
Chandra made good progress in her iliospoas rehab that started at the end of 2021 (def a reason we didn’t hike as much, especially in the first half of the year). She is cautiously returning to agility and we’ll see how that goes.
Chandra did some more obedience training and also made good progress there. We didn’t trial other than some at-home WRCL runs.
Blizzard really picked up her agility trialing! She had her first full year of trialing after a slow start largely due to covid.
Between virtual runs and real trials, Blizzard made her way up to Masters in USDAA and Level 5 in CPE. She earned her MPD (Masters level title in USDAA) and is about halfway to her PDCH (championship title)
I finished 3/4 of my schooling for my GIS certificate and transition away from dog training to a new career. There is still a lot of anxiety going on with that, but the mental relief of getting away from agility-as-a-job has been soooo worth it.
I put more effort into self-improvement mentally and physically! After years of yo-yoing and steadily creeping weight gain, I revamped habits, made better choices, and lost about 25lbs. I admit this came after hitting a mental low point (and high weight point) early in the year when I was sitting in a hotel room eating grocery store chocolate cake with my fingers because I ‘needed’ it. The cake wasn’t even that good.
I also reined in my internet and social media habits, especially Facebook as recently mentioned. But also things like not scrolling my phone in bed at night, and not checking it first thing in the morning either. I think a lot of people these days have some sort of social media addiction, or at least way too much there, and Facebook was mine. For a long time I knew how bad it was making me feel for a hundred different reasons, but it was still a struggle to quit or cut back. I finally managed it in the last couple months of 2022 and I really do feel soooo much better just ignoring my friends feed and going on primarily to check some hobby groups. It is so much easier to spend less than 5-10 minutes a day there versus the hours I used to spend. Unfortunately I’ve kind of replaced the FB addiction with a Reddit addiction, which is something to work on in 2023....
I got myself spayed and off of hormonal birth control! It’s only been about five weeks but I can already feel the mental benefits and I’m so glad I did it. Only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. I look forward to seeing how my brain and body continue to change and hopefully for the better. HBC is great for so many reasons (esp the No Babies part, so I have no regrets for that), but it’s also got shitty baggage.
Seems like a lot of 2022 was about me, which was probably more than a little overdue. As they say, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. ~self care~ and all that!
What’s up for 2023?
Continue monitoring Chandra’s rehab and see how it goes and how she does with some agility again. I have a pipe dream goal of finishing her PDCH (she needs 8 Qs, even less than Blizzard) but I don’t want to be selfish about it. So we’ll see.
Obedience...idk. We’ll keep doing some training but at this point I’m not sure about trialing. The obedience community really does it make hard to love. Maybe later on I’ll feel interested again. I don’t want to regret not doing it, like I regret not finishing Ryker’s CD before he died.
Blizzard, I would love to finish her PDCH! It might be tough to do given the lack of USDAA trials here but I think it is still a possibility.
At this point I’ve put thoughts of Next Dog on hold for a while again. I’m currently enjoying the two dog life, backing away from dog sports again, and doing more non-dog things (even though a lot of it still involves them anyway, like hiking and camping). Plus with us likely moving, me hopefully getting a new job, I think it’s good to just not add another dog to the mix until all that has settled. I won’t say Next Dog is totally out of the question for 2023, but right now it’s unlikely and not something I’m planning to actively pursue.
At some point this year we’re planning to move to Minnesota. No specific timeline yet, but probably summer-ish. It will be incredibly sad to leave Colorado...
I’ll finish school this spring, hopefully find a real adult job in that field (yay..) and not have this schooling be for nothing.
Continue reinforcing and improving my habits for mental and physical health. I’ve been considering getting into bouldering for something different in the physical activity realm, so I’ll probably check that out. Plus the usual hiking and camping. Gotta get out and see some places before we leave! Then have new places to check out when we move.
Hmmm yeah I think that’s it so far. 😂
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tinydark · 1 year
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Tinydark 2022 Review
This year, the focus was on developing Tinydark’s upcoming open-world roleplaying game, URPG. This involved a lot of work on GAM3, the game engine that houses it. We also moved away from The Orbium and now all game accounts are simply housed under tinydark.com. And finally: we became an officially registered LLC!
What follows are just the highlights of another 1,000+ hours poured into Tinydark. Thanks to all the volunteers who helped with the non-programming-related tasks this year.
Jan - Mar
January saw the introduction of the Crafting system in GAM3 and brought a host of new items to craft with it. I cooled down from a serious dev grind in February and swung back in March to bring fallback projects, new bubble-style event projects, and the Carving free time activity.
Apr - June
Starting off April Fools with printing support for the engine, we moved on to many UI improvements and fleshed out some of the content of URPG in May. April was mostly spent preparing the Orbium -> Tinydark conversion.
The Combat Update released June 22nd and with it, the three “pillars” of URPG: Society, Adventuring, and Roleplay were realized. This was a massive content drop and technology upgrade, featuring new spells, perks, monsters to fight, items to craft, and prose written for all of it. Our players would spend the next few months practicing combat and delving deeper into the mine, until finally the golem known as Crystal made history by killing the final boss on October 14th.
July - Sept
Registered Tinydark as a real company in July. URPG received new content and technology all throughout this quarter, notably the buffs panel, character blurb, and the new combat/hunting panel.
tinydark.com was rewritten and redesigned to be more modern and useful, as well as house all our upcoming functionality.
Oct - Dec
In October, all links to theorbium.com were redirected to tinydark.com. This finalized the switch from Orbium to Tinydark.
Released the Characters page for creating and managing your characters; bumped available character slots up to 2. Introduced dream and travel magic and improved the top bar with a new menu. We finally wrapped up the year with the Inbox feature and a Christmas update featuring URPG’s first seasonal content.
Looking Ahead: 2023
Tinydark Roadmap
In 2022, I had to accept that I need to slow down and improve my development process. With the birth of my third child, free time’s gotten sparse. I’m not going to be able to release URPG into open beta this year. I’ve had incredibly good feedback for Bean Grower and it’s time to treat it like a proper game. This year’s goals are, in order:
Finish the URPG column on the roadmap. I am not moving on until the engine has customized items.
Do what I can of the Slow Quarter. I’m putting a hard expiration of May 15th on this.
Release new version of Bean Grower. We’re going to the Play Store, and I have a list of things that I want to do for Bean Grower before it hits. Apple’s App Store is a stretch goal.
Release Black Crown: Exhumed. This includes a Steam launch, hopefully before the Halloween sale. At the very minimum, I want BC:E fully playable on the web by the first week of October.
Once it’s sensible, I’ll return to URPG with the expectation of releasing into Open Beta some time in Q2 of 2024.
See you in 2023, Vael Victus
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chorusfm · 2 months
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Pearl Jam Announce New Album
Pearl Jam will release Dark Matter on April 19th. You can stream the title track and pre-orders are now up. Pearl Jam will release their twelfth studio album, Dark Matter, on Monkeywrench Records/Republic Records on April 19, 2024 and launch a 35-date worldwide tour this May. The album’s title track is available now HERE. Produced by multi-GRAMMY® award winning producer Andrew Watt, Dark Matter, marks the band’s first release since critically-acclaimed Gigaton (2020).   Dark Matter is now available for pre-order HERE.   In 2023, the members of Pearl Jam—Eddie Vedder [vocals], Jeff Ament [bass], Stone Gossard [rhythm guitar], Mike McCready [lead guitar], and Matt Cameron [drums]—retreated to Shangri-La Studios in Malibu where they simply plugged in and played with producer Andrew Watt at the helm.   The musicians faced one another in the same space and communicated sonically at the highest level. Writing and recording in a burst of inspiration, Dark Matter was born in just three weeks.   As a result, Dark Matter channels the shared spirit of a group of lifelong creative confidants and brothers in one room playing as if their very lives depended on it. All of the blood, sweat, tears, and energy of a storied career felt renewed and poured into this one body of work.   The band members personally previewed the record with a listening party at the iconic Troubadour in West Hollywood during GRAMMY® week: Vedder said: “I’m getting chills, because I have good memories. We’re still looking for ways to communicate. We’re at this time in our lives when you could do it or you could not do it, but we still care about putting something out there that is meaningful and we hopefully think is our best work. No hyperbole, I think this is our best work.” Ament added, “What Ed said about getting us in a room at this point, we felt like we were about to make a really important record. A lot of that had to do with the atmosphere Andrew set up. He has encyclopedic knowledge of our history, not only as a band and how we wrote songs, but as players. He could pinpoint things we did on old songs to the point where I was like, ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ His excitement was contagious. He’s a force. I just want to say thanks for keeping us on track. I couldn’t be prouder of us as a band. I feel so grateful for the fans, but mostly for my brothers and these people I’ve made music with.” The band is celebrating indie record stores with the release of a special edition of Dark Matter on April 20. Only at participating stores as part of Record Store Day. Get more information and find stores at www.recordstoreday.com Dark Matter album packaging features light painting art by Alexandr Gnezdilov. Light painting is an artistic form of photography where images are created by adjusting a camera's exposure for an extended period and using a light source, such as a flashlight, to "paint" in the dark. The album cover art was crafted using a large self-made kaleidoscope. Each letter visible on the cover was individually captured and handwritten midair with a specially designed flashlight to create the pearlescent effect. See more info on Alexandr Gnezdilov below. Track Listing * Scared of Fear * React, Respond * Wreckage * Dark Matter * Won’t Tell * Upper Hand * Waiting for Stevie * Running * Something Special * Got to Give * Setting Sun World Tour In support of Dark Matter, Pearl Jam will head out on a world tour this year, marking the first time the band has announced a new album and tour simultaneously and first time the group has unveiled all worldwide tour dates at once. Their global tour, hitting nine countries and 25 cities, kicks off at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, British Columbia, and will cover much of North America including shows at Wrigley Field, Madison Square Garden, Fenway Park, and their first hometown performance in six years at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena, the world’s first net zero certified arena.   The tour continues with performances in the… https://chorus.fm/news/pearl-jam-announce-new-album-2/
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taylorgraymoore · 5 months
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November 22, 2023
Writing on the SkyTrain after work again—that seems to be a good time for me. The end of a day, I’m slightly exhausted, I can review things and I’m too spent to get distracted by much. I put in earbuds and here I go.
Of course, I’m also too spent to do much more than a stream-of-consciousness ramble. Pros and cons.
I am drained. Retail work at a busy and chaotic store is a miserable way to spend a life, even with good benefits. People get sucked into it, often enough become what are called lifers. I am afraid enough of that happening to me in some form or another. I’m working to become a product consultant (PC), which is a nicer job within the same context: work with the high end products, run the tasting bar, talk to customers, I’d get to go to tastings, no more extremely early mornings or extremely late nights—but, especially if I stay at Brighouse, it’s another form of the same. Lifer. Something drains out, slowly, that’s already happening, until one day I retire and I looked back and see life already happened without me. That’s the human condition for most of us, I realize, and I don’t think I’m entitled to get out of it anymore than anyone else. And I do have good benefits: dental and paid vacation, so what am I complaining about? 
But still. Not the best way to spend a life. It takes over, and there’s no content to it.
I write, and that is my way of tearing a hole in it and slipping out for a bit. As often as I can. 
That’s what it’s become. It’s better than most things I could be using to accomplish that end—although I do drink a bit, I admit, an occupational hazard. 
Both occupations. 
Met a friend for brunch this morning, walked down to Aphrodite’s Cafe on 4th through the dying rain. I was worried the rain would be harder, but this is Vancouver and here a morning’s rain often enough done before the day has time to get going. So I wasn’t too worried. I don’t mind walks after a rain: the air feels so fresh. Good way to start a day. None of that pressure of all of that that I was kvetching about above with me, just the fresh air and the neighbourhood and twenty minutes of my feet on the pavement. 
See, this is why I should write these earlier in the day—they’d be a lot more of that and a lot less misery. That would be a touch pleasanter to read.
There are two Aphrodite’s, kitty-corner from one another. One’s a pie shop, one’s a full restaurant with brunch and everything, and we went into the wrong one first—I’d only ever been in the pie shop. And for Ken (should I be using fake names for this? I’ll change some), it was just that the pie shop was what was on the side of the street he exited the bus on. So, we went over to the other side. Brunch Aphrodite’s was cozy. We sat down, ordered egg dishes and caffeinated drinks (as one does), talked about quantum physics and Carl Jung. Projects we’re working on. It was good. Ken’s a guy I know a little, through another friend, that I’d like to see more of. Good company. 
Notably, he’s the first person to understand a project I’m working on, one of many incomplete jumbles I’ve got. He articulated it better than I ever have. What was it? “Lola is a symbol. Whereas a semiotic sign signifies something, a symbol signifies itself. Its meaning is ineffable.” Roughly that. Jungian language. Lola is is the abstract locus of human fanaticism. I would explain more, but it’s late. Another time. Anyway, I was pleased we found a way to put it. 
This sounds an awful lot like a diary entry. That’s about all I can muster after a shift like this, typing on my phone for the thirteen minutes I’m on the train. Hopefully I’ve jazzed it up in editing a bit. (Because here I am, two hours later finishing a tequila and soda, attempting to jazz it up.)
There’s a new PC (product consultant) being trained at our store starting today. He’s not staying at our store—he works in North Burnaby, usually. I got to interact with him a little as we passed each other in the store. He was full of energy, as a parent would say. Got to do a wine tasting near the end of the shift, because our on-duty product consultant was giving him one and I happened to be standing nearby. I hadn’t had any of what was there and, because I work as a PC now and then, I need to know how wines taste. It’s also one of the better parts of the job—and, yes, I do spit it out. 
The Burnabian was quite slow. He took notes as he went. He would never keep up at a formal tasting—but he’s new. 
The train is nearly at my stop, and I’ll stop then. 
I passed by the SPCA thrift store on Broadway after brunch, to pick up gloves and a warm hat for my trip to Montreal. The air there gets so cold that it hurts my hands—so it wouldn’t do to pick something up after I arrive. Found out after the fact that I didn’t need to buy new anything—there’s a drawer full—but that’s fine. Something refreshing about having gone to do it, picked them out. Part of why this was, really, a good day.
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theinstanceoflife · 6 months
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October 3, 2023
It is yet another day early in the week that has slipped away from me quickly after this morning's little extended writing exercise that I didn’t finish until 6AM. I enjoyed writing for a change and it was almost like old times too because I haven’t really written like that in such a long time I was just relaxed and able to touch on a lot of things as they came and went when I was reflecting in real-time. So much anger and bitterness has been in me since the harassment scheme ended, and I got back home. Needless to say, it’s one of the longest ones I’ve written for one entry at 40-some pages. Tonight hopefully, I can keep my writing session a little shorter and sweeter.
I didn’t get up until about 12PM this morning but didn’t feel very good so I just slept on and off in bed until about 5PM when I decided to take the bus down to the Kroger downtown where I get off for my jaunts to the FAN and the Starbucks there. The stupid Food Lion won’t ever get their system fixed and accept the debit card the medical insurance company sent me and Family Dollar over here doesn’t have shit and is marked up way too much too so you lose money. The other time I went there, the dumb girl tried to insist on not taking the card because she said they didn’t work and I had used it there just a few days twice before. I think what happened is I bought something I was planning to use cash for and it wasn’t approved and for some reason the system couldn’t figure it out. She wouldn’t take the damn thing or run it a different way so I just left.
It’s so ridiculous and aggravating because now I have to catch a bus downtown just to shop and get decent food. That’s what I did in the late evening and ended up doing better than Food Lion and Kroger had a much better selection and better quality stuff even though it’s a little higher. If you know how to shop though, you can balance it out and get the same or more depending on what you buy. I bought a lot of fruit and vegetables like I wanted before so I can make my own stuff and eat more healthy better food. I’ve been missing so much of that since I got home and my food stamps were cut and everything thing has doubled in price everywhere.
Needless to say the Kroger downtown store was and is always real busy because it’s in a food dessert and so everyone goes there that lives around the area and all. I did well though and got what I wanted and it’s all good stuff, not that shit from Family Dollar which is just bad processed shit and very little of it for marked up prices. They’re not so cheap like they make out to be. It’s a rip off. It’s a ghetto store too and they assume you’re stealing shit the minute you walk in the store and make you put your book bag up front.
The Dollar General up in the shopping center is the same fucking store as the new one and even worse, they won’t let you bring a backpack in there at all and it’s a fucking mess and the service rude. I am not sure why they didn’t just change it back to a Family Dollar it used to be and keep it rather than waste money on building a new store across the street. Maybe they could’ve paid for better employees and less obnoxious security.
The Food Lion is the only place here to shop now and that’s gotten ratty too and the selection is limited and it’s just high as shit on everything. I can’t get quality stuff that is healthy. I think I will shop at this Kroger or the one at Willow Lawn from now on until I get the truck fixed because it’s easier, cheaper in the long run and has much better selection and bigger quantities for what you get generally speaking. The bus goes by both (though their different routes and buses, it just depends on where you’re at, which one to use). I am ok with the either one for now. Food Lion just lost a good customer being so shitty and not fixing this problem.
I bought mostly fruit and stuff like bagged potatoes to make shit with and some tomatoes and stuff for salads. It was a little pricy on some stuff but cheaper on other stuff so it all evened out. I got a pack of these angus hamburgers with cheddar and bacon in them for ten dollars and some good bakery rolls as well as a deli pizza that turned to be really good –better than that Little Caeser shit and cheaper too at $7.50 on sale and $8 regular. I saved half of that and ate half tonight. I am going to make my own fruit boils with the fruit. I just need a water melon and maybe a little extra fruit I can get when I get my food stamps Thursday. I’ll be out at Willow Lawn that day for the doctor and may stop by the Starbucks in the Fan, either way there is Kroger on my way home so Food Lion has lost a regular customer for now.
I am so sick of this area and the crap around here being so fucked up and rude and crude and shit. They’re closing the Walgreens too on October 10th. They already closed the Walmart grocery and of course ran Ukrop’s further up out of business a long time ago during the grocery wars here. A lot of good it did –now there is no competition and prices are high as shit and service is terrible and Ukrop’s used to be the best all the way up until they closed. We had three places to shop but Walmart as usual caused a break in competition at the wholesale level that Ukrop’s couldn’t deal with it easily so it just closed all the locations. Publix finally bought the old Ukrop’s locations that remained and they refuse to do business in ghetto neighborhoods for obvious reasons.
Publix is ok and kind of like Ukrop’s but high as shit but again if you know how to shop there you can get the same deal in the end and much better selection and quality. Food Lion had converted Ukrop’s to Martins before it closed for good during the grocery wars. They bought the chain first and then ruined it when they decided to make all of them closed or turned into Food Lion. Ukrop’s had plenty of store in locations most chains outside the area would not build a store in.
Now there are big food desserts with this so called “Free Market” mentality and everything is higher and shittier. So much for that supply side economics bullshit about trickle down. It just trickles shit down like a stream of diarrhea shit dripping from a over filled deep dark chocolate Mocha milk shake that is really full of shit. I hate this shit today everywhere. It’s ruined so much in this country and there are no mom and pops that can compete with it. They treat their employees like shit and service sucks and so forth.
Then you got the yuppie fools who buy into that Instacart and Uberized bullshit with those companies delivering shit that is marked way up, costs way too much to deliver and raises prices for everybody while fucking anybody that works for them in the process. That’s the great service economy they said would be so great with the Reaganomics trickle down bullshit and break up of unions. Now nobody is happy and it’s all fucked up everywhere. People need to just get off their lazy ass and go shopping and with the shit out of control now they’re going to have to because the big bust is coming soon.
I always liked to go shopping and always was discriminated with pricing of things. I want to save money and get the most I can get and never pay into that gimmickry and trendy shit other than the money I waste with Starbucks but there is a reason I do that and I don’t do it often and do get the most out of that I can. Now they’re getting to be all focused on drive thru customers and delivery too and so the shops are not any fun to spend time at so I am not spending time there much anymore either because of that. I hate going to a ghost town.
This fucking COVID just fucked everybody’s head up somehow and it’s effects are still present and getting worse. The only good that came out of it was the work at home thing but these big corporate assholes are just itching to fuck that up by not paying people and then forcing people back into there little offices so they can keep control and work them like slaves. I swear, I am just so sick of living in this environment today and it’s been at light speed right down the toilet since about 2016 when Trump got elected but it was really going on around 2000 forward and spiked once before about 2005 before Facebook, after that –it just has been on a fast train to a demise of humanity and culture and so much else.
When I was at the Kroger tonight about the leave and smoking a cigarette while killed time waiting to go over to the bus stop out front to wait for it, this young girl was there putting her small backpack of stuff away. She was so short and young and I just couldn’t help notice how nicely she was dress and pretty she was. I didn’t stare at her but I just saw her and it just brought back so much in a way and I felt so old too. I thought about the time too because it was about the time I use to drive up to the Wawa on the highway and take my coffee break and leave about this time or a little later after an hour or so coffee break listening to music and after seeing either Kim or Caitlin or both. I was missing that and them.
This girl at the Kroger surprised me when she finished getting her bike off the bike rail that was locked up and was ready to leave. She turned to me and said hi and told me she thought my little skirt I was wearing was cute and then said good night and was just so friendly yet a little shy too. It sort of tickled me and gave me a little hope I guess that at least she didn’t see me as a pervert or anything and didn’t mind my little girlish outfit complete with my breasts on and all. I said something back to let her know I appreciated and it she left but the point is, it was just nice to have a little interest of some kind after so long since this harassment thing went on and I lost so much and was isolated so badly. She was probably a bit too young in her early 20’s but it was so sweet of her to do that I thought.
I was thinking about Kim afterwards and how much I miss her since our little moment I wrote about and the fact that she had been growing on me a lot before all that shit happened anyway and yet she never knew that and I always thought she didn’t really want me in her life or to go out so I kind of left her alone and just made small talk and teased her sometimes and would sometimes inadvertently piss her off but not with intent of course. Then Kim sort of finally revealed herself a little more and what she felt I think at the end like I did with her with the DVD. I wish we could’ve followed that up somehow and this harassment wasn’t going on because I don’t think she would’ve disappeared like she did right before that shit heated up real bad and they took it out on me and Caitlin. I would’ve probably asked her at least for her number if not just asked her out to a pizza or something.
I am not going to write a lot tonight about Kim or the Wawa girls because I spent so much time last night doing it but I really do wonder what happened to her and why she just disappeared without ever mentioning anything in particular that would indicate she was planning to do that. I mean it wasn’t my business I guess but she probably would’ve said something and I would’ve figured it out and she never did. It was like we had our little moment that night and I never saw her again. I checked several times for her.
I didn’t know how to ask about Kim or what to say and her sister was so sketchy with me for some reason so I didn’t want to ask her. I mean she wasn’t really mean but she just was always so pointed frustrated with me and a little bitchy to me and I never did anything to her. I will always wonder why that was. Anyway, they lived together in their own apartment they shared so I had heard so she would’ve known. I am not sure why she didn’t leave or the other girl I think was related didn’t either yet never would talk to me or say anything but they all knew something.
Kim’s older sister took care of Caitlin in a way through all of this. Then the last time I saw Caitlin working when I walked up there (on a day they would’ve normally been there) –the entire store was loaded with completely different people except Caitlin so maybe Kim’s sister and that other younger girl who might’ve been her youngest sister left too as did other people I kind of was acquainted with who knew me there. It was just weird to say the least. I just keep wondering how long this shit was going on in the background with the harassment scheme and Henrico Mental Health.
I trace it back to one girl before all of this and I thought it was kind of weird in that situation but at the time like I wrote before, I didn’t suspect anything and nothing else weird was happening but she too was like giving me these weird stares like Caitlin was at the end before that last time I saw her. She wanted to tell me something.
I didn’t know how to ask because it was so personal (I didn’t even know her name because I forgot to ask or look at her name tag) and I hardly knew her too but it always bothered me because I really liked the girl and we had, had some good conversations a few times right as COVID lockdowns were winding down. What the hell did they do to her. She just disappeared too and it was the second time she disappeared. She had done this a year or so before that and I think much of it but the last time I saw her that time, she looked very distraught about something and I didn’t know how to follow it up without fishing too much or being too obvious.
I sometimes wonder if that whole store and all those girls I knew and liked were not just staged there for the sole purpose of some clandestine plan in the future which turned out to be this harassment obviously in 2020 onward until I got thrown in the jail over that bullshit at the other Wawa by my house. I mean there was that incident at the Starbucks with Hannah that turned out to be real fishy and involved in this somehow too. I just left that situation alone once the shit started to digress and that’s how I met Kim with my brother one night when we used to go there regularly when he was still alive.
Kim did know I liked her because she was making coffee her first day I think it must’ve been and was so young and just sat there taking her time with the new coffee cannister putting up there as I looked her and thought myself on the rebound “I got to flirt with her the next time I get up here and get to know her…” It was so funny, she just sort of smiled and I knew I had to meet her.
God, the life I have had to live and these “check out chicks” as I call them or essential workers. But then, it’s like I never felt like it was bad, I really did like them once I got to know them and they liked me in many cases so why was it anybody’s business. All of them were of age and they sort of filled a void that created back when I graduated in 1995 and then lost Tracey too. In the case of Kim, as far as I know she was no setup and it was real. She was just six years younger at the time and more giddy than she was later. She was not the kind of person that would participate willingly in some setup. I think that’s why she disappeared in the first place after our marriage moment. She probably couldn’t stand what was happening and go the hell out of there and maybe her sister just stayed to take care of Caitlin who was the target this last time with the harassment.
I don’t know, it’s just disturbing to think a fucking person in Mental Health and people like cops would under official duty facilitate this bullshit. They ought to be prosecuted and sued through the nose and ass and never be allowed to ever wear a badge or practice anything in Mental Health again. The shit I saw Caitlin going through was horrible and the worst of the abuse like it was with me. I think she was unwittingly setup herself. She had come there a year or so before and then abruptly left after I kind of flirted with her and blew her off because it seemed hopeless. I remember her almost starting to laugh once as I tried to initiate conversation with her and was talking to her and she glanced back to her side as if to glace at someone in the back by the deli where Kim worked. I think Kim may have even been working that night or maybe she was off but it was like she acted really weird –just not normal for a young girl. She wasn’t mean or crazy but she was just acting suspiciously like she had been told to do something that was funny or something. I don’t know.
Then Caitlin was gone for a year maybe it was two (I forget) and showed up again and it started when she came to work a little while after that –she waved at me and smiled as I sat in my truck having coffee observing people like I always did around there –it was the afternoon. I didn’t know who this girl was and had never talked to her when she got back because of what happened before a year or so earlier. I left her alone so why was she suddenly interested? I hadn’t talked to her at all when she came back. I just went there like I always did, usually at night when it was slower and when I took my coffee break but sometimes in the mornings.
Me and Caitlin talked a few times after that as I made a point to get to the bottom of who she was and why she did that. She was a nice looking girl. I liked who she seemed to be but something was a little odd with her still. She talked to me once outside and almost broke down and cried and had to catch herself meanwhile she had a mini-van that wasn’t hers with the back door open for a long time when she was inside while I was there and it had all these baby toys in there scattered about. Why was that done? Maybe it was nothing but why was she almost crying with me and had to keep composure.
I later found out Caitlin had a kid so she said in passing I might add as she walked back to the office when I was in line and saw her so I knew that’s probably what it was. She knew I didn’t know and probably thought I would ditch her for that and of course I made a point later to make sure she knew while I couldn’t be a second father for her I didn’t hold that against her either. Yet Caitlin never told me directly about it. It was like there was this little game going with her somehow and I just kept fishing around and hoped I didn’t fall prey to some stupid trap or game but she seemed sincere and sweet in many ways too. I just never could quite put a finger on what was going on with her but something was but it didn’t seem like it had something to do with this whole harassment thing I got wrapped up in.
Caitlin mentioned too that she had the weekend off to see her baby as if to imply someone else was keeping her baby which seemed odd too given the context and her age and other things I profiled about her just reading little things she would do and say and her car and so forth. She never once showed up with her baby which was kind of odd too but that could’ve been for a number of reasons so I didn’t really think much of that. However, things started happening real fast as the harassment ramped up with her cars.
Caitlin told me she was lead foot and I teased her a little about it and told her to get dash cam an be sure to roll tape. Then suddenly she went through like four cars in less than a few months, totaling one just a week or two after she had it repaired and had to wait weeks for that to be done. She got a rental or some small car, totaled that in a week or two then she had her mother’s SUV so she said and that was a nice Toyota and moderately expensive but typical for a middle class person.
I think Caitlin was living at home. I remember once when she had just got her first car I knew her to have fixed after the wreck, she came to work and had this smashed out passenger side window which was real odd too. It was like somebody smashed it out and pulled someone out of there like either the cops or who the fuck knows but she never mentioned having a boyfriend –in fact she said she was lonely and had no friends and slept all the time and worked so much she didn’t have time to hang out with the friends she once hung out with and I could sense she didn’t really like those people whoever they were. She approached me out of the blue when I went there one evening for coffee and I couldn’t turn her away against all my gut instincts telling me to keep a distance.
I mean I literally had a churn in my gut at the time Caitlin approached me that one night at the coffee stand and I always wondered why that was. I also had to do a double take because I didn’t want another relationship like I had with Tracey and have it get ugly and really my heart was with Kim anyway. Then of course I was losing Kim because she was graduating and it hadn’t been settled, something where I pissed her off and wanted to make it up to her (which was the real inspiration for the DVD as well as the way Kim sort of had that last golden hour with me where she really put all out to let me know what she could that she liked me still.)
I made a point to ask Kim first if I could do it for her because of our little mess years before when I tried to ask her out. I had been kind of keeping a distance with her too but I liked her a lot and she was growing on me as both me and her got older even before the harassment really began in earnest. I had known her like six years at the time. It was just complicated because I didn’t want to get into some jealously game and then later on it ended up that way after I did the DVD for Kim and gave it to her. Caitlin blew up out of the blue. I had tried to give a little USB key with an impromptu message on video to her explain that DVD because I sensed she was upset and that was the only way I could do it so I tried and she almost had me banned from the store but didn’t. She cried so much though. It was awful.
I left for a few weeks and started to go the one in Hanover to give time to cool things down but then I decided to just go back because I wasn’t going to let that happen over this shit but I was careful to avoid Caitlin and leave her alone and damn it the first day I didn’t even realize it but she was right there beside me at the coffee stand just as I thought I was safe and she broke down and cried and ran to the back and I really didn’t do that on purpose. It was after that, that things started getting more and more weird with her. The stuff with the cars, the stuff she was doing when she left work and the way she looked at me all the time.
Caitlin wanted to talk at first then she got really scared as if I was going to kill her or something and that’s when Kim’s sister sort of walked to her car and helped her somehow in the background. I was grateful as weird as it was, that she did do that. That last I was there Kim’s sister took Caitlin to her truck and they waited for me to leave first and I waited for them and she wouldn’t go so I just left and knew Kim’s sister was with her so I was ok but it pissed me because I knew this harassment was way out of hand and already had got other innocent bystanders I knew involved in shit they had no business being dragged into.
The way Caitlin was being abused was the worst of the worst I knew about but I wonder about the other girl “C-Scrub” because back then it was so quiet and nobody else seemed to know or act funny with me –just her. It was really sad in retrospect last night when I wrote thinking they might’ve really worked her over too for some reason. She was about Kim’s age and they both were friends. But Kim never said anything or indicated anything weird at the time. It was just these double stares this girl would always give to me as if she wanted to tell me something and was feeling really bad about something. She was not mad at me.
C-Scrub liked me as I did her but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want a big jealousy thing there either because Kim was the girl that had my heart first and still did too. The whole name thing was just a joke. The girl had such a funny personality and well she was nice looking like Kim and it was just an off the cuff thing not anything serious. I feel so guilty about it now. It was just the first time I felt comfortable about that sort of thing and seeing the girl that inspired it and all but I knew better than to objectify her like that because I really liked her personality and her as a person most of all.
I wonder if these assholes who harassed me sexualized her like they tried to do me or sexualized the situation or my character somehow like I was going to rape her or violate her somehow or was some pervert. I never would’ve done any of that. It scared me to death –the reality if she really did want to do such things and knowing her, in her normal state, she’d laugh and probably want to and I just thought it was a funny little secret until she started acting so weird and sad and doing those double stares at me all the time.
The worst I would’ve done maybe is ask her and Kim on a double date with both of them as friends so I could get to know Kim better and be the other girl’s friend like Kim was and we all would’ve benefited socially I guess but I didn’t even consider that at the time. I just knew this girl put a good word in for me over that skirt thing that kind of seemed to upset Kim for a while at first when I first started openly letting people see the girl side of me and dressing as a girl.
I didn’t know shit about “C-Scrub” much but we talked a few times she was fun to talk to and I had overheard her say once to Kim, she hated Mechanicsville and well I do too so it was funny, I sort of laughed to myself about that –those goddamn fake rednecks out there. That’s why I hate it and I got a little redneck in me but those are so fake out there and sick too and well it was just so damn funny. I wonder what happened to her out there.
Anyway, with Caitlin, when I returned to the store after our little break and I was going to the Hanover location right up the highway a mile or two to help Caitlin (I hoped) calm down and see I didn’t mean her any harm or to hurt her –I just walked in and thought Caitlin was up front. She wasn’t and was right where I was at the coffee stand to my left and she’s short so I didn’t notice her as I was scanning the store to stay out of her way. Then I turn and look down and there she is all frustrated and crying and she ran to the back.
It was so sad and I hated it because I really did make an effort to accommodate her at least for a while so we could just return to strangers we were to each other if that’s what she was most comfortable with. After that, it got worse and worse. But there was a short period where I almost was able to get to talk to me so I could explain this shit to her better and maybe avoid this kind of shit in the future and then is when the harassment began to blow up quickly. Whoever was behind this shit didn’t want me making up with her or talking me talking to her and having any social contact at all. They kept working her hard as they were trying to isolate me to having contact with nobody and being complete on my own alone. They had already been doing shit at the Starbucks downtown too with the girl I liked there and had just started talking to on and off lightly so I could maybe get to know her and maybe ask her out which I intended to do if things didn’t work out with Kim which they didn’t.
It wasn’t working out with Caitlin either. I just wanted to make some friends more than anything else but I did have a special thing for Kim in particular because she had been there so much longer and I knew her longer and she was growing on me little by little as I observed her and changed myself during that one year of healing I did before this shit started.
Caitlin didn’t say it but she did mention her mother’s truck and I just got the sense her mother was handling her life because of things she got wrapped up in when she was younger. Of course when I heard about Kentucky, I knew the deal with that. Caitlin was probably with some druggie crowd in high school and had an illegitimate kid or was raped or something. She had all the signs of that emotionally –some kind of abusive relationship if not a very bad one that involved rape of some sort. She always was worried I’d send her “dick pics” too which I wouldn’t ever do to anybody. I don’t want “pussy pics” either like some of these dumb ass men these days. That shit is sick to me –all of it.
Caitlin was hiding so much and yet she didn’t have to but I respected her as much as I could. I could read between the lines and always have with people. I can profile people too and always do in situations like this. It’s just second nature to me. Most of the time I am pretty close to spot on though sometimes I make mistakes like anybody especially when I am being setup like they did with that youngest sister of Kim’s who resembled “c-scrub” and whom I thought was weird until I later found out more through observations of her and things she did.
Kim’s youngest sister (if it was her sister –they looked pretty much close facially –I can see the genetic similarities) was involved in this scam too and I am not sure she even realized what she was in the middle of. She did some weird shit leaving work one day with her little Impala doing a funky spin around as if I was tailing her which I wasn’t and almost caused me to rear end her the way she did it but she made a clean move and somebody had to teach her that.
Why Kim’s youngest sister (or whoever she is) did it is a mystery to me too because I made a point to leave before she got off –though it was just a few minutes. Somehow she got to the light just as I pulled up there too so maybe they had something on my truck or used my phone to track me in my truck because I did look a few times as I recall and randomly look when I feal with something funky but it’s easy to forget. I have nothing to hide but I don’t want someone setting me up either so I guess I’ll have to scan my truck somehow from now on in the future regularly.
I saw some shit on TikTok where a guy used a cellular jammer and frequency jammer on his vehicle which I didn’t know was illegal but it is (however they got to catch you and there’s probably ways to pulse it to make them never find it) –and because he took the same route, that’s how he got caught but it was so funny, he did it for years because he was pissed off at people driving and texting and clogging traffic. It even interfered with the entire cellular networks at several companies and law enforcement and emergency response shit too.
I had considered a jamming device after this shit that was done to me. I still may do it but just a different kind of way that is legal or in the grey where they could never quite finger you for it. Fuck these people, if the law allows them to do this shit to me, why shouldn’t I have a way to protect myself? I would simply find a way to dismember the device and also pulse the jamming technique and use a similar undocumented technology and they’d never figure out what the hell it was –it would just do it’s things when you need it to. They treated me like some spy in a foreign land and abused me, damn if they’ll get away with it easy again. The goddamn local cops abused me so why should they be able to freely communicate false information? It’s bullshit. That’s another law they need to revisit and change so people can keep these out of control mostly local law enforcement abuses in check.
Anyway, the point is this girl who may or may not have been Kim’s sister and who resembled “c-scrub” like she resembled Kim herself acted real weird to me and even let me study her face like I said that one time so I know she’s got to be related to Kim. She even cracked a smile but never would talk to me at all yet talked to some old guy once in the store and seemed to be a really nice girl so it was obvious she was doing this on purpose to spook me and be part of this false reality these assholes were trying to create –the so called psychosis I didn’t really have.
I know Kim would never sign off on some shit like this so I am not sure why this girl did. Even Kim’s other bitchy sister who didn’t like me wouldn’t have done that shit. It’s all weird and more weird the more I reflect. Maybe the entire family was in the middle of this shit somehow. They did drive fleet government GSA auction Impala’s except Kim. There were two of them, one blue and one tan. Kim’s bitchy sister always drove the tan one and once put ghetto rims on it and after I joked on the DVD message I did for Kim –they were quickly gone. I found that rather odd given the context.
The youngest of the girls used to come to work in the tan one her other sister had and they sometimes showed up together and then she started driving the blue one she had this night she did that driving stunt someone had to teach her because it was kind of tricky to do that without fucking up your car or causing a wreck and she did it perfect. I don’t know. I hope it’s not true that they willing participated and all of it was a lie from the start but who the hell knows. Stranger things have been true in the end. Maybe Kim got too emotional and couldn’t take it anymore or maybe she was just cunning and cold and didn’t care and participated but I kind of doubt it because my instincts just tell me that about both Kim and her bitchy sister but that youngest girl –I really don’t know. She did what she did and it was obviously a game to her and funny.
If I were going to tail her, I would’ve done it and she would’ve never knew it but I am not going to do that unless I really had to –especially to some young girl or some girl related to a girl I did know and like or just a girl I liked and read fairly well like Caitlin. I could’ve put a device on her car without her ever knowing shit and known in real time or later everywhere she went, times dates and locations and could’ve gotten a device to hack her phone and listen in and she’d never know it and I’d know everything I wanted to know.
It’s that easy now to dig dirt and track people and while some of it is technically illegal some it has not been legislated at all because it’s such new technology and there are all kinds of constitutional questions too. Needless to say, I should’ve and should’ve done it with Caitlin too like I almost started to do the old fashion “Rockford” way. I didn’t want to hurt Caitlin or scare her though but I did want to know what the hell the deal was with her and why this shit was getting strange with her so abruptly.
I may have avoided a lot of the shit that happened later if I had put a trace on Caitlin. I should’ve found out where she lived, grabbed the garbage one night from her house and did a profile on that like I did at the carriage house with that crazy bastard the FBI later took down right after my little “crash” there. Back then it was so funny, I had just done garbology on this guy was tempted to tap his fax line right outside the window and run it to my half assed computer to get a copy of his outgoing shit just to see what he was really doing. Everyone knew he was coning people but the feds apparently didn’t have enough to get him yet so he got away with for a long time while I lived there and I did this in the spring before the shit hit me so it was funny because if the CIA was involved like I think they were, they would’ve had this shit I had and known it and passed along most likely.
It’s really funny that right after that he got busted for exactly what I thought he was up to –a big ponzi scheme I deciphered from his garbage dump once he thought nobody was watching but I was because I knew he was dirty as shit. God knows what I’d find in Caitlin’s family trash and her trash if she had a separate can. I probably would be embarrassed to find some fucking sex related items from her trash. I mean she’s got to be a horny girl sometimes at least.
It’s so ridiculous and funny –garbology and what you can decipher from that shit that people don’t realize. All little tidbits paint larger picture and I know how to do this shit well. I remember those personality tests in college would always peg me into these professions involving private investigators amongst other things like that as well as sciences and strategic planning like I had thought about doing for political shit but decided against because of the nasty climate building since Clinton got elected.
Never leave one tidbit or stone unturned is the rule with investigation of people and events, no matter how trivial or small or unrelated it may seem on it’s face. It’s what intelligence people do too. That’s what is so funny about all this shit. Those dumb ass Mental Health people really underestimated who they got involved with and who I was and how I think and operate especially under fire and after the fact like now.
I am going to burn their ass for this shit and get some money out of their ass for it too because I am going to sue the fuck out of this county for that shit too. It was that way in 1995 though we didn’t have all the nice cheap technology we do today back then that makes it even easier for anybody –even average people with some sense to do counter intelligence and figure shit like this dirty as shit out and prove it and set them up too with little traps of your own to use later when you can’t fight back in real time while it’s happening.
During every one of these manufactured mental crisis’ I had since 1995 I always did that, I call it “rolling the tape” and just remember every detail, take notes visually and tag them in your mind if nothing else is available and after you survive if you do, you can piece it all together and stick up their ass and play them more if you have to. I had to do that for 28 years because I had no support otherwise or money but the records don’t like and they are all official records that better add up (and I know mine don’t) and if you get a lawyer(s) involved, their going to sink like the Valdez with a lot of political and civil and maybe criminal liabilities. They sure are this latest time because they were so fucking embolden they got real sloppy.
The thing is, I never did anything politically to warrant any of this even if they were planning to fuck someone. They fucked the wrong son of bitch because I do know people and know how the system works and I know how the CIA operates to some degree and I know enough about intelligence and counter intelligence to get myself by just fine. I could probably had gone into that after college and been paid well and not had to fuck anybody but just analyze information and plan stuff that was legitimate to track bullshit going on.
Henrico Mental Health doesn’t like that either and they thought they were going to take me out this last time and facilitated things that could’ve killed me and they know I know it and know I know they did it and now I bet they’re sweating bullets because of how sloppy they were and how much I do really know and didn’t buy into their little pill game and nut house game and co-dependent soup kitchen logic bullshit.
Those police better know it ( what I just wrote too) because now they’re involved in a real dirty way too and I am going to burn their ass too politically and sue them maybe too and the sheriffs office as well as commonwealth’s because they are all involved in this political mess created by Henrico Mental Health’s little games with me. They’re going to regret ever fucking me like they did recently too because I am going to make them eat shit at every turn.
Those elected officials who are Democrats in this county are going to eat shit if they don’t pull the plug in my favor too because they’re now involved like the Commonwealth’s Attorney and Sheriff’s office. Either they participated willingly or were lied to. I already had it out with a collector for the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office over this shit and told them, I don’t have money to pay them and then hinted around about the lies and deceit and this harassment suit.
I’ve been tagging shit online so I know it gets around to them sooner or later too. They wanted to make it political, I told Mental Health they didn’t want to do that and they did anyway so they get what they got coming. Shannon Taylor (Henrico’s Commonwealth) is a pretty transparent person and I voted for her and I just can’t imagine she really knew about this but I will hold her to fire when I write her office about it because these fucking people did this shit and I got fucked in court over it twice now –I did in 2005 too for shit Mental Health facilitated and did back then and lied about. They probably lied to her and so did the police. She’s going to shit a brick when she finds out what really was going on. I just know she will. She’ll remain silent but it’s going to burst sooner or later when I get some lawyers up the county’s ass both for the criminal violations and civil liabilities involved. We’re talking civil rights violations, human rights violations, deceit and harassment and violations of both federal and state law that Henrico Mental Health facilitated and active participated in too. It does not look very nice and it will blow up in the media once it gets out there like that recent case where they were involved in letting some poor black kid get murdered in the Henrico Jail.
They settled that case I mentioned for 8 million and would not take fault but everybody knows. Meanwhile 13 deputies are charged with murder after the Sheriff found out what happened and turned them over and this all occurred like a week or two after I was shipped off to Marion where the state nut house is. I know Mental Health was behind that somehow though not directly. They’re out of control with this harassment shit in this county and using mental illness as cover for all this dirty shit they’re doing like harassing me over the property and all out of the blue after years leaving us alone after I got the State Senator up their ass about that.
That time the state senator fried the county’s ass was when the county was harassing my mother with some turp in the building code section (not really mental health) but it was the same sort of shit they tried again this time with Henrico Mental Health facilitating it against me secretly. I am not stupid. I knew exactly where that was coming from when that woman handed me that paper right out of their stupid play book with the phone numbers that was photocopied from their office. It was ridiculous. There was nothing going on with me and I was fine until right after that when they started stepping up the harassment to a boiling point about the time Caitlin was involved in it.
This entire county has this secret little war going against poor people and they love to get mental health clients because they’re easy fooder they think. Well they’re going to find out now the made a very bad decision of who to fuck with. A very, very bad decision because I was going to be a political operative one day after college to clean ups shit like this and get people elected to fight assholes like this and I had just decided not to because I didn’t want to spend my time swimming in shit like this all my life but well, I have forgotten my skill and tricks and I know the game all too well, probably better than some young people doing it now. I am up there with Carville and the like.
I know my shit but I didn’t want to be dragged into this pissing contest at my age because of this shit for sure. I didn’t want to when I was young because it’s dirty business and the climate was just going to hell then too. I would’ve been a son of a bitch though and probably won a lot of them, maybe even a presidency for somebody if I had. The irony of it is here, we go again, all these years later and I am already pissed off as are a lot of people with the political state this country has gotten into and I am older, got even less to lose and I’ll go in and they’ll be sucked into a pile of sinking shit when I come to play.
When I am finished, I’ll die in peace knowing their asses are swimming in shit forever for this shit. Maybe those girls I knew that I liked and were stolen from me or denied a chance to share something with me  will get older can have kids and make enough money and raise them and have a family with a real future in a better place. Maybe someone like Kim will jump in and become a political operative and burn their ass some more. She’s got the ability little did I know because I saw it only once and I know it when I know it. I guess that’s kind of one more reason I kind of obsess over her though all these years later.
I haven’t seen Kim in three years now and miss her because if she was political like I think she was, I would teach her every trick I knew and somehow we’d share something like that before I am dead and I would be so proud to see her succeed and become a force on her own. She was a smart intelligent girl but a humble soul who did care about something. I know that much. She was not somebody in it just for power or money with anything —she hated that as evidenced by what she spontaneous said to me about Trump and was so angry and passionate about it. I had never seen her that angry and I told her then –just hold that thought –I wanted to say more, but I told he’s got what he’s got coming –just wait and now that asshole is getting it –that whole Trump movement is.
I really burns me that she disappeared out of the blue so abruptly after we had our moment not because she might’ve moved on which may be what she did but I kind of think she didn’t do it for that reason. She told me just a week or so before that how she wasn’t sure what she was going to do after graduation. She had no real plans so I think she got the fuck out of there because of what was happening to me that she had no control over and was angry about. She did all she could do to let me know she cared and I knew already she did but she was so especially sweet and it meant so much to me and doing the DVD was bitter sweet because I didn’t want to let her go but I sort of felt like she would someday soon anyway and I wanted her to know how I felt about her. I didn’t expect her to leave so soon though. She just did on her own without ever hinting she was about to. I think there was some reason for that that had to do with me and what was happening that she felt like she couldn’t tell me or just couldn’t because she had to deal with the potential harassment coming on her if she did. It’s so sad. I wanted so much to love her someday or learn to or at least give it a try.
As for Caitlin, I don’t want to lose track here like I have, Caitlin meant something to me in a different way. She was a friend and I needed a friend with Kim going like I thought she was because she finished college and had always told me she didn’t want sling subs all her life. On top of that Caitlin was really an emotionally unstable person in the sense she was trying so hard to start over from something ugly in her past and I just knew it though I never really told her that or the fact that I was myself in a lot of ways since my brother died and I was finally on my own with all the negatives (so I thought) out of my life at least with my so called fucked up family.
I wanted to give Caitlin some hope too like Kim gave me and just be there if she would let me and I think she would’ve if not for this other shit going on but then again maybe it all was a setup from the git go and she didn’t care at all but I find that hard to fathom given little things we shared and the way she was with me at first and what I observed with her when she didn’t think I was watching. Somebody was abusing her the entire time if it was a setup and she didn’t realize it until later and I seriously doubt it was her own family. She never mentioned her family much, just her mother but she obviously had a father and there as an ARMY sticker on her mother’s SUV so they probably used the Army to get the hell out of Kentucky (hence the vacation story I wrote about the other night.)
Out there in Kentucky, people are poor as shit and live a hard life generally and it’s hard to break that cycle and I am not sure Caitlin herself was ever there for long but she may have been an illegitimate baby herself that her parents had and they wanted to get her out of there for her own good and one thing led to another and they came to Virginia and somehow she got in with a bad crowd when she was real young in high school and repeated the old Kentucky cycle sort of. It was sad. It’s hard to know exactly what the truth was because that’s such a personal thing and I didn’t want to nose around about it too much. I just know from what I know about Kentucky and then I looked up Kentucky and a lot about it after she told me that vacation story. I already knew some stuff because of my grand mother’s mother had moved out there way back in the 20’s I guess it was –it was even worse then. There was this lady with a store out in Hickman Kentucky who often took care of stuff with my grandmother’s mother back then. The mother was like almost 100 then and died shortly after that. She lived in “graves county” Kentucky in a shotgun shack where she started decades ago I guess.
The Mormons also took care of my grandmother’s mother too but she was never a religious person and always hid her tobacco, whiskey and coffee under her bed and they never knew she had it. She had a shotgun too and that was about it. She was a character no less –I can’t remember all the stories but she’d kill a bastard and almost did when this guy fucked with my grandmother but decided to just “injure” him I think with the shotgun –I don’t remember if they killed him later or not but this was so far back in nearly the 1900’s or so –it was like the wild out there here in Virginia too near Charlottsville in a town called “Howardsville” which is still there today.
I bet Howardsville probably has suffered some gentrification too like everything today but in the 80’s it was pretty much like it always was, just a small dot on the map and town washed out from the hurricane during the Nixon years in 72. It’s where the James river meets with another river (I forget the name of it) and turns into the James and heads to Richmond which also was hit by huge floods during that hurricane that year. It’s not far from Fork Union on Route 60 I think (Patterson Ave lot of laughs here in Richmond.) I used to love riding up there just to relax and see the old country so to speak. It’s not changed a lot but with all this gentrification it’s getting a little shitted up in some places.
They lived in an old slave quarters on this small plantations of sorts there. It was a minified Jefferson style thing at UVA. It was for sale ironically the last time I looked it up to see if the town changed. I went there a few times with my brother and grandmother when she was in good health and it sort was washed out by Agnes in 72 and never fully recovered back then. The waterlines were still on all the stuff in the little town but they did have this one country store still there and it was pretty good. I liked it up there actually. It’s not that far from Richmond.
Anyway, the point was that after my grandmother turned about 18-20 (I don’t remember) she wanted to come to Richmond and live so her mother moved on to Kentucky and this was in the early roaring 20’s. My grandmother worked in a box factory down here and met her husband at this dance club downtown which I had just walked by the other day. It was in what is now an abandoned Standard Drug building or the building next to the old infamous “Progressive Barbershop (a black owned shop) as I recall. It was on the black side of the street, the street across was the white side (Broad Street).
My grandmother’s husband had a little half assed shop in Shockoe Bottom because he was also poor and then they somehow rented or bought this house which is one of few left on Cary St. by where lot where the State Prison used to be –the godless 100 year old one they finally tore down and moved to Greenville. The funny thing is, you can look from there all the way to the Jefferson Hotel right where I had my carriage house. Oh god, the stories are endless and I don’t recall all of them or miss some of the details but I’ve heard plenty from both my mother and grandmother when she was in good health.
There was a lady that used to own a Western Auto out there in this town with all these inbred people who had a genetic deformity in the same arm and were just poor and uneducated –products of the shit that goes on out there. That lady left Kentucky and was smart and came back to try to help with the Western Auto when she got married and I can’t remember or never knew her name but she had a store in “Hickman” Kentucky and that’s where the story about the washing machine in the late 80’s came from. They all thought it was a spaceship and never saw one before and were so mesmerized by it but nobody could afford it –it was just a simple washing machine. I guess I never knew all the rich history or forgot some of it but there was a lot just not known because back in those days they didn’t have record keeping like they do today.
My grandmother’s mother was in a “Dry” county too with her shack and you had to go to the next county to get booze. My grandmother gave my brother the house once before she was real sick and out of her head. My damn stupid brother sold it to the county sheriff for taxes. It wasn’t like a mansion mind you but it was a piece of unique history and it was not that much owed. Shit, I could’ve taken Caitlin out there and we could’ve had a road trip to that place and stayed there awhile –I bet her parents would’ve loved it and took both of us because poor Caitlin needed to know her history and I think they were trying to teach her some of it when they made her sit in the truck and just look as they drove out there with a camper to visit someone –that is just what people who have roots there too –you never forget your people especially when they’ve had to be stuck in Kentucky. It’s hard as hell to get out the that hell hole the way it is –long story but it has revolves around coal mining.
I did a few songs for Caitlin about all my feelings and who I was and I am not sure it meant much to her or if she cared. I ended up sort of getting on an deep old country bent with her with music. I learned to play “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” – the Patty Loveless version for her as well as a Johnny Cash song I discovered and Chris Stapleton to start with. I really wanted to someday try to teach her to play guitar and sing and also teach the computer stuff I do like with graphics, video and graphic design and all. I just felt a certain need to do this for that girl and it would’ve been a good way to bond while we did it too and for her learn something that might’ve kept her more at peace and given her more direction inside. She was so empty in a way but so sweet and trying so hard but she needed something more.
She wasn’t real educated and the poor girl I didn’t really know at the deli during this who shit going on before it got real bad –had to explain to Caitlin what certain words meant that I used. It was so funny, that girl, I always wondered about her too because she aways just came and did her job and didn’t fuck with anybody but I think she kind of liked me the way she did that thing for Caitlin and I was there as she did it. It was so weird. I wasn’t offended or anything but I just didn’t know how she felt so I never flirted with her. She was very nice though and educated too. She disappeared each year for college but this time she disappeared along with Kim right as this shit started heating up with the harassment.
Caitlin would go outside when I was there by the side door for employees to use to take out trash and shit and just stand there sometimes early on and just get into this zone and she did that so I would see her. Then one time I drove up to her on the way out to talk to her before I left as she sat smoking and playing with the phone and she seemed so oddly just carefree and out of her zone and just blew me off an I went on my way. It was just weird because usually she’d either be in a zone or she would happily be talking to me. This time she was like just not listening at all on purpose.
Maybe she was on the phone app. She used to use snap chat she said so I knew she was really young and behind because that used to be notorious for the teens and now nobody uses it much. She told me she liked to watch the videos on there but wasn’t on TikTok like I am. She wouldn’t give me her user name on Facebook and said she never sued it too and well there were these little oddities that started to seem a little out of place. On the one hand she was so sweet and sort of sad and a poor lonely girl but on the other she was this carefree almost calculated girl and hiding something too but then she’d break down and cry and I know that was real. She would do that “startled look” a lot like she was “caught” with me a few times too so I do wonder if she wasn’t a setup the entire time both times she worked there solely for the purpose of dragging me into some scheme these assholes with Henrico Mental Health had cooked up.
I didn’t doubt Kim or the other girls so much like that because they were real with me and straight except of course they were dragged in later along the way somehow and it was not willingly. With Caitlin it seemed almost like she was being directed to do things. I never said shit, I just let her be herself and see what she would do and just observe too. I was going to follow her once but decided against it because it was just to creepy and I figured if she is a fake, then so be it, I will just stand back which I kind of did anyway later on.
When Caitlin saw my pussy that was one of those moments where it was like so funny but so weird because she did get caught and she knew it and I knew something was odd then. She knew I dressed as girl all the time and so why was it so important to see my fake pussy popping like I used to do and still do because I love it. I left it alone but it kind of hurt in a way. I just sort of fished with her after that to see what she’d do to confirm one way or another if shit was straight with her and I kept running into the same vibe that something was nefarious and not true about her.
I wished I had just asked the random girl out I met downtown during one my Fan walks while all this shit was brewing. She was pretty real as far as I know it, a little older and pretty as shit and she had this dog and was practically asking me to ask her out. I was about to do it but I didn’t want to be playing the field with this shit unresolved with Caitlin.
That girl I met would’ve gone out with me and we probably would’ve had a good time. She had an apartment right down there and a job and wasn’t just a college student and she didn’t care about my girl side –in fact I met her when she was behind me walking the dog and she was smiling and we came side by side at the cross walk and started just talking. She was pretty nice and intelligent and just a good looking girl and I know we could’ve gone out and probably been dating. I swear in the future if I am ever in some helix like that shit with the Wawa girls turned into, that’s what I am going to do –just step away and if I meet some girl like this girl I met I am just going to go for it. She really was a knockout and not pretentious at all. I liked her. Maybe then those assholes harassing me would’ve had a check and couldn’t have played me or those other Wawa girls like they did ultimately do, whatever the details really where.
I miss Caitlin in a way now but I am not sure if I should or if she was even real at this point. I mean it just seemed like from the git go something was not quite right and I walked into an ugly setup that turned even uglier. Yet then, there was a human side to Caitlin that was so seemly sweet and real so I really don’t know. The things is, I couldn’t be romantically involved with her I doubt.
I wanted Kim and had not really gotten over Kim being gone. I mean we had a graceful break and she was sweet to me before she left but I still need time to just not do anything romantic or let myself feel romantic. I would’ve rather just had a girl that I could be very close to minus the sexual commitment given my odd and frankly kinky sexual side and dysfunctions too. I didn’t want some girl expecting me to jump her or fuck her to heaven so to speak because I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to. My whole sexual functioning was fucked up years ago in 1995 with the first bout with whatever this shit is I got dragged into and that Henrico Mental Health kept going.
Then too, there was just all the shit that happened with Tracey too when I wanted that with her (and we should’ve and could’ve had that if not for her problems.) I was fine just keeping sexual gratifications to myself alone knowing few if any girls would want to be with a “guy girl” that had to role play and all that other crazy shit I have to do to enjoy sex even remotely. Frankly, I like my pussy emulator and the vibrator is so goddamn fun –more than anything else and just role playing fantasies. Girls want some tough guy with a big dick and I ain’t it. I am still a fucking virgin really and that’s embarrassing too. I am not gay though like so many people misjudge me for and never really was.
I’d say I am non—practicing bi-sexual that likes sex and getting off but because of dysfunctions growing up and shit that has happened along the way it’s hard for me to just do missionary style wham bam and thank you mam shit. I will say “Clitoral Scrub” did kind of make me horny as shit in a way and that’s where that name came from because I kind of secretly wished she could teach me how to eat pussy and I think that would be so fun especially along with girl thing I have in me and doing at as a girl in a sort of submissive way with another girl. I seriously doubt there are many girls out like that and that Kim would be that way and certainly not Caitlin. Caitlin was all sort of a stacked up four wheel drive F-150 growling diesel mudbogging Bass Pro or Econoline kind of big dick fucking guy if she was anything. But the way she was, it was like she was so hurt by someone sexually, I don’t think she was interested in that all really at the time. She just always got weird with me about that like I was going to jump her and I never even remotely thought of her that way. I was too embarrassed to even remotely fantasize about Kim sexually and I really liked her a lot and wanted to be with her.
God help me, Clitoral Scrub scared the fuck out me in that sense because somehow I think she was the kind of playful girl that would love to fuck and teach and just have fun (given you respected her and didn’t fuck her over or whatever.) I have no idea how Kim was sexually. She’s probably been around but she didn’t strike me as someone that all that into kinky shit or playing the field but I bet she wanted to fuck too given that giddiness she used to hide.
I have to laugh she’d kill me for writing that but I loved her to death in away and loved that giddy side she had and kept hidden like that time she did that stunt with the ribbons and bows that I have a photo of. She was so damn cute. But it just seemed so weird to think about such things because I did care about her and wanted to respect her and be something and if we had sex I wanted her to be able to enjoy it and yet I Knew nothing about sex like she probably does so it always made me a little ambivalent.
Kim would probably be laughing about how bad I was if we had ever done it and if she knew I was still technically a virgin, she’d probably lose interest so fast after her girlfriends found out and they talked. It just sucks (no pun intended) the shit I missed out on not learning how to share sex and have sex long ago because of all the emotional abuse in my life and then some sexual abuse and all the shit I’ve gone through along the way. I am happiest sort of living as a girl but not really a girl and well I to use fantasy and staging and vibrators and my fake pussy and shit. I doubt any of these girls especially Kim would find that very amusing or tolerable.
Damn, it is sad in a way. I mean all these years, I probably could’ve been in a relationship with Kim if it were not for these things and we’d make it somehow and maybe we’d marry each other. I really think we probably would’ve in a different context if life was different and I was closer to her age and all. We just danced around it all the time and it was more me than her really. She’d get so frustrated with me and I knew why but I didn’t know how to do anything better. We couldn’t talk in that work context and I already bombed asking her years before so it was too hard to go ask for her number and worry her again knowing all this shit about myself. Kim became so dainty and just so beautiful in these little ways I never told her about much like the way I saw her being such a good mother someday if she had kids and almost wanting a little girl with her somehow after I saw those two little girls and other little girls when I started hanging out at the coffeeshop and somehow ended up old and thinking about life and family and what I never had and missed out on. Kim was always the go to girl I thought about the most at that point.
I would’ve loved at to at least gone out with Kim like to that arts in the fan thing and we could’ve did some photos and videos together and captured those little girls I got on tape for my British friend. It was so cute, they were just having fun like kids do but you could she their upbringing shining and I had nobody to share the small little wonder and joy I saw and felt that moment having been able to do that. We could’ve closed the evening going the art museum and catching dinner at one of the local places around there too and made a long night of it and come home to her place and I could’ve kissed her good night and went to my shack happy.
I’d bring here but this place is such a terrible edifice of so much demise and is a mess. However, it would’ve been nice to at least cuddle next to her and sleep maybe and fix her breakfast in the morning. I know it sounds dripping romantic but she just made me feel so much and I would’ve loved doing it because I like to cook and all anyway and it would’ve been so sweet to do it for her whether we did anything else or not. I don’t know to this day why Kim happened to be the girl in the end of this little helix in the last several years starting with Hannah –that ended up being the girl I wanted the most and liked the most.
I hardly knew much about Kim but I did know more and we did talk at least. She was real and I didn’t have to doubt myself with her at all. I knew she cared and had feelings of some sort for me though she didn’t realize how old I was at first and got upset (I found out through just pure chance observance once there right after that.) We talked about that by accident and things were ok but then she started getting frustrated a lot with me I think but I didn’t want to ask her out again because I feared she’d blow up and we’d be back at square one.
I kind of kept a distance from Kim too because I knew myself and how weird I am and I didn’t want to disappoint her or drag into my sorry ass life. I don’t know. She just kept growing on me though. All those other girls I chased were gone for one reason or another and Kim was the only girl that really seemed to be right for me in a way because she was just different about things in a lot of ways that most girls her age or other girls I chased in the past in my lame attempts to break my isolated poor social cycle and habits.
Kim was intelligent and worked hard but wasn’t a bitch either or a game player and was honest and while she did get mad and frustrated sometimes I knew it wasn’t just because of me not knowing how to communicate or being afraid or whatever from lack of experience and all. I really admired the things I would see in her when she didn’t know I was looking and listening. She was passionate and she had that giddy side I adored too and was very sociable too and I figured she could find any man given the way she was.
Kim was a nice looking girl thought not like some queen or princess but that’s what I liked. She was a girl next door you could love and get to know and be with and be comfortable with and she knew how to be cute too when she wanted to. I just saw her at work so I never got a chance to see her outside that context. I often wonder what she would wear outside of work. I always wondered where she hung out because I wanted to sort of accidently show up like she did with that damn Jimmie John’s obsession she has. It’s so funny.
I would just never run into Kim anywhere else. It was weird, it was almost like maybe it wasn’t meant to be because of that. Usually, when it’s really meant to be with girls in the past, you always seem to run into them somewhere all the time at the oddest of moments and places. It was like that in college with the girl liked named Susannah. I never even ran into her at VCU when I was down there and she wasn’t working. She had lots of girlfriends it seemed so she must’ve had some common places she would hang out. I just didn’t know where or what they were and didn’t want to get too nosy because I didn’t want to tip her off.
I told Kim I hung out at the Starbucks sometimes but then she serves coffee all day so I knew she probably would not want to be hanging in a place like she works at. I saw her once right as I came from the gay thrift I used to frequent and she had this cute little bag that was so telling about her. She was adorable and god I wanted to go wherever she was going and go shopping. I always thought of her at the thrift when I would go wander around looking and buying good cheap stuff. I did look into her truck one time and it was so funny, I almost felt guilty but I was profiling her lot of laughs. It was so southwestern flavored and she even had this little trinket dangling like Tracey did from the mirror. Oh boy, I would’ve loved to teased her about it and do stuff with it like I used to with Tracey when she’d pick me up and we’d go out when I didn’t have a car. I just couldn’t quite figure if Kim had given up on me or even really wanted me the way I wanted her. I don’t know still.
Caitlin on the other hand was so just wrapped up and would hide her body and I knew why but one time she did come out and walk past my truck and was waving at me with a sub in her hand at lunch time when I happened to be there randomly and it was odd. I had the dash cam rolling and so I have a photo of her. She was all happy and totally unlike she would be some other times. This was before the DVD thing though. I looked at the photo recently and noticed that she had no tattoos on her right arm as she waved which was close to the camera. It was weird be cause I knew she had all these tattoos so I sometimes wonder if that was even her at all but then she did get in the same truck her mother had. Maybe it was her fucking mother for all I know and she got sucked into this and put Caitlin up to it. Who the fuck knows.
I can’t be sure the girl I have in that photo was Caitlin because the other photo of her I have, she’s all wrapped up and seemingly a little shorter and looks just different. This other girl, if it was Caitlin, had reddish hair like Kim but it was shorter and an average woman’s body, proportionate breasts, not bad looking. I wonder if those assholes harassing me did a double take again there like they tried to do with the c-scrub replacement girl and the girl down at the Starbucks and I just didn’t think about it or notice until later. Naturally, I felt what I did thinking it was someone I thought it was who was not really that person. I hope this isn’t true but shit was so crazy that these people did to harass me and try to drive me crazy and create this false reality did some really crazy shit and it got crazier and crazier along the way.
I could barely keep up with the crazy shit going on but I kept up with most of it and remember it all and even in real time I knew most of it but the switching of girls I always missed because I didn’t know these people well and usually would only see them a lot from a distance or was in a rush doing whatever and so it was easy to pull off but then with Wawa it didn’t work so well because I did know Kim and her sister and had more time to study things unlike I did those times they did that once at the Starbucks in the Fan that I wrote about earlier in some other entry. They got me with c-scrub though. I missed that one completely and it was embarrassing because I did a podcast for the girl thinking it was something wrong that it wasn’t. This is when stuff was just starting to come more clear and more crazier by the second but not so much where I was not able to do my usual routines. It all happened so fast too.
Whoever was behind the actual planning of this harassment scheme facilitate by Henrico Mental Health just tried to mimic me and create these things they knew I would be affected by in certain ways and how I handled certain things I didn’t want to directly address just yet. That’s how that podcast happened. I used social media to kind of put shit out there to see if it came back a lot and if I could find anything out later. That was the purpose of that podcast.
I was going on very little with the podcast but my good instincts about people and they just continuously exploited all of that and nobody could react any differently than I did because it moved so fast and was so convoluted. The only way to do it would’ve been to directly address the person question and well, how the hell was I going to do that if I didn’t know them and they didn’t talk to me? It is a form of trial ballooning they do in politics. I know it’s kind of ridiculous but this shit was some serious shit and I didn’t want to embarrass the girl or put her on the spot but I did give a shit and care and they exploited that fact. I really thought the girl in question was c-scrub and I wanted to try to help her if I could or at least get her to talk to me but it was a completely different girl mimicking what c-scrub had done.
I think this shit began around Halloween when these girls got sucked into this shit with me. That’s when I had gone up to see if c-scrub was working because sometimes she did on the weekends if you hit the place the right time. I kind of had a general idea of when those girls would be working if they worked that day. Kim would sometimes work the morning and evening but usually the mornings before she left. She worked evenings a lot during the COVID thing so I’d see her a lot and stop by to see her when I went to Starbucks on the way home sometimes if I saw her truck there just to see her and hopefully talk to her. I knew nobody at Starbucks at that time because all the ones I liked there were gone by then. I just used the place to get out a little and write and relax because nobody would come inside anymore and everybody just used the drive through. I hated it but it’s still that way and getting that way down in the Fan too.
Caitlin just never came around the Fan as far as I knew because I told purposely once that I hung out there hoping she would come there sometime and we could talk when she was off and not working. She never would come by the Starbucks by the Wawa either. She was just not that kind of girl. She was sort of blue collar and in with a kind of redneck crowd I think and it was sad because she was not a redneck herself but that’s all she seemed to have around her and probably felt so small she didn’t deserve to go to town was my impression. She didn’t want to go to university area because she probably though she was dumb or would look like white trash. It was so sad. I mean she really should’ve somehow gotten into going to college in something of interest and worked too if she wanted and at least had some more exposure to a different lot of people. I think whoever she was hanging around, they were kind pulling her into a bad kind of lifestyle habit and way of thinking too. She kind of once came out and as much as told me that but didn’t once as I recall.
Caitlin worked herself to death she told me because Wawa wanted her to do it and then she’d just sleep all the time when she was off mostly or when she got home. It was so sad. It was obvious she was suffering depression, a deep depression. She told me about her little pajama’s and I wanted to buy her some Yosemite Sam ones I think they are called. I wanted to ask her size but never got a chance too and wanted to sort of surprise her with some. I was going to leave them on the coffee counter and just leave after a visit and come home so I wouldn’t be outside and leave a card with it for her maybe with a little candy or something or do a little gift bag.
I just wanted the girl to stop doubting herself and me and know I did give a shit and wanted to be her friend and share something in life with her that way if we could. Then it just went to hell not long after all that. She was so happy the time she was gone for two weeks and I had asked her where she was because I was just curious and she told me the Kentucky vacation story. She really was so happy that somebody cared and was genuine. That’s why it’s so hard to figure out the deal with her now. In one way she seemed so not real but then she was real and then there were these almost calculated on cue thing she’d do that were aimed at me in particular it seemed.
I never once thought she was setting me up or trying to do me dirty but now I wonder if she didn’t really just come there for that purpose unwittingly and that’s why all that shit that happened was so weird when it started falling apart and the harassment was not only aimed at me but also at her somehow where these people were using her to exploit me and exploiting her in the process.
My gut tells me Caitilin is innocent and honest and cares and is real and didn’t know what this was going to become whatever happened and usually my gut hasn’t been wrong though sometimes it raises questions and I always question even my gut instincts the way I’ve had to go through live and with mistakes I’ve made in the past. I don’t have much experience with girls either except for Tracey and god help me I never thought I’d lose Tracey and that she’d be so nasty and bitter, hateful and vindictive to this day now ever since. I regret ever getting involved with Tracey and letting her use me like she did and she really does hate me and holds an eternal grudge I don’t deserve.
Funny thing is with Tracey, she’s not happy and I know it. She made bad choices and doesn’t want to fess up to the fact I am right and was right during all of that shit with us. That’s another story, I don’t want to ever see her again. She’s worthless to me now because of what she did and the choice she made in the end to blame me for her own mistakes when I tried my best to make up for those I knew about and never abused her at all knowingly and if I did and knew about it, I would go out of my way to make things as right as I could. She’s just so full of anger, bitterness and shit towards me. Why should I care anymore. That was a mistake on my part. She was my age, these other girls are more than half my age and got more sense and respect than she had. That’s very telling for a woman who now 60 years old.
Needless to say Caitlin just really needed someone in her life to bring out some good in her that she didn’t have and inspire her because I know she’s never going to be happy being a store manager hanging around the environment she was in back then. I mean Wawa was or used to be a decent company and they ran a tight ship so how this ever happened on their property and they had anything to do with this is beyond me. But the point is Caitlin is young and has plenty of years to build a good life for herself if she just was in the right environment and around the right people. I doubt she is now. I really do feel for her and care about her but it’s not like I want to marry her or she inspires that kind of thing like Kim does in me.
Caitlin is so sensitive too and I think she thought I didn’t give a shit because I felt different about Kim and well she just wouldn’t seem to realize back then, I am old and I can’t have that with Kim either as much as I wished I could. Kim is also young, but older and she’s intelligent and has a whole life ahead of her and will be 40 year old when I am probably did if I don’t die sooner.
The reality is that it would be a heavy weight for her to invest in me and I wouldn’t want her to in a way though a part of me needs someone like her but the costs of that down the line is delicate and it’s expensive. I came to this realization long before I met Caitlin. If me and Kim did have anything I would still want Caitlin to be a part of that as a friend just as anybody else has their own friends. I wouldn’t be cheating on Kim though and if she had a problem with that, I would end it but you know that shit gets easier said than done in the heat of a love orient relationship like I think Caitlin thought I had or wanted. I did kind of want it but I am not sure I could do it or that Kim would want that or that she could tolerate those realities of age either and so it’s just one of those undiscussed things with us.
How the hell could we discuss it in the context of work at Wawa anyway. Kim would never go out with me and damn if I dropped the conversation into that area she’d probably be as scared as I am and ditch me and run for the border because it was too serious and deep and well it kind of is especially for two people who hardly know each other. However, I did like all of those girls and I need to heal from my past and fill that lost time I had the voids it created somehow so yes, I did like to talk and have some kind of social relationship that could work if I they were ok with it and well I don’t know if they ever were so I never pushed it much. I just tried to accept the little things I could have that touched me and admire from afar if I had to and be at peace.
How this whole thing with Caitlin got to be a jealousy thing I am not sure. I hope it didn’t get that way with the other girls there I liked. I am no prize by any means and certainly not this big Casanova but I like cute youngish girls or shall I say women because I missed all that when I was their age and don’t relate well with older women and am not attracted to a lot of these older women either. It’s so funny, in college I was always hanging with the older crowd my age then —women and a few guys that they had in their life and one of my own where we sort of had a mutually understood transient relationship.
That was Debbie and she sort of taught me something about sex –that I’d liked to fuck and liked girls and was not gay like sometimes I had thought I might be at one time. God I only got it in her for like ten seconds hard and it was incredible but I was so hung up and emotional I couldn’t follow threw even though we slept together that night and she kept trying and later told me once it was fine by her. Even she thought I was gay (lot of laughs) and I wasn’t really –just not quite anything yet.
It was sort of funny, I never got a chance to fuck a girl or eat a girl or anything because shortly after that this whole conspiracy to harass me began three months after graduation a year later and they fucked up my sexual functioning somehow and nothing worked for ten year and now it’s barely there and hard to get off and I only get a dribble (not to be gross) but it was hell having to live with that. It finally came back a little and works a little but not like very well. But I used to be a horny bastard and loved sex and still do in a way. I just can’t perform well and then I finally unrepressed the girl in me and now I’ve tried a little girl stuff like vibrators with my pussy emulator and oh god that is so fucking fun I can’t stand it lot of laughs.
I can go on for hours it seems and I bought this huge ridiculous Chink dick to use to do the girl fantasy thing and that could be used with a girl too and a girl would love that goddam thing and well it helps a little with me cause I can have fun playing little suckity suck daddy’s girl for a bit until it gets old and tiresome and sometimes along with the vibratory device it can be such a blast getting off like a girl even though it’s so nasty in a way afterwards thinking about doing that for real (which I would never do –suck a dick –at least I highly doubt I would. –Men are nasty generally speaking I feel like.)
I dress up and pretend to be the cheer chic or the gymnastics chic and all that shit and it’s so sick but funny and ridiculous but damn it’s fun if you can tune all that negative out and take it for what it is –just a silly sexual foreplay to help with sex and getting off. I doubt there is any girl in the world that would want to participate in crazy shit like this. I always fantasize about being this girl and having the girls make me be girl and submissive and learn how to be the girl and suck a dick –that’s the funniest one if not too embarrassing like it is and nasty it is in a way.
This particular China dick has a tube too on it that holds water or fake cum so you can use that too if you really want to get a good laugh and have fun but jesus, you really have be in a certain mood to do this shit. Lately, it’s so bad I can’t do it much. It seems so sick and perverse but before the harassment I was doing it and had so much fun most of the time but it was a little embarrassing too at times just not as bad as now. It helped me get over a lot of sexual dysfunction both physically and emotionally too.
But, after all the sexualization that went on during the harassment of me, it’s not quite the same. I am very disturbed a lot of times by it and feel like I’ll never have a girlfriend like this and so I avoid girls now and don’t flirt much at all and if they flirt with me –I just kind of ignore it. It was nice tonight that girl actually did talk to me and say something sweet and gave me a little hope even though she was so young. I mean she liked me and it just was nice to know maybe there is hope to recoup some of what I lost in all of this someday before I am too old or die. Those assholes just sexualized me so much and people I cared about like Kim and Caitlin (little does she know) and it was just awful. I have flashbacks sometimes as I try to please myself now and I had been healing from all that before this shit happened and so I am real bitter about it because it’s like I have to start healing that all over again too. I try to imagine sex with girls I like but I always feel like I am violating them or abusing them or am some pervert and this shit I did before this harassment helped get past a lot of that so maybe someday if I was with the right girl we could share a sexual relationship that was healthy somehow despite being kinky at times. Now it’s all gone it seems and like it used to be long before any of this for decades since my brother abused me once or twice sexually.
I tried to visualize Kim too like just tonight that way because of what these assholes had done and how I really feel about her to just see out of curiosity if I could tolerate it and I did for a bit but lost it because of the kinky shit I was doing which really wasn’t all that kinky but knowing Kim as I did, she would be offended so I felt bad and had to stop. I just had my little skirt on I went out in and outfit and just used the vibrator and imagined her doing that to me with her ribbons and bows like in that photos I have of her and it was getting fun and tender and to me and I was enjoying it along her making me do girly shit and all –then imagining using that on her and eating her and well I had to stop –it just didn’t seem right given all that happened.
I never once thought of Caitlin in a sexual way like any of this shit I just wrote and never had the idea come over me to try it. In fact I doubt I could even do it now or ever knowing what I sort of knew about her and thinking of her the way I did. Somebody must’ve abused her sexually somewhere in her life that led to that baby she had. You could just see so many tell tale signs of that like the outburst of crying and the thing about dick picks and so forth. I liked her a lot though and wanted to at least be able to hug her someday but I am terrible with affection too because I never had that in my life growing up either.
I will say when things were good with me and Tracey, she did hug me all the time and it felt so good holding her and dancing close a few times we did that. She had been abused herself and we had talked about that but she was never ready to deal with whatever happened but it was obviously tearing her apart. It came out when I wanted to ask her to touch me and rub my back and maybe later initiate sex and she broke down into a child and just cried after I was really enjoying her rubbing my back for a second. I took her to my room and asked her if she would come and sit and we could talk and if I could touch her legs and rub her legs and feet which she let me do as she cried and I just listened. It was so weird.
The next morning it was like all that me and Tracey shared the night before never happened though and I don’t want to get into that thing again but it was what led to our first major disaster break and later to the 2005 crash where I almost got murdered by the local police SWAT TEAM because of lies and bullshit with Henrico Mental Health when they facilitated abuse and harassment of me back the. We recovered later for a little while but it never was the same and finally it turned to the shit is today. I certainly didn’t want a repeat of that kind of shit with Caitlin because Caitlin was in many earie ways like Tracey. The parallels were sometimes uncanny so I had to be careful and keep a certain eye on things with Caitlin. I didn’t want to get too close because of that but we could’ve gone out to eat or hung out taking photos at the river or something I think if she had let me take her.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Caitlin like it sounds though. I mean I did in a way but I just have been through life long enough to know that the best intentions can turn into the worst nightmares no matter what you do are both of you do in a relationship. Look at what happened to me and Tracey. She never used to be the person she quickly became because she would choose the worst of men to get involved with and I wouldn’t leave her and would always come to clean up the emotional mess for her. I was her defacto boyfriend without the benefits and that was my mistake. I should’ve left her the first time she fucked up with me like that and just made it quiet and just distanced myself and let it die for my own good. I probably should’ve never let her back into my life right before her divorce which I had to tell her to get and walked her through because I did care about her and her husband.
Her husband was not bad but she created a situation where they abused each other and it wasn’t working. I had gone to her wedding in 1995 I think before the crash I had. He was a country boy green behind the ears himself. He always thought I was going to cheat with her so I made a point to stand up for him with her and talked to him sometimes about shit just between us so he finally realized I wasn’t the problem.
It was all sad, the whole thing with Tracey’s marriage –8 years with no sex I might add, but she is still friends with him, she hates me like shit and I still don’t know why she blames me because it’s her own fault what she walked herself into afterward and after our last break when I wrote her a letter and was direct about shit with her after she got progressively shitty with me when I needed her to be my friend and to be there for me after all the times I had been there for her.
So many times Tracey was not there for me when she should’ve been and this last time I finally just laid it on the table we didn’t speak for six years and she even tried to sue me with this bogus lawsuit some asshole put her up to which I got rid of quickly. It was the principle of it though.
Tracey went out of her way to sabotage me and I know it was someone in the wings getting her head just by the shit had said before I told her politely and directly off with that letter. I sure as hell didn’t want to get in a trap with Caitlin like that. That was the last thing I needed again in my life. While sex isn’t the most important thing in a marriage, you are supposed to consummate your marriage and have sex sometimes and that’s why people get married in the first place –the commitment and she could never make it that way or a lot of other ways.
I don’t give a fuck what Tracey does now or how she feels because she never gave a fuck about how I did and fucked me over so many times and made a conscious choice to do it and then try to use me and have her cake and eat it too with other people. It was just too much finally. I am not sure why I ever put up with as long as I did –like what over ten years or more. We only shared a good relationship when I was her only friend for two or three years during her divorce and shortly afterwards.
Tracey was so different and she was good person gone bad later. It’s so sad. I am sorry though, I have to be honest she’s just a worthless usurious and deceitful vindictive selfish hateful person now. She made that choice not me. I think other people have found her out now and that’s why she’s so unhappy, she’s old and can’t get away with that shit anymore and all those old guys she fucked around with who used her too, they’re either dead or in a nursing home and word is common knowledge on the street about her too so to speak. She deserves what bed she made for herself. I don’t hate her though, I just resent some of the shit she did to me and says and tried to do behind my back. I think she’s finally getting her karma for all those games she was playing.
Needless to say I guess I broke my own rule that I stated when I first started writing this entry when I said I wasn’t going to write all night or shall I say morning about this whole Wawa thing and other things here I am having done it again. God, it’s just so much information and so many details and you start writing it out and you can’t help but want to document everything with as much detail as possible because this may never come out in my own words until I am long since dead the way this harassment scheme is. That’s why I run with it sometimes and it ends up like this. I write in stream conscious format a lot of times too so if I digress like I have in some places in this entry that’s the reason why. It would be easier to just talk about it with a person you could trust and record it but that’s hard to do alone and I do like to write and think it is better in a way on paper too.
It proves one thing for sure, I am not crazy and was not crazy back then when this shit happened. It was real and it was not my imagination or some grandiose delusion from a schizoaffective or schizophrenic person or psychotic person like Henrico Mental Health keeps trying to cover my health records with and built a history of erroneously to cover up their dirty little involvement in this bullshit and their facilitation of some very ugly harassment that was both illegal and immoral and atrocious as much as it was an ongoing lie and crime in and of itself. I will never know who they got in bed with but they got in bed with some dark people underground doing some nasty dark dirty shit.
Henrico Mental Health got real sloppy this last time and know they did too and I am going to turn up the heat on all of this finally somehow. I will not suffer this anymore being left silent like I have so far because I couldn’t fight back for one reason or another. I got them where I want them rolling the tape like I have for 28 years on all of this shit.
Henrico Mental Health has built their own history and pattern of organized illegal harassment and human rights as well as civil rights violations and violations both state and federal laws going all the way back to 1995 –that’s what they did. That’s what Henrico Mental Health also did for themselves not taking my advice not to get political with me like I told them after that nut house fiasco at Henrico Doctor’s before it got really even worse. Now they’re going to see what I Know and regret it. Now they are going regret trying to shut me up and think I am stupid and this mental health shit will cover it all up. I am going straight for the aorta of all of this so to speak. The police are going to get fucked too for their part in it. Some asses are going to be frying like a black fish fry when I am done with these assholes in this county.
That said, I guess this entry goes for Caitlin since I wrote so much for Kim the other night but It’s kind of disjointed because so much more was involved and it was more convoluted with her and how she ever got dragged into this I will never know or why she would unwittingly ever get involved knowing in this I don’t know but I think she did in a way and got fucked and didn’t fully realize what she was walking into and doing. I hope she’s ok and not a basket case or in a mental facility because if she is they’re really fuck her life up in there. She was not crazy but all this abuse they had going definitely took a toll on her emotionally and I saw it first hand the last time I saw her. She was so disassociated and just gone and couldn’t even speak. It was like she became this robot and didn’t realize what the fuck she was doing. I will never forget it. It makes me so bitter they did this shit to her.
It was bad enough fucking Kim in the middle of this but Kim at least knew how to handle things and was smart and while it probably did have a deep impact on her too, she was strong and she could handle this sooner or later an had people in her life that would help her who were like her too and not just mindless rednecks or white trashy people that don’t now how to pour piss out of a boot and who value the wrong things. I don’t why Kim’s sister or whoever that youngest one in the mix got involved either but she may have been used like Caitlin was and then got pulled out by somebody like Kim or Kim’s other sister. They were a little weird in a way but my gut tells me they had nothing that deeply engrained against me especially with this harassment bullshit scheme going on. I doubt they would’ve knowingly or willingly fucked me over. They probably got dragged in separately and then it took a life of it’s own.
I have nothing left of a social circle and life now. It sucks. Henrico Mental Health successfully ruined everything I worked so hard to build for myself after I got liver disease and when I successfully started healing myself on my own after my brother died and I had to handle all that shit associated with that. They broke my six years of sobriety by driving me to drink and now I have to deal with that again which I am but it’s harder now but I want to do it on my own. I don’t want any exchanged co-dependency bullshit going on like they always try to push you into with that shit. That’s how I did it on my own the first time. I just stopped and never looked back other than to reflect on where I had been.
I never thought about drinking until those assholes reduced me to a homeless lifestyle even when I got back home and won the worst of the battle. Its like I don’t give a shit now but I know it could kill me with my liver issues but it’s just going to take time. If it does, it does. They’ll be responsible more than me. They ruined me in 2005 too and two and half years of being smoke free and fine with it but after the abuse and horrible shit I went through then and got out of jail after their lies put me there —I have smoked ever since and that might kill me too because I’ve smoked so long. I had a chance before to heal from it had I not started again.
Yet Henrico Mental Health always talks about “helping” people –a lot of help they did me huh? Those people are lying fucking assholes and bullshit artists and criminals. They should be prosecuted for all this shit and be thrown in jail like they threw me in, for a long time. I’d love to see how long they would last without turning into basket cases like they would deserve and being harassed and beat up and maybe murdered in one those shitholes. They just hated it that they couldn’t shut me up forever by having me go to prison or jail or a state nut house and use their lies and erroneous diagnosis and bullshit records against me to do it.
I beat them again and now they are going to eat shit for all of it before I die if I have my way somehow. They’ll deserve whatever I manage to throw at them and do to them. Whatever and I mean whatever which can be taken to mean exactly like it sounds. I am sick of being a ginny pig and being abused and harassed and having thing always trying to pull some shit and throw dictates at me and dope me to high heave into a fog with drugs I don’t need and will forever refuse to take now.
The science doesn’t even know what these fucking drugs do long term anyway and they sucked so much life out of me. No more. If they ever fuck with me again, or the police facilitate abuse of me again –they’ll get something they don’t like and I will get those assholes sooner or later if I don’t then and there. Tap, tap and boom might be the way they go so they better watch their fucking back. That’s all I can say right now because I am not sure justice will ever be done or handed out until they do get what they really deserve which is the former.
I will be nice and let lawyers handle it but I am not letting it go and if I get fucked or ignored then I will do whatever I need to do someday and get my own justice if it has to be that way. I am sorry if that sounds like it does but after 28 years of abuse and lies and harassment and violations of my legal rights they deserve whatever they get harshly in need be. I am not going to be fucked the rest of my life until I die without having justice served on these bastards for all this shit they’ve gotten away with and done in the past and especially this most recent shit they did. They’re fucking animals and perverts and worthless people to ever participate or sign off on any of this shit, all of them that did deserve nothing but the most brutal of justice served cold. They denied me my due process why should I give a fuck what they say or what I do. Needless to say that’s my feelings after all this shit. I am tired of it.
SEE YA! civil rights, civil rights violations, henrico county government, henrico county mental health, henrico county virginia, human rights abuse, lifestyle, mental health, mental heath support, psycology, self help, survival, wellness, writing
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thetoxicgamer · 8 months
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VALORANT fans could be a vital source of warmth during the seemingly imminent esports winter
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The try-hards you encounter in Unrated or Swiftplay are usually the first thing that springs to mind when you think of "sweaty" VALORANT gamers. But at Champions 2023, you got to see a considerably more upbeat perspective on "sweaty" VALORANT fans in the hours before the start of the match days. As part of Riot Games’ VCT Champions add-ons, a Fan Fest was put on for players of all skill levels in the early hours of each morning during the finals in the Kia Forum parking lot. Eager fans who were up and about bright and early at 8am local—definitely not gamer hours—could get a chance to meet up. Some fans turned out right away, and the event swelled to several hundreds of people before the gates to the arena finally opened. Watching and hearing several people who’ve only met online, some even who only knew each other by their Discord usernames, finally meet in person was really touching and sweet. Even those of us in the media who’ve only heard each other in digital press conferences got to join in on experiencing that feeling. But one thing that really stuck out to me during the pre-match festivities, other than the terrible pull-up jump shot Acend Elevated and I saw from the Red Bull court, was how much merchandise was in people’s hands and flying off the stands. VALORANT fans are willing to spend, which could provide some relief from the impending esports winter. This term has been thrown around excessively over the past year or so, as the industry as a whole is resetting from the bloated valuations and investment figures from before the pandemic. While ultimately good for long-term growth, there will be significant growing pains, in the form of shuttered orgs, scaled-back salaries and content, and people losing jobs. As always, the question comes down to how esports organizations make money during these trying times. Well, one of the few profitable paths for organizations can be merchandise. As much as was said about Sentinels in the wake of their crowdfunding launch, making and selling merch has been profitable for them, and those profits improved from roughly $1.3 million in 2021 to $1.9 million in 2022. While walking around Fan Fest, it felt like at least two-thirds of the fans there were wearing either team jerseys or official VALORANT merchandise. And the longest lines outside of the ones to meet influencers were the ones for gear. As soon as people got into the venue, it was a mad dash to the stores inside to snag the high-value items like plushies and hoodies. Saturday was the most packed by a considerable margin, due to it being both a weekend and the grand finals. There were plenty of Paper Rex and Evil Geniuses jerseys, but also jerseys supporting Fnatic, Liquid, 100 Thieves, Cloud9, Sentinels, FaZe, and TSM. The lines were even longer, and the number of bags in people’s hands was at its highest. So this is all well and good for Riot, but what about the organizations looking to survive? It proved to me that fans really do care about VALORANT and its esports scene, even if they’re more likely to be supporters of individual players than teams. Esports fans have been regarded as more stingy than traditional sports fans, but between merch and in-game items like the Champions bundle and hopefully the eventual partnered team skins, that might finally be changing. Teams and organizations will need to learn to capitalize on more than just merch if they can even get that right, but it’s proven to be a profitable arm for companies that have really struggled to ever be profitable. If you can get fans to go stand in a baking Los Angeles parking lot to buy merchandise en masse, then maybe the esports fan market is more lucrative than we thought. As a result, maybe more will survive the winter than we thought would. Read the full article
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