Palace of Chance Casino (2021) 🥇 Review | Games - AskGamblers

Artist: Run The Jewels
Album: RTJ4
Date Released: June 3rd, 2020
Listen
YouTube
Spotify
Tidal
Apple Music
Artist Background
The duo consisting of Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, and legendary underground produceMC El-P, known together as Run The Jewels, originally came together as a result of Adult Swim executive Jason DeMarco who introduced the two in 2011. After his 2011 album PL3DGE peaked at #115 on the US charts, Killer Mike told Jason that he wanted to make his own AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Jason informed Mike, “If you want AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted modernized, the only producer I know who comes close to the Bomb Squad-level of production is El-P”. The duo’s chemistry was immediate, as El-P went on to produce all of Killer Mike’s 2012 last solo album R.A.P. Music, and Mike featured on El-P’s final solo album Cancer 4 Cure. Mike and El’s respective albums released within a week of each other in May 2012, and the two embarked on a twenty-city US tour in the following months. After returning from tour, the pair had found a friendship growing between themselves, and made the decision to put other projects on hold and focus on the chemistry that had been sparked. Recording at an upstate NY studio beginning in April 2013, the duo re-appropriated the phrase “Run The Jewels” from the LL Cool J track “Cheesy Rat Blues", and released their self-titled collaborative album, for free via digital download, only a mere 2 months later in June 2013.
36” Chain vs. Pistol & Fist
Run The Jewels discography currently exists in a distinct pairing. With Run The Jewels as their debut, this record set the group's tone as a light-hearted, braggadocious duo with as much confidence in their abilities as swag in their punchlines. Just over a year later, the sequel Run The Jewels 2 took the foundation set from their freshman effort and dialed the insanity up to 11. RTJ2 pushed the boundaries of their aggression and flows to new heights; with incredible energy in their verses, and absolutely impeccable beats, blending El-P’s signature industrial sound with sharp synth arpeggios, chopped Zach De La Rocha vocals, and absolutely bonkers Travis Barker drums.
It was then nearly 3 years before Jamie and Mike followed up their breakout RTJ2, with Run The Jewels 3 being released again ahead of its scheduled release date via free digital download, this time on Christmas Eve 2016. Instead of these two attempting to outdo the pure insanity and in-your-face attitude found in their predecessor, Mike and El decide to evolve themselves as a group. The duo had noticeably pulled back on the swag and dick jokes which made such a splash on RTJ2, instead choosing a more subdued, electronic approach to their beats, as well as a clearly stronger political approach in their lyrics. This change in sound and style is demonstrated in the album cover’s artwork. The first two records featured the distinctive RTJ “Pistol and Fist”, with the fist tightly gripping a chain. The chain, in my opinion, represents the swag and braggadocio that drove the aggressive nature of their first two albums. In RTJ3 the chain is removed, leaving only hands that have transformed from bleeding and bandaged, to a pristine gold.
This brings us to early 2020. It’s been nearly 4 years of living in a post-Trump America, and El-P announces that Run The Jewels fourth record has been completed. Mike and El live-stream the first single “yankee and the brave” on Instagram on March 22nd, 2020. Lyrically and sonically, RTJ4 exists as the successor to Run The Jewels 3, with Mike and El again taking the good from their previous effort and launching it into the creative stratosphere. El-P’s beats are again leaning towards the synthetic, electronic side, this time with the intensity dialed all the way up to 11. From a lyrical perspective, RTJ takes the politically-charged lyrics from their predecessor, and again, up the ante, laying down some of the hardest hitting and politically poignant bars either of these two have ever spit.
Album Review
2020 was a year that none of us will soon forget. An unprecedented global health crisis kept the majority of us inside for months at a time. RTJ4 was announced on May 12th, 2020, with a release date slated for June 5th, 2020. However, with 2020 as the gift that won’t stop giving, the end of May was highlighted by the unjust killing of George Floyd. The phrase heard around the world, “I can’t breathe” instantly became a rally-cry for the oppressed to finally take to the streets to demand systemic police reform, as Floyd’s death was not the first time this phrase was uttered in an unjust police killing. In fact, a 2020 study by the New York Times showed that at least 70 people have died in police custody after using the same phrase over the past decade. As millions of American’s began organizing protests and demonstrations in the wake of Floyd’s death, Run The Jewels made the decision to release their latest chapter two days ahead of the scheduled release. El-P tweeted, just minutes ahead of the drop, “Fuck it, why wait. The world is infested with bullshit, so here’s something raw to listen to while you deal with it all. We hope it brings you some joy. Stay safe and hopeful out there and thank you for giving 2 friends the chance to be heard and do what they love”. In line with all past Run The Jewels releases, the album was made available for free digital download, two days ahead of its scheduled release date, on June 3rd, 2020.
THE RETURN (we don’t mean no harm but we truly mean all the disrespect)
RTJ4 opens with the first single, “yankee and the brave (ep. 4)”. Using the team names from their respective hometown baseball teams, Mike and El use the opening track to prove that they’re not just a hip-hop duo, they’re brothers, for better or worse. El-P kicks this installment off with rapid-fire, machine-gun esque snares, matching Killer Mike’s aggressive flow and tightly packed rhymes, before El jumps in to trade some dense rhymes as well. Mike and El depict themselves as outlaws, with Mike surrounded by cops with only one bullet remaining. He contemplates suicide instead of allowing the police to take him alive, until El-P jumps back in, offering Mike a way out, with a getaway car waiting outside. This tense situation is depicted lightheartedly in this song’s music video, which was released via Adult Swim and features the duo animated.
The trade-off between Mike and El’s short verses are reminiscent of late-80’s EPMD flows, while the production sounds like boom-bap that’s been sent to us from the future. This distinctive blend of old-school rap roots and forward thinking production is what continues to separate Run The Jewels from absolutely all of their contemporaries. While so many artists are continually playing catch-up with the latest trends, RTJ are side-stepping the trendy and moving forward with the mind-bending.
FLEXIN’ (ayo one for mayhem, two for mischief)
The second single “ooh la la” samples a Gang Star track "DWYCK (feat. Nice & Smooth)" as the basis for the chorus. I say “samples” as that’s how it is credited in the album’s liner notes, however it’s truly an interpolation of Greg Nice’s bar, slowed down slightly, and sung by El-P and Greg Nice himself. El-P is a true old-head at heart, and it’s abundantly obvious in his work, even going as far as to recruit legendary producer DJ Premiere to handle the scratching on the back end of this banger.
Out of key piano chords are looped to quickly create an unsettling aura surrounding the track, before El-P’s voice cuts through the infectious piano like a whip. Pounding, up-tempo drums are introduced after the chorus’ first iteration, creating what is possibly El-P’s first danceable beat. Lyrically, Mike and El-P initially seem scattered on this track, however the music video quickly makes their point very obvious.

”we imagined the world on the day that the age old struggle of class was finally over. a day that humanity, empathy and community were victorious over the forces that would separate us based on arbitrary systems created by man.
this video is a fantasy of waking up on a day that there is no monetary system, no dividing line, no false construct to tell our fellow man that they are less or more than anyone else. not that people are without but that the whole meaning of money has vanished. that we have somehow solved our self created caste system and can now start fresh with love, hope and celebration. its a dream of humanity’s V-DAY… and the party we know would pop off.”

The video envisions a society celebrating the fact that the class system we currently exist within has finally imploded. Money is worthless, and we have rejected the desire to bind ourselves to the constraints of capitalism. All creeds and colors unite to burn the system that has so effectively controlled us for over a century. It’s a party, and if there was a song to celebrate the end of the world as it is currently known, “ooh la la” is that song.
Mike’s last verse features a few metaphors and comparisons celebrating the destruction of capitalism, saving the most poignant for last:

I used to love Bruce, but livin' my vida loca
Helped me understand I'm probably more of a Joker
When we usher in chaos, just know that we did it smiling
Cannibals on this island, inmates run the asylum

Premo’s expertly cut scratches lead us into the equally hard hitting sample flip of “Misdemeanor”, by Foster Stevens as the basis for the beat to “out of sight”. Lending yet another nod to the old-school greats that laid the foundation for RTJ, “out of sight” samples the same track as The D.O.C.’s “It’s Funky Enough”, only adding a bouncy, electronic synth atop the inverted chord hits, and uptempo, industrial drums, to create an absolutely infectious groove for Mike and El’s dynamic chemistry to shine, rapidly jumping between each other’s two line flows in the first verse.
“out of sight” shows each MC providing insight into how each of them earned a living and achieved their current status. Mike and El’s opening verse each details themselves robbing people in order to eat. El alludes to the fact that he crossed his accomplices in crime for the whole bag, while Mike details the fact his assailant tells him it’s an “honor” to be robbed by his mother’s only son.
While El-P’s production is the obvious stand out on first listen, Killer Mike comes through with one of the most sonically pleasing and technically proficient verses of 2020.

We the motivating, devastating, captivating
Ghost and Rae relating product of the fuckin' '80s
Coke dealin' babies, never regulating, bag accumulating
It would not be overstating to say they are underrating
The pride of Brooklyn and the Grady, baby
We don't need no compliments or confidence
Our attitude and latitude is "fuck you, pay me"

The dense, intricate rhyme schemes smack you in the face, almost distracting you from Mike’s delivery and blistering flow on the verse; flexing his legendary status while paying homage to his drug-dealing past. This absolutely stunning display of technical skill, story telling, and complex rhyming illustrates how RTJ seamlessly integrates the best of both old school and new school hip-hop.
“out of sight” also features a guest verse from 2 Chainz, and he continues to lay the braggadocio on thick. Considering Tity Boi’s dedication to trap stylings, his verse feels right at home on the flex track, despite it’s late 80’s tribute sample, a considerable departure from his usual sound palette.
Up until this point, I haven’t mentioned any of the El-P’s lyrics specifically. El-P is a great rapper, but Killer Mike… Well, Killer Mike is an incredible rapper. He’s the guy who draws you in. El-P is the one who lays the foundation for greatness and Mike is the show stopper, and that’s generally the case for most RTJ tracks. But on “holy calamafuck”, El-P seems determined to make people stop and ask, “Who the fuck is this?!”.
A sharp, yet nearly minimalistic drum kit backing a heavily distorted synthesizer melody lays beneath rhymically knocking cow-bells. This aggressively set stage allows Mike and El to flex as the dynamic duo they are, until the beat suddenly takes a turn for the chaotic. A gnarled, ultra-menacing synth overtakes everything while Mike screams into the abyss, until a distorted snare, enormous 808s, and skeletal hi-hats cut through and launch the beat switch into another dimension. The minimal, yet incredibly dark soundscape allows El-P to snap in a way I have never heard from him previously. His rhymes schemes are reminiscent of an old MF DOOM lyric notebook, while his topics flawlessly combine flexing, psychedelic use, and his well-cemented legacy in the hip-hop community. Cutting and pasting a few of his bars into this review could not convey a fraction of how stunning El-P’s performance on “holy calamafuck” is.
Slightly later in the track list, making liberal use of the Ether song “Gang of Four”, “the ground below” samples and loops the sharp guitar riff and adds aggressive, pounding drums as the basis for the beat; this is finally reminiscent of the forward-thinking, stridulous production El-P has built his reputation on. Capitalising on the classic RTJ moment, Mike and El both flex in their own unique ways. Mike compares himself to Godzilla taking on Tokyo, and El-P demands respect for his name as the legend he is, threatening to smack dying children for mispronouncing his name with his middle finger to the world; his complete disregard for human life and confidence in his abilities are summed up at the end of his verse.

You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit
Cancel my Hitler-killing trip
Turn the time machine back around a century

SO¢IAL JU$T-ICE (until my voice go from a shriek to whisper...)
While the first few tracks aren’t without their social and political themes, the back-end of RTJ4 is where Mike and El start to bust out the heavy topics. “goonies vs. E.T.”. starts off light, with El-P pointing to the irony of how once he finally started to make it “big” in the industry, the world began to descend into chaos due to climate changes, increasingly obvious social injustice, and political madness. He culminates his frustration with our disregard for the Earth with a fantastic quotable.

Fuck y’all got, another planet on stash?
Far from the fact of the flames and our trash
That is not snow, it is ash, and you gotta know
The past got a wrath, it’s a lover gone mad

Mike’s verse takes the light-hearted frustration expressed by El-P, and turns the aggression to the next level. Aiming his sights against the ruling class and their society that’s been designed to oppress people for profit, who have very meticulously painted themselves as celebrities and idols to the American public. Mike accepts that he will be villainized by these people for speaking against them, but he welcomes the nefarious role, knowing that the working class will eventually eat the rich, no matter how much they are stomped into the dirt.
And this is just the warmup.
If it’s possible for a song to represent a moment in time that captures the absolute shit storm that has been 2020, “walking in the snow” is that song. It’s release coincided perfectly with the protests for George Floyd which were sweeping the nation. Killer Mike’s verse directly references the phrase “I can’t breathe”, the last words of Eric Garner, which also happened to be the last words of Floyd as well. The fact that this verse was reportedly written in November 2019 perpetually underscores the importance of the content and perfectly represents how persistent this problem is. “walking in the snow” is a true encapsulation of both a defining moment in time and an ever-persisting issue.
But he doesn’t just stop at the racial injustice. Mike goes on an absolute rant about the American education system; how it’s not designed to teach people, but to discriminate against poor populations, limiting their legitimate opportunities, and therefore disproportionately leading them into a criminal lifestyle. He calls out the media as fear-mongers, and the apathy of the American public in the face of indecency. Fortunately for Mike, by the time we finally had the chance to hear this masterpiece, we were already on our feet, using this album as a war cry to mobilize against a tyrannical government that militarized against its own citizens simply for asking that we recognize systemic racism and demanding change. Killer Mike has the best verse of the year, no doubt in my mind.
The only drawback is that Mike’s verse is so fucking good that it completely overshadows El-P’s, which is also amazing. A menacing guitar riff and haunting synths kick the track off into a bouncy groove, where El-P unleashes a flurry of internal rhymes that does not relent for about half his verse. Even adding layers of social commentary within the densely packed bars, El refuses to quit and continues on his political tirade; criticizing ICE’s detainment center practices and the “pseudo-Christians” who support them, with a bar that now lives in my head:

Pseudo-Christians, y’all indifferent, kids in prison ain’t a sin? Shit
if even one scrap of what Jesus taught connected you’d feel different
what a disingenuous way to piss away existence, I don’t get it
I’d say you lost your goddamn minds if y’all possessed one to begin with

The combination of two of the best verses spit by any rapper(s) this year and production help from El-P and long time RTJ collaborator Little Shalimar, create a bouncy, aggressive, deeply truthful banger. “walking in the snow” not only encapsulates the crux of 2020 with lyrics that will become more powerful as they age, but will also forever be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and the determination to expose continuing racial and societal injustices.
The sonic palette of RTJ4 holds an extremely unique place in El-P’s discography. Jamie is the definition of a self-made 90’s hip-hop legend. This is the dude who put New York underground hip-hop on the map with Company Flow, and he did it with his unique flavor of dark, noisy, dense, boom-bap. Whether he was doing it with the help of Rawkus, or completely independently during his Definitive Jux run, El-P has never made music with the intention of becoming famous. Funcrusher Plus, Fantastic Damage,I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, and Cancer 4 Cure are all highly revered as industrial, technical, abrasive, and completely unsuitable for the radio or a party. The fact that three songs on RTJ4 could easily be heard on the radio, at a party, or in a TV series credits scene is frankly, astounding. In a 2002 interview/documentary on El-P’s budding record label Def Jux, he stated that his friend bet him $500 that he could not make a beat that was “happy”. At the time of the interview, El-P said that he had not won that bet yet. While I might not qualify the beats on RTJ4 as “happy”, if you showed El-P the beat for “JU$T” in 2002, I believe he might have won that bet.
Pharell opens “JU$T” with the pre-chorus, spitting varied examples of how we’re all slaves to our current system throughout the track, over echoing snares and bouncy 808s before bright synth chords and up-tempo hi-hats burst in while Killer Mike delivers the chorus, pointing to the fact that the majority of the people featured on American currency owned slaves at one point in their lives. Mike’s verse touches on the fact that he has committed crimes to get where they are today. Mike is publicly open about his past as a drug dealer. So why is he a criminal, but Benjamin Franklin isn’t? These are the people who built our country, and they built it on the backs of slaves. He illustrates this theme with a more recent examples:

You believe corporations runnin marijuana? Ooh (how that happen?)
and your country gettin ran by a casino owner (ooh)
pedophiles sponsor all these fuckin’ racist bastards (they do)

When corporations are able to sell cannabis legally, but the government continually incarcerates people who trap, our president is a notoriously fraudulent businessman, and the people who helped put him in power run a pedophile ring, yet none of them face consequences and are allowed to continue to profit and remain in power while people suffer; well, we might be closer to slaves than previously imagined.
Rage Against The Machine frontman Zach de la Rocha also makes his mandatory feature appearance at the end of “JU$T”. As the only artist to feature on three Run The Jewels albums, Zach is essentially an unofficial member of the group at this point. His fiery verse is spit with the same “Rage” energy that set him apart in the mid-90’s, ending the track questioning his place in a capitalist society as a recipe for his inevitable demise, since his “breath”, or art, as his weapon to express himself is still being exploited for other’s profit.
Continuing with RTJ4’s heavily synthetic sonic palette, “never look back” features wavering synth leads resting above the slow-jams snappy snares and thumping bass, while a haunting voice echoes in the background. This unsettling aura provides additional gravity for Jamie and Mike to continue self-reflecting on defining moments in their childhood, and as well as how far they’ve come from those moments. Mike and El are both self-made men, and while they have a certain fondness for those gritty moments that defined them, moving forward in life is undoubtedly more important.
Skeletal drums reminiscent of a slowly pounding heart opens “pulling the pin”, before rhythmic hi-hats and textured, watery synths fluttering in the upper register resting above a bouncy synth lead, and punchy 808s, burst in. The track digs itself into a slower, marching groove and shows the duo figuratively doing exactly what the title implies. Painting a portrait of a society that has turned on itself, Mike and El are ready to pull the pin and start over.
The duo both detail their despise for the ruling class, pointing out multiple examples of how the elite have designed our society to keep poor people in their class. Simultaneously recognizing their own hypocrisy for profiting in a system that inherently discriminates; Mike reflects on his own success, knowing that living the lifestyle he enjoys is one built on oppression, and expresses the guilt that has caused him. El-P opens with a brutal metaphor for police, implying that they’re the root cause of the “wretched state of danger” our society exists within, and that the only effective corrective action is to numb yourself with drugs. Despite his advice, Jamie knows this is not a permanent solution, but one that causes more self-inflicted wounds.
The final piece of the puzzle that is RTJ4, “a few words for the firing squad” begins to close the album with ever crescending strings, and loud, thunderous drums which never seem to resolve, continuing throughout their verses. While the drums that lead to nowhere can be sonically unpleasant, the unresolved melodies are intentionally representative of their current mindsets. Their verses are reflective and grim, but simultaneously optimistic and envisions a world where tragedy is a less common occurrence.
El is grateful for what he has now but recognizes his entire life has been skewed by traumas, so out of place feels normal for him. He reflects on his current success, noting that the worst people tend to end up with the most, which makes becoming “rich” something not as desirable as it once was.
Mike opens up about the death of his mother who died while he was on an airplane, admitting his struggles to not cope with his trauma with opioids. However, his wife provides him the most important reason to stay clean “but my queen/say she need a king/not another junkie rapper fiend” while a heartbreaking saxophone solo highlights the gravity of his lyrics.
The track ends with what sounds the like wrap-up voiceover to a TV show, a conceptually satisfying ending, as the opening track “yankee and brave (ep.4)” began with El-P stating:

”This week, on Yankee and The Brave”

This voiceover paints the duo as brothers on the run from the law and crooked cops, and while this does close this “episode” out as intended, the critic in me is bothered by the slightly kitschy outro to such a spectacular album. The voices singing over and over, “Brave, brave, braaaaaave, Yankee and the Brave” would be, simply put, better left on the cutting room floor. The ending of this track alone is what knocks my score of this album down a few points. Despite its stellar lyrical content, with drums that never seem to reach that “holy shit!” moment, and the easily skippable outro, it’s upsetting to me that an album this great ends on such a low note.
Overview
RTJ4 is by far my favorite album of the year. El-P’s cutting edge approach to their sound, blended with lyrical content that continues to be more relevant by the day, the duo have come together with what is objectively their most accessible album to date. RTJ4 is the natural evolution of sound and subject matter for the duo; taking the foundation set by Run The Jewels 3 and evolving it into a more concise, more accessible, and more conceptual album. While I still personally prefer the “fuck the world” intensity and experimental nature of Run The Jewels 2, RTJ4 opens themselves up to a whole new world of exposure, and when you’re as talented as these two, you know they’re going to capitalize on it. RTJ is currently at their apex, and they’ve created an album that will make many new life-long fans going forward.
9.2/10
Discussion Points

How does this compare to other RTJ releases? How about in comparison to the member’s solo works?
Does the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of this album surprise you?
How will this be looked back on in 5 years?
What are your favorite lyrics?

Borderlands 3 - a great shooter with a lot of flaws

An Average players Honest Review on each Gamemode

Stokes's Bristol Nightclub incident in detail (From: The Comeback Summer by Geoff Lemon)

IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a place where misadventure could begin, you can’t go past Mbargo. The nightclub’s streetfront is painted a purple so bright you’ll see it in your dreams. Strings of giant sequins shimmer in the breeze. Its phonically inventive name is spelt in silver letters that climb its three-storey terrace facade. Inside are strips of burning neon, a few booths, floorboards so marinated in drink that they have an ingredients list. Bristol is a student city on England’s south coast crowded with music and nightlife and street art. This is Banksy’s home town, and the tourism board suggests in rather strong terms that ‘you would be a fool not to see his amazing work firsthand’. The same organisation describes Mbargo as ‘intimate’, which is fair for a place where you can catch an STI standing up. Students cram into its modest dimensions while people with names like DJ Klaud battle for billing with £1.50 drink deals over seven sloppy nights a week. To get a sense of the story about to come, consider that it’s the kind of place open until two o’clock on a Monday morning, and that at two o’clock on a Monday morning, Ben Stokes still thought it had closed too early.
The Ashes of 2017–18 had disciplinary bookends. It was after that series that Australia’s two leaders went off the rails in South Africa. It was a few weeks before that Ashes tour that England’s biggest star windmilled his way into his own disaster.
In the early hours of 25 September 2017, Stokes and teammate Alex Hales were barred from re-entering Mbargo after a night out on the piss. A Sunday thrashing of an abject West Indies in an ignored series at the fag-end of the season apparently required ample celebration. After arguing with the bouncer and hanging about at the door for a while, they wandered off to find a casino in the hope of more drinking. They’d barely made it around the corner before getting in the middle of a conflict between four locals. As is said on the internet, it escalated quickly.
The 26 September reporting was bloodless. Withholding names, police stated that a man ‘was arrested on suspicion of causing actual bodily harm’ while another went to hospital with facial injuries. England’s director of cricket Andrew Strauss separately confirmed that Stokes was the arrestee, adding that he had been released without charge and that Hales had gamely offered to ‘help police with their enquiries’. Administrators had a good chance of hiding behind that investigation, and the next day Stokes was named in the upcoming Ashes squad as expected. But that night the video emerged.
Bristol student Max Wilson had shot it on his phone, then offered it to The Sun. What he thought was playing hardball was actually lowball: his opening price of £3000 was snapped up by a tabloid that would have paid ten times that. The Sun went on to make a mint by syndicating the rights worldwide. From a window above the fray, the vision showed six men on the street below performing the muddled choreography of a melee. One was right at the centre of it. One was waving a bottle, one dipped in and out, one tried to calm it. Two others floated around the edges. The central figure was unmistakable: red hair burning even in the streetlight as he launched into a series of blows against two of the men, falling to grapple with them on the ground, then following both across the street, swinging punches the whole way. Hales trailed behind, repeatedly and impotently shouting ‘Stokes! Stop! Stokes! Enough!’ The ECB could fudge issues that existed only in thickets of legalese, but not those captured in moving colour. Stokes was stood down from the next West Indies match, then suspended indefinitely. It emerged that he had broken his hand during the fight, something he’d done twice before while punching objects in dressing rooms.
The response in Australia was fierce: Stokes was a thug, a lowlife, a selection that would disgrace England. It was not entirely coincidental that a ban for England’s best player would be handy for the Aussie team, but there was also a cultural split. In England, plenty of people still minimise pub fights as lads letting off steam. In Australia, heavy media coverage as a succession of young men were killed had inverted that tolerance. The discourse now saw any punch as potentially deadly and accordingly reckless. This was more poignant in a cricket context given that David Hookes, the dashing Test batsman and state coach, was killed in 2004 by a pub bouncer’s fist.
The PR situation was bad for Stokes as details emerged of the injuries to the men he’d hit, and that one was a young war veteran and father. Stokes wasn’t officially removed from the Ashes squad through October but stayed behind when his teammates left, hoping for police to dismiss the matter in time for a late dash to Australia. His annual contract was renewed on the due date in case that came to pass. Then 29 October brought a twist in the tale.
‘Ben Stokes praised by gay couple after defending them from homophobic thugs,’ ran the headline. Kai Barry and Billy O’Connell had emerged. Not entirely out of nowhere: while Stokes had made no public comment, this story in his defence had initially been leaked to TV host Piers Morgan after the fight, as soon as the video appeared. Police body-camera footage played in court would later show that Stokes had given the same story to the arresting officer on the night. But no-one knew the identities of the fifth and sixth men in the video, and police appeals had turned up nothing.
It was The Sun again with the breakthrough. Kai and Billy were perfect for a readership not keen on nuance. ‘We couldn’t believe it when we found out they were famous cricketers. I just thought Ben and Alex were quite hot, fit guys,’ said Kai, who was memorably described as a ‘former House of Fraser sales assistant’. The paper had the pair do a full photo shoot: layering the fake tan, showing off chest waxes, mixing Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton into a range of outfits. Their best shot had them standing back to back, heads turned to the camera, in a mirror-image Zoolander moment.
Suddenly The Sun was the England team’s best friend. ‘Their claims could lead to the all-rounder being cleared over the punch-up and freed to play in the First Test in Australia next month,’ it gushed, then gave a tasting platter of quotes: ‘We were so grateful to Ben for stepping in to help. He was a real hero.’ ‘If Ben hadn’t intervened it could have been a lot worse for us.’ ‘We could’ve been in real trouble. Ben was a real gentleman.’ Would it be known forever as Kai and Billy’s Ashes? No. While the Bristol boys provided spin for Stokes’ reputation they didn’t influence the police. With charges still pending there was little choice – not given Strauss had previously sacked Kevin Pietersen for being annoying. Stokes remained suspended through the Ashes and a one-day series in Australia, and lost the vice-captaincy. It was January 2018 before the Crown Prosecution Service laid a charge.
That charge surprisingly came in as affray, a crime that can carry prison time but is classified as ‘a breach of the peace as a result of disorderly conduct’. The men he had punched, Ryan Ali and Ryan Hale, faced the same count, charged as equal participants in a fight rather than Stokes being charged with assaulting them. Alex Hales was not charged, despite being seen in the video to aim several kicks when Ryan Ali was lying on the ground. Given the underwhelming standing of the offence, Stokes was cleared by the ECB to tour New Zealand, and kept playing until his trial in August 2018, which he missed a Test to attend. None of the three defendants would be convicted.
The reasoning behind the charges was never released and was attributed vaguely to ‘CPS lawyers’. The service gave the case to Alison Morgan, a prosecutor of a class known as Treasury Counsel who usually handle serious criminal matters. Morgan had a scheduling clash and never ended up court for the case, but in 2018 and 2019 she would go on to win damages and admissions of libel from The Daily Mail, The Times and The Daily Telegraph variously for incorrectly reporting that she had been responsible for the inadequate and inconsistent charging decisions.
Morgan’s successor on the case was Nicholas Corsellis QC, who on the first day of trial was permitted by the CPS to request two assault charges be added against Stokes. ‘Upon further review,’ claimed a CPS statement, ‘we considered that additional assault charges would also be appropriate.’ This was patent nonsense from the service that eight months earlier had chosen the lesser charge. Any lawyer knows that no judge will allow new charges once a trial has begun, because the defence hasn’t had time to prepare. But such a request could deflect criticism of the prosecution service by technically making the judge the one who disallows the charge.
Working through the story from the trial and the tape is complicated. You had a Ryan and a Ryan, a Hale and a Hales, a Billy and a Barry and a Ben. You had several versions of events as to who knew whom, who was drinking with whom, who had insulted whom and who had merely engaged in ‘banter’, a word that in modern Britain has to do an unconscionable amount of lifting. The reporting had constantly mixed up the Ryans as to who had which injury, who was in hospital, who had played which part in the fight, and whose mum had which stern words to say about it.
Let’s agree that from now Ryan Ali is Ryan One, the firefighter who ended up with a fractured eye socket and a cracked tooth. Ryan Two can be Ryan Hale, the soldier who scored concussion and facial lacerations. Mr Barry and Mr O’Connell are best known per The Sun as Kai and Billy. In scorecard parlance we’ll leave the cricketers as Stokes and Hales.
Amid the confusion, Stokes and his lawyers built his case in a straightforward way. The UK legal definition of affray is ‘if a person threatens or uses unlawful violence or force towards another person, which causes another person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for their safety’. That means it doesn’t account for violence that harms a target, but violence that might frighten a theoretical bystander. The wiggle room for Stokes was with ‘unlawful’, because the charge excuses violence in defending oneself or others.
This interpretation hinged on the beginning of the video, where Ryan One waves a beer bottle about and takes a swing at Kai. The version from Stokes was that he was minding his own business walking down the street when he heard homophobic abuse. He intervened verbally and was threatened verbally by Ryan One – something that Ryan One denied but that couldn’t be proved or disproved. In fear for his safety Stokes had to nullify that threat by bashing Ryan One before it went the other way. He registered Ryan Two in his peripheral vision as another possible threat, and again had only one recourse.
Stokes also had to convince the jury to disregard testimony from Mbargo’s bouncer that he had been looking for a fight. A solid lump of a man, Andrew Cunningham had not enjoyed his patron’s attempts to get back into the club after the bouncer declined an offer of a bribe. ‘He got a bit verbally abusive towards myself. He mentioned my gold teeth and he said I looked like a cunt and I replied, “Thank you very much.” He just looked at me and told me my tattoos were shit and to look at my job.’ Cunningham described these words as coming in ‘a spiteful tone, quite an angry tone’, and said that Stokes still seemed angry as he walked away.
These were details the doorman had nothing to gain by inventing, but each of them Stokes denied. By his own accounting he had drunk a beer at the game and three pints at his hotel, then ‘potentially had some Jägerbombs’ along with half a dozen vodkas at the club. He insisted that after all of this he was not drunk.
If I may take a moment here to call upon the wisdom of experience – a person who cannot definitively say whether they have had any Jägerbombs has definitely had some Jägerbombs. A Jägerbomb is an experience that does not pass one by. Further to that, a person who says they have ‘potentially’ done something has definitely done that thing and doesn’t want to admit it. A person who has had between 15 and 24 standard drinks in one evening is shitfaced. A person who tries to bribe a bouncer £300 – three hundred quid! – to get into Mbargo – Mbargo! – is beyond shitfaced.
If Stokes admitted that he was drunk then the prosecution could say he was out of control. He claimed clear recall of assessing a threat, feeling fear and deciding to protect himself with force. He confidently denied details from the bouncer’s testimony, like using the word ‘cunt’ or mentioning gold teeth. Yet on other details he claimed a ‘significant memory blackout’. He didn’t remember the punch that saw Ryan One taken away by ambulance. He didn’t remember what the Ryans had said to Kai and Billy, only that those words were homophobic. With no head injury, as one of the few people who hadn’t been hit, he had supposedly suffered this memory loss despite being sober.
The version from Kai and Billy was compatible but vague: they had been walking along, they ‘heard … shouts’ of abuse from an unspecified source, then Stokes ‘stepped in’ and thus they avoided possible harm. They claimed to have been bought a drink by Stokes at Mbargo, although CCTV showed them meeting outside. The overall implication from both accounts was that the cricketers had been pals with Kai and Billy, while the Ryans as per The Sun’s headline were a roving band of thugs.
The reality though is that the Ryans were the ones hanging out with Kai and Billy at Mbargo. Police discussed CCTV from inside the club in questioning and at trial. On that footage the four Bristolians bought drinks for one another, danced together, and Kai was noted to have variously touched Ryan Two’s crotch and Ryan One’s buttock. Ryan One told police that all of this was taken lightheartedly and wasn’t a problem. Indeed, when the Ryans called it a night the other two left with them.
This much is clear from footage out the front of Mbargo, which shows Kai and Billy exit the club and start talking with a subdued Hales and a demonstrative Stokes, who are stuck outside. The vision was played in court to determine whether Stokes was antagonistic towards Kai and Billy, as he appears to impersonate them and to throw a lit cigarette their way. More interesting is that after a few minutes the Ryans emerge, and all six actors in the fight video briefly form a prequel in the one frame.
Ryan Two pats Billy on the chest in friendly fashion with his right hand before clapping him on the back with his left. He moves past and does the same to Kai before leaving the shot. Ryan One stops to speak to Kai. They lean in for a moment, talking, then Kai turns and they walk out of frame together. Billy hangs around for a few seconds at the door and then looks after them and races to catch up. Stokes and Hales remain outside the club to remonstrate further with the bouncers. Whatever discord develops around the corner is between four men who left amicably together minutes earlier.
There’s no way to know what caused that friction. If Ryan One did use homophobic slurs, he might have been drunkenly obnoxious for no reason. He might have had an insecure macho response to some extra flirtation. He might have thought unkindness was funny – ‘banter’ once again. Or he might have said something that was misunderstood, as both Ryans insisted in court that they had not used nor had the impulse to use any abusive language.
What clearly didn’t happen was an attack by bigots on random passers-by. This kind of crime is regular enough that an audience understands the horror of it, and this is what was evoked by the public accounts of Stokes, Billy and Kai. All we know is that there was some verbal dispute among the Bristol locals, and that Stokes came along behind them and put himself in the middle of it. Ryan One responded to the interference aggressively and away they went. There are plenty of reasons to look sideways at the idea that Stokes was a saviour. Foremost, neither Kai nor Billy was called upon as witnesses in court. You’d think it would be ideal to have Stokes’ story backed up by those who benefited from his selflessness. But his defence team had developed the impression that the pair had shown a changeable recall of events amid a hard-partying lifestyle, and would be dismantled by the prosecution on the stand.
That raises the question of whether The Sun coached their quotes for the 2017 interview. Despite missing court, Kai and Billy clearly enjoyed the attention. In 2018 after the trial they did a follow-up spread in the same paper about how poor Ben had been mistreated. They got a television spot on Good Morning Britain and glowed about his heroism. In 2019 The Sun wheeled them out once more to say that Stokes should get a knighthood. In 2017 they had ‘never watched cricket’ but by 2019 were supposedly volunteering sentences like, ‘He saved us, now he’s saved the Ashes.’ Whether they were paid for these appearances is not known, but the chance to be famous for a day can be lure enough.
If you find this cynical, consider that on the night in question, the Bristol boys were so deeply moved and thankful for Ben’s intervention that they left him to be arrested and never attempted to find out who he was. Seconds after the video ended, an off-duty policeman reached the scene. You might think that someone grateful to a saviour would speak on his behalf. Instead, said Kai, ‘it all got a bit scary so we walked off. It was too much for me and we went to Quigley’s takeaway for chicken burgers and cheesy chips.’ They didn’t give their hero a thought for over a month while police issued multiple appeals for witnesses.
As for Stokes, he told his arresting officer that ‘his friends’ had been attacked. After three minutes of chat outside a nightclub, these friends were so dear to him that he has never contacted them again: not after the newspaper piece, not after the verdict. He didn’t want to see how they were or thank them for their support. He didn’t mention them by name in his solicitor’s statement after the trial.
The Stokes defence rested on Ryan One’s bottle, which he had carried out of Mbargo to finish a beer, not to use in a Sharks versus Jets amateur production. But once he turned it over to hold it by the neck it became a weapon. Intent and interpretation can change the material nature of things. Part of Stokes’ justification in court was that the bottle implied that the two Ryans might have ‘other weapons’ hidden away. You can understand how a jury could decide that created doubt.
Not being convicted, though, doesn’t give the contents of the video a big green tick. It does not, as his lawyer claimed, vindicate Stokes. Looking in detail, Ryan One is belligerent but his movements telegraph a bluff. Hales is the person he’s gesturing at, but they’re several metres apart when Ryan One cocks his arm ostentatiously, showing off the bottle rather than bracing to swing. He skips forward but Hales skips back and Ryan One doesn’t follow. Kai stretches out an arm to impede Ryan One, who has a drunken stumble, nearly eats pavement, then staggers towards Kai and hits him in the back. That hand is still holding the bottle, but his strike is a side-arm cuff on a soft part of the body. It’s all pretty tame.
This is where Stokes gets involved. Having moved across to protect Hales, he now takes three large steps to run around Kai and booms his first punch at Ryan One. They fall to the ground and the bottle clinks away. Stokes gets to his feet to punch down at the fallen man, while Hales arrives to kick him ineffectively then runs off across the street for some unknown reason. Ice-cream van? Stokes is soon back in the grapple having his shirt pulled up to show off his Durham tan. Ryan Two steps in for the first time to pull Stokes away, prompting a couple more random punches at this new target, then Stokes trips backwards over Ryan One and sprawls in the street. Hales chooses this moment to return and aim some solid kicks at the head of the man on the ground. Nothing so far is a triumph of moral philosophy or the pugilistic arts. But if it all stopped here, perhaps you could say it was somewhere approaching fair. Ryan One has behaved like a turnip and it’s not an entirely unjust world that would give him a whack across the chops. The antagonists have disentangled, Stokes has some distance, it’s time to dust off and go home. Ryan Two steps forward for this purpose with his palm raised in conciliatory style and says, ‘Settle down, stop.’
So Stokes punches him.
It’s roughly his fifth punch overall, and he really winds up into this one. He misses so hard that he stumbles away into the shadows of the shop awnings along the road.
Hales starts shouting for him to stop. Ryan Two backs into the street, still holding his palm up. Stokes closes on him from about five metres away, six large steps, to where Ryan Two is standing on his own. Stokes pushes him a couple of times, as Ryan Two keeps trying to placate him and saying ‘Stop.’ Stokes throws his sixth punch, largely missing as his target ducks.
Ryan Two keeps pulling away and reversing, into the middle of the street now. Stokes follows him, grabbing his sleeve to drag him back. By this point Ryan One has found his feet and walked around behind his friend. Both of them are in the same line of sight for Stokes, and both are backing away. Stokes aims his seventh and his eighth punches, which Ryan Two tries to deflect, as Hales walks up behind Stokes to grab him.
Stokes yanks away from his friend and switches to Ryan One instead, taking seven paces to grab him before throwing his ninth punch of the night. He grabs again; Ryan One blocks that arm and pushes himself back away from Stokes. Ryan Two again intercedes, putting himself between the two with his palms up and his arm extended.
Stokes throws his tenth punch, a right-hander at the face of Ryan Two, then shoves him backwards. Ryan Two backs away once more, four paces. Stokes follows, steadies, lines up, then launches his strongest punch yet, his eleventh, a proper right hook from a solid base, one that cracks across the man’s head and gives him concussion. Ryan Two ends up flat on his back in the middle of the street, his hands still outstretched for a moment in useless protest until they twitch and drop to the blacktop.
Stokes isn’t done. He once more shoves away the restraining Hales and follows Ryan One, who keeps backing away saying, ‘Alright, alright, alright.’ Five more paces from Stokes before another blow at the man’s head. Kai and Billy are now standing over the poleaxed Ryan Two. The video ends, but seconds later Stokes will punch Ryan One hard enough to knock him out too, before off-duty cop Andrew Spure arrives on the scene to bring down the curtain. When the body-camera footage kicks in some minutes later, Stokes is in handcuffs but Ryan One is still laid out in the street. Ryan Two has regained consciousness, folded his shirt under his friend’s head and is asking police for an ambulance.
‘At this point, I felt vulnerable and frightened. I was concerned for myself and others.’ This was how Stokes described that sequence to the court. An elite athlete with years of gym work and training to snap a bat through the line of a ball with astounding power and precision, swinging fists as hard as he can at men with none of those advantages. Punching so hard that he breaks his hand, and repeatedly shoving away a friend so he can punch some more. Frightened and threatened by two targets shouting ‘Get back!’ and ‘Stop!’
The off-duty officer testified that Stokes ‘seemed to be the main aggressor or was progressing forward trying to get to’ Ryan One, who was ‘trying to back away or get away from the situation’. The student who filmed the video can be heard on the tape at one stage exclaiming ‘Fuck!’ and testified that it was because ‘I felt a little bit sorry about the lad that had been punched and it looked like he had his hands up’. That tallied with the prosecutor’s depiction of ‘a sustained episode of significant violence that left onlookers shocked at what was taking place’.
The defendant stuck to his strategy. ‘No, my sole focus was to protect myself.’ All up, in the 33 seconds of footage after he falls over, Stokes takes 35 steps forward to keep hitting two men who keep trying to get away. Not once is he hit back.
After the verdict, Stokes’ solicitor positioned him as the victim. It had been ‘an eleven-month ordeal for Ben … The jury’s decision fairly reflects the truth of what happened that night … He was minding his own business … It was only when others came under threat that Ben became physically engaged. The steps that he took were solely aimed at ensuring the safety of himself and the others present …’ The statement was impossibly self-righteous and self-absorbed.
If there was anyone to feel sorry for it was Ryan Hale, the second of our two Ryans. He’s the one who emerged from the club with a friendly arm around the shoulder for Kai and Billy. He’s the one who interposed himself to end the fight, then kept putting himself back in the firing line, trying to calm an intimidating stranger while dodging blows. For his show of restraint he got laid out regardless, concussed in the street, then was issued a criminal charge equal to that of the man who hit him, and described in national media as a violent bigot in an untested story to support that man’s defence.
Lawyers for Ryan Two made a more convincing post-trial statement, noting that Kai and Billy, ‘neither of whom were relied upon by the prosecution or the defence team for Mr Stokes, have taken the opportunity to speak with various media outlets about the alleged homophobic abuse that they received in the early hours of September 25. Mr Hale has passionately denied this allegation throughout the course of this case,’ it continued.
‘It is upsetting to Mr Hale that although he was acquitted, the accusation that he was the author of such abuse remains. Both Mr Hale and Mr Ali were knocked unconscious by Mr Stokes, and although Mr Stokes has been acquitted of an affray, Mr Hale struggles with the reasons why the Crown Prosecution Service did not treat him as a victim of an unlawful assault.’Good question. Avon and Somerset police were the investigating force, and they were frustrated by the decision. Ryan Two was filmed clearly not hurting anyone, but police were instructed by the CPS to proceed with a charge. Hales (the cricketer) was filmed fighting but ‘a decision was made at a senior level of the CPS’ not to proceed. Police expected Stokes to be charged with assault but the CPS declined. It doesn’t take a wild cynic to think that placing the same lukewarm charge on three men for vastly divergent behaviour might ensure that none would be convicted, even as the trial would maintain the pretence that a defendant of influential standing had not been given a free pass.
A couple of years down the line, the original interview with Kai and Billy has disappeared. All traces have been scrubbed from The Sun website, its social media history, and even from the Wayback Machine internet archive. Given its headline of ‘homophobic thugs’ and text that names Ryan Two but not Ryan One, the libel liability isn’t hard to spot. Later interviews with Kai and Billy take the passive voice – they ‘suffered homophobic slurs outside a Bristol nightclub’.
The article that was once claimed to exonerate brave Ben Stokes now links only to a missing content page, with a picture of a dropped ice-cream cone and the phrase ‘legal removal’ inserted into the web URL. In terms of consequences, Stokes missed one tour. When he resumed his career in January 2018, the Australians hadn’t yet ruined theirs. Their year-long bans looked much more stringent. But the Stokes case dragged on in other ways. With no criminal liability, the Australians confessed promptly enough for the sporting world to give them the full length of the lash. Their situation was ugly but there was closure. Stokes got stuck in legal stasis, unable to be fully backed or condemned. Instead his issue was always present, a browser full of open tabs that the ECB swore they would read any day now.
Through 2018 Stokes was back but he wasn’t back, in the sunglasses and finger-guns sense. In his return one-day series he nearly cost England a match with 39 from 73 balls in Wellington. His first Test hit was a duck as England got rolled in Auckland for 58. At Trent Bridge while Stokes was injured, England posted a world record 481 against Australia. With Stokes three weeks later at the same ground they made 268. He crawled to 50 from 103, the second-slowest any Englishman had reached that milestone in 20 years. That span covered Alastair Cook’s whole career. It was apologetic batting, acting out responsibility via the scorecard. Stokes was creeping back into the team like he’d been kicked out in a blazing row and was hoping to tip-toe to the sofa.
It was December 2018 before the ECB disciplinary committee ruled on him and Hales. In a ‘remarkable coincidence’, wrote Simon Heffer in The Telegraph, ‘the punishment both players faced in terms of bans from playing at international level was covered by the amount of games they had already missed when dropped by England’s selectors, in the furore that followed the incident’. The verdict compounded the omissions around the case by not addressing the violence at its heart. Nor did Stokes, apologising only ‘to my team-mates, coaches and support staff’, and then ‘to England supporters and to the public for bringing the game into disrepute’.
The implicit next step was to rebuild that reputation. It might have been easier had his court defence not meant that he wasn’t game to admit any fault at all. It might have been easier if he or his advisers had been willing to change tack once the trial was done. Imagine a world where Stokes had stood outside court and apologised for overreacting, for the injuries he’d caused, and for the time and energy he had sucked out of other people’s lives. That would have been a show of responsibility beyond a scorecard. When the time came around to assess forgiveness, it might have meant forgiveness was deserved.

The End: The problems with MassForTheDead

Overview

Well, I'm sure everyone has seen the news. The end of MassForTheDead is upon us. I started in early November. After doing all the story quests and some other things I ended up with only 3 5-star people, and sort of quit because the odds were horrible. I can't remember the exact number of rolls, but I saved every single Choas Stone.
I quit around Thanksgiving, it isn't that the game isn't fun, but the odds were horrible and the prices made no sense. I will get into the problems with this game later, but eventually, I started back up before Xmas. I had better luck this time, while I didn't get any xmas people, but I had decent luck getting other 5-stars.
It's a fun game, but it has many problems. As a developer, I somewhat expected it to fail, but I really was hoping that it wouldn't. I actually mentioned many of the reasons behind it in my review on google play. I shared my review with a few others, but I didn't actually make a post about it. However now I guess it's the last chance I get. I hope that the creators of MFTD see this... because many of these problems I feel almost anyone could come to the same conclusion as me.

NOTE: My language gets a little spicy, do forgive me for not being PC.

Online Only

One of the biggest problems with the game is it being online only. This means that if the game servers are shut down... simply the game doesn't work. Meaning if the game ends in 3 months (like now) everything you have to spend was pretty much wasted. It isn't like steam where you can buy and sell skins or items... you buy a digital product with the potential chance of it being taken away from you at any time.
No one likes this... I would like to blame the devs, but typically it isn't them who make this decision. It's almost always someone higher up, but either way to be honest it was retarded.
It should have been an offline game, are at least playable offline people wouldn't have felt so bad by buying stuff, since they could still use it after the servers are shut down.

Multiple Versions

Having multiple versions of the game is stupid. Simply stupid. It is already hard enough for developers to support Android, Apple, and say the web... but now they need to support Android (jp), Apple (jp), Android (globe), Apple (global).
You rarely see this in western games... However, it is pretty common for Asian games. Rpgs especially almost always get a special global version. My only guess is because of location and language... however you should have designed your app to work with multiple languages. This is web dev 101, you space things out or have scroll bars or cut it off with a popup to give the full name or details. There are tons of ways around this... It's the same story with locations, you should have designed the online game from the ground up to be usable with multiple servers.
I don't want to go on forever about this, but it's basic things. Just add multiple languages, that was it. All you needed to do, yet tons of games every year get a "global" version just for it to die a few years later. STOP IT. Make 1 version, with servers globally. Not enough people in Germany?... shut that server down and move them to another server.
Sorry for the rant on this part, I've played at least 20 games they forced you to play the global version and ended up shutting it down after a year or 2. Honestly, at as dev it drives me crazy they do this. People don't care you have a special ____ holiday or whatever... AWESOME, cool you have a holiday about some cucumber god, ok let us play it, we don't need a second version.
I guess what I'm trying to get at... Crunchyroll shouldn't have been involved in the first place. Maybe as translators, but AAAaaah fuck me dude, why do they keep doing this?

Worse than Gambling...

You buy "chaos stones", which give you a chance to roll for people in the game. Aka gambling, but instead of getting a chance for money, you get a digital item that could disappear at any moment when they shut the game down. At least with gambling, you have a slim chance of getting your money back.
There have been many countries trying to put regulations on loot boxes in games... I'm pretty sure this game would eventually fall into that category. If they are not forced to change it, at the very least they will probably make it 18+ or the local equivalent. Some countries have been trying to force similar taxes onto these types of apps that casinos have to deal with. Potentially they are going to run into an issue with this game because of the random aspect.
They continue to make it worse by having "free" Choas Stones mixed with "paid" Chaos Stones. Honestly, I'm surprised some mom hasn't created a Facebook group about how it's tricking their children. Anyway, I don't care about this, but it is something to note, that this will probably be brought up against them later on.
I know some people will probably argue saying baseball cards, or pokemon cards are similar... however you are getting a physical object. You have it forever, you can sell it, trade it, lick it. It's yours forever. Yes, they are both random chances, but as I explained above... at any moment you could lose it. I could go on with other things, but I'm ranting, so we will leave this here.

Price

... do I have to explain this. The prices are INSANE, let's just forget about it being something you could lose at any moment or the random chance. There are many packs and things for $32.99. Let's look at one. 515 paid stones plus some other stuff. That is 1 roll or ten items... WHAT?!?
Look at any other game, even the MOST money-hungry games like Clash of Clash or Fortnite are 1/4 of this price... and they are games that have been around for years, with tons of content, and tons of game play, and large player bases.
It's like paying $30 goto a movie... or $15 to goto another movie at a better theater, that also in 3d. Don't get me wrong... I LOVE OVERLORD. I love it, I read at least 2 novels a month... but the prices for MFTD are just crazy. Personally, I bought VIP, I think that it's a decent price to support the game and help them developed it... but to be honest for $20 you don't shit. I understand they need to make money, but I 100% guarantee if they cut the price in half, they would more than double their sales. Many of the people reading overlord are younger in high school or college... I can't imagine they are looking forward to throwing down $32 for a roll at 10 cards? (or whatever you call it)... however $16? it far more reasonable. How many of would have bought a "pack" for $16 yet didn't because it was $32?
I'm an old (not really old, 31), and I didn't because it's a ripoff. I just feel like I'm getting bent over around back.

Summary / Horrible

LMAO, guys... honestly this game I love it. I love Overlord, but some of the ideas behind it were horrible. It isn't just 1 of them... but when you add them up all altogether I knew it wasn't going to last long.
What is even worse... they announced they are closing the game down... YET you can still buy shit. YOU CAN STILL BUY DIGITAL ITEMS that will be gone in 2 months. WHAT THE FUCK?!? Am I'm crazy, or is this just me or is this a total douchebag move?
They don't force you to see the notification, nothing pops up... just a quiet little whisper "psst, the game ends April". I will admit, they are at least shutting it down in march... Do they are not a complete scumbag... However, it should have been locked the moment they announced the ending of this game. People love this game, they are dedicated to it. They have spent thousands of hours grinding just to save up for the new stuff coming out next week. I'm sure there are people who just bought stuff yesterday...
What is even worse, I'm pretty sure someone knew about this at least a week ago. I can't imagine some CEO just say, yea I'm done, lets tell them today the game ends. There were meetings, discussions, multiple companies involved... probably a public relations person who spend a day to come up with that announcement.
I'm going to end it here, while I wasn't surprised I wish it continued or was offline as its a fun little game to play throughout the day.

Album Of The Year #15: Joji - Nectar

Artist: Joji
Album: Nectar
Label: 88Rising
Release Date: September 25, 2020
Listen:
Spotify
Apple Music
YouTube Music
Deezer
Soundcloud
Background
Not many artists have had a come-up as interesting and eccentric as George Kusunoki Miller, a former YouTube comedian/edgelord turned moody R&B singer. George first got his taste of internet fame as FilthyFrank, a character he described as everything a person should not be, he played the notorious persona on YouTube for over 6 years and eventually had to retire it due to him losing passion for it and suffering from stress induced seizures, which playing the character often caused.
Throughout his time as FilthyFrank however he began experimenting with music, mostly of the satirical kind at the start, his first tracks were under the FilthyFrank persona, the first one being Who's The Sucker, a dumb track where he somehow manages to rhyme "nicer" with "vagina", go figure.
A few years later, alongside the satirical rap, Joji began to make what he would consider as serious music, and this is where the timeline gets a bit messy, as he put out multiple tracks under multiple different aliases and the lines got blurred pretty fast, so I won't focus on aliases too much, but rather on the music he put out, around this era he released the therapeutical Medicine, the slow and melancholy We Fall Again, and Dumplings, which was Joji's best attempt at a trap banger.
In 2015, he birthed the Joji alias, released two singles on Soundcloud under that name, and announced a project called Chloe Burbank Vol. 1, the project was later scrapped and is probably sitting on Joji's hard drive, unfinished, however, the two singles he put out, thom and you suck charlie, were the tracks that put him in the spotlight, not to mention that to this day, there are some of his fans that believe these 2 tracks are his best and will not be topped, but that's a discussion for another day.
Following the overwhelmingly positive reception, Joji began to put out more tracks and singles, both under the aforementioned alias and Pink Guy, which was a character that blossomed into a satirical rap project, but I won't be covering that too much, and will focus on what he did as Joji instead, most tracks Joji put out were met with positive reception, some of the tracks, such as worldstar money, ended up on his debut EP as well.
Sometime around early 2016, Joji ended up signing with 88rising, a label focused on building the bridge between east and west, he explained in an interview that he was initially a consultant for the duo behind the record label, however, once the duo noticed his music and how well it was received, they asked him to jump on board and he instantly took the chance, getting signed alongside the likes of Rich Brian and Higher Brothers.
The label immediately undertook Joji and began distributing his catalog on their YouTube channel and helped him release more music, which was a couple of singles in the earlier half of 2017, and his debut EP in the latter half, the EP, known as "In Tongues", was met with mixed reception from fans and critics alike, with some describing it as his most concise body of work so far that is oozing potential, and others describing it as a bleak project that fails to set Joji apart from the sea of artists on the same wavelength as himself.
Following the release of the EP, Joji began working on his debut album, known as BALLADS 1, the album's first single, YEAH RIGHT, was released on the 8th of May, the track was first believed to be a standalone loosie as it was released 5 months before the album itself, however it ended up being on the album and was confirmed as the one of the singles alongside SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK, CAN'T GET OVER YOU, which features a production credit from non other than Clams Casino, and TEST DRIVE.
The album was well received, and was praised for containing a wider variety of sounds than its predecessor, it felt like a natural progression for Joji's sound and was a step forward towards a more mainstream approach whilst not sacrificing any of the rawness that Joji's older stuff had, which seemed to be what most fans were expecting from him.
Moving forward Joji stayed mostly silent throughout 2019, appearing on the second 88Rising collaboration album, which was negatively received due to it's lack of creativity and sub-par performances from most label signees, he also appeared on Rich Brian's sophomore album, The Sailor, and released which is now known to be as the first single from Nectar, Sanctuary, a synth based poppy track that previewed a vocally improved and more confident version of Joji.
What was assumed to be a loosie turned out to be the beginning of an album rollout, as half a year later Joji released Run, setting a new standard for himself both instrumentally and vocally, and a couple of months later he released Gimme Love, a double sided track with a fun, catchy beginning and a melancholy ballad driven ending, the last single, Daylight, was released on the 8th of August, the instrumental was produced by Diplo and the track itself sounded like Joji's attempt to break into the mainstream.
Without warning, he also released two tracks that he classified as "NOT SONG", the first being Pretty Boy, which actually ended up on the album with a Lil Yachty feature, and the second being FTC, which sadly did not end up on the album, both tracks had videos and it seemed to me at first that the purpose of both tracks was to serve the lore that Joji has built around the album, which I will be touching up on in this write-up.
A day before the album's release, he put out Gimme Cum, an enigmatic track with a mysterious message.
Nectar itself was pushed back from it's original July release date due to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, the album however was released on the 25th of September.
Album Lore
If there's one thing George is no stranger to, it would definitely be worldbuilding, as he has proven time and time again that he has a knack for it, especially with his FilthyFrank YouTube channel, where he managed to create characters, locations, and an entire universe out of a few satirical characters, his lore was adored by many and even though visually he never wrapped up the story he did release a book that served as closure for the FilthyFrank lore.
This album's lore is not as straight forward however, and there are multiple theories doing the rounds on the internet, personally I will go by what sounded most convincing to me in terms of timeline and storyline, however do feel free to expand on what I've said or correct me, George has left multiple things left open to interpretation therefore I would not be surprised if there were multiple different meanings to the same thing.
Our story begins in the music video for Gimme Love, where we see a young Joji who appears to be a small time engineer that is eager to climb through the ranks of the company he is working for, as he rises however he appears to become more stressed out and agitated at all times, lashing out at his coworkers and breaking down consistently, throughout the music video we can see that the more he progresses, the more roadblocks he runs into, which causes his behavior to become more psychotic and manic, as the shots move forward we see him accept awards, lead his very own research team, run failed experiments on his coworkers that causes them to bleed, and eventually receive military covert status, which did not come without sacrifices, as we see him smile less and less throughout the video.
In the second half of the video, we see Joji steal the rocket he helped build by locking out his crew members, and launch himself into space, disappointing everyone he worked with and stabbing them in the back he appears to be quite happy however, eventually his mood flips as he is faced with two choices, engage or eject, the following shot does not allow us to see which one he picked as we are facing his back, all we see is Joji making the choice and gearing up for what's to come.
The lines get blurred around this spot and many people have different theories as to which video is the right one chronologically, personally I believe Daylight comes next, and my theory is Joji is having some sort of fever dream featuring his previous coworkers, most notably the older people who went through layers of plastic surgery, who appear in the music video for FTC, where they are seen wearing badges that features the same organization Joji worked for, throughout the video they are seen rummaging through the wreckage caused by Joji, clearly looking for something specific, which ends up being the award Joji won.
Back to Daylight, Joji appears to be some sort of intern working for the director and the actors, towards the end of the music video we can see Joji waking up from the aforementioned fever dream, clearly in a daze, as the shot widens we see that he is alone, in a barren wasteland, with nothing around him except for a tent and what appears to be a device used for communication, he plants a few seeds in the soil and sits by the device, hoping for a sign of life.
Next comes Run, where we are once again met with Joji having a nightmare, the entire video symbolizes being trapped in a place you don't want to be in, as Joji appears to be in a never ending limousine with people he has no interest in whatsoever, towards the end of the nightmare we actually see Joji running across a massive wasteland, the same wasteland we saw him in at the end of the Daylight music video, throughout the video, we see Joji become consumed by the soil itself, which I would assume is a representation of his fears back then, seeing as he was alone and had little to no hope of being saved whatsoever.
Joji wakes up from this nightmare and appears to be in some kind of spaceship, if the videos were released chronologically, we would be completely lost at this point, lucky for us, we already know what the spaceship is, as we see a picture of the Sanctuary crew in the final shots of the Run music video, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the crew is the ones that saved him from death and picked him up from the mess that he placed himself in, hence the name Sanctuary, which means refuge or safety from pursuit, persecution, or other danger
The crew itself is seen in action in the music video for Sanctuary, where Joji appears to be fighting and defeating some sort of one-eyed alien supervillain at the start, however, once he is defeated, both Joji and the crew themselves become aimless, as they are living monotonously without a goal, thankfully(???), one of the crew members sees this and decides to take matters into his own hands, by surgically removing his own eye, which portrays his transformation into the new supervillain, and following this up by killing a crewmember and escaping on his own, once again giving the spaceship it's own purpose.
Unfortunately the music videos that were put out after the release of the album appear to be too subtle for me to think they are connected in any way, shape or form, there are many theories of course but I can't help but feel like that most of them are a reach.
The most plausible explanation for this lore that I can think of is that the whole escaping from earth on his own, landing in a barren wasteland, trying to plant seeds in it, and eventually being picked up by a group(88Rising, wink wink) is a metaphor for his transition from FilthyFrank to Joji, the barren wasteland stands for how hopeless he felt at the time and the seeds symbolize the loosies he was slowly dropping before ditching his channel to become an R&B superstar, which if true, solidifies the idea that George was done with FilthyFrank long before he actually left the channel itself.
Regardless, I thought the lore was very enjoyable and it was nice to see Joji back in one of his elements at least, most fans would have been disappointed in me if I had not touched up on it a bit seeing as it was a huge part of the albums release and they are intertwined in some sort of way.
Review

When it's lovely I believe in anything What does love mean When the end is rolling in

It is important for me to preface this review with the fact that this Joji album is not like anything we've ever heard from him before, this is not the one man army, garageband using, sample meshing Joji that we knew in the past, this is Joji with an entire team behind his artistic vision, a whole group of people working with him to help him push his sound to the next level, and unfortunately, while the quality of the music has clearly went up, when so many people have their own input on something eventually the lines get blurred and the album loses its artistic direction and cohesion, which is one of my only complaints with this album, and I'm glad I got it out of the way first.
Artistic direction and cohesion aside, this album contains some of Joji's highest highs to date, especially the singles, that's not to say that there aren't some deep cuts on here that shine as well, but once you listen to the album in it's entirety you quickly understand why the singles were chosen as singles, especially when you consider how sonically different they are from the non-singles.
Sanctuary, the album's first single, is a sweet, poppy and synthy track that features a high pitched and melodic Joji, some of the track's lyrics are somewhat abstract but they are quite visually descriptive and that's always a plus in my book, the instrumental itself is quite spacey and has a nice retro vibe to it, already a huge step forward from what we've already heard from George, the track's climax reaches towards the end and gives us a beautiful bridge,with Joji crooning about wanting to be held by a significant other.

I fell for your magic, I tasted your skin And though this is tragic, at least I found the end I witnessed your madness, you shed light on my sins And if we share in this sadness, then where have you been?

Run is one of the more cinematic cuts on this album, the track is truly a double edged sword because although it's one of Joji's best, it has set an extremely high standard for both Joji and the album, leaving fans such as myself worried about whether or not he will ever reach a similar high, the production is clean, Joji's vocal lines are as dynamic as ever, the guitar melody is infectious, the lyrics are better than anything Joji has ever written and he is putting his heart and soul into every word, the electric guitar solo at the end is also something worth mentioning, which sits perfectly right in front of Joji's distant and wide vocals, ending the track on a strong note.

Look into your heart and let me know Do things turn black and gray as they go? When I'm far too gone, can you show me love? Give me love

Gimme Love

The lyrics above come from the album's third single, a 2 sided track that starts as a bouncy, percussive, fast paced, and catchy song, with Joji chanting and pleading to be given love, softly singing about being surrounded by apathetic people, after the second chorus the entire song comes to a halt in order to make room for a mellow guitar and Joji's harmonies, which are absolutely stunning if I may add, the track, much like many other tracks on here, ends on a cinematic strong note with a string section and a grandiose piano.
The final single, Daylight, is no doubt unexplored territory for Joji, the instrumental, which was produced by Diplo, starts off slow and minimalistic, with a simple yet groovy bassline, and reaches its apex on the chorus, when it suddenly becomes extremely lush, heavy, and thick, the track is most definitely a solid attempt at modern day and mainstream pop music, clearly made with the intention of receiving radio play.
All of the singles show up in the first leg of the album, which is absolutely phenomenal, the opener track, Ew, starts off light and easy, with a somber and distant arpeggiated piano backed with Joji's soft vocals, who's singing about heartbreak and the loss of many relationships, sounding as bitter as ever lyrically, the chorus includes a grand string section and a chord progression that is fully panned to the right and sitting all the way behind the mix, and surprise surprise, the track itself ends on a cinematic strong note, much like many of the other tracks on here.

I've got no aim, a million rounds, is nothing real? A hundred pounds of heavy steel, it feels so loud Tied to my chest, it feels so loud I'll take a peek to across the peaks This grass is neat and I'm quite unique But I'd like to be, but I'd like to be

MODUS

Up next comes MODUS, a moody track that has an intro similar to the opener track but later on has Joji melodic rapping to a murky trap instrumental, with Joji of course sounding better than ever, lyrically speaking, many of the themes on this album are similar, Joji is mostly singing about relationships, heartbreak, and the need for a significant other, the lyrics themselves give the album a nocturnal, bitter, hopeless vibe, which is what we've come to expect from Joji's music nowadays.
The third track, Tick Tock, is a plucky banger of an instrumental that has Joji rapping over it with pitched up vocals on the chorus which is something that's a little bit reminiscent of his older, more amateur work, the vocal layering on the verse is also something worth mentioning, really showcases Joji's dynamic range and how much he improved as a whole, the track is nothing groundbreaking in terms of what we've heard so far and remains lowkey for the most part but is without a doubt one of my favorites on this project.

On Nectar, one of the yet-to-be-announced tracks was produced when the artist was only sixteen years old. “I’m excited to see if it sticks out or not to the listeners.” he reveals.

Joji Interview with Schön! Magazine.

While not officially announced by Joji himself, it is safe to say that Upgrade is the aforementioned track, a small interlude that seats itself in the earlier part of the album, the track starts with a grandiose piano, which is quite unnecessary if you ask me, because once we have it out of the way all we get is a very obviously barebones instrumental made from a different time, the telltale sign being non other than the ukulele that we have seen in George's earlier work.
It upsets me that Joji has not made this fact much more known because this track has been consistently the subject of criticism by critics and fans alike, but at the same time I understand, because at the end of the day George left that track in there for the die hard fans, not the critics.
Up until this point there is no doubt that Joji has played it safe, sure the album is much more grand and cinematic than its predecessor, but there's no denying that the signature sound is still there, we still get the hazy and moody slow bangers, if Nectar was only the first half then Joji might have had a strong album in his catalog, maybe even a classic, but I understand him wanting to expand and experiment with other sounds in order to grow as an artist.
The midsection gets a little bit tricky, as Joji begins to get out of his comfort zone and the album features start appearing, to me it sounds like Joji did not know how he could keep the listener interested in the second half of this album and decided to opt in for a bunch of features as a quick fix, some work out fine, some better than others.

Handsome young man, never pull up on time Lookin' in the mirror, lookin' good should be a crime, crime All this pain I'll never let show (No) My real thoughts, you'll never know (No)

Lil Yachty on Pretty Boy

I never really listened to Lil Yachty that much aside from the obvious hits he had over the course of his career, but he clearly shined on this track as the feature, for starters, the track is very light-hearted, definitely one of the more lofi tracks on this album, the highlight for me without a doubt is the bridge, which sounds like something straight out of Pink Season, George was clearly having genuine fun with it, some even speculate that most of the bridge was made using samples from his earlier work as Pink Guy.
High Hopes, which features Omar Apollo, is one of the more lowkey cuts in here as well, the percussion on the instrumental and the detuned guitar on here remind me of some of Joji's stuff from BALLADS 1, unfortunately however the track doesn't stand out much, at least not as much as Afterthought with BENEE, another track where Joji's melodies and vocals shine through once again, and BENEE's feature definitely adds some character to the track, at least enough to the point where the feature made some sense
On Normal People, Joji recruits childhood friend rei brown, in an attempt to capture lightning again after their first collaboration, Once In A While. Unfortunately lightning didn't strike twice here for me and the track felt quite lackluster and uninteresting, especially for such an anticipated track and when compared to their first song, many of the tracks and collaborations on the second part of the album really felt like Joji just trying to recapture the magic of his earlier work, and while some of those attempts did work at the end of the day it does feel like a cheap cop out.

Oh, understand, girl, I'm out of sight To the other side, I don't want no stripes Got my insides loud like motorcycles Girl, don't notice it, I don't notice it

NITROUS

Another example of Joji attempting to recapture magic is NITROUS, which marks Joji's second time collaborating with Clams Casino, the track is very reminiscent of their first track together, both Joji and Clams Casino however killed it, the track's instrumental is very murky and nocturnal, much alike most of the album, but that doesn't stop Joji's delivery, which is very fun-loving and upbeat.

By the way you move, I know you want me to Tell you all the rules, I know I'm searching too Give me all your clues and things to guide me through The end of the world, the end of the world

Mr. Hollywood

Produced by the one and only Kenneth Instrumentals, Mr. Hollywood is one of the more heartfelt and personal tracks on this album, Joji is singing about his evergrowing popularity and how it will never affect what is important for him, which in this case is the girl he's singing about, like many other tracks on this album, you will often hear something that will remind you of Joji's older work, in this case it is the ad-libs on the chorus, which are very reminiscent of his ad-libs on BESIDJU, regardless the song has at least a bit of substance which makes it one of the more commendable tracks.
The final run of this album is where Joji flips the script here, there are a few tracks that have questionable artistic decisions, such as Reanimator, with non other than Yves Tumor, the track serves as an instrumental interlude before the final two tracks, however with a feature such as Yves Tumor I honestly expected much more than what we got, and what we got is basically a 3 minute track, with the first minute and a half being nothing than a drone-y, synthy instrumental, and the second half being quite a lackluster performance by Joji and his guest, much like some of the other tracks on the album, it seems like it received a similar treatment, where the track was initially unfinished and still half-baked, and rather than attempting to finish the track they opted for an easy way out, which in this case was making more than half of the track an instrumental and then calling it an interlude just to be safe.

"that weeknd synthpop track sure is doing huge numbers, maybe i should also make a synthpop track as well"

Joji, probably.

I would be down to argue that if Blinding Lights by The Weeknd had not existed, 777 wouldn't have existed either, Joji's constant attempts at breaking into the mainstream and commercializing his sound have always left a bad taste in my mouth as it felt like it came from a place where authenticity is lacking, nevertheless I find it bizarre to make a track that is very similar to one of the most successful tracks of the year and not attempt to push it at all, that's not to say that 777 on it's own is not a good track, however there's no denying that the sound selection on the instrumental, some of the flows, and the chorus itself hold blaring similarities to The Weeknd's track, I understand why he would make such a track however and find it admirable at the very least.
Thankfully, the album ends on a strong note, the final two tracks are both beautiful even though they're worlds apart, Like You Do, is a quintessential love ballad from Joji, a stripped down instrumental with beautiful piano chords and a laid back vibe, Joji is singing about his current partner and how what they have might not work out, even though he feels like they're perfect for one another, the closing track, Your Man is a massive change in tempo, with an upbeat, electronic, deep house-esque instrumental, we hear a Joji that is optimistic, which is a nice change of pace, especially considering how bitter most of his albums and projects have been up to date.

Since I met you All the gloomy days just seem to shine a little more brightly Consider what we've got 'Cause I can never take you for granted

Like You Do

Conclusion
There's no denying that some tracks on here sound like a bastardized version of Joji's signature sound. Joji is trying his best to commercialize his sound without sacrificing the rawer elements of it, which unfortunately results in a jumble of sounds. This album is not free of criticisms as there are many issues in here that need to be worked on, it's much less cohesive than its predecessor and at times sounds like a bunch of rough ideas put together in order to create the world's most average musical equivalent of a photo collage, but if we were to just set all of that aside and just look at this album for what it is, then there's definitely something in here for everyone. George might have not made a classic, and he certainly hasn't found his sound yet, but this album is an indicator that he's on to something, and once again I am already anxious to hear what he has in store next.
Talking Points

What did you think of this album? Is it a good follow-up to BALLADS 1?
Do you think Joji works better alone or when he has a team behind him?
Do you think Joji will yet again set another high standard for himself next project?
What are your predictions for Joji's sound in the future?
Now that he's more keen on having features, who do you think would compliment Joji's sound the most?
Favorite tracks?

The Pretty Idiot's Guide to Human Space: Rugen (part 1)

The salvo of coilgun shells smashes into the complex of bunkers on the opposite riverbank, sending a spray of charred dirt, sandbags, and timber flying into the air. A sloped bastion caves in, burying the rifle pits at its base. One leg of a watchtower is blasted away and the whole thing sways drunkenly before twisting and collapsing across the trenches, the flagpole on its roof somehow landing upright and leaving the enemy's blue-and-gold standard waving in the debris-laden breeze.

The Human artillerymen beside me let out a cheer and jump up and down, slapping each other's outstretched hands.

The army of Humans watching from beyond the battery all jump around and cheer, too, their yells loud even compared to a half-dozen high explosive shells.

And... so do the Human gunners on the hillside across the river, and the army behind them. They all cheer and applaud. Even though they are, in fact, the enemy whose defenses are getting blasted into pieces the size of a poet's paycheck by the aforementioned coilguns. So... I cheer my lovely green head off right along with them, because things are exploding and stuff is burning and apparently the Humans on this planet just generally approve of that sort of thing.

My name is Solontha reValthinna, and I'm the Felra who goes to the places nobody else wants to and learns about them the hard way so you can learn about them the easy way. That's my angle as an author, and that's why I'm the Pretty Idiot.

----

"Solontha, darling, I've got just the destination for your next Pretty Idiot's Guide!"

My business agent only sounds that chirpy when she's found some new way to try to get me killed. I'd like to think it's because the more trouble I get into, the better the resulting books turn out. That, or she still hasn't forgiven me for that topless dance I did at the Publishers' Guild dinner party she took me to. In my defense, they provided the liquor. I just happened to drink a lot of it.

Also in my defense, my topless dancing is godlike.

"Not back to the Tarq Imperium, I hope? They said they'd shoot me if they ever caught me inside their borders again."

My agent clucked at me. "They said no such thing. They just heavily implied it. And that was only because you wrote that they were a bunch of pointlessly brutal totalitarian fuckwads."

I snorted. "That's right. And it was the 'fuckwad' part that they objected to."

"Nobody likes being called a fuckwad, Solontha. Fuckwads least of all. But, no, I'm thinking we send you to write about a Human planet this time."

Humans? Interesting... The few I've known, I've mostly liked. Well, I don't hate them, anyway. And they look kind of like us Felra, at least a little bit. If you took a Felra and eliminated everything behind her forelegs -- and kept her from dying from lack of some important organs, obviously -- you would have something that still doesn't look particularly like a Human. So, dye her green skin an earthier color, replace her beautiful tresses of feathery-branching tvan with coarser, single-stranded hair, remove one pair of breasts, and take a digit from each hand. She still doesn't look quite Human. Make her face a bit rounder and flatter, thicken her bone structure, and Congratulations! You've surgically converted a Felra into something that could possibly maybe pass for a Human in really poor lighting. Also, you're a sick fuck for doing such a thing.

Point being, Humans are sufficiently similar enough to us that they can be cute, in a goofy bipedal sort of way. And immersing yourself in an alien culture can be more rewarding if you can also immerse yourself in some attractive alien nookie along the way. Any aspiring travel writers who are reading this can consider that a pro-tip from the Pretty Idiot.

"So, any particular Human world? Somewhere with casinos, maybe? Or some place run by the Church of Giving Money, Liquor, and Carnal Pleasure to Sexy Alien Visitors?"

That last bit caught my agent off-guard. "Is that an actual religion?"

"If it was, do you think I'd still be working?"

"Of course you would. You love travel, trouble, and remunerated smart-assery too much to just quit." Ah, I'm such a lucky Felra. Most agents charge extra for that kind of quality banter. "The place I've got in mind for you is Rugen, a frontier-level colony world well off the outer fringe of the Arm."

"The tail-tip of nowhere, in other words. And what's the attraction for a Pretty Idiot to play tourist there? Societal collapse? Rampaging Felra-eating predators? Pandemic-level clown outbreak?"

"How about the longest-running ongoing war in the Known Galaxy? Two hundred eighty-seven common years and no end in sight."

Yow. I'm passingly familiar with war, having wandered through five or six of varying size and awfulness while sightseeing -- and writing about said sightseeing -- and three centuries is a lot of war, especially confined to one planet. I could only imagine how that could twist and scar a world and its people. The devastation. The tragedy of wasted lives and resources. The sheer dysfunctionality of societies raised for generation after generation on bitter vengeance and the never-ending march towards victory and a peace they can no longer even properly conceptualize. A world of bloodlust, paranoia, and the threat of sudden brutal death staining every moment of every day. Why, the possibilities for misery were endless.

It sounded perfect for a vacation getaway.

----

I took regular commercial liners as far as Thielbarra, but had to buy passage from there to Rugen on an independent freighter that was slightly more reputable than a spaceport prostitute, just not as hygienic. There were only three other passengers headed to my destination, including a Kreevin botanical researcher who ignored everybody and a not-very-sober Zharg who worked for one of the big interstellar communications providers and who must have fucked up his job just badly enough to get sent to an isolated hole-in-the-void posting, but not quite badly enough to be fired. I ended up sharing a cabin with the only other quadruped, an adorably optimistic Iraitrian missionary who was going to Rugen to set up a temple to the Harmonious Gods and try to get a congregation going.

Being the cynical agnostic wretch that I am, I just had to ask how much demand she thought there would be for a doctrine of cooperative religious pacifism in the middle of a war zone.

"You offer food to the starving, not to those with bellies already full," she told me. "Our beliefs are meant to be applied in the world, not just agreed with in the temple."

And did she expect to end the war all by herself?

"I hope to make a difference to someone. Whether it's by teaching the Way, by being an example, or just by offering a person who needs it a roof, a meal, and a sympathetic ear. If even one person considers their life to be better for having known me, my mission will be worthwhile."

Damn. I had been entertaining myself with the idea of flirting mercilessly with her for the whole trip, but all that earnestness. All that simple, undeniable goodness. Even my cynicism and libido combined couldn't look that in the face.

So I flirted with the ship's captain, instead. Not that there was any real challenge in it, as despite Felra not being four-armed lizard people, Jixavan males are completely enamored of our tails, which are both more voluptuous and generally more exposed than those of their own females. Pro-tip from the Pretty Idiot: if you're a Felra and need to manipulate a Jixavan guy, buy one of those tail-stockings their women wear. Even the biggest ones will be too tight and short for you, so cut a bunch of slashes in it and pull it as far up your tail as it will go. Then wear a skirt short enough to expose the top hem of the tail-stocking and enjoy your newfound powers of persuasion. I ended up getting twenty percent off my fare and three marriage proposals.

Captain Akothin had made a few runs to Rugen before, so I was able to ask him some questions about the place. If you've never read one of my Pretty Idiot's Guides before, part of my schtick, if you will, is lack of prior research regarding the places I go. My self-imposed limitation is that I can only obtain information by seeing for myself or asking someone with firsthand experience. No encyclopedias or hyperweb research. That media stuff is, at best, quarter-truths and agenda-driven grazershit, anyway. By going into a place without 'knowledge' of it, I go with fewer preconceptions. That's the 'Idiot' part of the title. The 'Pretty' part is because I am. And if you have to face life as an idiot, it really does help to be a pretty one.

The good captain had never actually made planetfall on Rugen, always conducting business from orbit. Sensible. Boring, but sensible. I therefore confined my inquiries to spacers' matters. Like, were we going to have any issues with pirates or paramilitaries on our way in-system?

"No pirates. Not enough shipping in or out for those guys to make a living raiding it and too far from any active lanes to make a useful base. Pirates operating across star systems have to really watch their fuel expenditures." Captain Akothin then proceeded to give a suspiciously well-considered dissertation on how to turn a profit in space piracy, which I will not share here but have filed away for future reference should too many of my books bomb on the market. And as for paramilitary ships affiliated with the warring factions? "I've never seen any."

What about orbital defenses? Would there be minefields to be tensely navigated? Would we be subject to stop-and-search by military patrol craft? "Rugen's a frontier-level system." The captain looked at me like I was a moron, albeit a moron with an incredibly sexy and distracting tail. "There ain't even a transshipment station, just a few cheapo weather and comm satellites. I just put the ship in a parking orbit and they send shuttles up. But it's not like the shipments are ever so big you'd need an orbital dock anyway, and shuttles are fine for passengers. Of course, that also means no orbital repair yard and no fuel depot, but that's not much worry since Rugen is just a long detour off our Thielbarra-to-Rialto route and I always do a refuel and refit at Thielbarra for safety's sake and, um, will you marry me?"

----

The shuttle ride down was as uneventful as such things generally are and afforded a chance to take in the view of Rugen from medium-high orbit. It was not a particularly exciting planet seen from 18,000 miles above its equator -- under the sparse clouds, some smallish seas, broad smears of iron-red in the right places to be deserts, accented by patches and streamers of an odd green that was almost an indecisive blue, and some blink-and-you'd-miss-them polar caps. But the thing is, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how many planets you've seen out the porthole, or how much of an undifferentiated dirtball the one below you is. There is no such thing as 'ordinary' when it comes to the sight of a whole damn world suspended in space right in front of you. It's a moment of magic, every single time, and anybody who says otherwise is lying, or is a soulless shithead. Or, since those aren't mutually exclusive, they could be both, like a corporate journalist or a Rybathi.

I used the flight time to mentally review what firsthand knowledge of Humans I possessed. Pro-tip-slash-caveat: members of a species often behave very differently in their own polities than they do in foreign or more cosmopolitan settings. Expatriates or visitors to your world are typically trying to get along in your society and tend to adjust their behavior accordingly. Their behavior when they are in the majority and they get to decide what's normal may be radically different. That said, there were a few truths I felt comfortable in ascribing to Humans in general based on experience.

For starters, sexual dimorphism. Humans born biologically male or female remain that sex, unless medically altered. Females are usually smaller and are the ones with slightly inadequate breasts. Males tend to be bigger, stronger, and coarser-looking and, like most mammaloid males, have completely inadequate breasts. This dimorphism leads to the most basic social structures being built around male-female pairings and their offspring -- family -- rather than the looser pack-based structure of Felra. These family structures appear to have a relationship similar to, though vastly more complicated than, the Felra mother-daughter bond. Basically, if you wrong a Human, you may face retribution not just from her, but from her entire bloodline. Except sometimes you won't, because, like I said, complicated.

Second, though many Galactics tend to use the terms 'Human' and 'Terran' as synonyms, Humans emphatically do not. Among Humans, the word 'Terran' refers specifically to an inhabitant of the Terran Commonwealth, the oldest, largest, and apparently most detested Human stellar nation. Humans who are not Commonwealth natives tend to have negative reactions to being called 'Terrans'. In this context, the term 'negative reactions' seems to cover a range from 'cold and profane verbal correction' to 'assault with a power-nailer'. Maybe this trip would offer a chance to find out why that might be? I'd also been told that actual Terrans react poorly to being called 'Human', though I've never met any Commonwealth Terrans and can't say for sure if that's true.

Third, Humans tend to be territorial, and therefore possessive. They have a strong impulse to guard things they have laid claim to. Don't try to make use of anything a Human regards as their own without asking permission first, even if you intend to give it right back. This impulse extends quite strongly to their romantic or sexual partners as well and attempting to bed, or even flirt with, a Human who has been claimed by another will tend to be met with hostility. You could try asking for permission, I guess, but that just seems to lead to socially awkward hostility. And if you don't know why socially awkward hostility is worse than the regular kind, then obviously you've never been in a fistfight with a drunken Dahu who was sporting a clingy wet kilt and a massive erection.

next

****
More Known Galaxy stories

True Story Time

Ok, forgive the formatting. This was originally a greentext post for all the /b/tards at 4chan. It's also a long read but if you can get past that then it is actually a quite interesting story that happened to me years ago.
be 22 active duty air force assigned to Nellis in Las Vegas not disclosing job, but no stranger to weapons and tactics get pulled in to supervisor's office one day told I've just been "voluntold" to participate in a training exercise with DOD no other information given other than reporting instructions pretty much any question I asked was answered with "I have no fucking idea " report to conference room at base hotel next morning per instruction see about 12 other guys from my unit also voluntold to be there five guys enter room in civilian clothes introduce themselves as the "WHITEBOX" Group Assume it's an acronym for something, but never explained told we will be upgrading our security clearances hours of paperwork, only told we are participating in a force on force exercise released back to our unit crack jokes about how the exercise is a lie and we will be experimented on return to regular job and time passes eventually assume that it was canceled and forget the whole thing
about 2 months later supervisor pulls me aside and tells me that I need to report to a briefing the next day says it’s about "some WHITEBOX exercise" has no idea what it is and doesn't seem to care. once again report to base hotel with the other 12 guys WHITEBOX guys show up and pick us up in a van driven off base to some random office building and escorted into the offices of the Department of Energy, WTF? mystery only deepens, what the fuck is happening? what if this actually is some evil experimental shit more hours of paperwork and security/safety briefings by random suits had to fill out and sign a non-disclosure agreement and that threatened arrest if violated required to turn in cell phones and any other electronic devices in our possession our cell phones get locked in a cabinet while the office phone in the room gets unplugged WHITEBOX guys finally return and fire up a power point briefing first slide just titled WHITBOX Exercise 0X slide also labeled in bold red letters "CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / NOFORN / ORCON this is really starting to feel serious
WHITEBOX Exercise finally explained told that for the next two weeks we will be role playing as OPFOR (opposing forces) we will try to attack and penetrate a DOD facility and carry out a simulated act of sabotage facility is protected by a contracted privately owned security force security group is required by the DOD to carry out this exercise in order to audit their protection every couple of years if we succeed, security company fails the audit and looses the contract the exercise is the conclusion of a two week inspection of the security contractors and their procedures every exercise a random military unit is chosen as OPFOR "reminded that we are silent professionals and that this isn’t something we should be advertising shaving wavers granted and civilian attire only FUCKYEAH.jpg power point scrolls to a page with a google earth screenshot on it instantly recognize the picture it's Area 51 holyfuckingshit.exe are we are being told to break into Area 51? can't be real random unit bro pipes up out of nowhere "Is that fucking Area 51?" we are all fucking stoked later told not to call it Area 51 as that just makes you a total chode Groom Lake, Paradise Ranch, or Homey Airbase are the acceptable names many insiders simply refer to it as “The Base” also reminded of the possible legal action via UCMJ if we go around telling everyone about it One of the WHITEBOX guys is now our designated "insider threat" exercise is designed to simulate that someone inside has been comprised by a foreign government he will provide any information that we ask for that he has knowledge of or access to other WHITEBOX guys handle will handle exercise logistics they will provide any weapons or equipment that we request to carry out mission "within reason" told this is not a COD loadout screen
ground rules established... will only be provided with weapons that we are certified to carry weapons will be armed with blank rounds or completely empty also no vehicles will be utilized by us within the DOD property landmarkers simulating road chases are not authorized our insertion is simulated so we will already be escorted/processed through various checkpoints and dropped off near the base no impractical equipment requests, so no tanks, helos, surveillance drones, or scud missiles, lol any explosives we intend to simulate will be assessed by WHITEBOX so if we want to blow the perimeter fences we will tell them before hand, they will calculate the weight of the bang we would need, it would be simulated by rocks, and then someone would need to hump the weight number 1 rule established and stressed with a very serious tone we will be escorted by WHITEBOX evaluators at all times within the DOD landmarkers at no point are any of us authorized to be alone in the facility actual security is not laxed because of the exercise, nor is this a free pass to roam security personnel can still use real force in the event that we deviate from the established protocols shown various pictures within the airbase that most will never get to see a specific hangar is designated as our target building. we will need to gain access to that hangar and carry out an act of sabotage for our sabotage we will need to ///REDACTED/// obviously we won't be doing it for real so we will actually need complete a random task inside the hangar task will be designed to be as complex and time consuming as the real thing all while being hunted by the security force insider threat briefing continues, various elements of the base security procedures and day to day operations explained however, get the impression that the chosen source is someone with a generic admin position and is not actually involved with security we are also encouraged to do our own research and scour the interwebz for info about the base told to supply the URLs to WHITEBOX if we find anything of interest. sorry if we got your Alex Jones or Art Bell conspiracy blogs taken offline briefing finally concludes, we are reminded of our non-disclosure policy and taken back to Nellis and dismissed for the day
next day we all meet at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada we will be using this location to build our plan of attack and do rehearsals/dry runs it's actually pretty cool because it's on us to plan our op, just a bunch of random Airmen periodically grill our insider with questions and start asking our other WHITEBOX guys for gear we tried to have our insider take pictures of the interior of our target hangar, but he got caught IRL he would be arrested and interrogated by the feds, and the whole op would be dead instead though the guys that caught him received kudos from the inspectors, and he just tells us nope have to rely on a whiteboard sketch of the inside decide to keep it simple, M4 riffles only however I am certified on the Barret M82 .50 cal. we decide that I will carry that heavy mother fucker as well as an M4 and provide overwatch from the distance kind of bummed out because im not going inside it will be on me to neutralize certain security positions that we have previous identified we remind our WHITEBOX guys that the M82 is an anti-material weapon with the ability to disable vehicles they tell us that I will just need to call my shots to the evaluator that I will be partnered with he will radio to the vehicles that they are destroyed and will need to stop driving guess I should mention that is also part of the disadvantage we have we will all be paired with WHITEBOX evaluators who will sort of act as referees during this simulated battle however they will all be wearing bright orange reflective vest identifying them as exercise officials that really fucks our ability to stay hidden and stealthy, but it is what it is also should mention that this is a daytime raid despite our objections sounds like they are setting us up for failure, but they remind us not to think of it like that this is all being done just so the evaluators can get a good look at the security's incident response procedures it's not an unannounced drill, the military doesn't really like to do that kind of thing especially with large scale exercises such as this everyone on the base know we are coming, there's no element of surprise here except with what kind of attack we prep it would be a real hot clusterfuck if the security contractors failed the audit heads would roll, people would get fired, and numerous officers would be relieved of command I still get to attack Area 51 so don't care as this is the coolest thing I've done in the military
our plan is starting to come together over the days decide to sacrifice one of us in a suicide bomb attack figure out which of us is the most "FNG" or lowest ranking and make him do it he will approach one of the ECPs (entry points to the base) on foot wearing a rucksack loaded with rocks (make-believe explosives) he will be wearing a uniform and will identify himself as Air Force and will franticly yell that he needs help we don't anticipate that he will make it that far or that the security will actually swallow this ruse however his goal is to get as close as he can to the ECP and yell allah ackbar and release his dead man's switch and try to take out what he can his evaluatoescort will drop a GBS (ground burst simulator) when he detonates GBS is a little miniature explosive device that just makes a really loud boom anyone who’s been through any type of military training is familiar with them, they are used to add stress and create excitement we are hoping this will be a distraction and will get as much security as possible to converge on that location the rest of us will assault from the other side of the base and try to breach the perimeter several of us will also be rucking explosive rocks for the breach chose a breach point that will have us crossing only a minimal portion of the flightline (place where aircraft operate) if we successfully simulate breaching the perimeter the exercise will be paused and we will be inprocessed through the ECP and brought into the base exercise will resume and we will continue to assault towards the target hangar I will stay outside in my sniper position and try to smoke what I can inside the hangar the team will cover the doors with simulated claymores and take up cover two guys will carry out the simulated sabotage act while the rest cover the doors WHITEBOX doesn't have any inert claymores to provide so the will be simulated with small weighted ammo cans the weight is really starting to become problematic so we abandon the claymores and decide to just cover the doors with firepower would really help if we had a vehicle, but not happening to be fair, vehicles wouldn't make it that close to the base if they tried to attack IRL armored or not
week one down, plan looking solid considering how much of our attack is simulated two weeks of planning is actually excessive not complaining though cause two weeks of hanging out and smoking and joking compared to normal work at Nellis only downside is the hour drive back and forth each day to Creech AFB casino right outside that base with awesome steak and eggs so not too bad though one of the WHITEBOX guys tells us he's actually employed by the Department of Energy he doesn't actually work at Groom Lake, he works at the Nevada Test Range the massive amount of Nevada landscape that is restricted and owned by the feds is actually impressive contrary to popular myth there is road access to Groom Lake via the adjacent test range, but not too many people actually make that drive. the 737 shuttle from McCarran Airport is how everyone gets there since the drive is long as fuck the main paved road through Rachel Nevada that all the tourist flock to doesn't really have any operational use anymore allegedly we will be driving there through the test range via a convoluted series of paved and dirt roads route is CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET, not kidding
DOE dude gives us a tour of the test range one day load cases of water in back of van drive to Mercury Nevada and stop at checkpoint inprocessed inside, get pictures taken and issued escorted visitor passes also required to wear radiation badges once inside get to see all that shit from The Hills Have Eyes, fake towns that were blown up with atomic bombs not as intact as they are portrayed in films though, they are pretty rekt or deconstructed show us a massive crater called the Sedan Crater in the 50's they experimented with using atomic bombs for mass excavation projects hoping they could just nuke the ground and build shit instead of fucking around with bulldozers pretty stupid and impractical but they didn't know any better back then they buried an atomic bomb a half a mile underground and blew it up Sedan Crater left behind as a result and the fucking thing is huge. they allegedly herded cattle down to the bottom of the crater afterwards to test the post fallout effects pretty fuckin savage, and it was actually stunning to look at two hour drive to Groom Lake though endless desert roads now see why we loaded the water, we’d be pretty fucked if the van broke down or got stuck get first distant look at the base without having to enter their checkpoints holyshit.mp4 very few people get to actually see what we are seeing to be honest though, looks like any other air force base I've ever seen except smaller besides the obvious fact that it is in the middle of bum fuck nowhere and its main runway is long as fuck also realize one of the reasons they didn't want us operating vehicles most roads are dirt and the entire lake bed is surrounded by "moon dust" everywhere moon dust is the ultra-fine sand found in certain parts of the desert with the consistency of flour it's also a total bitch to drive in and the security patrols getting stuck is a somewhat frequent occurrence told that they even have some of the AAFES fast food joints there that you find on any other base imagine working at a Burger King that you need a Top Secret security clearance for, how the fuck does that work??? noticed that despite being authorized to be here, we are still being watched by distant security patrols wonder if they know we are the bad guys that are going to be attacking the joint make some minor adjustments to the plan since the google earth pictures lack some detail conclude tour and take the 3 to 4 hour drive back home, most of us slept in the van
arrive at Creech next day and see that more WHITEBOX guys have been added to the mix, now there's like 20 of them for the past two weeks they have been inspecting the security contractors and its procedures you can tell a lot of them are ex-military based off of language and the people that are dipping and spiting in empty water bottles the mood is light, all of the exercise planning is finished, nothing to do the last two days we managed to borrow an empty hangar at Creech and used it as a mockup of our target hangar to run rehearsals no longer asking our insider questions about security, instead start asking completely ridiculous questions about conspiracies for lulz accuse some of them of being reptilians to see how they react, some of them get legit uncomfortable before you go sounding off, doubt they are hiding anything, some folks just don’t get military humor one does, however, and shows us a velcro patch that he wears on his rucksack it's one of those standard patches you spot on a pilot’s flight suit that has the name, rank, branch, and blood type his blood type seriously says reptilian it's obvious that they embrace and poke fun at the reputation this base has, in fact they thrive off of it
the day finally fucking arrives, time to attack this bitch wake up at 0400 and drive an hour to Creech dressed to kill decide to wear DCU "desert combat uniform" pants and a sand t shirt with my personally owned Blackhawk tactical vest to carry spare M4 mags sometimes the military issues some real shitty gear so our unit is somewhat lax and allows us to personally buy our own better equipment if it has command approved use and doesn't break SOPs also wear my empty gas mask pouch attached to my hip and use it to carry spare M82 .50 cal mags also wear a black turban for lulz that I bought off an ANA (Afghani Northern Alliance) dude downrange used to have a guile suite but it got lost on a deployment so that's a no go unfortunately arm up with an M4 with M68 red dot sight and attach a BFA "blank firing adapter" to the muzzle, and load six mags of .556 blanks also provided with my trusty Barret .50 M82 and five mags there is no BFA for the Barret that I'm familiar with so carry that with empty mags, guess I get to cheat with the weight load up in the vans with WHITEBOX team and drive another hour to Mercury get inprosscessed through security checkpoint and receive visitor badges for the test range drive another 2 hour on random roads passing more checkpoints /// REDACTED /// forced to surrender cell phones, personally owned electronic devices and CAC cards (military ID cards) again receive our escorted visitor passes for Groom Lake and now continue down some of the most forbidden roads in American history start unloading as close to our start point as the terrain allows and hump the rest of the distance on foot with our escorts suicide attack bro hangs back in the van with other escorts and is driven to his start point the terrain is favorable and allows us to set up out of sight hence why we chose the spot I break off and try to set up my nest at my chosen OP "observation point" as discreetly as possible not really stealthy cause I'm being followed by a guy wearing an orange reflective vest that says STAN EVAL and he's just casually walking he tells me to set up the Barret, but just simulate your shots by firing the M4 blanks now in a spot where I can observe base activity and provide cover fire for the breach, but I am also the most easy to spot sniper ever now wait for confirmation that our distraction on the other side has happened, taking a real long fucking time
my escort's radio chimes to life and starts talking "attention all WHITEBOX, we now have proper authentication via CASTLE ROCK for initiation of a detachment level exercise" voice on radio proceeds to spit out a long winded exercise safety briefing realize it's been about 40 minutes and we are just now fucking starting another 10 minutes and finally get word that suicide bro is approaching his target escorts all inform us that the security force is responding to reports of an explosion outside of the ECP later find out that suicide bro was stopped and challenged at gun point about 50 meters outside of ECP by a mounted patrol he then just fuck it and started sprinting towards the ECP until they opened fire with blanks and his escort set off the GBS he actually managed to take out the vehicle that stopped him and create several casualties (we gave him the heaviest explosive rocks loadout) overall our distraction was pretty fucking successful give it a another minute or two and finally start shooting and calling my shots to my escort/evaluator he's talking on his radio and relaying my simulated violence, "inform Merc-17 that they are dead from sniper fire" etc... I have predetermined targets to engage based off of what poses the biggest threat to the breach team I actually do some damage and get confirmation of casualties from my escort it's about a 600 meter run to the base perimeter in the open desert so it's on me to try and clear their path as much as I can the plan is to try to lure some security vehicles to our position then eliminate them with the Barret while they are en route the dead vehicles can then serve as points of cover for the breach team as they assault towards the base breach team was also aiming to see if they could snag any security radios from the dead patrols so we can monitor their comms didn't really work out that way however, in the end we simply didn't have all the info about the anticipated security response without giving away too many sensitive details, we all got ambushed by the security from unexpected locations forced to abandon my nest and the Barret to start moving towards another location to back up the breach team that was under fire trade some shots with security until my escort finally announces "ok dude, you're dead. go ahead and lay down" that's it, game over
play dead for about 20 minutes while security cleans up the area breach team gets rekt, we managed to get within 100 meters of the perimeter couple of security dudes approach me and perform a dead combatant body search on me it's a specific type of search designed to search a dead body while also checking for possible explosive booby traps pretend to be dead and let security dudes run my pockets finally one of the evaluators shouts "PauseEx" (pause exercise) we got fucking annihilated, no chance this attack was going to be successful our evaluators tell us that everyone did a great job, HOWEVER.... we are going to continue the exercise because they didn't get the chance to observe much of the internal security components we are going to resume the exercise assuming that we were actually able to get inside that target hangar this will give the evaluators the opportunity to observe the security's recap and recov procedures (re-capture and recovery) we all get magically resurrected from the dead I realize that I am actually going inside Groom Lake! Fucking Awesome...
spend about 15 minutes policing up the area for brass which means wandering around and picking up spent cartridges board vans and get driven around to ECP. realize that only half of the security force is playing in this exercise the rest are still armed with live weapons and are still performing regular protection duties forced to show our visitor passes, names and badge numbers are compared against a master list that the security has /// REDACTED /// /// REDACTED /// notice a homemade sign hanging on the wall at the security center it’s got a picture of an alien with a red X through it that says "no extraterrestrial entities or relics beyond this point" like I said earlier, everyone enjoys the reputation this base has drive to our target hangar, holy fuck! I am now inside Area 51 use of blanks not authorized indoors, everyone is told to clear out weapons rest of the exercise will use simulated firing, the equivalent of pointing your empty weapon at someone and yelling bang sadly not the first time I trained like this, military does it all the time it’s ridiculous and awkward every time, looks like a bunch of kids playing backyard soldiers with sticks security has already reset its posture, they know we are attacking but doesn't know the building we are hitting we all enter the hangar, get the impression that it doesn't actually get used IRL anymore reeks of mildew and no power inside, dust everywhere in the center there is a pickup truck covered with a tarp and roped off with red rope and stanchions, signs posted identifying it as a controlled area told that this is a simulated military asset and this is what we are sabotaging WHITEBOX evaluator pulls a box out of the bed of the truck remember when I said we will have to do a complex and time consuming task to simulate our act of sabotage? it’s a fucking Star Wars Lego kit! I shit you not! evaluators tell us we will need start building it and reach page 12 in the instructions without errors or mistakes kind of wish we went with our earlier plan and brought claymores cause I spotted some sweet chokepoints outside the building to set them up also wish we had the idea of bringing padlocks and chains so we could lock down the hangar and make life more difficult for the security force set up our spots to cover the doors, we are well versed with building clearing tactics so we know what spots to cover to make it hard
WHITEBOX evaluator authenticates over the radio with someone by passing letters and numbers back and forth, process known as sign/countersign voice on radio announces that the detachment level WHITEBOX exercise has resumed showtime! Two unit bros start opening the Lego kit and sorting parts me and the suicide bro weren't supposed to be in this hangar or even on the base to begin with so we don't have points to cover inside come up with idea and ask one of the escorts if we can go out the back on to the flightline plan to walk to two separate buildings in opposite directions and see if we can create distractions evaluators approve the plan, but tell us we can't approach or enter other buildings, nor approach any parked aircraft decide to leave firearms and my tac vest behind for clever reasons if we are unarmed the security will most likely apprehend us, and search us this is more time consuming than just shooting us and will keep them away from the hangar longer exit the back of the hangar on to the flightline and just start casually walking down the tarmac with my escort eventually hear the sound of police sirens in the distance getting louder, hear they come! get the urge to start sprinting but decide not to since it would most likely result in me being tackled on the pavement, fuck that later realize distant sirens are actually responding to hangar after reports of a silent alarm being received so much for the distraction plan
decide not to return to hangar since there is not much I can do unarmed, and continue walking down flightline all the parked aircraft I see are just normal military aircraft, although some do seem to have “enhancements” or cosmetic features that I haven’t seen before ask my escort where they keep all the flying saucers, he smirks and just replies "underground" wonder if there are actually any subterranean levels to this base, suppose a lot of these buildings could support that ask my escort if there are really underground levels, he facetiously says “who knows” white pickup truck with police lights approaching fast pretend not to notice and keep walking voice starts barking at me over a loudspeaker "stop right there! do not move! get your hands up! security mercs climbing out of vehicle with rifles drawn, don't see magazines in the riffles, they are part of the drill they actually try to challenge both of us, escort has to remind them that he is out of play security goons bark at me, "face away from me NOW! keep your hands up!" they are actually pretty intimidating, I comply proceed to have me lay on the ground face down with my arms and legs stretched out yell at me to put my hands in the small of my back, palms together, fingers up big black guy approaches me and actually puts his knee on my neck George Floyd style "don't fight me, don't resist me, or you are gonna get hurt" he says puts me in zip ties and picks me up, see other guards still have weapons drawn on me overall whole thing similar to a gangbanger getting rolled up by the cops black guy puts me in some weird and uncomfortable arm hold tells me to start walking while he steers my body with the arm hold and walks me off the flightline taken to a grassy area, get put back on the ground and searched and questioned /// REDACTED /// I try to bluff and say that the hangar will blow if anyone goes inside, see if that stalls them he tries to question me about it, but I can tell he’s not biting, I decide to tone it down and stay quiet cause the dude really looks like he’s going to fuck me up actually overhear his partner talking on the radio, he’s telling others to exercise caution and beware of possible explosive booby traps lights out, realize that someone put a bag over my head evaluator calls out "EndEX" (end exercise) all portions of the exercise are terminated, it's all over
black security guy cuts my zip ties, takes off the hood and sets me loose later find out that security retook the hangar with no problems my guys inside struggled with the Legos since it was so dark and hard to see instead of immediately going in, security tossed inert CS gas canisters inside none of us brought gas mask since it was something our insider failed to mention evaluator let us build legos for another 30 seconds then yelled “GAS, GAS, GAS” unit bros in the hangar were told to lay on the ground and pretend to be incapacitated security swarmed the place with gas mask and guns, kicked away weapons they got a similar treatment to what I received on the flightline and got hauled out of there we all regroup at the base's main visitor center for the AAR (after action review) overall security responded quite well, only some points were critiqued, nothing failing smoke cigarettes and crack jokes back and forth with the security dudes, finally get to see the human side of the guy who snagged me on the flightline tell him he’s one scary mofo, he smiles and we shake hands security dudes leave, head to base theater for full debrief WHITEBOX guys thank us for our participation, time to head home wait a sec, let’s see some fucking aliens WHITEBOX guy smirks and says he’ll give us the dollar tour another day drive back to Mercury knowing full well that we are not going to hear back from them, especially about a tour return radiation badges to the Mercury office told that if we never hear back from them that it’s a good sign told that if they do call us then our Tricare (military health coverage) will get put to good use whole experience was cool as fuck one of the evaluators hands out business cards for ///REDACTED/// and tells us to look them up when we separate from the military starting pay for the security force is pretty fucking dope and only certain military backgrounds are considered for it return to Indian Springs and hit up the casino for drinks with the original 5 WHITEBOX guys ask if any of the prior OPFOR units actually pulled it off and broke in told that a group of CCT guys from the 24th STS was the closest anyone’s ever gotten but even they still failed makes sense, I’ve heard that those dudes are legit operators tell war stories and get drunk actually receive a letter of appreciation from the Air Force Test Center Detachment 3 from Edwards Air Force Base, California about a month later it thanks me for my participation in an exercise but makes no mention of Groom Lake my participation in a vaguely worded “DOD exercise” actually gets mentioned as a bullet in my annual performance report mfw I attacked Area 51
tldr - me and my coworkers "broke" into Area 51 with automatic weapons so we could put together an X-wing starfighter out of Legos
Thanks for reading. I should mention that I have intentionally withheld a lot of details and even altered a few. I'm not trying to blow up anyone’s spot and compromise shit. Just wanted to share a true story about some cool shit I got to do in my youth. For example WHITEBOX is a completely fabricated name while the whole operation actually went under another random weird name. It still ranks as some of the most cloak and dagger shit I got to do in the military. I actually don’t really tell too many people because it is no one’s business and no one would believe me anyways. I finally figured that enough time has passed and like I said, I have specially tailored this story to avoid leaking any sensitive shit. Overall the base was actually kind of underwhelming. I didn’t really see any earth shattering secrets there. All of the alien and reptilian conspiracy theories were openly mocked and made fun of there. It’s really just a base that gets an extra layer of discreetness and physical security for more sensitive assets and projects to be kept there. The CIA, JSOC and other intel gangs from Washington even have offices out there because it’s just a quiet tucked away place to do business. I will say that their security is no joke and that they have some truly fascinating techniques to detect and deny intruders. Hope you enjoyed.

my chance casino review video

My Chance Casino Reveiw Review (2020) Casino-Reviews 0 April 19, 2020 11:18 pm Fortune Cat Casino Review (2020) Casino Of Dreams Review (2020) Vegas Rush Casino Review (2020) Players from United Kingdom NOT accepted. Palace of Chance is an online casino with a royal look and feel. Although they were once in the AskGamblers blacklist for slow payment, their new pro-player policies have taken them out. The casino is powered by Real Time Gaming, one of the largest platforms in the world.Palace of Chance holds a Costa Rica business license. MyChance Casino has been scheduled to launch in November of 2017 and top on the list of player incentives is the generous bonuses and a wide selection of casino games. By using a platform designed by Bethard, the casino is already passing a message to players that the site is secure and well protected. MyChance Casino has been warned and added to our illegitimate casinos Blacklist. This is due to the fact that they lost contact and got complaints from players that had trouble to cash out. All of our attempts to contact this casino were not fulfilled. We strongly advise that players will play at other casinos. MyChance Casino is an online casino where members have access to a range of games which includes video slots, table games and live games. Members can enjoy titles from multiple providers which includes leading names like NetEnt , Microgaming , Play’n GO , Thunderkick and Yggdrasil. MyChance Casino Review 2020. MyChance Casino is a relatively new casino established in November 2017. Despite this, their expertise in the online gaming industry is quite remarkable. From hefty bonuses and seamless gaming experience to round the clock customer support, My Chance Casino seeks to be the ultimate online gaming destination for casino lovers across Europe. My Chance Casino Review mychance.com Check out mychance Slots & Live Dealer Games for FREE ⭐ My Chance Casino Mobile Review List of My Chance Casino Software Providers and Payment Methods ⚙ AI My Chance Casino Analysis Ma Chance Casino is ’n relatief jong casino. CasinoJager struikelt voorlopig even over de (te) lage uitbetalingslimieten, wat klachten over late uitbetalingen en de vergunning op Curacao. Review last updated – June 2020. My Chance Casino are operated by the BetHard Group – a company based in Malta. Betive are dual licensed by the MGA in Malta and by one of the master license issuers in Curacao.My Chance Casino are sister casino to: Live Lounge, Sir Jackpot, Night Rush, Toto 2, My Chance, Lets Bet, Scandi Bet, Sverige Kronan Casino, Norge Vegas Casino and Suomi Vegas Casino. My Chance Casino Review. MyChance casino is a welcoming sight to behold, and with all that it currently has in store for its customers, this should be a perfect opportunity to get on board with all the gaming action that can be experienced upon signing up with this network.