Don’t judge my musical taste.

Eric Carmen’s ‘Make Me Lose Control’ was on the radio a lot and it resonated with me.

I ended up calling the radio station to find out what song it was, and then learned that my mom had bought that tape on accident because she thought it was Eric Clapton.

Months later, on a camping trip with grueling hikes (to chubby young me, not that I am less chubby), I was singing variations on those lyrics as motivation to keep moving. Dunno what my Dad thought of this.

On this trip, my grandpa and step-grandma hiked in to say hello and have dinner with us, only to have my 14 year old sister (on her period) lean out of her tent to vomit on their feet.

Good times.

You are definitely being creative in a roundabout way, but once you have all that work done, you can theoretically tell almost any kind of story within that setting.

I have been doing this in a very minor way (compared to you) in creating a D&D world so that I can step in at any point in history with an adventure and have the players version of the world change through their cumulative adventures.

I don’t have 5000 years of detailed world history or even a completed world map yet, but I am having fun and so are my players.

So to tie all this up, you are doing this for you and having fun with it. Why stop now? Write your stories. Maybe find an audience.

More or less though that writing process is similar to Tolkein’s. Make the setting well enough and the characters will suddenly start to make their own decisions for you. (And then you rethink earlier decisions when you get better at it and need to retcon things.)

My understanding is that it is a direct sequel to Endgame. Some of the stuff that happened since will have mattered, and characters you don’t yet know will be in it, but the story beats extend from Endgame.

If you chose to watch one thing, I would suggest the two season Loki show, but even that they will introduce to the audience with enough information to catch up.

The unicorn is Illimita Whitedove, and he is kind of a surfer/stoner dude.

The nightclub is gonna be great fun, as is the patron. He is a gregarious, over the top host who is not at all what he appears to be.

Edit: Illimita showed up! We filled him in on the situation and he said “Whoa. That’s heavy.”

Family D&D game, 1pm-3pm.

We are attempting to recruit the former assistant to our big bad who is attempting to take over the Feywild, leading the Seelie and Unseelie courts to unite against the threat.

It just so happens that we have killed him before but the bastard had a clone.

The assistant is a kobold who has fallen out of his favor. We have scryed on him several times in the past and even healed a burn through the crying spell. We are using a unicorn ally (who is a result of the wild magic sorcerer accidentally summoning a unicorn three times) to convince him we are not evil.

Then 6pm-9pm I run a session for friends. They are in a SCP-themed aberration/ooze dungeon and are almost done, but they have not yet discovered that they are locked in by guards who are waiting for reinforcements. Then they will head further in the tunnels until they reach The Crypt, which is actually a nightclub run by someone who wants to be their patron.

Could’ve added: Cook.

Cook sprayed with non-cooking spray stick.

In my world, wood elves, of buried within a year in a grove, become a part of it (sorta like in Speaker for the Dead) and high elves choose to enact this ritual living separately.

These majestic trees grow to great heights, akin to redwoods. When such a tree dies of old age, the heartwood animates but has only the vaguest memory of its prior lives. That’s the origin of warforged for my world. Incredibly rare, filled with history but oddly disconnected from it.

Haven’t invented new races yet, only twists on existing ones.

Lizardfolk? Eat their dead with reverence, carve their stories onto their bones and then reanimate then for labor or battle. Their dead never truly die and remain a respected part of their culture.

Dwarves care about achieving immortality through craftsmanship, humans through magic. It’s only halflings, and gnomes to a lesser extent, that have simply accepted death and lived their lives.

I do love that it’s set in Bikini Bottom.

We nuked the hell out of the Bikini Islands for nuclear tests.

SpongeBob and his friends are all mutants.

I actually saw a minute or two of SpongeBob and was surprised/annoyed they didn’t seem to be moving underwater.

I think I expected the show to be more sophisticated in a useless way.

Oh I definitely got the genetic reference already, just wanted to know if I was reading it appropriately as a laugh.

Never having watched SpongeBob, I hear Popeye laughing and think that’s the joke. Am I right?

My journey was:

Wait, there’s a ton of religions, most of which think that they’re the ones with the one immutable truth?

Then none of them are right, or it would be obvious.

I still spent years with Christian apologia and god-in-the-gaps nonsense but at least my personal moral and religious development was rooted in doubt rather than faith.

Somehow both of my parents were disappointed in my atheism.

USPS has a way of combining smaller towns and suburbs to the largest nearby city. In practice this is very useful. You know your friend is near Nashville, say, and the zip codes do the heavy lifting.

So I would posit that using USPS as a source in this case is not a great idea.

From my experience, IBS is both about diet and anxiety.

Obviously not eating isn’t going to help. You’ll have to learn what foods set you off and limit or eliminate those from your diet. (For me it’s raw onions and overly starchy foods.)

But I believe your condition is fueled more by your anxiety and depression.

I can’t really help you there other than to say that controlled breathing exercises seem to be helping me. I often take cold showers when in an IBS attack that has verged into being a panic attack, but in that cold shower I realized I focus on my breathing.

My background is that I knew I had IBS but it was getting out of control. It turned out I had a hernia that was causing an occasional intestinal blockage. Once that was fixed, my IBS started to slowly improve.

It should’ve been massively better, but I had been training myself to be anxious each morning, worrying whether I’d be able to function at all.

I had to unlearn that worry… and it took a long time.

I dunno that I can give you advice on making friends. I am lucky to have a very good core support group of friends who have been with me through the last twenty-some years. We are all middle-aged dudes now, with our own complicated lives, but we still get together for board games, d&d, and chat on a discord all the time.

There was a time when we grew apart a bit. (We are stoners and one of our rowdier friends went to jail.)

I called a few together for a board game night, and it stuck. If I had not done that, we would almost certainly not still be in each other’s lives.

So find some friends and keep them close. It is very hard to get through life alone, as you know. It takes hard work to make and maintain these relationships, but they are necessary.

I completely understand where you’re coming from.

I do wish there was something omnipresent and beneficial. It would be comforting. But we are here because we do not agree with that concept.

And that’s been the ‘problem’ that most of us here face. We strive to be decent people while defining our own moralities based on other principles we find to be more reliable.

On the other hand, not all Christians would be good or kind or forgiving. That isn’t something that comes from a worldview.

Even if they are truly convinced that the Christian God is real and omnipresent, there has been no external force in their lives to command them to be better, so they don’t.

These changes come about when personal experience drives the change.

As such, it is up to us to push the world to be the utopia we wish it to be. This is all we have and are likely to have.

Good to know!

We don’t know what’s going on in the brain at that moment. It might be enough during an oxygen starved moment. It might be only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

I’m not claiming to have answers, only possible insight.

I did have one friend who did a larger dose of DMT with a cocktail that let the trip last for eight hours rather than five minutes. Maoi inhibitor I think, keeping the drug from being broken down quickly. He thought he had overdosed, died, and was facing judgment.

All I can say is that the brain produces DMT when near death, and I have done DMT. Not a ton, but I have.

Until that is properly studied, we can’t know much more about NDEs, in my opinion.

I’m sure DMT is but a small piece of that puzzle, but the feeling (whether real or chemically induced) of being in contact with cognizant entities on DMT is not uncommon.

Personally, I’m an agnostic atheist. I think we are entities that end. But I’m not so stubborn to consider that there is more to reality than what I know.

So I am inclined to dismiss NDEs and the like as being some kind of transcendent contact. Just full disclosure, no disrespect intended.

It’s just a mistake, there’s no point in beating yourself up over it at all.

Try to find a way to laugh it off and either cancel or have a fun time doing something else in the area.

Your mistake is an embarrassing inconvenience. Nobody is hurt, nobody lost their job, you aren’t fired, evicted, or divorced.

Take a deep breath. Self-forgiveness is a skill worth practicing, lest you poison your memories with regret.

9 looks like you could slap a G’oauld symbol on that forehead easily.