Yes, really. I have good reasons to. For my whole life, I have been an incredibly spiritual person. And part of that lifelong spirituality and call to the realm beyond the physical, to more than what science knows? Was in fact dipping my toes into exploring Christianity. I went with my mom on multiple Easters, and now I have gone with my wife on Easter. I enjoyed watching the people, and bonding with the person I went with (my mom as a kid, my wife now), and I wanted to, in my curiosity, explore the religion to see if it could provide a tug to my innate spirituality.

...But every time, it does the exact opposite. My innate spirituality is repelled by Christianity because Christianity is in violation of everything spiritual, at least in the form that it is practiced and, particularly, preached by. As I've explored, I've found how much is so close to being spiritual in a healthy way, which is why I will still sing praises to elements, to aspects of, Christianity, for all of the good they stumbled upon, but it is that very fact that they almost have greatness and then they squander it by rhetoric drenched in shame and pressure and in lessening oneself and promoting one true path and in doing so demeaning those not following said path, that I am as critical as I am of the religion, because the spirituality which could be found there is destroyed and ripped apart by the rigid dogma of their preached doctrines.

The Easter sermon I attended today was in particular a fine show of that, where I could see the closeness to good ideas, and how those good ideas are then hard-pivoted into a self-centered belief system that undermines growth, that undermines faith itself, in favor of obedience to the church. And make no mistake, 'faith' and 'obedience', despite how closely they're often linked, are two entirely different things altogether. One can have healthy blind faith without a lick of obedience, but what I often observe from these sermons is asking for blind obedience without a lick of actual faith.

In fact the sermon I listened to made it clear that faith would give nothing, because belief alone is not enough. The good idea was there, but the twisted execution makes it deliver the exact opposite of an uplifting message of hope, of love, of bonding, of community. The sermon made it clear that the Christian doctrine dictates that the only one with any say in who goes to heaven is God and nothing we do can change that judgement, loosely speaking. Which is a nice idea, but horrible execution.

​And that brings me to one of my main gripes with the religion. An estimated 25 - 33% of humanity allegedly follows, loosely speaking, some denomination, variant, and/or cultist offshoot of Christianity. But by the belief of Christianity, belief in Jesus as the one true savior and the only path to Heaven would thus require that God would condemn a minimum of 66 - 75% of humanity to eternal damnation, per their belief system.

Now, in my last Christianity rant, I focused on how that doesn't sound like a combo ever possible from a God that's all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. Because an all-powerful God has the power to intervene in any way God sees fit to set things exactly to God's plan. And an all-knowing God would know the exact consequences of those actions and inactions. And an all-loving God would see that under the current path with the level of interventions as they are, the majority of humanity would be condemned.

So by the Christian belief system, we would thus have to assume that God, knowing humanity's free will, would see that the majority of humanity would not follow the path to eternal salvation, and knowing this would happen, didn't...do anything about it, and willingly let the majority of humanity be condemned.

That aside from the contradiction between the idea of Jesus's sacrifice and the justification provided. Per Christian lore (and on Easter in particular this was heavily emphasized and reiterated), there was an Original Sin, committed by the biblical Adam and Eve. Aside from how we scientifically know there never was a singular Adam or a singular Eve and that humanity evolved (which undermines the entire concept of an Original Sin, because if humanity gradually evolved from prior forms of life there was never a garden of eden from which we were expelled from due to eating a forbidden fruit from a tree of knowledge or anything of the sort).

Even by the established lore, Jesus is said to have purged said Original Sin by his sacrifice. So if Jesus purged the original sin, then logically, all those born before would have it removed and retroactively be given a chance at Heaven (this is part of Christian lore as Jesus entered purgatory to remove all of those who should have been eligible for Heaven, per Christian lore), and all those born after would never have the Original Sin, because Jesus already purged it.

So if Jesus purged the Original Sin, then why would we still be dealing with the consequences of the original sin? Jesus paid the toll for ALL of humanity--past, present, and future. So if Jesus paid the toll of humanity for the original sin, then humanity shouldn't be suffering the consequences of the original sin. Yet this, as far as I can tell, just kinda...gets glossed over and ignored by the faith.

The preacher today literally said sin still lives in all of us. Which, I don't disagree with. But logically it shouldn't if Jesus removed the original sin as he allegedly did. And like, while I agree that all humans are imperfect (another part of the sermon), that imperfection doesn't equate to inherently being sinful. The majority of humanity, regardless of their beliefs, are good people who try their best to do their best and want to and try to do good.

Any God that would condemn the majority of humanity, when the majority of humanity is inherently innately good and trying their best? Couldn't be an all-loving God, so couldn't be a God of mine.

Even if we add in adjacent beliefs, like Islam, that's still a good half of humanity damned to their idea of Hell. (Because those of the Abrahamic faith make up about half the human population according to a quick Google search, with about 33% identifying as forms of atheist, agnostic, nothing-in-particular, or pagan, and the remaining being other belief systems if I recall correctly.)

And that's aside from how just belief in Jesus as the savior and the one path to salvation is not enough to guarantee a place in Heaven, as made clear. (And I actually agree on that part.)
Not all who (allegedly) identify as Christian, hold to the standards of Christianity. Aside from the monsters committing the most heinous of crimes against humanity, life, and the planet itself, there's the stringent contradictory standards required of the faith per their doctrine. What rules to follow, what rules to ignore, is something left arbitrary, in a way which it couldn't possibly be if The Bible were truly the One True Word of God showing the One True Path.

If The Bible, if Christianity, truly held One True Path towards Salvation, then which rules to follow shouldn't be so widely debated and so widely different and contradictory. What one branch of Christianity might view as a sacred requirement, another might see as trivial. What one branch might see as a hard line which if crossed condemns a soul, a different branch might see as a requirement for salvation.

When the belief is so divisive as to what matters and what doesn't in terms of salvation and damnation, it cannot be seen as one true path, because every branch views themselves as the best path, and thus, they cannot all be the mandated path of salvation by God. Now, there's nothing wrong with a doctrine deliberately leaving things arbitrary and up to the individual. That's one area I mean in how Christianity comes so close to true spirituality.

Leaving spiritual beliefs and practices for what matters and what doesn't up to an individual with none more or less valid than the other? That, I can get behind! I believe in precisely that! But every single branch of Christianity, every single denomination, doesn't present their faith in that light, from what I've found. To the contrary, they do the exact opposite. They try to portray Christianity as one unified faith with one unified path towards salvation where if certain rules are followed it puts you in good graces with Jesus whereas certain other things will be judged by God as worthy of eternal damnation.

​There's definitely beliefs that tend to be more widespread, of course. In particular New Testament focus, on Jesus's words, on Jesus's preaching, on what Jesus said and on what Jesus did. But it should be no surprise, then, that this is where I find my greatest disappointment in Christianity. If I were ever asked by a Christian, I would say "I actually follow the teachings of Jesus, but because I follow the teachings of Jesus, I cannot identify as a Christian because no branch of Christianity I know of follows them to my satisfaction".

As one example of many, I've found that all modern churches I know of, without exception, fail to follow one of the most important tenets of their alleged savior Jesus.

If they were to truly embrace Jesus's teachings, these churches would organize volunteers to keep their doors open 24/7.

They would accept, around the clock, regardless of weather (within their capacity to reach the church and keep the church powered, at least), people staying in the house of God, for as long as they wish. This tenet of Jesus's teachings was historically known and followed, with churches as sacred places of refuge, of sanctity, of shelter. These places were safe spaces, places for even those who weren't true believers, who weren't of the Christian faith, to come to at any time they needed, even in the dead of night.

Christians in churches, if they were actually following Jesus's teachings, would have kept to that. Providing shelter from the elements, water, and bathrooms, all for free, all for as long as they need them. If desired, they would provide sermons, and similar services. To direct those who come seeking aid to places they can find it, to teach, to read, to give those in need some love and support in their time of need.

I would ask all Christians who attend church:
Why doesn't your church do this?
Why doesn't your church, with all of its members, with all of its volunteers, with all of its community members, with all of the services it offers, with all of the donations they receive and resources they have available, organize a way to keep the church open around the clock to give year-round services to the needy, to the poor, to the unfortunate, to the vulnerable?

Why does your church have hours of operation? Why does your church shut down during times that are often the time people most need help? Why does your church turn away people who are at the door requesting aid, requesting services, requesting entry? Why does your church not try to help those people more actively and passively?

I want those Christians who attend church to give that some real, good, long, thought.

Because the answer is often more uncomfortable than they're willing to admit:
The answer is, quite simply, a failure to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as they allegedly aim to.

The answers most Christians would give for why their church doesn't do that, I guarantee would be in violation of the faith's fundamental teachings. How many passages deal with treating every single person as if they're God, as if they're Jesus, as if they could be an Angel, and showing them kindness, showing them empathy, showing them love, showing them compassion, and trying to help them? Even me, without being someone who has read The Bible start to finish, is familiar enough with it to paraphrase entries along those lines. Bible nerds can quote the exact passages I'm sure.

So if they know that they should be doing those things...why is their place of worship...not built to provide those things? Why are churches not designed to provide 24/7 humanitarian relief and service humanity as a whole?

I understand Christians who have private property they live on not opening up their home to everyone; that is their right. (It probably isn't supported by the faith, but I personally support it, because people deserve to have their own personal sanctuaries, their own safe space, their own control over their own domain and their own homes are theirs, as far as I'm concerned, regardless of what The Bible may say.)

I understand Christians also often operate services like food banks and homelessness shelters, so it's not exactly like they don't do any humanitarian work at all. (Although many branches don't do any, I will at least acknowledge some do.)

But unless those services are available 24/7, then they run into the same question. Barring logistical impossibilities, where there's not enough people to run it, where there's no ability to get there, where there's no power, where there's severe weather making it impossible or extremely unwise to get there...why aren't they open 24/7?

To give to the needy, to give to the poor, to give shelter and refuge to all, no matter what, is something that is baked into the faith, which is at the heart of Jesus's teachings. To have humans help humans, to the best of their ability, and that all of humanity when they network and band together are capable of doing a better job at it than any individual human would be.

And Jesus got very mad at the greed, the corruption, the waste, of those who used their wealth to further enrich themselves and reject the poor and to become elite and entitled. Jesus flipped tables and encouraged nonviolent resistance to said elite, to make reform and to advocate for the needy, the poor, to chastise the rich and the wealthy for wasting their resources and not distributing them to those who need them.

​There was a time Christians understood this and were known for following it, where they would provide a place of refuge to even those accused of crimes--even at the risk to those within. They would risk their church, they would risk their lives, to protect those who were seeking sanctuary, particularly from forces of oppression.

​Now, I understand the church does have a bad rep in going too far in this regard, notoriously having sheltered those guilty of war crimes (particularly, smuggling them after world war 2 for instance), and more infamously in modern times, actively protecting those who enact the worst of crimes on children, women, and fellow humans.

But there's a difference between shielding those worst-of-crimes-individuals from the consequences of their actions (something allowing them to continue to propagate harm to humans),
And providing a place of warmth and basic human decency to all, regardless of risk.

The latter is something Jesus demanded of all his followers. A level of personal risk in trusting in the inner goodness of humanity. To serve, to assist, those in need, without prejudice, regardless of whether those in need are thankful, loosely speaking. I would, in my personal belief, state that there are of course reasonable limits to this. You can't pour from an empty cup, and all that. But I don't think The Bible itself has any verses from Jesus where he states there are limits to providing compassion. That, I admit, I could be wrong about, but at the same time, I think you understand where I'm coming from in how the faith, per Jesus, demands that level of faith in the good in humans and trust in them and the command to help those to the best of our ability to.

​I know a lot of Christians justify not providing these services off of the belief that those receiving them are exploiting good faith--that their good faith in humanity is being exploited, being used, by people. Often "they're lazy". But that sounds awfully judgemental, doesn't it? Nobody knows the circumstances of others. Only God does, per their belief. Only God gets to make judgements, per oh so MANY verses in The Bible. God being the Judge, not humanity, is kinda a very big thing in The Bible.

So stopping to provide services on the belief that those receiving the services are lazy, are exploiting the services, are greedy, are sinners, are unworthy of being helped, cannot be helped, don't need the help, etc.?

All of that sounds like, to me, passing judgement and taking God's place as judge. As judging humans who these Christians do not know everything about.

I can understand there being certain cases where tough judgement calls must be made. Do you value one human you want to help over the safety of all the humans you already are helping, for instance? Of course you would want to, but it would be totally fair to say, "I can't, we don't have the ability to help you while also helping those we already are". It would arguably be irresponsible to try and help everyone while knowing you can't.

But at the same time. There's a difference between logistical realities (those are things we must acknowledge and tackle overcoming and cannot ignore),
Versus preconceived biases in notions of what can be done for humans and who can be helped.

​Jesus would lecture, disappointed, every Christian guilty of the latter, for closing the doors of their churches, because the one good use of those churches should be to serve communities. Jesus had lectures about how religion was largely something to keep between the individual and God, in that religion was deeply personal, and that the institutionalized organized churches of his time were straying from that, straying from God, by serving to succumb to corruption, to greed, to apathy. (Sound familiar? It should.)

And while I don't think churches should be abolished, I do think they should be structured in a way to avoid greed, to avoid apathy, to avoid corruption, by having them be geared to provide said 24/7 services to their community.

According to Christian lore, Jesus knew the risks going into Jerusalem, that he was going to die doing what he was to do, but he went anyway, under the belief he was going to save all of humanity by doing what he did. He faced the worst of humanity, without fear, without judging, for the sake of humanity at its best, for the sake of the parts of humanity worth saving.

Yet churches close their doors in fear of humanity's worse. Fearing looters, fearing vandals, fearing druggies, fearing the unclean, fearing the diseased, fearing the ill, fearing the deranged. And in doing so, in closing their doors to humanity's minority, in closing their doors in fear of humanity at its lowest, those churches forsake humanity at its best.

According to Christian lore, Jesus died for us, because he loved us.

Yet Christians who close their doors to their churches are unwilling to risk death out of love for humanity.

That shows why churches not open 24/7 (barring logistical impossibilities of this) are, on a fundamental level, not following in the footsteps of their alleged lord and savior. They put hours on the church for when the doors to God are open, rather than leaving God's doors open around the clock. And I bet you they do it primarily out of fear, out of prejudice, out of passing judgement on their fellow humans, despite being human.

Despite being imperfect and having imperfect knowledge of other imperfect humans, they deny continuous service to those other imperfect humans.

If I ever found a church that was organized such that it kept the lights on and doors open 24/7, offering free access to shelter, to bathrooms, then that alone might interest me in joining the church. I could never share their faith in believing Jesus is divine and the one true savior, but I would happily help them in servicing their community and serving as a beacon of spirituality and offering sanctity to all.

But to my knowledge, no Christian church like that exists. And that is perhaps one of the strongest reasons why I cannot get behind Christianity as a faith. It is quoted to cliche about how much it is said Jesus was a chill guy but his Christians are insufferable and unable to be endured. So while I can truthfully call my beliefs Christian-adjacent because of all of what Christianity almost does right, I can never follow the faith itself in proper, because Christianity as it is laid out by Christians is the foil to everything I consider spirituality to be:

An example of so many things gone close to healthy, gone close to uplifting humanity, but twisted in a way which only biases and divides as most Christians understand their doctrine.

Once again, though, I want to reiterate that I actually endorse many of the ideas of Christianity. My point in this blog isn't to purely deconstruct Christianity, tear it down and leave atheists out of previous believers, to leave doubters out of those previously holding faith. Rather, it's me doing my own reconstruction of Christianity, by calling out the parts that need to be called out, and to shine a light on the better parts of the faith.

I said previously that Jesus might not literally be the son of God, but I still see him as divine, and that remains true--because I feel like his teachings provide a great amount of insight into spirituality, into how to help humanity, how to bring humanity together, and his legacy there is undeniable. Many spiritual practices state that humans can be elevated to divinity in some form or another by their legacy, and while I personally don't ascribe to that belief, I would certainly agree with anyone who holds that belief stating Jesus more than qualified!

His life is something only those were there knew about. And those who saw, believed; those who don't but still do, are by Christian scripture, extra sacred. (Yes this was given, the Bible version was verbatim given in the lecture during Easter, although I'm obviously paraphrasing.) This history was given orally over a couple of generations, then written down in various accounts, then translated a couple of times, then some of them arbitrarily compiled, and while the true form of it was known only to those around to witness it, the fact we have at least pieces of his life over 2,000 years later is incredible.

I might have beef with the religion and all of those who identify as Christian without being much like Jesus, but I still hold a level of reverence for it, and believe there is merit in a lot of it. But for now, that's all I have to say. Happy Easter, to all who celebrate. And to those who don't, I hope you can find your own things to celebrate. I don't have the energy to reconstruct the holiday of Easter the way I have previously done on my blog for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I hope you still enjoyed the read.

I won't share exact details for safety but this trip is going to take until mid-April.

What I can share is the reason why; it's a last-ditch effort spearheaded by my wife to save us having a life together.

Because we're running out of time and resources and likely to get an eviction notice...again. Because we're a month behind in rent and don't have $3400 (and nobody we know can pay that amount or even remotely close to it) to pay two months' rent.

I firmly believe Washington State, especially on the west coast, is the best place to live in the United States, and arguably the entire world.
There's a natural beauty here not found elsewhere.
The weather is wet, of course, but is otherwise mild in comparison to the extremes elsewhere. Our weather might be bipolar, rapidly swapping from cold to warm to sunny to rainy and so on and so forth, but at the same time, these swings aren't to an extreme that makes them insufferable. Quite the opposite, they're kinda inviting, a nice surprise, a welcome change.

We have some of the richest culture of art in the entire country, and are a prominent place for the entire world in terms of the culture of the arts. While we don't have the same hundreds of years of culture as elsewhere in the country, the culture we have developed is one of high appreciation for the arts, for creativity, for expression, for experimentation.

We have one of the best healthcare plans in the entire country, with constantly proposed legislation to adapt healthcare modeled after that of the majority of civilized nations, where every Washingtonian receives free healthcare paid for by taxes.

We have some of the best trans healthcare policies of any state in the country, with the barriers to receiving gender-affirming care lower here than anywhere else and trans people eligible for three months of hrt medicine free of charge.

We have programs for assistance not found elsewhere, and even those with national versions, our state is better than most or all.

We have one of, if not the highest, levels of innovation in the entire country, which as an innovator myself, makes it my backyard.

We have the best coffee in the entire country, and the highest diversity, too, with independently owned and operated coffee stands literally everywhere.

We have one of the highest incomes of any state, with generous policies in place for work conditions and worker rights.

We have great natural wonders including just about every biome on the planet, including rainforests!

The outdoors are unbeatable in what they offer, and how they are largely safe.

It's got great growth in terms of connection and infrastructure.

Music here is arguably the best in the country with many of the biggest artists in alternative and rock getting started here.

The problem is.

The cost of living here keeps on going up.
And the wages for jobs like mine...don't.

We're drowning in debt, and we can't get more money, more resources.

We're being priced out of the state because it's such a good place everyone knows it and wants to be here and that gives the people setting prices for things like places to live and jobs like mine...leverage. They know they can replace me as a tenant, they know they can replace me as a worker, so they drive rent prices up and keep wages low, and that means...we...can't afford to live here anymore.

We're being driven out.

And my wife is placing hopes on their home state of Michigan having a lower cost of living.

So the trip there is largely scouting things out, talking to people, and seeing if we can swing a move there somehow.

So. You're not likely to hear from me a lot, if at all, going forward.

​I wish I had more to say, more to explain, but I'm tired, and got so much to do before leaving. Hopefully, see you on the other side.

And as is usually the case, that probably means I'll end up talking about each of them, but none to the level I want to, especially the later I go and the longer this takes.

I'll start with the follow-through on my last blog. It's overall worse, but at the same time, there's a reality of somehow making it through and that reality provides hope. At every stage, I feel like there's more and more setting us up for failure and less and less providing a path for success. But at the same time I still do cling to the hope my wife is right and that everything they dream of is possible.

That we can pull off a cross-country move.
That where we will live will be cheaper.
That where we live will have employment.
That where we live will allow us to finally progress in areas of our life that have remained stagnant for years.
That where we live opens up the avenue for building a future family together and starting the rest of our lives together.

After all, there's a lot going for us. For a start, my line of work is more likely to have openings because there's fewer who would qualify for and have the certificates I have, with my experience providing me an edge over other applicants.

We have tangible places to look at we know the general pricing of, which don't price us out or breed restrict us out.

We have the potential support of who knows how many others, from potential friends, family, loved ones, and maybe even coworkers.

There's the potential to maybe have transitionary housing with a relative.

We might even be able to use credit cards in this transitionary period to pay off big bills and then make gradual payments off on said cards even if it's only a small amount over time and accrues a huge level of interest.

All we need is the help getting through the door, and we would likely be good.

The hope-crushers are all getting more problematic for me to try and ignore though.

This would mean that for the second time in a row, we can't pay for the full lease of a place we're currently renting. We know the old management for our place would definitely have been willing to work with us, but at the end of last year our apartment complex was bought out by a more parasitic toxic management who is immediately violating state law in refusing to offer payment plans. Which is funny because we learned about said state law being a state law from the current lower management who helped us move in in the first place. The lower management is great and would love to offer us the accommodations we would need, but the higher up company policy overrides their sanity.

And we might not be able to meet their insane demands, despite actually desiring to pay them what they are owed. (We like our current place enough where we WANT to pay them the full amount of our lease, plus any moveout costs, plus any fines and interest that are reasonably accrued. For instance we would fight them on a charge of repainting the walls because nothing about any of the walls was damaged by us as tenants, but there's definitely some upkeep cost we would likely be responsible for.)

Moving half-way across the country loses all of the benefits of my current state. I don't think people understand just how many programs we have here that are helpful, and I genuinely believe my state offers some of the best public and semi-public and non-religious private education in the entire country across every level of education from pre-K all the way through college up to master degrees at a minimum. We'd be closing ourselves off from being eligible for state healthcare, from my state's education, from my state's culture and diversity and education and from being in one of the few places to have the ability to opt out of shopping at a big corporation like Walmart.

We would have to begin paying for things we currently receive through my parents. AAA membership and car insurance being the big ones.

We would have to somehow pull off a move of all of our stuff with me as the only driver, and to also get our car to our new place too despite my car and the rental truck likely being half the country apart.

Employment isn't a guarantee, it's just a hope--and there's no guarantee I receive gender-affirming care of any kind in a state which is less blue than Washington State would be. Not only on a social level (would I even be able to use the women's bathroom, locker room, etc.?), but on a medical level as well (here as long as you have medical insurance of just about any kind, you're eligible for all the services needed to transition pretty much for free with the maximum copay being $60 or so at the most expensive, with most cheaper ranging from free to $15 or so).

We have no protections against something going wrong. With our car for instance, or with moving vehicles.

There's less support available from family and the support available more likely to be toxic and come with conditions. I know I can rely on my family for any services they can afford to provide. They can't pay thousands per month, which is why we're in as dire a straight as we are, but they can provide a lot of help for things like food, transportation, storage, etc., all without conditions. My wife holds hopes of receiving that, but I don't think that the family in the area we would be going would be able to provide.

We would lose all of our social connections in the area and need to start over, when getting the few we have was difficult enough already. No friends in the area we would be going, and far less programs we'd be interested going to. I genuinely love going to Sapphic events and to Witches Markets. While I've gained some level of cynicism for both (Sapphic events overbook for their venues getting too crowded and provide too few protections from drunken ladies becoming too drunk to have spacial awareness aside from parking being paid; witches markets have poor parking availability, vendors outside are ridiculously cold, vendors inside don't allow dogs, and a lot of the vendors don't feel properly vetted), I genuinely love both and they have provided me enrichment and fulfillment in my life that I never thought possible going out in public.

Where am I going to get that in a place with far fewer people and far less diversity and far fewer outside of the cult of Christianity? There's probably still LGBTQIA+ events a plenty to be found, but would there be Sapphic events specifically? I doubt there's enough sapphics to generate the demand for monthly events the way we have an overabundance of Sapphics here. (Demographically we have a disproportionately high number of queer femme-presenting people here, our state is probably one of the top five in terms of queer ladies being openly queer.)

And even if there is...what would there be in terms of witchy events? Maybe, maybe, there would be some form of yearly market that is witchy-adjacent. Here we have a nerdy market which is technically focused on nerdy oddities particularly focused on Dungeons and Dragons and D&D-adjacent topics, which runs four or so times a year, and has a good 60 - 80% of the same vendors as the eight yearly witch markets.

And here we also have gothic markets covering darker things, loosely of the edgy hail-satan variety, but not really. The type of market covering metal music, and emo music, and similar genres, black clothing and lipstick and makeup and all types of things with spikes, bones, and similar.

And here we also have krampus markets, similar to the above.

Between the three of those, nerdy D&D-adjacent markets, gothic markets, and krampus markets, there's probably one or two that would run at least once a year...but I would be shocked to find witches markets for all eight witch events anywhere outside of where we live right now because as far as I know...the pacific northwest is the only place in the country with the level of diversity and cultural identity to have the level of demand to fuel these events being run rain or shine year-round.

Basically, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of cultural identity, social acceptance, in basically every way except for the cost of living, we already live in the best place in the entire United States for queer disabled neurodivergent witches. We live in a place where queer folk, disabled people, neurodivergent folk, and witches, are all at a level of unusually high percentage of the population. Anywhere else in the country isn't going to have the same amount of "our people" locally, at least not as openly so.

We have no real plan to get all of our stuff moved. We have only the hopes of it being cheaper and the cost of living actually being reduced lower than the increased amount of things we'll have to pay for and the likely decrease in comparable pay.

All of that is building up to be a weight because I'm on the verge of receiving all of the care I need here. I'm going to physical therapy and making huge strides in not being in constant pain. I qualify for behavioral health being given to me. My depression could get proper medication, as could my ADHD, and I have the access to medication for my disabilities, and I have access to HRT. I lose all of that when not here.

And those took me years to get, here, in the place considered one of the easiest in the country. How long would it take for me to get them in a place less queer-friendly, less neurodivergent-friendly, less disability-friendly?

My depression is getting to the point where with all of my anxieties, with all of the pressures, with all of the weights of the bills we're liable for and responsible for, with all of what we are likely to be dealing with...I'm just feeling hopeless and defeated.

I'm at the point where I feel like I am the obligatory sibling who never amounts to anything and is a total failure in any family of four or more kids. It's to the point where I feel bad enough where I've contemplated ending my life for only the fourth time in my entire life and only the third time since I got with my wife, for the third time since July 2023. (The other two being December 2023 and then around June 2024 if I recall correctly.)

Now, to be clear, I'm not actually suicidal, yet. If I were at risk, you'd know. I'll say that the best way for you to keep an eye on it is that my enemies should really be praying for my success and not my downfall because if I do go down I'm not going quietly into the night. I'm not going to be radio silent and then end my life. If I go down I go down swinging and will mince no words about any of the traumas, any of the abuses, any of the injustices, I've faced, my wife has faced, etc.

I've held back from ever lashing out like that because at the end of the day, as long as I have a hope for living a life, I don't want to live a life with hate. So if I succumb to hate, if I succumb to lashing out, then you'll know that I'm close, because if I am going to air out every secret I have, it's only because I don't want those weights to drag me down in whatever comes after my current life.

Again, why I say my enemies should be praying for my success, because I know enough to take them down with me and the only reason I don't take them down already is because I don't want to. As long as I have a hope for a future, I will never want to. But if they pray for my failure, and then it turns out I do indeed fail and lose my last reason for living...then they're gonna find out the hard way why they should've been wishing me well because the things I know are things I would be willing to go to the grave with if I live a long life but aren't things I'm gonna let be left unsaid and secret if my life were to end early.

Now, granted. I use the term "enemies" here mostly to invoke the stock phrase of enemies wishing success. I forget the exact phrase at the moment, but you probably know it well enough. I personally am of the Vinland Saga of "no person has any enemies". As I said in my last blog post, I'm slowly becoming the worst version of myself, the version of myself I least want to be. And that's the version which would retaliate against people who I know aren't bad, by and large, and deserve to live their own lives of prosperity. The worst version of myself would forget that.

But the me that I am, the me that is the best of myself and my life, believes that most humans are good, and that very few people deserve to be condemned. I believe in us all sharing a lot of the same desires in life and being owed the chance to pursue those things.

I believe in building people up rather than tearing people down. That to find common connection and to find the ability to empathize with each other and help each other is far better a life and future than a life where we're dunking on people for their worst sides and excluding them for their shortcomings. A life filled with joy and with awe and with passion is one far more fulfilling than a life filled with paranoia about the people you know secretly being terrible, more fulfilling than a life tearing down those around you, than a life of hatred and dividing and excluding those who don't meet the standards set.

I have this belief that "childlike awe, childlike wonder, childlike joy, childlike idealism, childlike passion", are not in fact traits of children but rather innately the inherent nature of humanity. That what makes humans be humans is that we have a natural innate awe and wonder of the world around us, we have an innate desire for the joys of both laughter and happiness, that we have an innately positive view of the future and of the world around us and of others, and that creativity is arguably the most human thing which is human above all else.

And that any association with those things being childlike is an artificially enforced view by an artificially built modern society that encourages conformity over individuality, but also selfishness over community, when it should be individuality over conformity and community over selfishness.

Yet despite how strong I am...I'm not so strong as to hold these beliefs so strongly I would rather die for them wordlessly, silently, in a young age. The pressures of society are enough, I know, to break me, and while in my better moments I believe all of the above...in my worst moments the amount of pain and suffering I've lived through on a daily basis is enough where I know I would lash out in hate, in bitterness, in despair, in destruction.

It takes years to build what can be destroyed in seconds. While that makes the efforts to build all the more sacred, all the more precious, all the more things we can and should appreciate for lasting as long as they do...that destruction is something I actively have to suppress, because the worst mistakes in my life and the fuel for the things I need the most therapy for are from not having been strong enough to prevent from lashing out as I did.

All of the lost friendships.
All of the burnt bridges.
All of the things I destroyed from anger, from desperation, from apathy, from asking too much and giving too little.

That's what I don't want to continue to be. And you'll know I've given up on life if I give up on not being those things and actively am throwing them away--and I'm dangerously close. I'm dangerously withdrawn. I'm in far less spaces than I was last year. Ever since January, I've been shrinking myself to be less and less out-there, to the point where I've stopped being involved with many of my closest friends.

I've stopped providing daily check-ins.
I've stopped talking to friends.
I've stopped coming to streams.
I've stopped keeping up to date on discords.
I've stopped visiting websites I've had as a core part of my life since I was 13 years old despite my age now being a flip of those two numbers. (31 going on 33, because I haven't felt like the last year has had anything really noting me as having a birth.)

I've largely lost my passion for games, given up entirely on content creation and streaming, and while my passion for writing was recently reignited...it chose the worst possible time with me unable to really put any time or energy into nurturing it. Most of what I'm passionate about right now is organizing my notes and making them more coherent, connected, and consistent. All of which there's secretly an ulterior motive for, in that it's also one of those suicidal ideations, where I have this idea that if I were to note every aspect of my work then it would be okay for me to not make it if it were released publicly in a way anyone could follow and make.

Now, I know better from experience. ComicFuryians literally lost one of their most beloved members to a suicide where the person gave up on life, released their work, and took their life. To this day, nobody as far as I know has continued their work and nobody likely ever will. I am the only one who actually will make my work and logically I know that. But suicide is never logical and illogically, it feels more okay to have my life end if I have the potential of a legacy after, and releasing my work in a way where anyone could pick it up fuels that.

Butstill. At the end of the day, that wasn't what fueled the reignited passion. In fact, quite the opposite. It was me just...wanting to. To have this pure passion, this unbridled joy to share my work with the world, reignited. I had a fire lit under me to show what the world of farn is really like, and I want to share it with everyone, in full, which is something requiring me to be there to work on it.

So that's one of the few things keeping me alive right now, and it's something hard to keep. I've been creating stories and ideas and games and such since I was 13. To date, nearly 20 years later, none have been realized, because I can never see them through.

​And I do have a lot of ideas.

My most recent idea, which is both kinda political but also kinda not, is that I think websites should stop being lazy with their filters for content in terms of age being largely a binary setting tied to maturity, and that for all content filters it shouldn't be a strict binary but rather a sort of slider, which both posters/creators can set appropriately and readers/viewers can filter for also appropriately.

As I see it, this should be a universal thing for websites, because it would also help create further protections for children.

"I never make content with a target audience of children", "I very rarely make content with a target audience of children", "I only sometimes make content with a target audience of children", "I make content with a target audience of children about half of the time", "I often make content with the target audience of children", "my content is near-exclusively targeted towards an audience of children", or "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children".

A filter would then be for what is defined as children. "12 and below", "14 and below", "17 and below", or "20 and below".

Set that as the first setting. "I never make content with a target audience of children" would automatically skip the following filters based on mixed audience targeting in favor of focusing exclusively on more mature ones, whereas "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children" would automatically skip every mature/adult filter. Those filters would note why they are disabled by the above.

From there, the next filter would be:
"None of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is inherently 18+ and for mature audiences", "I very rarely make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is inherently 18+ and mature in nature", "I only sometimes make content suitable for all ages; most of my content is 18+ and mature", "about half of my content is suitable for all ages; I don't try to be mature but don't shy away from 18+ material", "I often make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is not mature, but I have occasional 18+ material", and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages; I never have mature or 18+ material in my content".

There would likely be a similar filter for the maturity range of the content. "My content is 18+", "My content is 21+", "My content is late 20s and above", "my content is young 30s and above", "my content is 36+ and above", "my content is 40+".

Similarly, "none of my content is suitable for all ages" and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages" would disable most of the following filters by and large, with the disabled filters explaining why they're disabled.

"I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times", "I am an adult who frequently covers adult material", "I am an adult who often covers adult material", "I am an adult and about half of material I cover is adult in nature", "I am an adult and some of the times I cover adult material, but it's not my focus", "I am an adult, but I never cover adult material", and "I am not currently an adult", or something approximately close to that.

There would also be a filter for definition of adult. 18+, 21+, late-20s, early-30s, late-30s, and 40+, potentially both for the age of the individual and for their target audience. There might need to be an option for "my material has aged as I have".

Obviously children, as well as those selecting that they never cover adult material, would be locked out of describing the filters for various types of adult material, and this would be a list of trigger warnings and essentially how often they are shown.

Nudity: "I show full-frontal nudity, including sexual acts", "I show full-frontal nudity, but no explicit sex", "I show breasts and butts, but any lower frontal nudity is partially censored", "I show breasts and butts, but lower frontal nudity is heavily covered or censored", "I show butts, and heavily suggestive near-nudity, but full nudity is avoided or partially censored", "I show butts, but heavily suggestive nudity is avoided or heavily censored", "I don't show full nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured and/or near-nudity is displayed and/or nudity is heavily implied", "I don't show full nudity or near-nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured", "I don't show full nudity or prominently focus on lewd body parts, but near-nudity may be present", "I don't show full nudity or focus on lewd body parts, but nudity might be implied", and then at the SFW end, "I don't show or imply nudity, near-nudity, or prominently display lewdness".

Maybe breaking the above into two filters, one for nudity and one for lewdness.

Sexual content: "I show sexual content, including explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, including implied explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but don't show explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness and kissing", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness", "I don't show sexual content". This one I had a better version of in my head, I'm running out of momentum on how to explain it.

Adult topics: "I always talk about adult topics and themes", "I almost always talk about adult topics and themes", "I frequently talk about adult topics and themes", "I talk about adult topics and themes about half of the time", "I talk about adult topics and themes occasionally", "I on some rare occasions will talk about adult topics and themes", or "I never talk about adult topics and themes". 

This would probably have subcategories for what constitutes adult topics.

Always/almost always/frequently/about half/occasionally/rarely/never for:
Death,
Depression,
War,
Genocide,
Abuse,
Finances and Employment,
Living Conditions and Situations,
Food Struggles,
Life Skills,
General Darker Themes,

Probably more, I can't think of everything which would constitute an adult topic.

Violence would require at least two filters. The first:
"I exclusively focus on violent content", "I heavily feature violent content", "I frequently feature violent content", "I often feature violent content", "I feature violent content about half of the time", "I feature violent content sometimes", "I feature violent content on rare occasions", or "I never feature violent content". This filter would mention that it explicitly ties into any of the sub-filters.

The one I can think of being,
"I show the most gruesome form of violence including extreme gore", "I show heavily bloody content, including some light levels of gore" "I show heavily bloody content, but avoid gore", "I show bloody violence, but avoid extremely realistic and/or over the top levels of blood and violence", "I show bloody violence, but stylized and/or in moderation", "I show violence, but avoid extremely bloody content regardless of how stylized it is", "I show some blood through violence in weapons and fighting", "I show violence in weapons and fighting, but blood is kept minimal or nonexistent", "I show weapons and fighting with minimal extreme violence", "I show weapons and fighting but there's no violence", and at the lowest end, "I occasionally show weapons being displayed and discussed but never used and/or I occasionally show characters hitting other things".

Or something to that effect.

​To give an idea of how these filters would apply to, say, my blog?

I never make content with a target audience of children.
Arguably (and what I would do for safety), none of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is mature and inherently 18+.
Similarly, I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times--even my earliest 2014 blogs were made after I was already an adult, albeit a very young one.

As such, my content is aimed at 21+ adults at minimum, with the content aging as I have. This blog is not designed for young-20s anymore, but the earlier 2014 entries were. I don't know what the minimum age for current blog entries would be, but it ain't 18-year-olds, I can confidently say that much at minimum. You could say anything 21+ is okay, my personal definition is usually "if you were born after 9/11 you're probably too young to be here", but you could go up to saying the youngest allowed age would be my wife and anyone younger is too inexperienced to really be dealing with the heavy topics my blog has delved into at times.

I never show nudity, and very rarely do I talk about nudity, but I do talk about kinks and lewdness on occasion (probably need to refine the filters for that).

I am extremely lewd, with lewdness almost always mentioned (deez nuts and hardly know her jokes in particular but also pickup lines a plenty and innuendos of all kinds), so sexual content isn't shied away from whatsoever.

I almost always am talking about adult themes and topics.

​Literally all of them have those themes, in heavy levels.

I feature violent content sometimes.
But it's in moderation, with me not going into gruesomely detailed versions of things, I'd say.

Then from the perspective of a viewer/reader, you would have filters.

First being selected age range.
"I am currently considered a child", with filters for "12 and under", "13 - 15", "16 - 17", "18 - 20". This would lock the user out of the majority of content regardless of selection, but based on the filters of the creators of content it would have some more available. (For many websites, arguably 12 and under being selected should auto-ban the account.)

"I am an adult", with filters for "18 - 20", "21 - 25", "26 - 29", "30 - 35", "36 - 39", and "40+". This would lock the user out of content which their age range makes them ineligible to view. Namely it would lock them out of content exclusively made for children and content heavily targeting children, as well as content they are too young for.

I think that mandating filters of this sort to be implemented on all sites offering content would make the internet a safer place for everyone. Does it stop people from lying? No. Does it stop people from misapplying filters? Not entirely, but these would be things that people would try their best at, with small misapplications corrected and punishments only for those who are wholly and entirely in very obviously extremely wrong classifications.

You might not know the difference between some violence and moderate violence, but if you're showing extreme violence with a filter set to showing almost no violence, you know your filter isn't properly applied.

These might be somewhat variable in being applied to specific content or to the account or to both, depending on the medium. Artists for instance might have filters for their content in general, but specific pieces might have filters that are different from their general filter. Streamers might have some filters for things that change, but likely less things change stream to stream than for an artist piece to piece. Posting on social media is something that likely wouldn't be viable to set most filters for most posts, so that would rely heavily on the profile filtering.

The specifics there are less important than their existence in general existing.

And this was my latest idea.

The third thing I wanted to talk about is religion, specifically how I believe that Christianity is arguably the only false religion in the world and arguably the only one to not be intrinsically tied to specific cultures, but also going into why many of the beliefs of Christianity are arguably applicable to nearly any culture and any religion and any belief system despite the religion being invalid.

But I don't think I have the energy to cover that in detail.

What I'll say there is basically that to accept the path of Christianity as valid requires first a belief that Christianity is not put on a pedestal above any other mythology. From the onset, the idea of "God" and Angels should be taken as no more real than Zeus and the Olympian pantheon, Odin and the Aesir and such from Norse mythology, Ra and the Egyptian pantheon, etc. You get the idea.

There should be the understanding that the universe wasn't made in 7 days, that evolution is real and there was never a real Adam or a real Eve, that there was never a Noah's Arc that contained literally the entirety of all life on earth in pairs of two, you get the idea. Science comes first, and that includes things like a virgin birth and the parting of a sea and the presence of mythological divine plagues and divinely striking down enemies and instantly vaporizing those who touch an artifact.

These should be considered as having the same basis in historical fact as any other piece of mythology from any other culture, in that whatever truth there may be behind these accounts has been heavily filtered by the mythology of numerous isolated cultures through countless generations of oral tradition that changed the tales and were eventually attempted to be written down long after they happened and were attempted to be unified even longer after they were written.

That in the same way there's no unified singular Greek Mythology or Egyptian Mythology or Norse Mythology with the mythologies of them being from countless different cities/tribes/etc. told over centuries or even millenia, the stories told throughout Christian lore are from countless different groups over a period over a thousand years, and as such, they have the same level of variance with there being no one singular truth above all others.

And that also, there needs to be a viewing of things as they would have been seen at the time, not as we have reimagined them over the millenia, before we can truly apply a modern lens on those ideologies. Jesus was understood to be a Jewish man (a man of color), and while it can safely be assumed he genuinely thought himself to be a man of reform, a man divinely inspired by God to reform the Jewish people, Jesus did not view himself as being born from a virgin. Jesus did not view himself as having mythical origins as being literally born from a supreme deity.

The phrase "Son Of God" was, in the historical context of the time, seen as a phrase for one enlightened by God, more or less. Someone with divine inspiration and backing. It was applied to all prophets from my understanding, not specifically Jesus and Jesus alone above all others being just Jesus. It was understood to not be an indicator of literally being the child of a divine being, of not literally being fathered by a divine being, of having no mortal father and only a divine one, but rather to be in the metaphorical sense of being divinely chosen to be divinely empowered to have a divine fervor, divine favor, divine spark, to be divinely empowered to deliver divine messages and miracles.

That Christianity culturally appropriated YHWH, the God of the Jews, and artificially elevated YHWH to be a supreme deity that is omnipowerful and omnipresent in ways that YHWH is always displayed in Jewish material as not actually being, because YHWH was The God Of The Jews, with The Jews as YHWH's chosen people, the two intrinsically being linked with a symbiotic relationship.

That even in the time of Moses, it was understood that other gods were as real as YHWH, but that YHWH had power over The Jewish People, and that YHWH's power over The Jewish People allowed YHWH to be more powerful than those other gods in service of The Jewish People, but that YHWH's domain was not so absolute as to totally trump those other gods. That those other gods were not in fact demons in disguise, but were in fact genuinely gods and recognized as such.

Including how witches were at one point consulted as mediums, in ways which no servant of YHWH was willing or capable of providing, meaning that explicitly there were limits both on YHWH's power and scope of knowledge and reach and ability.

That there is in fact no unified message or truth in The Bible because it is filled with contradictions.
Lucifer/Satan/The Devil (not even really named as such as we tend to think of) could never have successfully led a rebellion against an all-powerful all-knowing supreme true ruler, because by virtue of being all-knowing and all-powerful, God would be able to know of this plan in advance and instantly quash the rebellion before it began.

This would also require God to have known Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create this evil, and willingly let it happen. God would have created Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create evil in rebelling against God, and God still made Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing this and let it happen without either stopping it or discouraging it or preventing it.

There's contradictory narratives about how humanity was given free will by Adam and Eve eating from the fruit of knowledge and by virtue of being the only creatures with souls being the only ones with free will, and how Lucifer/Satan/The Devil and a third of all angels rebelled against God. If they had no free will, then that would mean God literally designed them to become evil in a deliberately designed failed rebellion.

God would know Adam and Eve would have chosen to take the forbidden fruit, yet still commanded them not to, despite knowing they would violate the command.

God would have known everything was going to happen, and yet still have created those circumstances and let them happen, despite being supremely powerful and able to stop these things by virtue of being supremely knowledgeable about all that would happen.

These actions make zero sense under a God that is actually all-powerful and all-known as is Christian doctrine, but are perfectly in-line with depictions of deities that are extremely powerful and knowing but not quite all-powerful and all-knowing, akin to Odin from Norse mythology.

It is commonplace in many cultures for a deity to rebel, to resist, to kill, to fight, another deity in their lore, to varying degrees of success. In Greek lore Zeus was the THIRD-generation ruler. Not second, that'd be his father Kronus (might have spelling there wrong, but not to be confused with Chronos, they were two different titans I'm pretty sure but are often combined to be one), and not first, that'd be a deity I don't remember the Greek version of but I think the Roman name for that first-generation ruler is Uranus.

If memory serves, Uranus + Gaia produced the titans including Kronus and Rhea (by the way a big part of many mythologies people tend to forget is that literally almost every religion is heavily laced in inherent incest), and Kronus and Rhea then produced the next generation of Gods (both Olympian and those of the Underworld which I forget the exact term for), including Zeus. Just as Kronus and Rhea and the titans overthrew his father, Zeus and the Gods overthrew Kronus and the titans.

In Egyptian mythology you've got the struggle of Sett after murdering Osiris with Osiris's son (whose name I can't remember at this exact moment).

In eastern culture you've got some arrogant rebellion in the form of things like Sun Wukong.

And so on and so forth. Across countless cultures and religions, you've got tales of rebelling against the divine, to various levels of success. In terms of Jewish folklore, it would make total sense for a failed rebellion of a servant of their Jewish God to take place, because with said Jewish God not being all-powerful or all-knowing, the rebellion stood at least a chance of succeeding. With a third of all angels being involved, it was a genuine threat and one that almost was victorious, because of how close the two sides were in power.

But that doesn't work if God is all-knowing and all-powerful because that would mean that Lucifer/Satan/The Devil, knowing that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, deliberately entered a rebellion against God, knowing God knew about it and knowing God could end it at any time by virtue of being all-powerful. And that also only works if Lucifer/Satan/The Devil shares the gift of free will with humanity, because without the free will to rebel in the first place, then it wouldn't be rebellion; it would be a divine command from God.

In short, in order for Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have rebelled, it either requires Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have free will and a third of all angels also had free will to join (in which case, free will is not in fact unique to humanity), or if they lack free will then God literally designed Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to rebel and a third of angels to join, because that was God's plan, meaning God by virtue of programming them to do what they did would be the one who created those evils in the first place.

The entire mythology doesn't hold up to scrutiny, either scientifically or as a continuous narrative. It is filled with hole after hole, and even someone as casual as me can point these out. Christianity for two thousand years has spun narrative after narrative to justify these contradictions, rather than just admitting that they are contradictions. Or when they do admit there's contradictions, they pick and choose which parts to follow.

Any religion which you have to pick and choose which parts to follow could not be that of an all-knowing all-powerful God, and that requirement to pick and choose which parts to follow demonstrates why the religion is built on a temple of lies, inconsistency, and fabrications that people blindly believe to be truth despite their logical and rational brains being capable of noting how this shouldn't make sense.

But I'm not covering this in the detail I wanted to. In short I wanted to both deconstruct the flaws behind Christianity, while also rebuilding the strengths of it.

Jesus was against organized institutionalized religion because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus believed religion should largely be a personal practice kept to an individual, private. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against deification of humans, because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against hoarding of material wealth, because he knew how pointless it was. A good belief to hold true to.

Jesus preached about how what we do to everyone is what we do to God (you all know the full verse for this). How we treat others is reflective of how God will judge, essentially. That means treating to the poor and needy, showing empathy, etc., are all good things to do, and that's a good belief to hold true to.

Jesus was a pacifist, teaching nonviolent resistance, but 'nonviolence' was defined as not hurting others, with him perfectly willing to flip tables and cause property destruction and damage so long as no humans were harmed. A good philosophy to ascribe to.

Jesus preached love, empathy, and forgiveness, pointing out humanity is inherently imperfect. Nobody is without sin, nobody is without their faults and flaws. A good philosophy to live by.

And so on and so forth.

Christianity also has an excellent grasp on many spiritual practices, which have been adapted by the religion over the centuries, including an understanding of what many in the witchcraft community believe to be an understanding of the nature of "the universe", our role in it, and what follows after we die.

There's certain interpretations of Christian scripture which portray 'Heaven' and 'God' as one and the same, a state of everything everywhere all at once. Everything that ever was, ever could have been, ever will be, ever could, all existing simultaneously in one space happening all at once, and that we reach our highest self by joining with that whereas we experience 'Hell' by rejection of it, and punish ourselves.

And there's many other examples on how Christianity touches on many good spiritual practices.

But the religion itself is arguably built on cultural appropriation and the only religion to have been built without an existing culture it is inherently innately integrated with. (I would argue that even Islam, a religion which took from Christianity, is inherently tied to the Arab people at the time of Mohamed. Although by that logic it might also be possible to argue that certain branches of Christianity, such as the Eastern Orthodox version, do have the culture of their people integrated within. I'm not too concerned with defending my argument since my argument is mostly a combination of clickbait and a thought experiment more than it is a viewpoint I really want to defend. It's mostly a way to engage in the subject rather than a core belief if that makes sense.)

That makes it one of the religions easiest to apply to everyday life and widely broadly giving it appeal to billions across the globe even in this age of skepticism and science.

But it also makes it a religion fraught with issues from the get-go. The Bible was made 400 years after Jesus by a council arbitrarily deciding what to include. The books included were all written 60 - 120+ years after Jesus lived, and translated numerous times. That's a lot of men involved and no proof of divine, yet there are far too many who to this day still believe The Bible to be the Word Of God, despite their bibles being translated and transcribed numerous times and compiled and recompiled by men who had an agenda fueling their decisions.

So I do wanna delve into how to deconstruct the religion and why I do believe it's possible to reconstruct it. I personally don't follow Christianity, since I am very much a witch believing in no specific religion but with my brand of spirituality pooling from my own experiences, beliefs, and what resonates with me from numerous cultures and research, but a lot of my beliefs are Christianity-adjacent so I have an interest in showing how while the text of Christianity doesn't hold, part of the spirit in the most important messages does.

Jesus might have just been a man, but he left a legacy that could arguably be called divine, and I would love to delve into it more.

But alas.

For now, that's it. I've been writing this blog for five hours. The first subject about me, I covered pretty well. The second about my idea of reform for a better internet, kinda got across. The third about religion...didn't really get done, but I've done my best to at least touch on the subject, with the hope of doing more some other time.

​Thanks for reading.

I'm booting the game up special just to grab some final screenshots because while the game isn't over, it's as good as over. Egypt is basically destroyed, and Scythia is in shambles, Carthage is losing territory, and we're inching towards the conquest mark I set despite having hit the city limit--the limit I chose was set high enough to be something nobody could accidentally trigger in the middle of their fun, but low enough to actually be feasibly possible to achieve, and with me having run through Egypt, we're at that mark pretty much.

We've got a few territories that don't have 100 culture which when they expand will expand my percentage of the world area that final percent. Even if not, it will only take a city or two captured to get there.

The percentage of the world population is a little less controlled or predictable. I'm probably slowing it down by drafting every turn to try and contain the Persian Pillager Problem. But it'll be something that I get to just from my natural cities growth outpacing that of the entire rest of the world, and again, every city I take and build an infirmary within will help skyrocket that further. It's already close, so that will be within the next five turns or so, I reckon.

Two spearmen, both conscripts, in one of Egypt's two remaining cities.

I have the manpower where I could wipe them out, just like I can the Celts. Their continued existence is sheerly by virtue of my mercy.

And while the Scythians are technically better off, it's not by much.

Now, I might not actually have the manpower to brute force a taking of Tanais, but with even a light dusting of save scumming, I easily could.

They've got three tier two spearmen and some Scythian Riders, but that's it. The main reason I'm not attacking Tanais is because I don't want to risk the Persians taking it yet, and I actually find the idea amusing of letting them try. Again--mercy, on my end, to let them continue to live. Because their only other three cities? One has only one tile to its name, with Melitopol better off destroyed and only existing because I don't want it razed yet.

Ereen is surrounded on all eight sides by swamp, and I don't want to bother clearing eight tiles of swamp yet. But Ereen is undefended, like Giza, and could theoretically be captured at any time.

​The Horde Spearman is up in the Scythian's newest city, which is raw forest on all sides, no roads. Not as much a pain as Ereen would be, and more valuable, but at the same time, is much the same. I have the power to take it; I'm not because it's not worth it, honestly speaking.

Ditto for the Celts. I can walk into both of their remaining cities which have no remaining units. I left Burdigala to give those warring with the Celts the false hope they can gain something. Ditto for them sending all of their naval forces towards Ireland to be disappointed they can't reach Caiseal.

And Carthage, despite spamming War Elephants every single turn (how do they have so many galleys and war elephants, I didn't give them that many and I didn't think their production was good enough to pump them out that quickly), is rapidly reaching its ultimate end as well.

I have some Cataphracts in Malaca and Carthago Novo. Easily enough to storm Carmona.

I have an army of Cataphracts in Nora (plus Tarraco). That's enough where I wouldn't even need to save scum to take Madrid, I could brute force it, tank/accept the loss of Cataphracts that die, and still run through the Carthaginian defenses.

​I've got three Legionaries in Cadiz. Given a Galley to transport them, that's easily taking Lagos.

And even if I had none of those?

From my learnings against the Goths, Celts, Scythians, and Egyptians?

I know that with a sufficient level of save scumming, I have a sufficiently large enough pillager horde to overwhelm their defenses despite Tyrian Guards being a 3/6 unit defending against a 4/1 attacker. If my pillagers have 4 - 5 HP against one HP, I only need to hit them once. And let me tell ya as someone who had to save scum when my 4/1 pillagers with one HP kept being killed attacking units with only 1 defense...sometimes it's not the bigger value in attack/defense which wins but rather just which unit has more HP. (Also the reason why Armies are so good at brute forcing their way through, and also why quantity of units matters a lot more than quality in terms of advancing a conquest.)

Carthage continues to exist in the Iberian peninsula because I'm taking my time, not because I can't end them.

Sooooooooo.

I've effectively won. There's nothing that can bypass my defenses. Even the Persian Pillager Problem is gradually being contained. It's the main area of concern, to be sure, but a lot of their cities are surrounded and a lot of my borders are being secured and my forces are building there. I forgot to take screenshots before closing my game, but as it turns out even conscript Praetorian Guards with their 4 HP and 7 defense are pretty good at stopping 4/1 pillagers from escaping.

Yeah, it's the area I'm most vulnerable, sure. But I'm not as concerned as I was before.

So this time for real--there's nothing left to really share. The only thing from here is to officially end the game.

But being honest...that's not the reason why it's a final update.

The reason why it's a final update is because the worst is looking like it's going to happen. I don't want to dare share the details, but know that what I'm sharing isn't the worst, it's just scratching the surface of just how bad things are getting. And I don't see a way out.

Back in January, I made a letter, a final call for help. I posted it literally everywhere I could--in every discord I'm in, in every forum I'm in, in the social media platforms I partake in, on my YouTube channel, on the webcomics I've made, and on every platform I write my blog on. Everywhere I thought it wouldn't be against the terms of service, everywhere I could place it, everywhere I thought I could post it and it wouldn't instantly be taken down/deleted.

I posted it.

And then...silence.

I went largely dark.

Because I was, quietly, trying to fight for my future, for my life.

Every time I've blogged about this let's play, there's been a section, a dark section hinting at bleak undertones. And the reason why?

...Because that final call for help...reached...nobody who could.

All of the issues that I mentioned in that letter are still there...some worse, and some new ones not mentioned.

I have no money in my bank account--and we're two months behind in rent, which is $3400.

I've been trying to have some fun before life falls apart, because I don't see how to stop it from falling apart. If I did, then I would have been fighting harder. I've done little things here and there. And some of them have helped keep us afloat for this long. Stalling, delaying.

But it's been just that. Pushing back and ignoring what can't be pushed back and ignored indefinitely.

There's...still a few things left to potentially try.

But as much as I hate to say it...this...might be it for us.

I don't like sharing this bad news. Heck, I alienated some of my best friends back in January, the communities I was closest in, from asking as I did. I've been doing nothing but burning bridge after bridge after bridge and becoming a worse and worse version of myself in pursuit of trying to survive. In trying to do whatever it takes to live life with my wife, I've done...whatever it took, including losing things I never wanted to lose, and doing things I never wanted to do.

And despite those efforts it's looking like it's still not going to be enough. We need another miracle or two, and we probably used our last one last week.

I prefer to Bree a Breeacon of joy. I prefer to share my nerdy hyperfixations, to ramble about things going on in my life, to share events we've gone to, to talk about things I've done, ideas I've had. Heck, today saw me come up with a million-dollar board game idea!

But I've been closing myself off because...I've run out of energy.

So this is likely the final let's play because...I probably won't be gaming in any future. I've got a few things I can try fighting for, but those will take the time/energy I've spent relaxing playing my for fun recharge game.

I don't want to be bleak, I don't want to have people worry, but the unfortunate reality is...this is my reality.

I made a final call for help and I didn't get help, so I have no...no real ability to ask for help again. Because who's left to help me? Everyone who could, already did and has. And it hasn't been enough. So now what? Can't be anything good. All I can really do is hope for a miracle.

We have one week to pull it off. I get paid this week, and I have to get $1740 paid to my apartment complex before the 18th. My paycheck will get me half-way there, albeit leaving me about $600 - $900 short. Who knows what we can maybe pull off? Only time will tell. And if I end up never blogging again at some point...well, that's what time will have told you. But we're not there yet, despite being close. So here's to hoping we never will be.

I always have said I intend to live forever. I know it's not possible, but at the same time, the sentiment is there. I enjoy life, and I'm a fighter. Let's hope that can carry me through what's to come.

I mean, historically, my blog has been a blog about...literally whatever I felt like talking about. A lot of it sharing a lot about what's going on in my life, a lot about games I was enjoying at the time, a lot reflecting the corners of the internet I was in at the time, a ton about my various ideas for video games, stories, and songs, and a lot about my evolution of personal beliefs.

A lot about my health, a lot about my neurodivergencies, a lot about my journey through life and self-discovery. A lot about my current hyperfixations. You get the idea. But I'm both running out of interest in my current Civ 3 hyperfixation (a third Carthage playthrough might revitalize it, but the double long turns is kinda draining my interest especially given the amount of save scumming), and there's other things I want to talk about.

I want to share a lot more of my beliefs. I know a fair number of those beliefs can be heretical, can be slightly alienating, can be radical, but I want to share them all the same, despite how I know smarter people than me who do more research than I do can likely give better breakdowns of those things.

Namely I have a lot of things that I feel like could help challenge the, so to speak, 'programming' of many of the demographics who typically hold beliefs that are largely detrimental to people like me. I wanna give out, for instance, a 'cure' of sorts for the male loneliness epidemic by giving a breakdown of what these men who have been poisoned by toxic masculine podcasts can do to help reconnect with humanity. I've mentally had a lot of ways to break down the walls there in a calm, gentle way that can help ease them into it, and I wanna follow through on how to basically hand them the instruction manual on how to improve themselves to be the actual best version of themselves.

​I wanna give out breakdowns of Christianity and spirituality and religion, laying out how basically the teachings of Jesus are incompatible with Christianity but at the same time the heart of Christianity through the messages given mean that there is good beliefs within, but they come only after deconstructing an entire religion that was never designed to be a religion in the first place.

And I wanna also tackle the mindset of those who think they follow logic and science but have poor choices in sources that lead them to believing conspiracy theorists and worldviews. The people who have this genuine belief they are in the right, that they know the way the world works, but have these glaring blindspots in their sources and their information and lead to some warping of facts to fit the worldview rather than adjusting world view for the ever-evolving information.

​I know nothing I do will be the best, and I know I have no platform and no reach. I love being a content creator even if I've stopped really making content (although I still plan on making music and songs regardless).

But at the same time, these are ideas I've had to talk about for the better part of three years at least, I just thought I'd never be able to do them, I'd never do the research for them (to be fair, I probably won't, this will be a lot of talking out of my ass), I' never have the energy to, I'd never have the words to, etc. I made reason after reason for not pursuing talking about it, despite how in private I would freely share these ideas over discord and thoughts and lay out these trivia and beliefs and so on and so forth.

And I also wanna include my spiritual beliefs, and my view on healing, on communities, on helping people and oneself, on growth, on all of the things.

But for the time being.

You get one more blog about Civ 3, and my playthrough of a modded Rise of Rome scenario. I'm once again playing as I'm blogging, but the tl;dr of it is, I've found out that with enough pillagers to bombard the 3/5 defenders down to one hp and then another pillager to kill them, that I actually was able of capturing a whole lot more than I realized. I'm pretty sure I've mostly done what I can for Egypt this turn, but suffice to say even if they do produce pillagers they're not gonna be able to snowball it into retaking much territory at this point. They've got only seven cities left in Africa, Heliopolis will fall next turn, Kahun and El-Amunra will fall next turn, and while not certain, Pi-Ramses and Heirancopolis are both vulnerable and potentially enough to be taken.

Bubastis and Alexandria, the two I really want, are gonna be harder to take, with Bubastis taking at least two to get my troops there and Alexandria requiring a proper siege unless Egypt actually sends their forces out to try and retake cities (which is likely to fail, barring pillager snowballing).

Scythia is where I'm mostly finishing up this turn right now. Sadly, Asiopolis (iron) and Saka (horses) are two cities I lack the resources to take, and are connected to two to four other cities I can't take this turn. It's the last bastion of Scythian strength, so they might launch a counter-offensive, but at the same time, they can only field swordsmen (3/2/1) units that have 5 movement and their cavalry with 10 movement and they can only produce a maximum of 5 and they only have 10 horseman units right now, so I'm not too worried about a counter-offensive. I've got like five cities which might be vulnerable, but those cities are not going to give them momentum.

The main problem I'm going to be facing is actually going to be from one of the two civilizations I'm not at war with.

...Yeahhhhh. That's...a lot of pillagers being produced. I've basically swapped all of my cities in the area to pillager/Praetorian Guard production, because my only real recourse is to surround all their cities, then create a wall around my borders. Normally I make the wall first, but I don't have the time to build it up, it takes eight units to surround a city but it takes 12 to surround boarders.

I could be mentally mathing that wrong, but yeah. Persia is on basically pure Pillager production. I need to try and contain the pillager production, which will have the side-effect of limiting Persia's angle of attack for the Macedonians to be purely by sea. (By the way, I buffed the Macedonians' supply of naval power because Persia is overwhelming the Macedonians with their fleet which should be the other way around.)

Now, there's probably a lot more I can say, but I have two options at the moment. Option one is to leave this blog to be completed later, option two is to post it as-is and if I wanna make more go make it later. If you're seeing it as-is, I chose the latter, which makes sense, because I badly hurt myself when taking our puppy out. Again.

I don't think I blogged about how I badly fell and SLAMMED my back, slightly on the right side, back in December.

This time I slipped and got dragged down concrete stairs, and have scraped myself very very very badly in three different areas.

I already needed to run errands, but now said errands involve getting medical supplies because while we have medical alcohol and while we have band-aids...these are some GNARLY wounds. Like, we're talking, my left thigh is scraped badly enough to have instantly swollen up and it's covering nearly the entirety of the thigh (bad enough I would never take a photo to share how disgusting it is), my right heel has a deep cut, and my right hip also has a deep cut. The right side wounds are deeper but cover less surface area, the left side is something no bandaid can cover because we're talking a scrape about the side of two hands at least. Soyeah. Gonna need to get treatment. Not hospital-visit-worthy, but I'm badly banged up rn.

​Gotta go.

What a difference a turn makes. By giving up on crushing Scythia in a single turn, I've ended up with something I always consider my favorite part of every playthrough:
Crushing Egypt.

Now, I'm disappointed in the sudden lack of manpower against Carthage (although I was close to driving them out of Africa anyway), and also how the Persians have lost their only real competition with the war against them effectively over, but at the same time, I'll take any excuse to war against Egypt, because the civilization controlling Pelusium is able to, through land instead of sea, connect the entirety of the map for their units.

​Byzantium gives a similar point, but can technically be bypassed by traversing around the Black Sea (which for some reason, NPC-Persia is quite fond of doing rather than just directly attacking Byzantium or using galleys in the black sea).

Scythia signed a mutual protection pact and trade embargo with Egypt against me, and it auto-triggered at the end of my transitionary turn thanks to me already having units in Scythian territory. (A bit weird, since I thought it'd require actual aggression, but oh well.)

​Not the type of war normally declared against me, but hey, I'll take it. I'm never signing a peace treaty with Scythia and the only way Egypt has out of this is for that to happen, so now I'm gonna wipe them out. Gradually. I'm playing as I'm writing this blog, but currently losing some RNG battles despite an advantage in both HP and attack. (I have Legionary IIIs with +3 HP and 7 attack losing to 5 defense 3 HP Numidian Mercenaries.)

So by the time I actually post this blog, a lot of the info I'll have to share on the Egyptian front will likely have changed. I'm actively in the process of taking Pelusium (which will eat up the majority of my available manpower and might be a struggle to hold when Egypt inevitably mounts a counter-attack), and there's just enough Legionaries available for me to take Asyut as well. Which won't rob the Egyptians of Ivory (they actually have 3 sources), but it'll link one of my cities cut off and will help to cut their cities off.

Now, as is the case for all of these wars so far...my cities are inadequately prepared for the war. I don't have the manpower in galleys for cities that have plenty of units, I don't have Legionaries in the cities with galleys to send them off for aquatic assaults, I'm very much lacking in Cataphracts to launch attacks against their Numidian Mercenaries, and I don't have an adequate supply of pillagers to really overwhelm their defenses.

And Egypt is no push-over. They've got numerous sources of horses I can't decapitate their usage from, multiple sources of ivory, and at least one source of gold. The saving grace is that, unless they're importing Iron from the Greeks, they have none, which means no more War Chariots, what they have is what they have and they can't get more. The problem is in how many they have, and how they're about to be a horde with their pillager production.

Basically every city of theirs is going to produce a pillager, unless it works differently for NPC cities compared to the human player. The human player can produce a unit in a city if the city loses access to the resources. So if the Egyptian cities are the same...that's a lot of pillagers. Now, in theory, as far as I can tell, they only have one source of gold, and no source of silver. (I don't know how they are producing the pillagers tbh, this iteration of pillagers requires gold, silver, and ivory. I've tweaked it for my next playthrough but as-is they shouldn't be able to make them so I don't know how they are.)

So I'll be cutting them off.

​But if the production goes through...that's a lot of ouch times.

Now, the upside to this is, outside of those pillagers being produced...Egypt has very limited ability to counter-attack, outside of their limited supply of War Chariots. What my cities DO have plenty of, nearly universally, is lots and lots of Praetorian Guards. Egypt has a lot of War Chariots, and Alexandria poses a serious threat of retaking Pelusium thanks to them, but otherwise their War Chariots are fairly scattered, outside of one area of concern where they have a lot and I don't yet have the defenses to defend confidently. I'm pretty sure List and Abydos can weather an attack, but they might genuinely suffer losses there and be left vulnerable, especially if the pillagers are produced and gain momentum.

When I took those screenshots, I was losing the RNG battle to Egypt's only Galley, which has since been destroyed, and I've also already taken Pelusium with my current assault being on Asyut. (Which I'm currently one unit away from capturing, but I just lost the RNG war despite a 2:1 advantage against their final Heavy Cavalry.)

But here's a fairly good breakdown of their army.

Not shown is the two pillagers they already have, one in Alexandria and the second I don't remember the location of. (The Pelusium pillager was the final defender I destroyed when taking it.)

​Egypt is in a very similar situation to Scythia; literally all of their cities have at least one Numidian Mercenary, with most having multiple. And while they have some cities in key areas heavily defended, the vast majority of their cities are actually rather vulnerable, all things considered.

If not for the unfortunate fact the two cities I needed Galleys in this turn don't have galleys yet, I could have captured Hierancopolis, Avaris, and threatened either Pi-Ramses or Heliopolis (alas, sadly not both). Alas, they'll be given a turn to bolster their forces, but I'll pull off the invasion of Egypt next turn. I'll probably leave them with Giza, because it's their most pathetic least-valuable city and is easily invaded by Persia, so that if I do end up making peace with them, they can be kept technically alive or wiped out by Persia.

But this will take a few turns. Alexandria is heavily defended, I've gotta get all of their African cities, and while I can move to annihilate them within a few turns, I can't decapitate their forces fully this turn or next. But I am currently wiping out their excess war chariots and hopefully can leapfrog the pillagers responsible into being a veritable menace this turn and leave Egypt with less resources even if they produce their pillager army.

This is what I had to show off before I took Pelusium for their two main cities beyond Pelusium and Alexandria though to give you an idea of where their forces are focused.

So these screenshots were taken at the beginning of the turn pretty much, and since then, the war chariots near Memphis and that advanced infantry near Khmun are both already wiped out. Pelusium and Asyut have been captured in the process of writing this blog, and the war chariot army I wrote about earlier is being dealt with by a pillager who I need to spawn another pillager or two in order to complete the eradication.

I can kill their single warrior and a couple of war chariots, the remnants of their Carthaginian spearhead, and then near Avaris a few more. An advanced infantry, one heavy cavalry, and a couple war chariots are all easily dispatched this turn, which will reduce their numbers significantly. Life allowing, I'll probably make a follow-through end-of-turn report on the amount of devastation I was able to inflict on the Egyptian army.

Granted, this is only half of the turn.

​All of this work in Egypt?

Mostly just a distraction from the grind of obliterating Scythia. Ulsky has been captured, Massagetai I'm deliberately waiting until Persia's army has softened their defenses so I can sweep in and steal it next turn with my forces fresh and Persia's weakened, Scythia is down to about 14 Scythian Riders, and a few cities might be capturable albeit with a grind involved. I've already done my round of Carthage conflict for the turn, but I do need to do a lot of work to deal with Persia.

Still, Egypt has become my main focus for now. I want to capture Alexandria and Bubastis because those two cities are two of the largest in the game, but to get there will take time.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully, fingers crossed, life allows me to give a follow-through, but if not, then just know, I hope you have enjoyed and thank you for going on this journey with me and indulging my hyperfixation of modded Civilization III. As a reminder, my life might be on the verge of falling apart and things could go to the worst timeline at any moment pretty much, so nothing is certain. But regardless of what the future holds, I still did this and if you're reading this then I hope it brings you some amount of pleasure, because it happened and gave joy. <3

Now, part of that is because all I have left to do is to grind out the bits remaining. Once I've save-scummed my way to defeating the RNG gods (so far, I've been reloading bad luck I ought to have won, but I'm about to enter into the zone of luck I have no right winning so any time I do is actually good luck), then there won't really be much left to report on. I might give a final after screen and show off Persia and the Egyptian pillager to show the next challenges, but the main challenge of effectively taking out all of the barbarian civilizations who betrayed me will be completed.

And the other part of it is because life is going to get busy regardless of whether it's in a bad way, a good way, or as is usually the case a mixture of both. I'm in this weird zone where I actually have a lot of hope of things improving, of being able to negotiate for the things I am most concerned about, of working things out, of getting the small bits of help, and of life improving. I completed a training that increases my value in my field of employment by a considerable amount. I've applied for four positions that are higher up in the chain of command, positions that are considerably rare to land but which I feel I actually for the first time in my life have a reasonable chance of landing them.

My current boss actually recommended I apply. Promising sign. I got an email from HR which mirrored the email I first got when I first applied for my current job. Promising sign number two. I have updated my resume, gotten a stronger cover letter, and improved my voice in my workplace, and I have a lot of people who have seen this change in me where I am performing exceptionally.

Plus on a sidenote, my bosses have actually had to work the current shift they assign me to work regularly in the last two weeks, and their struggle to actually work the shift they expect me to do every day? Presumably gives them a lot of perspective on just what I have been capable of in terms of what I accomplish. In short, I feel like they've, through actually experiencing what I go through, gained an amount of appreciation and respect for my workload previously not found. Which I feel will translate into them realizing I've been doing a lot more than they realized, been keeping things running in ways they didn't know, and that I am more valuable than they were giving me credit for, all of which translates into...presumably, advocating for me.

My medical health has improved significantly since getting physical therapy, and while it doesn't solve all of my health issues, it's making me less in pain and less sore in my back, neck, shoulders, and right side, so I'm slowly healing and improving.

Regardless of whether we end up moving or not, I feel like I've got a good chance of getting things to work, and I feel if we did end up moving, we have the resources available to make it work.

All of that is where I have the hope of things continuing to improve.

But at the same time, I'm also in a zone where I also have lost hope of things going well, and am just waiting for a death blow to be dealt to my life, to my dreams, to my chance of getting going. It could be anything. Something happening to my car which can't be covered, something happening to my income, being unable to get severely out of debt, being evicted from our new place because of an inability to pay on a reasonable timeframe, losing health insurance...again...being unable to go to the food bank...again...not getting access to food stamps...the list goes on and on.

In order for life to improve it takes nothing going wrong and at least one or two things to go right and continue to go right;

In order for life to collapse and go beyond shambles into actually being ended, it takes only a single thing going wrong with no ability to find a way out, to pivot, to fight, to recover. There's been so many close calls. Every month since December or so has had at least one if not multiple and we're probably a day or two away from another. I'm not sure what will happen but it can't be good things.

Soyeah. If things go well I'll be really busy. Either with a new job or with efforts to move, hopefully.
And if things go poorly...I'll...be...unavailable, to say the least.

And if it's a mixture of both, doubly so.

But in the unlikely event even all of those don't remove my free time, I'm not sure what's left to show. After Scythia falls, and after I clean up in the Iberian peninsula, there won't be much left to share and victory will be around the corner, likely only requiring one final war to wage against whoever first pulls the trigger on peace with Carthage. Then it's on to the next, playing as Carthage, to see if they're as viable to play as and have the playstyle I'm aiming for. (This'll be the first time on either version of this mod I'll be playing as Carthage since I've only gotten far enough to play as Persia and Rome on either version of the mod.)

​With all of that said, here's the current Scythian city army distribution.

Now, this doesn't give the full picture of the units, but you can at least get at least some idea of where their unit strongholds are. Ereen and Melitopol are going to be their last bastions, Ereen because I don't want the swamp until I can clear it (so I need to pre-load a bunch of units there to have available for that), and Melitopol because it's possibly where I limit the Scythians to, one of three cities I'm considering with Ereen as one of the other two. (Iazygia is the third.)

Now to give you an idea of what those icons are, lemme show you (the majority of) their unit breakdown.

The Scythians don't have their tier three horseman units yet, limited to their Scythian Riders. The three Scythian Scouts you see there are all in Ulksy, because Ulksy produces a Scythian Scout and Scythian Spearman every turn (which is also why Ulsky has like ten Horde Walls in it, because the Scythians gained access to the resources to upgrade said spearmen produced every turn).

Not all of their Scythian Riders are in cities, but they've still got an uncomfortably large amount. I'll be trimming the amount they have by reducing Melitopol and Ereen, but that'll still leave 30ish around their cities, all hiding behind Horde Walls and Numidian Mercenaries.

Not shown; they have a lot of Horde Warriors (the tier 1 swordsmen) and a few normal Warriors, as well as like 20 regular spearmen, too. All of those are annoyances, but not really concerns. The concerns are their warlords which are their 5/3 tier two swordsmen that treat all terrain as roads (meaning 5 movement for each of them). The horde raiders are their all-terrain-as-roads swordsmen, 3/2, but they're not much of a concern.

The advanced infantry, generic 5/3 units, aren't a threat because they can only kill units inside of Scythian territory or on the edge of my boarders, not able to penetrate deep.

The area of greatest concern is actually the Horde Walls being used offensively. They're 3/5, with the same treat-all-terrain-as-roads buff of the other Scythian units, and while Scythia can't make anymore as long as I hold onto the territories on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, they also have a large amount. Now, I'm relatively confident the Scythians are always going to keep at least one in each of their cities with one. That keeps 27 of them out of concern. And despite the save scumming required, I intend to breach Ulsky this turn or get it in breach range for next turn, taking an additional 10 of them out of concern. (Make no mistake, that's gonna be the majority of save scumming because it will require my pillagers who have only 4 attack not only winning against the horde wall but producing enough pillagers to keep the assault going. It's the area I'm most likely to be forced to give up in.) But that's only about 37/57 horde walls guaranteed to be locked down. The rest are at risk of being used offensively, and might kill units and are gonna be pains to take down.

And that brings me to my next show--of how all the easy work has been done pretty much, leaving only the hard parts left.

Every. single. city. is protected by a minimum of one Horde Wall (with the points of greatest pain being 2 - 3), with a couple having a Warlord as well. (Warlords, despite technically having one less defense than my pillager army, are still a pain and often take me 3 - 6 times to kill.) My pillagers have 4 attack and can sometimes retreat at 1 HP without killing the target, and in order to take these cities I need to not only kill the horde walls but also enslave at least once to create a pillager capable of mopping up the leftovers underneath of the horde walls. And the Scythian cities also have catapults making the attacking pillagers often start with 1 less HP, against an opponent they already have the disadvantage against.

Like I said. This is the section of the game that is going to take the longest and require the most save scumming. Gaimonov is more lightly defended and I have two pillagers there whereas I only have one pillager at the other cities, but none of them are going to be easy to take. All of them are going to take RNJesus rolls for me to actually have a chance of taking, so my hope is to get really lucky, and/or do enough damage that even if I get burned out/frustrated and give up, I cripple them enough to prevent any counter-offensive.

Sarsae is going to be difficult. Phasis might be impossible. I can't reach Oblia this turn with any of my units so Oblia is gonna stay under Scythian control for one more turn regardless, which really sucks because Oblia is one of their sources of horses. Shibe will also be very hard to take. And it doesn't get any easier on the northeastern front.

Here I'm running into the issue of just not having the manpower to advance, and unless I can capture Great Bulgar this turn (which will require snowballing one pillager into three against multiple Horde Walls and a Warlord), my cities in the corner are cut off from all resources except horses, meaning they can't actually produce my advanced units. No Praetorian Guards, Legionaries, Cataphracts, or Pillagers. (I forgot to swap them over before the declaration of war, whoops!)

​Now, Ulliastay has one Pillager, which can be used to easily attack Paratae or potentially the other border cities here.

And Kelermes has one pillager that can be used to kill the horde raider and Scythian Rider near Asiopolis and potentially attack it and/or Chersonesus, and as you can see, I do have a pillager poised to assault Saka and assuming said pillager can kill the Horde wall I can probably capture Saka, too. But at the same time, I don't have the manpower to actually plow through these cities. I can devastate them enough where they won't be able to effectively mount a counterattack, or so I hope, but I can't actually stop them.

​I do need to capture Asiopolis though. If I capture Asiopolis, that means the Scythians lose access to iron, which cuts them off from producing Kheshiks (the name I opted for their tier three horsemen), swordsmen, and horde raiders. (They already lack the means to produce warlords since those require gold and silver in addition to iron, but losing iron also guarantees no more warlords, too.)

I can probably reinforce my weakly-defended cities and I can probably prevent them from reclaiming dangerous territory, but while I might be able to capture Kimmeria with sufficient save scumming, you can see how vulnerable a lot of my defenses are, here. The best defense I can think of is convincing the Scythians they don't have the manpower to mount an offensive and providing shinies to distract them from higher-profile targets. I'll temporarily lose a few workers if the tradeoff is not losing any cities.

Which brings me to the area of greatest annoyance.

Tanais has three horde walls plus a fourth 3/5 in the form of a numidian mercenary, aided by a catapult, and I don't have any units with 5+ attack in the area. All my legionaries and cataphracts got deployed to cut Scythia's ivory supply off on the other side of the Caspian Sea. So I don't really have the manpower except by brute forcing to potentially get through, and my terrain is not properly defended. My hope is that the Persians focus on Tanais and the Scythians focus on the Persians, but without that it's going to be very, very rough.

And then you can also see Ulsky. I've got two or three Cataphracts there, but I've also only got about three pillagers available--meaning in order to breach into Ulsky, said three pillagers need to multiply into one or two each for a total of six to nine that each have enough HP to attack twice.

That's...ah...not very likely to happen, so I might be forced to give up on my aspirations of capturing Ulsky this turn. I do have enough Legionaries in the area to easily capture it next turn tho, so here's to hoping. (Also you can see one of Persia's Immortals II armies in Khazar, courtesy of the Scythian-Persian conflict prior to the Scythians declaring war against me.)

Now, it should be noted; a lot of the poorly-defended areas can have their defenses bolstered, I haven't put in the time to move all of my units to where they need to be and set up my logistics to protect my units and cities appropriately.

But at the same time, you can see why I tend to not like warring with the Scythians. I have the first strike, with a unit capable of theoretically snowballing and creating momentum, but they have such a strong defense, such a strong attack, an overwhelming horde of units, and they're rich enough in resources to use them. And their units can all pierce deep into enemy territory, my territory, to attack at will. (There's a reason that the first barbarian civilization I'm going to play as is the Scythians, because I think in my hands I could genuinely take over the world using them, the easiest of the barbarian civilizations to do so.)

It'll take a LOT of work to neuter them effectively, and I'm 2 - 4 turns from wiping them out. We've got a lot of save scumming to do, and then the pain of after. But once they're gone, I'm pretty much left just dealing with Persia, who I'm hoping will be my next foe. Both because it guarantees my conquest victory, I don't want them to expand further, they're the greatest threat, and they stole a wonder from me so I want to steal all of their cities. But obviously that will also be the hardest foe to fight, so not looking forward to it.

The challenges of being a conqueror, I suppose.

Anyway, that's it. Gotta go to bed and tackle the challenges of being an impoverished married disabled neurodivergent queer witch trying to start a lesbian family in a capitalistic society designed to prevent people like that from ever succeeding.

I don't wanna pretend that life is in any way okay, because things are quite bad and likely to get worse. Any blog could be my last at this point because I'm not sure I'm going to be able to keep blogging if things get worse. But at the same time--if things do get worse, I want to have what amounts to a last hurrah of having a good time.

So if any update could be my last, I want to leave a lil bit of fun to remind folks that I did a lot of really nifty things and was genuinely enjoying life. So without further ado, let's return to my second playthrough of the broken-modded-to-all-hell Rise of Rome scenario in Civ 3. The laptop busted overexaggerated over the top version, where I'm playing as Rome.

When last I checked in, it was 250 BC, one of the longest turns ever.

Since then, we've advanced to 205 BC, which...might prove to be the longest turn ever.

The Goths are gone--the Scythians wiped them out, after I captured most of their cities and destroyed their army leaving it easy for the Scythians to mop up the leftovers.

The Celts have been reduced to two cities, completely surrounded by my units, with me having killed all of their military units, leaving them effectively dead. Burdigala is their one mainland city and they have one single-tile city in Ireland, too.

Carthage, as of this turn, has lost the majority of their African territory, with me taking Tingis and Mersa Madakh, although there's 2.5 cities I want and one city I don't care for left to capture yet. The Iberian front is slower, as while I did get Cadiz, they still effectively have the entirety of Portugal and Spain. They've mostly ran out of steam, and my defenses are almost impenetrable for when they do mount an offensive, but I've not advanced much. I've sent an Army (as in, four-units combined into one) of Cataphracts (my name for the Roman equivalent to Heavy Cavalry) to take their city of Asido, their furthest northeast city, but it'll take time to actually capture. Meanwhile the Greeks and Persians are probably also gonna attack Carthage's remaining territory, so that's not a big concern of mine.

The Egyptians were convinced to declare war against the Persians, and then they roped the Scythians into it as well, leaving Scythia at war with Carthage, the Celts, and Persia, which they still are. I was content to let Persia fight the Scythians and Egyptians as a mostly neutral observer, with my pillagers picking random workers up as they could, but I knew I needed to do two things:

Strengthen my defense against the civilizations who would eventually deploy pillagers,
And to strengthen my defense against Scythia because the Goths and Celts declared war, the Scythians would sure to soon follow.

Much to my disappointment, I've been too slow on both sides. Egypt has their first Pillager (I probably need to up their cost again), and Persia produced five, in Antioch, Jordan, Babylon, Ctesiphon, and Persepolis. I don't have the means to shut their pillagers down yet, so that's gonna be a point of pain.

And Scythia...is war-ready with me. I got them to remove their forces from my territory at the beginning of my turn, but when I ended my turn and they told me to remove my forces (this was also how I discovered pillagers were on the loose), I told them to do the same and they declared war, so I closed and reloaded my end of turn save, and here we are, in 205 BC...with me deciding to ask them before ending the turn (despite having done so at the beginning of the turn), and sure enough...they declared war on me.

Now, I hate warring against the Scythians because they're arguably the most OP. They produce a large horde of units that can treat all terrain including enemy terrain as if friendly roads, meaning their units go 5 moves for foot units and 10 moves for their horse units. Scythia also has a lot of tier two spearmen, meaning that they're well-defended and have good offense, making them a terrifying opponent to face and the question usually isn't if I lose stuff, but rather how much I lose.

I think I'll maybe lose a few units, particularly captured workers, but mostly...I think if I play everything out, I'll be fine and Scythia, while not destroyed, will be crippled. But it's gonna be a slog. I've made a lot of progress already, even since taking screenshots, but there's a whole bunch I'll need to do or want to do.

So this is a city I might be able to capture, because I do have a pillager there already and more nearby. The question isn't if I can but whether I should, due to the amount of swampy terrain. Maybe I'll put a Praetorian Guard, Legionary, and Cataphract in each spot, then take the city, then clear the jungle in one single turn. Still gonna be a pain to get through that amount tho.

And this is one of the easiest spots.

Pazyryk here is gonna be a pain because their Horde Walls are...well, a wall. And they've got an army there. I may or may not be able to capture it this turn. I'm working on clearing out the units in Belgorod below.

Belgorod will be relatively easy to get, because there's only the two high-defense units, but it's still gonna be a slugfest to get there and also clear out the units slightly to the west (my current angle of attack).

Slightly to the east we have the city which was the Goth's last city, and that's why I already have so many units deployed in the area. It's gonna be painful to get through five high-defense units, but I'll be able to pull that off and then get through them all after that.

I already took Solokha, so the other main area of focus here to neuter is a nearly-invisible territory not a threat in terms of size, but menacing in terms of size of units.

Six horde walls, and an army of units, in a size-two city with one single tile. Because every time I told them to remove their units from my territory, they got sent to Melitopol. Not gonna be fun dealing with that, but even if I end up unable to kill them all, I'm cautiously optimistic I'll be able to contain them.

The majority of Scythian cities are actually pretty lightly defended, so I'm not too worried about most.

Parnii is the heaviest-defended city with the most units in it, but all the others in the area including Shibe are actually barely defended at all. I don't need to capture them, I just need to cripple them and defend my own.

Again, Great Bulgar is the heaviest city for its area, with the rest all pretty much not defended at all. They've got a single Horde Wall, and then maybe another defensive unit, and then that's it. Barely a Scythian Rider to be found, and basically nothing.

You can see here on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea that they have a single Rider to their name and then nothing else. I've run out of momentum this turn, but they can't go on the offensive, so it'll be me crushing them within the next few turns.

Not shown: Tanais, down south of Khazar, which also has a veritable army of units of all kinds and which I definitely can't capture this turn.

This is the area of greatest grind. Massagetai is relatively capturable, the problem is that I have a higher-priority target in Ulsky. Which is capturable, but to get it...will require a huge grind.

Jinjan was just captured by the Scythians, because much to surprise, they were actually winning the war against Persia. Persia has an Army unit in Khazar, and a lot of units in the area, but Scythia burned one Persian city and captured Jinjan. I wanted to watch Persia and Scythia fight further, to see if Persia could mount a counter-offensive and potentially take Ulsky, but alas. Scythia declared war against me before I could get the chance. So I've got this entire area to clear out.

And like...by the end of it all, I'll do to Scythia what I did to both the Goths and the Celts, and probably have enough territory to be at or near a Conquest victory, allowing me to finally play a third time as Carthage with the fixes and tweaks I've made from playing this round. But getting there is a grind.

These days I tend to only share the ones I probably will never actually make--not because I don't think they're good enough, not because I don't want to, but purely because I don't really have the time to make everything in my lifetime that I want to make. There's too many ideas and an increasingly short amount of time to make them.

Like, yeah, I'm only in my 30s. That's potentially two-thirds of my life left to make things, still.

But since my current state in life isn't going to advance things to where I'm likely to be able to actually make anything I think of for the next couple years minimum...that means that much time before the first could POSSIBLY be made. Which pushes all the others back behind it. And pushes the ones further back to be even further back. You get the idea. Missing a day of creativity doesn't matter. Or a week. Or a month. But when you miss a year of making things...it might not matter much, but it begins to be notable in terms of scale of missing out.

A year is greater than 1% of my life, so every year I go by without making my ideas real means I've got less of that percentage left. And like...yeah, even if it takes me an additional 30 years to get things made...that's still gonna be things I get to make. It's just that the maximum possible amount to make does dwindle as I get older and my amount of time left decreases gradually. If I get things created when I'm in my 60s, that's generously a maximum of 30 things I get to make if I complete one a year. (I'd likely make a lot less, given many would take multiple years.)

I have a whole lot more than that I'd love to make. Even if I were to pump out one project a year starting this year, that'd be 60 in my lifetime. I have hundreds, even thousands, I would like to make. So while in my lifetime I can probably manage to make a few dozen, I will never be able to make the thousands upon thousands of ideas I have be realized. Not unless the technology to make me immortal magically is invented and applied to me within my lifetime, or there's breakthroughs spiritually which would allow me as a ghost to create all of them in perpetuity.

Since both of those seem rather dubious to say the least, realistically speaking my ideas will die with me. That's motivation to make as many as I can, yes, but it is also reason to write down all of the ones I can't make. Not because I don't have the skills or talents, but because there's other things I just want to make more.

And this is one of the ideas to get the short end of the stick despite its explosive growth. I literally came up with the idea yesterday and it has already become a full-fledged series of epic proportions in my mind with multiple seasons, characters, villains, etc.

The genre for this would be Magical Girl Superheroes, and the best way to describe it I can think of is "Power Rangers meets Miraculous Ladybug meets Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt".

The name for this series would be "Fire Fist and Lightning Kicks".

It revolves around the titular heroines, the superhero magical girl martial artist Fire Fist (ironically, despite the name, most of her martial arts techniques involve an open-palm with her using an Uncle Iroh style of redirection, with her only closed-fist techniques being rapid-fire ranged attacks) and the superhero magical girl martial artist Lightning Kicks (who does more dance moves than kicks since she's a dance battle girlie and gymnast although she is still a martial artist just not as much as she is a dancer and gymnast).

Together, the titular duo are known as the "Sol Strikers", and they are a lesbian duo in a relationship with each other. (Mostly out of costume but there's times they do let it slip in-costume they're an item.)

They're the main guardians of their city (this could really be any city, I didn't choose any specific setting for the setting yet), and they mostly fight supernaturally-empowered temporary supervillains (a la Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir), as well as numerous supernaturally-created minions loaned to said supervillains (a la Power Rangers), but they also fight a bunch of beasts, monsters, etc., which appear, as well as occasionally other supers, because they're not the only permanent supers in the setting.

Their main nemesis is Lilith, The Queen of The Dark, The Empress of the Night, etc. She is the one who feeds off of the negative emotions of people and offers them a deal, where she empowers them to act on their impulses and become supernaturally empowered, in exchange for having their powers limited in range to be (with a few exceptions) within a 150 square mile radius of the duo, with the promise the powers would become permanent if they actually delivered a permanent defeat to the Sol Strikers and robbed them of their powers permanently.

She not only creates these temporary supervillains, but also provides said supervillains with her army of darkspawn minions, creatures she, as well as those she empowers, can mold into various forms and create a small, infinitely-replenishable, invasion force to wreck havoc at the whims of her empowered supervillain commanders.

The Sol Strikers are actually the latest incarnations of an always-female duo, with one half having the power of the heat of the sun, and the other half having the power of the power/energy of the sun. That's because they are, together, the two halves of the mortal incarnation of the Sun Goddess Solarie, the maiden warrioress of the sun, both a protector and fierce aggressor. (Think kinda like the Eye of Ra, mixed with Helia and Solarii, in that her traditional weapons were maces and morningstars.)

In a twist, it turns out that their archnemesis, Lilith?

...Was actually originally the mortal lesbian lover to Solarie. She usurped the original god of the moon, Abep the Moon Lord (think Lunord and Adepts mixed with Apophis). Abep was, originally, neither malevolent nor benevolent, being one of the most neutral forces in the world, but eventually, isolation drove him insane. He couldn't find companionship and people were scared of him so he eventually lost his mind. Lilith was both ambitious, seeking a way to become immortal to match her immortal goddess lover, but also altruistic, in seeking a way to stop Abep from overwhelming her lover, because Abep was gaining power and risked killing Solarie if nothing was done.

So what was thought to be a usurpation was actually her doing what she thought she needed to do--but it had a horrific cost. Her stealing godhood from Abep carried such a wave of chaotic destructive energy it shook the pantheon of deities to the core, negatively impacting all of them in some way. In the case of Solarie, it split her into two, mortal, woman, who have perpetually been reincarnating ever since.

And this is genuinely the first iteration of the two where neither is using her traditional weapons, and the first iteration of the two where they are lovers with each other, who know each other both inside and outside of their hero identities.

This, as it turns out, is why they are extra-strong targets of Lilith. The reason why Lilith is targeting the duo is because her ambition is just to bring Solarie back, by having a Sol Striker duo that's strong enough and bonded enough to actually have circumstances which enable them to merge into Solarie. The Sol Strikers duo is frequently known to have the ability to merge their powers to become the light of the sun, being a magical duo associated with paladins because they're embodiments of the light, but that's only half of their potential, and Lilith's goal is to bring them to their full potential.

And the only way she can do that is--by having them fight her. And her minions. And her empowered supervillains. So she's not targeting the duo to try and crush them and take over the world (the assumption she deliberately creates and has fostered ever since the first Sol Strikers duo), she's literally just trying to make them stronger and more in unison to the point where they'll actually be able to be so attuned they accidentally just become Solarie again, allowing Lilith to see, meet, and talk to her long-lost lover.

About 3/4ths of the way through the series, and/or around season 5 or so, this would be revealed...by Lilith succeeding. All of the above would be revealed, and Solarie would get to talk to Lilith. She would mention how she can see through the eyes of an observer, as if watching a movie, the actions of all her incarnations, and would never forgive Lilith if she actually killed anyone, including Solarie's mortal incarnations. Solarie points out that her mortal incarnations, especially Fire Fist and Lightning Kicks, have the right to live their lives, and her life isn't worth sacrificing theirs.

As such, Solarie's presence is only temporary, with her eventually splitting back into Fire Fist and Lightning Kicks, who remember everything the same as Solarie, a la a third person perspective who were watching a movie of the entire conversation. In a twist, the duo actually decide to, in a sense, conspire with Lilith. They point out how Lilith's empowering of supervillains is--mostly--harmless. The supervillains don't cause long-lasting harm due to the Sol Strikers' ability to partially reverse damage (again, Miraculous influence is pretty strong here), and it actually allows the temporary supervillains to work through their traumas and issues.

​In short, these dark transformations are literally therapy for the transformed temporary-supervillains. It gives them outlets (albeit technically not healthy ones) to work through their issues. In many ways, this Lilith (like her actual goddess) is a mistress of shadow-work but in a more literal sense than usual with the people who are transformed able to become stronger, permanently, and undergo real growth without her help after having gone through the ordeal. It also serves as a way where the superheroine duo gains a mortal supporting cast of characters to become their friends and allies in these adventures.

​Because the goal is a noble, understandable one they empathize with, and they know the rampages are relatively harmless, the duo encourages Lilith to keep attacking them, and they vow to try and find a way where Solarie can be brought back while they can continue to live--even if it means in the aftermath they would end up permanently depowered by it.

But wait, there's more!

An occasional ally, occasional foe, of the duo is the mortal avatar and current mortal incarnation of the Nature God, Nanoc. He was originally one of humanity's greatest allies, but in the current day and age, he is largely in opposition to humanity due to humanity's continued destruction of his realm of nature. Nanoc, thanks to Lilith's actions, is forced to continuously reincarnate as a mortal avatar, lacking a divine presence, and as such, his creatures often are set loose on rampages. These beasts target primarily the humans most endangering nature, not out of malice but also not altruistically, purely as an animal would to defend itself from a perceived threat.

Nanoc's divinity wasn't actually taken by Lilith (who was a scapegoat), but rather, by his three sons, who were immortal but lacked divinity initially until they were given the opportunity to usurp their father's powers for themselves and gained divinity to go alongside their natural immortality. Nanoc's mortal avatar thus tends to avoid conflict with the gods' chosen, but also his creatures tend to be extra hostile towards any except Nanoc's divinity.

This is partially because Nanoc's mistress (not wife, they never married and were never more than a fling), Chlia, the goddess of the unnatural, of the artificial, of the premature end, of the artificial endless, was complicit. She supported her sons' efforts because she loves her sons unconditionally, her fling with Nanoc was fading, and it felt like it would empower her nature even further. Chlia tends to mass-spawn monsters, sending them out into the world, but leaves those monsters as blank slates capable of being anything. She also empowers individuals, and she's the main source of permanent superpowers because her power has grown to the point where she's the strongest deity in existence. She has no endgoal other than to just exist eternally and support her sons in the same eternal existence.

​So, basically all of the superheroes and supervillains outside of the temporary ones made by Lilith, outside of Nanoc, and outside of the mortal duo incarnations of Solarie known as the Sol Strikers? She's responsible for, both the bad and the good. Chlia, being the goddess of the unnatural, is in many ways the goddess of chaos, because what's considered unnatural is always going to change. If mortality were natural then immortality becomes unnatural (thus how she empowered her sons before godhood); if immortality were ever to become the norm, then she would be a source of fear for inducing mortality; with superpowers not being the norm, she provides them; if superpowers were the norm, then suddenly she would become a source of depowering.

There's also her three sons as additional agents in the story, albeit indirectly.

Knom, the God of Justice and the hard rock of the earth itself, has often empowered his champions to disguise themselves as angels, because they're agents of the divine (not a lie), who serve a deity (not a lie), but are using the existing beliefs of the people to establish Knom and allow him to empower more people because the more people who pray to him, the more people he is able to empower. So by trying to hijack existing religions, he essentially is making it so that he can create more demi-divine agents, including multiple superheroes who cross paths with our superheroines sometimes as allies but also sometimes as villains with good publicity, because while they are advocates for Justice, their Justice doesn't leave any room for forgiveness.

Corda, the God of flora (plant-life) and freedom, randomly selects agents who advocate for this freedom. He's more laid-back than Knom, but despite this, arguably meddles more often. Knom might be tricking the masses for what he sees as a greater good but otherwise isn't intervening much directly. Corda on the other hand, he is always looking to create as much freedom as possible, no matter the means, even when freedom isn't a good thing.

Agrea, the God/dess of fauna and of the Soul, is a genderfluid deity (usually using bigender pronouns). He identifies as a son of Chlia and Nanoc, but she's fluid in how she presents. Sometimes he's a guy, sometimes she's a girl. Since souls are technically genderless, technically this is just him being a perfect representation of her domain, in that she is both a he and a her, and will be whatever he needs to be for the moment.

As the mistress of animals, he's basically the creator of countless beasts and is their greatest defender, but because she is also a mother of fauna that technically includes humans, he's also a defender of humanity, empowering humans with defenses against the more destructive aspects of her domain.

In general, if you haven't noticed the theme, none of these gods are good nor are any of them evil. They're all essentially personified forces of the universe, as it were. (In the case of the three sons, literal forces of nature.) The closest the deities have to a goddess of good is Solarie herself, although even she is arguably too intense and smothering in her love if left to her own devices for too long. It can safely be assumed if not for having Lilith to theoretically balance her out and for her not currently existing permanently, that she, too, would have more negative aspects. But since she has those, she is widely considered by myth and lore to be the goddess of goodness itself.

​The series would introduce these agents of various deities throughout the story, with the monsters and beasts being faced from even the earliest of episodes. While Lilith would be the source of the majority of the conflicts, any of the deities could be a potential source of the Foe of the Week, or an Ally of the Week.

After the big reveal of Lilith's true origins and motives, these deities would have a vastly increased role and presence, so while Lilith would still provide conflict, these would mostly be increasingly in the background. Instead of entire episodes, being openers and closers for episodes, or a mid-point conflict, rather than the entirety of the conflict start to finish.

So that's the idea behind Fire Fist and Lightning Kicks (which is the name of the series).

I'll never get to make it, as much as I'd love to, but I'll all too gladly share it. Hope you enjoyed.

So 250 BC has proven to be the longest turn I've ever played in any game (okay so I've had a couple of other long turns but this one is pretty darn long), but it's finally reached the end, so I'm gonna show the main points of conflict I have on the map. (Zoomed out, so I might need to describe for people to see and understand.) Let's start with the Iberian front.

So a couple turns ago or so I captured Malaca, and Carthage has been harassing me ever since, sending War Elephants into the spaces you can now see Praetorian Guards occupying. (Praetorian Guards are what I named the second-tier Spearman, Rome's equivalent to the generic Numidian Mercenary, the upgrade to Garrisons which are the first-tier Spearman equivalent native to the scenario.)

I like to take my time in my conquests, so despite having the manpower to advance, I'm waiting until the road to directly invade Cadiz is repaired so the Legionary IIIs can attack instantly. From there it'll be Carmona and then Corduba.

You can also see further north Carthage started with about six War Elephants near Nora, and I drove them mostly out. This back-and-forth has been going on for multiple turns now, and will likely go until Carthage is either unable to spam War Elephants or I have enough momentum from my units to brute force their removal from the peninsula. 

​There is a bit of an annoyance though.

So up until a couple turns ago, the Celts were allies against Carthage. They betrayed me by signing a peace treaty, but I make it mandatory most of the time that if you're gonna have a war against my enemy, your Right of Passage is tied to that war; betray me by ending the war and signing a peace treaty? You lose the Right of Passage, so those Celtic units have been stuck there, unable to get hime, because I'm not letting them through.

And you may recall, the Celts declared war against me this turn, so I've got them as a potential nuisance in the area.

I'm not too worried about this though, because I have a, relatively expensive, secret weapon.

Now, the Scythians also betrayed me in my war against Carthage. They abandoned me in my moment of need. They were supposed to use this veritable horde to wipe out the war elephants who have been harassing me in the northern parts of Iberia. But when I most needed their cannon fodder, they signed a peace treaty with Carthage and lost their right of passage, and got on my "I'm going to end you" list.

At this point only Macedon and Persia have kept their word, but that's likely because they both have forces in galleys headed to invade Carthage combined with them needing the right of passage to war against each other. (I'm not screenshotting their battle, but you can see the red there means they're not accessing each other without my say, by and large.)

But I'm pragmatic--whereas the Celts and Goths declared war against me, the Scythians didn't, and because I needed their manpower in a couple of spots, I was willing to bribe both them and Persia. (Which you'll see why later for why Persia.)

So I'm not too worried about the Celtic nuisance there, because the Scythians should have them sufficiently distracted and the Celts don't have any of their T2 spearmen or T3 swordsmen there, making them easily dealt with.

​So let's talk about the other Carthage front.

So that mid-health Praetorian Guard you see near Theveste? Just killed Hannibal. As in, the army the Carthaginians start with was near Saldae, poised to invade, but was at mid-HP. I sacced a Praetorian Guard to get the army low and then sent a second to finish it off. The one north of that was also dispatching a War Elephant. Timbuktu is currently undefended, but I'm not too concerned about it since Carthage can't take it this turn and even if that War Elephant kills my Praetorian Guard, I've got a replacement next turn. Ditto for the Sulcis area. Could I send a praetorian guard to kill that war elephant? Sure! But I don't feel a need to.

As for Carthage itself (renamed from Carthago because I was feeling petty and wanted to spite the Carthaginians), they've been sending 3 - 6 War Elephants per turn to try and retake their capital. I'm slowly building up my forces there to where I'll be able to take Utica and Tunis (artistic liberties were taken, I wanted cities in those locations), but this is going to take some time. You can also spot the Persian and Macedonian galleys bound towards the pillars of hercules I imagine since if they're not carrying armies to try and take Carthaginian territory they're probably trying to explore the sea.

Carthage isn't my main priority though. That'd be wiping the Goths out, or putting them as close to as is possible without pulling the trigger. (Ideally, either the Scythians or Persians take their final city for me.)

So the goths basically controlled nearly the entirety of the northern corner of the map at the beginning of this turn. I don't have a screenshot of what they had at the beginning of the turn, but every city without an obvious Roman name aside from Ubii? All of those were controlled by the Goths. If I had taken a screenshot over to the left, it'd be more obvious, but while the Goths might retake some of their workers and kill a lot of the low-HP pillagers, I've still got enough to be poised to wipe them out next turn, which will reduce their presence down to one spot.

So this is the area of greatest concern to me. The goths shouldn't have any 2-movement units left, except in that tile between Melitopol and Kriyvyy Rih (which are all 1-HP). The main concern is they do have a lot of swordsman-tier second-level teutonic warriors, a lot of swordsmen, and a lot of teutonic warriors. This was also a lot of why I asked the Scythians for help, and also bribed the Persians. The Celts and Goths both have a presence where the Persians and Scythians are, so by having their help, I should have a lot of assistance in handling their hordes. which will protect my cities. I'm actually thinking of not trying to take the two Gothic cities, despite how well Kuczkowo is positioned, because I don't really have the manpower in the area, all of my units are Praetorian Guards and I don't really have the ability to make many more offensive units. (Although spotting it now, I can swap Sevastopol and Kul Oba and such to units, so good thing I haven't hit 'end turn' yet.)

You can also spot a Celtic horde near Bampur and Kriyvyy Rih. It's all defensive units, but it's a lot of them, plus a bunch of settlers and workers. I don't really have the manpower to get through the horde, but it won't threaten me more than maybe a road or two destroyed, so the Scythians are probably gonna have fun there capturing that army of workers. If the opportunity arises I'll nab them, but I'm not planning on it.

The front which is newest, and of greatest concern, would be that of the Celts. Now, the British Isles area isn't too bad.

I captured and destroyed Noviodunum, which was between New Confinium, New Pompeii, and York. That Praetorian Guard you see on the cattle? Rebuilt the road from the ruins of Noviodunum, because I saw it as unnecessary to keep. I did keep all the other cities though--Bibactre, Dyfedd, and Decetia all got captured, but while I reduced the power of Gwynedd and Strathclyde, I lacked the manpower to capture them this turn. It'll probably take me a few turns to really build up the momentum for actually capturing all of northern England, and even longer to actually get to Ireland.

I'm not sure what city to let the Celts keep. I don't want to wipe them out, but I do want to leave them with only one city with no resources in a location which won't inconvenience me. It needn't be on the British Isles though because there's another front to fight them on, which is also an area that terrifies me.

The Celts have a veritable army in La Tene, including a couple Woad Raiders, their T3 swordsman unit. As a reminder, Celtic units universally have +1 movement compared to generic counterparts and ignore the movement costs of hills, mountains, and forests. Which means Naissus (well, theoretically; the units there are likely too weak to zerg rush my defenses), Verona, Grenoble, Luna, Caesarea, Lugdunum, Basel, Antium, Mediolanum, and Benevetum are all in striking range in theory.

Now, mind you, the Celts only have 6 Woad Raiders left across all their cities, so that's only six units that are 5/3/2, but they do have a lot of their T2 spearmen (how did they even get Ivory, I don't know, but they have 20 of their 3/5/2 defensive unit), 120 of their 1/2/2 spearmen, 7 2/1/2 of their archers (mostly near Naissus), 27 of their 1/2/2 warriors, and an alarming 70 3/2/2 Gallic Swordsmen.

Some of that horde is in the Scythian territory, there's a small amount near the rim of Gothic territory guarding settlers and workers, a fair amount is in the British Isles, but La Tene has about 80 different units of all kinds and all of those cities are stacked.

I do have leftover pillagers near Alesia due to capturing the Gothic cities, but that means I have to wait until next turn to mount an offensive.

Unlike the Goths, who I had to preemptively strike against, the Celts I'm actually mostly better off being defensive about because my units have better defense than their units have attack, butstill...it's gonna be scary hitting that 'next turn' button and scanning the area for the damage to result next turn.

Here's to hoping it's minimal!

Butyeah, that's my report for 250 BC. It was a long slog to get this far, but it's finally time to brace for impact and hope I did enough.