#anyway because of this that and the other can't end my insurance until it just automatically runs out which thankfully is at end of January

[nyhne]

.

[princesscedar]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What the fuck is a PBM?

TOMORROW (Sept 24), I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it's only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. "The Shield of Boringness" is one of the necrocapitalist's most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.

The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."

MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism's stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you're bound to notice that something is missing.

If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by "CDOs," "synthetic CDOs," "ARMs" and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these "exotic financial instruments" were just scams, you experienced Stein's Law ("anything that can't go forever eventually stops"). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.

As bad as 2008 was, it wasn't even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we're still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s even worse.

That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.

On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism's trash mobs.

PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of "what the fuck is a PBM, anyway?" explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-lina-khan-pharma

Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.

But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!

Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create "high deductible" plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and then their insurance would kick in. Along with "co-pays" and other junk fees, these deductibles were called "cost sharing," and they were sold as a way to prevent the "abuse" of the health care system.

The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism's intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.

No, the actual root of America's health industry's problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor's visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the true costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

"Cost sharing" was supposed to create "skin in the game" for every insured American, creating a little pain-point that stung you every time you thought about treating yourself to a luxurious doctor's visit. Now, these payments bit hardest on the poorest workers, because if you're making minimum wage, at $10 co-pay hurts a lot more than it does if you're making six figures. What's more, VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.

So now you have these high-deductible plans creeping into every workplace. Then along comes Obama and the Affordable Care Act, a compromise that maintains health care as a for-profit enterprise (still not a human right!) but seeks to create universal coverage by requiring every American to buy a plan, requiring insurers to offer plans to every American, and uses public money to subsidize the for-profit health industry to glue it together.

Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.

That's the background: GWB created high-deductible plans, Obama supercharged them. Keep that in your mind as we go through the MEGO procedures of the PBM sector.

Your insurer has a list of drugs they'll cover, called the "formulary." The formulary also specifies how much the insurance company is willing to pay your pharmacist for these drugs. Creating the formulary and paying pharmacies for dispensing drugs is a lot of tedious work, and insurance outsources this to third parties, called – wait for it – Pharmacy Benefits Managers.

The prices in the formulary the PBM prepares for your insurance company are called the "list prices." These are meant to represent the "sticker price" of the drug, what a pharmacist would charge you if you wandered in off the street with no insurance, but somehow in possession of a valid prescription.

But, as Stoller writes, these "list prices" aren't actually ever charged to anyone. The list price is like the "full price" on the pricetags at a discount furniture place where everything is always "on sale" at 50% off – and whose semi-disposable sofas and balsa-wood dining room chairs are never actually sold at full price.

One theoretical advantage of a PBM is that it can get lower prices because it bargains for all the people in a given insurer's plan. If you're the pharma giant Sanofi and you want your Lantus insulin to be available to any of the people who must use OptumRX's formulary, you have to convince OptumRX to include you in that formulary.

OptumRX – like all PBMs – demands "rebates" from pharma companies if they want to be included in the formulary. On its face, this is similar to the practices of, say, NICE – the UK agency that bargains for medicine on behalf of the NHS, which also bargains with pharma companies for access to everyone in the UK and gets very good deals as a result.

But OptumRX doesn't bargain for a lower list price. They bargain for a bigger rebate. That means that the "price" is still very high, but OptumRX ends up paying a tiny fraction of it, thanks to that rebate. In the OptumRX formulary, Lantus insulin lists for $403. But Sanofi, who make Lantus, rebate $339 of that to OptumRX, leaving just $64 for Lantus.

Here's where the scam hits. Your insurer charges you a deductible based on the list price – $404 – not on the $64 that OptumRX actually pays for your insulin. If you're in a high-deductible plan and you haven't met your cap yet, you're going to pay $404 for your insulin, even though the actual price for it is $64.

Now, you'd think that your insurer would put a stop to this. They chose the PBM, the PBM is ripping off their customers, so it's their job to smack the PBM around and make it cut this shit out. So why would the insurers tolerate this nonsense?

Here's why: the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.

Now, there's one more entity with power over the PBM that you'd hope would step in on your behalf: your boss. After all, your employer is the entity that actually chooses the insurer and negotiates with them on your behalf. Your boss is in the driver's seat; you're just along for the ride.

It would be pretty funny if the answer to this was that the health insurance company bought your employer, too, and so your boss, the PBM and the insurer were all the same guy, busily swapping hats, paying for a call center full of tormented drones who each have three phones on their desks: one labeled "insurer"; the second, "PBM" and the final one "HR."

But no, the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot.

That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.

But wait, there's more! After all, Big Pharma isn't some kind of easily pushed-around weakling. They're big. Why don't they push back against these massive rebates? Because they can afford to pay bribes and smaller companies making cheaper drugs can't. Whether it's a little biotech upstart with a cheaper molecule, or a generics maker who's producing drugs at a fraction of the list price, they just don't have the giant cash reserves it takes to buy their way into the PBMs' formularies. Doubtless, the Big Pharma companies would prefer to pay smaller kickbacks, but from Big Pharma's perspective, the optimum amount of bribes extracted by a PBM isn't zero – far from it. For Big Pharma, the optimal number is one cent higher than "the maximum amount of bribes that a smaller company can afford."

The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.

Which is why the FTC is suing the PBMs for price-fixing. As Stoller points out, they're using their powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act here, which allows them to shut down "unfair methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The case will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge, in a process that's much faster than a federal court case. Once the FTC proves that the PBM scam is illegal when applied to insulin, they'll have a much easier time attacking the scam when it comes to every other drug (the insulin scam has just about run its course, with federally mandated $35 insulin coming online, just as a generation of post-insulin diabetes treatments hit the market).

Obviously the PBMs aren't taking this lying down. Cigna/Expressscripts has actually sued the FTC for libel over the market study it conducted, in which the agency described in pitiless, factual detail how Cigna was ripping us all off. The case is being fought by a low-level Reagan-era monster named Rick Rule, whom Stoller characterizes as a guy who "hangs around in bars and picks up lonely multi-national corporations" (!!).

The libel claim is a nonstarter, but it's still wild. It's like one of those movies where they want to show you how bad the cockroaches are, so there's a bit where the exterminator shows up and the roaches form a chorus line and do a kind of Busby Berkeley number:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/news/2024-09-20-the-carlton-report

So here we are: the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness. If I've done my job, you now understand how this MEGO scam works – and if you forget all that ten minutes later (as is likely, given the nature of MEGO), that's OK: just remember that this thing is a giant fucking scam, and if you ever need to refresh yourself on the details, you can always re-read this post.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[justwinginglife]

Hi! Im not sure if you're open some request or I might give you some idea. I wonder what Hoshina's reaction when his s/o asked him curious question “what if I disappeared one day?"

Feel free to ignore this request! ^^

Omg my first request- hi! So sorry, this got so much sadder than I wanted it to be but the short answer is the poor guy just can't live without you.

My One & Only

You knew marrying Soshiro Hoshina was going to be the best decision of your entire life. You'd give up a winning lottery ticket just to be able to stand next to him at the altar. Marrying him was like winning the lottery anyway, only he was a lot more attractive than a couple of numbers in your bank account.

Nothing could compare to the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night just to check the time and realizing he was wrapped around you tightly like he couldn't sleep without your skin on his. Even when he'd roll off of you, some part of him would always be touching you, whether it was his leg thrown over yours, or his arm under your neck, or even just his shoulder snug against your shoulder. He needed to touch you like he needed to breathe. And you'd never get tired of it.

Your favorite part was when you'd get up to start getting ready for work, or even just to go to the bathroom, and he'd feel you move and roll over to you mumbling "Wait... don't go, I haven't said I love you yet, okay I love you," sleep still dripping from his voice, and then he'd conk out again. You'd kiss him on the forehead, cheek, lips, anywhere really, and then whisper back, "I love you too baby." And even if he was out cold, he'd smile like he heard you.

You loved everything about being married to him, even the fights- because he couldn't stay mad at you for long. The longest fight you'd had with him in the years you'd been together lasted less than 24 hours- you'd had enough of his pouting and his cold shoulder, and so you did what any rational person would do when they wanted to go to bed and have their significant other actually come to bed with them, you stripped naked. Ended that argument real quick. In fact, he was in the bed before you even got your panties all the way off, he wanted to help.

But, after only being legally married for a few weeks, you finally discovered one thing you did not like about being married. You'd have to have the talk with him. What happens if one of you dies?

Insurance companies wanted to know, your jobs wanted to know. Honestly, you hated to talk about it, but some part of you wanted to know as well.

So one day, you sat him down to talk about life insurance, emergency contacts, all the things you don't want to talk about when you're freshly married, but that need to be talked about anyway. Who do you want me to call first if you're in an accident? Do you want to be resuscitated if you're injured beyond belief and wouldn't be able to live a normal life again even if you were brought back from the brink of death? Do you want to be cremated or buried?

Then, under the guise of talking all things rational and logical, you slipped in a question you'd secretly wanted to know. "What if I... disappeared one day? What would you do?"

He went silent, gripping the legal paperwork in his hands tightly. You hadn't expected the vast amount of pain that would stain his eyes and spill over to darken his face. You reached over to rub his hand until he loosened his hold on the papers. He sighed.

"Like if you... went missing? Or... died?" He asked, the words like knives scraping out of his throat, threatening his very livelihood.

You nodded slowly.

"Well... if you were... missing, I'd search my whole life for you. I'd never give up. And if you... died. I'd be right there with you." He said solemnly.

You wanted to stop this conversation right now and tell him something like you'd never die or you'd never go missing, anything to erase the hurt that he was in right now because of you. But you couldn't stand the thought of you actually dying or going missing and him spending his whole life in pain because he couldn't move on.

You kneel on the floor in front of him and grab both his hands which have now been balled up into fists. You kiss at his fists and keep kissing them until his hands relax and wrap around your hands. He's shaking but he holds onto you tight like you'll disappear if he lets go.

"Baby." You say, making sure you have his attention. He won't look at you, it's like he knows what you're going to say. He always knows what you're going to say.

You pull a hand away from his trembling fingers and cup his face with it, stroking smoothly at his cheek. "If I die, I want you to promise me you'll live on and be happy."

He shakes his head no immediately. "Can't do that, love."

You smile at him warmly. "Baby. It'll be okay. I want you to be happy."

For the first time in your life, you think you might make him cry. If this weren't such a depressing moment, you might tease him about the Vice Captain of the Third Division being such a crybaby. But you can't tease him. You can't even seem to get anymore words out when you see the state he's in. He's acting like you're dead right now. His face has gone pale and clammy and his fingers must be bruised from pressing into your skin so hard to make sure you're still there. His eyes... you almost can't look at his eyes anymore as you see the tears start to collect. It's like he's drowning but there's no bottom so he just keeps sinking and sinking.

"I-" He starts but this time the words get stuck. He blinks and the force of it pushes a tear over the edge. You watch as it trails down his cheek, feeling helpless but also in a heartbreaking way, feeling so very loved by him. He swallows and then clears his throat. "I-I'm happy.... because you're here. How could I... be h-happy... without.. without you?"

You can't take it anymore. You stand up and throw your arms around him, hoping maybe he'll forget this whole conversation if you smother him with enough love. He pulls you in even closer to him and sighs deeply, like he's exhaling his first fresh breath of air after being submerged for so long. You think you might crack a rib from how tight he's holding onto you, but you're scared to pull away, having never seen him so vulnerable like this.

"Don't cry baby, you're going to make me cry." You mumble into his shoulder.

"Don't die then. Don't give me a reason to cry."

You smile against his shoulder. "Alright baby. You got me. I won't die. Ever."

He runs his fingers through your hair and you wonder if the repetitive motion is to soothe him or you. "That's my girl," he murmurs against your neck as he nuzzles up against you.

"That's my girl," he repeats again, "My one, my only."

[theradicalscrivener]

I'm gonna get new ears installed.

It's getting close to 5 am and I can't sleep yet. Part of it is because I just finished work, but part of it is because I'm... Excited? ... Anxious? I'm both happy and sad and a little hopeful but also very fearful.

So, for those not in the know. I'm deaf and have been my whole life. It's not one of those things like I can't hear anything. But a lot of frequencies and sound ranges just don't work well for me. I tried wearing heading aids when I was a kid, but they made things worse. All they did was amplify everything. That made it harder to hear the pieces I had to struggle to hear since it was getting further buried under even more background noise.

For example, if you've ever been to a movie where the sound mixing was off. The dialogue is incomprehensible because the ambient noise is so frickin loud. If you try to turn the volume up, all you hear is more jets and explosions.

Anyway, I've had some issues in class where some professors are very hard to understand but the college wouldn't help me until I had a current diagnosis from an audiologist saying that yeah. I really am just that deaf. In the process of seeing the audiologist though, she was telling me that they have new stuff that can work for people like me. Unlike old hearing aids that amplify all sound, these things have like adaptive sound controls and can amplify specific frequencies on the fly. So in theory it will bring my hearing to similar levels as other people's.

The thing costs $10k... I have decent insurance which drops it down to $6k but it's still a massive expense. I'm going to do it though.

I'm both excited and anxious. If the audiologist is to be believed, I spend a lot of my energy on listening to people speak, then replay it back in my head and soft through the possible similar sounding words and recreate the sentences on my head.

I've always said I do this. I jokingly refer to it as "buffering" because I'm running on a few second delay in conversation. Like imagine those interviews on the news where there's this awkward pause of four to five seconds where the signal gets sent across the world from the asker to the answerer before the other person can respond to it. The doc says this is probably the source of a lot of my frequent migraines and exhaustion and is exacerbating my tinnitus. Basically I'm in like hyper vigilant mode 24/7 constantly trying to pick out the faintest sounds so I can be functional in normal life leading to constant mental fatigue.

Anyway. I don't know how long it will take to actually get the device, and once I get it, the doc said it'll take a while to get adjusted. They're not just going to throw me into the deep end and let me figure it out. The plan is to slowly increase the deadened frequencies until they balance out with the others.

I don't know what this will actually do for me. I've never been able to hear normally so I don't know what it will feel like. I don't know if I will ever get to a normal hearing level. I wonder if this will make it easier out in public. I get overwhelmed in busy places since there are so many sounds which makes it impossible to hear the things I want.

I'm worried that I'll spend all this money and it won't improve anything.

I'm worried that I will get these and it will be everything I wanted.

How long has this tech existed? Could I have had this years ago? How much have I missed by not being able to understand people talking to me.

If I get this will it make a noticable difference in the migraines? In the chronic fatigue? I don't know. I want to be optimistic, but it's hard to even know what to expect.

Anyway. If you want a bit of a glimpse into what it's like being me, give this a listen

[x-v4mp3y3lin3r-x]

I honestly do like helping to educate people who just genuinely don't understand Hurricanes, prep, or evacuating. The problem is that we have these roundabout conversations year after year after year and it just never seems to stick. Evacuating can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. Cheap hotels fill up quick and even "cheap" hotels these days are $150+ a night. God forbid you own pets, expect to pay another $100+ deposit or fee.

When you're one of 10 million people trying to funnel through 3 interstates, it can take literal days just to get out of the state. Think about a 3 hour drive becoming a 10 hour long wait in bumper to bumper traffic.

And besides, what's the point of leaving if you know you're gonna come home to a destroyed house anyways? Then you've wasted hundreds of dollars and you have to hope that the government and your insurance will cover the cost of your repairs, otherwise you're gonna be out several more thousands of dollars.

It's just not as simple as leaving, that's my point. And it's not as simple as just going to a shelter, either, because shelters flood! They get destroyed, too! Not to mention that there's just not enough shelters for all of us. I see people say that shelters should only be for the homeless, and that's just ignorant. Counties will evacuate mobile homes only, sometimes, and those people need somewhere to go. People who have to flee their flooded, destroyed houses DURING the storm need somewhere to go, too. You can't plan for a tree to fall on your house (something that happened to our neighbors during Irma, they had to have others illegally break curfew to come pick them up)

And what about nursing homes, hospitals, prisons? People who can't be moved, or who the government refuses to move, who don't have the mobility to save themselves when the waters start rising? People on life support can't "just leave". Prisoners trapped in cages while the guards save themselves can't "just leave".

Not to mention something I'm hearing people up north in Appalachia: The storm path shifted! That's normal, it happens, but it means that people who do evacuate, who happen to evacuate to the "wrong" area, could easily end up right back in the path of a shifting storm. My mom used to say that I was a baby who could sleep through a hurricane, because back in 2005 my family tried to evacuate and ended up having to shelter in a hotel because the storm path shifted. Sometimes you just get fucked! Sometimes you spend hundreds of dollars evacuating and end up in a place where it's too damn late to evacuate again!

These are only some considerations. There's a thousand other reasons someone may end up in the storm. If you listen to interviews from Katrina survivors, some people say they stayed to hunker down with their parents or grandparents who wouldn't leave. Some people's jobs call them in until the very last minute, sometimes their jobs even force them to shelter at work, on the clock.

People have millions of reasons to do what they do, and none of them ever deserve to die for it. Whether they didn't get the evacuation order until too late, or whether they chose to ignore it, they don't deserve to die.

[poptimus-prime]

Flash Commissions: Medical Bill Edition

Hello all!

So, in February, I had to go to the ER for a serious acute illness (I'm healed, don't worry!)

My insurance denied covering the bill for a test, despite telling me they would cover EVERYTHING for this ER visit, leaving me on the hook for almost 900 dollars.

We love the American healthcare system.

Anyways, this means I am opening up some fast, cheap commissions earlier than expected because while I will try to fight my insurance, I don't have this kind of money, and I can't just. Decide to not pay the bill because I do not want that to go to collections.

Anyways! If you can't commission me (because we're all going through it, I know,) reblogging so more people can see this is enough.

All inquiries can be taken through my DMs on this account. I have samples to give directly upon request, but this blog has a lot of art and writing samples. All payments are taken through my Ko-Fi over here. I will expect full payment upfront for these, but I am willing to negotiate.

See below the cut for pricing and other information, such as fandoms, the wills and won't, and disclaimers.

These commissions at these prices will be open until I have enough to comfortably pay my medical bill, and then may stay open depending on what happens in the future.

Thank you

Daphnis

Visual Art (Limited due to time/energy constraints)

Digital icon (simplified designs where applicable with lineart, color, and shading): $15 USD per icon, $12 per icon if you buy 2 or more.

Digital sketches (simplified designs where applicable with flat color):

Bust: $10 USD

Half body: $15 USD

Full body: $20 USD

Additional character fees apply and will be 50% of the base cost per character, rounded down to the nearest dollar if necessary.

Writing

A flat rate of $10 USD per 1000 words up to 5000 words, and then $8 USD for each additional 1000 words.

Fandoms I feel comfortable drawing and/or writing in:

Transformers (I will draw for any continuity; check my pinned post for continuities I can currently write)

Sonic the Hedgehog (both games and live-action movies)

MLP: FiM (Writing up to the Season 5 finale, but will draw for anything in the series.)

Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu (Writing only up to before Rebooted, but drawing for anything in the series)

Will do:

Mild gore (robot or organic; bleeding and flesh wounds)

OCs or Self-Inserts (with proper references for art and sufficient character bios for writing)

Self-ship, Canon x OC, OC x OC, and Canon x Canon (with stipulations that it's not. A minor and an adult, or a ship that otherwise squicks me. Inquire in DMs.)

Furries

Humans

Mecha

Will not do:

NSFW

Offensive/hateful content

Excessive gore (exposed organs, bones, etc., Broken limbs. Stuff like that.)

DISCLAIMER: I reserve the right to reject any commission for any reason. I will not take your money if I think I will end up changing my mind about doing it or have too many commissions in the queue. In the case of the latter, I may start a waitlist.

[kabillieu]

This is the best bathroom selfie mirror I have ever encountered. It's in a coffee shop in Cloverdale, Montgomery where Dominic and I lived in 2017/2018. I met Dominic for lunch at the meat and three across the street, and then my plan was to work at this cafe for a while before going to Costco to pick up my big kid's new glasses, but I forgot my notebook with my entire semester's worth of work and due dates, so it was kind of a bust, but I did drink a nice cup of iced coffee and do some quality people watching. At one point, a big group of young men walked by me all at once. They walked from behind me and then turned right in front of me to go down some stairs. Nearly every last one of them looked at me, which I found hilarious because with my long blonde hair, I probably looked much younger from the back. And then they all saw my face lol.

In your 40s you suddenly start looking a lot older, and that is beginning to happen to me, and it hurts my feelings a little, but everybody gets old--if they're lucky--and I'm lucky to be the age I am, and I appreciate it.

After the cafe, I went to Costco, which is my number one place to black out from sensory overwhelm and then wake up on the other side feeling thirsty and overstimulated. This is why Dominic is our Costco person and not me. But I needed to pick up my kid's glasses, and I needed to order new glasses for myself.

My number one fatal flaw is that because I have great vision insurance coverage, I don't ever consider cost. This enables me to panic when it comes to picking out frames and then I let my indecision insanity take over. This means I usually pick out two pairs of frames because I can't choose between them, and then despite my excellent coverage I spend way more money than I really need to. Also, I own at least five pairs of perfectly good glasses, but I really only wear two of them, and they are both four years old. That means I haven't worn any of the glasses I've bought since 2020. They're all either too uncomfortable (by which I mean too heavy, my prescription is intense), or with one pair I just don't like how they look (why did I buy them? Indecision insanity.)

So, anyway I just spent a million dollars on glasses in Costco, yet again, only to probably continue wearing the purple wire frame glasses in this photo until the end of time or they finally break.

[dollsonmain]

Ok, Son's at school. I didn't realize they're getting out early on Thursday instead of on Friday, so I have a lot less alone time before another long holiday break than I thought.

Ugh. I do honestly like spending time with my Son, but not the noise videos he likes. They hurt. He's good about understanding when I can't take it anymore, though, and will either go in another room or is comfortable with me going down to the basement for a while.

I think maybe we'll listen to some of those records that I found unbearable together over the holiday. I think Son might like those, and while I don't like them, it doesn't mean he's not allowed to.

Still need to get a record cleaning kit.

-

That Guy is pushing both Son and me to get jobs somewhere in town without cars. I'm like, how we get to work????

He usually yells at me that I'm making excuses, then yesterday in the car yelled that he'd drive us, and had already said that.

He never said that.

He said he'd get Son a car once Son got his license, and then Son could take himself to work, and every time I mention how would I get to work he's said I'm making excuses and also said that I'd get the job first and then we'd figure out transportation which is illogical.

Not once did he say he intended to personally drive us to work, at least not until yesterday.

I don't think he means that anyway.

How's he going to do that? He leaves for work at 5 am, and if I don't start until like 9am to 6pm because I'd have to work full time to qualify for insurance which is what this is all about, I mean, I'm not sitting around my workplace for an extra 4-5 hours before my shift especially if I happen to find an office job and the office is closed until work time. That's just not possible in the winter.

Then he has to be home in time to drive Son to work after school but if he's not getting to work himself until 9 or 10 am because he has to drive me, then he's not getting home until 7 or 8 because it's a long commute (1 hr 15 minutes one way) to HIS work, and Son's work would probably be something like 5 to 10pm because he is a teenager in school.

Then he'd be having to go pick me up around 6 pm, and Son at maybe 10pm. They'd get home around 11.

The only other option is that I manage to stumble upon some legitimate work-from-home (I'd rather work outside and interact with people; I've been trapped in this house and isolated for 16 years) or work overnights, but he's vetoed the idea of me working nights because he doesn't want to sleep alone.

Depending on where Son and I would be working we might be able to manage our schedules such that Son goes to work right after school (5pm or so start time, gives him time to come home, shower, get dressed, and leave again) and then I start work when Son's shift is ending so that That Guy makes one trip to town to drop Son off at work, another to pick up Son and drop me off and that would be roughly 9:30 pm to 10:30 pm if we happen to work in the same place or at least nearby each other. He'd get home and get to bed around 11. Then That Guy has to come and get me at 7am which is right after Son gets on the bus (meaning That Guy would have to get up with Son in the morning to make sure he got on the bus because I wouldn't be there), bring me home, and then he might be leaving for work around 8:30 am assuming he did his morning get-ready before leaving to get me. Gets to work at 9:30, works the full shift so off work at 6:30 pm, then gets home at 7:30, though more like 8:30 or even 9 due to rush hour traffic out of the DC Metro area and at that point Son's missed most of his work shift...

It's the same as the insurance thing. He demands it happens then gets in the way of it happening and blames others for it not happening.

What he needs to do to make this work the way he wants it to is get at least one more car that son and I could share or for us to move somewhere the two of us can walk to work.

Either way, it's going to cost him money to not have to spend his money on us and he's short circuiting trying to figure out how to make this all work without him spending any money.

[largesunglasses]

Surviving not thriving is the name of the game over here. I think my dad's in a better mental space about the work thing. He either passed out or fell out of bed the other night. Thank God my parents throw the decorative pillows off the bed at night and it was in front of his bureau and that's where his head landed or he probably would have had an open wound. He didn't remember it the next day. I heard the loud thud at 2 am and bolted in. My mom ended up cancelling her dermatologist appointment because she thought they had no insurance but they have it until December 4th and now she can't get another appointment until June and she's supposed to go every 3-6 months because of skin cancer. I almost passed out the other night when I got up to go to the bathroom but was able to grab on to my door frame and fall to the side of my bed. I did give myself the first full rest day no work no walk since probably August when I had the vid. Anyways that was just a big long whiny complaining rant about nothing that I just had to get out.

And my weekly annoying accountability post

[cottoncandysecretlair]

I remember when I was a kid, this is around when I was 8-10 years old, my parents would ban me from eating the things I liked because they thought that would make me eat less, and ultimately make me skinny.

But that kept backfiring. I was a kid that, with a few exceptions, just really liked food. Green veggies weren't an issue, asparagus and green beans were outright treats for me. I adored fruit and would reach for it before candy and sweets.

So like, they just kept paring down my "permitted" meals to be less and less appealing. "You can't have bread on your sandwiches anymore, use these healthy wraps with veggies" and I would fall in love with the spinach and sundried tomato flavored wraps.

"No mayo or mustard, you can use oil and vinegar" and I proceeded to do that happily because I liked the sour taste of vinegar.

"You can only use one thin sliced piece of meat, the rest has to be veggies" and I had no problem making my wrap essentially a salad wrap with a little vinegar and the meat permitted to me.

"No more meat. No more oil and vinegar. You can only put beansprouts and a spoon of hummus in your wraps." I think they were sure I would hate hummus, but I actually ended up loving it. I wasn't huge on the beansprouts, but I still had hummus and the wrap I liked, and I didn't dislike them any more than cabbage.

After that didn't work, they made the size of wrap I was allowed to bring smaller and smaller and smaller. I remember looking at other kids during lunch, with my quarter of a beansprout wrap and little bottle of water, while my peers ate full lunches. I wasn't allowed to bring a piece of fruit, too much sugar.

Just the way it weighs on you sitting there, eating barely anything, knowing I wouldn't get a snack after school like my peers did, that this is all I had to eat til dinner, when my parents would serve me a plate that matches the amount of food I gave preschoolers for lunch when I worked with kids... And being able to see that I'm the fat kid, I'm bigger than anyone else here... But I'm also the kid that had never had a little Debbie cake, that never had snacks, never allowed to drink anything but water. And I felt like my parents must be right. I mean, I was always hungry! Clearly that means I was a fat pig and this was for my own good!

It wasn't long after that they told me that eating lunch at all was bad for me, that I'm already too big so I should just skip it.

I couldn't get away from how different I was from everyone else. I remember getting to hang out at a friend's house and the ordered food, and they asked my (8 y/o) friend what they'd like to get from the restaurant. That was shocking enough, but then they asked *me.* My father didn't start allowing me to pick my own meals til I was 16 years old, and even then if I didn't pick something he approved of he would still pick for me anyway.

They never took me to the doctor over this. To find out why I was the fat kid despite obediently under eating. They waited until I was 14 and started yelling at me to get it checked out. They would never tell me insurance info so I could find someone to go to though. I was clearly "adult enough" by then so I guess I was supposed to just know what to do and who to call by then.

I guess that's a lie, that I obediently underate. I did but mostly because that's the only option I had. I felt like it was my fault I hadn't made any progress? Why? Because when the church they sent me to had a pizza party, I ate so much so fast that I vomited. And then I went back out to eat more because these chances were rare. I didn't know that this was normal behavior for a kid being treated like I was, once again I thought it justified my parents, that I was a fat uncontrollable cow unless they intervened.

Every time I was in an environment where I was offered food, I overate to the point of making myself sick. Of course, no one worried or thought it was weird. I mean. I was the fat kid right? Of course I had no self control.

If I'm honest, I believed them totally and completely until an experience I had when I was 15. I got into a free academic summer program where I got to stay on a local college campus during the summer with other kids my age.

The meals were all buffet style, all you can eat, and I wouldn't even see my parents for weeks. On top of that, it was very active with a lot of walking, so I'd be using more energy too.

So I ate a lot. I made myself sick the first night, like I usually do. But despite that, there was just as much breakfast the next morning. And just as much lunch. And just as much dinner.

I still had to fight off my shame. Even when I calmed down and stopped making myself sick, and ate only til I was full, it was double if not 3x what my parents would permit me to eat. I felt disgusting every meal, but that primal part of my brain that knew it wouldn't last still pushed me to eat my fill.

At the end of that summer, for the first time in my life, despite being left fully to my own devices with no guidance on my eating habits, I'd lost weight.

And that's when it dawned on me. Years and years of feeling constantly hungry. Constantly exhausted. Using the energy I had to get good grades at school then crashing afterwards. Wondering why I never felt good. And then all of that going away within a week of being away from them and eating what I wanted.

That started to open my eyes to the fact that they'd been wrong. That what they'd been telling me to do wasn't good for my body.

It feels terrible to say, but after that I started stealing money from my father. He kept a lot of cash on him, would just have 800 bucks in his pocket. So I'd slip a 10 or 20 here and there. I'd skip class and walk down to the dollar store, stock up on shelf stable foods, then hide them in my room at home.

I'm not pretending that saltines, peanut butter, and canned ravioli were good things to be so prominent in my diet, but I did feel so much better once I started doing that.

It's silly to make this post. I saw something on twitter where people were being weird about kids asking for food, and I kinda went on a journey.

I've never really met anyone who's upbringing around food was like mine. That's a good thing, it's an awful thing to do to a kid.

But it does feel very lonely.

[fbfh]

OOOOOH BOY chat we are COOKED!!!!! my insurance is being a little fuckin bitch about covering my adhd meds so I'm out and I have to self medicate with caffeine so espresso!op is back!!!! /lh

anyway almost done with season 3 of young royals and I'm thinking about August falling SO hard and fast for adhd!reader. you are the only person at hillerska who sees through his bullshit and calls him out on it and he HATES it and he can't fucking stay away from you. after you've been together for a while (people still marvel at how weirdly good you are for each other) you seem a little off, and finally fess up to him that there's a shortage of your adhd meds bc assholes keep abusing them or faking adhd to get it as a study drug (you are unaware that august is one of said assholes) so of COURSE he plays it off like "omg how could someone do that!!! that's just awful!!!!"

so despite his historical patterns of self centered douchey behavior and decisions he actually DOES care about you. there's this tiny little redeeming part within him that wants to be good. like lilo and stitch. dating august is like lilo and stitch and I will not elaborate further. anyway he genuinely does his best to help you out until your meds are filled again. he helps you with chores and laundry and stuff (calls in a cleaning service) makes sure you have grab and go meals (orders you a meal prep service and catering from your favorite restaurants) and helps you find your stuff (follows you around and keeps your keys wallet and phone on a shelf high enough for you to not reach that way you don't misplace them again). he listens to you ramble when you're feeling hyperactive and chatty, he lets you lay on his lap and watch bits of dust float through the air for hours on end when you're feeling inattentive. if you need to stim he'll take you to some indoor gymnastics trampoline park thing and let you go nuts, and if you use caffeine to self medicate when you're off your meds by GOD he will have espresso and energy drinks on tap for you. he won't mind when you wake him up at night because you can't sleep or keep moving around because you can't get comfy, he'll make sure you get where you need to go on time and act as your personal human planner. even if he needs to pick you up and carry you (which he will if necessary), he won't let you start stressing out about forgetting stuff. if you feel bad about it at all, if you feel like you're asking too much of him or being a burden, he will shut that shit down so fast. it's hard work, but he wants to do this, he wants to take care of you. he still won't tell you that he had a faking adhd for meds phase, but after seeing what you go through, he vows never to take prescription stimulants again. he'll make sure no one else in his circle does either - except vincent, who's actually diagnosed and has to regularly remind August that he is in fact supposed to be taking adderall whenever it comes up. August has so much more respect for you and for neurodivergent people in general after that. he didn't think karma really existed before, but he sure as fuck does now, and he might think a little more about tempting her by doing something douchey next time. even if he doesn't, he has you to keep him in line.

[dangerpronebuddie]

I'm so sick of feeling like this.

Just need to rant for a moment because I am so frustrated with myself.

A couple years back, I started having a constant pain in my knee. I went to the doc and he recommended physical therapy. My PT discovered my hips were really misaligned. Like how the fuck are you walking misaligned. She set them back into place (which hurt like a bitch) but then a back pain set in and whenever I walked more than like, a hundred yards, I'd get this sharp pain down the outside of my shin and into my foot (and now the pain in the foot is a constant. It's never not there anymore). But the pain in my leg would never happen during a PT session, so she couldn't figure out what to do for it. When did it actually do it during one? Ten minutes before my final appointment ended. I couldn't keep going bc my insurance wouldn't pay it. But while I was there, she had me see their spinal specialist. She had to reset my hips again, and gave me different exercises to do. Whenever I did them, a new pain would show up. It was frustrating as hell and we all kinda gave up after that. I didn't bother going back to the doc to try and get the insurance to give me more appointments because it wouldn't have done anything.

For the past two-ish years since then, I've been putting up with chronic pain in my back/hips and that stabbing pain in my lower leg. But it's fine, I can usually manage most days.

My family, more often than not, just tell me to push through when it gets really bad. I know they hurt too, they have their own issues, but it really sucks because it makes me feel like they don't believe I hurt as bad as I do.

Anyway. There's only been a few times the pain brought me to tears. It's usually that sharp pain in my leg that does it (pretty sure it's a pinched nerve pero... ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯. I stand still (or on a few memorable occasions fall over) and wait it out and then get about my business, cause what other option is there? Today though? Today was the worst I have felt in a long time.

I was cooking with my mom- something I love to do- but I've noticed lately I find it less and less enjoyable. For some stupid reason it took until today to figure out the pain is why. But anyway. My back really started to ache, but I pushed through. Mom was really hurting too (we think she and I have the same issue- whatever it is), so I just worked through it. I didn't want to leave her to finish all the work by herself. Things were fine, it was honestly a pretty average pain day. But I got up to do the dishes after we ate and a pain in the left side of my back had me sobbing. I couldn't- and still can't- stand upright. I had to have help to get to a chair. The back massager I use when it gets really bad only made it feel like pins and needles. I'm lying in bed afraid to move because the slightest wrong move will have me in tears again.

But the pain isn't what bothers me the most.

I feel useless. I'm so frustrated at the fact I don't know what's going on, let alone how to stop it. I don't know what makes it worse, what makes it better, nada. I have so little energy, some days I don't even want to leave my chair/ bed. I can't go back to the doc for it right now (which is a whole other issue in itself), so I'm left trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me. And coming up empty. I hate feeling like this. I hate bending over and constantly worrying if I'll be able to stand back up. I hate walking and having to stop just to let the pain subside. I hate this. I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.

[rjalker]

February 12th 2023: don't donate until this part is removed! someone stole my fucking wallet.

I'm making this my pinned post because I am tired of suffering.

Here's the link to my actual About post. Read it if you're going to follow me, it has my DNI as well as tags I use for things so you can blacklist them if you want/need to.

====

Hi I'm fucking too disabled to work but have to get a fucking lawyer to get fucking disability SSI from the stupid fucking government because it's literally designed to make people give up before they get their gods damned money.

I literally don't even eat even a single meal each day.

I'm also trans and would like to fucking medically transition someday but at this point I've just fucking give up that hope because I will literally never be able to afford it unless capitalism gets smashed tomorrow. in which case none of this matters, but that's not going to happen because that's not how revolution works so fucking anyways

also we're out of ibuprophen and I have fucking menstrual cramps right and yeah I should probably get fucking tested for endomitroiosis or whatever the fuck it's called but you know what else I don't have? Health insurance. Because I'm too disabled to work, and even if I could work literlaly no one will give me a full time job that wouldn't literaly just end up killing me.

====

Here's the gofundme link.

My paypal, venmo, and cashapp are all "Rjalker".

Here's the link to my redbubble store if you'd rather buy something.

You can also tip me through tumblr.

====

I have the Redbubble prices set so that when you buy a product I actually get a decent cut instead of $2 max. If you buy a pin, for example, I get $9.

My paypal icon is the same flower design as my tumblr icon. I don't think cashapp and venmo have icons but if they do I'll make sure they're the same too.

Check out and request more pronoun pins on my sideblog @custom-pronoun-pins

This post is being made November 30th 2022 but unless they suddenly invent No Longer Disabled pills it's just not going to have a fucking "this is no longer relevant" date because this shit isn't going to get better.

Here's what your money will be going towards if you donate:

rent, $500 a month for my half

phone bill, $35 a month

water bill, around $35 a month

internet bill , $45 a month

cat food, cat litter, and vet visits

groceries

clothes

fixing the washer or just buying a new one

fixing the dryer or just buying a new one

all the fantasy and scifi books I'm going to write that I will literally be giving away for free because if it's not clear enough yet I fucking hate capitalism. You will be able to download the books for free endlessly and the only time you'll have to pay money is for the cost of the materials to make the physical book.

we literally have not had a functional washer or dryer for the last like five fucking years in a row. All our clothes have to be washed in the fucking tub and then hung up in front of a fan to dry, or put in the fucking pop-up air dryer we found that takes for fucking ever and can't hold more than a few things before it stops working almost entirely.

I'm making this my pinned post because I'm tired of suffering. I'll fucking put the other one back when capitalism ends or I get the fucking disability SSI I literally would have been getting from birth except for the fucking idiot in the government who decided to fucking remove us from the fucking disability list when we turned eighteen when they took us off the fucking survivor's benefits of our fucking dad dying.

No I am not fucking joking. My twin and I were literally born four months early. We were literally guaranteed disability SSI from the moment we were born because of all the shit that went wrong and the fact that both of us were blatantly fucking autistic and had dyslexia and all this other shit.

And some fucking government worker fucked up when we turned eighteen and not only took us off the fucking survivor's benefits SSI, which overrode the disability SSI, but also fucking took us off the list for the disabled SSI.

Literally assigned abled at eighteen.

And I still haven't even fucking been diagnosed with anything for my physical disability because again! No health insurance! Because I can't work! Because I'm disabled! And since I can't work I can't get my disability diagnosed! Which means I can't get accommodations! It's literally a fucking endless cycle that will only stop if I or capitalism die!!!

======

Update 12/11/22: The water bill for November has been paid! Thank you!

[doodlemunster]

You can't just leave me hanging with "great stories"! Would you kindly share your some stories from your Escape Room days that were the:

1. Craziest

2. Silliest

3. Wtf-iest (moment that made you go wtf/question humanity)

LMAO oh I am more than happy to tell them!! Strap in, cuz I def have a few!

Some of these stories kind of fall into all three categories and mixtures of both, but I'm gonna do my best!

Craziest

would have to be a story that I tell almost every time someone asks me about my time as a game guide cuz it THREW me for a loop.

Okay so, my workplace would offer group deals for companies looking to do 'team building exercises'. We have four themed rooms, so all four would be blocked off for their entire company to split up into. This was absolute chaos cuz our place was s m a l l and every time these events happened, it was damn near elbow to elbow.

Anyways, we had an insurance company come in to do the rooms and I was tasked with guiding them through our basketball themed room. This room had two hidden rooms separated by doors you had to solve and unlock. Each one even had its own TV too.

My team comprised of all women and they were pretty quiet, so I had to give them some extra nudges, but otherwise they did well and at the end, really got into the spirit of things! Sadly tho, they didn't break out so I went in to show them how and boy howdy, this is when things get interesting.

One puzzle you have to complete is this brochure with a cross word puzzle. Many people think you have to use this brochure for the entire game, but that's not true. It's a one and done thing. However, these ladies were CONVINCED it was crucial. Anyways, they handed it off to me and this piece of paper is SOAKED. Like, real soggy and its ripping apart. I'm confused because this is the worst state I've ever seen one of our brochures in. Didn't question it, continued to show them everything and ask if they had a good time.

As I'm ushering them up to the front, one lady approaches me and tells me that she panicked in one of the rooms. See, this room is about the 'rules of basketball' and that someone is running in to steal it and you have to find them before this mysterious thief gets it, so the TVs will periodically do emergency broadcasting beeps and have a panicked basketball player telling you you are their only hope. It DOES indeed get people panicked and makes kids cry at times.

So, she continues to tell me she believed the brochure was the actual Rules of Basketball and needed to hide it where no one could find it. At first, the way she worded it, I didn't quite get it till the whole group was done and gone. MY DUDES, SHE STUFFED THE BROCHURE IN HER PANTS.

She was sweating and this brochure had been stuffed next to her cheeks. As with all rooms, we game guides sit in the back watching and hearing the group to give them clues. I watched these people like a hawk, but she sneaked that brochure down her pants with EASE. So, in conclusion, I had a sweaty ripped brochure covered in booty sweat.

Silliest

I got two stories for this category as they are simply silly and light hearted.

The first one is a big family that also did the basketball room. One of these family members is this little girl, who couldn't be much older then like, 5. The adults were in a tizzy trying to figure out the answer to this puzzle, which was a number combo. It's loud and a lot of members are talking over each other, until I hear this little girl just spit out the answer but NO ONE heard her.

In these rooms, there is a small TV up above where I send clues and when I send one, it'll be beep. So I immediately sent them a message 'the little girl just said it! she said the answer!'. The family reads the clue and immediately, ALL the attention is on this little girl. All the adults are like 'What is it? What did you say??' and the girl is NOT prepared for this attention. She's giggling, smiling shyly and saying 'I don't know! I can't remember!' and the adults are scrambling to figure it out.

So, because the whole family was already SO close to breaking out and technically a member of their party DID say the right answer, I repeated what the little girl said to the group and they got the puzzle. It was really funny and a great time.

What running these rooms have taught me is that kids are VERY good at these escape rooms. They can by pass the bullshit and get to the actual puzzles/answers. They just need an adult to keep them focused, that's their only downside. I had SO many kids blurt out what they think the puzzle is and have adults straight up ignore them. So, I'd take the extra step and tell the adults to listen to their kids.

The second silly story is about a group of four who came to do our Y2K inspired room. This room theme was about how you are stuck at a New Years Eve party and its just about to be the year 2000, but its up to YOU to stop the computers from crashing and the world ending. I liked this one cuz you could listen to early 2000's music while the room ran. I always knew I had 3 minutes remaining in the room once Mambo Number 5 played.

Long story short, this group was struggling with a puzzle and one of them suggested to google the answer. Not sure how they would do that, but regardless, I was about to send them a message to NOT do that.

My worry was totally unwarranted, as another from their team blurted out 'You can't do that!! It's the year 2000, phones don't EXIST YET'. Which had both me and the rest of the group cracking up.

WTF Moments

as much as I loved being a game guide, I did experience a lot of fuckery in the rooms.

There is a reason most of the stuff in escape rooms are bolted down. People WILL try to destroy the room. Usually not intentionally, but some shit heads will try to on purpose, even AFTER you tell them to stop. So, sadly I do have quite a few stories.

I had a group of women come in to do our Civil War themed escape room. This room was all dark except for the lanterns you would use to pick them up and see around the room.

I had one lady yank on the portraits on the walls which I told her they do NOT come off. I told her once, she ignored it and continued. I had told her a second time and she STILL didn't heed it and RIPPED the fucker off the wall. This thing was ANCHORED INTO CONCRETE. I don't know how she did it.

Our cameras weren't the best so through the dark, the talking and everything else, I don't think I knew she did this till I came into the room to find the picture on the ground.

In the hidden room there was a pipe that is attached to the wall but is pretty fragile. This same lady kept grabbing it and pulling it at it, in which I had to tell her multiple times to STOP. She finally did after goading from both me and her team mates (her team mates especially because they were catching on that I was only sending them messages about her messing up the room). I was about to kick them out, but thank god she finally stopped.

Another group, two women, got mad at me for penalizing them for being super tardy (this isn't some unspoken rule, its a common rule at most escape rooms and is both posted on our website AND in the lobby). So, they picked every lock open in the Y2K room, messed up the flow of the puzzles, and in turn, didn't break out (womp womp).

Another group of two, a wife and a husband, did our Y2K room as an anniversary activity. The wife was nothing but smiles and was super excited to play. Her demeanor and attitude did a total 180 once the room started.

The husband got to looking at the walls, the decor, the drawers, etc. and was speaking out loud "hey, i think this might be a clue" "hey, I think this might be a puzzle", so on and so forth. She never really replied to these questions, instead ignored him and looked elsewhere. He then began solving these puzzles on his own and opening things up, which sent her into a TIZZY.

All of a sudden, she is getting pissed. "You've done this before haven't you?" "well how did you get that so fast? you done this before!" just over and over. He continued to deny it and would calmly say 'no, I haven't. I just found this and figured it was a puzzle'.

He gets to the secret room all on his own and now she is SUPER mad. Convinced he did this on his own, she sits herself down on a chair and exclaims 'Well, since you've clearly done this room before, I'll just sit here till your done' and crosses her arms.

Well, this is real fuckin awkward and I have....no idea what to say. I had tried to send freebies, but it didn't seem to help ease the tension nor make her any less pissed.

Toward the end, she did sort of try to help, but it was more like angrily stomping from place to place. At one point, she retorts 'I didn't think you would get it. You usually aren't this smart'.

which gob smacked the hell out of me. Holy jesus. This woman was terrible. I was reeeaaally not looking forward to coming into that room to ask them how things went, but ya know, its part of the job.

That's when her demeanor changed AGAIN. I opened up the door and said 'Oooh I'm sorry you guys didn't make it! Did you have fun tho?' and this woman turned to me, beaming and cheerfully saying 'omg yes it was so much fun! Were we close?' and while I was thankful it wasn't horribly awkward, it had me so incredibly confused. The poor guy was quiet but still very kind with me, but I just felt awful for him. If she was like this in an escape room, how was she like behind closed doors at home??

We also had some racist asshats come into our rooms and we had to kick them out and ban them from ever playing again. I wasn't there when this happened, so I don't have the full deets, but like damn dude.

Honorable Mentions and Other Tidbits

I had a group from Australia come in and give me a little nudge nudge, wink wink to tell me their 'coffee' was definitely not coffee. They were awesome.

I had a group forget my name, so they just called me God to ask for clues

On one of my first couple days of work, I looked away from my group for only a few minutes before discovering they had unscrewed and taken the vent cover off in my room. I never typed so fast in my life to tell them THERE ARE NO CLUES THERE OMG PLEASE DON'T STICK YOUR HAND IN THERE

I wasn't there for this, but my co-worker told me a story of a couple who played the basketball room, only for them to break up half way in. They sat on opposite ends of a bench in silence till time ran out

I had several instances of people getting VERY mad at me for giving them freebies.

A lot of people weirdly just...straight refused to pay attention to the TV where I gave clues. This was a bigger problem then I thought it would be for some reason.

If I had to give any tips on going to an escape room, It'd be this:

Be nice to your game guide. This should be a given, but you'd be surprised the amount of times people would forget I can see and hear them and say nasty things about me. If you are kind, you can get yourself some freebies in crucial moments or, in some super rare cases, even get some time added to your room. They WANT you to break out and are just as excited as you when you make it!

When a game guide asks if you have questions, def ask some! There is NO such thing as a dumb question. Escape rooms in of themselves are weird and not many people even know what they really /are/ or what the goal is. I know I was more than happy to answer them if asked. You'll feel better and do better if you ask.

Definitely get there at least 10-15 minutes early. Most escape rooms require you to sign a waiver and the guide has to go over all the rules before it starts, so it just makes it easier on them to keep their rooms on time. Like I said, most places have time penalties if you are late and that's simply to make sure the schedule doesn't get messed up. If you are lucky and the escape room place is small, like ours, you could get away with it, but there were times where even /we/ had to put our foot down and enact the policy.

Thank you so much for asking Mysc!! ^o^ So so sorry its a HUGE WALL of text lmaooo I tell stories in text just like I do irl -- long winded and too much context. But I freaking LOVE telling my stories from my game guide days. It was such a hoot.

[jayflrt]

Calling that there was an agreement where Jennie taps Hoon and Sujin taps YN to avoid the whole situation looking nepo baby and WHEN Hoon freaks about it then his brother is just going to frame it as him not trusting him again. The gas light is on people.

Heeseung you fishy little fish. I feel like Hee was probably once a decent guy but surviving in this world is not easy and he has begun to drift away from his previous frame of morality. He doesn’t want to admit to himself that he’s not that much of a decent guy anymore.

Controversial opinion but I feel (based solely on the evidence we have now) like Hoon is actually one of the most morally upright members of that group. His methods are NOT always great and he frequently loses sight of what is important, but my dude generally has pure goals and is not out to wreck people for fun. He is genuinely working for what he has. He is being bullied and manipulated by his family. He is a truly tragic character and fully deserves better. Hoping Yeonjun’s secret twin sister (or something) shows up and teaches him how to love like a human being. He genuinely deserves someone who cares about him. YN did but she was not the right person. Hoon needs a ball buster with a heart of gold. YN had the heart in spades but she didn’t have that pitbull streak that would really be needed to partner with this Hoon.

YN is a genuinely good person and she is strong in so many other ways. Hanging on to her morality and her compassion in that group is not easy feat but she has not bent to considerable pressure (both spoken and unspoken). It makes sense that someone looking to ruin her might need to resort to hiring outside help. Unlike many of the others in her group, she doesn’t have an immediately obvious exploitable weakness. I know she HAS made mistakes before and I fully believe those are going to come back in a big way. The stuff she wrote about Heeseung and the real reason for her fallout from Sunoo…I mean there is obviously something cooking there.

My theories are…that Hoon’s family might have something to do with hiring Jay. They need to secure a connection with YN’s family. It would be smart to have an insurance policy.

But to be more specific… if it is Sujin… Jay is the perfect insurance policy. He just needed Hoon and YN to drift apart, then he takes over the company and uses info from Jay to ensure that YN’s hospitals will be in business with the Hoon family company only if HE is CEO.

I really hope I’m not spelling Sujin’s name wrong. lol. But yeah this series is amazing.

OOH can't wait to see your thoughts on sungjin's motive reveal 🫣🫣 i totally agree with your take on heeseung too !! he's definitely wrapped up in trying to fit in with everyone else when he was once just like jay 🤧 (or, well,, mostly like jay LOL) and hoon def goes about most things the wrong way LMFAO 🤧 but he is genuinely focused on his goals and future !! it's only a matter of time until his family pushes him to a limit tho :(( HAHAH NOT YEONJUNS TWIN SISTER but bro does deserve love 😔 tho i don't think he has the capacity for it rn after how messy it was with mc

hot take i love mc too 🫶🫶 my soft spot for tragic characters and i wrote this story to be teeming with them MUAH and you're so spot on with her because she's got her secrets and hides them WELL 🧎‍♀️ doesn't even let her close friends into her priv because she's actually so reserved for someone who is forced to be a social butterfly

HAHAH *sungjin but you were close and his name only comes up at the top of the screenshot in a handful of chapters anyways !! 😩 and your theories are so intriguing to read 🫣 when we get to the ending im SO looking forward to reading back on these 🥰 also i'm so so glad you like the series 🥹💖 it's always such a joy to read what you have to say !! i hope you're doing well ml and having a great day/night 🫶