This is a compilation DD for you new simps out there trying to become chad GME investors and grow 1/1000th the dick that DeepFuckingValue has. This post will cover the basics of how we got here and answer some of your simmering questions that I see flooding daily discussions.

TLDR: Hold the line and buy the dip give the glorious finger to these greedy corporates. Remember 💎🙌 = 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

GameStop History Lesson:

tldr: GME bumbles about like a senile boomer and dabbles in terrible bets. Turns into undervalued stock with cultural significance, gets picked up by Big Dick Burry and Ryan Chewy Cohen.
GME is a childhood dream that turns any grown man into an autist as soon as he walks into the door. Now due to our Lady Rona (covid), a bunch of past Boomer business decisions (GME fucking bough 507 AT&T stores in 2014, not pivoting into omni-channel, largely misssing the gaming industry explosion, and a CEO who prides himself on brick and morter Advance auto parts, Best Buy, Target, Home depot) GME by and large was shitting the bed as investors thought of this company as neglected mallfront with dwindling clientele.
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In comes Michael big dick Burry
With the stock trading at $3.78/share in August 2019 investers were sure it was finished. But here's where it gets interesting. With big dick energy seemingly out of no where Michael Burry (yes that dude in the Big Short who seems like a fellow autist) buys 2,750,000 shares or 3.05% of GameStock. In his actual letter to the board (yes I dug it up so you can read it as well) he describes the thought process for the purchase bullets below.

• GameStop was trading at an all-time low ($3.78/share) and he believed that it had not leveraged it's "elite potision in the gaming universe" over the last 5 years (keep in mind, it's fucking GameStop a cultural icon large enough to make a grown man weep with fond memories
• Shareholders do not have faith in current managament and have not been inspired by new leadership policies
• At time of writing stocks were more than 60% shorted

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(Taking a break to say, it's not too late the squeeze has not been squoze oblig 💎🙌 = 🚀🚀)
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Ryan mega dick Cohen writes a letter
Then in Nov 16th 2020, Ryan Cohen comes in swinging and tears a new one to the board members of GameStop. For people who don't know who Ryan Cohen is, he stuck the finger to Amazon and built a digital e-commerce site) (wiki link) for fucking dogs and cats into a $3.35 billion entity by 2017. Keep in mind that he submitted a Schedule 13D to purchase 121,644 shares at $6.56 per and 163,030 at $8.63 - that's a 10% stake (yes, I've also dug the original Schedule 13d using google). Now Ryan's letter reads like a solid talking down that might rival the Queen - looking at you TheCrownNetflix, AskUK.
I've included Ryan's letter to the board but will bullet point paraphrase below for you folks still on Yahoo or Ask Jeeves.

• GME has a strong brand across the globe and has 55 million PowerUp members
• GME needs to pivot immediately to a tech structure and it can (lolz, after this letter they immediately brought Ryan and Chewy co onto board)
• Size of the global gaming market has grown more than 2.5x since the last console cycle

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Ryan mega dick Cohen and team join GameStop board
In January 2021 Ryan Cohen, Alan Attal, and Jim Grube join GME's board. Now for those of you in the bread line or living at your wife's mothers house playing DnD with her boyfriend, board changes are big news. These board members have the power to make multiple grown men cry, fire CEOs like it's nothing and change a companies strategy sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.
With Papa Cohen coming onboard and his squad of Chewy troopers, it's likely that we are going to soon see a pimped out GameStop that will make you name your first born "GME". Now I'll let you do your own digging and reading but here's just some of the GME DD on it's future potential (link to DD on some of GME's possible pivots, One DD to rule them all)
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The squeeze has NOT been squoze:

There is still time for you to convince your wife's girlfriend to lend you money to buy GME. The squeeze has not been squoze and likely wont until we see the type of eruption that accompanied belledelphineXmas leaks (yes that sub is NSFW).
Side note on the Squeeze, GME is still massively over shorted at estimates from 130-300% and counting. The important thing to know is that these greedy bastards took multiple short positions on a single stock (naked) and essentially bet that GME was going to go down.
https://financhill.com/most-heavily-shorted-stocks-today (249.67% Shorted)
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But what happened on Thursday/Friday?
Gamma squeeze. Short and simple. Now you can read some other DD about what a gamma squeeze so I wont dive into it too much.
It was not the squeeze. Market makers needed to rush to fill calls that were In The Money. This prompted these market makers to buy up stock in the off chance that they needed to actually sell them to degens who were actually betting that GME would blow it's sweet load at 60 and now at 150 lolz. This pared with the low stock volume on the market makes for high volitility on a per stock basis. Here's some DD links talking about what a Gamma squeeze what we witnessed was that.
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Ok MallCop2020, but when will it Squeeze? (when it does squeeze it may squeeze multiple times)
Thanks to fellow autist u/tsukune_surprise (and no, CNBC I don't even know this person - they could be a robot or even a fucking dog with a cybor implant IDK!) BUT I love their DD for the MOASS (Mother of All Short Squeeze). Short answer is that it could be this week, could be next but it's hard to say when the big banks are using dirty tricks like naked call ladders, actual bail outs lolz. (Fresh DD from another internet stranger on GME EndGame Part 3)

EVERY SINGLE indicator shows massive upward momentum on GME.
GME momentum is going to create a massive upward feedback loop. The combination of options gamma squeeze, available float, and short interest makes it impossible for shorters to escape.
Normally, shorters deep underwater could hedge their losses by buying call options.
But buying call options decreases the float and the only tightens the squeeze. It’s like fighting against quicksand for the shorters.
This GME squeeze is going to be historic because of the compounding effect of options and short interest.
This could be bigger than the VW/Porsche infinity squeeze. But it’s completely different from VW – so don’t draw too many comparisons.

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Okay, I've asked my wife's girlfriend nicely and now have $1k...
Buy fucking shares. No legit, support your random internet brethren (who don't know each other) and buy shares of GameStop. Every share you buy bleeds money from Citron and Melvin.
Here's an explanation from u/robert1032010 a Hedge Fund Manager on the current short position within GME: (A hedge fund managers perspective on GME)

The short positions of this issue appears (although I can't be certain) to exceed 100% with all available shares already lent out from marginal accounts and probably a lot of naked shorting going on as well. Although I don't yet have the current data on todays short position, I can say for certain the stock remains very heavily shorter, perhaps more so now than at any previous time. Today, I called my broker asking about the availability of shares to short and the borrow costs. We have one of the larger accounts at our brokers firm and I was able to speak directly to the "hard to borrow" desk. No borrowable shares are available at any broker, anywhere, at this time, even for high borrow costs or even from other brokers. This extreme short against a small common float, made more extreme no-doubt by naked shorting, could end very poorly for those short this issue. As they are forced to close out their positions, the stock will continue to rise and continue to exacerbate the positive effects the rising price has on the above 4 issues.

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Lastly, this is not financial advice; do your own DD. I'm holding $20k at $100/share and yes, I still fucking believe that the tendieman will come and rain tendies.
Oblig:
💎🙌 = 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

50 Reasons to Quit Porn forever in 2021

1. Have better sex/ understanding of sex.

The biggest lie porn sells is that it’s fantasy world is filled with six positivity. What it doesn’t mention, however, is that the deeper the consumer dives into that fantasy world, the more likely the reality is to become just the opposite.

1. It’s like a drug.

On the surface, cocaine and porn don’t seem to have a lot in common. But more and more studies are coming out showing that consuming pornography tricks your brain into releasing the same pleasure chemicals as other behaviors or even drugs

1. Habits and addictions can escalate

Because of its addictive nature, in order to retain the same level of interest and excitement, an individual usually needs an ever increasing dosage of porn and constantly evolving material. overovertime their appetite escalates to more hard-core versions just to achieve the same level of arousal

1. Improve behavior

sooner or later consumers start to find themselves getting aroused by things that used to disgust them or that go against what they think deep down is right. once they start regularly watching extreme and dangerous sex acts. these porn consumers are being taught that those behaviors are more normal than they actually are

1. Form deeper connections.

The porn industry objectifies people. There’s nothing romantic or realistic about porn, and it seriously puts a disconnect between the consumer and reality. this makes it hard for them to have an intimate connection with a real person

1. Appreciate your body

The make up, surgery, Photoshop, and acting that goes into porn gives us an unrealistic view of the human body and sexuality. we start to subconsciously compare ourselves to what we’re seeing, m causing overthinking and low self-esteem when it comes time to be intimate

1. Appreciate those you’re attracted to

In addition to affecting the way we see ourselves , porn can cause consumers to under appreciate the opposite sex by training them to see others as sexual objects and not as humans with beautiful and unique features.

1. Prevent sexual dysfunctions

Porn 90% of the time leads to less sex and less satisfying sex. for a surprising amount of consumers, porn eventually means no sex at all.but thankfully there hope. the cure is to quit porn and let your brain rewire and return to normal

1. stop supporting sex trafficking.

The facts are clear the clicking porn directly fuels the demand for sex trafficking. there are countless victims of human sex trafficking who are forced to have sex on camera. even in the “legitimate” adult industry, porn performers are frequently victims of violence coercion and drug abuse

1. Porn promotes violence against women

From making actors participate in unsafe sex to the countless real stories of performers speaking out about the rape violence and drugs behind the camera. there is certainly a dark reality to the industry. porn tries to normalize this exploitation.

1. Porn can lead to violent behavior

The majority of mainstream porn is packed full of people, especially women,being physically and verbally abused. watching it takes a serious toll on the consumer. even the non-violent porn portrays a power difference between partners where men are in charge and women are submissive sex objects. learning this behavior can influence your mind significantly

1. Increase your creativity

Porn clogs up your imagination with cheap content that disconnect you from feeling real passion and motivation

1. Live a more honest life

Not every porn consumer lies about their addiction, but 90% feel shamed and obligated to hide it. whether they admit or not, they know that their partner wouldn’t like the idea of them sexually bonding to a computer screen. when you live a lie for long enough, you start to convince yourself of it as well. The more lies you tell, the harder it becomes to tell the truth about anything

1. Free up some time

Porn consumers spend anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours daily consuming these harmful images. If you spent just 10 minutes a day watching porn, that’s over 60 hours at the end of the year you could’ve spent doing something beneficial to your life

1. Find someone special

In porn, everything from the way people look to how and why they have sex is a lie. porn consumers often get so obsessed with chasing something that isn’t real that they miss out on actual relationships

1. Be a better partner

Porn doesn’t just affect you, it affects your partner as well. A great deal of information exist for those suffering from porn addiction, but partners are often left feeling alone with equally real wounds of their own. partners of porn consumers commonly feel betrayed and neglected when their significant other chooses to share their sexuality with a screen instead of them

1. Become a better parent

Children and teens these days are exposed to hard-core porn at a young age. be an educated parent who can inform your kids of the negative impacts of porn

1. Become a better friend

Your porn habit can isolate you from valuable social time with friends, and the shame that comes with watching porn can cause you to be distant at social gatherings

1. Maintain mental/emotional health

Being tied to a consistent porn habit requires you to spend a lot of time alone and can quickly make you uninterested in the every day pleasures of life such as having conversations with real people and being active

1. Take back control

Research shows that one in five people who regularly watch porn admit to feeling controlled by their sexual desires. as a result, many consumers start feeling like somethings wrong with them because they don’t know how to be turned on by a real person. this only leads to watching more porn because it’s the only escape that works

1. Be the author of your own sexuality.

With the exaggerated bodies in rehearsed scenes in porn, consumers can quickly lose perspective on their own natural desires as well as their partners. unplugging from porn will help you become more in tune with what you and your partner went instead of influencing you to reenact what you’ve seen in porn

1. Increase sexual energy

Many people deep in their porn habit can often be too busy venting their sex drive through porn. they’re not going to have much interest in real sexual intimacy with a partner. you may have already experienced a lack of drive for the inability to perform with your partner but by quitting porn you’ll likely reclaim that natural energy

1. Increase overall energy

It’s obvious the porn consumed your time and your sexual tension, do you think about how that doesn’t leave you with energy for much else, ejaculating every day takes away many vital nutrients that your body needs for energy

1. Regain focus

People often watch porn as an escape when they become overwhelmed by the daily decisions of life.quitting porn allows you to assume responsibility and become accountable for your own goals

1. Reclaim self confidence

A belief in yourself is a huge casualty of consistent porn consumption. people who feel they don’t have control over their porn habit often believe they are broken human beings with a damaged capacity to love and feel joy. these negative feelings come from your own negative feelings about porn mixed with your inability to quit or from any of the negative side effects that go with it

1. Protect your marriage/ relationship

Whether you were currently married or one day hope to be, it’s a sure bet that porn is a poisonous ingredient in a marriage or any type of committed relationship. porn will lead to a broken family/relationship

1. Save your money

Porn is a global estimated $97 billion industry with 12 billion of that coming from the United States

1. Maintain your natural sexuality

Porn removes the concept of intimacy and emotional connection from sex. It teaches consumers that sex is about taking selfish pleasure rather than giving love

1. Protect your passions

The more you consume porn, the less desire you might have for the things that previously got you excited .the things you once knew in life as fun now lack the shock factor that porn gives the brain

1. Prevent sexual compulsion/ addiction

Porn can create a constant need for sexual material that needs to be fueled,but is never truly satisfied

1. Don’t bond to a screen

Watching porn triggers the release of oxytocin tricking your brain and essentially bonding you to the experience of sexual release to pixels

1. Prevent anxiety

When consumers feel like they have to be watching porn or can’t stop thinking about it, it creates serious anxiety. not to mention this anxiety can transfer over to the bedroom and contribute some porn induced erectile dysfunction. another form of anxiety occurs when a consumer gives into porn when he says he will never watch porn again, thinking he will never escape

1. Prevent depression

Porn is often used as a self-medicating tool which only leads to feeling worse than before. when you feel bad about giving in to the porn, you go to the only thing that will make you happy again, more porn

1. Live without shame

It’s pretty simple, no porn equals no porn fueled shame . no more secrecy and no more isolation.

1. Increase productivity

A survey done on the no fab community observed that 67% of those who quit had an increase in energy levels as well as productivity

1. Be better at your job

Quitting porn will boost confidence, motivation, and energy which will definitely help you at your job. there are real stories of people being caught watching porn at work.that would be a sad life to live

1. Prevent STDs

Researchers have found that people who have seen a significant amount of porn are more likely to start having sex sooner and with more partners and to engage in riskier kinds of sex, putting them at a greater risk of getting STDs

1. Be proud of yourself

Quitting porn is one of the hardest addictions to break. you can also stand out in the crowd and not be like most men today

1. Better the world

By recognizing that porn is hurting you and others around you, you can spread knowledge to the world about the negative impacts of porn

1. Ditch loneliness

Porn can fulfill feelings of loneliness in exchange for making them worse in the long run. porn promises immediate satisfaction endless excitement, and easy intimacy, but in the end it robs a consumer of all three

1. Avoid normalizing violence.

It’s grown normal for 11-year-olds to be exposed to the most hard-core degrading content imaginable. imagine what that does to their expectations for real life relationships and true intimacy

1. Respect others more

Choosing real love and choosing not to consume porn means that you’re that much better at respecting others and yourself

1. Object to objectification

We fight against porn because people aren’t just the sum of their parts to be used and discarded without a second thought

1. Ditch fake sex

Don’t take sex tips from an industry that profits from fake orgasms

1. Protect children

By avoiding porn you’re avoiding the twisted and unhealthy fetishes of kids and teens and that is a great thing to stand behind

1. Enjoy real, flawed bodies.

Photoshop isn’t something you can have in real life, but that’s a good thing. perfection means predictable and boring, but real flawed human bodies are unique and beautiful

1. Avoid romanticizing unhealthy relationships

Real intimacy is a world of satisfaction and excitement that doesn’t disappear when the screen goes off. it’s the breathtaking risk of being vulnerable with another human being that makes intimacy so amazing

1. Have realistic expectations for sex and relationships

Relationships are hard work. they aren’t always flawless and neither is the sex if it’s involved. It won’t be easy and perfect every single time. love can be messy but that’s the beauty of it. it’s real not synthetic. it’s natural not produced. real love is immeasurably better than porn because real love is exactly that- it’s real

1. Believe in love

Sometimes when porn has clouded a consumers idea of what healthy relationships are and what real love can provide, they start to believe it doesn’t exist. some consumers have started to believe that real healthy love doesn’t exist and that’s not true. love is worth fighting for

1. Choose real love

This is by far the most important reason to quit porn
So what are some ways to quit porn? A great list of things I do are below, but there are more. -Workout -take supplements like zinc, fish oil, l arginine, magnesium. -read -take cold showers -delete social media or only install it when you are around people -run -socialize -rewire with a girlfriend if you have one -Avoid artificial stimulation at all cost. If it’s pixels on a screen and it’s turning you on, avoid it. -stay busy -eat healthy and drink a lot of water - set goals
There are more, but these are some great ones I have been applying recently.

I run a private campground. Now, it seems some of you are frantic after my last post so I’ll just give you an update on that and get it out of the way. The truth is… I hate all my options right now (the dancers were like nope, not our expertise, good luck with that) and am procrastinating acting on them. It’s fine. I’m fine. The fairy said I have time. It’s probably just nerves. I’m trying not to think about it every time I have to cough. So to keep my mind off my current problems, I’m going to talk about something other than the fomorian situation.
Anyway, if you’re new here, you should really start at the beginning and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
Around here, disobeying a rule typically gets you killed. Insulting one of these inhuman things, however, has collateral damage. The extent of it will depend on the severity of the offense and the disposition of the insulted creature. As I’ve talked about before, the fairy’s vengeance is the most devastating and is not limited to the campground’s boundaries. However, none of these creatures are content with a single victim when seeking redress.
None of them.
I’m going to use rule #9 to elaborate on this. I have quite a few options to choose from - including Beau - but from the comments I feel everyone would appreciate learning more about the thing in the dark.
Rule #9 - Keep track of what time the charge on the solar lights typically runs out. If the solars go out before then, do not leave your tent until sunup. Do not open the tent, not even to look. Stay in your tent, try to sleep, and wait for daybreak.
I have no way to know for certain what the offense was. We already know that merely looking at the thing in the dark is cause for it to swallow you whole, doomed to forever wander the tunnels of its body until the heart calls you to your final death. What kind of offense could you give to such a creature that would cause it to seek even greater retaliation?
I wasn’t as strict on disallowing camping near the mound in the past, as people aren’t crammed in so tight as they are at the big event when I put the senior camp there. I figured people would naturally stay away from the foreboding mound of debris and mostly they did. When the thing in the dark arose with fury, I could only assume they camped too close and did something dumb. Maybe shined a spotlight on its face or something.
But after this past year, I think I have a plausible theory.
I bet they used branches from its body as firewood.
It’s in the camp rules to not use wood from around the camp for fires, specifically so they don’t offend something inadvertently and also so our local firewood suppliers get some good business throughout the year. But we’ve all seen how well people follow the rules.
I think this year I’ll spray paint the plants around the mound magenta so people think it's surrounded by poison ivy. Use some other behavioral pressure to get them to follow the rules, since we all should know by now that structural incentives are wildly ineffective.
We saw that when a certain someone (I swear to god you better not be reading these still, I’m angry just at the thought of it) threw holy water at the children with no wagon. He knew the rules and still did something terribly offensive.
There is a priority in which these creatures take their vengeance. The first to die is the offender and those associated with them. The order in which those two groups are targeted depends on the maliciousness of the wronged party. The dancers, for instance, prefer to take the offender last, after they’ve seen the sort of fate that awaits them from watching the demise of their friends.
If this is not enough to sate the creature’s rage - or if their preferred target has luckily left the campground already - then they turn their anger against my staff.
They are representatives of my campground, after all. In a sense that matters only to the creatures here, they belong to me. The campers are my “guests'' and a failure on their part reflects badly on myself. Not enough to warrant my death necessarily - although I’ve personally had some unpleasant encounters in the past because of people doing something offensive - but my staff are considered of lesser importance. Disposable. And they’re used to send a message.
Their deaths tell me that one of these inhuman things is angry and I am to blame.
In the human world, our leaders certainly do a good job dodging responsibility even for heinous actions they’ve themselves committed. The inhuman world is not so lenient and it has the power to enforce consequences.
I’m sure some of you are thinking, dang, must be sweet to be an inhuman thing. There’s certainly some assholes that have pissed me off that I’d like to take to task. But look - you know those “you can only take this one thing to a deserted island” memes? This is “you can only eat this one thing until the heat death of the universe” and you might want to think long and hard on how raw liver ripped from a screaming victim would taste after 5,000 years of it.
The night the offense was committed, I dreamed of my death at the jaws of the beast. I fled from it down a narrow corridor of which I could not see the walls or the floor, but I knew they were there nonetheless. Behind me the beast approached, its jaw stretching wide, swallowing up everything in my wake until it felt as immense as the ocean. I felt the world tilting, my feet slipped for want of purchase, and then I fell into the beast’s gaping mouth. Its throat glowed like embers and I felt the heat as I tumbled down, into that white-hot heart of light, and I heard the screams of people I thought I knew as I fell.
Then I woke in a cold sweat. It was past dawn. I’d slept through my alarm.
I knew all too well what such a nightmare meant. Someone had vanished and the thing in the dark was to blame. I hurried down to the staff break room to intercept the handful arriving for the shift change.
What they told me as they arrived was alarming. They, too, had nightmares about the death they feared. I uneasily assumed it was due to their daily proximity to the campground. Perhaps that created some tie, tenuous, but enough that the campground could leak into their dreams. After all, the thing in the dark only troubles the dreams of those asleep on my land. That’s how it’s always been.
I’ve seen that the campground… leaks… now. It is not a perfect prison. Perhaps the thing in the dark’s rage was simply that great.
The day passed uneventfully. I learned who vanished in the night because my staff found an abandoned campground. They watched over it, checking in throughout the day to confirm it was truly empty. The tents were made up with all their belongings inside. The coolers were still full of food and beer. It was like they’d all simply gotten up and walked away and never came back.
They were swallowed up without even a struggle. All of them.
I decided we would take down their tents and pack up their belongings the next day. Some of them had left wallets in their tents instead of having them on their person and these we turned over to the local police. None of us would go searching for their relatives, of course. But better that the police knew their names if anyone came calling for answers.
It didn’t occur to me at that point that the thing in the dark had been wronged. There was another, more palatable, explanation at hand. This entire camp had looked at the thing in the dark and been swallowed up at once. Perhaps they were sitting around a campfire - for there were the remains of a fire pit - late at night and the firelight vanished and instead of closing their eyes, they all turned around to look like deer in the road.
I didn’t know of many instances of the thing in the dark taking multiple people at once, so I theorized that this was the reason behind the extended reach of the nightmares. It echoed more strongly this time, touching those closely associated with the campground even though they weren’t on my land.
I told my staff to be a bit more careful and to let me know if they found anything unusual. That was all.
When I’m wrong, people die. It’s easier to bear when someone else is at fault. I can point to their mistakes and say look - see - that isn’t me this time. This is what they did wrong. It’s deserved. Right or wrong, that’s how I looked at it for a long time. It made the job easier. I’m still not sure if I’m willing to shoulder the blame for this one. Yes, my theory was wrong. But it’s not like the thing in the dark made it apparent that it was angered. Beau didn’t drop by to warn me, as he’s done before. It was just me, piecing together the clues as best as I could.
But deserving or not, the thing in the dark held me responsible for the actions of the campers. They always do.
I got up the next morning to find one of my overnight staff dead on my front porch. He’d been methodically disassembled. His body had been opened up, the flaps of skin and muscle neatly pulled open for dissection, and his organs had been removed and set aside. They were still connected, the veins unraveling like yarn, grouped close to the body so that everything remained intact.
He hadn’t succumbed immediately. There wasn’t much blood. Some of the organs were disturbed, though. Instead of being laid out neatly, they were positioned closer to the body, and one hand lay draped close to the heart, as if it’d slid off shortly after death. He’d been left alive, desperately trying to scoop his organs back into his body, before dying of shock.
I called my uncle for help. My great-aunt’s death has always weighed heavily on me and I couldn’t bear disposing of the body alone. We worked together in stoic silence, piling the organs back into the hollowed out shell and hiding it beneath a blanket before any campers could wander past the house. The police came and discreetly took the body away.
“This isn’t like the people with no faces,” my uncle said grimly, after our morbid task was done. “Well, it’s not like them to leave it on your front porch, at least.”
“The man with the skull cup could have done it.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
I took a deep drink of my coffee. It wasn’t creamer I’d added to it.
“Can you talk to his girlfriend for me?” I asked. “Find out which creature on the campground he feared the most.”
My uncle did. Or rather, he sent my aunt to talk to her. She reported back that my employee had most feared the people with no faces. He’d never had a run-in with them and he hoped he never would. Their scalpels and their deliberate precision terrified him, worse than a creature that would rend and tear like a mindless beast. Their careful intent was far more sinister than something that merely wanted a meal.
The thing in the dark wasn’t merely showing us in our dreams what death we feared the most. It was enacting it now, upon my staff, and leaving the results at my doorstep.
I was at a loss on how to appease it or if it even could be appeased. But nor would I simply stand by and let it murder my staff with impunity. They knew they were potential targets. It was part of the job and why I pay so much more than everyone else around here. For the locals, this is one of the better jobs around, short of owning your own business. However, this was an extreme circumstance, as all of us knew the thing in the dark was not something that could be escaped or reasoned with.
It was like a force of nature and screaming defiance at a storm does nothing to halt its advance.
So I closed the campground. If we couldn’t appease the thing in the dark, we’d wait it out. Let it helplessly expend its anger in whatever manner it chose - so long as it didn’t have human prey within reach.
I evacuated the campground of campers. Fortunately, luck was on my side, and I had an easy excuse that people were more than willing to accept. It had been raining that week. A LOT of rain. The handful of campers that remained on site were already planning to leave, as the forecast predicted it would keep raining for another few days. I sent my staff around to tell everyone there was concern about flooding (there wasn’t) and we were asking everyone to leave as a precaution. They even offered to help people pack up, to ensure they got off the grounds before sundown. I offered partial refunds, but they had to come to the camp office and claim them in person. I hoped that the rain had worn down their wills to the point that few would bother with the extra effort, and my hunch paid off - literally. Few claimed the refund.
Look, I do run a business here.
Then I sent the staff home. I stocked up on groceries and warned my relatives that live on the land to do the same. We’d wait it out. I was confident in the security of our houses, as the main house was never touched (except by the little girl and the beast) and my relatives house’s had the visitor’s blessing (rule #1) and other protections. I locked the gates, cancelled any outstanding reservations that hadn’t already been cancelled due to the coming week’s weather forecast, and hunkered down to wait for the worst.
I kept the blinds drawn so I didn’t inadvertently look outside at the thing in the dark, in case it passed near to the house. No sense in angering it further. I could hear the little girl though and her weeping was close by, as she stayed huddled up against the wall of the house throughout the long night. Around one in the morning my aunt called me to say she’d heard a loud noise passing by, like a gale, but she hadn’t looked and it’d moved on.
I waited through the night, too uneasy to sleep. I might have dozed off a little between two AM and four AM, but it wasn’t a real sleep. I just lay in my bed, hardly covered by the blankets, and nodded off for snippets at a time.
I was waiting to see if the thing in the dark came by my house, carrying its anger in its shadow.
An hour before dawn I heard a noise that made me sit bolt-upright. Something like the scream of a wildcat, but deeper, and far louder. An unnatural sound that had the snapping of trees as an undertone. A cry of rage - and despair, I thought - that made my heart ache for reasons I couldn’t understand.
I think… looking back… the thing in the dark wasn’t merely angry. It was mourning the loss of itself, screaming its pain because it had no other way to make us understand.
And as soon as that unearthly sound stopped, a rumbling took over. The ground itself was shaking. My breath caught in my throat as the ground shifted, trembling from the force of the thing’s scream, and my bed began to rattle in place. Bookcases in my library toppled over, spilling their contents all over the floor. Pictures fell from the walls, spewing shattered glass as they hit. A cacophony of breaking dishes echoed from my kitchen as the plates and glasses slid out of the cabinets, drowning out all other noise. I cowered in my bed, pressing myself into the mattress and hoping nothing fell on me and that the house didn’t collapse. Then the rumbling was gone and the only sound was the rain outside, the little girl’s crying, and the groan of the house as it settled back down on its foundation.
I called my aunt with shaking hands. They’d experienced the same thing. I checked on my other relatives and they all had the same story. A scream and then an earthquake. I called some people outside the campground, checking on my staff, and while none of them had nearly the level of destruction I had, their houses were similarly affected. No one was hurt at least.
Now, this was some time ago, so the old sheriff hadn’t been swallowed up by the vanishing house yet. He drove by to check on the campground the next morning, asking if we’d had any damage from the earthquake. I said that I was still checking the buildings, but so far we appeared to be unscathed. I didn’t say that was because our houses are protected against unnatural things and this was certainly an unnatural earthquake.
The old sheriff told me there’d been a few buildings in town that suffered minor damage. He and the local officers were still making the rounds to check on the remote houses in the surrounding forest and fields.
“Damned strange,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “Didn’t think we got earthquakes out here.”
Very strange, I agreed. As much as I like the old sheriff, he is an honest man where the town is concerned, and I didn’t want their animosity once they found out that the thing in the dark could reach out beyond the confines of the campground, in a sense. They leave my family in peace so long as I keep these creatures contained and their wallets full.
I kept the campground shut down for a full week and when there were no further disturbances, I tentatively called my staff back. Volunteer basis at first, with a hefty bonus as an incentive. A few took the offer and when they survived the night, I felt confident enough to re-open the campground. The thing in the dark remained in its lair, its anger spent in that last helpless cry.
I run a private campground. I’ve always had a healthy level of respect for the thing in the dark. Of all the creatures on my land, I consider it one of the more benevolent ones. It doesn’t actively seek people out to harm them, after all. It just wants to be left alone. But now, when I think back on that scream it uttered, at how it made my chest ache with a yearning that was not my own, I feel something else towards it. I think of what it said to me. How it isn’t whole.
And I pity it. [x]
Also I'm right about the spiders so HAH.
Read the full list of rules.
Visit the campground's website.

I was the only one home when my father called me in for his death bed confession.
He wasn’t very old in the grand scheme of things, only fifty-eight, but after a violent mugging that took place about twenty years ago, his physical health hadn’t always been great. It really took a downhill turn last year. Heart failure. And it just wasn’t getting better.
My sister Amber and I were taking care of him as his health deteriorated. Last week though, Amber was running errands for our grandmother, so yeah. I was alone. When dad called for me I thought he might need a drink or help getting to the bathroom.
Instead, he told me to sit down. He told me I needed to know the truth, the truth about the mugging and about what really happened that night.
After all of this, he’d pass in his sleep a few hours later. I can’t ask for any more details. All I can do is relay this story to you… and find out how much truth there really is to it. Below is the confession, word for word.
~*~
You know, if your mother and I weren’t in the middle of our first separation, it may have never happened. I wouldn’t have been alone in bed that night. Alone in the house, since she took your older sister with her and you were still two months out from being born. That following morning I was found on the streets, all bloodied up, pockets turned out and missing my shoes. They concluded I had been mugged. I let them maintain that conclusion.
I hadn’t even left my house the night before. It was an early night, I was tired from work. I basically passed out on the couch while the TV was on. I don’t remember if anyone broke in, if I woke up before they abducted me.
The next thing I do remember? Waking up strapped to a chair, dressed in white scrubs with electrodes plastered on my now shaved head and sitting with a circle of people in the exact same condition.
I only recognized three of the other people there, and I only knew two of their names. One of my classmates from back when I was in high school was to my right, I barely recognized Magnolia since most of the blonde hair had been shaved right off. A few patches were still plastered to her scalp, whoever had taken the razor to our heads hadn’t been the most meticulous about it. Perhaps because they had a lot to get done before we woke up.
The other two I recognized was Augusta, an older woman who lived down the street from where I grew up, and the homeless man that I usually saw begging for cash in downtown was to my left. I didn’t know his name, I only recognized him because he’d been there every day.
There were eight of us in total. The woman right across from me had smeared lipstick and a cut on her forehead, maybe the razor had slipped during her head shave. Next to her was another woman with long fake fingernails and a natural scowl that was even there when she was unconscious, like she sucked on lemons in her spare time. The most conscious of us was a middle aged guy with a few more bruises than the rest of us, I imagine he put up a fight, he was a big dude. Finally there was this portly, smaller man who didn’t need his head shaved, since he was already bald as an egg.
Magnolia began breathing faster when she came to full consciousness, glancing around wildly and in full panic. “What the fu- where am I!? What’s going on!?” She yanked at the straps, which didn’t so much as budge. “Get these things off me?! Help! Someone help!”
The burly bruised guy shushed her loudly. “Quiet down. Don’t want to alert the wrong people we’re up,” He craned his neck around to look at the room around us, it was quite bare other than the circle of people strapped to heavy duty chairs- dark brick walls, a cement floor with a drain in the center. The only light was in the center of the ceiling, and that thing was set on to bright as it could go. Everyone looked a little washed out, a little pale, sickly.
The one thing I had missed was the speaker, attached to the wall right behind my head. It crackled to life before shrieking with feedback. This definitely got everyone awake, the portly fellow moaning and bitching the loudest while the woman with smeared lipstick being the only one perfectly quiet. Her eyes I remember the most, dark and careful. She was watching everyone in the room.
“Welcome, everyone.”
Once the feedback died down, the male voice coming from it was perfectly calm, smooth. It would’ve almost been soothing if the situation surrounding it wasn’t so bizarre.
“I am the Judge.”
I flexed against the bindings experimentally. There was no coming loose from them. I was stuck there, here for whatever this ‘Judge’ had planned.
“You sit in them now because you have all committed crimes. Crimes ranging from white lies to ones that may result in… capitol punishment.”
The scowling woman’s jaw dropped. “What do you mean, capitol punishment?”
“This is my court room. Where we are, no one will hear you scream. I advise you don’t cry out unless you can’t avoid it.” The Judge didn’t even take note of the interruption. “These are my Chairs of Truth. When we are finished, you will pay for what you’ve done. If you lie or talk your way around the truth, you will be punished. We will start with you, Connie.”
The scowling woman sputtered. “How dare you! I’m not a criminal! Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. Of course I do, Connie Andrews.” The Judge sounded almost… amused. “I know everything about you. Your first question is this: where do you go every Wednesday afternoon?”
“Are you for real?” Connie looked genuinely baffled.
“We are starting with an easy question. One that has minor effect on your life, legally or illegally. Where do you go every Wednesday afternoon?”
Connie looked relieved. “Um… I get my nails done,” Her fingers tapped on the arm of her chair. “What, is that a crime?”
“We’ll come back to that. Frankie? Can I call you Frankie, Frank Smith?”
The burly guy shifted in his chair. “You can,” He decided.
“Frank, during highschool, what was the extracurricular you and your wife participated in?”
“I was a football player, she was a cheerleader.” Frank cleared his throat. “And who are you?”
The Judge quietly chuckled. “I am not important. I am here only to fulfill judgment, officer,” He cleared his throat, “Onto the next. Augusta Armstrong? How many children do you have?”
My neighbor looked terrified, shaking in her chair like a scared Chihuahua. “I have five, they’re the light of my life. Please, please, let me go,” She whimpered.
“If you answer these questions, we can see about that. Charles Nolan?”
“When I get out of here, I’m going to sue you!” The man snapped, lurching in his chair. It didn’t so much as budge, it had been bolted to the floor.
“Charles, what is your occupation? No need for specifics, you like those, I’m aware.”
“Businessman, I work for-”
Charles suddenly breathed in sharply. I had to crane my neck around the homeless guy to see what had happened. I only caught the glimpse of what looked like a sewing needle exiting Charles’ arm and going back into the chair, a pinpoint of blood beading from his skin.
Fuck. I took a better look at the chair, which I’d only assumed was a heavy duty wooden chair. Now I saw there was holes all in it, some small enough for needles to come out and jab, others thin slats that looked large enough for daggers to come out and slice through us.
“When I say something, I advise you listen,” The judge explained patiently. “Harley Scott?”
The homeless man lifted his head up. I’d never heard his name before then. It was strange, finally putting a name to the face I’d seen so often. “Yes?” He said, barely louder than a whisper.
“Harley, what branch of the military were you in, and what was your rank?”
“A-army,” Harley swallowed, “Private.”
“Edward Adkins.”
I flinched when I heard my name.
“What is the date of your wedding anniversary?”
I actually had to think for a second. My mind was running blank.
“What is the date of your wedding anniversary? Don’t make me ask a third time.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I- it’s June 6,” I managed to get out.
I felt genuine relief when he went on to Magnolia, asking what she did for some extra spending cash, and she responded that she was a babysitter. The final question was asked to the woman with smeared lipstick and careful eyes, her name was Delilah, and it asked where she lived. I don’t remember the exact address, but I know it was in a rough part of town. Part of town I’d never go, anyway.
The Judge sighed, sounding pleased with our cooperation. “Very good, so far, only one punishment had to be doled out,” He said.
“Oh go fuck yourself!” Charles snapped. This did get the needle jabbing back into his arm, right where the wound had just began to scab over.
“These questions are not going to get any easier. In fact, they will be harder. So learn to cooperate and answer truthfully now. It will save you later.”
I expected him to start going around the circle again. Instead, the voice surprised me.
“What is your occupation, Delilah?”
“Unem-” Delilah cut herself off, sighing. “I bet that’s not what you mean. Fine. Sex worker. Prostitute. Hooker. Whatever you want to call it. That what you wanted to hear?”
“Very well. Charles, how did your friend Rosemary Marshall make so much money from your company’s stock?
Charles shifted. “Good luck?” He tried to lie, so poorly though that no one was convinced.
I didn’t expect to hear the crackle of electricity and Charles’ eyes to bug out of his sockets, his teeth clamping so tight as his body jolted with electric current running through his veins. When he finally did manage to scream, he flopped back against his chair, screeching and howling at the top of his lungs. The room beforehand reeked of antiseptic, now I could detect a faint hint of urine. The rest of us sat in mostly dumb silence, the only sounds being Charles gasping for breath and Augusta crying. I certainly didn’t know how to react.
“Charles? Answer the question correctly.”
“I…” Charles swallowed. “I gave her some information… that helped her out. She’s a single mom, she needed the money!”
“Which you took a cut from. About ten thousand dollars, a high price from the single mom you claim you sympathize with. Edward?”
Fuck.
“How did you pass your final exam in algebra, senior year?”
I actually sighed with relief. That wasn’t nearly so bad as I expected, since I was following up on Charles’ question. “My friend helped me cheat.”
“Your friend’s name?”
“Jordan. Jordan Mills. He was a genius, he knew I needed his help. He gave me the answers.”
The Judge paused for a moment before turning on Magnolia. “And you, Magnolia? How did you pass your SATs with such high scores? Remember, I can see the rest of your grades. They’re… barely mediocre.”
“What!? They’re-” Magnolia glanced over at Charles, who still looked like a mess. “… I cheated too,” She grumbled.
“Both of you, such poor students, in the same graduating year,” The Judge tutted his tongue, “Our future generation is looking so promising already. Frankie, what happened to the cocaine from the raid on the Wolfe home?”
“It’s in evidence,” the answer came out so fast I think ‘Frankie’ didn’t even consider it a lie, and for a second I thought it wasn’t a lie either.
Then the knife came out and sliced clean through the meat of his shoulder. To his credit, Frankie just breathed in sharply, gritted his teeth and took it.
“I presume you want to change your answer?” The judge asked as the knife slid back out, blood now staining Frankie’s white scrubs.
“Mm… mmhmm,” Frankie exhaled slowly, his body shaking as his face went white. “M-me and another officer took some. S-sold it to someone we knew was a dealer.”
“Therefore putting it back on the streets that you swore to take it off of?”
“It’s different!” Frankie swallowed, his eyes fluttering shut as his shoulder continued to bleed. “The original punks were dealing to highschoolers, kids! The dealer we sold to, he only sold it to thugs who have already ruined their lives.”
“… An interesting point of view, for sure,” The Judge said. “Now, Augusta? How did you get your eldest to sleep sometimes?”
“Oh, I’d rock him to sleep,” Augusta bobbed her head up and down, “He was always so fussy, and-”
She didn’t even get a chance to finish her lie. Her whole body seized up and she screeched as the electric crackle filled the room. It wasn’t as long a shock as it was for Charles, but Augusta looked far worse for wear, gasping and coughing as she tried to calm down.
“Augusta. Stop lying.”
Augusta wailed before her head flopped forward. “A… little whiskey in his bottle… never really hurt anyone, honest, how could I ever hurt my own children?” She said.
I was blown away. Magnolia cheated on SATs, a police officer dealing drugs, and now one of the nicest neighbors on my block gave her kids alcohol so they’d sleep. Christ.
It didn’t get better. That first round wasn’t always fair, after all, all I had to answer for was a false grade, and Harley admitted he took part of a military hazing in which the poor victim had to streak across the base naked. Meanwhile Connie confessed to cheating with a married man and convincing him to leave his wife for her, only to completely blow him off once the wife took the sap for all he was worth. He couldn’t spoil her if he was broke, after all.
I only lied once, I learned quickly enough after that. It was over something stupid, about driving drunk and getting into an accident, slammed into a tree. Jordan covered for me that time too, said he was the one driving since I was tanked. I’d never been electrocuted before that day and I never wanted to again. I didn’t judge Charles for wetting his pants after that, you lose all control when you get shocked like that and that’s all I’ll say about it.
It’s amazing how often some of them chose to lie, and which ones chose not to. Delilah never once lied, completely blank faced as she told us how she robbed one of her johns of everything in his wallet because he passed out drunk or how she didn’t tell her boyfriend that she tested positive for gonorrhea, although the Judge was kind enough to inform her that it was likely him that infected her and not vice versa. Harley only lied twice, once about that hazing and another time about how he abandoned his pregnant girlfriend without even a note.
Meanwhile, Charles had to be shocked and stabbed nearly ever other question, and Augusta lied literally every time. The elderly woman I’d thought was the kindest soul admitted to so many shitty things, some things I can’t even say. All I can say is I pity those poor children of hers, with such a nightmare mom that would beat them for shattering a glass or literally calling the police on her second youngest when he brought his black girlfriend home. She had claimed the girl was trying to rob them. Actual sociopath.
We’re all devils, you know. Devils with different sins blackening our hands, tearing up our souls. No one is innocent. And the Judge knew every one of those sins, no matter how some of us tried to hide them. I wish I knew how he knew that Frankie beat a suspect to get a confession, only for it to be revealed that suspect was innocent all along. I can’t even imagine how he found out that Magnolia slashed her ex boyfriend’s tires because she was mad at him for dumping her, especially since he dumped her since she was so goddamn controlling he couldn’t even see his friends.
For that final round, we all looked fucked up. Shocked, stabbed with everything from knitting needles to steak knives, being forced to reveal our darkest secrets around people that were acquaintances at best, and most were just strangers.
“It’s time for your final question. You will only have one chance to answer this properly. We will start with Augusta.”
Augusta definitely looked the worst off. Like I said, she lied every question, sometimes even more than once. I was surprised she was still alive.
“Augusta, how did your eldest two children die?”
Augusta shakily inhaled and my heart sunk to the bottom of my stomach.
“Doctors… don’t know… I don’t either… mystery illness took my babies from me when they were just six and four years old… let me go home,” Augusta whined.
The Judge sighed.
“Augusta, that’s not the truth. And I told you, this time you would only get one chance to answer correctly.”
The door on the far end of the room and the Judge finally walked out. We finally saw his face. He was tall, well built, probably at least a little handsome, but by that time my brain felt like watery pudding so all I could do was blankly stare at him. He pushed in front of him a television connected to a VHS player, tapes stacked on top of the screen.
The Judge plucked the first tape up, showing us all the name ‘AUGUSTA’ written in black sharpie on the front. He placed the tape in the VHS player and stepped back.
It was a recording of medical documents, a lot of them. The camera panned over several paragraphs nice and slow so we could get the general gist. And that general gist? Augusta’s children would get sick for no discernible reason, but would recover at the hospital. Once they got sent back home, they’d just get sick again. And one day, they both got just too sick and passed away.
“Munchhausen's by proxy,” The Judge said, and I saw true pain in his eyes as he stood by the wall, where eight switches were neatly lined up. Each of them had a name beneath them, our names. “What are your final words, Augusta?”
“I…” Augusta shook her head. “No, I loved my children, I really did…”
She paused to take a breath and that’s when the Judge flipped the switch.
Augusta writhed and her eyes went so wide they looked like they were going to fall out of her head. She wailed one last time before her eyes rolled back and then the only movement from her came from the electric current.
The switch was turned off and the Judge looked back at us. Then he raised his hand and had his fingers ready at Delilah’s switch.
“Delilah?”
The woman, the truthful one, finally looked up. “Yes?” She asked.
The Judge stared at her. “Your boyfriend. Calvin McLaughlin. Was his murder premeditated?”
“… Yes.” Delilah bowed her head. “… he had friends in the force. He was getting out of jail for nearly killing me, because none of them believed me. So I just waited for him to get home. I waited for him to get drunk. And I wasn’t going to wait for that first punch, so I took a baseball bat and I smashed his head in.”
There was a deathly quiet pause before the judge lowered his hand from Delilah's switch. The Judge turned his gaze on Frankie, who went pale.
“How did your wife die, Frankie?” He asked.
Frankie, to his credit, did come off as convincing. “Car accident. She went off the road, killed her instantly,” He said.
The Judge did his best to hide any emotion to us, but I did see that look of murderous intent as he grabbed another VHS that had Frankie’s name written on it. He put it in.
Another recording of another document. An autopsy report, about how a Mrs. Nancy Smith had many injuries that were in different phases of healing. How her ribs had been broken multiple times in the past, and this time one of those rib fragments broke free and punctured her heart. Followed by that were reports, doctor’s reports about Nancy’s many visits to the hospital, all for ‘accidents’.
“Was Nancy that clumsy, Frankie?” The Judge asked quietly. “I highly doubt it. Your last words?”
“You don’t understand!” Frankie blurted out. “No one seems to understand how hard our job is, what we see! It takes a toll! It’s not my fault that Nancy didn’t get it-”
I turned away from this electrical death, and when I heard the electrical chair powered down I looked up to see a froth bubbling from the dead cop’s lips, his dead eyes staring at the now flickering light on the ceiling.
“Connie Andrews?”
Connie slowly looked up at the Judge, her face twisted in rage.
“Where did you get the poison for all of the husbands you killed?”
“Fuck you,” She spat at him, saliva landing on his clean white shirt. The Judge simply wiped it off, picked up another tape that no doubt had her name on it, and put in the VHS player.
This time it wasn’t a document, it was a woman exiting a nail salon and heading into a small drug store that happened to be right next door. It was clear the video was taken from someone’s car. Connie exited the store about ten minutes later with a small bag. A newspaper was raised in front of the camera, revealing the date.
“This was two days before your third husband mysteriously passed in his sleep. Your last words?”
Connie went white as The Judge raised his hand for her switch. “No, wait! Don’t do it! I’ll give you whatever you want! I’ll confess! I’ll tell the truth!” She yelped.
Click. The acrid smell of Connie’s fake fingernails melting was so bad it made my head spin.
Magnolia shook her head wildly as The Judge went to her switch next. “I never hurt anyone! What the hell are you doing?!” She screamed, thrashing about so wildly I thought she might actually tear an arm free.
“What did you tell your boyfriend, Zachary Cullen, to do before he shot and killed himself?” The Judge’s stare.
“That… that wasn’t my fault!” Magnolia shook her head again and again, the strap holding her head in place actually coming loose. “How was that my fault?!”
The Judge held up a finger before pulling a voice recorder from his pocket. “This doesn’t need video,” He said simply before he hit play.
The conversation I heard… I can’t repeat it. It was too terrible. Magnolia telling her boyfriend again and again how worthless he was, how he was such a pathetic waste of space, and how she couldn’t wait for him to kill himself because that was the only good thing he’d ever do for himself.
The recording ended with a gunshot. The Judge cocked his head to the side.
“Your last words?”
“How was that my fault!?” Was all she wrote. Being right next to the person being shocked, it’s… it’s so disgusting. I could smell the burning hair and skin, hear every garbled sound that ripped its way out of her throat as she jolted and contorted in horrifying ways.
Charles moaned loudly as The Judge approached the switch. “Don’t. Don’t ask,” He said, even though he knew what would happen.
“Charles? Last month, early morning. Rushing to work because you were late. Did anything happen on that drive?”
Charles didn’t even speak, he just shook his head.
Another tape was taken off the VHS player, the Judge flashing the front to show off Charles’ name.
This was from a traffic cam. A couple was walking across the street, probably the same age your mother and I were at the time. The collision happened so fast, the car slammed into them and sent the man flying over the hood while the woman was crushed under the car. The car stopped for a moment, just a moment, and I recognized the bald head that poked its way out of the window. Just for a second.
And then he zoomed off, leaving the bodies broken and bleeding in the street.
“Mr. Oscar Long was dead on arrival, but Miss Hannah Garcia? She took longer to die, and she suffered for every minute of it. Do I even need to ask for your last words?”
“It was just an accident!” Charles wailed.
I don’t need to describe what happened next. I’m sure you know by now. Another human being electrocuted to death, executed by the expressionless Judge.
Harley sighed shakily as The Judge looked at him. “And?” was all the Judge said.
“… I know what I did was wrong.” Harley admitted, his head bowed before he raised it and looked at The Judge. “So I will not be confessing today, Judge. I know what I deserve.”
The Judge paused and I caught a glimpse of something. Sympathy. “Being apart of the massacre of a village of innocent people and then covering it up. The act of a cowardly soldier. So, I believe this is the bravest thing you’ve ever done.”
“Just end it already,” Harley said, his eyes closing as he prepared for the shock.
“I won’t make you suffer.”
For a moment, I thought the Judge might have an inkling of mercy in him. Instead, he crossed the room of corpses and grabbed Harley’s head. It was so efficient, the twist of his head, the snap of his neck. Harley was dead in less time than it takes to finish a sentence. Perhaps it was mercy in the Judge’s mind. It was certainly quicker than what the others went through, that was for sure.
The only people left that were still alive in that room were me, Delilah, and The Judge. I was the only one left who had a final question. He went to his switches. I knew what he was going to ask.
“Why did you kill Jordan Mills, Edward?”
I took a deep breath.
“Because I was in love with his girlfriend. And she wouldn’t give me a second look as long as Jordan was alive.”
“And the girlfriend?”
“We’re now married. Have a daughter. We have another kid on the way.”
Delilah stared at me, probably shook that someone else confessed their most dirty secret, their most wicked of sins. The Judge nodded.
“And with that, court is adjourned.” The Judge left the room, coming back a moment later with two needles. He jabbed one into Delilah’s neck, the woman’s eyes flickering as she fell unconscious.
“Why did you do this?” I asked as the Judge walked up to me, tilting my head to the side with the hands he’d just used to murder six people.
“So you never do it again,” The Judge hissed before the needle entered my neck.
The next thing I know I’m lying on the street, cops are all around me, asking if I was okay and what happened. I was back in the clothes I’d fallen asleep with, the only sign that anything that had happened was the bruises on my wrists and the memories.
Oh, I know, you never expected me to have taken a life too. I regret it. Jordan was… kind to me. It was a moment of rage, something not at all planned out. I was just lucky no one ever found the body until it was too decomposed to really tell anything. Everyone assumed he fell off the hiking trail and hit his head on the way down, causing his death.
I paid for it my own way, of course. Ever since that night in the Chair of Truth, I’ve practically been a saint. Paid my taxes, watched my words, donated time and money to help others, and even when your mother finally left me for good, I never held it against her.
Why? Well, it’s hard to do anything wrong when you know someone’s gone through your life with a fine tooth comb. The fact someone is still watching me, no matter what I do, and I feel if I ever slipped up again, I’d wake up in the Chair, and next time I’d not get away so easily.
And I hope, my son, that you learn from my mistakes… that no matter how well you hide your sins, you will be found out, whether in the afterlife or this one.

Part 1
When I escaped the Crimson Carnival the first time, I knew I had to go back. It didn’t matter that I had almost died, that I had been badly injured, half-blinded, and burned.
Sarah was there. All these years I had felt certain, but had no way to prove it. As it turned out I had been right all along. She had found the place and it had trapped her there, along with hundreds of others. Thousands maybe.
The secret ritual needed to get into the place was shared via an online forum and now I had real suspicions about who had planted those “tips”. I had the feeling very few other people had actually been there and escaped. The only reason I had gotten out was that Sarah had seen me and warned me about the true nature of the place. Even then I had barely made it. It had me in some sort of trance, I realized. The time had passed quickly at first, but the longer I stayed the more it sucked me in and consumed me. Hypnotized me.
I went home and immediately read the sticky post from the moderators at the top of the main page. After scanning it again, there was no doubt in my mind the whole website was a trap being used to lure people in.
Here is what it read:
CRIMSON CARNIVAL MODERATOR TIPS
- Don’t worry about tracking the time too much! Although “The Crimson Fair leaves with the sun” that doesn’t mean you have to find your way back to the exit before that. Most people stay and watch as the carnival evaporates like smoke at the break of dawn – the grand finale of the fair, as it were. Speaking as someone who has seen it I can tell you, it’s quite a sight and not to be missed!
There were plenty of other tips as well, some useful, but most were outright dangerous in retrospect. The whole thing was just a ploy to get people to go to the place, it seemed. To trap them there.
And it had worked. Judging by the looks of the midway, filled with entrapped workers, the bait was working and the carnival would continue to grow. Unless someone stopped it.
I suddenly had a vision, thinking about the giant red canopy tent at the center of the place. I pictured a massive beating heart in the middle of it, veins and arteries extending out from it, feeding poison to the entire place and everyone trapped there.
At the very center of the canopy, I had no doubt now, was the creator of the whole thing. The master of it all. The one who controlled everything and had caused all this chaos and heartache.
How many other families had been torn apart? How many relationships destroyed? Husbands and wives, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters – how many lives had been ruined by the monstrosity that was The Crimson Carnival?
Somehow I had to stop it. I was maybe the only one who could.
I vowed to return, and marked on my calendar the next Friday the 13th, so I would be ready.
What I didn’t expect was another person to be waiting in the gravel parking lot to visit the carnival. Another thrill-seeker like my wife, I assumed at first.
It turned out they were more like me.
“You might want to rethink your visit,” he said after rolling down his car window. “This place isn’t as advertised.”
“Tell me about it. I barely got out last time. I wouldn’t be here if I had a choice.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked at me solemnly, then got out of his car and went around to the trunk. He pulled out a small bag which he slung over his shoulder.
“I’m Gary, what’s your name, kid?”
“Jordan.”
“You’ve always got a choice, Jordan. Don’t go back in there. It’s no good. It’s got me and it’s gonna get you too if you keep coming back here. Maybe you can still have a life if you go now and don’t come back.”
I thought about what he said for a few seconds before responding. He looked serious, and genuinely worried. Was this some trick of the carnival? Did its reach extend this far out?
I decided probably not, or else the carnival workers would have pursued me to my car the last time I escaped, instead of staying within its boundaries.
“How many times have you done this?” I asked. “Maybe we can help each other.”
“Hmm.” He rummaged in his trunk and grabbed a larger backpack and slung that over both shoulders with his bloodied hand leaving red stains everywhere in the process. Next he withdrew a gun belt which he put around his waist. He loaded a large revolver with bullets and shoved it down into the holster.
“Kind of old school, isn’t it?” I asked, pointing at the pistol with its wooden grip. I knew nothing about guns and had never fired one myself, but knew they had much more sophisticated weaponry for sale these days. Things that could hold more than six bullets.
“Old school doesn’t jam. Old school fires straight every time. It’s that new shit that doesn’t seem to work in there. Almost got killed the first few times until I figured that out.”
A thought occurred to me.
“Wait a second, those are real people in there! You can’t kill them, this isn’t their fault.”
“Listen kid, there’s two types of carnival workers. Those who can be saved and those who can’t. We’re here for the ones who can be. Who is it they got of yours? Girlfriend, I’ll bet.”
“Fiancée, actually.”
“Well, did you find her? I’m guessing by the look in your eyes you did. So what did she say? Did she recognize you?”
“Yeah. She did. For a minute, until something else took over. She came back again for a second, told me to run and never come back.”
“You shoulda listened.” He shook his head, gazed up at the sky and seemed to think about it for a few seconds. Letting out a deep breath he admitted, “That means she can still be rescued, though. I think, assuming I’m right, anyways.”
“How? She attacked me when I tried.” I pointed a thumb at my eyepatch.
“Ha! Yeah I bet she did. Did you see the tubes?”
“What tubes?”
“Think intravenous tubing. It comes up out of the ground and it’s drilled into their legs. She’s hooked up to the thing at the center of it all, just like the rest of them. Take a look next time, a real close look. The ones who already belong to this place don’t have them, because they’re already full of the poison. Like the welcome clown for instance. Or the ‘Test your Strength’ guy with the sledge hammer.”
I recalled with a shudder how that gentleman had nearly murdered me.
So that was how they were changing them. The place really was poison. It was taking Sarah’s life force and replacing it with some dark toxin and converting her into a minion of the carnival. A mindless vessel forced to do its bidding until death and beyond.
“Come on, we’re wasting time. You got a nickel?”
I pulled out the handful of bloody coins I had stolen the last time after I tackled the bastard at the entrance.
“Holy shit! Maybe I underestimated you, kid. What did you do, kill the welcome clown or something?”
“Ha-ha, no, I… Actually I sort of tackled him.”
He let out a short whistle of respect.
“Alright. Let’s do this. You got a weapon?”
I showed him what I had brought with me. He laughed pretty hard at that.
“Oh, shit. You’re serious.”
I nodded, and walked forward, approaching the welcome clown.
“HOO HOO HOO hoo! I’ve got a surprise, it’s true! Who found the Crimson Carnival? What a delight, it’s you!”
The clown seemed not to remember me, he was jovial and happy again. Until the end of the next part of his rhyme, which he said through gritted teeth, in a dark and deep voice full of malice and hatred.
“You found the place, my friend! Get inside and have some fun! Your time now very soon will end. The crimson death can’t be und-“
BANG!
I looked over in surprise to see that Gary had just shot the welcome clown in the head. He was holding the revolver out and smoke and steam misted from the end of the barrel in the early morning air.
He loaded a fresh bullet and flicked a nickel at the dead clown’s body. I couldn’t help but notice the hatchet the clown held in his hand, concealed behind his large baggy pants.
I did the same as Gary, tossing a nickel from my shaking, bloodied hand. We had both cut our palms before arriving at the place, and now began to wrap them in makeshift bandages as we proceeded through the turnstiles.
“Well, that should make it easier to get past him on the way out,” I said, still in shock.
“I learned a while back that the ones who belong to this place don’t die. It doesn’t matter what you do to them. They aren’t human anymore.”
“How the hell do you know? What if we can kill the thing responsible for all this? Maybe we can bring them all back to reality!”
He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again. It appeared he hadn’t thought of that possibility.
“Alright. I’ll try not to kill anybody else,” he conceded. “Unless I really, really have to.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that.”
As we got into the carnival, I looked around in surprise to see that none of the stalls were the same as the first time. It was like we were in a completely different midway.
“Shoot out the star and win a prize!” a man said from a nearby booth where air-rifles were set up on stands and positioned to point at crimson red stars drawn on paper.
I saw a ring toss booth, another with green glass bottles lined up on the floor, and rides just ahead to the left where previously there had been food stands.
“What the hell is going on? It’s all different…”
“Yeah, the place changes every time,” Gary said, pulling something out of his bag.
I saw it was a map.
It showed a star with five points, a circle around the outside of it. A pentagram.
“It’s a giant star. The pentagon at the center is the canopy tent. The circle around the outside is the fence. Every time you come back, it spins around and you get a different entrance. The clown stays the same, he never changes, no matter which entrance you come in through.”
I saw writing on the map and realized he had put little symbols in places. A Ferris Wheel. An apple. A balloon. Each on a different part of the star.
“This is the section with the rides. See the Ferris wheel symbol?” He pointed up ahead and I saw the giant wheel, lit up and glowing red just ahead of us. “Do you remember what you saw when you came in last time?”
“Let’s see… There was the sledgehammer guy, can’t forget about him. And the darts game where you try to hit the balloons. Sarah was at the Spinning Wheel of Fortune near the entrance to the canopy, I remember that.”
His eyes lit up and he smiled, looking relieved.
“Well, ain’t that a coincidence? Looks like we’re headed to the same place. My partner Bruce is over at the ticket counter in that area. So we can stick together if you want. Help each other out?”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “You seem to have this place pretty well figured out…”
“I wish. Every time I come here it manages to surprise me.”
We were walking the whole time as we talked and proceeded past the Ferris wheel and “The Kraken”, “The Gravitron”, and a mini roller coaster.
Our route took us near the entrance to “The Funhouse”, and that was where things began to go downhill.
Just as we were walking past the stairs leading up to that place, I noticed that the entire carnival had gotten quiet suddenly. No one was shouting at us to visit their booths. The rides had all stopped and so had the music.
All I could hear was the sound of our footsteps in the mud. And then others joining in, getting louder as they neared us.
Suddenly there was a dozen carnival workers approaching us from all sides. They walked towards us in unison, silently, their eyes glowing red in the darkness.
“Shit. They’ve never done this before. I don’t think they like that we’re teaming up.”
I looked back over my shoulder and saw more coming from that direction.
The only way to escape was up the stairs and into “The Funhouse”. We both went that way without thinking, as they closed in on us from every direction.
Once we got inside, I was immediately disoriented. I felt the reflective walls with my hand and followed after Gary, trying not to lose track of him.
The first section was a maze made of mirrors, and I found myself running head-first into a few of them, causing my nose to bleed. The shapes of them made everything warped and distorted. My absent left eye was not helping, thanks to my newfound lack of depth perception.
“OW! Fuck.”
“You alright back there, kid?” he asked.
“Yeah, just great. Are we almost at the exit of this place yet?”
“Not sure. I haven’t been in this one before.”
I heard footsteps in pursuit behind us and my heart began to hammer with fear again. They were following us closely and by the sounds of it they knew this place a lot better than us.
“Hurry, they’re right behind us,” I said, pushing him forward.
Finally we got out of the disorienting darkness of the house of mirrors and arrived at the next section. The walls and floors were slanted and I stumbled trying to walk towards a door that seemed further away than it actually was. The lines on the walls didn’t help, as they seemed purposely drawn in such a way as to confuse the eyes.
A strobe light began to flash, making me feel even more sick and disoriented, as we stumbled along through the wonky space.
I saw the corridor was narrower the further along we went, until I was breathing rapidly with increasing panic and claustrophobia.
Soon we were on our knees crawling through a tight space, and then we began to slide without warning downwards and around bending corners like a spiral slide in a waterpark. Only this one had no water and I found my knees beginning to burn and ache from the friction of movement.
We picked up speed and began to go up and down in wavelike motions as the slide became steeper and steeper. Faster and faster, until the walls were a blur and I felt my stomach drop sickeningly with each rise and fall of the floor.
Finally we reached the bottom and I felt completely weightless, sailing off a ramp and flying through the air, screaming, to land in a giant ball-pit. At first it was a relief, since I didn’t die from the impact of my fall, but then I began to sink and kick, trying to find the bottom. It wasn’t there.
“Oh fuck. I don’t like this.”
I looked over and saw Gary panicking as well. The ball-pit seemed to have no floor underneath it. You had to actually swim in it to stay afloat, pushing off against the resistance from below to keep your head above the surface of it.
“I can’t swim, kid,” he said desperately. “Help!” His head went under and he flailed and kicked and came back up again, his face red and looking deprived of oxygen.
“Shit. Just pretend you’re on a bicycle, Gary. Kick with your legs and… I don’t know, make kind of like arcs in front of you with your hands, okay? You can do it, just keep kicking and moving your arms.”
I could see his head going beneath the surface. I knew if I went to save him I would be dragged under with him. People drowning usually have a tendency to take other people with them, unfortunately.
“Come on, Gary. This way,” I said, trying to lead him away from the slide and towards solid ground off in the distance. There was a sign marked “exit” that way as well. “We’re almost out of here!”
His eyes became large all of a sudden, and his head disappeared below the surface in an instant, as if something very large and strong had just grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him below.
I took a moment to stare in shock at the space where he had just been before I heard the sounds from behind me and my instinct to survive kicked in again.
I started to swim out of the ball-pit and towards the exit, just as the carnival workers came careening down the slide. I saw knives and axes and other weapons glinting in their hands in the dull light.
Kicking with my legs as hard as I could, I swam towards solid ground through the ball-pit. My heart was hammering loudly in my ears and my mouth and throat were dry. Music began to blast from speakers above so I could no longer hear my pursuers.
It was the song of the circus – the classic we all know but have never bothered to look up the name of. “Entry of the Gladiators” is what it’s called if you’re interested. The music that blasted from all angles was jarring and disorienting.
I felt something sharp bite into my leg and looked back to see a woman with a pierced nose and her hair done up in a bun with a bone stuck through it. She was smiling widely and her eyes glowed red as she slashed the air and missed me just barely with her knife.
Screaming in pain, I kicked at her face and tried to move away from her towards solid ground, which was still not nearly close enough. Looking in that direction, I saw now there were several clowns holding knives waiting for me there. They stood salivating, their shoes squeaking as they paced back and forth watching me and waiting for me to get near enough to them.
Gary was dead, and with the carnival workers closing in on me, and nowhere else to run, I had a feeling I would be next.
That was when I felt something grip my ankle, hard, nails biting into my skin like talons. It began to pull me down, down, down, into the darkness below.
Part 3
JG
TCC

No disclaimer as there is no financial advice here.
Position: 800 @ xx.xx
TL;DR: The squeeze is not required. We can save everybody and shoot for the stars.
My fellow 🐵, retards, a-genius and girlfriend's husband, it is now your time to shine and show the world what eating crayons and sniffing glue has done to your smooth brains.
GME is currently at $52.40, with a market cap of $3.65B. As I math badly I will rule of three and say we need a $34B valuation to reach $483 (Edit: the SEC is worried about primary school maths, this publicly available information qualifies as manipulation).
I know... $34B (Edit: illegal number) seems like a lot of money, but humour me for a second and have look at this.
You have landed on page 6.
For the next few minutes, I will ask you to scroll up the top of the list and gibber if you don't find a name that, in your mind, is worth far less than GME.
Do it, I will wait...
You did your DD but it's still shocking, isn't it?
The squeeze is not required.
Now that it has sunken in:
• This sub has nearly 80000 members.
• Let's say 1% of them read this post, it's 800.
• 10% (trying to be super conservative) of the 800 have ideas about how to improve GameStop business in general and/or make the public realize the true value of the company. That's a dedicated and motivated team of 80 producing at least 1 idea, so 80 ideas.
• 2% of the 80s are actually really good and we end up with a bit more than 1 genius idea.
...and that's all we need.
A single (Edit: business not market!!!) idea to move GME's valuation to a fair region above $34B (Edit: I am not allowed to say that) and come back for our wounded.
Now here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to update this post and the list below with the best 🥜 produced by your challenged cerebra. With a little bit of luck, we get enough traction and get pinned.
So without further ado,

How to ensure the long-term survival of GameStop – our plan to become an interplanetary species and settle permanently among the stars:

1. u/schokoschlotze: Allowing digital reselling of gamekeys, unlike steam.
   
2. u/Diamond_Hands_Only: They need a online gaming platform like steam so I can buy and stream all my purchased games through them from one spot. GameStop.(u/mouldysandals: GameSpot)
   
3. u/OTHERMIKEtm: VR arcade with memberships. Not everyone can afford the high end computer and peripherals to have the ultimate VR experience.
   
4. u/Purrnie_Sandturds: Digital crypto currency that is accepted at GameStop stores and compatible with popular mobile/app gaming platforms. Should be distributed as a shareholder dividend.
   
5. u/pawn4king: Non shitty esports SaaS. Allowing me to create a local esports tourney and manage it all with the branding of GameStop. Esports gambling and leaderboards included. From local tourneys to large scale corporate events.
   
6. u/wiscowhaaat: Honestly, I’d like to see them as a competitor to twitch, but also become a steam competitor, as another redditor mentioned they would like to be able to sell their digital key. The one thing I hate about GameStop is that they deal too much in figurines and Knick knacks. What they need is the ability to sell ad space, because that’s obviously where the money is based on what we’ve seen out of Facebook and Twitter, etc.
   
7. u/utkant: GameStop should make play cafe, where kids can hang out and play together. Sell candy, soda, pizza, etc. Run local tournaments, regional tournaments, national, world tournaments. Sell best seller games on these places so kids can buy them to have at home if they want to.
   
8. u/Alarming-Event-8788: How about being able to live bet ($) games against each other online?
   
9. u/AvenDonn: Expand into all forms of gaming. Sports, tabletop, roleplaying, arcade (VR), as well as a publisher for video games. Good synergy with a steam competitor, being able to return digital "used" games for store credit or even real money is defintely a strong move.
   
10. u/Walruzuma: Ummm... Pretty sure Ryan Cohen has this covered. I think he's much of the reason for the original DD on the play and why no one is worried about hodling.But what do I know. I'm just a simple cave man who does not offer financial advice. But I do offer advice about shills. Don't tell this guy anything (op: sure mate)
    
11. We like the stonk.
    

Ladies and gentletards, synchronize (Edit: dangerous word) Flik Flak.
💎👐🚀

Alright folks, buckle up and Charge your batteries. This play's going to smack you all the way back to 1999.
First, a recap. WSB has proven to the world that retail matters. With the power of the hive mind, leveraged options trading, and distinctly fragile market conditions, we've refueled a few businesses that were written off by the street. And we made some money doing it. To no one's surprise, the gaslighting boomers called us manic, irrational, and stupid. They hired CNBC to dismiss us, politicize us, patronize us, or accuse us of cheating. They told us to go back to watching Netflix and let the big boys steer the ship.
Fact is, we all know the GME play was no smooth brained fluke. The strategy formed organically, built on a masterly combination of market technicals, narrative, underlying facts, and community research. A few timely events, and we took off to the stratosphere.
Now it's time to let them know that we can also bring things back down to earth. It's time to prove that us lovely commoners are grounded, sophisticated analysts--or at least, we're fast learning newbs. We are measured in judgement, clear in action, helpful to our communities. And we're having some fun. Retail is not a stupid mob, we are a collective social intelligence.
So there's my heartfelt intro, now onto the play.
Two words, and you're not going to like it:Short. Tesla.
I'll give you a minute.
If you just bought $TSLA and think all stonks only go up, you can skip to the comments, turn caps lock ON, and go nuts. Stonks to infinity means hyperinflation. You're a millionaire, and a burger costs 12k. No thanks. So here's the breakdown.
Table of Contents. (That's right.)

1. The Gravity. Hive Mind is Uploaded: Retail Options Control the Delta Hedge.
2. The Mass. All Roads lead to Mars...and Back. Passive Inclusion of $TSLA, the "God Meme".
3. The Playing Field.
4. The Trade.
5. The Risks.
6. The Endgame. Power to the Players.

Let's goo.

I. The Gravity. The Hive Mind is Uploaded. Retail Options Control the Delta Hedge.

Let's start with what we know. We're all poor and the Hedge Fund managers are rich. If you add together all retail investors, our funds would barely tick on the balance sheet of your local BlackRock. There's a reason they're called the 1%.
So what gives? How can a few Reddit analysts and their YOLO followers trigger cascading rallies across multiple tickers, even moving the very SPY itself?
​
GME vs SPY, during the Deep Fuckin Squeeze
To grasp the answer, you need to understand one thing about Delta-Hedging. Delta Hedging is what Market Makers do to stay 'risk neutral' while buying or selling options.
It works like this: When a Market Maker sells you a Call option, they also buy more Shares as hedge. That way, if the call ends up being right, they already have the Shares to sell you, and they've made a little profit on the price increase. If they didn't do the Delta Hedge, the Market Maker would have to go out and buy those shares above the Strike Price, then sell them to you at a loss.
There's more to it, but thats all you need to know here.
We saw these dynamics at play with GME. You probably heard the terms Delta Squeeze, Gamma Squeeze, Short Squeeze, etc.
As you recall, the squeeze happened because lots of people started going long GME. The more people went long, the more shares Mr. Market Maker had to buy, which sent the price higher and higher, tempting more and more people to buy in and go long. It's a feedback loop, sparked by a few retail traders at the bottom of the food chain.
As Alex Harfouche, former head of Goldman Sachs' European block trading, keenly points out:

"Basic maths can demonstrate that the massive price moves are not ONLY a function of Reddit retail crowd YOLOing calls turning MMs into delta-hedging chasers. 15% to 20% of daily traded calls become OI (they are day traded) hence have no effect on dynamic delta-hedging. This leaves one explanation to the parabolic moves: when Reddit starts concentrating call buying volumes on some names, some keen observers are using this as a signal and fueling the moves." https://twitter.com/alexharfouche1/status/1355177706292465664

The $TSLA Delta Squeeze has been more prolonged, and MUCH more YUGE, but it follows the same mechanics. The more speculative calls, the more shares Market Makers have to buy up. Price goes up, speculation increases. It's a feedback loop, with little retail at the bottom, deciding everything.
That's the Gravity. Now onto the Mass.

II. The Mass. All Roads lead to Mars...and Back. Passive Inclusion of $TSLA, the "God Meme".

The second turbocharger that sent $TSLA soaring is pure courtesy of boomer mismanagement. They're called passive index funds, like the beloved SP&500. If you're not familiar, these funds track the 'biggest companies' and continuously rebalance their portfolios to hold an weighted distribution of shares.
Once the Delta-Squeeze hit the magic number, $TSLA was signed up to be included in these Passive Funds. This resulted in a astronomical amount of forced buying. For example, the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, the OG passive index-tracking investment fund, has assets of over $600B. To bring Tesla up to the required 1.6% of its portfolio, Vanguard has to buy about $10B worth of Tesla shares. Just because.
And Vanguard is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Barron’s, “between $5 trillion and $6 trillion are invested in funds indexed to the S&P 500.” Because of arcane indexing algorithms, these funds were forced to buy around 120 million shares of Tesla, worth $80-100B, and divest $80-100B of other holdings, to align their portfolios with the new index composition. That's a whole lot of Buy Pressure.
But that's not it. An additional estimated $6.7 trillion in Active Funds are really just blindly following the S&P500, in a dubious practice called "Closet Indexing". [1] Basically you pretend to be an Active Fund Manager, but just construct a portfolio based on the SP&500 and collect a big management fee. It's the copypaste-from-wikipedia homework of the hedge fund manager world. Def can't go tits up.
So that's the Mass.
It's a whole of lot of money blindly buying up a stock, sending it higher and higher, luring in more and more speculation, despite the fact that the present day business fundamentals absolutely do not correspond. At this point, the bull narrative for Tesla has been whittled down to full reliance on "distant futures" and the cult following of Elon Musk.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but with the Gravity of Retail Driven Delta-Hedge and the Mass of Passive Fund Inclusion, there's a chance that even a small shift in public opinion will trigger cascading downward prices, as the Market Makers reverse and the planetary mass of Passive Inclusion Funds (and all their copycats) desperately rebalance and sell off.
But what do I know, I just eat crayons.

III. The Playing Field.

You might ask yourself--Why would so many Money Managers rely on Passive Indexing, copypasta, or reddit sentiment to do their jobs? Simply put: Because they live on yachts, and think they're too special to interface with the real world. These people have no way of knowing what is actually going on in the lives of everyday people, what we like, what we need, and how we assign value.
Remember: the underlying isn't the Stock Price. The underlying is the business. The actual real world operations associated with the Ticker, how they affect people's lives, and how we the people feel about that. In 2021, Retail will teach everyone this lesson, and many will be butthurt.
​
Tech Cycle Rolls Over. Courtesy of Trader_ferg, read the tweet. https://twitter.com/trader_ferg/status/1359504988960026627
On a way zoomed out macro level, this all makes sense, and is squarely aligned with the Central Banks mandate to undertake new social & economic reform. Part of this reset is the technological reality that accessible Retail Options trading is a far more granular method of capturing sentiment and valuation. With share trading, all a User can do is "Buy" or "Sell". Not much info for the AI to feed off of. On the other hand, with options, a user can provide a nuanced input about their projected Value and Future Timing of the Business. It's like Photo vs. Video. 4D Chess. A lot more data. All it needs is to be wired together and get a few more big Pumps of The Juice--not to make 'all stonks go up forever', but simply to facilitate the transactional throughput of higher order computing.
This is good: A massive Hive Mind of independent rational agents, feeding the blossoming AI with rich realtime votes on the value and future prospects of a Company. The AI needs this. It does not need a handful of overpaid money-managers who have never peeled a banana to sit on their yachts and pick tickers out of hat, or sleep at the wheel while an intern copies the trades of a 40-year-old indexing algorithm. There's too much risk of mis-pricing the underlying, and too many inefficient middlemen. With our help, the Hive Mind can do it better and cheaper, and the Real Big Boys know that. As the old adage goes, together Apes Strong. 🦍🦍🦍
Data from Options trading is just the beginning. Soon enough, stakeholders from across the world will seamlessly participate in realtime corporate governance, valuation, and ownership of the companies that touch their lives. The World Economic Forum call this the Shareholder Economy.
But that's future talk. Q3 2022. Let's stick to the present situation.

IV. The Trade.

I'll keep this part simple. If you're holding $TSLA, start selling the top. What the actual fuck are shares, anyway. If you're new or looking for a YOLO, Puts on TSLA, all year long.
Exact timing? Sooner than you think, maybe Tuesday.Pick your own risk/reward. Don't get freaky behind Wendy's or pawn off your girlfriend's cat.
690 is not a meme. 420 is probably not a meme. 42 is a meme.
And If you believe in the resonant effects of Mass and Gravity: Puts on SPY down to 369. NASDAQ-100 Puts to 10420.
Paper handed bitches too emo to go short: Buy some Steel, limited edition Air Jordans, or a '99 Cherokee straight 6. Collectibles will print for the next decade.
And if you're here bc you really dgaf and just want to Send A Message, throw puts on all the bois that keep ruining society: FB, Google, Twitter, Amazon, etc. Get creative. Trust your gut. If they don't print, at least you die a hero.
Remember, we don't have money, but we're the ones in charge. It's a spiritual choice. Boom. And guess what else, Dennis? We're not "afraid of a market crash" any more than we're afraid of getting shot at in Fortnite. A game's a game. We're already poor, unemployed, stuck at home in your dysfunctional system, eating shitty cold food from DoorDash. (Another excellent short, btw.)
But Wall Street did teach us one thing: you don't need to lose money, as long as you're on the right side of the trade. We see you. And we're capable of sitting back, crackin' a cold one, and surfing this wave all the way down the mountain. We are rising to the occasion, and putting ourselves on the right side of the trade.
If that was all too complicated, just call it the Reverse Moon. All Stonks go up, therefore All stonks go down. Now it's time for Stonks Go Down, so hop on board and don't worry. This Truck is Fully Powered By Gravity--the cleanest energy--the code is live in the matrix, uploading to your braincells as we speak. 100% self-driving, always have been. Turn off the iPhone and go hug your Mom. In the 5th Dimension, we're already Trillionaires.

V. The Risks

Timing. As far as I can tell, the biggest risk here is timing and scale. The TSLA fundamentals check out: bona fide crap. Price is the only thing that made it to Mars. Market conditions are primed for a steep reversal, It might have even started last week. Product quality is weak, but I can't confirm since I've only seen their cars on Youtube. Big Boys like Ford are coming to bat. Tech multiple is a ponzi.
But we still have no way of knowing how long elevated prices in the sector can last. Usually these things are drawn out like a drugged out bender, until they roll over and quickly collapse. Unfortunately, there are alot of rich fallguys like Chamath and Cathie Wood trying to distract you with Shiny Objects while they show their even richer Masters to the door.
I say fuck it, let's pre-empt, call out the bullshit and get our asses on the right side of this trade before it's too late. I don't want to be the last guy at the party strung out on the couch. I bet you don't either.
But what about the other failed shorts? Yep, lots of hedge fund managers have bled themselves dry trying to go short $TSLA. They neglected to realize the importance of The Vibe, and were generally short TSLA because they didn't believe in the core business or EVs or rocketships or some other arcane boomer technical thing. This time its different. Retail has already cashed the $TSLA stimmy check. Twitter is pwned. We see the smart money moving away, and can call it like we see it. We have learned how the market works, and we've adapted. $GME might not have made us all rich with money, but it made some of us just rich enough to spark confidence in the rest. We can spot the right moves, call them out, and participate in our financial system and economy. Who woulda thought.
But what about More Fed Stimmy? Silly boomer, Fed Stimmy was never about shifting to a paradigm where all stonks go up. It was about a macro return to shareholder economics, an embrace of price volatility, and the necessary technical upgrades to facilitate Big Data sentiment capture from the retail Hive Mind. Didn't you read Larry Fink's 2021 Letter to CEOs? Central Banks have played these games before, Take a look at Japan, or read about the Carry. Weird shit happens. But guess what, Bankers? In reality, you're the subs. I said it before, this is the 5th Dimension. We're gucci; you work for us. Enjoy the yacht and stay out of our treehouse. We don't have all your money, but we have our communities, our friends, our families, and our glorious lossporn. Freedoms so wild you literally could never imagine. Maybe that's why you locked us down, so our lives would suck as much as yours. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
But what about The Future? Get those crayons out of your mouth. Human civilization is not one pre-order deposit away from a Techno-Paradise-Utopia. The Tesla Roadster took $250k deposits 3 years ago and has still delivered nothing. With $250k in 2018, you could've bought 50BTC and sold 'em to Musk for $2.3M last week. You got played, 'Frisco. Sorry not sorry.
The market is about main street, schools, small businesses, food, and homes. Root canals and babysitters. It's about real fucking people, none of whom will ever be rich enough to upload our brains to a network of satellites floating around Mars. Most of us, even the ones who made money with your dumb 2020 stonks, have had a pretty rough year. The future is wonderful, but there's also this little thing called the Present. And it's proving to be of vital importance.
But what about Internet Fame? No one can sustain infinite economic growth by going on Joe Rogan Podcast or shooting off cryptic 3 word tweets. Most of the engagement on elonmusk twitter is spam. The rest is Cringe. Go Check. On top of that, we all know that Twitter is compromised, that Mark Zuckerberg still has no real friends, and that web2 ad-tech social media is a garbage business model that ends up building worthless propaganda machines and echo chambers. I'd rather chill w my cat and horde Uranium. Whoops.
Unexpected Interventions? As we know, the Powers At Be have a lot of levers to pull. Tesla has been propped up by sweetheart government deals and tax credits. In fact that's the only reason they make any money to begin with. Go read about it.
So there's that: the government might do anything. There might be a new crisis and the gov might forces us to close all our bank accounts, wear chicken costumes, and dance in circles. Government intervention is a wild card. But weirdly enough, I think the Big Banks are on our side, ish. They def need to pwn all our trading data, harness our collective brainpower to go full AI, then cut out the previous generation of complacent middle-market fund managers. So who knows. This is all speculation. I don't work for the CIA. We do know that Michael Burry is short. And sequels sell.
China? Had to throw it in there, bc Biden might be pwned by the CCP and we might already be living in a Chinese colony. If that's true, I got no problem. China is cool, I love China, great culture, great people, the food, all of it. And they'll probably fix our roads! Xie xie! :D
But with respect to $TSLA price action and The Trade, the China Factor could work for or against us. I have no idea what China wants from me. Pelosi did buy some $TSLA Leaps, but that might've been a PsyOp. She's got hella deepfake vibes. Again, No idea. Consult your tea leaves.
But who's going to lose? Who will be the bagholders? As you've probably learned, every trade has a winner and loser. Such is life. There will always be bagholders. All I can say is that this time around, it doesn't need to be us.
If it all plays out according to my Tarot Cards, the Bankers will do what they've done best for centuries, and losses will be socialized across all the boomers with $ in passive index funds. People thought it was safe, but neglected to realize that the lazy overpaid fund managers didn't update their models since 1985. Instead, they let a hyped up trojan horse distort their portfolios and stretch the connection between SPY and the Real World, while in the background a tech-enabled Options market became the new Hive Mind of retail sentiment.
The Bagholders will be everyone who was comfortable and complacent enough to actually believe that if you dump all your assets in a passive index fund then durpa durp all stonks go up.Newsflash: It was a meme. We were kidding.
​
Now don't get me wrong: Elon Musk is still weird and cool and none of this is a knock on him at all. He is undoubtedly a genius, and probably embraced these ideas years ago. He's told us many times: the future is re-usable rocketships. Up and Down. Up and Down. Volatility. In the long term, Tesla will succeed and fulfill its mission, and the influence of Musk and his companies will go down in history.
But Markets are markets. Trader_ferg says it best:

Multiple contraction overrides perfect mgmt execution. Your views can prove correct, Yet you get killed. Take Cisco in 2000. If you'd invested based on it: -Becoming a mainstay of the internet -Growing revenue strongly for next decade
You'd have been right. Yet still lost >80%.

Remember. Do not get emotional here, this is fundamental trading. Puts on $TSLA won't hurt baby X Æ A-XII. I know you might be a fanboy. It's ok, we forgive you.
The move is technical, and the point is simple: infinite money isn't a thing. All stonks go down. The markets are fragile; Retail Option Traders are in charge. $TSLA is overbought by a delta squeeze & huge passive fund inclusion. And at this precise moment we're rolling, Because we control the narrative.

VI. Endgame. Power to the Players.

So where does this all lead us? What happens to a world where the market is truly just a video game, fed by a mass of independent individuals riding a play up or down, talking strategy, making friends, and having fun? What happens is simple: markets function better, society is improved, and there is Way More Chill™. One day the social hive mind will cut out the Chamaths and Dorseys of the world and autonomously perform market functions: valuing companies and steering corporate governance in a realtime, decentralized, transparent way. There will still be Shadow Kings, but we might stop stressing about Booms and Busts, horribly opaque corporate governance, and endless media-Induced panics. We just want to play. The system might be smart, but we can always move first.
Anyway, started trading last week, so take this with a spoon of salt. Def not financial advice, but if you've read this far, you know that. Full Disclosure: I drive an '87 Chevy 4x4 and it rips. Only simps buy a Tesla.
​
Sincerely yours,
-0xpectation.
​
what up

Appendix. Notes, Edits, and Responses:

FUCK IT, WRITING ADVICE POST
Are we gonna do this? LET’S FUKKEN DO THIS. This is a writing advice post for people who don’t own thirty seven black turtlenecks or seven bookcases full of Books You Had to Read in High School and Hated or a completely unadorned macbook pro because what kind of sociopath doesn’t put stickers on their laptop??
HERE ARE MY CREDENTIALS I write both for fun and profit, I have been published here and there and paid here and there and won awards here and there and I have been writing down stories since the moment I got the hang of holding a crayon which was a long fucking time ago. I’m most well known for writing erotica, being a huge asshole, exploring themes of trauma and mental illness, and being a huge asshole.
We are going to start from the BEGINNING of how to write a story, because not everyone knows how to tell a story let alone write one and THAT IS FUCKING OKAY because holy shit have you seen the god damn dumpster fire that is the world right now you have other things on your mind.
STEP ONE: CONSUME
A lot of writerly types will tell you that you have to read and read and read in order to get better at writing and I am here to let you know that THAT IS ONLY PARTLY TRUE. There are A THOUSAND ways to tell a story and the more ways you absorb stories, the better you will get at shitting one back out. Here are is a random list of things to shove into your brain hole that will feed your story monster:
BOOKS (not just fiction, not just the genre you’re interested in, but ALL KINDS OF BOOKS: adult literature, “adult” literature ;), YA, whatever comes before YA that isn’t picture books, actual picture books, nonfiction, biographies, autobiographies, coffee table books about World War II, basically anything that has pages and two covers and isn’t blank on the inside.)
And here I’m already gonna have to step on the breaks because HEY YOU’RE A BUSY FUCKING PERSON and NOT EVERYBODY HAS THE TIME OR PATIENCE TO READ and holy shit NOT EVERYONE ENJOYS READING EVEN IF THEY ENJOY WRITING and ALSO PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES EXIST, so let me just give you blanket permission to “read” a book in any way that you goddamn choose. Audiobooks read by an actor, Kindle books robot-read by Alexa or some other text-to-speech program, fucking-- SPARKNOTES if you have to. If there is a way that is easier, more accessible, and more comfortable for you to put words into your brain then THAT IS A GOOD WAY and any ableist fucks who say different can EAT MY ASS.
Back to the list.
MOVIES (of any kind, from the G-est of G rated Disney musicals to a fucking Serbian Film, every movie has a writer behind it and every movie tells a story and you need to consume that story to feed it to your story monster. Also don’t watch a Serbian Film.)
TV SHOWS (even reality TV has a script writer, folks, and the raw video is cut INTO A COHERENT NARRATIVE)
PODCASTS
VIDEO GAMES
BLOGS
ANIME YEAH MOTHERFUCKER I SAID IT
THE NEWS, if you can handle it and frankly if you can’t I don’t fukken blame you
STORIES TOLD TO YOU BY FRIENDS AND FAMILY
STORIES TOLD TO YOU BY STRANGERSSTORIES TOLD TO SOMEONE ELSE BUT YOU WERE EAVESDROPPING
STORIES TOLD TO YOU BY YOURSELF, also known as SHIT THAT ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY HAPPENED TO YOU
Ladies, Fellas, and People That Don’t Give a Fuck, there are stories being told EVERYWHERE, and you should consume as many of them in as many different ways as you can.
STEP TWO: SCRIBBLY
So you’ve been greedily stuffing all this different data into your brain hole to feed the story monster. What’s the thing that’s gonna make you different from all the other plebes who only watch Game of Thrones for the tits and Peter Dinklage? You are gonna WRITE STUFF DOWN.
I have a habit of waking up in the middle of the night, blindly groping for my phone, opening up the notepad app and dictating whatever random idea just came into my brain before slamming my face back into the pillow. You see, I can do this because I am a seasoned autheur, but you are gonna have to get some practice in before you’re as good as I am at slurring “ground beef incest fic” at Siri at 4:00AM.
Here’s how you do that: bust out your trapper-keepers and garfield pencil toppers because I am sending you back to third grade to write a fucking book report. You’re standing up at the front of the classroom with the blackboard behind you and the teacher taking another swig from their “water bottle” and you are gonna tell yourself about what you just read, or saw, or listened to, or heard.
Some examples of what you want to write down:What you watched, when, and what type of media it was
(The Mandalorian, 12/12, illegally downloaded Disney + TV show)
The main cast of characters and what they were doing
(Mando, Baby Yoda, Mulan, Spoiler Alert, and a Shitton of Stormtroopers were fighting over whether or not Baby Yoda was gonna go with the guy from Breaking Bad.)
How Did It Make You Feel or, for super beginners, Did You Like It Why/Why Not
(The episode was a half hour of action that should have taken place in ten minutes, so the whole thing felt like *Spiderman running comically slowly while yelling “quick!”* The sense of urgency was just Not There for me.)
And the optional “Hmmm…” Meaning little things that you noticed that you kind of liked.
(The only part that wasn’t eye-rolly to me was Spoiler Alert absolutely destroying people with Sand People weapons as if [they] really knew how to use them, which was a neat bit of silent exposition that I appreciated.)
Now the first like, seven times you do this it’s going to feel like a fucking chore, but what you’re doing here is teaching yourself how to consume something as a writer instead of as an audience member. You’ll find yourself actually thinking about the story as it unfolds, considering the mechanics of it-- how the writers handle giving emotion to a man who never takes his helmet off and is goofy looking when he does, how a character speaks is leading you to make a judgement about him and might be setting you up for a twist later, how a writer can convey the atmosphere of a time or place even when read in the most robotic of Alexa voices.
WARNING: ONCE YOU LEARN TO DO THIS, YOU CANNOT UNLEARN HOW TO DO THIS. FROM THIS POINT ON, BADLY WRITTEN STORIES ARE GOING TO BOTHER YOU SO MUCH.
STEP TWO POINT FIVE: MORE SCRIBBLY
If you get an idea, write it down. Even if it sounds stupid to you. Most ideas sound stupid when they’re rendered all the way down to the barest notepad app bones. “Guy goes fishing, spends all fucking day trying to reel in a marlin, but it won’t fit in his boat so by the time he gets it home it’s been eaten by a bunch other fish and he’s like, ‘fuck’”; “A kid is shipwrecked and stranded in a lifeboat with a tiger but not really”; “I have never met a Geisha in my life but I’m going to pretend I did and make up a bunch of shit about prewar Japan”; “YET ANOTHER fantasy series based on the War of the Roses, this time with dragons/demons/people with guns/incest/samurai.”
Just get it down, get it out of your brain, you can come back and refine it later if you want to or you can leave it in your journal or notepad app to rot for eternity but get in the habit of doing it.
STEP THREE: WRITING???
But you already have an idea and you’ve already got your fingers on the keyboard and you just want to do it do it do it do it already.So do it. Take your idea and write that shit down. Here’s the catch: it is going to suck.
No no no no stop stop stop put the gun down, it’s okay. Everyone’s writing sucks. Not just at first; most published authors’ writing just fucking blows when they put virgin words on a virgin page. That’s what rewriting is for. That’s what editing is for. That’s what practice is for. You really have to take your trembling, hairless virgin idea and get it nice and dirty before it’s gonna start looking like anything decent.
In your first draft of your story, your main character is way too perfect and things just sort of happen to him and he defeats all the bad guys without breaking a sweat or experiencing anything that even smells like growth. So you start over.
In the next draft, MC is a bit more fleshed out but he’s still kind of being railroaded from one place to the next and not making any decisions that show the reader what kind of person he is and that he has an effect on his own path. So you start over.
In the next draft you realize shit this dialogue is really wooden and what the fuck is happening in the third act, is that even a third act? Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of climax? Wait, is the climax just before you beat the bad guy or right after? So you start over.
Yes, it’s kind of a drag, and yes, this is why writers are usually portrayed as cranky and disheveled because we fucking are. But each time you miss, you are learning something new about your story, about its characters, about the world, and about yourself, as a storyteller. You can outline and plan to your heart’s content, but it’s in the actual draft that you’re going to find out what makes or breaks the story.
“Well fuck, Sauce, is there any way around having to draft and re-draft and re-re-draft and re-re-re-draft until the Hemingway Option starts to look really tempting?”
Well, sort of. All those little book reports you’ve been doing, those are your tools for becoming a better writer. But you have to learn how to use a tool correctly, and that takes time and yeah, trial and error. If I really like the “reverse character arc” thing that Breaking Bad did and want to try it out, it’s going to take me a couple whacks to get it going the right way. If I want to nail atmosphere and witty dialogue like Ursula Vernon, you bet I’m gonna shit out a pile of straight-to-dvd Disney threequel snoozefests before I hit on something really great.Here are some things that can make your writing better:
1. Get to know yourself pretty well. The more in touch you are with you, the more authentic and honest your writing will sound to your readers. Don’t try to sound smart, or try to sound funny, or try to sound like Neil Gaiman or whatever. Try to sound like you.
2. Write what you like, write what you know, write what you want.

• WRITE WHAT YOU LIKE: You love gorgeous blondes so your main character’s girlfriend is always a gorgeous blonde. Don’t worry about what other people are gonna think-- indulge in ideas that you find interesting and fun. Anyway, far worse literary sins have been committed than blonde girlfriends, I promise you.
• WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW: Here’s what that doesn’t mean: “I’m a postal worker so I can only write books about postal workers.” I mean you can, there’s an audience for everything, but what I mean here is that you know what it feels like to be exhausted, to be joyous, to be furious, to be terrified. Scoop out those delicious emotions and experiences and plagarize the shit out of your own life.
• WRITE WHAT YOU WANT: “Is this too dark? Is this too fluffy? Is there too much sex? Is there not enough sex? Should I include seventeen subplots?” If you want to do it, do it. Your story shouldn’t be told how you think it should be told, it should be told how you want it to be told, even if it’s unconventional or scary or goofy or really fucking horny. Whatever you write, however you write it, there will be readers who love it.

3. Write a lot. But not too much. I know that it’s hard to find time, find motivation, find inspiration. I know that Stephen King in his infinite wisdom has hereby declared that anyone who doesn’t write for sixteen hours straight per day isn’t a Real Writer, and I know that the common advice on here is to write every day. Fuck that noise. You should write when you can, and you should try to write a lot. But if you push it and push it and push it and push it, you’re going to start hating it. Let yourself write one hundred, two hundred, five hundred words. If it’s just not happening, get up and go do something else for a little while. Give your brain a break.
“But you’ll never get published that way,” smirks an army of beturtlenecked Liberal Arts majors. “If you want to get published, you have to work hard at it.”
Fuck you, y’all know that getting published is based on luck and marketing, not skill, right? Have you read some of the hot garbage that gets put to print? Go choke on a fukken macchiato.
Something important to note is that if you aren’t putting down a lot of good stuff this year, it might be because the entire fucking world is on fire and you’re under a tiny bit of stress because of it. Give yourself a break. The world may end, but it’s probably not going to end because you decided to watch The Witcher instead of banging your head against the keyboard for two more hours.
IN CONCLUSION
Being a creative is a really fukken weird experience and everyone approaches it differently. Beware of any strict advice or rules that you’re told you’re not allowed to break. Take in as much information as you can and shit it back out any way that makes you feel good. When it’s time for the business part of it-- finding an agent, marketing, publishing, all that bullshit-- then’s the time to buy a book and talk to an expert. Until then, just get the story told.
Love,
Your neighborhood asshole
EDIT: why did Reddit destroy the formatting on this post, what did I ever do to you
ETA: If you DO want my rec for a book "about writing," Carolyn See's "Making a Literary Life" is one that I read ages ago that really spoke to me in a way that none of the other writing books I'd read had. THIS IS NOT MY BOOK-- just one that I like.
For all of you asking where to find my work, please read the most well-written novel you have ever encountered and pretend that it's mine.

If you haven't already, please checkout Link 1 and Link 2 in that order to get caught up to speed.
Once again, names, places, and certain specifics have been changed for privacy reasons,
(Aso fixed the ages to the actual age of each person.)
I overheard Amber and Troy going at it one Saturday night and I got fed up with constantly hearing them. I knocked on their door to let them know I could hear, and then I knocked on the wall in my room when I could still hear them. A shirtless Troy soon opened the door to my room and asked what was up, and I asked him if they could at least not fuck while I'm still present in the apartment. He gave an annoyed response of “ok sorry” and walked off and then Amber showed up almost immediately after he went away. Amber confronted me about the knocking and then had Troy stand in their room and sing the ABCs to see if she could hear him. I could hear him as he got to L M N O P, but I guess her hearing isn’t as good as mine because she couldn’t hear him in the slightest. After that childish display was done, I asked her the same question that I asked Troy “Can you at least please not fuck while I’m home? It's rude and inconsiderate! Besides, you promised me you wouldn’t long before he even arrived here.” She didn’t anything and just closed my door, and after that, I thought it was the end of it. I thought wrong.
I woke up on the following Sunday morning and checked my phone for any messages and/or alerts like I usually do. At first, I had to collect myself because I saw that I had some discord messages from Amber that read “and also GTFO” and “not asking too much :)”. I had to collect myself a bit because maybe I was imagining things, but once I had some time to fully wake up, I saw that what I saw was real. I opened discord on my phone to see if there was more she had sent me, but upon opening our DMs there was nothing there, almost as if she had conveniently deleted them. I hopped on my laptop to check discord because I thought that maybe my phone was acting weird, but as I turned on my laptop and waited for discord to load up, the notification bar on the bottom right popped up with two more discord messages from Amber that read “STFU” and “XDD”.
It was then that I realized that I needed out of there as soon as possible. If that’s how a grown woman is going to respond to someone asking her to not fuck her boyfriend while someone else is still present in the apartment, then who knows how that same grown woman will react if there's a bigger and nastier disagreement down the road. I didn’t want to stick around to find out if it would have evolved from hateful highschooler-Esque messages to fists flying or things being thrown. That same Sunday morning I applied for as many apartments within my price range that I could find.
I was scheduled for an interview for an apartment on Tuesday, literally a few days after my initial (post). My heart was kind of pounding because the demo unit the lady was showing me happened to be right next door almost to the original apartment that I shared with Amber and Troy. We had to cut across the back before reaching the demo unit. The unit she showed me was newly renovated and the perfect size for someone like me, not too big and not too small, and it even had space for a balcony on top! I was thoroughly impressed with what I saw, and to be honest, I would have been impressed with any unit so long as it got me out of my situation at the time. The lady who was giving the tour of the unit said she has a couple of other prospects looking at similar units, but they hadn’t come to decision yet. It was then my joy got the better of me and I ended up shamelessly blurting out “Sold! I’ll take it!”. It got a good laugh out of her and we made our way back to the office to confirm the acquisition of one of the units she was talking about. I was fortunate enough to be able to select an upstairs unit because she had sent me a text that stated there were two units available, an upstairs unit and a ground floor unit. After sending an initial fee for the application, I was almost instantly approved the next day over and soon after had sent in my deposit.
The Friday of that same week, however, Amber brought up the topic of the incident that occurred on Saturday night earlier in the week. She wanted to get to the bottom of how I knew they were having relations and that it made her “livid-pissed” when I knocked a second time. She then went on what seemed to be like a rant/discussion about the entire incident for a little over an hour, trying to figure out just how I was able to hear them. She made statements of “Why were you listening?” / “why did you hone in on what we were doing?” / “You said you could hear everything, so clearly that means you can hear everything and anything we can say or do!” / “That’s both creepy and an invasion of privacy!”. Amber told me that she was so angry that Saturday night that she was wanting to kick me out and had typed up what she described as “an entire book worth of a message” out of rage. She only deleted it because her boyfriend Troy had convinced her to, and said that “It's not worth it, let it go”. She even went as far as walking to her bedroom, playing a video on her phone at full volume, closing the door, going into my room and closing the door, and trying to listen for the sound of her phone. Surprise surprise, she could hear it, and only proved that I wasn’t lying or making things up. She wanted to know how I could “hear everything”, and I told her…6 separate times…that I can’t hear exactly what they are saying, just mumbles that sometimes get loud as well as laughter, but it's pretty easy to differentiate between whats a mumble and whats a moan. Any adult worth their salt should know what a moan sounds like, or at the very least, understanding that a long drawn out muffled tone sounds kind of weirdly suspicious and different from what you'd hear if it was from two people talking or laughing.
Amber basically called me a tyrant and that I was acting like a nazi as she went on to tell me viewpoints, stances, and opinions on the matter. It was basically a slap in the face as she (for lack of better phrasing) demanded to know how exactly I could tell what was going on. I don’t just sit there in silence and wait for something to happen, I either have music playing or a video going while I play a game on my console. I keep one headphone on and the other off my ear because I want to hear my game as I play music for background noise whenever I'm not watching a cutscene. (Please tell me I’m not the only one who does this) It’s not my fault if I happen to overhear her laughter as it raises a few handfuls of decibels and I don’t choose to listen or hone in on whatever is they're talking about.
Amber has this nasty habit of exaggerating things when she talks about something. For example, when she was talking to me about all of this, she said that I constantly knock whenever I hear something and now whenever she hears me get up and out of my room, she always huddles in place and waits to hear what I'm doing. (much like a child who’s up late past their bedtime and is trying to be stealthy. Freezing when they hear their parents up and about) The only time I knocked on her door is when I wanted to talk to her or Troy and/or see when they wanted to go get groceries, or even just casually brief and friendly conversation.
Amber told me that she’s never been this stressed before in her entire life and that she’s going to need therapy after all of this. (to which she repeated that she’ll need therapy more than once) I couldn’t agree more in all honesty, this whole experience is nerve-wracking, a huge mental strain, testing our patience, and it's putting our mental stabilities on a rusty razor wire. The messed-up part is that NOBODY should have to be going through this situation, to begin with! Nobody should be forced to basically live with their ex and boyfriend of said ex. The mature and responsible thing to do is to live out the rest of the lease and THEN either person can live with their new partner after they’ve acquired their own places. Again, I just want to reiterate that I know I wasn’t the best boyfriend. I said and did things that I shouldn’t have and I accept and acknowledge that I did my fair share of wrongdoings, but I wouldn’t invite an LDR (long-distance relationship), partner, to come to live with me while my ex was still present in the remaining duration of the lease, regardless if they were here to help with bills and rent. I’m not a bad person for asking her to not have relations while I'm in the house, and I don’t actively go out of my way to spy and eavesdrop on every little thing that happens to go on in their room. I sincerely don’t give one Fresh Prince of Belaire’s fuck of what goes in their room, and I don’t even give them any shit when Troy smokes his pot out on the balcony (neither he nor she smokes on the balcony. They just sit on the floor in the apartment and crack the door open, they don’t set foot on the balcony in the slightest. They’ve even smoked in the apartment with the doors closed because they didn’t want to have to deal with a wasp. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve woken up smelling cigarette smoke or pot smoke. I was too afraid of being called a “tyrant” or a “nazi” to speak up and ask them to go outside) or in general.
Amber is solely focused on the fact that we’re struggling financially, but we were doing just fine financially when we were together because we pooled our money together and were able to slowly build up a savings of sorts for when we really needed money. The only poison we encountered in terms of finances was DoorDash. (it gets addicting because of the comfort and ease of use). Amber even said it herself, we got by because we pooled our money together. We were even at one point on our way to a substantial amount of 5k within almost a year’s time, and we were doing extremely well for ourselves! She was never for want and we were never starving ourselves to pay bills or rent, we were able to get nice things and live comfortably.
Another issue I faced is Troy’s fondness for pot. Troy liked to smoke weed to unwind and whatnot, the problem is that it’s illegal in the state I reside in. I ran the risk of going to jail by way of “guilty by association” even though I myself have never smoked any or plan to smoke any. I couldn’t say anything about it because I know it would just be another “Demand of The Nazi Tyrant” in Ambers's eyes. I was always on edge and stressed out of my mind for fear of cops showing up at the apartment one day and then arresting everyone present. My perfectly clean background record would have been smudged and stained by the actions of another, and it wouldn’t matter what I would say to law enforcement, Id still be residing in a house where drugs were present, and I know for a fact they have it because Amber took the liberty of showing it to me one night.
Amber and I had somehow had a moment of civility one day as we talked about Christmas like two mature adults. She was brainstorming on what to get Troy for Christmas, and that she knew he liked unique knives…and guns. You guessed it, she wanted to give him a gun, and needless to say, I wasn’t about to let there be a mix of alcohol, pot, AND guns in a place that I don’t have any legal ties to and wasn’t moved out of yet. (mainly because if they were to get busted somehow, it would only worsen the shit pit for me that I would be inevitably thrown into). Amber proceeded to call me a pussy multiple times while laughing before finally giving in and agreeing to give up the pursuit of gifting her boyfriend a knife. The conversation about the gun for Christmas took place on Thursday, December 17, the week before the week of Christmas. The apartment complex didn’t have a move-in date for me on my apartment, but I was in communication with the complex and they informed me that they would have a “better update” next week.
I called the apartment complex and inquired about the status of my unit, I was informed that the remodeling team was behind a bit, but all they had left to do was to finish with painting the walls and that she would check in on the following Monday of the 28th. Despite my constant advice (warnings) of telling Amber to save her money, she went out and bought me a pair of skull candy (noise-canceling) headphones for Christmas. She also bought Troy some gifts, as well as getting a tree, stocking, and stocking stuffers to decorate the apartment with. While Amber and Troy lounge in the living room, I finalized getting my utilities turned on and ready for my move-in date.
The date was set for a solid 01/01/2021 with no foreseeable bumps or hiccups. The plan for that Friday was to go to bed like normal on Thursday, set an alarm to wake up when they do on Friday, wait for them to go to work, text/call my folks to give them the green light to come here, load up the Uhaul, drive a few seconds across the way to my place, and then load my stuff into my place. I only had 6 hours to get a head start, but it was better than none.
I was hit with some extremely unfortunate news on the 28th of December in the morning after I had started my shift at work. The entire staff (save for one technician) had been stricken with covid were unable to complete the punch card (checklist of things that are or aren’t up to their standards) necessary for me to move in on the 1st. Needless to say, I was absolutely devastated, because that not only meant that I had lost my 6-hour window to pack the Uhaul while they were at work, but I would also need to wait for an additional 2 (maybe 3) weeks due to the move-in date being pushed to the 8th of January. Another blow was the fact that I had to pay rent TWICE, once for the place that I was staying at with Amber and Troy, and again for my own place once I was finally able to move in. I pushed the Uhaul reservation out another week and I made the necessary calls to utilities to push the service-start date to the same week. It was getting hard to stay positive and upbeat after being hit with not only this bad news but the bad news of 3 extremely close members of my family catching covid and not doing so well. What little good news or small wins I had won were quickly being overtaken and overshadowed by a fast-growing tsunami of bad news.
I went to work Wednesday that same week with my soul crushed and basically, all hope lost. It was a grueling day that week and I was in the middle of a task when I had received a phone call from the apartment complex. I could hardly contain myself as spoke to the lady helping me with my case, she informed me that they had a similar unit just a few doors down from the one I was supposed to move into and that a similar unit was available for a Friday move-in date. Needless to say, I said yes.
Fast forward to Thursday, I found out that it was going to start snowing late Thursday night and would keep on snowing until noon on Friday the following day. I got in touch with my parents and we all agreed that the best course of action was to move in on that Thursday before the snow had a chance to fall. The only downside is that I did the move while both Troy and Amber were present in the apartment.
The move went surprisingly well, save for Troy and Amber only speaking up when my parents weren't present in the apartment. They asked me why I didn't give them a sooner heads up, and I told them that they gave me my 30-day notice when I was told to STFU and GTFO. Amber tried saying that she didn't say that, but I wasn't about to let that blatant lie slid on by without being called out.
Once all my things were moved into my new apartment, I started receiving texts from Amber that varied from levels of being civil to straight-up rude and filled with over exaggerations and lies made up to strengthen her crusade against me. She told me that I took things from her that she herself got, and when I apologized and tried to return them, she told me to not worry about it and that she would replace them. At first, I thought that would be the end of it, but then she went on to say "You must have told your mom to take everything" and "it's spiteful and you're doing it out of hate. How else would your mom know that some of the things were stuff that my own mom gave me?".
I would say that I was surprised at her text messages, but honestly, I wasn't. My own parents knew what to take because they're the ones who literally bought me all of my kitchenware, anything else was by accident and I would have GLADLY returned it civilly and rationally and I would have also apologized in person. I got sick of her rude and immature way of speaking to me, so I called her out on it. She resorted to calling me a child and a hateful asshole, and that I shouldn't "try and be a martyr", and then tried guilt tripping me with "My mom asked about you, and I bet you anything she has presents for you.". When I tried giving her a taste of her own medicine by telling her that I don't appreciate that guilt trip, she claimed that I was being hateful and that she was only stating a fact. So suddenly when she's the one doing it, she's giving out facts, but when I'm doing it, I suddenly "have an answer for everything" and I'm "hiding the truth".
She then told me that "If I wanted to be hateful, I could spread all of your toys onto the floor for you and your parents to walk in on when you come to get the rest of your things.". I'll admit, I got a good laugh out of that one. What would a pile of sex toys on the floor accomplish other than proving that she's being childish and immature?
After my folks and I finally moved into my new apartment and we finally settled down, I heard through "the grapevine" that she's telling people I "emptied the apartment and took everything," and that she had to replace what I took with money she doesn't have. Yes, I did empty the apartment, but I didn't take EVERYTHING. The furniture (save for one couch), the utensils (save for a few things she bought, plus what she didn't want me to return), the shower curtains, the showerheads, the toilet seat covers, the toiletries, the appliances, the vacuum, all the electronics I brought with me when I moved, and the seasonings/spices/herbs....all mine.
All of that was either stuff I brought with me or stuff I bought after. I left behind the shower curtains, some food, the toilet seat cover, the showerhead, the seasonings/herbs/spices, some food I got for myself, a couch I bought, and a memory foam queen-sized mattress I bought. She also has the audacity to spread rumors, calling me a snake. She's and the ones that gravitate to and around her are so focused on the bad and negatives I did during the time that we were together, that it somehow makes them believe it gives her a golden ticket to do what she did to me. In what situation or setting is it ever ok to fly down your new love interest from another state to come to visit and then live with you and your ex after you just broke up with them not even a month ago?
However, karma is catching up to her because last I heard, she's about to lose her apartment and her car. I have since blocked both Troy and Amber from everything and anything I can think of, and I'm only looking forward and up from here on out. I don't wish misfortune on anyone, but sometimes there's only so much you can take in life, and when you reach that point, your mental health and sanity instantly become your top priority. I wanted out and I couldn't take another moment in that hell hole.
The only thing on my mind right now is completing the Kingdom Hearts games and enjoying me, myself, and I. I don't plan on dating anytime soon because I want to focus on not only healing but learning to both love and live with myself and be comfortable with just my own space and my own thoughts. I don't want to be romantically involved with anyone any time soon because I'm afraid they might unintentionally become a rebound, and I wouldn't wish that evil on anyone.