I've been friends with someone for 18 months that seems to be taking the friendship in an inappropriate direction. Well, it started inappropriate as well.

At my last job we all sat in cubicles. One day, having just led my ornithologist brother on a small bird tour of the area, I described the trip to a co-worker. Someone I'd never noticed before popped up from behind a cube wall and started asking questions. She introduced herself and for the next few days continued to strike up conversations with me.

After a certain amount of this I wondered if this was a romantic interest from her. I was already counting the days until I would quit the job so saw little reason not to ask her out for a drink. When I proposed the idea she gave me a devious smile and we quietly headed out. Afterwards, in the settling of the tab, I Venmo'd her for a beer and noticed her Venmo account had a different last name than she has at work and asked about that. She's Chinese and I wasn't sure if sometimes Chinese people might have an anglicized last name in addition to their first name. "Oh, sometimes I use one, sometimes the other" was all I got. Nothing physical occurred or was initiated.

A week later after texting and going to a company workout class together she tells me that she is married. I'm absolutely shocked and feel like I've been used as part of someone's adulterous fantasy. The style of our conversations seemed identical to the getting-to-know-you type of stuff you cover on first dates. But I wasn't sure. Maybe I misread the situation. I tell her I'm not comfortable with the situation and we stop talking for a week. But I'd already joined the group workout class on her recommendation and would see her there anyway. I decided that I didn't really know what her intentions were and would give her the benefit of the doubt. She seemed to be interested in us having a friendship.

But I really wanted to know... what did happen? One of my favorite podcasts is Heavyweight. In it, Jonathan Goldstein plays the role of a social detective. People come to him with relationship issues from their past and he, without the restraint most people feel, badgers people for answers with his journalistic skills. I suspect I am mildly autistic, so for me many mundane social interactions carry mystery. To have Goldstein take relatable life experiences and crack them open for all to see is powerful. It's like we can finally get some goddamn answers to people's closest kept secrets.

So as time went on I got integrated into her group of friends, met her husband, her dog. Her husband seems like a great guy. But my friend would give indications of unhappiness in her marriage, often in groups when he was not around, occasionally over text message to me. I never engaged.

She had some hard-to-get permits for a backpacking trip. It would be a trip of four. Her husband was not interested so she invited three friends including myself. I went on the trip, made a new friend who just moved to my city, and had a great time. Immediately afterwards we started planning a new trip.

At some point my female friend did initiate a conversation on what she was thinking when we went out for a drink and what happened during the days after before she told me she was married. It boiled down to her wanting my friendship but not wanting to change my behavior. In my interpretation she wanted the attention of being dated. I honestly wasn't sure how much I believed this explanation - and even on its face it didn't sound super great.

So we just got back from another backpacking trip - myself, my female friend, and a male friend of hers who is married. During the trip I ended up discussing my sexuality with the two of them. I consider myself to be on the spectrum of asexuality. I described, as best I could, what makes me attracted to people (an emotional connection, their personality and intelligence, etc.) and the short list of people I had found myself strongly attracted to. I didn't list my female friend - I had lost most of my interest with that initial feeling of being used a year and a half ago. And a couple weeks isn't quite enough time for me to really get things revved up. Visibly I could see she was very confused but I didn't acknowledge her reaction. "Wasn't there one more ... the married one?" I dodged the question.

On the drive back her male friend brought up the topic of my sexuality again. I answered his questions. My female friend seemed to again want to know if I was attracted to her. "Do you ever find your friends attractive?" "Are you attracted to older women?" (she's older than me)

On my side of things, this friendship has been predicated on the idea that as long as I didn't engage with anything I consider to be unethical there couldn't be any harm done. But now I'm not so sure. And what's worse - I'm finding myself attracted to her again because of her interest.

I've been thinking about having a conversation about how she's making me uncomfortable. I think it's past the point where there's any chance nothing's going on. I really do not get the impression she's trying to leave her husband. I just feel played with.

Edit: Okay, the friend in question is away for a few weeks but I'll have a conversation with them when they get back to figure this out.

What media representation resonated with you personally?

In teaching, we talk about kids’ need to access diverse literature in the framing of “mirrors” and “windows”. A mirror is a character that the child can see themselves in; a window is a character that is different and requires perspective-taking.

A gay child seeing a gay character in a story might see that character as a mirror of themselves, while straight readers might see the character as a window instead, offering some perspective into what it’s like to be gay.

No mirror or window is a perfect match, of course, and people can still identify with characters who don’t exactly align with their identities (which is what makes fiction such a powerful tool for empathy!).

Share some of the characters and people that have resonated with you (whether as windows or mirrors) across any media types (books, movies, television, music, comics, anime, podcasts, etc.).

They can be people who helped you understand yourself better, or people who gave you insight into others' experiences (or both!).

Addenda:

• They do not need to be fictional characters. Real-world people can be windows and mirrors too!

• You don’t have to specify whether someone’s a "window" or a "mirror" for you unless you want to. It’s a simple shorthand way of helping kids understand the concept, but it can feel a little limiting and boxy for adults to use it, since people and characters are complex individuals.

Event Guidelines

Everyone is welcome to participate. This includes allies! You do not need to identify as LGBT in order to join in the topics.

I will use "queer" and "LGBT" interchangeably as umbrella terms to refer to all minority sexualities and gender identities. These are intended to be explicitly inclusive.

Be kind; be gracious; listen to others; love lots.

Schedule

I won't reveal everything upfront, but with each post I will give a teaser for what's next:

June 1st: Introductions and Playlist
June 4th: Who is a historical LGBT advocate that you admire?
June 7th: What positive changes have you seen in your lifetime?
June 10th: What's something you wish more people understood?
June 13th: Ask almost anything
June 16th: What media representation resonated with you personally?
June 19th: (teaser: a check-in on those close, or maybe not so close, to us)
June 22nd:
June 25th:
June 28th:

If for whatever reason you would not like to see these topics in your feed, add pride month at tildes to your personal tag filters.

Alright, so one of my favorite things to do at night is throw on a great audiobook and play a video game...but it has to be a very specific type of video game. No meaningful dialogue or plot, no math or strategizing, and lots of hyper addictive gameplay that you can almost do subconsciously.

Here are the games I've found like this so far:

1. Trials Rising (and it's predecessors). I've actually made some global leaderboards in this game. It seems so simple when you start the campaign mode, then you learn about ninja mode and it's suddenly a different game.

2. Olli Olli world

3. Skater XL, Session, Skate series, Tony Hawk series

4. Lonely Mountains Downhill

5. Descenders

6. Any multiplayer shooter (COD, Fortnite, etc.)

7. Trackmania - not my thing but it definitely scratches this itch for a lot of people.

8. Mudrunner and Snowrunner series.

Here are some that did not work for me.

1. Sekiro - I just get too into it. Can't multitask.

2. Vampire Survivors - just not into it.

3. Rogue likes - never enjoyed them.

4. No Man's Sky - amazing game but I prefer to play it co-op. Already conquered it anyway.

Any other suggestions?

I have a KZ ZSN Pro IEM and it's been going strong for 4+ years.

I also have a cheap Bluetooth QCY IEM that I use for podcasts and when I don't want wires tangling me.

Whenever I change from the Bluetooth QCY to the wired KZ I am in awe. The KZ ZSN Pro is a blast to listen to. Specially metal. The definition, the sound of the bass drums, everything is clear and powerful.

So I decided to try some entry level open back headphones and bought the SHP9500 that was cheap on Aliexpress recently. I thought I would find it even better since a lot of people sang it's praise for the price, but I am underwhelmed.

I find my KZ to have way more definition and power.

Also I need to up the volume of my smartphone quite a bit compared to the IEMs. It is near max volume.

Of course they are different beasts and the IEMs are literally inside my head. I don't really know what I expected.

I'm sure beyerdinamic or other more expensive brands might be better, but I don't feel like going down that path.

I'm going to keep the SHP9500 for a week more to see if I like it for different situations, but for now I am not amused.

I noticed that Tildes has had no previous discussion of Andrew Hickey's wonderful music podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. So I thought I'd write a little about it, in case it might bring as much joy to someone here as it has brought me. It's easily my favourite podcast, and it might actually be my favourite work on music history in any medium. It's really that good.

The podcast started something like six years ago, and like its name suggests, it presents a history of rock music. But not just the "four white guys and some guitars" rock music of the 1970s and beyond, but a far more in-depth exploration of where the genre came from and how it has evolved. This is not one of those podcasts where a host or hosts have chosen a topic, done some light resarch and then talk about what comes to their mind. Instead, each episode is thoroughly researched, pre-written and edited. It is a high quality audio lecture delivered by an excellent and witty storyteller who knows what he is talking about.

The first episode was on "Flying Home" by the Benny Goodman Sextet, a jazz and jump blues track released in 1939, and therefore naturally not really a rock song, but something that works as a good starting point in the wider discussion of the genre's evolution. From there, episode by episode, Hickey has told us about the (or rather "a") history of rock music chronologically, taking us through the 40s and 50s, and currently heading towards the end of the 60s. He has indicated that just as 1939 was a somewhat arbitrary starting point, his 500-song history will end with a song that was released in 1999. Looking at his current pace, it may be a while until we get there.

The latest episode is song #174, "I Heard it Through the Grapevine", first released in 1967. It's part one of a two-part narration, with the current episode concentrating on the song's early history and its writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, while the upcoming episode two will look at Marvin Gaye's version and career at that point.

Hickey has in fact recently started to split some songs into multiple episodes, and he did it also with the previous song, song #173, Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower", first released in 1967. That one had Part 1 that concentrated on Dylan's version, and then Part 2 that covered Jimi Hendrix's version. Although, when I say that those episodes concentrate on Dylan's and Hendrix's versions of the song, that's not exactly true. It would be more accurate to say that Part 1 concentrates on Dylan's career in the late 60s, as well some related subjects and artists from the era, while Part 2 looked at Hendrix's career at the time, as well as subjects and artists related to him around that time.

And this is actually an important point to make. While the episodes certainly tell you a lot about the song that they are discussing, they are not solely about the song in question, and they never really aim to give you a subjective interpretation of the song or anything like that. Instead, you are given plenty of historical facts, you hear a lot of interesting stories, and you find out how the song and the people who were involved with it fit into a larger narrative of rock music. And you also get to hear excerpts of some really good music along the way. Hickey is very much an expert in the topic, a great storyteller, and seems like someone who knows how to do his research.

The podcast's early episodes were shorter, about half an hour or so, while some of the more recent episodes have become much longer, some reaching over four hours, which is the reason why Hickey has started to split some episodes into multiple parts. In addition to the main podcast, there are also Patreon bonus episodes which are not part of the main narrative, but which I can highly recommend. They function as companion pieces to the main story, and typically last between 10 to 30 minutes; for instance, the bonus episode for the first "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" episode was on the song "Bend Me, Shape Me" by Amen Corner. And so, although he is officially just at song #174, Hickey has probably covered well over three hundred songs so far.

The podcasts are free of ads and fully community supported. You should be able to find the podcast on all the main podcast providers, and it has a dedicated website at 500songs.com. If you don't know where to start, the double episode on "All Along the Watchtower" that I mentioned earlier could be a good way to check if the podcast is for you. Or, if you have some favourite artists or songs from the 40s, 50s or 60s, check out the tags on the website to see if he has made episodes on them. Or you can of course just start from the beginning, like I did.

Last year, Hickey was also a guest on Rick Rubin's podcast, and that interview could also be a good introduction to Hickey and his work.

the Israel-Palestine war has not been good to my mental health and the coverage and the treatment of the campus protests oddly is what did me in.

Now one approach could be to just not watch the coverage but I have come around to the point of view that not watching meaning not knowing what's happening and you need to know what is happening if only for the hope to be more informed about the politics of the government you live in.

So I guess I am trying to understand what is a responsible way to digest news about something that enrages you? Or is there no such thing? Cause I don't do social media (aside from occasional reddit and just the frontpage when I do that once in a while) and I refuse to watch any 24/7 news networks. I only do an hour of CBC and like 1-3 daily news podcasts which each do like 10-20 min daily updates.

Cause the Israel-Palestine war doubled with the terrible way the campus protests are being treated has really shaken my faith and trust in institutions and I won't go into how cause I don't want to invite infighting on tildes and potential Islamophobia and antisemitism after what happened in that macklemore thread.

In online forums I use far too many punctuation marks. I especially use dashes - to separate clauses that don't need a dash (and sometimes I'll add brackets like this because, well, I dunno). And sometimes I'll start a sentence with "and" when it doesn't need to be there. My comma use is wild and uncontrolled, but I feel it's a bit more controlled than these other marks.

Importantly: I do not care how other people use punctuation.

But I would like to try to fix, or perhaps just improve, my punctuation use. Like the way I just start a new paragraph at random.

I feel like my posts are the same as those flyers that use 7 different fonts, with bolds and underlines and italics (and combinations of them), and with some words in red and some in green and some in black and there's no rhyme or reason to it.

I do like a casual tone but I feel that I go far too far in the informal direction. English is my first, and my only, language. (I love Europe, but I am a bad European. "Please look after our star" we said, and most of us said it in English because most of us who said it don't know other European languages)

Do you have any advice? I'd be interested to hear about books, or videos, or courses, or podcasts, or anything at all that can help. I'd even pay for this. But not Eats Shoots and Leaves please

I started listening to podcasts in June of 2017 after having heard about them being great for years but never getting around to listening to them. I preferred music at the time and would put on a playlist or an album if I had a long drive, walk, etc. Once I started listening to podcasts I was hooked. The amount of time I spent listening to music plummetted and since I started I've spent 4% of my time listening to podcasts, I've used the same app since I started which makes keeping track of that easy.

I mainly listen to mine whenever I have some tedious or when I don't need too hard about what I'm doing. Walking the dog, driving, all of the housework, and some video games when I have time to play one and just want to zone out a bit and do something. Its made me enjoy cleaning more which my wife has appreciated a lot.

I was curious when other people listen to podcasts, how you fit them into your schedule, and if you're keen on sharing what your favorites are. I have way too many podcasts bookmarked in my app to listen to but its fun to add more to the ever growing list.

I just started watching Taskmaster after finding most TV right now pretty boring. I do like the silly challenges (and dry British humor in general lol). I never really watched game shows growing up, I'm aware of the bigger ones of course, (Jeopardy, Millionaire, etcetc.) but I wonder what I've missed in the meantime. I feel like sometimes game shows bleed into Reality shows a bit, which kinda turned me off from the genre until now. I do love trivia and seeing people solve problems in interesting ways though!

To throw in some of my favorites,
Game Changer on Dropout - My favorite at the moment, just because the cast is great and the tasks are great. Sam Reich is a great host too of course, and I just love the things they come up with.

The Mole on Netflix - Even though I don't loveeee reality shows for some reason this one got me. The players were super dumb but it was kinda interesting. I watched it a while ago though so my opinion might be different now.

Lateral (Podcast) - Tom Scott's trivia/gameshow podcast. It's really chill and I really enjoy the trivia I learn while walking my dog. The guests are (mostly) fun and interesting people too! The questions themselves are super "thinky" and playing along is fun.

It's not something I've thought about much until I had a conversation with someone who sets up their RSS reader, and uses it, completely differently to me.

I self-host FreshRSS, and typically just use the Web UI provided by that - sometimes I use Android RSS apps to consume from that, but I've never found one I like that much. But I just categorize my RSS feeds by broad theme, e.g. computing & tech, local news, programming, tech news, gaming, business and so on...

For the most part, I just browse through my main feed a few times per day and see if anything catches my eye. The only exception to this is that I have a few feeds in the 'Important' feed. One example is the forum related to a university project, where I need to know about entries pretty quickly.

The person I was discussing with never subscribes to anything noisy. No BBC, no Ars Technica, and really nothing that posts more than once per day. They split their feeds into "Important", "Casual", "Videos", "Podcasts" (I never thought to add Podcasts, as I use a separate map) and "Comics". They have it set up with the intention of reading everything that comes through.

I respect the curation effort that it must take to have an RSS feed where everything is interesting enough that you'd want to read it all. But for me, RSS is a method of discovering content. I don't need it too clean or overly curated. For the most part, I'm just going to skim it for interesting titles and subjects. The most curation I do is removing feeds after a while, if I notice I'm never interested in their content.

I'm very keen to hear how you use RSS.

Please share why it's your favourite took, avoiding as many spoilers as you can.

Mine is Episode 45 of Darknet Diaries, Xbox Underground (and also Part 02).

It is about a group of hackers called the XBox Underground who infiltrated the networks of major video game companies. Their motives started out harmless, with members of the group enjoying playing early versions of games. However, things take a serious turn and there are many twists and turns as the story unfolds.

It's so good that I have listened to it every year since it first came out.

So I came across this new dudesy video titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead" and it put me down a weird rabbit hole. I'm not a Carlin super fan but I know some of his famous bits and respect his work and maybe that's the perfect setup for watching this because... I'm honestly blown away. I planned on listening to 3 minutes of it to make fun of stupid AI but ended up letting it run for the entire hour and actually laughed quite a bit. It all makes sense. It does sound like him. I don't know how much editing went into it, how much prompting and discarded material. I especially don't know if it just dug up old jokes somewhere else and copied them. But still.

It feels like we just had awkward AI-wordsalad experiments and things like the infinite Seinfeld stream which was fun in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way but... I mean, it obviously was bad. The funny part was that it was unpredictably bad.

But only a year later we're having some uncanny valley shit. I looked it up and apparently this started with a comedy podcast with an AI co-host which produced a clip for a fictional Tom Brady standup routine which turned out popular enough to get them sued, apparently.

There's this part in the fake Carlin special where he talks about the future of entertainment being 24-hour streams where an AI comedian comments on daily news events in real time or something and I can't say I wouldn't watch that. Just to see what it's like. But I also get people calling it disgusting. It kinda is. I get [his daughter says "machine will ever replace his genius"](machine will ever replace his genius), she's right of course. But that video got close IMO.

You can still point at little flaws here and there with AI generated content but with this trend, it will be 3 or 5 years before we get perfectly polished content machines that don't trip over any of the easy and obvious stuff. What place would such content have in the entertainment industry?

What do you guys think?

My dad (a veterinarian by trade) is really into medical history, so I was wondering if folks had any recommendations or favorites. I know he's done a lot of reading about the history of vaccines and the Spanish flu epidemic, but it's really not my area of interest, so I'm somewhat at a loss for how to find him something. Ideally it would be something available on audiobook because that's mostly how he consumes books these days.

Edit: Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I am not sure he has the wherewithal to do podcasts, but the book recommendations are great. I'm going with The Emperor of All Maladies and The Ghost Map, assuming he doesn't have them already.

Hi

I figured before I start venturing into other forums dedicated to this sort of thing, I'd ask here on Tildes since I'm at least comfortable with the community and how helpful they can be here.

I'm tired of all of the subscription services I have, movies and TV shows disappearing from them, buying a film on Prime and only being able to watch it offline through a specific app. Even then, half the time we're watching comfort TV shows that we have on DVD already (X-Files and Friends for instance).

So I figured that building a home media server would give me the chance to cut the cord with a couple of these services and allow us to start using and controlling our own data again.

I have a budget of around £300 (I could perhaps push to £400 if needed) and I'm honestly not sure at all where to start. I have knowledge on how to build brand new, medium to high end gaming PCs as I've done it since I was in my late teens and built my first PC with the wages from my very first job but building a budget minded PC for use as a home media server goes completely over my head.

I've noticed that a lot of the pre-built NAS or media server boxes are very expensive so my first thought was to buy a refurbed workstation or small form factor PC that has enough "oomph" to do the trick but I don't know what ones to even start looking at and then I start to feel a little bit out of my comfort zone.

Things like getting the right CPU in these refurbed machines that offers the features I'm looking for like hardware transcoding etc., integrated GPU's, ensuring there's enough SATA ports for multiple hard drives and an SSD for a boot drive, and then to top it all off ensuring that while achieving these features the thing shouldn't draw too much power when idling as it'll be on for long stretches of time, if not left on 24/7.

I've also got no knowledge of Linux, I've never even looked at it but if it's genuinely easy enough (for someone with next to no Linux experience) then I'd be happy to give it a shot if it offers better performance compared to using Windows 10 or something.

All the server will be used for is watching TV shows, perhaps the odd film, listening to a bit of music perhaps and the odd podcast now and again. Simultaneous streaming will be fairly minimal, perhaps 2 streams as me or my partner watch one thing and our daughter watches another on her tablet. In regards to streaming outside the house that will also be almost non-existent, perhaps, again our daughter watching a kids TV show like Pokemon or Fireman Sam on her tablet when we're out but me and my partner don't tend to watch anything when we're outside the house, certainly not TV shows or movies anyway.

Redundancy isn't something I'm too horrendously worried about, I wouldn't be storing anything like photos that we wouldn't want to lose on it and while it'd be annoying, losing a drive with TV shows or films on it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Any help would be massively appreciated, thanks.

A recent post here made me realize how much I really wish I just could pop in a CD while driving (you can skip those, and I can make mix CDs, so no need for cassettes haha). I commute a decent amount and I'm using a Pixel with GrapheneOS. Adding a streaming service would just be one more piece of Google I'd have to add to my "work" profile. I'm listening to some great podcasts, but I'd rather go full nostalgia without ripping all my CDs.

That being said, I'd like any recommendations. USB would be nice for the constant power option, but blutooth is doable as well. TIA!

I just got a new phone, and I opted to download all the apps I usually use manually, rather than having them transfer over automatically. It's like a nice cleanup thing that I get to do every couple of years. I feel like I partially should just have a list somewhere of the apps I usually use and was wondering what people would download first (plus if I forgot anything)

For me, this was my process yesterday:
Password manager - Bitwarden - mostly so I can copy/paste my logins for everything
Authentication - Not listing these but ya know
VPN - MozillaVPN - just something for hostels and travelling
Browser - Firefox Beta or Nightly - for downloading my new wallpaper and general use (including Tildes!)
Sleep + Alarm - Sleep as Android
Car things - My car app, EVGo/Electrify America - getting around and things
Rideshare - Uber and Lyft - When I'm in a new city!
Food - Doordash, Grubhub, asian specific food apps - to eat when I'm lazy!
News - Boston Globe, AP News, BBC - Kinda obvious what they're here for
Todo - TickTick - Checklists and all that
Fitness - Fitbit, my smart scale app, and my gym app - general fitness stuff
Language Learning - Duolingo and Lingodeer!
Banking + Investment + Payments + Insurance - not listing these but yeah!
Music + Podcasts - Spotify
Streaming - D+, Netflix, Vudu, Peacock, Max, Movies Anywhere, Dropout, Hulu, Prime Video, Twitch - General Streaming
Books - Kindle and Audible
Messaging and Social Media - Signal, Beeper, Messenger, Discord, Slack, Instagram, etc. - just daily entertainment and connections
Games - Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Nonograms, Don't Starve, Cards of Terra, Bloons, etc.

Bonus Q: I've been thinking of trying to add Obsidian to my general day to day, how? Might ask a question about this later though!

I'd love to add some more podcasts to my rotation tbat include artists. Possibly talking about stuff they've been working on, or talking about new media in the field they work in and discussing jt, or talking about old works or really anything.

Maybe podcasts with helpful advice or something?

I've listened to almost all of draftsmen. That was entertaining most of the time. It doesn't have be like that though.

Just curious if anyone have any good ones tk share.

American Prestige did a series on the History of Modern Palestine. The first episode is always public, but they have unlocked the remaining episodes for this week in light of current events.

I listened to this back when it was posted and learned a lot about the role of colonial powers in the formation of Israel and Palestine and the way Palestinians are being treated today. The viewpoint is is not anti-Semitic but it is also not pro-Israel. For example, they discuss Israel's (then) current treatment of the Palestinians as apartheid.

I can't imagine what it would be like to live in those conditions. I don't mean to condone terrorist violence, but set against the background of the oppression in Palestine, it's hard to imagine what people might be driven to.

As an author who normally writes a lot of thrillers with dark subjects, I found at the outset of last year that I just couldn't add any more darkness to the world. Lisica is a story I've been incubating for over 20 years, about a fictional island 1600 km off the coast of Oregon in the middle of the Pacific. I've just finished the series and it needs a new set of eyes to take it to the next level.

It is pure escapism, a love story about eleven researchers who are sent to Lisica for eight weeks to categorize the island's life before a new global satellite agreement comes into force and the USAF has to reveal the island to the wider world. The novels are equal parts scientific discovery, (with special emphases on data science, field biology, geology, meteorology, marine science, archaeology, and linguistics) and equal parts torrid romance between all these beautiful people. In many ways it is a utopian story, about people in paradise doing valuable work who can also love without hurting others. There is no toxic masculinity or bullying on this island, no sophomoric communication problems, no jealousy nor regret. It is my belief that natural challenges such as storms and cliffs and the mystery of the unknown is enough. This isn't Lost. There is magical realism here but it is more realism than magic.

I'm hoping to find a few qualified beta readers who have a background in these sciences, to help me make sure I present them correctly. But it's a lot to ask, for sure. Each of the four volumes is 15 chapters of exactly 26 pages each. 1560 pages in all. 425,000 words. If anyone knows a retired biology teacher with plenty of time on their hands, that's basically who I need at this stage.

My next step is to turn each chapter into audio episodes. As well as an author, I'm an Audible narrator and professional character actor. It is why each chapter is exactly 26 pages long. They make for sixty 42 minute audio episodes. I will eventually release the series week by week for free on my literary podcast over the next year.

Hopefully, this scratches someone's itch. Thanks for reading!