330 PC - Illegal Gambling Laws in California

So, a lot of people have pointed out all the flaws in Caesar's Legion and how the faction won't last very long after the death of Edward Sallow, and hence for that reason (aside from just not wanting to live in a genocidal slave society) it isn't the best choice for New Vegas. I don't disagree with those people, but I also think that the NCR may collapse as well, and this is why I personally think Vegas would be better off becoming independent (I prefer the Yes Man ending to the Mr House one but I'm not going to get into that since this post is about the NCR).
Now, obviously every society and faction will eventually fall apart, but I mean within a human lifetime. This isn't inevitable, granted, but it will likely require major reform to be averted, and I don't think annexing New Vegas will really do anything to prevent it, in fact it might actually end up doing so would do more harm than good.
Doctor Thomas Hildern predicts that due to the projected population growth of the NCR, the country will suffer mass starvation just ten years after the events of New Vegas. Bringing a whole new city and its surrounding settlements into the fold in a region not particularly well suited to agriculture would like the problem even worse.
What's more, while the Legion as it currently exists will of course collapse, it's former soldiers aren't just going to be immediately pacified, they're likely to continue raiding the area for slaves and resources, and while divided they might not be able to threaten the NCR like they did during the two battles of Hoover Dam, they are still going to continue harassing them to the point they have to station a lot of troops in the area, while they are still dealing with enemies in other parts of the country, such as in Baja California to the south.
And bear in mind, the NCR has to transport all of its supplies by Brahmin, and since the roads are so damaged they can't even have them pull carts and instead have to carry the goods directly on them. It has few or no trucks, trains, boats or aircraft, or the infrastructure needed for these things to run on, and even the few that it has could pretty easily be sabotaged by their enemies or attacked by raiders or hostile wildlife, unless they deploy even more troops to patrol them.
Now of course, some of you might point out that these same issues would likely affect an independent Vegas as well, but aside from the fact that the Mojave is a much smaller area than California, the primary advantage of the Securitron army isn't the fact that individual Securitrons are so powerful - it's the fact that they're robots. They don't need food or water, they don't need to sleep, they don't to be paid and they don't have emotions. This means that they will never suffer the morale or logistical issues that the NCR is facing and will continue to face.
The troops are already barely scraping by during the events of New Vegas, but if the NCR due to it's over expansion and economic crises ends up unable to supply or pay its troops then they may well end up deserting, mutinying and even defecting to other factions in order to support themselves and/or their families (afterall, even Chief Hanlon had plans to sabotage the defence of Hoover Dam, so I’m sure the soldiers in the lower ranks are even more frustrated). This is especially likely considering the fact that most troops in Mojave are conscripts rather than volunteers. They're there because they were forced to go there, not because they wanted to.
The securitrons on the other hand will always obey the leader of New Vegas, be they Mr House or the Courier (FTR, Josh Sawyer himself clarified what Yes Man meant by saying he was going to reprogram his personality to become more assertive - i.e. he was now only going to listen to the Courier, and hence some other person couldn't just come along and take over like the Courier did themself).
The NCR would also struggle to recruit local soldiers because it's pretty much universally hated in the region. Jacobstown are opposed to them because they've attempted to exterminate its inhabitants, Westside don't like them because of their water dispute with them, the Great Khans hate them due to the Bitter Springs massacre and all their wars with them, the Brotherhood are still technically at war with them at the beginning of the game, the Followers are opposed to them because them because of their imperialistic aggression coupled with the fact they just denounced the organisation, the Boomers hate them because they’re not Boomers, the Kings are opposed to them because they want to maintain control of Freeside, Goodsprings are opposed to them because they don’t want to pay NCR taxes, the Powder Gangers are angry because they practically enslaved them, gambling and prostitution are banned in the NCR and so the tribes on the Strip are unlikely to support them.
Now, regardless of whether you think these grievances are justified or not, they are nonetheless present. And yes, obviously the Courier can recruit the support of the aforementioned factions in the game or convince them to make peace, but I’m talking long-term here, not just the very brief amount of time the game takes place in. If things escalate further, NCR’s unpopularity could result in locals revolting against them, especially if the Legion has been defeated and hence the NCR’s presence is no longer considered necessary to protect the local populus.
Another problem is in the internal politics of the NCR. The NCR has pretty much copy-pasted the entire political, economic and legal systems of the pre-war United States. The same United States which had itself collapsed two centuries earlier. Now, regardless of whether the US started the Great War or China or whoever else did, the fact of the matter is the excessive consumption of US, coupled with its jingoistic foreign policy at least shared part of the responsibility for the calamity.
We even see the very same issues of the pre-war US crop up in the NCR. Like the former it has a hungry need for resources, and will stop at nothing to acquire these resources, hence its desire to occupy Helios One and the Hoover Dam. In doing so it has acquired more and more enemies from the likes of the Legion to the Brotherhood to the Enclave and so many others.
The capitalist economic system of both the pre-war US and the post-war NCR demands endless growth. Choosing to simply cut its losses and pull out of the Mojave would not be acceptable as this would result in economic stagnation, hence why it simply won’t do so unless forced out by one of the other factions.
We also see the rise of large corporations like the Gun Runners and the Crimson Caravans. Much as companies like Poseidon Energy and Vault-tec had done in the PWUS, these companies have begun using their excessive wealth to provide them with a disproportionate amount influence over the NCR’s government, effectively buying politicians that support their interests, helping them maintain their monopolies over their respective industries and muscle out potential competitors by any means necessary, and effectively replacing the democratic government with an oligarchy.
Now, as awful as Caesar may be, he makes a very fair point when he says that…

Greed runs rampant. The government is corrupt, accepting bribes from Brahmin barons and landowners, to the detriment of citizens. The NCR is a loose conglomerate of individuals looking out for themselves. It's lost virtue. No one cares about the collective, the greater good. It's not built to last. I'm just hastening the inevitable.

Corruption both historically and in our modern world has been a major hamper for civilisations. If you look at the Corruption Perceptions Index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index), you’ll notice that there is a very strong correlation between a country having a high level of corruption and being economically poor and/or politically unstable.
This is because corruption makes it much harder for a country to collect taxes, enforce its laws, and do everything else it needs to do. If NCR corruption continues to run rampant, then Mr Sallow is very much correct in saying that it’s inevitable that it will be destroyed.
The rise of the aforementioned corporations also suggests that the NCR is facing a growing gap between rich and poor, as many of its citizens have been forced to squat in Freeside, suggesting a lack of housing in NCR territory. Economic inequality is associated with numerous health and social problems including obesity, drug abuse, poor mental health, crime, poor social mobility, and warfare. It has also historically led to numerous political upheavals including the French, Russian, Cuban and Iranian Revolutions.
During the NCR’s war with the Brotherhood, the latter destroyed the NCR’s gold reserves, which its currency was backed by. This forced the NCR to abandon the gold standard and adopt a fiat currency. Now, fiat currencies work in our real world because the countries/group of countries that issue the “safe-haven” currencies of the world (the Dollar, the Euro, the Pound, and the Yen) have been *relatively* stable and at peace for the last 75+ years, and hence they are generally trusted not to accrue excessive debt or to print money to excess.
The same can’t be said about the NCR. The country has been almost constantly at war ever since it was founded. Whether against the Master, or the Khans, or the Enclave, or the Brotherhood, or the Legion, or all the various raiders within or around its borders, and as I mentioned earlier, it is also on the brink of famine. This forces the country to borrow or print money in order to fund its war and relief efforts, respectively, further devaluing its currency.
In the game, NCR workers mention that the money that they are paid is worth a lot less than it should be as people in the area are reluctant to accept it instead of caps. The NCR has effectively three choices here – it can either continue paying them in NCR dollars at the current amount, which would over time decrease in effective value due to the inflation (which would likely spell disaster – if it’s workers or god-forbid, its soldiers were to see their wages gradually become worthless, they’d refuse to work or turn hostile), keep increasing it’s wages to keep up the inflation, which would result in further inflation, or just pay their wages in caps, which would set a pretty bad precedent if even the NCR’s government can’t trust its currency. If it were to abandon its currency altogether and go back to using bottle caps officially it would render all dollars worthless overnight.
California, even in our real world is notorious for its water insecurity, and real-world Californians don’t have to worry about their existing water supplies being irradiated. In New Vegas, Chief Hanlon remarks that:

Back west, you don't see too many of these. Lakes, I mean. Natural or man-made. Any kind, really. We neglected the dams or pumped all the water out a long time ago. Owens, Isabella, the San Luis. Drained the aquifers of everything they had. Just a lot of mud and dust now. It's a different feeling, watching the sun come up over the water. Takes some getting used to.

This would suggest that the NCR is facing a massive water shortage due it its unsustainable use of its water reserves. Only the Hoover Dam can really prevent a major crisis.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, the NCR gaining control of New Vegas would present a heavy burden on its already overstretched resources. But the truth is, it has kind of backed itself into a corner by even attempting to annex the region in the first place.
If it were to pull out of the region and accept the independence of New Vegas, then that would break the lure of invincibility that it has acquired though out the American South-West. Under Kimball’s leadership, numerous settlements both in Mojave and elsewhere have been annexed into the NCR against their will. If all of them, inspired by New Vegas’s success were to revolt into regain their own independence, then it would spell disaster for the NCR, as it would have to divide its forces even further to quell said rebellions.
Secondly, while Mr. House and presumably the Courier are willing to export water and electricity to the NCR, they are nonetheless going to charge heavy prices for it, and in caps, which would further deflate the value of the NCR dollar.
If the Legion were to take the dam and New Vegas, then they obviously wouldn’t been keen on supplying their enemy with water or power.
What’s more, while the NCR might still be able to defeat the Legion in a long-protracted war, due to the latter’s own internal problems, in the meantime, it would still have to defend against the Legion’s invasion.
This might actually come with some benefits, as everybody in the NCR would be united against their common enemy, and tribes and settlements on its frontiers who might have otherwise been hostile to the NCR might become supportive after learning more about the Legion, seeing the former as the lesser evil at least.
However, the amount of money and lives it would have to invest in its defence would be very difficult to source, especially without the increased tax revenues it could receive from New Vegas and from traders in the region.
While the NCR is intended to resemble the US in the 20th-21st centuries, in practice I think it better resembles the US prior to the Civil War. At that time, it was more common for a person to identify with their state first and foremost and their country second rather than the other way around.
The same holds true in the NCR – the five states that make up the union are constantly prioritising their own interests, even when this is to detriment of the nation as a whole. There are also internal disputes between them, with the Hub and Shady Sands competing with one another for economic dominance.
With the perfect storm of a famine, a currency crisis, a shortage of water, a revolt of the frontier territories and a protracted war with the remnants of the Legion, escalated internal disputes could well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
So, what changes would the NCR have to implement to prevent collapse? The first thing it would need to do is break up the trade monopolies that have developed. If they are split up into smaller companies and forced to compete with one another than their ability to interfere with the NCR’s political process would go away along with a lot of the corruption the NCR is plagued with.
Another thing it would have to do is adopt a much more sustainable policy towards its water resources, discouraging waste amongst its citizens and banning business practices which allow water to go to waste.
Any further expansion should take place in the much less arid north, towards Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, providing more water and arable land. Further wars should be avoided wherever possible.
The country would have to reform to become more centralised, diminishing the influence of the individual states and preventing further division of the country.
Unfortunately, I don’t see these reforms being implemented quickly enough to prevent collapse.
But then, why is New Vegas better off becoming independent? Because it presents an opportunity to create something entirely new, and better, rather than trying to recreate the very society under whose watch the world ended, and not even doing a very good job of that.

Over the course of 34 days in the spring of 2018, three unsettling crimes played out in the city of Bakersfield, California. The families of the three victims realized their children all knew each other and ran in the same circles, and they began to suspect that all three crimes were connected. But what began as a crusade for justice among grieving parents took a shocking turn when investigators discovered that the so-called Bakersfield 3 were embroiled in a criminal underworld of black-market weapons smuggling, the Hells Angels, unspecified ties to drug cartels, torture and kidnapping, and a convicted felon nicknamed “The Boogeyman of Bakersfield.”
This is a genuinely bizarre case, and while I’ve never written up a case for this sub before, I’ve been following this story closely for the past couple years. The last time it was mentioned on here over a year ago, but there have been some huge recent developments in the last year that I thought deserved as comprehensive a telling as possible. And despite all that, it's nowhere near resolved. So without further ado...
Part 1: Missing
On March 23,2018, Micah Holsonbake, 34, went missing in East Bakersfield near the intersection of Flower Street and Mount Vernon Avenue. Micah was a clean-cut dad who worked in finance, a former high school debater who loved karaoke despite not being any good at it. He was presumed endangered missing until August 22, 2018, when teenagers swimming near a local park found an arm in the Kern River that was identified as his. The rest of his body has never been found.
On April 18, 2018, James Kulstad, 38, was murdered on a quiet block in Southwest Bakersfield. A father of two daughters, James was a serial entrepreneur described as the type of man who “could sell a dollar bill on the side of the road for a million dollars if he could just get 5 minutes with you.” His brother Ryan heard the gunshots from the next street over, but didn’t see the shooter, and he claims he held James as he died in his arms.
On April 25, 2018, Baylee Parrent-Despot, 20, disappeared from Rosedale, the upper-middle-class neighborhood in Northwest Bakersfield where she’d grown up. Baylee described herself as a “flower child” who had been born in the wrong generation. After facing a number of serious challenges, she was struggling to get her life back on track, and was said to be pregnant and trying to leave her boyfriend when she went missing. She has never been heard from again.
Local media christened Micah, James, and Baylee the “Bakersfield 3” after the victims’ families discovered that all three victims knew one another. In the wake of the links between all three disappearances coming to light, Micah’s father told a local news reporter, “Just to be blunt, something happened to Micah… and a month later something happened to Baylee, and I think it’s because she knew what happened to Micah.” And in between them, there was James Kulstad, who ran in the same drug-fueled circles as Baylee and had helped Micah move just weeks before they both were killed. Bakersfield is a city of half a million people, but on a social level, it can feel as insular as any small town — you’re rarely more than one or two degrees removed from anyone you meet — and even in a city where everyone seems to know everyone, it’s hard to buy three friends all going missing within the space of a month by sheer coincidence. But as time went on with few official developments in the investigation, it seemed like people largely lost interest in the case by late 2019.
Then, in 2020, the Kern County District Attorney’s office charged three people with a total of 34 different charges, ranging from first degree murder, torture, kidnapping, assault with a firearm, and illegal manufacturing of assault weapons. Two of the defendants were already in custody — and the third may not even be alive.
Part 2: Some Local Context
By every metric, Bakersfield is just a flat-out terrible place to live. It’s my hometown, I left for a reason, and the reason is that it sucks. Kern County suffers from a slew of serious socioeconomic and public health problems, the largest of which is probably related to economic and income inequality. A fifth of the population is under the poverty line, and crime rates are sky-high, especially drug-related ones. Opioid abuse is rampant, though it still falls second to methamphetamine, the most widespread drug in the area. There’s a significant issue with white supremacist gang violence. When I was 16, my 70-year-old next-door neighbor got stabbed in a biker gang fight at a tattoo parlor by a Hells Angel called “Delano Mike.” A high school chemistry teacher was literally arrested for trying to make meth in his classroom three months before Breaking Bad even premiered. This is a region with a lot of serious problems that go deeper than any one symptom, but suffice it to say, there’s a reason I moved away as soon as I tuned 18.
The other thing you need to know is that despite being one of the most conservative cities in California, there’s a widespread distrust of law enforcement outside of the police and courts themselves — and, frankly, for good reason. Corruption in the justice system is widespread, and basically a local tradition dating back to the tenure of longtime district attorney Ed Jagels, perhaps best known for ramming through 36 false convictions of ritual child abuse at the height of the satanic panic. (34 were eventually overtured, and the other two people convicted died in prison and never saw justice.) Jagels’ history of prosecutorial misconduct is also the subject of Mean Justice, a 600-page doorstopper by Pulitzer-winning author Edward Humes about the wrongful conviction of Pat Dunn, who is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife despite a wealth of evidence that would suggest his innocence. In 2002, Jagels’ protege, an assistant district attorney named Steve Tauzer, was murdered by a former Bakersfield police deputy, Chris Hillis, after Hillis allegedly learned that Tauzer had a sexual relationship with Hillis’ 22-year-old son, an addict in recovery; facing first-degree murder charges, he pled out to manslaughter and received a 12-year prison sentence.
In 2015, The Guardian published an in-depth exposé about how widespread corruption within the local law enforcement community led to Kern County having the highest rate of police killings in the country: the deadliest cops per capita. And over the past several years, the Kern County law enforcement community has been mired in a police corruption scandal in which members of the BPD abused asset forfeiture laws to illegally seize guns, drugs, and money from suspects, which they in turn trafficked for personal gain. All this is to say that Bakersfield cops and prosecutors have not engendered much public trust outside of their own communities. In a city with high rates of violent crime, law enforcement has consistently put its own interests above public safety, justice, or victims’ rights. That's just something to keep in mind while reading.
Part 3: Down the Rabbit Hole
Micah
In the weeks and months prior to Micah Holsonbake’s disappearance, his family could tell that something was troubling him. Lance and Cheryl Holsonbake both recalled their son behaving erratically in the days before he vanished. But none of it seemed to make any sense coming from someone like Micah, whose family described him as intelligent and hard-working. He had a comfortable upbringing in Rosedale and worked his way into a lucrative career as a financial advisor despite only one year of college. In the photo his family circulated following his disappearance, he wore the suit and tie and placid smile of someone posing for a corporate headshot. But Micah was going through a dark time following a rocky separation from his wife and family, and had been struggling with a painkiller addiction for the past two years. The year before, he’d been laid off from his job after going on disability leave due to depression.
According to court documents, Micah owed drug-related debts to members of the Hells Angels as well as “the cartel.” One friend of Micah’s told police his life seemed to be headed in a downward spiral after he lost the ability to see his son, and often got in fights with others at bars. In one witness statement, an unidentified woman told police of a prior incident when she and Holsonbake were kidnapped at gunpoint and driven to an orchard in west Bakersfield. Holsonbake bolted from the vehicle as it was moving, she told police. That account was corroborated by a friend of Holsonbake's who told police that he said he had been kidnapped at gunpoint. He told his parents that he feared for his life, frequently thought he was being followed in his car, and rambled about various people he believed were out to get him, but they mostly wrote it off.
James
Micah had been hanging around with James Kulstad for some time before he disappeared. It’s not clear when they first met, but it appears they become friendly through the drug scene. Like Micah, James first became addicted to prescription painkillers after being hit by a car, before progressing to fentanyl patches and eventually heroin. He’d been a single father to his daughters Camryn and August. His obituary characterized him as a free-wheeling surfer who held a patent for an action sports product and earned the nickname “Joe Vegas” for his love of gambling and table games. Camryn, now 19, says she and James had an especially close relationship after her mother died when Camryn was an infant, and James often warned her against getting involved with drugs and partying in a clear-headed way, which made it even harder to watch him spiral downward in the years before his death. “I felt like I lost him before I even lost him, but I worked so hard,” she told a reporter. “I was working so hard on everything I could do to make him get better… I was hanging onto hope and whoever killed him took that away from me. I don’t have that anymore, I don’t have hope.”
In the wake of her father’s death, Camryn says that a number of stories and rumors about his life surfaced, further complicating her grief. “Some of the stories I’ve heard is that he was a really bad person these last 3 years,” she said in 2019. On the night of his murder, James reportedly drove to an acquaintance’s home in Southwest Bakersfield where his brother Ryan Kulstad was hanging out. Ryan claims that the homeowner allegedly owed money to James and told Ryan that if James came over to his house, he’d “call his boys and they’d come over there strapped,” which Ryan says he didn’t interpret as a serious threat. Ryan and James reportedly argued about this on the phone, and James showed up at the house a couple hours later. Ryan says he had just returned from driving someone else home and noticed a driver in a silver sedan behaving suspiciously as he returned to the house. Moments later, Ryan and his unidentified male passenger heard gunshots on the next block: an unknown gunman opened fire on James from another car, causing him to crash into a parked trailer. The same silver sedan was seen speeding away from the scene.
The owner of the home where this all took place was Dr. Sukhjeet Bajwa, who at the time was a chiropractor with a local practice. Bajwa lived in a quiet subdivision in Southwest Bakersfield. It was an unlikely setting for a drive-by, and according to initial news reports, police were at a loss for the motive behind the killing, or what James was even doing in the neighborhood at all. Then things began to unravel: Bajwa, it turned out, had been arrested twice in 2016 and 2017 after driving while impaired, and in addition to liquid heroin, Xanax, and hydrocodone, police also found two unregistered, loaded guns in his car, an AR-15 and a .22LR semi-automatic rifle with a fake silencer attached. All of this was detailed in a disciplinary complaint filed by the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners, and after Bajwa’s name began repeatedly surfacing in connection with the shooting, a rumor began to circulate about a black-market gun and drug trafficking ring in which Bajwa was supposedly a central figure.
It was the type of conspiracy theory most people instinctively write off as too bizarre to be credible. But it must have rung a bell to Lance Holsonbake. Before Micah’s disappearance, he told his father that he was “putting together guns for people,” according to a 2019 interview. Lance said he reacted in disbelief to this confession, because the idea that Micah would risk his career by getting involved in illegal gun manufacturing just didn’t make sense. “If you’re this afraid, just stop,” Lance recalls telling him. “And he’d say, ‘I can’t do that I can’t do that.’ He was afraid he did that they would hurt his family.” He wrote it off as paranoia exaggerated by his son’s drug use, and didn’t know how much of it was real and how much was in Micah’s mind. According to Lance, Bakersfield police initially suggested that Micah had left town of his own volition after getting mixed up in criminal activity and, from what I can tell, didn’t make much of an effort to investigate. Though the family says he was last seen on March 23, 2018, Bakersfield police claimed he wasn’t reported missing until April 4, and it appears they waited until April 13, when he’d been missing for almost a month, before BPD made its first public statement regarding his disappearance. After James was murdered a few days later, the Holsonbake and Kulstad families grew increasingly frustrated with the apparent lack of interest in investigating either case, and told the media later that as they began digging into the circumstances surrounding both cases, one name kept coming up with everyone they talked to: Baylee Despot. And within a week, Baylee Despot had also gone missing in Bakersfield.
Baylee
Baylee Parrent-Despot was 20 years old when she was reported missing in April 2018, and the families say that it was her disappearance that finally motivated the police and local news to start investigating the links between all three cases, for reasons that seem obvious to anyone who has ever seen the media react to a pretty white 20-year-old going missing. Her sister, Katelyn Parrent, describes her as “a girl that’s grown up in a good neighborhood, raised by good parents, had a good childhood, could’ve had everything she ever wanted,” much like James and Micah. And beneath the surface, she was as troubled as either of the men: after graduating high school, she’d run off to Vegas to marry her boyfriend, but their rocky relationship turned into an abusive marriage that ended just a year later in 2017. In the aftermath, she wrecked her car, lost her job, and in her mother’s words, “Her life just spiraled out of control.”
In July 2017, Baylee was arrested for disorderly conduct in front of her friend Micah Holsonbake’s house. This came as a surprise to her sister, who had at one point been friendly with Micah herself — she didn’t realize he and Baylee even knew each other. But even though he was 14 years Baylee’s senior, Katelyn remembered him as a clean-cut guy who worked at a bank, and their mother, Jane Parrent, says Micah helped her get a restraining order against an abusive ex-boyfriend. They didn’t see any cause for concern. Still, Baylee’s life continued to spiral out of control. The following month, she was drugged and gang-raped at an acquaintance’s apartment complex. She disappeared for days at a time and resurfaced with “horrible stories” or pleading phone calls begging to be picked up. On one occasion, Katelyn remembers, “She had none of her belongings, no shoes… A couple nights after that there were two vehicles that came to pick her up and we could tell by the look on her face that she didn’t want to go, but if she didn’t go, we didn’t know what would happen.”
Matthew
Not long after that incident, Baylee had a new boyfriend. Matthew Queen was 43 years old, a convicted felon, and an all-around bad dude. Not much is known about his background, with one major exception: in the early 2000s, he plead guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal firearms dealer after he used a false address, but his real name, to purchase $11,000 in guns from dealers in Indiana. Many of those guns were later recovered at crime scenes in Detroit and Chicago. If you want an idea of what type of criminal mastermind we’re dealing with here, I recommend reading just the final ruling on that case from the 7th Circuit court of appeals:

“We reject Queen's argument that gun buyers may lie about a street address so long as they live within the state where the gun is sold . . . Queen in fact had once lived in an apartment at 2072 Egret Court, but he did not live at this address when he completed the forms and bought the guns because he was evicted on December 18, 2000, for nonpayment of rent."

Great. Sounds like a great guy.
Lest you assume Matthew Queen might have hypothetically seen the error of his ways and cleaned up his act after this early foray into gunrunning, he absolutely did not. In December 2017, just a couple weeks into Matthew and Baylee’s relationship, they were arrested after police found four unmarked, unregistered, loaded assault rifles in Matthew’s car during a traffic stop. Neither he or Baylee said a word to the police, but while Matthew (who, as a convicted felon, was prohibited from carrying any guns or ammunition at all) was charged with several felonies, while Baylee pled no contest to a lesser misdemeanor and received three years probation. Later that month, she moved in with Matthew, his mother, and his estranged wife. Baylee’s family saw and heard even less from her. And in April, a month after Micah’s disappearance and just one day after she and Matthew attended a court date for the weapons charges, Baylee went missing. Her mother believed she was pregnant with Matthew’s child and was trying to leave him at the time. Matthew told police that she had connections through her father's side of the family with a Mexican drug cartel and believed they had something to do with her disappearance.
Local interest in the case reached an even greater frenzy after Micah’s severed arm was found in the Kern River in Hart Park on the east side of town, not far from from where he was last seen. It was positively identified in late December 2018. By this point, the family of the Bakersfield 3's investigation had amassed around 10,000 followers on Facebook and another 5,000 in a private group, and the story was a fixture on local news. Another curveball came around this time too, when a former friend of Baylee’s named Sara Wedemeyer, 21, filed a restraining order against Baylee’s mother, Jane Parrent. As it was reported, Sara had moved in with Matthew mere weeks after Baylee disappeared, and she was four months pregnant with his child when she attempted to take out legal action against Mrs. Parrent, whom she claimed was harassing her and her “fiancé” by hanging up missing person fliers in their neighborhood. The restraining order wasn't granted, but Queen allegedly began making disturbing social media posts about Baylee, Micah, and the Parrent family, with Mrs. Parrent as the primary target. And in mid-2019, the investigation seemed to grind to a halt.
Part 4: New Developments
On May 27, 2020, roughly two years after the first developments in the Bakersfield 3 case, the Kern County District Attorney held at a press conference to announce they believe Baylee Despot and Matthew Queen “deliberately and with premeditation" murdered Micah Holsonbake. Despot and Queen, along with a third man, Matthew Vandecasteele, were charged with the alleged kidnapping, torture, and first degree murder, as well as unlawful manufacturing of assault weapons, conspiracy relating to the murder and torture plot, and a slew of other assault and gun charges (34 in total). Queen and Vandacasteele were both in custody at the time the charges against them were filed, but even though Baylee still has not been seen or heard from since 2018, the DA’s office issued a warrant for her arrest, leading some to speculate she may still be alive.
According to court records, Matthew Queen allegedly believed that Micah Holsonbake had stolen a .44-caliber revolver from him. He and Baylee Despot kidnapped Micah, zip-tied him to a chair in Matthew Vandecasteele’s garage, and attempted to torture him in order to extract information from him. A blood stain in the garage matched Holsonbake’s DNA. Vandecasteele told police that he didn’t see or hear Micah on the night he was killed, but knew that the other two had brought him there to question him. After several hours, Baylee allegedly returned to the apartment seeming “flustered” and changed her clothes in a back bedroom. Before they left, “Queen told Vandecasteele that he had cleaned everything up and it was OK to go inside the garage.” The next day, Queen returned to Vandecasteele’s apartment and said he “needed help disposing of something” in a large black storage container in the trunk of his car. Vandecasteele claims he refused to help with disposing of the body, but according police reports, his Google history during that period of time included searches for “lye chemical formula,” “lye for sale” and “how long does it take to dissolve a human body,” as well as browsing for lye on the Home Depot and Lowe’s websites.
Queen, Despot, and Vandacasteele allegedly manufactured and sold AR-15s from gun build kits. Other witness testimony released by the courts described various kidnappings that witnesses allege Queen, known as “the boogeyman of Bakersfield,” committed. In one incident, Queen allegedly handcuffed one victim to a chair and put an electric dog collar around his neck because he believed the man had stolen a gun part from him. Another witness said that Queen and Vandacasteele showed up armed at his hotel room after the witness told Baylee where he was staying, and that he believed they intended to kill him because he’d been arrested “with a large quantity of narcotics that he was fronted or given without paying for them and the people who had gave him the narcotics could have been upset.” (According to the police report, surveillance footage from the hotel corroborates this account.)
It’s also believed that he made anonymous calls to the police tip line to misdirect the investigation away from himself: one such caller referred to Baylee as a “sugar momma,” a phrase which Queen reportedly used to describe her when he spoke to investigators in August 2019, and he also used the same pseudonym on the tip line that he did on social media. When police questioned him around this time, he denied being part of a criminal enterprise and claimed he could barely pay his bills. Then, while out on bail for unrelated gun charges in January 2019, Queen allegedly kidnapped another man at gunpoint and forced him to walk into the Kern River while Queen accused him of snitching to the cops. He’s been in custody since July of 2019 due to this kidnapping.
Part 5: No Body, No Crime
So where is Baylee Despot?
According to official statements from law enforcement, no one knows. After the warrant was issued for her arrest, a wave of speculation followed that she had faked her own death or fled to Mexico with the help of unspecified “cartel connections.” That story seems less and less likely as more details have emerged from court documents. Vandecasteele told the police that Despot was “falling apart mentally” after murdering Micah. He and Queen both suspected that she was cooperating with police on an investigation relating to the illegal weapons charges, called her a “snitch” in one interview, and told investigators he believed Queen “made her disappear.” In one interview, a female witness said Queen kidnapped her at gunpoint, took her to an orchard, and held an AR-15 to her head while he questioned her about whether Baylee was faithful to him.
When police questioned him about Baylee’s disappearance in July 2019, he said was depressed and off her medications, and she had said she wanted to die. When the investigator told Queen there had been allegations of domestic violence involving him and Baylee, some of which resulted in bruises, Queen said he never laid a hand on anyone. He told the detective she was clumsy. Despite all of this, Jane Parrent says that police have told her that they don’t consider Matthew Queen a person of interest in Baylee’s disappearance, and that there is "no known physical evidence that definitively confirms her possible death." She is now offering her own personally-funded $1000 reward for information about her daughter’s location.
The rest of Micah Holsonbake’s body has not been recovered, though according to court documents, investigators believe Queen may have buried him in the hills near Taft, a rural area about 45 minutes west of Bakersfield.
There have been no developments in the investigation of James Kulstad’s murder since 2018. Anyone with information is urged to contact the Bakersfield Police Department at (661) 327-7111, or the Kern Secret Witness program at (661) 322-4040. A reward of up to $10,000 is being offered for information leading to an arrest in this case.
Ultimately, what really frustrates me about this case is that even after this avalanche of charges, so many questions remain unresolved, and not just what happened and who did it, but why. If the investigation concluded that James Kulstad’s death was unrelated to the disappearances of Baylee and Micah, who ordered his murder, and what was the reason? To what extent was the chiropractor involved with Queen and Vandecasteele’s trafficking racket? Was Sara Wedemeyer involved with Baylee’s disappearance, and if not, how’d she end up living with Matthew and expecting his child just two months after her “friend” went missing? Why did Sara and Matthew harass Baylee’s mother for months after the disappearance?
More than anything, I’m still lost as to Baylee Despot’s motivation for any of this. Did she just find herself in too deep with no way out? Did she actively make the choice to become a gunrunner? Did Matthew, looking to settle a grudge against Micah, seek out a relationship with Baylee with the intention of using her to get to him? Did he kill her because she was cooperating with the cops, because she attempted to leave him, or because he was just a sociopath who felt she was no longer useful?
Or is there a chance that law enforcement knows more than they’ve let on? When investigators told Mrs. Parrent that Matthew isn’t a suspect in her disappearance, was that an indication that she may, in fact, be alive?
Probably not. But at this point, anything is possible.
Sources:

1. Baylee’s page on The Charley Project: https://charleyproject.org/case/baylee-cheyanne-despot
2. First news story about Micah Holsonbake’s disappearance, 4/13/20: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/breaking/man-reported-missing-april-has-medical-condition-family-says/article_8af62936-3f73-11e8-a82e-4b2ef30f031f.html
3. “Baylee Parrent-Despot reported missing for more than a month,” 6/8/18: https://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/baylee-parrent-despot-reported-missing-for-more-than-a-month
4. “The Bakersfield 3: Reward offered in Baylee Despot case,” 9/18/18: https://www.kget.com/news/the-bakersfield-3-reward-offered-in-baylee-despot-case/
5. “Bakersfield 3 mothers recall their last contact with children,” news article dated 10/24/18 https://www.bakersfield.com/news/momma-loves-you-bakersfield-mothers-recall-their-last-contact-with/article_418f70a8-d7e0-11e8-ac3c-67a7fc8df3d1.html
6. “BPD: Missing man in Bakersfield 3 believed to have been killed, and his death shares similarities with disappearance of missing woman,” 10/20/18: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/breaking/bpd-missing-man-in-bakersfield-believed-to-have-been-killed/article_fbeb8eb4-04b8-11e9-bb07-17e07813288b.html
7. “Mother of missing woman fights harassment claims stemming from her daughter’s disappearance,” 12/18/18: https://www.kget.com/news/mother-of-missing-woman-fights-harassment-claims-stemming-from-her-daughters-disappearance/
8. “Micah Holsonbake dead; DNA test confirms arm found in river his,” 12/20/18: https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bpd-believes-a-man-missing-since-march-was-murdered
9. “Stories behind the Bakersfield 3,” 12/20/18: https://www.kget.com/news/homicide-news/stories-behind-the-bakersfield-3/1669785945/
10. Ryan Kulstad appearance on Dr. Phil, 1/14/19: https://www.drphil.com/videos/a-young-man-describes-what-led-up-to-him-holding-his-older-brother-in-his-arms-as-he-died/
11. “A closer look at the Bakersfield 3: Where is Baylee Despot?,” 3/5/19: https://www.kget.com/news/local-news/domestic-violence/a-closer-look-at-the-bakersfield-3-where-is-baylee-despot/
12. “A closer look at the Bakersfield 3: Who killed James Kulstad?” 3/6/19: https://www.kget.com/news/a-closer-look-at-the-bakersfield-3-who-killed-james-kulstad/
13. “A closer look at the Bakersfield 3: What happened to Micah Holsonbake?” 3/7/19: https://www.kget.com/news/a-closer-look-at-the-bakersfield-3-what-happened-to-micah-holsonbake/
14. “One year later, mothers of Bakersfield 3 continue their search for answers,” 3/23/19: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/one-year-later-mothers-of-bakersfield-3-continue-their-search-for-answers/article_528a7650-4cfc-11e9-886c-23d55ec3c32d.html
15. “One year since death of James Kulstad, one of the 'Bakersfield 3’,” 4/8/19: https://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/one-year-since-death-of-james-kulstad-one-of-the-bakersfield-3
16. “Mother of missing Baylee Despot speaks out on arrest of kidnapping suspect Matthew Queen,” 7/15/19: https://www.kget.com/news/local-news/mother-of-missing-baylee-despot-speaks-out-on-arrest-of-kidnapping-suspect-matthew-queen/
17. “Investigating the mysteries of what happened to the Bakersfield 3,” 11/3/19: https://www.turnto23.com/news/crime/investigating-the-mysteries-of-what-happened-to-the-bakersfield-3
18. “Defendant in alleged kidnapping waives right to preliminary hearing,” 11/9/19: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/defendant-in-alleged-kidnapping-waives-right-to-preliminary-hearing/article_b5a3274c-00c4-11ea-a1e9-635cd4a35c9e.html
19. “More charges filed against accused kidnapper Matthew Queen,” 1/1/20: https://www.kget.com/news/crime-watch/more-charges-filed-against-kidnapping-suspect-matthew-queen/
20. Press release announcing charges filed against Queen, Despot, and Vandacasteele: https://www.kerncounty.com/home/showpublisheddocument?id=4595
21. “Matthew Queen makes a court appearance in connection to 'Bakersfield 3' case,” 6/12/20: https://www.turnto23.com/news/crime/matthew-queen-make-a-court-appearance-in-connection-to-bakersfield-3-case
22. “‘Bakersfield 3’ member Micah Holsonbake believed killed by Matthew Queen over alleged stolen gun, defendant says in court documents,” 6/18/20: https://www.kget.com/news/crime-watch/bakersfield-3-member-micah-holsonbake-was-killed-by-matthew-queen-over-alleged-stolen-gun-defendant-says-in-court-documents/
23. “Documents suggest Micah Holsonbake was afraid of suspect Matthew Queen; suggest Queen attempted to mislead investigation,” 6/17/20: https://www.turnto23.com/news/crime/documents-suggest-micah-holsonbake-was-afraid-of-suspect-matthew-queen-suggest-queen-attempted-to-mislead-investigation
24. “Documents detail depth of investigation into suspected murder of Bakersfield 3 member,” 6/19/20: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/documents-detail-depth-of-investigation-into-suspected-murder-of-bakersfield-3-membearticle_ac1fb9a4-b278-11ea-962b-6b8ee0b03647.html
25. “Bakersfield 3 update: Matthew Queen appears in court, pleas not guilty to all charges,” 6/11/20: https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bakersfield-3-update-matthew-queen-appears-in-court-pleas-not-guilty-to-all-charges
26. “‘Bakersfield 3’ member Micah Holsonbake was afraid of murder suspect Matthew Queen, became increasingly paranoid before he disappeared, documents say,” 6/17/20
27. Appellate court decision against Matthew Queen: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/408/337/509670/
28. Obituary of James Kulstad: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bakersfield/obituary.aspx?n=james-john-kulstad&pid=188771330&fhid=6140

Once again, the Calvary comes to the rescue. Americans can now heave a sigh of relief after months of having to watch their fate hang in the balance as both Democrats and Republicans sparred over stimulus. After foot-dragging and name-calling for several months, Congress decided to approve a $600 stimulus package. However, the incoming Biden administration has promised an additional $1,400 making the total of $2000 in stimulus to be received by Americans.
As expected, some of that money would find its way into the stock market. The explosion of retail trading made possible by apps such as Robinhood and Etoro has meant that more people can trade in stocks for zero or little commission. Flush with cash from the government, people are trying to the stock market to increase their money.
Based on the prevailing macro-economic conditions, financial valuation, and social trends, we have compiled a list of stocks you should be spending your $2000 stimmy on.
DraftKings
As more states become amiable towards online gambling, one of the stocks which would benefit from expected legislation would be DraftKings. The expanding legalization of digital sports betting is an emerging trend. The November election results showed voters in several states largely approved ballot measures that legalized sports betting and other gaming expansion measures.
On the revenue side, DraftKings saw a 98% year-over-year surge to $132.8 million in the latest quarter, reported on Nov. 13. In the quarter, the company raised its full-year 2020 revenue range to $540 million-$560 million, which equates to 25%-30% annual revenue growth.
DraftKings also introduced 2021 revenue guidance of $750 million to $850 million, which equates to 45% year-over-year growth using the midpoints. The resumption of major sports such as the NBA, MLB, and the NHL in the third quarter, as well as the start of the NFL season, has generated tremendous customer engagement and revenue which implies that this stock would definitely see some significant upside.
Square
2020 was a very good year for Square. The company’s share price soared above 250% last year and was one of the pandemic winners in the market. Given the company’s fundamentals, Square's stock price will repeat the type of growth it saw in 2020. The services that Square provides -- particularly its Cash App, which allows people to send and receive money without physical contact -- have become more necessary during these times of social distancing and working from home. Revenue for the Cash App was up a whopping 574% year over year in the third quarter.
The company is also invested in bitcoin having out in seed capital in acquiring bitcoin. With bitcoin estimated to cross the $40,000 mark and possibly running as far as $146,000, this would shore up the company’s reserves.
GM
One reason why investors have been wary of the EV sector is the mounting debt and huge cash burn. This has made investors question the profitability of stocks in the electric vehicle space. With more EV stocks coming through the market through SPACS, investors are already mulling the idea that this may be a bubble. However, one company that many believe to have potential in the EV space is GM. Apart from having the infrastructure necessary to build cars, the company is can leverage its brand to ensure loyalty from customers. In addition, while other EV stocks such as Tesla and NIO may be fully stretched, share prices of General Motors are cheap, plus the company is been raking in profits.
In November, GM announced it plans to invest $27 billion in EV and autonomous vehicles through 2025. GM also plans to release 30 EV models globally by 2025. For comparison, Tesla currently has exactly four EV models. Earlier this week, the company signed a deal with Microsoft for its autonomous vehicles. GM continues to execute well on its Core and Future businesses and remains one of the best-positioned companies in our coverage over the long run. The stock is a good buy for the long haul.
AMD
As the digitalization of the world continues at an astronomic pace, microchips would continue to play a more prominent role. Already, there is a shortage of chips worldwide which means demand and prices would surge. One company poised to benefit from this growing demand is AMD. The company has managed to chip away at Intel's CPU dominance thanks to its superior product line, which is based on a smaller manufacturing node, allowing it to deliver better computing performance and reduce power consumption. The use of chips would continue to grow as more people are drawn to cryptocurrency mining, online gaming, and data center storage. AMD was one of the biggest winners in2020, and the trend is expected to continue well into this year. It is also one stock that may not be affected by the rotation into value as microchips would continue to be in demand.
TSM
Taiwan Semiconductor is a dedicated foundry that manufactures semiconductors for other companies. It aims to lead in both semiconductor technology and manufacturing, providing an open collaboration platform to build enduring trust with its customers.
The core strategy of Taiwan Semiconductor is its flexible business model. TSM does not need to design its own chips and prove its performance against the competitors; it only has to provide the technology and base for producers looking to make the best and fastest chips suited to their products' needs. By maintaining high-quality manufacturing processes and offering a collaborative platform to its customers, Taiwan Semiconductor ensures that it caters to producers across the spectrum even as technology rapidly evolves.
The company has experienced strong growth: From 2015 to 2019, net revenue increased by a solid 26.9%, while net income increased 12.7%. However, as smart technology has become ever more central to lives the company's growth has begun to heat up. In Q3 2020, the company boosted its net revenue by 21.6% year over year, while net income increased by 35.9%.
ETSY
Etsy provides an online e-commerce platform where creators of arts and crafts, vintage items, and other unique goods go to sell their products. Etsy has something that many high-growth companies don't -- a profitable business model. It boasts a trailing-12-month operating margin of 16%, making this unique online marketplace a buy today even at its premium valuation. It has outmaneuvered eBay (EBAY), avoided the Amazon (AMZN) crush, and dodged competition from Overstock.com (OSTK) and Wayfair (W).
When it reported third-quarter results on Oct. 28, Etsy reported a 128% leap in revenue to $451 million, well above Wall Street estimates of $412.7 million. Adjusted earnings came in at 70 cents, vs. estimates of 57 cents. In addition, gross merchandise sales jumped 119% to $2.6 billion.
Sunpower
Interest in renewable energy sources has soared immensely and continues to rise with each passing day. Two key forces are behind this surge: Increased awareness and urgency to address climate change, and falling costs of generation using renewables. Among renewable sources, solar energy looks most promising, due to its more predictable generation pattern. Solar's share in electricity generation is expected to rise from roughly 3% currently to more than 20% by 2050. SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWR) is one stock poised to benefit from these trends.
With a huge government push, California leads the way in solar adoption. Still, only 9% of homes in California have solar installations, representing a huge untapped market. In the new homes segment, SunPower has headway, having already worked with 18 of the top 20 builders in California. The company captures more than half of California's new homes market.
Its low-cost model positions it well to compete on pricing. The company can leverage its vast customer base to sell its storage products. Moreover, its leading position in the commercial and California's new homes market provide SunPower an edge over others in these segments.
PLUG
Plug power provides hydrogen fuel cell turnkey solutions to electric mobility and stationary power markets. The company continues innovating end-to-end hydrogen fuel solutions by harnessing its unique capabilities and is the largest buyer of liquid hydrogen in North America.
Though the company has not posted any profit, many hedge funds are bullish on the stock, with analysts having high recommendations. The company’s $1.5bn deal with South Korean conglomerate SK Group into American hydrogen company has certainly drawn a lot of attention, with many investors gauging the company’s profitability.
Plug Power’s core business is providing fuel cell-powered forklifts for commercial customers. However, it has expanded to hydrogen production following its acquisition of two hydrogen companies.
These acquisitions expand the plug’s addressable market which has already exceeded $30 billion. The resulting vertical integration of the acquisitions makes Plug Power an even stronger company as can now provide the hydrogen that powers its vehicles.
This definitely allows Plug to leverage on its already existing customer base which includes some of the best companies in the country. Plug Power raised its 2024 guidance to $1.2 billion in revenue and $200 million in operating income. Shares of PLUG have risen by 111% in the last month.
Tesla
Returning to the green-energy theme, Tesla is one stock that has significant upside. The company is positioned to benefit from the clean energy drive of the Biden administration. Apart from that, Tesla is the leader in its sector and continues to increase its delivery numbers. Tesla is now the most valuable auto company in the world. It has recently surpassed Facebook (FB) by market capitalization. The stock has recently received upgrades from analysts and if the EV market continues to evolve, Tesla would continue to be in the pole position, which gives it significant market share and of course revenue.
GrowGeneration Corp.
For those looking at balance sheets and income statements, GrowGeneration Corp is one highly profitable marijuana stock to watch in 2021. The company has the largest chain of specialty hydroponic and organic garden centers in the U.S. with 36 storefront locations. In essence, the company supplies products necessary for growing cannabis and works closely with major marijuana companies in the U.S. market.
Shares of Grow Generation returned a whopping 880.98% in 2020, posting the fastest-growing quarterly results in the industry. It is expected that the company would continue its momentum this year. The shares of the company have so far risen by 20% this year.
Additionally, the company continued strategic acquisition and expansion plans in the quarter, giving GrowGen more growth potential for 2021. It was easily one of the best performing cannabis stocks for 2020. In essence, GRWG stock showed greater market stability than other pot stocks in the U.S. in 2020.
Thanks for reading!
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Well, this is going to be a long hot mess, I apologize from the start, like Inigo Montoya I have to say, "There is too much" even trying to sum it up, partly because it's a lot and I mean a LOT of history, also because it's very personal to me. I'm lucky that I don't live with any Qultists, but I deal with it at work, and we all deal with them on some level, as we saw on Jan 6th. I really want to make a joke about a national "Epiphany" but there's just nothing funny about it, even if it has some grotesque comedy.
It's personal because I was raised in a worldview that feeds this, and I feel amazingly lucky, like I was just missed by a meteor by inches, that I got out long enough ago that there was no chance of buy-in. But the whole thing is so triggering for that reason, I have a clear memory of having believed in secret alternate histories full of conspiracism and prophecies, in which every historical event had alternate interpretations explained by Sin, with the greatest sin of all being abortion, where all the media and all of science/medicine was lying to us because they hated God and families and goodness, but we weren't supposed to DO anything but pray because it was part of God's plan (trust the plan!)
So it's like being a fish that has taken to the land, remembering swimming in that sea of delusions, but now breathing air and even trying to recall that mindset feels like drowning today. But it helps explain what is going on and why Q is so potently seductive - it's a very ancient meme that has been constantly refined and tweaked over centuries, with a steroid injection a hundred years ago that took it to all new catastrophic levels culminating in the Holocaust.
That was of course the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a propaganda work created in 1903 by the Russian government to retroactively justify their pogroms by supposedly-leaked documents revealing the secret programs by the secret Jewish leadership to subvert and destroy mainstream Christian society, which was translated in 1919 in English and was promoted and published in America by non other than Henry Ford, whose bigotry and open embrace of fascism somehow never made it into our history books when I was in school and he was praised as an American genius-hero, while the theater class was putting on "Fiddler on the Roof. "
They didn't tell us about IBM then, either.
The Protocols memetic influence can be seen in the David Ickes Lizard people secretly rule the world stuff, but it's also invisibly omnipresent in the entire anti-abortion movement. The Protocols didn't appear in an early 20th century vacuum, instead they drew on a long tradition across Europe of justifying persecution of minorities by claiming they were uniquely wicked and depraved so it was really self defense, and particularly targeting their Jewish neighbors with the accusation of ritually killing and eating Christian children. William of Norwich was the first unsolved crime of a murdered boy whose death was blamed on the local Jewish community, in spite of the local government saying it was unproven at the time, but not the last.
Right there, you can see where we are now, in a "distant mirror" to use historian Tuchman's phrase: the accusation wouldn't have been made if there hadn't already been bigotry, which in turn led them to reject the official government statement that persons unknown committed the crime, and an entire fictional account being treated as "the truth" since it didn't have the uncomfortable possibility that it was one of US who did it, and we could be breaking bread with a murderer! No, no, it must have been one of those heretical THEM!
And it never goes away, even if serious respectable people in positions of authority tried to debunk and disprove and defuse the mob mentality - that just proves that they've been turned or bought or are part of the child-sacrificing cult too. The Freemasons get pulled into it, as rivals to the established churches, and eventually abortion too, because Jewish tradition says not a child until born, and the life/health/safety of the mother always took priority. So "Jewish doctors" in pre-WW2 writings where there doesn't seem to be any relevance to a doctor's religion really means abortion, in the censorship of the early 20th century.
And abortion means "good" women running around having sex for fun, with all the fears of being "cucked" that have never left conservative masculinity. "Jews will not replace us" as they chanted at Charlottesville, this "Great Replacement" theory, has it that the secret plan is to use the degenerate arts and media made by (((Hollywood Liberals))) to convince pure white women to race mix, or to not want godly white husbands, so feminism too is part of the plot, and tolerance of gay rights, along with Communism which rebels against the rightful authority of rich white Christian men, whose money means they're blessed by God, unlike the bad people who shouldn't be rich because they're NOT white Christian men, in the horrible hash of memes which fed the rise of the Reich as it had the Tsars' pogroms the last generation.
And so the whole world dealt with the consequences of letting these conspiracies fester and interbreed from the old media of pulpits and bars to the new media of cheap printing, then radio waves, then movie reels. The "blood-dimmed tide" reached everywhere, but that's cold comfort to the victims.
And then the same people who had been preaching the Blood Libel until they got their genocide turned around and cynically applied the term "Holocaust" to legalized abortion. The people who were fans of Fr. Coughlin the "Radio Priest" who did an early Horsehoe Theory going from supporting FDR to supporting Hitler, who rejected Vatican II because it rejected the former ritual blaming "The Jews" for killing poor baby Jesus, and also rejected any and all calls to social justice of every kind.
The Catholic conservatives rebranded by changing "the Jews" to "secular humanists" and "Hollywood liberals" and added "environmentalists" to the long list of child-sacrificers in their conspiracy, and the Fundamentalist conservatives jumped on the bandwagon as a way to erase the stink of supporting segregation and reclaim a moral high ground by protecting innocent babies. Who's more innocent than anyone? The unborn! They've never done anything, so they can't be Milkshake Ducks. (Once they're born? Fuck 'em.)
And YOU don't need to do anything either, just pray and vote Republican! It's so easy! You get to bask in the righteous glow of hating the worst people in the world, people who KILL BABIES for fun & profit, because OBVIOUSLY the doctors are lying when they say pregnancy is dangerous, it's NATURAL, so it must be a highly-profitable industry because otherwise why would they do it? This is straight out of 1930s fascist propaganda, only by 1975 they had so thoroughly erased the word "Jews" that a younger generation never knew it had been there. So there's your distrust of science and medicine and demonization of Planned Parenthood, mandated by Christian religion in far too many churches.
You can boost your conspiracy fix with add-ons like miracles, visions, and secret truths that even the mainstream clergy don't want you to know about, like The Third Secret of Fatima or The Tribulation/The Rapture, or with accusations that not only are the evil (((doctors))) butchering babies for profit and to overthrow Western Civilization, but they're SELLING BABBY PARTS to cosmetics companies and even Coca-Cola.
Why? How would this make sense? Why would companies sneak illegal human tissue into your shampoo or your soda, ffs? Because they're EVIL, duh. Now YOU are part of the ritual cannibalistic cult, like it or not! There are BABBY PARTS in your vaccines, doncha know? You've ALREADY BEEN contaminated! And Procter & Gamble has a Satanic symbol for a logo, and you put their toothpaste IN YOUR MOUTH! How can you care about baby seals when they're murdering baby HUMANS? How can you care about adult workers suffering picking grapes toiling in the vineyards of California or the packing plants of Nebraska when they're killing BABIES? It's a (((Communist)))-Muslim-homo-fascist plot! WE know the TRUTH! The rest of you are either asleep, or supporting the Devil!
At the same time, it's obviously part of the same evil God-hating conspiracy that the media is publishing allegations of priestly pederasty. Disbelieve everyone except us, and hate them because they say WE are the baddies.
No, it's the whole godless nation of America that's evil, because the laws and culture tolerate abortion/gay people/women who take jobs away from men EVEN IN THE ARMY obviously to weaken us so the Commies can roll right over us Wolverines!/tree-huggers who want to replace humans with baby seals and spotted owls/Freemasons/the foreign family who moved in next doothe teens who play loud music and wear weird sexy clothes -- and someday soon, God will smite the land, and THEN you'll all be sorry!
UGH I CAN'T EVEN, I used to believe ALL of this crap and I didn't even get to Paul Weyrich and the Southern Strategy. That will have to be another post, but this is at least a peek through a private window into how "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" and we saw the same exact flailing of leaders between running away from the stochastic terror consequences of their words and plunging deeper in when some impressionable young Christians started shooting and blowing up health care providers after having been raised in "Stop the New Holocaust" rhetoric since birth. It was just supposed to motivate you to send us money, vote for the Corporation Party, and do absolutely nothing else except maybe yell at some miserable pregnant people trying to get medical help.
Past is predictive.
All of Q has its roots in the fertile soil of American conspiracism going back to the "Purity of Essence" antifluoride campaigns and the John Birch Society so often mocked but never extinguished, which in turn goes back over a thousand years and even more, because accusing the religious minority you want to scapegoat of being child-sacrificing cannibals worked for the Romans, too.
History is Irony.
Eye-Opening Links - the link between white supremacy and abortion opposition isn't even trying to hide these days, but a decade and more back, it was pretty much only Fred Clark writing as a liberal Christian trying to bring sanity to America by debunking the Rapture peddling reverends of the Right before TEOTWAWKI - "The Biblical View that's Younger than the Happy Meal" is very powerful:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/
Here's a Salon article which cites this post, and other authors, on the use of abortion as a way of memoryholing school segregation:
https://www.salon.com/2018/07/08/when-evangelicals-were-pro-choice-and-the-nra-was-pro-gun-control-a-history-of-hypocrisy/
His entire blog, Slacktivist, is worth checking out but it's a lot, so here's just the abortion tag:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/tag/abortion/
And here's the one that explains why Qult members WANT there to be a vile cult of (((Hollywood liberals))) raping and eating children that they can feel justified in murdering if only by proxy, the saga of Bad Jackie:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2010/09/19/jackie-at-the-crossroads/
Here's his post on the Blood Libel propaganda transformation of William of Norwich from tragic victim of an unknown killer into a "martyr" - EXACTLY like Trump using that poor woman shot by accident as a justification to persecute immigrants from the southern border:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2019/05/02/thomas-of-monmouth-the-hugely-influential-christian-writer-youve-never-heard-of/
Here's that earlier instance of the alternate reality creation, the Procter & Gamble Satanic fabrication:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/procter-gamble-satan-conspiracy-theory
I don't want to put up links to historic bigoted propaganda, you can find that easily if you really want to, but one thing that's really interesting about the Protocols is that large parts of it were plagiarized from novels and other sources which weren't even about Jews, translated into Russian, and changed to fit the rest of it. That was how the Times of London debunked it in 1921, a lot harder before Turnitin existed. Villainy, but also LAZY villainy, just like we saw the last four years. But it works because the people who ate it up didn't CARE that the fake justification for doing pogroms was a bad pastiche - and they STILL don't.
I'm sorry this is so rough and rambling, but it's like looking into the Mirrorverse and seeing who I could have been if I wasn't too gay, too nerdy and too overall fucked up, when I see those smiling preppy women beating down the Capital doors or posturing on the TV with their guns. The Abyss smirks back winking at me, unrepentant as Sarah Palin at the shooting of Gabby Giffords. I don't know how to get anyone else out of it -- I'm not even sure how I escaped, really!

Team has been involved in a substantial number of the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming industries’ most significant merger and acquisition transactions, holding key positions at, and transacting with Scientific Games Corp, Inspired Gaming Group, FOX Bets, Ocean Casino Resort, Resorts International Holdings, PokerStars, DraftKings, Mohegan Sun, Caesars Entertainment Corporation, Harrah’s Entertainment, Tropicana Entertainment, Inc., TSG/Sky Betting & Gaming, Facebook, Inc, Wynn Resorts, Dubai World/MGM Resorts
Here's all the Bios. These guys are stellar! TEKK closed at $10.30 today. Still cheap!
If you don't like to read... you don't like to make money!!!!
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Matthew Davey — Chief Executive Officer and Director
Mr. Davey has over 25 years of experience within the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming ecosystems, as well as experience in the public sector. He is an experienced public company executive officer and board member. He has served in executive management positions across the gaming technology arena. Over the course of Mr. Davey’s career, he oversaw more than ten mergers and acquisitions and over $1.2 billion in debt and equity capital raised to support the companies he has led.
Most recently, Mr. Davey was Chief Executive Officer of SG Digital, the Digital Division of Scientific Games Corp. (“Scientific Games”) (Nasdaq: SGMS). SG Digital was established following the purchase by Scientific Games of NYX Gaming Group Limited (“NYX”) (formerly TSXV: NYX), where Mr. Davey served as Chief Executive Officer and Director. The NYX acquisition provided Scientific Games with a vehicle to significantly accelerate the scale and breadth of its existing digital gaming business, including the strategic expansion into sports betting. In his capacity as Chief Executive Officer of NYX, Mr. Davey developed and implemented a corporate strategy that generated strong revenue growth. Mr. Davey shaped company strategy to focus on digital gaming supplier platforms and content that provided various gaming operators with the underlying gaming and sports betting systems for their online gaming business. In 2014, Mr. Davey oversaw the initial public offering of NYX, and his experience in the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming industries helped NYX recognize momentum as a public company. After the public offering, from 2014 to 2018, Mr. Davey oversaw seven acquisitions which helped establish NYX as one of the fastest growing global B2B real-money digital gaming and sports betting platforms. These acquisitions included:
• OpenBet: In 2016, NYX completed the $385 million acquisition of OpenBet. This was one of the more complex and transformative acquisitions that Mr. Davey oversaw at NYX. Through securing co-investments from William Hill (LSE: WMH), Sky Betting & Gaming and The Stars Group (formerly Nasdaq: TSG, TSX: TSGI), Mr. Davey was able to get the acquisition from Vitruvian Partners completed successfully, winning the deal against much larger and well capitalized competitors. By combining two established and proven B2B betting and gaming suppliers, NYX was well positioned to provide customers with exciting player-driven solutions across all major product verticals and distribution channels. This allowed NYX to become the leading B2B omni-channel sportsbook platform in the market and the supplier to over 300 gaming operators globally with an extensive library of desktop and mobile game titles, including more than 700 on NYX platforms and more than 2,000 on the OpenBet platform.
• Cryptologic/Chartwell: In 2015, NYX completed the $119 million acquisition of Cryptologic and Chartwell. The acquisition provided NYX with more than 400 titles of additional leading gaming content, a broader customer base, and direct exposure to PokerStars and Intercasino, part of the Gamesys Group (LSE: GYS) — two of the world’s largest online casino offerings.
• OnGame: In 2014, NYX completed the distressed acquisition of OnGame, a premier poker content, platform and service provider. This acquisition provided NYX with one of the best poker products in the industry, access to several regulated jurisdictions, and a valuable talent pool that was instrumental in the growth of NYX. The addition of OnGame further established a path for NYX to continue its growth in both European and U.S. markets.
These acquisitions, together with meaningful organic growth, increased NYX’s revenue from $24 million in 2014 to $184 million annualized in 2017. During that time, Mr. Davey helped build NYX to have over 200 customers in the global gaming industry and a team of 1,000 employees. Mr. Davey’s success at NYX ultimately led to its sale to Scientific Games for $631 million in 2018.
Mr. Davey joined Next Gen Gaming, the predecessor to NYX, in 2000 as the Vice President of Technology, was appointed as Executive Director in 2003 and named Chief Executive Officer in 2005. Prior to that, he was the Senior Consultant for Access Systems, a company that specializes in the provision of back-end software for licensed online casinos. Prior to joining Access, Mr. Davey worked for the Northern Territory Government specializing in matters pertaining to the internet and e-commerce along with roles in the Department of Racing and Gaming. Mr. Davey received a Bachelor of Electrical & Electronic Engineering from Northern Territory University, Australia (also known as Charles Darwin University).
Robin Chhabra — President
Mr. Chhabra has been at the forefront of corporate acquisition activity within the digital gaming landscape for over a decade. His prior experience includes leading corporate strategy, M&A, and business development at two of the global leaders in the digital gaming industry, The Stars Group (“TSG”) and William Hill, and a leading supplier, Inspired Gaming Group (Nasdaq: INSE). Mr. Chhabra served on the Group Executive Committees of each of these companies. From 2017 to May 2020, Mr. Chhabra served as Chief Corporate Development Officer at TSG and, from 2019 to August 2020, he also served as the Chief Executive Officer of Fox Bet, a leading U.S. online gaming business which is the product of a landmark partnership between TSG and FOX Sports, a transaction which he led. During that period, Mr. Chhabra led several transactions which transformed TSG into the largest publicly listed online gambling operator in the world by both revenue and market capitalization and one of the most diversified from a product and geographic perspective with revenues of over $2.5 billion. Mr. Chhabra’s M&A experience is extensive and covers multiple global geographies across the digital gaming value chain and includes the following:
• TSG/Flutter Entertainment Merger: In 2019, Mr. Chhabra led the TSG M&A team that was responsible for TSG’s $12.2 billion merger with Flutter Entertainment (LSE: FLTR). The merger between TSG and Flutter Entertainment is the largest transaction in the digital gaming industry to date. The combination created the largest publicly listed online gaming company with approximately 13 million active customers and leading product offerings, which include sports betting, online casino, fantasy sports and poker. The combined entity includes some of the world’s most iconic digital gaming brands such as Fanduel, Fox Bet, Sky Bet, PaddyPower, Betfair, PokerStars and SportsBet. TSG/Flutter Entertainment is one of the most geographically diverse digital gaming and media companies with leading positions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany and Georgia.
• TSG/Sky Betting and Gaming (“SBG”): In 2018, Mr. Chhabra led the acquisition of SBG from CVC Capital Partners and Sky plc, Europe’s largest media company, in a transaction valued at $4.7 billion. At the time of the acquisition SBG was the largest mobile gambling operator in the United Kingdom and one of the fastest growing of the major operators having doubled its online market share in three years. The acquisition of SBG provided TSG with (a) greater revenue diversification, significantly enhanced expertise and exposure to sports betting just ahead of the judicial overturn of The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) by the U.S. Supreme Court, (b) a leading position within the United Kingdom, the world’s largest regulated online gaming market, (c) improved products and technology as a result of the addition of SBG’s innovative casino and sports book offerings and a portfolio of popular mobile apps, and (d) expertise in deeply integrating sports betting with leading sports media companies, positioning TSG to create more engaging content, deliver faster growth and decrease customer acquisition costs.
• William Hill (LSE: WMH): At William Hill, from 2010 to 2017, Mr. Chhabra served as Group Director of Strategy and Corporate Development where he led several transactions which contributed to William Hill’s transformation from a land-based gambling operator in the United Kingdom to a leading online-led international business. Mr. Chhabra led William Hill’s entry into the U.S. sports betting and online lottery markets with the acquisition of four businesses, including the simultaneous acquisitions of three U.S. sportsbooks, Cal Neva, American Wagering and Brandywine Bookmaking, in 2011 for an aggregate purchase price of $55 million. These businesses ultimately led William Hill to achieve a leading position in the U.S. sports betting market with a market share of 24% in 2019. Additionally, Mr. Chhabra played a key role in structuring William Hill’s successful joint venture with PlayTech Plc (LSE: PTEC) in 2008. The combined entity created one of the largest online gambling businesses in Europe at the time of its formation and led to William Hill’s buyout of Playtech’s interest for $637 million in 2013. Prior to the transaction, William Hill had struggled in its attempt to establish a strong online gaming platform and a meaningful presence outside the United Kingdom.
Mr. Chhabra has also successfully completed four transactions worth over $1.2 billion in Australia, the world’s second largest regulated online gambling market, and various partnerships in Asia. Additionally, he completed several technology and media related transactions, including William Hill’s investment in NYX, where he worked with Mr. Davey on NYX’s transformational acquisition of OpenBet.
Prior to working in the gaming sector, Mr. Chhabra was an equities analyst and a management consultant. Mr. Chhabra received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Eric Matejevich — Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Matejevich is a seasoned gaming executive with extensive experience in both the online gaming and traditional casino industries. From February to August 2019, he served as Trustee and Interim-Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Casino Resort (“Ocean”) (formerly Revel Casino, which had a construction cost of $2.4 billion) in Atlantic City, where he successfully led the management team through an ownership change and operational turnaround effort. Over the course of seven months, Mr. Matejevich managed to reduce the property’s weekly cash burn of $1.5 million to an annualized cash flow run rate in excess of $20 million.
Prior to Ocean, from 2016 to 2018, Mr. Matejevich served as the Chief Financial Officer of NYX. At NYX, he focused his efforts on integrating the company’s many acquisitions and multiple debt refinancings to simplify its capital structure and provided liquidity for growth initiatives. Additionally, Mr. Matejevich was instrumental to the executive team that sold NYX to Scientific Games for $631 million.
Prior to NYX, from 2004 to 2014, Mr. Matejevich was the Chief Financial Officer of Resorts International Holdings and later, from 2011, also the Chief Operating Officer of the Atlantic Club Casino, a property under the Resorts International Holdings umbrella — a Colony Capital (NYSE: CLNY) entity. As Chief Financial Officer, he provided managerial oversight for all finance functions for a six-property casino company with annual gaming revenue exceeding $1.3 billion, 10,000 gaming positions, 7,000 hotel rooms and over 11,000 staff members during his tenure. Mr. Matejevich led the transition effort to integrate a four-casino, $1.3 billion acquisition from Harrah’s Entertainment and Caesars Entertainment (Nasdaq: CZR). As Chief Operating Officer of Atlantic Club, he lobbied for and was successful in obtaining the first internet gaming legislation passed in the United States. The Atlantic Club was the sole New Jersey casino proponent of the legislation.
Prior to serving in various gaming positions, Mr. Matejevich was a Vice President of High Yield Research for Merrill Lynch, where he managed the corporate bond research effort for the gaming and leisure sectors and marketed high yield and other debt transactions totaling $4.8 billion. Mr. Matejevich received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from The Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our Board of Directors
Morris Bailey — Chairman
Over the past 10 years, Mr. Bailey has been a leader in turning around Atlantic City, as well as being among the first gaming executives to embrace online gaming and sports betting in the United States. In his efforts, Mr. Bailey partnered with two of the largest digital gaming companies in the world, PokerStars, part of the Stars Group, and DraftKings (Nasdaq: DKNG). In 2010, Mr. Bailey bought Resorts Atlantic City (“Resorts”) and initiated a comprehensive renovation which allowed for the property to be rebranded and repositioned. In 2012, Mr. Bailey signed an agreement with Mohegan Sun to manage the day-to-day operations of the casino. In addition to Mohegan Sun’s operational expertise and ability to reduce costs via economies of scale, Resorts gained access to their robust customer database. Soon thereafter, Mr. Bailey and his team focused on bringing online gaming to the property. In 2015, Resorts established a platform to engage in online gaming by partnering with PokerStars, now part of the $24 billion Flutter Entertainment, PLC (LSE: FLTR), to operate an online poker room in Atlantic City. In 2018, Resorts announced deals with DraftKings and SBTech to open a sportsbook on-property and online. For 2020 year-to-date, Resorts has performed in the top quartile in internet gross gaming revenue in New Jersey. Mr. Bailey’s efforts in New Jersey helped set the framework for expansion of online sports and gaming throughout the United States.
In addition to his gaming interests, Mr. Bailey has over 50 years of experience in all facets of real estate development, asset M&A, capital markets and operations and is the founder, Chief Executive Officer and Principal of JEMB Realty, a leading real estate development, investment and management organization. Mr. Bailey has notable investment experience within the energy, finance and telecommunications sectors through investments in the Astoria Energy Plant, Basis Investment Group and Xentris Wireless.
Tony Rodio — Director Nominee
Mr. Rodio has nearly four decades of experience in the gaming industry. Most recently, Mr. Rodio served as the Chief Executive Officer and director of Caesars Entertainment Corporation (“Caesars”) (Nasdaq: CZR), one of the world’s most diversified casino-entertainment providers and the most geographically diverse U.S. casino-entertainment company, from April 2019 until its acquisition by Eldorado Resorts, Inc. in July 2020. Mr. Rodio led Caesars through its $17.3 billion merger with Eldorado Resorts, one of the largest transactions in the gaming industry to date. Additionally, Mr. Rodio was instrumental to Caesars’ expansion into the digital gaming industry and oversaw the implementation of new digital segments such as its Scientific Games powered retail sportsbook solution that now operates in various states throughout the U.S. From October 2018 to May 2019, Mr. Rodio served as Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Gaming. Prior to Affinity Gaming, he served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a director of Tropicana Entertainment, Inc. (“Tropicana”) for over seven years, where he was responsible for the operation of eight casino properties in seven different jurisdictions. During his time at Tropicana, Mr. Rodio oversaw a period of unprecedented growth at the company, improving overall financial results with net revenue that increased more than 50% driven by both operational improvements and expansion across regional markets. Mr. Rodio led major capital projects, including the complete renovation of Tropicana Atlantic City and Tropicana’s move to land-based operations in Evansville, Indiana. Each of these initiatives, among others, generated substantial value for Tropicana. Ultimately, Mr. Rodio’s efforts at Tropicana led to its sale to Eldorado Resorts in 2018 for $1.85 billion. Prior to Tropicana, Mr. Rodio held a succession of executive positions in Atlantic City for casino brands, including Trump Marina Hotel Casino, Harrah’s Entertainment (predecessor to Caesars), the Atlantic City Hilton Casino Resort and Penn National Gaming. He has also served as a director of several professional and charitable organizations, including Atlantic City Alliance, United Way of Atlantic County, the Casino Associations of New Jersey and Indiana, AtlantiCare Charitable Foundation and the Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming Hospitality & Tourism. Mr. Rodio brings extensive knowledge of and experience in the gaming industry, operational expertise, and a demonstrated ability to effectively design and implement company strategy. Mr. Rodio received a Bachelor of Science from Rider University and a Master of Business Administration from Monmouth University.
Marlon Goldstein — Director Nominee
Mr. Goldstein is a licensed attorney with nearly 20 years of experience in the gaming space. He joined The Stars Group (Nasdaq: TSG)(TSX: TSGI) in January 2014 as its Executive Vice-President, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary until his retirement from the company in July 2020 following the merger of TSG with Flutter Entertainment, PLC (LSE: FLTR). Mr. Goldstein also previously served as the Executive Vice-President, Corporate Development and General Counsel of TSG. Mr. Goldstein was also the senior TSG executive based in the United States and was one of the primary architects of TSG’s strategic vision for its U.S.-facing business. During his tenure, TSG grew from an approximately $500 million market-cap company to an approximately $7 billion market-cap company through a combination of organic growth and strategic mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Goldstein participated in numerous M&A transactions and capital markets offerings at TSG, including several transformational transactions in the digital gaming industry. Notable transactions in which Mr. Goldstein was involved include:
• TSG/Flutter Merger: In 2019, TSG merged with Flutter for a $12.2 billion transaction value, the largest transaction in the digital gaming industry to date.
• TSG/Fox Bet Partnership: In 2019, TSG entered into a partnership with FOX Sports to create FOX Bet in the U.S., a leading U.S. online gaming business. Wall Street Research estimates an approximate $1.1 billion valuation for Fox Bet post-partnership with The Stars Group.
• TSG/Sky Betting & Gaming: In 2018, TSG acquired Sky Betting & Gaming, the largest mobile gambling operator in the United Kingdom at the time, for $4.7 billion.
• TSG/CrownBet and William Hill: In 2018, TSG simultaneously acquired CrownBet and William Hill, two Australian operators, for a total of $621 million in a multi-part transaction.
• TSG/PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker: In 2014, TSG acquired The Rational Group, which operated PokerStars and Full Tilt and was the world’s largest poker business, for $4.9 billion.
Through his ability to legally structure large and complex transactions, Mr. Goldstein was integral to TSG’s vision of becoming a full-service online gaming company. Additionally, he assisted in structuring TSG’s capital markets activity, which generated liquidity for acquisitions and strengthened its balance sheet.
Prior to joining TSG, Mr. Goldstein was a principal shareholder in the corporate and securities practice at the international law firm of Greenberg Traurig P.A., where he practiced for almost 13 years. Mr. Goldstein’s practice focused on corporate and securities matters, including mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, and financing transactions. Additionally, Mr. Goldstein was the founder and co-chair of the firm’s Gaming Practice, a multi-disciplinary team of attorneys representing owners, operators and developers of gaming facilities, manufacturers and suppliers of gaming devices, investment banks and lenders in financing transactions, and Indian tribes in the development and financing of gaming facilities.
Mr. Goldstein brings experience and insight that we believe will be valuable to a potential initial business combination target business. Mr. Goldstein received a Bachelor of Business Administration with a concentration in accounting from Emory University and a Juris Doctorate with highest honors from the University of Florida, College of Law.
Sean Ryan — Director Nominee
Mr. Ryan is a digital media and technology operator with extensive global experience in online payments, e-commerce, marketplaces, mobile ad networks, digital games, enterprise collaboration platforms, blockchain, real money gaming and online music. Since 2014, Mr. Ryan has been serving as Vice President of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, Inc. (“Facebook”) (Nasdaq: FB), where he leads a more than 500 person global organization that manages the Payments, Commerce, Novi/Blockhain, Workplace and Audience Network businesses. Prior to his current role, Mr. Ryan was hired in 2011 as the Director of Games Partnerships to lead and grow the global Games business at Facebook. While the Director of Games Partnerships, Mr. Ryan focused on re-shaping Facebook’s games and monetization strategies to derive more value for Facebook, its users and its partners, including the addition of a Real Money Gaming offering in regulated markets. Mr. Ryan’s team helped accelerate a major trend in engagement through cross-platform games and therefore the opportunity to increase users through establishing games on multiple platforms. Prior to joining Facebook, Mr. Ryan created the new social and mobile games division at News Corp, an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by Rupert Murdoch. While at News Corp, Mr. Ryan led the acquisition of Making Fun, a San Francisco social-game start-up, that created News Corp’s games publishing division.
Before joining News Corp., Mr. Ryan founded multiple digital businesses such as Twofish, Meez, Open Wager and SingShot Media. Mr. Ryan co-founded Twofish in 2009, a virtual goods and services platform that provided developers with data analytics and insights for individual application’s digital economies. Twofish was later sold to online payments provider Live Gamer, where Mr. Ryan served on the board of directors. From 2005 to 2008, Mr. Ryan founded and led Meez.com, a social entertainment service combining avatars, web games and virtual worlds. The white label social casino gaming company Open Wager was spun out of Meez and was later sold to VGW Holdings, Mr. Ryan also co-founded SingShot Media, an online karaoke community, which was sold to Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: EA) and merged into its Sims division.
We believe Mr. Ryan’s experience will be valuable to a potential initial business combination target and would provide an expanded perspective on the digital gaming landscape. Mr. Ryan received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Tom Roche — Director Nominee
Mr. Roche has more than 40 years of experience in the gaming industry as a regulator, advisor and independent auditor. Mr. Roche joined Ernst & Young (“EY”) as a partner in 2003 and opened its Las Vegas office. He was subsequently appointed as the Office Managing Partner and Global Gaming Industry Market Leader. In 2016, Mr. Roche relocated to the EY Hong Kong office to supervise the expansion of the EY Global Gaming Industry practice in the Asia Pacific region. Mr. Roche has been integral to numerous transactions that have shaped the current gaming landscape, including:
• Wynn Resorts (Nasdaq: WYNN) initial public offering: Mr. Roche was the lead partner on Wynn Resort’s initial public offering, which raised $450 million in 2002.
• Harrah’s Entertainment/Apollo Management Group & Texas Pacific Group: Mr. Roche headed the regulatory advisory services on the buyout of Harrah’s Entertainment, the world’s largest casino company at the time, for $17.1 billion.
• Dubai World/MGM Resorts: Mr. Roche headed the regulatory and due diligence advisory services to Dubai World in its approximately $5.1 billion investment in MGM. Dubai World bought 28.4 million MGM shares, or 9.5 percent of the casino operator, for $2.4 billion. It then invested $2.7 billion to acquire a 50% stake in MGM’s CityCenter Project, a $7.4 billion 76-acre Las Vegas development of hotels, condos and retail outlets.
• MGM Growth Properties (NYSE: MGP) initial public offering: Mr. Roche provided tax and structural transaction services to MGM Resorts in the creation of MGM Growth Properties, a publicly traded REIT engaged in the acquisition, ownership and leasing of large-scale destination entertainment and leisure resorts. MGM Growth Properties raised $1.05 billion in its 2016 initial public offering.
Mr. Roche also directed EY advisory services to boards and management teams for profit improvement and technology related initiatives. In addition, Mr. Roche provided advisory support to the American Gaming Association on several research projects, including those specifically related to sports betting, the revocation of The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) and anti-money laundering best practices in the gaming industry. Equally, he has assisted government agencies in numerous international locations with enhancing their regulatory approach to governing the industry especially in the online gambling sector.
Prior to joining Ernst & Young, Mr. Roche served as Deloitte’s National Gaming Industry Leader and as the co-head of Andersen’s Gaming Industry Practice in Las Vegas. In 1989, Mr. Roche was appointed by then Governor of the State of Nevada, Robert Miller, to serve as one of three members of the Nevada State Gaming Control Board for a four-year term, where he was directly responsible for the Audit and New Games Lab Divisions. As a board member, he spent a substantial amount of time assisting global jurisdiction regulators enact gaming legislation in the design of their regulatory structure. During his career, Roche has been involved in numerous public and private offerings of equity and debt securities. His background includes providing casino regulatory consulting services to casino licensees and to federal and state agencies including the National Indian Gaming Commission and the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, and industry associations such as the Nevada Resort Association and the American Gaming Association.
We believe Mr. Roche’s highly regarded reputation as a gaming auditor and advisor in the gaming industry will be valuable for us and a potential business combination target. Mr. Roche is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and is licensed by the Nevada State Board of Accountancy and Mississippi State Board of Public Accountancy. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Southern California.

(Credit for the below list has to be given to u/BurritoFueled, who created the original list in 2014 and updated it a year later. Almost two-thirds of the items below are still from that original list. All I’ve done with the list is revive it a little bit by updating dead links and making little tweaks when necessary. Also, thanks to those that submitted new additions to the list last week. Over a third of the below items are new and a lot of the original items have had newer information added onto them.)
People are always looking for something to do around here. Maybe you’re a transplant, unaware of what this area has to offer, or maybe you’re a lifelong resident, tired of the same old thing. Well friend, if you fall into the latter category, do not despair. There’s actually plenty of things to do in the Sacramento area – things of interest to almost any lifestyle, personality, or budget.
So, whether you’re an athlete, geek, eccentric, hipster, weirdo, sexual deviant or just a normal person looking for a new activity, below is a list of activities for you to try. Please note that it includes only activities that take place at least a few times a year – no one-off events or festivals here.
Enjoy this list. If you have any suggestions of your own to add, comment below in this thread. I'll try to keep this as up to date as possible.
Away we go.
UPDATED 10-6-20
(Note: Due to the current pandemic, some of these activities may be curtailed or not offered at all.)

• Cast you some spells and slang them multi-sided dice at Great Escape Games and/or A1 Comics in Sacramento.
• Paintball it up at Capital Edge or Davis Paintball,
• Take a walk among the tree tops at Tree Top Sac.
• Visit the California State Capitol Museum. Or just the Capitol building. They are one and the same. The tour is free!
• Rekindle your dreams of being a pilot or astronaut at the Aerospace Museum of California.
• Take a ride through automotive history at the California Automobile Museum.
• Like to Knit? Enjoy a good chat? Join a Knit and Chat at Knitique: A yarn boutique in Elk Grove.
• Play disc golf at one of several courses in the area.
• Become the next Tiger Woods (the golf part, not the cheating, getting your windshield smashed by your wife with one of your golf clubs part). Start by hitting up a driving range at Top Golf or Haggin Oaks.
• Can't get enough 2nd Saturday? Try 3rd Saturday in Roseville, 3rd Saturday in Placerville, or 2nd Friday in Davis.
• Get your culture on at the Crocker Art Museum.
• If you prefer culture that keeps you on your toes, check out the Sacramento Ballet. Want to become a ballet dancer? They offer classes as well.
• More into theater? Check out the Broadway shows that come to the Music Circus annually. If your tastes align with smaller productions, check out the B Street Theater calendar.
• Go Geocaching for one of the thousands of great hides in the area.
• Join an intergalactic war for local landmarks and public art in the Google-produced, GPS-Dependent MMORPG, Ingress.
• Tour the live-work spaces of Sacramento artists, and buy some art, during First Friday at Warehouse Artist’s Lofts. They often put on performances during First Friday as well.
• Everyone knows about the Kings, Republic and the River Cats. Check out some of Sacramento's other sports teams: The Sacramento Sirens (women's tackle football), Sacramento Gold (men's soccer), or California Storm (women's soccer).
• Enjoy the fast-paced, bone crushing action of roller derby with Sacramento roller derby.
• Preserve and explore the area's unique history and heritage by joining or supporting groups such as the Sacramento County Historical Society, Preservation Sacramento, and Sacramento Modern.
• Watch people drive really fast at Sacramento Raceway (drags), All American Speedway (short track), and Placerville Speedway (dirt).
• Drive your own car really fast at Sacramento Raceway's Wednesday Night Street Legal Drags.
• Purchase the sweetest sweet corn in all the land at the Davis Ranch in Sloughhouse.
• When you're done in Sloughhouse, head a little further up the Jackson Highway (just past Rancho Murieta), hang a left on Michigan Bar Road, and cross the bridge (it's safe, trust me!) for one of the most historic, beautiful, and adventurous road trips in the entire area. Make sure you bring a hearty vehicle and avoid during winter and spring.
• Play bocce ball at East Portal Park or Sutter’s Landing Park. When Sutter’s Landing skate park is open, you can borrow free bocce balls at the front desk if you give them your ID.
• Get your party on at THIS, a free concert series every second Saturday at 20th and K during the warm months of the year.
• Grind some rails at Sacramento, Elk Grove, Folsom, Rocklin, and Citrus Heights skate parks.
• Catch some air at Elk Grove, Oak Creek, and Elkhorn BMX parks.
• Learn to dominate obstacles with parkour training at Free Flow Academy.
• Dominate the boulders at Putah Creek. If indoor rock climbing suits you better, try Pipeworks, The Boulder Field, or Granite Arch.
• Spend a day at Sacramento’s only “extreme air sport park”, Defy. Or just spend hours jumping in a trampoline park at Rebounderz in Arden-Arcade, Urban Air Trampoline & Adventure Park also in Arden-Arcade, or at Rockin' Jump in Elk Grove or Roseville.
• Become a confident public speaker with the Toastmasters.
• Learn about some of Sacramento’s history at Sutter’s Fort. (Or you can just follow u/sacramentohistorian).
• For a different view of Sacramento history, check out the State Indian Museum. (You can still follow u/sacramentohistorian though).
• Of course there’s the “official” Sacramento History Museum. A visit there can include an underground tour of Old Sacramento if that interests you.
• After taking the underground tour, take a stroll across this sub’s favorite bridge – the Tower Bridge). Make sure to take a picture and post it. This sub can’t get enough bridge pics.
• Beat the summer heat by getting soaked at Raging Waters, getting towed by a cable (wakeboarding) at Wake Island Water Park, or playing on floating inflatable climbing structures at Velocity Island Park. If you prefer to dip your toes in the sand and just lay out in the sun, try Sand Cove Park.
• Show off your moves at the downtown outdoor ice skating rink during the winter months. If you need to show them off year round, you can do so indoors at Skatetown in Roseville.
• Take a short drive to Rancho Seco Lake for picnics, swimming, fishing, and hiking. Watch out for three-headed frogs.
• Attend an event with the cool kids at Sacramento’s DIY artist event space, The Red Museum.
• Take a trip out of the city and go visit one of our many state parks in the region.
• Or stay in the city and visit one of those state parks – the Leland Stanford Mansion – if 19th century Victorian architecture floats your boat.
• Watch some slobberknockers live with Total Wrestling Federation and Supreme Pro Wrestling events. If you'd rather lay the smack down on some jabroni yourself, both promotions offer training.
• Join a fraternal organization like the Elks or Odd Fellows for cheap drinks/meals, camaraderie, and old school cool – all for a good cause.
• Explore the amazing Vernal Pools of Mather Field – an endangered habitat.
• Check out – or offer your services – at the Oak Park Fix-it Café, a community-powered gathering for repairing and maintaining bicycles, clothing, household items, and the ties that bind a healthy community.
• Buy some tricks, attend magic workshops, and become the next David Blaine at Grand Illusions.
• Go watch some horseracing at Cal Expo. It’s harness racing from November through April and then traditional horseracing during the state fair. Want to end up with small fortune at the end of your day at the track? It’s easy. Just start your day there with a large fortune.
• Take in a sultry and sexy burlesque show from these local troupes: Midtown Moxies, Siren Academy, The Darling Clementines.
• Learn about wild edibles in the area with the Sacramento Foragers.
• Live your Hunger Games fantasies at the Discovery Park Archery Range and Wilderness Archery in Rocklin.
• Watch some high school football! The Sacramento region boasts some of the best high school programs in the state. Check out top notch teams like Grant, Elk Grove, Folsom, and Del Oro to see potential NCAA Division 1 and NFL players of the future.
• Watch some college football! Sac State had a huge resurgence in 2019 and UC Davis has always had a solid program. You can also check out the JC teams such as ARC and Sac City.
• Learn about bizarre and fascinating surgical implements of the past at the Sierra Sacramento Valley Medical History Museum. Entry is free.
• Partake in Mike Tyson's favorite hobby with the Fort Sutter Pigeon Racing Club.
• If Live-Action Role Play (LARP) floats your boat, Sacramento Valley Amtgard has the battles, weapons workshops, and skills classes you've been looking for.
• Take a ride on the Sacramento River Train. You can ride the train or power along the tracks yourself with railbikes. They have different train excursions, including beer tasting and wine tasting trips. If you want to book a trip on a weekend, book early.
• Want to learn how to fish? Try Fishing in the City from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. After you’ve learned, check out the blog from FishingBooker on where and when to go fishing and what to expect. For some recent local recommendations, check here, here, here or here.
• If fishing tours are more your style, catch your lunch on a guided fishing tour of local waterways.
• Take in a play at one of Sacramento's smaller, edgier, more contemporary community theatre companies, like the Big Idea Theatre.
• Take acting classes from acting coach to the Sacramento stars, Ed Claudio. If comedy is more your thing, try taking a class at Sacramento Comedy Spot or STAB! Comedy Theater.
• Of course, if you just want to drink and watch comedy, there are several clubs in the area, offering both local and national touring comedians.
• If movies are your thing, check out the only drive-in theater in the area.
• Enjoy some dirt cheap entertainment with one man band Winko Ljizz at the Acoustic Sanctuary.
• Party down and help kids with the Women's Active 20-30 social club.
• Take a tour or attend an event put on by the Old City Cemetery Committee.
• Do you like beer and visiting breweries, but don’t like driving between them? Midtown Sacramento has got you covered! Make a day of it by visiting these breweries, all within easy walking distance of each other: At Ease, Sacrament, Big Stump, Golden Road, Fieldwork, and Alaro. If you don’t mind walking a few extra blocks, you can add Device and Urban Roots to the list.
• Visit a cidery at Two Rivers Cider in Land Park or a meadery (honey wine) at Strad Meadery in Rancho Cordova.
• I don't know any chess puns to make here, but if you're into chess, you should join the Sacramento Chess Club.
• Join a pickup basketball game at one of Sactown's best streetball courts.
• Join a running club. Sloppy Moose Running Club does a three-mile fun run at New Helvetia Brewing on Thursdays. Fleet Feet Sacramento Run Crew meets every Tuesday at Sac Yard Tap House for a three-mile walk or run.
• Attend Wonk Wednesday, where policy wonks, planners, developers, urban designers and concerned citizens partake in an ongoing conversation about smart growth, urban planning, and climate change.
• Enjoy your favorite horror flicks in a whole new way with Amber's Sweets – one of the nation's premier shadow casting troupes.
• Attend a conversation hosted by California Groundbreakers – you’ll hear interesting people talking about interesting things.
• Do you need a heavy dose of tranquility? Stroll around the UC Davis Arboretum for an afternoon and take in all the flora and fauna. If you really love flowers, you can also visit Horton Iris Garden in Loomis (open April and May only) or Amador Flower Farm in Plymouth.
• Ever wanted to learn to sail, kayak or row? You’re in luck! The Sac State Aquatic Center offers lessons for those activities and more.
• Antiquing never gets old, right? Visit Midway Antique Mall in Citrus Heights (focusing almost solely on midcentury wares), Antique Trove in Roseville, or the Antique Fair that happens every second Sunday on X Street, under the freeway.
• Take butchering classes at Taylor's Market and become the master of meats.
• Learn to prepare fabulous meals at home with cooking classes at Good Eats or Sac Food Coop.
• See 1500-4000 year old petroglyphs, rock art, and grinding holes at the Maidu Museum and Historic Site in Roseville.
• Take the plunge at SkyDance Skydiving in Davis. If you want the skydiving experience without actually jumping out of an airplane, try iFly in Roseville.
• If you'd rather fly the plane than jump out of it, take pilot lessons at Sacramento Executive Airport.
• Produce and broadcast your own TV and radio programs at Access Sacramento.
• Play that weird sport you always watch when nothing else is on during the Winter Olympics with the Wine Country Curling Club at Skatetown in Roseville.
• If playing weird sports on ice isn’t your thing, partake in a weird sport on dirt and grass with the Sacramento Cricket Association.
• For more normal sports, with a big time social emphasis as well, join one of the sports leagues at XOSO and make some new friends.
• Scratch that adrenaline itch by going bungee jumping.
• Join a local car or motorcycle club.
• Take a walk along the Sacramento River Deep Water Ship Channel after parking at the Barge Canal Access near the port.
• Become a kingpin…of the lanes! There are plenty of places in the area to go bowling: Capitol Bowl in West Sacramento, AMF Land Park Lanes in Land Park, Punch Bowl Social Sacramento next to the Golden 1 Arena downtown, Country Club Lanes in Arden-Arcade, Bowlero North Sacramento in North Sac, Steve Cook's Fireside Lanes in Citrus Heights, Strikes Unlimited in Rocklin, or Foothills Bowl in Auburn.
• Be amazed or creeped out by more than seven million living and dead insect specimens at the Bohart Museum of Entomology in Davis.
• Take your 4x4, dirtbike, or ATV off-road at Prairie City SVRA
• If motorcross is your bag, hit the track at Prairie City MX (private track) or Riverfront MX Park in Marysville. Rental bikes and lessons are available at both.
• Programmers, coders, entrepreneurs, makers, inventors, and those who aspire to be one of these: find workspace, resources, meet-ups, and classes at the Hacker Lab..
• Pub crawls are the past, The Brew Bike is the present. Just ask anyone here. This sub loves the Brew Bike!
• If you would rather pedal over water than on land, try The Brew Boat.
• Get into a duel at Sacramento Sword School or the Sacramento Fencing Club.
• Exercise your 2nd amendment rights on the ranges at The Gun Room in Elk Grove or The Gun Range. Rent one of their hand cannons or bring your own.
• Build superior intelligence (or some sort of contraption to feed your cat for you) with the Sacramento Area Robotics Group.
• Play a round of Citizens of Catan and enjoy a tasty brew with the Beer and Board Game group.
• Go see the cool animals at the Sacramento Zoo. Bring the kids and make it a full day out with a visit to Fairytale Town or Funderland Amusement Park as well.
• Go on a walking food tour with Local Roots Food Tours.
• Buy some gold pans or a sluice box and head for the hills to pan for gold, just like those that first came to the area.
• Join a cryptocurrency group.
• If you don't wanna work and just wanna bang on your drum all day, Sacramento Taiko Dan can help.
• Want to become the next Picasso? You gotta start somewhere, so take a paint and sip class at The Painted Cork in Midtown Sacramento or Historic Folsom.
• It’s well known that you can play miniature golf at Scandia, but did you know that there are indoor mini golf courses in the area as well? Try SacMiniGolf in Old Sacramento, Flatstick Pub in DoCo downtown, or even glow-in-the-dark indoor mini golf at Monster Mini Golf in Rancho Cordova or at CaliGlo in Elk Grove.
• Learn how to manage your mind with Sacramento Insight Meditation.
• Play some poker at any one of several local card rooms.
• Race your RC cars (or rent one) at LSR Speedway in Sacramento or Speedworld in Roseville. Slot cars run at Fast Track Hobbies in Rocklin.
• Find cool stuff that other people lost with the Sacramento Metal Detecting Buffs. Or learn to dive and see if you can meet up with u/Merman_Mike and find stuff at the bottom of rivers or lakes.
• Visit tribal-owned Seka Hills Olive Mill in the Capay Valley to taste local olive oils and honeys as well as getting a tour of the mill itself. Check to see if there is an active Groupon before going.
• (NSFW) Take it all off and strut your stuff at Gold Club Centerfolds Amateur night for a chance to win $450. Sorry guys...this is for ladies only.
• (NSFW) Men and women, if you just like walking around naked in general, let it all hang out at Laguna del Sol nudist resort in Wilton.
• (NSFW) Find someone to get freaky with at an Allures Lifestyle swinger party.
• Make Mr. Miyagi proud by joining the Sacramento Bonsai Club – the oldest bonsai club in the United States.
• Make something quaint and take a selfie next to that giant needle flagpole thing at the Meissner Sewing & Learning Center
• Grab your binoculars and admire the hundreds of native bird species in the area – as well as those passing through via the Pacific Flyway – at several recommended locations.
• Find true love, or just someone to do all these activities with, at a local singles event.
• Rent a raft with River Rat or American River Raft Rentals, or grab some crap from the pool, and participate in a favorite Sacramento pastime by floating on the American River.
• For a more invigorating river experience try a whitewater tour
• Do a free, self-guided tour of Sacramento history via Anytime Tours, an app and project of the Center for Sacramento History, City of Sacramento and Sacramento History Museum.
• Take a coffee-tasting class or brewing/barista class at Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters.
• Explore the fascinating world of orchid collecting (seriously, this hobby and the people who pursue it are crazy interesting) with the Sacramento Orchid Society.
• Race go-karts at K1 Speed in Sacramento.
• The Sacramento Cactus and Succulent Society meets, and hosts a talk, at the Shepard Garden and Arts Center in McKinley Park monthly and welcomes guests. They also do field trips and their Annual Show and Sale is a must-see event for plant lovers.
• Take a relaxing cruise on the Sacramento River aboard the Hornblower Yacht.
• Go on a scavenger hunt with Urban Adventures Quest, Sacramento Scavenger Hunt, or Let’s Roam. For a cool, unique hunt using your bike and finding stickers around town, follow Sacramento Bike and Seek on Instagram and be on the lookout for their free adventures.
• Blow something long and hot in the glory hole at Sacramento Art Glass.. Classes are available.
• Shoot your dinner on a guided hunting tour. Potential targets include ducks, geese, turkey, quail, and deer.
• Check out some of Sacramento’s murals or see muralists in action during Wide Open Walls, a yearly event.
• Take a guided tree tour with the Sacramento Tree Foundation.
• Admire the heavens above with the Sacramento Valley Astronomy Society. You can also take a drive up to Placerville and visit the Community Observatory for free (although they do charge $2 for parking).
• Explore the history of pharmacy in California at the Don and June Salvatori California Pharmacy Museum.
• Did you know an "extreme sport" was invented in Sacramento? While the Z-Boys were taking skateboarding to the next level down in Dogtown, Launie Porteous and Mark Robinson were pioneering flatland (or "inland") skimboarding right here in the River City. Buy yourself a board or make one and give it a try pretty much anywhere you can find shallow water. Paradise and Discovery beaches along the American are this sports' ancestral home.
• Mellow out at a kava kava bar with locations in Rancho Cordova and Davis.
• Get the willies watching one of the largest Mexican Bat colonies on the west coast take to the skies at a Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area Bat Talk and Walk.
• View some famous bikes and learn about their riders at the US Bicycling Hall of Fame in Davis.
• See Sacramento's drag queen scene at Faces or Badlands.
• Take a scenic horseback ride around Lake Natoma led by Shadow Glen Family Stables.
• Hang out with feral chickens (yes, chickens!) at Fair Oaks Village Park. In the summer, you can watch live music with said chickens at their summer concerts in the park series.
• Not to diminish the concert series at Fair Oaks Village Park, but when you hear "concerts in the park", everyone knows that is the Concerts in the Park series in downtown Sacramento. Live local and national acts perform on Friday evenings in the summer, and it’s totally free. If you’re not good with crowds you may want to give this a miss because it is packed!
• Vacation or day trip so close, yet feel so far away, along the Delta. Rent a boat, jet skis, a cabin or camping spot, buy some bait and tackle, and/or eat out at various locations on the river.
• See model railroaders in action once a month at the Sacramento Model Railroad Historical Society. For the real thing, check out the California State Railroad Museum. Both are great for kids or your inner child.
• Get into the sweetly rewarding hobby of beekeeping with a starter kit and guidance from Sacramento Beekeeping Supplies. Once you’ve got your kit, take a beekeeping class in Davis.
• Brew yourself a batch of beer goodness with classes and supplies from various home brewing stores in the area.
• Go wine tasting at a couple of the closest wineries to Sacramento: Frasinetti and Old Sugar Mill.
• Think you’re good at solving puzzles and mysteries? Try one of the many escape rooms in the area.
• If you’re one of those folks that thinks you know everything, see how you stack up in one of the various pub trivia games.
• Go see the highest freestanding bridge in California. Bonus: there’s some good hiking in the area as well.
• Take a drive around the world’s smallest mountain range: the Sutter Buttes. You can actually drive around and hike the Sutter Buttes in the same day, however hiking is not free, you must do it as part of a guided group and you have to reserve a spot in advance.
• Walk or mountain bike Sacramento Valley Conservancy’s Deer Creek Hills Preserve. All visits must be part of a pre-scheduled outing so plan in advance.
• Drive to Rio Vista via the only two ferries that are actually part of the state highway system.
• Catch a free lunchtime concert every Wednesday at Westminster Presbyterian Church downtown. You can bring a bag lunch!
• Go to the top of the Memorial Garage on the corner of 14th and H for some nice views. Watch the sunset or visit on a nice clear night.
• Explore some of Sacramento’s nature preserves. Start with Effie Yeaw and Cosumnes River. Camp Pollock is another one, but unfortunately, it is not in the best of areas.
• VOLUNTEER!

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This was one of the few times in my younger years that I wish that I wasn’t so naive. It started with me getting laid off from my school job for the 3rd time due to dumb paperwork reasons and needed a new one for the time being... So just my luck when one of the local dnd Facebook groups had someone offering to pay anyone to run a game for him, his “girls'' and their “friends.”
He was going to pay me in cash about 20USD an hour for one or two sessions a week for about 6 to 8 hours a game. Pathfinder with the basic handbook to start and adding books from there depending on the players, players which we had a very high turnable of, the one player who was consistent enough was the host I will just call the pimp rogue.
He lives on the edge of a very well-off neighborhood leading into the poor, gang-infested half of the city I lived in. The shared living room was full of different anime, video games, comics, sex toys and drug paraphernalia neatly put away on shelves. At first, I thought this was strange but remembering that I’m in California and everyone at the house was of college-age I figured this was normal-ish.
Mr. Rogue was a thin man in his late 20s who dressed and sounded like shaggy from scooby-doo, he owned the house turned boarding room, with a massage parloTraditional medicine shop, or at least that’s how he explained how he knows everyone’s drug habits in the local area.
He was studying at the local community college to improve his current property management skills and hopfully to convert some investors to help him open up a hotel...in the middle of the drug and gang filled area of the city. That plus his addiction to WoW (world of warcraft) and he hasn't had any time to run games for his “girls” or there “friends”
He had me run a test game with some of his top girls, which at the time seemed either not too interested or had other things on their mind, like pot or food. Also, I was rusty at the time and was hoping that I didn't have to be the living rulebook at the time. The three college-aged girls seem to wear very revealing clothing for their work who were “very progressive” about dress code and wear heavy amounts of makeup despite as far as I can tell they were on their day off.
I felt like this was kind of strange but reminded myself that for the 2nd time that I live in California and nothing is normal here.
So I run one of the free mods off of the pathfinder website. Me and Mr. Rogue helped the other three players make characters, a barbarian, a fighter, a bard to the begrudging agreement from his top “assistant” girl.
It was a simple clear out of an old tower for the local lord, the girls seemed to understand what was happening and what to do but needed some reminding of the rules... A lot.
They didn't seem too inquisitive about what was in the tower, just that they wanted to kill the few monsters that were there and get out of there. The rogue went off by himself and looted everything he would find ways to avoid the traps and monsters as the girls would run to whatever the monster were because of the heavy amount of meta gaming and kill them. I tried to throw in descriptions of the ruined halls and destroyed rooms but all I got from Mr. Rogue was “yeah, that's cool but what is in here that looks valuable” and I'll give him a roll for the loot he found.
By the end of the game session and a brief closed talk in another room, I was told that I got the job. I was to run 4 to 6-hour pathfinder sessions once a week at 20USD an hour. He would pay for the pizza, drinks, and even offered his own meds from his “herb side hustle” which I refused, not fully understanding what he really meant.
He also wanted me to find more players for the group seeing as his girls may have to do some long shifts from time to time and would like to get more business for his natural med and massage “hustles.” he said I had that “innocent kid look” and would be better if I asked around.
Asked some friends to help join the game as I looked for more people to join from the local groups. The host asked me to run an urban campaign that didn't go too far from the main location. I had a homebrewed city out in the middle of a stormy tropical isle i was building in my spare time and now a group to try it on.
It was made to be very drop in and drop out but had a story involving the group going from poor outcast to wealthy Respected members of the city's political class. I had months of Content already and Excited that I could finally use them for a game that I was DMing. At least I had be excited as I underestimated how much of a “that guy” the host was as he somehow bypassed most of the contact I had planned for the group. I'm not sure if he was doing this on purpose or because he wasn't at the table for large chunks of it as he would pop in after taking care of some business around the large house/apartment. Here are some notable examples of what he did to personally ruin or outright bypass everything I've planned for the game.
The inheritance...wasted
When the party first arrived at the tropical city the first thing I wanted to do is give them a proper base as the starting tavern I had them start at “the rusty floater” which was more of a flophouse than a proper inn. Some of the other players have said they had some noble background and wanted to check in on them.
The hook was that they went to the family manor to see it in ruins and an old butler who had a small shack near the front gate of the manor would tell the party how the noble paladin and wizard’s family lost their home to less than noble means. The party can begin by getting the key to the manor to find that the documents have been faked and a quest to get the manor back from the evil rival noble family.
What happened was that as most of the party was looking at the ruined manor, Mr. rogue spotted the old butler coming out of his shack and looking at the party, spotting the paladin's seal on his back. That's when the pump rogue told me “I'm going to sneak up to the creepy old man and slit his neck open.”
Me: wait what?
Pump rogue: it's a creepy man waiting in the shadows, I know what he wants and I'm not letting him hurt anyone in the party!!!
So he sneaks up and crits the old man, killing him Instantly before any of the party members' characters could take note of him. He then looted the old man’s shack where the butler's journal, key, and some papers I had made into handouts that were meant for the group. I gave them to the rogue who at the very least could pass them onto the rest of the group after looking them over. He asked if there was some kind of hidden code in the documents that he wasn't seeing and asked to do some skill checks which I Told him did not apply here and then burned the documents in the fireplace as well as set fire to the shack.
“If I don't deserve whatever code in the docs and no one else has as high skills as me might as well destroy what other assassin codes and orders he had,” he said to me as he throws out the handouts only he saw and got the party back a tavern to plan to guard a beekeepers farm. I tried to salvage it by having a 2nd servant of the old family be in the same tavern and ID the nobles of the group to share the same info I tried to give them beforehand.
The rogue who said beforehand he was “looking for anyone watching them” picks up on the old woman and decides to split from the group to talk to her. Opening up by giving her some wine from his personal stack.
The old woman: thank you kindly, is that man…
Rogue: please drink first then we can talk
Me as an old woman: what
Rogue: I offered you a drink and in halfling costumes, it is an insult to talk without drinking first
One diplomacy check later the old woman is shamed into drinking the wine
Old woman: o this is great, now is that young man…
Rogue: she has to man a Con save or take stat damage.
The Rogue used his earnings from earlier to buy poison that would weaken normal monsters but would outright kill normal non-player characters like a level one commoner, so she fails her save and outright dies from Constitution damage. As the rogue props up the body of the “spy” before rejoining the party with the wizard and paladin glaring at the rogue who defended himself by saying out of game “they were clearly assassins and spies for some kind of cult, that's how I would DM it anyway”
It didn't help that later that session as the rest of the party was gambling and fighting in the rusty floater basement fight club, the rogue sneaks into the manor the (former) future base of the party, looted the different rooms like the training room, the library or the lab, interrupting my description of the rooms to “speed up the looting of the assassin lair” and then set the whole place on fire.
Yes, I did talk to him after and he continues to say that he knows it was the assassin’s but that I gave it my best try at hiding the fact and took his money.
The quickness gang war ive ever seen
The next big hook was a gang war between two rival gangs and the city watch trying hard to keep the peace, the party had done a number of smaller jobs and one of the new players a dwarf fighter, desired to have his big character arc be rejoining with his brother who was the Captain of the watch.
The plan was to slowly dig up info on the two gangs by intrigue and combat missions ending with a big raid on at least one of the bases with the surviving base becoming one of the big bad for the campaign.
The pimp rogue who was the unofficial leader desired to mail the captain a drawing of his ass saying that “we would never work with piggies” and forge the dwarfs signature on the latter burning that players plot arc for “his own good”
They did do a great job of plotting out and following a number of members of the gangs to find the HQ of the gangs. The pimp rogue then got one of his girls playing a bard to use a charm to get into the base and a 2nd charm spell to get the leader to lead a charge of the other gang's base. He then called the watch who had their top NPCs come to join in on the raid of the base in the hopes that they get the reputation needed for the next step of the campaign but then got Blind sided when the pimp rogue ordered the girls to “as soon as we are deep enough we set the building on fire and lock everyone inside officers and master criminals alike.”
Everyone fled, excluding the dwarf fighter who was trying to RP at least his honor-bound bond to his brother and tried to warn his brother of the trap. He died with his brother and the player quit outright.
The pimp rogue was kind of proud that he not only made the city safer from crime but completely decapitated the leadership of the watch as “a good pig is a dead pig” which was a bit of a shock for me as I never encounter someone who had a deep hate for law enforcement as this was years before the BLM movement got started.
Finally, the thing that derailed the whole thing: the exposition for the deep dwarves
It was after the party completed at least one of the major quests breaking up a demon cult operating out of a cursed item shop. They were able to loot a large amount of gold and the pimp rogue had taken a few levels of a cleric by burning some demon summoning scrolls, so seeing as 2 of the three major quests got killed horribly by the holy pimp rogue I decided to start stage 2 early.
The plan was that after getting a rep for being great, noble, and reliable problem solvers they will be sought out by a gnome scholar who was trying to set up an exposition to the local ruin to look into an extinct race of dwarfs that lived so far down that the light of day never touches them. He's been trying to find funding outside his homeland who had some fascistic religious types take control of it by a military coup.
The idea was simple, they go to each of the guilds and trade unions to ask for assistance in supplying the exposition with men, gear, and supplies to make it to the dig site to begin the dungeon diving as a different actively when not running the holdings that would come from the money and fame generated from completing the dig.
First, they would have to complete a quest with the tropical traders who were having dire fruit bats moving onto the three growing islands with druids protesting the farmers trying to make a living off of the fruit and crops there.
Second, they were to help the craftsman make their surveying and digging tools if they found out why one of their trade settlements was being weirdly quiet and the inspectors they sent hadn't shown up. Turning out to be that a Lovecraftian cult moved in, killed off or converted the leadership to suvre the elder ones then started making a pair of lens that would be used to bring dark beings into the world.
Three but finally was the labor union that wanted the party to clear a rock quarry that had raptors move into it to make a nest, but in reality, the raptors were attracted by the lizardfolk and naga who didn't take kindly to the quarry company coming in and destroying there temple for building materials killed everyone in there sleep and now trying to place a dark curse onto the city. The runners who were sent up there to see what the delay was and only saw the raptors and mutilated bodies and called that in.
I figured that this would be a great chance for some morally gray RP, to get the party as a whole more XP seeing that they were flying through most of the planned contact and story. It also could have gotten the party the magical upgrades I was trying to give them as they barley exploited there surrounding except for the rogue and a few of the vets who would lose out on the checks to the min/max rogue or to the votes on who gets the loot as his girls would outnumber the client players every time. He would then sell off the magic items seeing as he can't use them or even rent them out to the other players who saw it as the exploitative bull that it was.
So guess what happened….guess what the divine pimp rogue did.
Pimp rogue: hell no, deal with your own F***ing bullS*** you commie parasites.
The Rogue didn't want to do any favors with any of the guilds or unions nor did he want to pay them for the use of any of their man, equipment, or goods despite them controlling nearly 90% of each of their respective markets. So he put it to a vote to just do the bare minimum seem like a leader to the new players and win 5-3, the three no’s being the paladin who was just there to see how this trainwreck goes. And two new guys who I had tied there introductions to the guild and union quests respectively who than left after this seston for how blindsided of a derailment this was for there backstories and saw that this wasn't going to be a Role Play heavy game as they fought it was going to be.
The pimp rogue got the cheapest gear, gathered the poor, crippled and elderly, demanded that the people coming on the trip do the grocery shopping as a buy-in, which turns out by the luck of the die mostly spoiled meats and donated food by the evil gnome cult I would have following them and did the medieval equivalent of wire fraud in the name of the professor who he had tricked into being his legal posy for anything else he thought we needed. On the day of the departer, He and his girls broke into each of the guilds and unions to steal their lagtors and then set fire to the record rooms with the leaders inside for good measure.
So they were off 3 to 4 months ahead of schedule and now having to figure out what statue to put the city in when they return or if they return as most of the hands-on leadership is dead, the economy had been halted, the underground had a massive power vacuum to fill. The city folk were at risk of starving as food would have to be imported from the mainland months away. The worst of it is that two cults of pure evil were about to attack the two.
At this point as well paid as I was for this, it was getting onto my nerves, I was having to plan more on the fly, it was affecting my hunt for a more effective job, it was affecting my sleep and my school work to the point I was having frequent arguments with my folks. It came to a head session later.
Its been about a week in-game since they took off for the dig site and were about a few hours away from making it to the site when I desired to mix up the encounters by having a small bandit fort set up in the middle road they been using and need to pay them or take a long way around. So I set it up either for them to one fight the fort, talk them into getting them thought, pay or go the long way.
They choose to find the small form of 500 or so untrained thieves, 30 in the form and the rest slowly trying to sneak behind them with the two leaders they had at least 100 saraband guards with basic training and at least and at least 5 to 7 (the paladin friend, a guy new to the area and dnd, the pimp rogues, and at least two to four of the rogue's min/max combat monster girls) party members of about 3rd or 4th level. The party was interested in some of the newer books of pathfinder. So decided to test out the mass combat rules and thought that everyone would enjoy leading the guards into battle….
That's not what happened
Turns out being interested does not mean reading the rules, even if you print them out for them. The pimp rogue decided the best plan was to trick the workers into fleeing into the ambush with some of the guards to sell the bluff.
He told the paladin character that he had his back to take the fort to plan a counter defense which he had the spell power, creativity, and gold to make taking the fort easy. This was a lie, hoping that it would be a good enough diversion. He and his girls fled for their lives as "you said that fleeing may be an option at any time" which I did say but for more obvious reasons like rolling stone traps, or the sewer monster they never cleared because of the pimp rogue "neat freak" character trait.
So the easy mass combat encounter became a bloodbath as the noob and paladin blindly charged the fort with no support as most of the guards being disorganized, to say the least, made an easy fight turned into a bloodbath. The paladin and noob were shot down by tower archers as the leak of real leadership made the guards' squid rolls useless as they were easily overwhelmed despite the better training and gear.
The rest of the party made it to the dig site alone, and after auto rolling for the rest of the battle more than 70% of the caravan was wiped out with only a handful of carts left with nearly all of the key NPCs excluding the professor and a kid that one of the former players befriended. on the trail had been killed. As the decimated caravan rolled in the pimp rogue asked me “so how much gold did I save getting all the guard and trail guides killed” I don't think I ever found out if this was his plan the whole time or I didn't explain the encounter right. I know that I wanted to hurt this guy (in-game) for all the stress of his nuclear-powered sananagins.
So for the next few sessions, the rogue and the girls (at this point I was running out of gaming groups to pull players from) had them digging up the entrance hall to the dungeon as one of the massive skips in content left me no time to design the dungeon and that I wanted to unleashed the gate guards on them. The gate guards were too massive black marble statues made by the deep dwarfs ritual blood rites to drive back anyone who dares try to unlock the door to the elevators. The gate guards acted as high leveled necromancers that would cause the excavators to go mad then kill each other or themselves by sabotaging the digging in some way. As the dead mounted the necro magic would kick in to turn the dead bodies of the people and animals in the area into undead monsters and horrors to defend the gate.
I may have played my hand too early, for when they were clearing room for what was happening in the area I rolled on the random encounter pool to get a couple of trapdoor spiders. The spiders grasped the rogue into their hole, and started to well on the halfling rogue and nearly killed him. His girls were able to break into the hole and kill the spiders before they can finish off the rogue. So I might have fugled the undead creation rules a bit and ask they were leaving from the cave rogue in the back, the spiders with newfound undead vigor, jumped the rogue and rolled a nat 1 on both of their surprise attacks. The rogue who I forgot was a cleric up to this point used “turn undead” and forced the spiders as far back into their hole as possible and the 5 of them set the webs on fire. This quads him in that something was off, did a scan for magic, and found the status 20 feet below the ground. I got to say that at this point, it got interesting again if not fun as it was full on me vs. him instand me running for the party. I know that sounded bad but the amount of stress I was under at the time and frankly I was mentally and emotionally done at this point 20 dollars an hour be damned.
I tried to have the statues, whisper dreams of unionization, and coffee breaks. He and the girls scouted out one of the unions, took the leaders out of range of the statues for a hunting party to take about better pay, and murdered them in their sleep, and burned the bodies. Tried to start heated racial tensions in the caves with charm spells, rogue makes an example of a few of them by burning them alive saying he won't tolerate bigots and reorganizing the teams to be least racially diverse. Had a few cave-ins and accidents seeing it's the best way to make bodies. He and his girls wound the risks to saving them and if he cannot he found a way to get to the cave, fill it with oil, set it on fire, and reseal it to be a make-shift cremation oven complete with smoke coming out of holes on the surface. I even had a rebellion do to all the nightmarish acts of cruelty and wanted better treatment or they all walk, the rogue and his girls hit everyone with sleep spell seeing as there were about 50 or less of them and all were low-level common folk excluding the professor who was fearful of his life and tortured a few time on hints that he may be planning something. He and his magical girls reformed the walls and defenses set up earlier to keep people in as well as keep critters out and murdered more by fire to make it clear who was in charge.
Finally, the day came where they broke the seal to the door after a week of death and torment. He was proud of himself and was making a speech to the workers with no spirit left or even will to live, some figuring that they’ll be killed after or made into food seeing as no one was sure were the fresh food was coming from seeing as all hunting and fishing stopped long ago and this point figured canimalism was at play (it was some druid spell I forgot the name of but the pimp rogue didn't tell the workers that) and were just waiting for the end with there follow workers which had been widaled down to 20 or so. (if your wondering there were about five to seven hundred of them to start)
This is when I sounded in the dead that the pimp rogue missed, you see in the digs they were using birds to see if enough air in the shafts, tropical vermin moved in looking for food and a shelter. Even bigger hunts like ferrets to control the vermin problem. The only thing they checked for is if the horses and other pack mules were dying so that they can be burned as well as the other bodies.
So you should have seen their surprise when packs of shadow rats, swarms of undead birds, and dog-sized ferrets their bodies fused together. As some of them had given resistance to divine magic it made it harder for the pimp rogue to just use his holy pimp slap on them. It was a long and heavy battle as they were attacked by air and ground both under and above. The birds didn't stand a chance as the mass casting of turn undead made them flee wildly but still was enough of a distraction to have the meat ferrets sneak attack from underground and the shadow rats turned control to move around the tank in front liners and get to the squishes of the pimp’s squid of casters. I don't remember much of that battle, just that I nearly got two of the four girls downed and the rogue had to spend the last of his healing bursts to get everyone on their feet again.
The main boss was a flesh golem as when the fighting started some of the workers hide in some of the utility tunnels which collapsed during the fighting killing all of them. Giving the black statues the bodies need to make one. I figured this was it, a TPK, there wasn't anything I thought they can do as the big mass of hateful flush dig its way out and was going up one of the two entryways to the dig site. That is until the rogue called on the earth bender. Now originally I wanted to have it be the main handbook. As the game went on and on, one of the girls who seemed more interested in the game than the others would talk to me after games about the rules and the more complex classes. She even kept in contact with me on Facebook to talk about other nerd or anime topics. One of the classes she really wanted to multiclass into was the Elementalist, I decided to allow it seeing as out of all of the players she seems to have a spine and willing to give herself real agency even if it was just to be better at support casting.
So she used her earthbending to collapse the entry on top of the flush monsters face than kept the monster in place so that the rest of the party ganged up on the monsters head and beat it into a bloody pulp as I failed to save after save to get out of the mud and dirt it was trapped in.
The rogue and earthbending bard high fived as they finally entered the dungeon that I barely designed and at this point know would just be stumped on by the rogue’s BS, but I had to try. Seeing as I had an idea for what he would face with the cult chased up with them and find witnesses in the remaining workers still locked up at the camp that would give them the blackmail needed to turn the city august them. As part of the cultists turned to bring the survivors back to the city and the rest stayed to wait for the party to come back.
A week passed and I came in with all my gaming gear to see that another DM was in my place. The rogue felt like I was burning out and decided to have an old friend come in to replace me. He at least gave me money for the last game and for the game I was going to run. I played for the first game, the new DM seems to have taken my dungeon idea and expanded it and seems to be about to counter the rogue’s BS better than I ever can. I left the group and never went back.
The epilogue
Months later I ran into the new dm trying to join a game as it seems like I had some kind of rep hanging over my head, keeping me from joining. So it was refreshing to be about to join a game again. I asked how the old game went and if he made any money from it, he seemed confused as I told him that I was being paid to run games for him as well as the shenanigans he pulled on me.
He figured as long as he had known him the pimp rogue had been a huge “that guy” and min/maxer. He would have him take “breaks” as he would found ways to skip major encounters and dungeons.
I asked “how did you solve that problem?
The New DM: “o he got too busy with his drug and pimping side gigs”
ME: WAIT WHAT?!
The new DM: I thought he told you, I mean it was pretty obeasue.
Turns out he was trying to get a dnd based prostitution thing going on where nerdy clients would play with his hottest girls and maybe return for some “one on one” sessions. He soon found out his normal clients weren't that nerdy and drugs don't move. He also ground addicted to the world of warcraft and it barely gave the pimp rogue time to plan.
That was when I came in, I had the most innocent person he had even made and thought he could use me to get in more nerdy types and get them onto the whole RPG/SEx/drug thing he had planned. So the players that I attracted to the table he turned to offer them some private sessions with the girls for how poorly the game went. They would decline and stop coming over, giving me weird looks and excuses as to why they no longer wanted to be in the game anymore. Turns out my friends and colleagues assumed I was this guy’s partner in crime at best or at least one of his underlings and slowly ghosted me.
So that's how I updated my expectations and was a black sheep for my local gaming groups for a number of years.
TL;DR got hired to run games for a massive "that guy" and a real pimp and drug dealer was trying to expand his client base to the local nerd community.
Got kicked after trying to TPK the party with undead critters.
Edit1: for the people wondering how this "over the top" story is real as "any same man could see this come" I'm autistic and miss social signals that normal people would pick up on. It did help that my mother who works with law enforcement and courts shelter me to the point that my idea of a pimp was the stereotype 50s to 60s black guy in a big fur coat and hat simular to the boondocks and never to wear red or blue unless I wanted to be gutted by "the gangster folk"
Starting to understand that my mother has some underlings descrmaion problems