Warning: [Creativity.exe Now Running]

In we count every layer as the pieces literally layer on top of each other, then Caleb Widogast wears--on a typical day--at least 5 layers. He also wears boots & gloves. His body does not breathe. Istg, if sun touched his skin (aside from his face), he wouldn't know what to do with himself. He might explode. Maybe he's like me and he's mildly allergic, but there's no way he knows it wearing so many FUCKING LAYERS.

I adore him. He's so scrungly. But he might be "stinky" in part because of FUCKING BODY ODOR. MY GODS.

Why am I making this post? Why does this matter? I made the mistake of cosplaying him in a duo with my friend, who is cosplaying Nott, AND we're doing this in June. Caleb is a deep winter cosplay, I know this now. I should have been cosplaying him around the time of year I decided to make the cosplay in the first place. I bought a fan to go under my clothes. I know it won't be enough.

For context, I'm a bigger dude. I've always been a bigger dude. I do pretty well keeping myself cool because, since birth, I've been a literal radiator. I put off enough heat to warm a small house(slight exaggeration. Slight). I'm going to need ice packs. Thank fuck I added pockets. I genuinely don't know how I'm going to keep it up the whole day. I'm going to need handkerchiefs, water, and liquid IV constantly. My Nott literally told me I should skip adding the sleeves to the tunic. I might still make them, but I may make them to be tear away.

It's done. I fucking finished it. It took months. I learned so much

I am so very tired. The sleeves are tear away. They don't just fall off, you actually feel like you're ripping the sleeves off. Then there's a whole process to putting them back on, of course, but like if I'm tearing them off, that's the point. I can make all of one "As Beauregard says 'sleeves are bullshit'" type joke the whole day without needing someone to help reattach the sleeves while I'm wearing the tunic.

Like... ya'll I take back my earlier statement. Caleb is probably overheated. He probably retains heat *just fucking fine.* He's just so traumatized that he's walking around in a heavy ass coat to self-soothe.

This man makes me feel like sobbing so hard I puke. I relearned stage falls for this cosplay. I've learned how to sew garments from scratch, collars included. I've bled for this cosplay. I kept working on it after losing my dad in the middle of it. This cosplay had been a monster, start to finish. From materials, to labor, to life timing. I've gone half crazy trying to get this shit to look good and work. And I did it. I hope one day I can wear it to a con that someone from Critical Role is actually attending. For now, I'll just keep going. I'll upgrade it. Sew it over again with new skills. Keep learning.

In we count every layer as the pieces literally layer on top of each other, then Caleb Widogast wears--on a typical day--at least 5 layers. He also wears boots & gloves. His body does not breathe. Istg, if sun touched his skin (aside from his face), he wouldn't know what to do with himself. He might explode. Maybe he's like me and he's mildly allergic, but there's no way he knows it wearing so many FUCKING LAYERS.

I adore him. He's so scrungly. But he might be "stinky" in part because of FUCKING BODY ODOR. MY GODS.

Why am I making this post? Why does this matter? I made the mistake of cosplaying him in a duo with my friend, who is cosplaying Nott, AND we're doing this in June. Caleb is a deep winter cosplay, I know this now. I should have been cosplaying him around the time of year I decided to make the cosplay in the first place. I bought a fan to go under my clothes. I know it won't be enough.

For context, I'm a bigger dude. I've always been a bigger dude. I do pretty well keeping myself cool because, since birth, I've been a literal radiator. I put off enough heat to warm a small house(slight exaggeration. Slight). I'm going to need ice packs. Thank fuck I added pockets. I genuinely don't know how I'm going to keep it up the whole day. I'm going to need handkerchiefs, water, and liquid IV constantly. My Nott literally told me I should skip adding the sleeves to the tunic. I might still make them, but I may make them to be tear away.

It's done. I fucking finished it. It took months. I learned so much

I am so very tired. The sleeves are tear away. They don't just fall off, you actually feel like you're ripping the sleeves off. Then there's a whole process to putting them back on, of course, but like if I'm tearing them off, that's the point. I can make all of one "As Beauregard says 'sleeves are bullshit'" type joke the whole day without needing someone to help reattach the sleeves while I'm wearing the tunic.

Like... ya'll I take back my earlier statement. Caleb is probably overheated. He probably retains heat *just fucking fine.* He's just so traumatized that he's walking around in a heavy ass coat to self-soothe.

This man makes me feel like sobbing so hard I puke. I relearned stage falls for this cosplay. I've learned how to sew garments from scratch, collars included. I've bled for this cosplay. I kept working on it after losing my dad in the middle of it. This cosplay has been a monster, start to finish. From materials, to labor, to life timing. I've gone half crazy trying to get this shit to look good and work. And I did it. I hope one day I can wear it to a con that someone from Critical Role is actually attending. For now, I'll just keep going. I'll upgrade it. Sew it over again with new skills. Keep learning.

And it's not that it was unsuccessful. Everyone loved that game! I personally think they're too scared of the "edgy" color scheme/general vibe of the game and the egregious amount of titties for a Zelda title. They're afraid of what a Twilight Princess remake would do. They're cowards.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In we count every layer as the pieces literally layer on top of each other, then Caleb Widogast wears--on a typical day--at least 5 layers. He also wears boots & gloves. His body does not breathe. Istg, if sun touched his skin (aside from his face), he wouldn't know what to do with himself. He might explode. Maybe he's like me and he's mildly allergic, but there's no way he knows it wearing so many FUCKING LAYERS.

I adore him. He's so scrungly. But he might be "stinky" in part because of FUCKING BODY ODOR. MY GODS.

Why am I making this post? Why does this matter? I made the mistake of cosplaying him in a duo with my friend, who is cosplaying Nott, AND we're doing this in June. Caleb is a deep winter cosplay, I know this now. I should have been cosplaying him around the time of year I decided to make the cosplay in the first place. I bought a fan to go under my clothes. I know it won't be enough.

For context, I'm a bigger dude. I've always been a bigger dude. I do pretty well keeping myself cool because, since birth, I've been a literal radiator. I put off enough heat to warm a small house(slight exaggeration. Slight). I'm going to need ice packs. Thank fuck I added pockets. I genuinely don't know how I'm going to keep it up the whole day. I'm going to need handkerchiefs, water, and liquid IV constantly. My Nott literally told me I should skip adding the sleeves to the tunic. I might still make them, but I may make them to be tear away.

It's done. I fucking finished it. It took months. I learned so much

I am so very tired. The sleeves are tear away. They don't just fall off, you actually feel like you're ripping the sleeves off. Then there's a whole process to putting them back on, of course, but like if I'm tearing them off, that's the point. I can make all of one "As Beauregard says 'sleeves are bullshit'" type joke the whole day without needing someone to help reattach the sleeves while I'm wearing the tunic.

In we count every layer as the pieces literally layer on top of each other, then Caleb Widogast wears--on a typical day--at least 5 layers. He also wears boots & gloves. His body does not breathe. Istg, if sun touched his skin (aside from his face), he wouldn't know what to do with himself. He might explode. Maybe he's like me and he's mildly allergic, but there's no way he knows it wearing so many FUCKING LAYERS.

I adore him. He's so scrungly. But he might be "stinky" in part because of FUCKING BODY ODOR. MY GODS.

Why am I making this post? Why does this matter? I made the mistake of cosplaying him in a duo with my friend, who is cosplaying Nott, AND we're doing this in June. Caleb is a deep winter cosplay, I know this now. I should have been cosplaying him around the time of year I decided to make the cosplay in the first place. I bought a fan to go under my clothes. I know it won't be enough.

For context, I'm a bigger dude. I've always been a bigger dude. I do pretty well keeping myself cool because, since birth, I've been a literal radiator. I put off enough heat to warm a small house(slight exaggeration. Slight). I'm going to need ice packs. Thank fuck I added pockets. I genuinely don't know how I'm going to keep it up the whole day. I'm going to need handkerchiefs, water, and liquid IV constantly. My Nott literally told me I should skip adding the sleeves to the tunic. I might still make them, but I may make them to be tear away.