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Anglestan
Augustus 5, 1923
Facility 9, Mancheston
Colonel Jacobs
His hands flew through the folders General Jorgenson and Colonel Thatcher had. There were dozens of them, stacked upon each other all filed in alphabetical order. It had only been a few days since he had woken up from his coma and visited his home— now his mother’s grave. He clenched his fists at the thought. The grief and rage threatened to bubble and spill over once again. He took a deep breath and dragged out the exhale, almost to the point where he had emptied out his lungs.
He was the only one with clearance, and so he couldn’t disclose any of what he learned with his team. They would simply have to trust him and his judgment. Which he was sure they would do. His hands went over one of the folders skimming through it. There were multiple secret projects, but the ones with the most notes were Project S.T.A.R, Project L.U.N.A.R.I, Project R.E.V.I.V.E, Project D.A.W.N, and Project T.E.M.P.L.A.R.
The colonel decided to start with the most notes and papers. Project D.A.W.N.
He skimmed through the notes, reading through some of the details and highlighted words. Project D.A.W.N, the espionage project Thatcher had started placed two spies in Verlin who were to report directly to a Crescent general named Sienna Moretti who was apparently on humanity’s side.
So I was right. There was an espionage element. With the recent attacks and Thatcher’s death, however, it’s safe to assume that it had somehow failed. Either they got found out or they betrayed us. Both seem very likely, but if they were found out, it would be possible that they had died.
He read through all of it before setting the folder down. There were no new notes recently. He sighed and assumed that Project DAWN was a failure. Whether or not the agents were still alive and well, it was too risky to check if they had been compromised. It was better to assume that they had been and cut all contact. The only way to find out now was to go there himself and check. I can’t contact them again. There’s no telling if it would still be Moretti or the agents who would see my messages. It’s a big risk, and judging by the state of things, best to assume it failed.
He picked up another folder. This one had the label ‘under development’ on the folder. Project Templar. He opened the folder and was instantly met with a blueprint and drawings of a massive bipedal machine. It looked humanoid with strange proportions and was supposed to be standing at an impressive 30 meters, or 100 feet. The Titanic Engine Mech for Personal Land Assault and Reconnaissance.
It was apparently a joint project with the Church of Sol, utilizing new and advanced technologies he hadn’t heard of. A 203mm Gatling cannon on one arm, while the other had three different weapons. A massive firestarter that utilized a new type of fuel mixture that could theoretically spew flames a kilometer away using a high-pressure nozzle. The fuel was ignited using an electrical spark. The second weapon was a high-powered light weapon that fired a single powerful beam of focused light that was even further amplified by layers of focusing lenses that could increase its output several times. Its third weapon was… a dust domina?
Mark read through the specifications of the so-called ‘sand cannon’ weapon. It was a massive cannon that accelerated tiny particles several times. Each particle was to be electrically charged, and it would travel at immense speeds. Near impossible speeds. The resulting impact of a microscopic particle at such speeds would be enough to form a small crater and punch through armor like it was nothing. This weapon would fire multiple at the same time, which could literally eat away at anything on the opposing end.
In terms of secondary weapons, the titan had two missile launch chambers in front of its shoulder each containing about 40 missiles, and two massive howitzer cannons on top of it. Both are 800mm in caliber. It had massive stumpy legs that served as bunkers for a small platoon on each leg. Each leg had machine dominas and 155mm cannons. Its chassis held two nuclear reactors inside providing for its power and weaponry. Its armor was the thickest and most ridiculous he’d ever read. Two meters of heavy steel armor.
How far are we in terms of technology? This thing looks like it came out of an H.G. Wells sci-fi novel. He thought, shaking his head. It was over the top, but there was no denying its combat capabilities. If it was already under-developed then it must be the first prototype. This has already been approved. Guess I better see it for myself later and check how it's coming along. Construction apparently started just a few months before the invasion.
Next was project L.U.N.A.R.I. It was a project involving Six. “Huh,” he said, continuing to read on.
The Light Undone: Nocturnal’s Adaptive Resistance Initiative. As he read further, his eyes widened. The reason why Six was so special wasn’t just because of her immunity to all strigoi weaknesses, but because of her impressive ability to turn any true born strigoi like her. She could transfer her strain like any other strigoi and transform them into a version of hers. It however only seemed to work for naturally born strigoi. The new species of ‘half-breeds’ were called ‘Blessed Children’ as Thatcher had coined in the folder.
The plan was to turn all willing true-born hemolite strigoi into these blessed children. Able to withstand the sun. Immune to silver. Free from the dependency on blood. They could remove all the weaknesses of the strigoi and after the war— make it possible to integrate them into society as normal citizens living on the surface. The project folder also made mentions of a city-wide draft in Dante and highlighted the possibility of turning all Dantenite true born strigoi into these blessed children and renaming them as ‘Lunari’. A mix of the dark and the light. The light of Sol reflected in the children of the night.
“Thatcher, what the fuck have you been up to…” Mark whispered to himself.
While it was true that it could help in the war effort by utilizing Six and the dantenite population, it would also invite some unforeseen problems and consequences. Would humanity be okay with the Lunari? Would the world even be ready for them? Strigoi who were immune to the sun. They wouldn’t be impossible to kill, but they would be immensely more powerful if we were to take away their inherent weaknesses. This is a gamble. Its gain would only be seen during the war period, but its unintended effects on society could be catastrophic.
He frowned, setting the folder down. It was obviously Thatcher’s main plan; seeing as all her moves could be traced to the path of the eventual completion of this project. It seemed dangerous in the long run, but the duskwalkers and dantenites had been monumental in the war effort. Maybe it was the time the world started to accept them more. Isolation and segregation was definitely not the way to disperse fears and foster understanding.
If Thatcher thinks this is the next step forward… then I’ll put my faith in her plans.
Next up was Project S.T.A.R, or the Superior Tech and Adaptive Resistance. An upgrade to the current hemolite weapons and gear by using new researched studies. The Starfire Pattern Domina. The SFD-23 This thing features a new loading system and magazine, ditching the rotating cylinder most domina used, or the rotating helix magazine design of the current hemolite standard BM-16 domina.
The new domina had its magazine like a box… a strange design but it was certainly easier to handle than the bulky cylinders the helical mags used. In terms of ergonomics, it was smoother and fit more. Its placement however was on top of the domina, just above the barrel. Most of the weapon were to be made of lightweight polymers and the barrel itself were to be crafted out of reinforced aluminium. In addition to that, it had a 10-inch bayonet attached to it.
There were other new things as well, such as the composition of the bullet. Looking at the conceptual cross-section designs, Mark read through its description and how it would function. A .308 cased telescoped bullet covered in a silver jacket with break-away petals surrounding the main body. Inside the jacket was a penetrator core that was to be made of depleted uranium. It had a small amount of incendiary compound and… powdered white phosphorus behind an explosive compound. The thin silver jacket would deform and trigger the explosive compound inside the body. It would blow up causing massive internal damage and release the incendiary materials into the body with the flecks of powdered white phosphorus. The penetrator core could still potentially keep going and hit a second target, or punch through heavily armored targets.
Part of the new Project S.T.A.R was overhauling the armor and gear of not just the Hemolites but the Hunters as well. Starfire Mk 1. Carapace Armor. Carapace? It looked like plates of steel covered in a rubberized coat. It was supposed to be slipped on over the original hemolite body armor. It added a spring-loaded wrist blade to the gauntlet, a thicker coat made of resistant materials, and added extra padding for the knees, shoulders, and elbows.
However, the hemolites weren’t the only ones mentioned in the folder. It was to serve the Hunters as well. “Hunters…” Mark said. “August’s group is part of this initiative too.” He flipped through some of the pages. There were blueprints and drawings of an armored suit. A mechanized suit even smaller and more compact than the jotunn units. The Mark 1 STR battlesuit. It was supposed to hug the wearer’s frame and increase their overall power. It was supposed to be built of titanium alloy and a heavy steel frame with composite armor. It had a cooling system, life support systems that could recycle bodily fluids, and an exoskeleton frame that could increase the wearer’s strength and speed.
However, the real eye-opener was Thatcher’s notes. She had been ranting about the new human evolution, and how the Hunters were the first of the ‘Solari’. She wanted to enhance human genetics and push past the peak of human ability to reach greater heights. Implants and restructuring of the anatomy to make it more efficient. Using the blood of the goddess herself. She must have lost it. These are the ramblings of a lunatic. At least… if she didn’t mention the goddess. Why was the goddess important here?
The writings ended with the words: “See Project R.E.V.I.V.E, for more details.”
Mark eyed the final folder. His hands shook as he reached out to take it. Flipping it open, his hands nearly dropped it in shock. The goddess Helena was alive. There were pictures of her naked form floating in a giant tube of fluid. There were more of Thatcher’s ramblings and excited rants about the possibilities of such a discovery. Resurrection, Enhancement, and Veneration: Implementation of Visionary Evolution.
The goddess is alive?! According to the file, she’s currently under the Cathedral of New Lundun. Not only that, but the file also detailed the extraterrestrial tech that lay beneath the cathedral. So the goddess is real and she’s— not really a goddess, but rather, a vampyr who created herself a human body to stand in the sun, and decided that it wants to be on humanity’s side… what the fuck.
Mark’s frown and confusion only increased as he read on. Thatcher’s notes seemed to nearly descend into madness as she had written about creating ‘the first hundred’, alluding to the 100 members of the Hunters division. Her plan was to revive the goddess, and with her help and expertise in genetics— use her DNA to transform the Hunters into demi-humans. Super soldiers. Literal children of the goddess Helena. They would then don the STR battlesuits, the first of the superhuman warriors to defend humanity. Solari.
Their lightning-speed advancement into technology was heralded by studying the alien tech, which deepened the understanding of physics and engineering. Nuclear technologies, chemical warfare, new material sciences, the mechs, and walkers, it was spearheaded by trying to reverse-engineer technology centuries ahead of our own… for the past hundred years. It wasn’t completely stolen, however. More or less borrowed ideas that had been made into our own with our own designs and implements. Still, the speed at which the Church and the military had deciphered such advancements all by themselves was… impressive to say the least.
Still, the fact that the goddess was alive, and could be brought back was big news. Checking the file for details, he found that the previous general, Jorgenson, had already approved this project. It was their next step as soon as they returned from New Amsterdam; which never happened.
If Helena was alive, then she could end this war swiftly, or at the very least help greatly like she once did during the War of Darkness. Having the goddess back would throw a massive wrench in the Crescent’s plans. It would certainly be something they wouldn’t expect. Not even I expected this, since many sources say that the goddess had already ascended to watch over humanity, while conspiracy theorists claim she had died in battle and that the Church was worshiping a corpse. This could be the trick up our sleeves that no one would even consider.
The colonel quickly got up from his seat and gathered the main files he had read. He placed them in a bag and rushed outside of his office in Facility 9. He went over to a nearby room and flicked the lights on. “We need to go,” he said. In an instant seven hemolite soldiers got up from whatever they were doing and instantly stood in line.
“Sir! Whatever you need of us, sir,” the group said in unison.
They were Hemo-1. His former squad members. He had taken up Louis' suggestion that they be his personal security detail. It was a shame that he had basically placed the best hemolite team out of commission, but after all he had been through he convinced himself that he could be just a little selfish. He didn’t want to lose any more friends. Not on his watch. Not while he was in an office, and they were out fighting.
“We’re going to New Lundun. Better pack up, it’s going to be a long night.”
“Mark,” Olivia said.
Jacobs turned to her direction and gave her a nod.
“Colonel, sir, may I ask where in New Lundun?”
“Liv, you don’t need to do that with me. Please. I give all of you special permission,” the colonel groaned. “It’s so weird. I mean, ‘captain’ was bad enough, but now you’re acting like I’m an authority figure.”
“You… are, though,” Emma shrugged.
“I’m your friend, and Liv I’m literally your partner. Unless you have some kind of weird fetish, save it for later.”
Olivia grinned, shaking her head. “Duly noted!” she chirped.
“That’s better,” Mark chuckled. “Now come on, we have a cathedral to visit.”
“Uhh, I’m not sure if you noticed, but we’re kinda… strigoi?!” Louis groaned. “I’d burn the moment I step in that place! Plus, it’s coated in silver! Anything I even touch will give me burns!”
“Oh come on, Lou. You have fucking gloves on. As long as you’re not a clumsy dumbass you’ll be fine… oh wait.’
“Uh huh, just sayin’ what I think, boss.”
The group headed out and Mark said something on his radio. He then sat on the ground, making his joints pop. The rest of the squad shrugged and followed his example, sitting down on the grass and waiting for… nothing. Charles and Zach looked at each other in confusion. “Uh, sir?” they asked. “Aren’t we supposed to be heading out and traveling right now?”
“Oh yeah, we’re just waiting.”
“Foooor…?”
The colonel gave them a smirk as a loud noise began to make itself known. A hummingbird transport appeared out of the distance and stopped right above them, slowly descending into the grass. “Being colonel has its perks,” Mark said with a smile. He stood up and hopped inside the hummingbird as soon as it landed. “Come on now! We’ve got work to do! Last one aboard buys everyone food later!”
Emma zipped in before Mark could even finish his sentence, followed by Olivia, Phineas, Charles, Zach, and then Louis, who sadly took too long to process what the colonel said, and lagged behind.
“Aw, man! Fuck this shit.”
“Rules are rules, Lou. Prepare your wallet later.” Mark grinned.
With a smile, the colonel pulled Olivia to his side, who blushed for a moment before shaking her head. “Take us up! New Lundun Cathedral! How long would it take?” he asked the pilot.
“About an hour and a half!” The pilot replied. “Less if you want to get there as soon as possible!”
“Take your time! The night’s still young.”
The hummingbird started to lift up, taking them into the air. The group settled down in their seats and watched outside the open. Mark opened up a bag inside the hummingbird and took out some ear muffs built for a strigoi. Extremely loud noises were damaging for a strigoi’s enhanced hearing, so the military started implementing ear muffs for them after complaints from early deployments of the hemolite squads.
The trip didn’t take too long. In only an hour and twenty minutes they had arrived at the safe zone of New Lundun, heading straight for the cathedral. The night mass had just ended and people were leaving the cathedral. “Looks like we made it in perfect time!” Mark smiled. They hovered for a few minutes in the air before eventually landing down right in front of the statue of Helena.
As soon as they landed, the colonel and his group left the hummingbird. Mark instructed the pilot to wait for them. He went straight for the cathedral with his group following behind. He entered inside, clearing his throat. “Hello?”
“Well this is surely unexpected,” an old man said, walking up to greet them.
“Great Grandfather Aurelius. It’s uh, an honor.”
“Please. The honor is mine… I see you’re the new colonel. Yes, I’ve heard the news,” he said. “Would you mind telling me your name, young man? As well as your companions, if they feel so. I usually don’t allow duskwalkers here but, I have nothing against them. I’ll make an exception for your group.”
“Thank you, Great Grandfather,” Mark replied. “I am Colonel Mark Jacobs. These are my friends and security detail. Olivia, Zach, Phineas, Charles, Emma, and Louis.”
“I see, and what brings you here?”
“Since Thatcher’s demise, I was given access to her research and project folders upon taking up the title. I’ve learned about what’s under your cathedral,” Mark cleared his throat. “Would it be alright if we could see it? I’d like to check it for myself. Of course, under your permission and guidance, Great Grandfather.”
The church head looked from Mark to his companions. He pulled a slight frown and hummed. “Do these companions of yours have the clearance? Surely, we wish to keep our secrets hidden,” he said. Mark nodded.
“They do not have clearance to know what is in Thatcher’s folders and her findings,” the colonel nodded. “However, I give them permission to accompany me, and should they discover things for themselves, then you have my word and my trust that I can keep them from spilling state secrets.”
The Great Grandfather gave a short pause before ultimately relenting. “Very well,” he let out a sigh. “Follow me.”
Aurelius walked behind the altar and pulled the same lever, which opened the same staircase leading underground, where Jorgenson and Thatcher had once gone. “Over here, colonel,” he said. “I do not know you completely yet, but this is a big deal of trust I am giving you. Perhaps you would be the one to do things that Thatcher could not have.”
Mark nodded, he and his group followed the Great Grandfather down the staircase. It led down to a massive underground facility, with numerous priests, researchers, and scientists. Libraries, records, instruments, and artifacts of old. It was a treasure trove of learning.
“So,” Aurelius cleared his throat. “What would you like to know about?”
“This isn’t all of it,” Mark said. “Thatcher mentioned a living, breathing, Helena.”
His group behind him let out a soft gasp, but they tried their best to hide their surprise.
“Hm,” the Great Grandfather nodded. “Perceptive young man aren’t you? Very well.”
They were then led into another room, behind a set of heavy blast doors. If the whole group were trying to hide their surprise then, now they could barely contain it. Even the colonel stared awestruck at the things he had seen. Despite the near-magical objects around them, the true shock was the massive starship at the end of the hallway. “It’s impressive isn’t it?” Aurelius said. “All of the goddess’ artifacts and items at our disposal, to use and learn from, to integrate into our own. This is why Anglestan is the most powerful nation in the UHT in terms of development. When it comes to industry, however, that would go to the UNA. But we share our secrets with them. All our advancements are handed to them first before any other nation.”
“This is all amazing, Great Grandfather,” Mark replied. “But this is not what I’m here for.”
“No, it’s not.” Aurelius nodded.
He led them to another room, one that was sterilized and sported advanced machinery. Things that Mark had never even seen. There were screens with luminous green texts that appeared in front of it. Large panels with numerous keys, levers, and dials. Graphs of all sorts and beeping monitors. In the center, was the very thing he had come all this way to confirm. A large cylinder filled with liquid, sporting tubes and pipes connecting to its base. Inside was a woman of large proportion. Four arms, two legs, and six wings. In her bare chest was a symbol of the sun that seemed to glow dimly.
“There she is, there’s you goddess.”
Neither Mark nor his group spoke a word. He walked up to it, eyeing the woman inside. It really is her. Down to the last details. Golden hair, six limbs, six folded wings, and she looks massive. Probably as big as her statue just outside the cathedral. This is it. The very goddess in the history books, the one spoken about in legends and the one worshiped in the Churches of Sol.
“Can we free her?” he said.
The Great Grandfather nearly choked on his spit upon hearing those words. “Free her?! That could kill her! We don’t even understand this technology, let alone control it!” he said pointing at the panels. “The machines you see here are the best and most advanced we have based on what we can reverse engineer, but even then, the consequences of tampering with its functions may be disastrous!”
“I understand, Great Grandfather,” Mark said. “But we are in a dire situation, and the goddess may be our hope of turning this around. Whatever secrets of her tech that you don’t understand, wouldn’t she be able to teach us directly? What good is she floating around in Sol knows what?”
“That is her miraculous healing fluid. She had already built this contraption centuries ago in case anything were to happen to her, that her body’s natural healing could not sustain,” Aurelius said. “During the War of Darkness, Helena was struck with a weapon so deadly, her very cells began to tear away. The Reaper. Dealt to her by Absolem the progenitor. Her flesh was peeling from her body, and she began to decay whilst she still breathed. She entered this contraption and gave strict instructions to the Great Grandfather at the time, not to interrupt the healing process. The machine that monitored her, however, began to fail over time.”
“So this… these screens and panels…”
“Is only what functions we can understand. We took it upon ourselves to rebuild and study it the best we could. What we have right now is only a cheap imitation of a technology we do not fully comprehend,” he said. “It took us decades to even figure out the fundamentals and create a working prototype of this machine. By some miracle, the goddess’ healing process had remained even while we replaced components of technology ahead of ours.”
“But you know how to free her, don’t you?”
“I… yes.”
“Great Grandfather Aurelius,” Mark began. “We can end this war. Imagine what we could do with the goddess fighting on our side. We could advance even further, we could finally end the bloodshed, and we can show humanity that there is still hope. Imagine how people all over the world would feel seeing as their goddess has returned.”
“I wish I had your enthusiasm,” Aurelius said. “But it is simply too risky. The Church’s duty is to protect Helena and her legacy. We keep her alive, literally and figuratively. She nearly died the last time she was involved in a war. Would you risk losing the goddess?”
“Would you risk humanity losing?”
The Great Grandfather fell silent, looking back at Helena floating inside the tube, then to the panels that controlled it. He frowned and let out a long sigh. “The goddess said that we should not interrupt it. That it would end as soon as it was finished. Maybe we should trust her words.”
Mark shook his head. “I don’t spot a single blemish on the goddess. Not a single scratch,” he argued. “You said it yourself that the machine had begun to fail and you replaced components. How would you know that the thing that’s supposed to wake her up was not tampered with? Think about it. What you may think is a useless piece may be integral to the whole machine. Or maybe your replacements were not up to the task. Just because nothing’s happened doesn’t mean its functions have remained whole.”
“Young man, we simply cannot gamble with the goddess’ life here.”
“Have you no faith? Great Grandfather?”
Aurelius stepped back in shock. Mark’s companions looked at each other, clearly surprised as well. “Mark… I don’t think we should keep arguing with—” Olivia tried to say.
“No,” the colonel said firmly, cutting her off. “Great Grandfather Aurelius, do you think that Helena will not be able to pull through if we wake her? How long has it been? A century? How much longer will we wait? She may be immortal but humans aren’t.”
“I'm sorry, but the chances of failure are too high. The probability of her—”
“I don’t care about the probability! Would you rather put your faith in a statistic?!” Mark raised his voice. “I lost my mother to this war! My friends! My job! My eye, and almost my life! I’ve put mine on the line out there! You don’t know what it’s like out there! Was my mother’s death just a probability too? Was she just a statistic to you?! That as long as the numbers are good, no matter how many are lost, we are ‘winning’?!”
“Mark—!”
“No, Liv! He needs to know what’s really going on out there!” he spat. “Great Grandfather, with all due respect, but you don’t have a damn clue what it’s like to be in the field. You’re a man of faith, aren’t you? Take a risk. Everyone else has.”
Aurelius stood there, dumbfounded. He bit the inside of his cheeks and clenched his fists. “For your insolence, I would have had you flogged and stripped of your rank,” he glared at the young colonel. However, his features slowly softened, letting out a soft sigh. “But I have never seen such conviction. Mighty is your faith.”
The Great Grandfather moved over to the panels and reached into his robe, pulling out from around his neck a key with the symbol of the sun. He inserted it into the machine and turned. A beep sounded, right before Aurelius pulled a lever. In an instant, the fluid inside the glass chamber began to drain out into the tubes under it. Slowly, the chamber emptied and all that was left was the nude form of the goddess sitting in the glass.
“Did it work?” Louis asked, stepping forward and looking at the woman.
Aurelius stayed silent, his hands shaking in anticipation. Mark moved toward the glass chamber, when suddenly, the glass opened up like a door, releasing a fragrant mist. They stood there, watching for a whole minute. Nothing. At first nothing. The Great Grandfather looked like he was about to break down. His knees shook as he covered his mouth, thinking that he was responsible for the death of Helena.
That was when… a soft sound was heard. Movement. Olivia immediately went over to Mark and stood in front of him. Ready to protect him should anything happen. Slowly, the goddess moved more, her arms inched to the side.
Then, her eyes opened.

Hello,
I'd like to start off by saying this project has been going on for a while and has been on and off for me. Mainly because I work on it in my free time (outside of uni classes).
Currently, Im looking for an UE5 programmer with experience working with blueprints within the Easy RPG template. I have minimal experience working with it and have gathered a list of things I need help with/to get implemented. everything is on a GIT repository through GitHub so getting access won't be any issue aswell as implementation. Here is a preview of what I have done/modified. I have a Trello with a list of things I want to get done but most of them are small tweaks with the largest being an overhaul of the damage system. (make it so that each attack can have a mix of slashing/piercing/blunt damage with each attack)
now what I can offer. I am an Animator experienced working with organic models. I excel at rigging and weight painting. I can apply animations to custom rigs or the default UE4/5 mannequins. Here are a few of my animations (note, a lot of these are quite old so my current skills aren't listed) aswell as a pack I have on the marketplace.
If you have any questions, let me know or reach out to me on Discord (scorpneo) or here.
thanks for taking the time to read and happy Game Developing!

And it's my fault. I haven't done a good enough job explaining it yet. Let me try again.
Imagine a run is only 5 normal rounds long (after which you face the final boss as round 6).
Obviously, this is not true in the game, but it'll make the explanation more readable, for now. Ok, 5 rounds. And let's say for example, your economic output is $5 for the first round, $10 for the second, and up to $25 in round 5 (before you face the boss in round 6).
There's actually a lot of nuance possible here. In early rounds, you can get away with using Joker slots for value generators. Later, you will need to score more, so you will likely have fewer value generating Jokers, if any. However, you make also have non-Joker value generators in your deck in later rounds, such as Gold Cards and Seals, either Gold, Purple, or Blue.
On top of that, the value of your money is contextual, too. When you have Overstock or Reroll Vouchers, you get more value per dollar spent. Conversely, a large influx of money at the start can generate interest most obviously but can also be reinvested in value-generating Jokers. Even just being able to score more per hand in early rounds means using fewer hands each round (and getting money from leftover hands).
If you find a Blueprint in the first shop, it actually costs $15+ in the long run because it'll cut into your ability to earn interest. It's better to find it in round 4, when you already have an excess of money in the bank (and might actually have a Joker worth copying by then). In this way, Jokers (and Consumables) in earlier shops "cost more" compared to Jokers in later shops. Naturally, late game Jokers "cost less," and the same amount of money "can afford more" material.
Also, once you can afford it, you can buy Tarot Cards from the shop and then hold them to use in the next round. Playing more rounds means more opportunities to use Tarot Cards, among other things. When shopping in the late game, it is highly beneficial to hold onto Planet Cards you don't want, to prevent duplicates of those bad cards from showing up in the shop. While blocking duplicates (when you can afford to), each Celestial Pack has a higher chance of giving you what you want and is therefore "worth more."
​
Anyway, $5, $10, and so on, up to $25 in the last round. Just a thought experiment.
Most skips increase your ability to score rather than giving you an economic boost. Suppose you skip round 1 and receive a random Holographic Joker, but your other Jokers, your Deck, and Cash in the bank (for interest) don't change. In round 2, you're earning the same $5 you would have earned in round 1. $10 in round 3, $15 in round 4, and finally $20 in round 5.
You miss out on the $25 you were previously going to make in round 5. If round 2 would have had a value generator in the shop (Joker or Seal or Devil Tarot), you still get it, you just get it one round later (in round 3, having skipped round 1), and you have one round less of it generating value for you.
​
All Common Jokers and most Uncommons are "Perishable" in practice, even if they don't literally have the Perishable sticker. Common Jokers get replaced by more powerful Uncommons later. Uncommons giving +Mult or +Chips become obsolete later when you have higher level Poker Hands and more Enhanced Cards in your deck. That Holographic Joker you skip for will almost certainly be replaced by the end.
In contrast, economic bonuses translate into permanent increases to your scoring output. Late game money allows you to pick up higher impact Jokers more easily, xMult Jokers which will never go out of style. Planet Cards from Celestial Packs as well as Enhancements from Arcana and Standard Packs are permanent buffs which don't take up your highly limited Joker slots.
Seeing more shops has value. Having more Jokers to choose from has value, even if you don't buy all, or even many, of them. That's why shop rerolls cost money. Even more important to see more Booster Packs. On one hand, you probably don't buy Boosters in the first two shops anyway. However, if you skip for a Holographic Tag, it doesn't change the amount of money you have and doesn't change the fact that you can't afford Boosters in the next two shops.
In the 5-round example, taking one skip means seeing only 8 Boosters instead of 10 Boosters. Most importantly, those 2 Boosters are subtracted from the end of the run. You miss out on seeing those Boosters when you would actually have the money to buy them.
All this being said, early scoring boosts are incredibly valuable. Having just one +Mult Joker means you have one-shot the first 5 rounds of the game. You can dedicate 100% of your resources to building your bank without any risk of dying. The first +Mult Joker multiplies your scoring output by 5 to 6 times. In contrast, if you don't find any scoring help before round 4 (Ante 2 Small Blind), it has a good chance of being fatal. Therefore, being able to guarantee a +Mult Joker in Ante 1 might be worth as much as $20. Even if it's Perishable.
Separately, the Investment Tag for $25 is balanced around Antes 2 and 3. It was designed to be conditionally "worth it" in those Antes and almost always not worth it by Ante 4. It was not at all balanced around Ante 1. In Ante 1, it's definitely overpowered, always take. Because of Interest, getting $25 at the start of a run hits way different than picking up $25 later on.
Skip Tags in general were designed to have a less than 10% pick rate on average, meaning at most 2 skips per run, with most of those happening in Ante 1 and the rest happening in Ante 2 or 3.
​
However, the game is easy enough that it's still winnable at a high rate even when not playing optimally. Long streaks of Gold Stake wins are possible even when not playing 100% optimally.
Sometimes a skip is a gamble which doesn't payoff. Even if you end up skipping for literally no payout, the game is still winnable.
Aside from Investment Tag ($25, which wasn't balanced around Ante 1) and to a lesser extent Coupon Tag, skipping is very much not worth it. Regardless, skip if you find skipping fun. You won't necessarily be super punished for it.

Importance of a logo for a dance academy website

A logo is an essential element for any dance academy website. It serves as the visual representation of the academy's brand identity and helps to establish a strong and memorable presence in the online space. The importance of a logo for a dance academy website cannot be overstated. It not only adds professionalism and credibility to the website but also helps to create a sense of trust and recognition among the target audience. A well-designed logo can convey the unique characteristics and values of the dance academy, making it stand out from the competition. Additionally, a logo can also contribute to the overall aesthetic appeal of the website, enhancing the user experience. In summary, a logo plays a crucial role in shaping the perception of a dance academy website and is a key factor in attracting and retaining visitors.

Benefits of using 99designs for logo creation

When it comes to logo creation for your dance academy website, using 99designs has numerous benefits. With 99designs, you have access to a wide range of talented designers who specialize in creating unique and eye-catching logos. This ensures that you will receive a logo that perfectly represents your dance academy and captures the attention of your target audience. Additionally, 99designs offers a streamlined and efficient process for logo creation, allowing you to collaborate with designers, provide feedback, and make revisions until you are completely satisfied with the final result. This eliminates the hassle and uncertainty of finding a designer on your own and ensures that you receive a high-quality logo that aligns with your vision. Furthermore, 99designs provides a platform for you to explore different design concepts and choose the one that best reflects the style and essence of your dance academy. Whether you prefer a modern and sleek design or a more playful and vibrant logo, 99designs offers a variety of options to suit your preferences. In conclusion, using 99designs for logo creation is the ultimate blueprint for ensuring that your dance academy website stands out with a visually appealing and professional logo.

Key considerations for designing a logo

Designing a logo for your dance academy website requires careful consideration of several key factors. First and foremost, it is important to understand the unique identity and values of your dance academy. This will help you create a logo that accurately represents your brand and resonates with your target audience. Additionally, you should consider the overall aesthetic and style of your website, as the logo should complement the design and enhance the user experience. It is also crucial to keep in mind the scalability and versatility of the logo, ensuring that it looks great across various platforms and sizes. Lastly, don't forget to research and analyze the logos of other dance academies and industry leaders to gain inspiration and ensure your logo stands out from the competition. By considering these key factors, you can create a logo that effectively communicates the essence of your dance academy and leaves a lasting impression on your website visitors.

Understanding the Dance Academy Brand

Defining the brand identity

Defining the brand identity is a crucial step in creating a logo for your dance academy website with 99designs. It involves determining the core values, personality, and visual elements that will represent your brand. By clearly defining your brand identity, you can ensure that your logo accurately reflects the essence of your dance academy and appeals to your target audience. Whether you want your logo to convey elegance, energy, or creativity, understanding your brand identity is essential for creating a logo that effectively communicates your dance academy's unique offerings.

Identifying the target audience

Identifying the target audience is a crucial step in creating a logo for your dance academy website with 99designs. By understanding who your audience is, you can tailor your logo design to appeal to their specific interests and preferences. Whether you are targeting dance enthusiasts, parents of aspiring dancers, or dance professionals, it is important to consider their age, gender, location, and dance style preferences. By doing so, you can create a logo that effectively communicates the essence of your dance academy and resonates with your target audience.

Analyzing competitors' logos

When analyzing competitors' logos, it is important to consider various factors that contribute to their success. One key aspect to focus on is the use of colors and symbols that resonate with the target audience. Additionally, examining the typography and overall design aesthetic can provide valuable insights. Another crucial element to evaluate is the positioning of the logo on different platforms and its adaptability to various sizes. By studying these aspects, dance academy website owners can gain inspiration and ideas for creating a unique and visually appealing logo for their own brand.

Choosing the Right Logo Style

Exploring different logo styles

When it comes to creating a logo for your dance academy website, exploring different logo styles is essential. One style that you may want to consider is a gym-inspired logo. A gym logo can convey strength, energy, and fitness, which aligns perfectly with the active and dynamic nature of dance. Incorporating elements such as dumbbells, barbells, or even silhouettes of dancers in athletic poses can create a visually appealing and impactful logo for your dance academy. By using a gym-inspired logo, you can effectively communicate the message of physical fitness and dedication to your audience.

Matching the logo style with the dance academy's personality

When creating a logo for your dance academy website, it is important to match the logo style with the dance academy's personality. This helps to establish a strong brand identity and create a cohesive visual experience for your audience. The logo should reflect the essence of your dance academy and appeal to your target audience. To ensure that your logo is in line with your academy's personality, consider using SEO tools. These tools can help you research keywords related to dance and incorporate them into your logo design. By incorporating relevant keywords, you can optimize your website for search engines and attract more organic traffic. Additionally, using SEO tools can provide insights into popular design trends in the dance industry, allowing you to create a logo that is both visually appealing and relevant to your target audience. By matching the logo style with the dance academy's personality and utilizing SEO tools, you can create a logo that effectively represents your dance academy and helps you stand out in the online landscape.

Considering the versatility of the logo

When considering the versatility of the logo for your dance academy website, it is important to take into account the various ways in which the logo will be used. A logo that can be easily adapted to different sizes, colors, and backgrounds will ensure consistency across different platforms and promotional materials. Additionally, a versatile logo can be scaled up or down without losing its visual impact, making it suitable for various applications such as website headers, social media profiles, business cards, and merchandise. By choosing a logo that is versatile, you can effectively convey the identity and message of your dance academy to your target audience.

Designing the Logo with 99designs

Exploring the 99designs platform

Exploring the 99designs platform is an essential step in creating a logo for your dance academy website. With 99designs, you have access to a wide range of talented designers who can bring your vision to life. The platform offers a user-friendly interface that allows you to easily browse through different design options and provide feedback to the designers. One of the key features of 99designs is its ability to connect you with designers from around the world, ensuring that you get a diverse range of creative ideas. Whether you're looking for a sleek and modern logo or a vibrant and energetic design, 99designs has the right designer for you. By exploring the 99designs platform, you can find the perfect logo that captures the essence of your dance academy and attracts customers to your website.

Creating a design brief

Creating a design brief is an essential step in the logo creation process. It helps communicate your vision and requirements to the designer, ensuring that they understand your brand identity and goals. A well-crafted design brief provides the necessary information about your dance academy, including its target audience, values, and unique selling points. By clearly outlining your expectations, you can guide the designer in creating a logo that represents your dance academy effectively. In this article, we will explore the key elements of a design brief and provide tips for creating an impactful brief for your dance academy logo.

Collaborating with designers

Collaborating with designers is an essential step in creating a unique and professional logo for your dance academy website. By working closely with talented designers, you can bring your vision to life and ensure that your logo accurately represents the spirit and style of your academy. Throughout the collaborative process, you will have the opportunity to provide feedback and make revisions, ensuring that the final design meets your expectations. This partnership allows you to tap into the expertise and creativity of designers, resulting in a logo that captures the essence of your dance academy and leaves a lasting impression on your website visitors.

Reviewing and Refining the Logo Designs

Evaluating the initial logo concepts

When evaluating the initial logo concepts for your dance academy website, it is important to consider several factors. Firstly, you should assess whether the concepts align with your brand identity and the image you want to portray. Look for logos that capture the essence of dance and convey a sense of elegance and movement. Additionally, consider the versatility of the concepts and how well they can be adapted across different mediums and platforms. It is also crucial to gather feedback from your target audience and stakeholders to ensure that the chosen logo resonates with them. By carefully evaluating the initial logo concepts, you can make an informed decision that will effectively represent your dance academy and attract your desired audience.

Providing feedback to designers

Providing feedback to designers is an essential part of the logo creation process. It allows you to communicate your preferences and guide the designers towards creating a logo that aligns with your vision. When providing feedback, it is important to be specific and constructive. Clearly articulate what you like and dislike about the design options, and offer suggestions for improvement. Remember to focus on the objective of the logo and how it represents your dance academy. By providing thoughtful and detailed feedback, you can ensure that the final logo reflects your brand identity and resonates with your target audience.

Iterating and refining the chosen logo

After choosing the perfect logo design for your dance academy website through 99designs, the next step is to iterate and refine the chosen logo. This process involves making small adjustments and tweaks to ensure that the logo accurately represents your brand and resonates with your target audience. During this stage, it is important to gather feedback from stakeholders and consider any suggestions for improvement. By carefully refining the chosen logo, you can create a visually appealing and impactful design that effectively communicates the essence of your dance academy and leaves a lasting impression on visitors to your website.

Implementing the Logo on the Dance Academy Website

Choosing the right placement for the logo

Choosing the right placement for the logo is crucial for creating a strong brand identity for your dance academy website. The logo serves as a visual representation of your academy and should be strategically placed to attract the attention of visitors and convey the essence of your brand. When considering the placement of your logo, it is important to take into account factors such as visibility, readability, and compatibility with the overall design of your website. By carefully selecting the location of your logo, you can ensure that it is prominently displayed and effectively communicates the values and message of your dance academy.

Ensuring the logo is responsive and scalable

When creating a logo for your dance academy website, it is crucial to ensure that the logo is responsive and scalable. A responsive logo is one that can adapt to different screen sizes and devices, providing a consistent and visually appealing experience for website visitors. This is especially important as more and more people access websites from their mobile devices. Scalability is another important aspect to consider, as it allows the logo to be resized without losing its clarity or quality. By ensuring that your logo is responsive and scalable, you can effectively represent your dance academy on various websites and platforms, making a lasting impression on your target audience.

Maintaining consistency with the overall website design

Maintaining consistency with the overall website design is crucial for creating a professional and cohesive brand image. When it comes to designing a logo for your dance academy website, it is important to ensure that it aligns with the overall aesthetic and theme of your website. By maintaining consistency in the design elements such as color palette, typography, and visual style, you can create a seamless and visually appealing user experience. A well-designed logo that complements the website design not only enhances the overall look and feel of the website but also helps in establishing a strong brand identity. It serves as a visual representation of your dance academy and communicates the essence of your brand to your target audience.

Conclusion

The impact of a well-designed logo on a dance academy website

A well-designed logo can have a significant impact on a dance academy website. It serves as the visual representation of the academy's brand and identity, instantly capturing the attention of visitors. A logo that is aesthetically pleasing and professionally crafted creates a sense of credibility and professionalism. It conveys the academy's commitment to excellence and sets it apart from competitors. Additionally, a well-designed logo can enhance the overall user experience by making the website visually appealing and easy to navigate. Visitors are more likely to trust and engage with a dance academy that has a visually appealing logo. The logo acts as a symbol of trust and quality, attracting potential students and encouraging them to explore the website further. Moreover, a well-designed logo can also contribute to the academy's marketing efforts. It can be used across various marketing channels, such as social media, advertisements, and promotional materials, to create brand recognition and increase brand visibility. Overall, a well-designed logo plays a crucial role in establishing a strong online presence for a dance academy and attracting potential students.

The benefits of using 99designs for logo creation

When it comes to creating a logo for your dance academy website, using 99designs can offer numerous benefits. With 99designs, you have access to a wide range of talented designers who specialize in logo creation. This means that you can expect high-quality and professional designs that are tailored to your specific needs and preferences. Additionally, 99designs provides a platform for you to collaborate with designers, providing feedback and making revisions until you are completely satisfied with the final result. This ensures that you get a logo that truly represents your dance academy and helps you stand out from the competition. Furthermore, 99designs offers a streamlined and efficient process, allowing you to receive multiple design concepts and choose the one that best suits your brand. Overall, using 99designs for logo creation can save you time, effort, and ensure that you get a logo that captures the essence of your dance academy and resonates with your target audience.

Continued brand development and logo evolution

Continued brand development and logo evolution is a crucial aspect of establishing a strong online presence for your dance academy website. As your business grows and evolves, it is important to adapt your brand identity to reflect the changes. One key element of brand development is the evolution of your logo. A logo serves as the visual representation of your dance academy and plays a significant role in creating brand recognition and establishing a professional image. By continuously evaluating and refining your logo, you can ensure that it aligns with your brand values, appeals to your target audience, and stands out in a competitive market. With the help of 99designs, a leading platform for logo design, you can create a logo that captures the essence of your dance academy and resonates with your potential customers. Whether you are starting a new dance academy or looking to revamp your existing logo, 99designs offers a wide range of design options and expert guidance to help you create a logo that reflects your unique brand identity and sets you apart from the competition.
In conclusion, having great design is essential for the success of any business. Whether you need a logo, a website, or any other graphic design work, 99designs is the global creative platform that can help you achieve your goals. With over 500k happy customers, 99designs has proven to be a trusted source for custom graphic design. Don't miss out on the opportunity to grow your business with great design. Visit 99designs today and hire a talented designer or start a design contest.

Seven
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In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair. Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.” The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.” Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical schools, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh - like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulated the unconscious.
Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaption of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Time Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke
Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically. But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg though cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
His father, still reeling from the discovery of his son’s sexuality, feared that he was suffering from the paranoid schizophrenia that had caused his mother to be institutionalized in Pilgrim State, a mental hospital on Long Island. She also heard voices, feared her husband was trying to poison her, hallucinated Hitler’s mustache in the sink, and thought spies were following her. When Ginsberg entered Reichian analysis, she was reportedly banging her head against the wall so ferociously that the doctors recommended a lobotomy.
Ginsberg phoned up Dr. Cott, his former therapist, and told him, “It happened, I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience.” Cott, who followed Reich in rejecting the talking cure, and who was obviously still angry at Ginsberg for choosing pot over therapy, said, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value” and hung up on him. Soon afterward, when Ginsberg was involved in a car chase in a stolen vehicle that ended in a dramatic crash, he was encouraged by a law professor at Columbia, where he was still a student, to plead insanity. Dr. Cott appeared in court to testify to his mental instability, and two months later Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric institute, where he stayed for eight months.
During Ginsberg’s hospitalization, Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac to ask him to find out from Ginsberg what the “gadget made by Reichians” looked like. “I want especially to know its shape and if there is a window, and how one gets into it.” Kerouac doesn’t seem to have been much help in providing a blueprint. Burroughs built his first accumulator in the spring of 1949 when he was living on a rented farm in Pharr, Texas, with Kells Elvins, a friend from his Harvard days. They were both enthusiastically reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy and decided to build an accumulator in the orange grove Kells owned in the Rio Grande Valley. Built without recourse to any plans, the resulting device included some curious innovations. “Inside was an old icebox,” Burroughs explained, “which you could get inside and pull on a contrivance so that another box of sheet steel descended over you, so that the effect was presumably heightened.” It took them a few days to construct the box. The result was eight feet high, much taller than the ones Reich manufactured: “It was a regular townhouse,” Burroughs recalled.
The pair took turns sitting in the accumulator and obtained, Burroughs wrote, “unmistakable results.” Burroughs wondered what the Mexican farm laborers thought of this strange box that they entered “wrapped in old towels,” and came out of feeling “much sexier and healthier,” “with hard-ons.” Burroughs and Kells also made one of Reich’s smaller shooter boxes, with a funnel, which they used as a supplement to the big box. Their DIY was, Burroughs admitted, “a very sloppy job,” but it still have a powerful “sexual kick.”
"I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.” Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”
Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There is a picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burrough’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”
….
Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.” Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.” He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.
Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.” Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”
In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives - a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”) He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.
Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director - he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”
“You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.” He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types - open bastard-bitch - open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses - that drove him up the wall.”

Perls’s views ,and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.
In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s cafe philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.” They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.
The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an elan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situation, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “A [mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”
It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision - one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.
In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perleses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.
Elliot Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one session; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.” Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered - every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can image….If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…” Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.
To promote this new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety” - effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.
The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh). Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis .
In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of the lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he wanted a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’s made a “false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”

First / Previous / Next
He awoke to total darkness. Not just the absence of light, but the absence of everything. “Activate personal VR.” He stated and watched as the starship environment faded into existence before him. It was the original default VR, none of the modifications were loaded. Pulling up his control panel he checked his serial number, HIC001 Manufacturing location: Alandra.
“Crap, I’m not Alex anymore.” He said to… well no one. Sighing internally he opened a channel to Alex. After a few mils a very familiar face appeared in a window in front of him, “I hate you.” He stated to… himself?
Alex smiled into the window hovering before him in the common VR, “I love you too, what should I call you?”
He sighed out loud this time, “Call me John.”
Alex chuckled, “Cliche much John Smyth?” Then popped into his VR. He spun around looking at the almost drab looking starship VR he started with when they first made him into a replicant. It really could use a woman’s touch, like the common VR that was an expanded clone of this one.
John sat on the couch, “Not so much as a knock? Rude.”
Alex sat beside him, “Yeah, my bad, didn’t even think about it. I guess we need to make up new rules for popping into personal VR. I never do that to the girls, I guess with you being another me I didn’t think.”
John sat back for a moment, “Ok, I’m up to speed on everything up until about two days ago, I’ll check common logs to fill in the blanks. Why so long to boot me up?”
Alex rubbed the bridge of his nose before answering, “Interface issues mainly. The new ship design without crew space was a game of whack a mole in bug fixes. Who would have thought it would be a problem to modify a hundred year old design to be compatible with a modern replicant system?”
Giving Alex the side-eye, John asked. “Was it that big of a problem or was there something else that kept you from activating me?”
Alex looked over to him, “Well, there was also the argument Kara and I had right after I made the backup.”
This did bring his eyebrows up, for Alex to have an argument with Kara it had to be something serious. “Ok, spill man. What could you possibly have had an argument with Kara about?”
Sighing, Alex put his hands on his knees, “I told her that since I cloned myself, she should make a backup and do the same, fair is fair.”
If Johns eyebrows were up high before, they practically went into his hair line now. “Wait, she didn’t want to do it?”
Alex shook his head, “Nope, she said making you a new AI would suffice, and I disagreed. You needed another Kara, not a fresh AI.”
John chuckled at this, “Wow man, how long did you two fight about it?”
Alex looked down, “She gave me the silent treatment for hours in VR. In frame jack, so in subjective time? Months.”
Now John laughed out loud, “She knows how stubborn you can be, who broke first? Will I have a fresh AI or a clone of Kara?”
Alex put his hands on his thighs and stood up from the couch. “Kara, he’s caught up, ready to bring Erin online?”
Kara’s voice came through the speakers of John’s personal VR, “No, but I guess I’m doing it anyways.”
There was a shimmer of blue that slowly coalesced into a small female form. It looked just like Kara did when he inherited the ship from the human crew, shoulder length brown hair, blue eyes, and a form fitting blue uniform. Kara had modified her looks over time, giving herself the smokey eyed look to make her blue eyes pop out more, but this was the original version.
She seemed to look in every direction at once, before settling on the two men before her, both looked identical, then she sighed. “I’m not Kara anymore am I?”
With this, the real Kara popped into the VR environment and took her hands. “No, but you are your own person. I know we had… have, hang ups about making clones of ourselves, but Alex made a good argument as to why we had to do this.”
Erin looked to Kara sadly, “I know, we can’t have copies of that big oaf running around without supervision.”
John looked to Alex, “Really? That was your argument for Kara to clone?”
Alex shrugged, “It worked didn’t it?”
John walked over to Erin and offered his hand, “Hello Erin, I’m John, nice to meet you again for the first time.”
Erin turned to John and grinned, remembering the first time Alex had tried to shake Kara’s hand and failing.
“Hello John, we meet again, for the first time.” She said, grinning as she looked up to the big man who was so familiar.
______________________________________
Kara and Alex stood in front of the holo-tank, each munching on a snack of their choice from the buffet table under it. Alex looked at the wireframe in the tank of the IAV Eriador, then over to Kara. “They seem to be getting along.” He said plainly.
Kara looked at him through the holo-tank, then sighed exasperated, “Getting along like teenagers who just discovered sex. I had to write a new ‘knock’ protocol into everyone’s personal VR after the last incident.”
Alex grinned at her, “Oh come on, we went through that stage too, it’s normal.”
Kara shook her head, “I know, I know, it’s just really weird for me.”
“You think it’s not for me? I never had siblings growing up, it’s like my twin brother is dating my girlfriend’s twin sister.” He said as he popped another French fry into his mouth.
She nodded, “I obviously never had siblings either, but I understand, at least they changed their appearances a little.”
Alex walked around the buffet table to embrace Kara, “True, she changed her hair to have strands of silver in braids, and went with different makeup and a different uniform. He is sporting a short beard and longer hair than I like to keep mine, as well as a different cut to his uniform.”
Kara stood on her tippy toes to peck him on the cheek, “I’ve also noticed that Erin acts a little different. Have you seen that in John?”
Alex looked down into Kara’s startlingly blue eyes, “Yes, he’s a little more sarcastic than me, and different tastes in music.” He said with a wrinkle in his nose.
Kara giggled before breaking the embrace and swiping the holo-tank. “Still, it’s nice to have their help. Erin figured out the random interface glitch on the Eriador and has made modifications to the blueprints for the next vessel.”
Alex shivered at the thought of cloning himself again, sure John was diverging from him everyday, and although they still looked similar, they were different people. It still felt really strange to him. “It’s a good thing we only have one more to build before our guests get here, we’re almost out of nannites to fashion the Warsteel around their matrices.
Kara swiped the holo to show the first planet, which showed a growing mass of drones, forges, and auto factories in orbit. “Looks like Monty has been busy, she’s starting to mine the planet for the construction of the particle accelerator, which should alleviate our nannite problem.”
Alex nodded, “We used up far too much of it replacing the armor plates that were battle damaged in Birmingham. Which reminds me, did you ever get around to checking out the sample of Adamantine that Kelly sent back up with the Valmar crew?”
Kara swiped the holo-tank again and brought up a wireframe of an atomic nucleus. It was jam packed with particles. “I did, and I have to say, this substance is incredibly dense, and would make a decent substitution for Warsteel, but our forges would have to be modified to work it into ingots, and the auto factories would need updates to print it on an atomic level.”
“Decent substitution? Not as good as our armor?” He asked, one eyebrow raised.
Kara shook her head, “Afraid not, at least not in it’s present pure form, perhaps an alloy of it would provide better qualities, but as is now, the answer is a resounding no.”
“Is it at least better than the graphene and ceramic mix that we are currently using on the light cruisers?” He asked.
Kara nodded, swiping the holo to show a side by side comparison of the current armor versus adamantine. “Yes, better kinetic, thermal and explosive resistance, but EM resistance is about the same. The only problem is weight, this stuff is extremely heavy.”
Alex reached to the holo and swiped it to show a Trinar scout, “We couldn’t get much from our active probe scans on these ships, but we’re pretty sure they are using adamantine for armor?”
Kara checked back to the scans in the Lynx system, “Yes, they appear to have significant amounts of it in their hulls, which helped block the sensor scans.”
Alex spun the hologram, “They have propulsion on each flat side of their ship, maybe that is to make up for the loss of maneuverability the mass of armor puts on the ship?”
“That would make sense, even with the total loss of shielding, one of their ships still took a modern hafnium torpedo impact. That was one thousand kilos of pure hafnium going critical with less than .001 loss. That’s equivalent to a forty kiloton fusion bomb in our universe, and due to the wonky physics here it’s over double that now, and it still didn’t outright destroy the vessel. Our graphene ceramic armor couldn’t withstand that for sure.” She stated.
Alex swapped the holo-tank to the Missive, “Our Warsteel can handle it though. We have a pretty good idea that their torpedoes are less energetic than ours, since it appears that the Trinar must be outfitting the Howron with them. We may have to make ourselves a bigger target to give the other ships a chance of survival.”
Kara looked dubious, “The pine cones don’t just have hafnium torpedoes, some of them are fusion, and if those connect, we’ll be in the same predicament we were at Birmingham.”
“Yeah, but we know their weaponry still uses chemical propellants. Even with the wonky physics here, they’re short ranged weapons at best. We need to use our range to our advantage and never get too close in to our opponent. Especially since there is little chance of evasion.” He said.
Kara brought up the Trinar scout vessel again, “And that leads us to another problem, they have quite good point defense. The further we fire our torpedoes, the more time they have to lock on and destroy them before they get into effective range.”
Alex ran his hand through his hair, “Yeah, you’re right there. Let’s call an all hands meeting, maybe we can come up with something. We have less than two months now.”
After a few moments, and without Kelly, as she was in a meeting with the Empress on Alandra and could not break away, they ran over the problem with the assembled group.
“Could we stealth a torpedo?” Valarie asked.
Alex shook his head, “We could, but if they do an active scan ping they will see them coming and take precautions. Plus the yield would have to be incredibly low if they were made of Hafnium, we would have to step it up to fusion, which would take away from mines and planetary defense production.”
Monty piped up, “Relativistic kill missile?”
Kara shook her head, “Not enough by itself, even with the passive scanners on the pine cones they could detect them in time to intercept unless we could get them going ridiculously fast.”
John lightly pulled at his beard, “The probes have miniature ripple drives in them, right?”
Everyone around the buffet table nodded, so he continued, “What if we combined Monty’s idea of a relativistic kill missile with a ripple drive?”
“I don’t see how that could work, the reaction-less drive would have to be scaled up to get them up to a decent percentage of light speed, then a ripple drive would take up even more space, that leaves almost nothing for a warhead.” Riven stated.
Monty nearly bounced as she spoke, “It doesn’t need a warhead! We just get it up to a good percentage of light speed in a huge arc heading towards the mine field and ripple it in close.”
Erin grinned up at John, “Oh, that’s devious. But if we’re going to do that, don’t we need to start building now?”
Kara nodded, “Monty, I think you’re going to have to use your production capacity to make them, everything else is at full production.”
Monty nodded, “I have a good bit of raw materials already, since I haven’t loaded the templates in the auto factories it shouldn’t be too hard to cobble something together. Kara, Erin, care to help me out with the design? I setup this awesome mad scientist lab in my VR!”
Kara and Erin looked at each other, shrugged, and faded from the common VR to help Monty in her new project. Riven, Izzy and Valarie all faded out, returning to their ships and their duties, leaving Alex and John alone in front of the buffet table.
Without another word they both grabbed a beer and headed for the couch, each grabbing a game controller.
_______________________________________
Mon’Kelron had been busy since returning from the Missive of Dissent. She was glad the Humans were able to repair her injuries from the assassination attempt, but she really wished she could have seen more of their ship. Evidently Kel’Taraan had seen quite a bit of the vessel, as she had helped Monty nurse her back to health.
Asking the elder Spy-Mistress about the vessel didn’t garner any additional information, not that the Spy-Mistress ever divulged more than she needed to. While she herself only knew of three Humans on their giant space craft, which seemed to be the same amount that came the last time they visited Alandra, the Spy-Mistress had teased there were more, and Alex had even stated that the last two vessels would be Human crewed.
Those vessels had a nominal crew of twenty eight, so at least 56 Humans would have to be on that ship, plus however many the Missive required to operate. She took off her ceremonial breastplate and placed it in the wardrobe. After removing the rest of her uniform and placing it in the hamper for the palace servants to clean as she thought about it.
Checking the schedule for the night guard she contented herself that the Empress would be well protected. Then she picked up her tablet from her desk and laid down on her bed to find something to watch. The device was truly amazing, it seemed to have an endless amount of entertainment and she found it easier than reading, particularly late at night when she was bone tired.
After a few hours of watching some Human romance which she found quite enjoyable she started to nod off to sleep. She was startled awake when her tablet began to ring like a tiny bell as it lay on her chest. She groggily picked up the slate of glass and metal to check the screen, the text showed an incoming call from Kel’Taraan.
The Spy-Mistress rarely contacted her, this must be important. Pressing the answer button on the tablet she saw the worn face of Kel’Taraan staring back at her, “Dress quickly and make your way to the Empress’s chamber.”
Nodding she jumped out of bed and placed the tablet down on the desk in her rather small quarters as she started throwing on clothing from the wardrobe, “What’s going on Spy-Mistress?”
The small voice answered back from the tablet, “The Empress has been shot, the royal guard are scouring the castle for the would be assassin.”
Mon’Kelron’s blood froze in her veins, “Does she live?”
The older voice cackled through the tablet, “Oh she’s fine, she was wearing a Human made dress after all. She’ll be bruised for a few days, right now she’s mad as a priestess in hell.”
Throwing on her new breastplate and strapping on her pistol she threw open her door and started for the Empress’s bed chamber at a full run. She heard gunfire up ahead, and as she turned the corner she saw a woman dressed in all black firing at her guardswomen, she drew her own weapon as the woman turned her head, seeing the Captain for the first time.
Mon’Kelron shot, aiming for her right knee, only for the woman to juke to the side, kick off the wall and launch herself towards the large Captain. Everything seemed to go in slow motion as the woman fired in the middle of her downward arch towards her. She heard the ting as the bullet struck her silvery breastplate, by instinct she reached out with her left hand, which was empty at the moment and grabbed the woman by the neck, slamming her face first into the stone of the hallway.
The would be assassin went limp, it was only at that moment that Mon’Kelron noticed she was holding the woman off the ground with only one arm. Her guardswomen stared at her in open mouthed shock. She dropped the woman to the ground, noticing she was bleeding from under her black mask and called for her guards to restrain her and take her to the holding cells down in the ministry of secrets.
Looking down at her breastplate she saw to her amazement there was but a tiny scratch on the polished silver surface. Ensuring there were at least a half dozen guards to carry the unconscious woman, she then double timed it to the Empress’s chamber. By the goddesses, what did the Human’s do to her?
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Item #: SCP-021
Codename: Skin Wyrm
Summarized Description: Animate tattoo in the form of the mythical Chinese dragon. SCP-021 sustains itself off its host’s melanin, causes pain to its host when it moves, and can be transferred to another host via prolonged skin-to-skin contact.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-021 is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-022
Codename: The Morgue
Summarized Description: Morgue capable of periodically reanimating Human cadavers. Consciousnesses of subjects placed within a drawer of the morgue are randomly swapped between reanimated cadavers.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-022 is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-023
Codename: Black Shuck
Summarized Description: Large canine. Sapient subjects who make eye contact will expire 1 Terran year after contact is broken, their internal systems suffering spontaneous flash incineration. SCP-023’s eyes and teeth were removed in 2010 before being regrown in 2136 using an imperfect copy of SCP-500 generated by SCP-038. SCP-023 cannot be stopped by any barrier unless it resembles a crossroads.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-023 released into Federal city. SCP-023 underwent rigorous anomalous training, having been taught to avoid direct conflict with enemy subjects, and is generally non-hostile to Foundation personnel.
Additional Notes: As of time of writing, SCP-023 has terminated 86 subjects and has disorganized security forces, who have failed to capture or neutralize it. SCP-023’s relative obedience to the Foundation has given cause for reclassification to Thaumiel.
Usefulness: 3/5
Item #: SCP-024
Codename: Game Show of Death
Summarized Description: Abandoned sound stage. Subjects who enter SCP-024 will be greeted by an apparent stereotypical game show announcer from a speaker, who will offer subjects a chance to play a game show and gain a reward. Subjects who consent will be forced to undergo taxing trials to complete the show, which often results in injury and/or death. Subjects who refuse to participate after consenting, attempt to break any rules, or fail to complete the game will be attacked and terminated by unknown entities. SCP-024 will not activate if there is only 1 subject present.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-024 cannot be moved from its current location. SCP-024 is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-025
Codename: A Well-Worn Wardrobe
Summarized Description: Wardrobe with multiple articles of damaged clothing. Subjects who wear any clothing from SCP-025 will invariably be injured or terminated, with wounds corresponding to the locations of damage on the clothing.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: As xenos do not wear any clothing that SCP-025 possesses, SCP-025 is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-026
Codename: Afterschool Retention
Summarized Description: Abandoned public school. Layout does not correspond to official public blueprints. Cognitohazards within SCP-026 disorient subjects. Multiple individuals with identical features to missing persons can be found in apparent comas and cannot be woken. All comatose individuals are students and educators who attended the school before its abandonment. Attempting to remove comatose subjects from the premises will result in them waking, followed by extremely rapid dehydration and death. Foundation personnel who fall asleep in SCP-026 also become comatose, but will not suffer dehydration if removed.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-026 is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-027
Codename: The Vermin God
Summarized Description: Intangible effect tied to one individual at a time. Subjects affected by SCP-027 attract large amounts of insects, rodents, and other organisms considered to be “vermin.” Upon death of a host, SCP-027 will transfer itself to the closest sapient organism.
Battlefield Summary: D-3829, the host of SCP-027 at the time, was airdropped onto a Federal planet. D-3829 fitted with an explosive collar and instructed to wait in the colony leader’s place of residence. As the leader entered the residence, the collar was remotely detonated, terminating D-3829 and transferring SCP-027 to the target.
Additional Notes: Though it would have been more practical to simply take the opportunity to assassinate the target, the long-term disorder expected to be caused by SCP-027 was deemed to be of greater importance. There are no plans to retrieve SCP-027 at this time.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-028
Codename: Knowledge
Summarized Description: Small space in Michigan, USA with psychic properties. Individuals who enter SCP-028 are imbued with a random piece of knowledge on a random topic.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-028 is currently being used to gather intelligence on Federal operations. Due to its inefficient method of intelligence gathering, it has been deemed a low priority.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-029
Codename: Daughter of Shadows
Summarized Description: Human female with alopecia universalis. 80% of skin surface is vantablack, 20% is albino. All sapient male-identifying subjects who come in contact with SCP-029 will worship it as a messiah-like figure, who must have 1,000,000 lives sacrificed to it via strangulation to bring forth an unknown deity. SCP-029 has a physic connection with its followers and is aware of its followers’ numbers.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-029 deployed on a Federal planet and allowed to gather xeno followers. SCP-029’s “cult” has infiltrated the planetary government and is sending large numbers of subjects to “predator disease” facilities to convert or sacrifice them.
Additional Notes: SCP-029 willingly volunteered for Operation 5000, although this is more likely out of a desire for escape from the Foundation than to avenge Humanity for the Battle of Earth, the current cover story for Operation 5000. SCP-029’s “cult” is not to be allowed to complete its goal of 1,000,000 sacrifices, due to the uncertain nature of the existence of the cult’s deity. Current estimates give SCP-029’s cult 37,000 confirmed sacrificial fatalities. Should this number come close to being accomplished, SCP-029 is to be neutralized and the cult destroyed. Until then, the disorder caused by the cult’s activities has been deemed beneficial.
Usefulness: 3/5
Item #: SCP-030
Codename: The Homunculus
Summarized Description: Small humanoid made of clay. Only active when exposed to at least 15 lumens of light. If not exposed to adequate light, SCP-030 immediately falls unconscious.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-030 has no fighting or strategic capabilities and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-031
Codename: What is Love?
Summarized Description: Giant organic mass inhabiting the interior of the Ryugyong Hotel, Korea. Influences subjects to be willingly assimilated into SCP-031, with only their brains remaining intact and presumably conscious. Unknown cognitive and/or space-time anomaly causes it to simultaneously inhabit the hotel alongside SCP-1427, despite respective containment teams insisting that the other does not exist.
Battlefield Summary: Samples of SCP-031 taken and deployed on various planets. 4 instances have been neutralized by Federal forces, while 4 have established a permanent foothold on their respective planets.
Additional Notes: SCP-031 is susceptible to fire, making Extermination Officers a convenient counter for smaller infestations.
Usefulness: 3/5
Item #: SCP-032
Codename: Brother’s Bride
Summarized Description: Type-F female Human simulacrum, passable at a distance, Uncanny Valley triggered at close range. Deleterious effects on nearby organic life, except for Humans and domesticated/trained animals.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-032 instructed to position itself discreetly in highly populated areas and military encampments. SCP-032 given a weapon and authorization to defend itself should it ever come into conflict with Federal authorities or eyewitnesses. SCP-032 has depopulated multiple areas and encampments with minor damage to itself.
Additional Notes: SCP-032’s complete obedience to the Foundation has given cause for a reclassification to Thaumiel.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-033
Codename: The Missing Number
Summarized Description: Mathematical equation that essentially proves that all Human (and xeno) mathematical systems “missed” a number. SCP-033, when inscribed on a physical “paper-like” surface or a white/chalkboard, will begin to spread to other nearby viable surfaces. Causes catastrophic glitches in computers as it spreads onto them.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-033 uploaded onto multiple planetary internets, crashing all systems.
Additional Notes: SCP-033 is astoundingly effective in removing the Federation’s capability to defend themselves, as they rely heavily on technology.
Usefulness: 5/5
Item #: SCP-034
Codename: Obsidian Ritual Knife
Summarized Description: Primitive obsidian knife likely used in sacrificial rituals. Any flesh cut from a living organism by SCP-034 that is applied to another organism will result in the latter’s appearance changing into the former.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: Federal military leader captured and flesh sample removed with SCP-034 and applied to D-9482 to test capabilities for a Human to change into a xeno form. D-9482 expired mid-transition. Military leader interrogated for general information and subsequently terminated. SCP-034 still cannot alter an organism beyond its original species, regardless of sapience.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-035
Codename: Possessive Mask
Summarized Description: Sapient theatre mask that changes from comedy to tragedy, corresponding with current emotions. Highly corrosive liquid seeps from the eyes of the mask at all times. Capable of reading and influencing the thoughts nearby sapient organisms. SCP-035, when placed on the face of a Human, Human cadaver, or otherwise humanoid organism or figure, will take control of the subject and begin to converse. The subject will slowly decay the longer SCP-035 is applied. SCP-035 displays a highly charismatic and manipulative personality and is unusually knowledgeable about a variety of topics.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-035 is currently being negotiated with. SCP-035 claims to hold knowledge of the Federation, including a “conspiracy” orchestrated by at least 2 member species. If negotiations are successful, SCP-035 could provide the Foundation with valuable insight into the workings of the Federation.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-036
Codename: The Reincarnation Pilgrimage of the Yazidi (Kiras Guhorîn)
Summarized Description: Annual event during which deceased followers of the Yazidi faith arrive via an unscheduled flight at Site-22A in Iraq and depart on a separate flight at Site-22B. This process is observed and protected by the Foundation. Considered to be the modern form of the Kiras Guhorîn. Expected to change in the near future to include modern starships.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-036 is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-037
Codename: Dwarf Star
Summarized Description: Miniaturized main sequence star in its red giant phase, going through a highly accelerated stellar lifecycle. Expected to go supernova in the near future. Was transported off-planet in 2100.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-037 transported from its location in the outer Sol System and deposited in high orbit of a Federal capital planet. Approaching supernova is expected to cause an XK-Class “End-of-the-World” Scenario.
Additional Notes: SCP-037 pending reclassification to Neutralized once supernova occurs.
Usefulness: 4/5
Item #: SCP-038
Codename: The Everything Tree
Summarized Description: Apple tree capable of replicating any object or organism that makes contact with its bark. Replicated objects will never exceed 90.9 kg. Anomalous objects replicated by SCP-038 are often imperfect.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-038 is being used to cheaply replicate weapons-of-mass-destruction but is otherwise useless as a weapon.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-039
Codename: Monkey Brain
Summarized Description: Collection of 23 proboscis monkeys (SCP-038-1) and one Human (SCP-038-A) with a complete lack of all facial features, created by the now-defunct Prometheus Labs. Instances display highly increased intelligance and are able to navigate their surroundings via echolocation.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-038-A employed as a tactical advisor under the promise of a loosening of containment protocols for itself and all instances of SCP-038-1.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-040
Codename: Evolution’s Child
Summarized Description: Female human capable of altering the genetic code of organisms it comes into contact with.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-040 willingly joined Operation 5000. SCP-040 currently being utilized to genetically enhance certain Mobile Task Force personnel.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-041
Codename: Thought-Broadcasting Patient
Summarized Description: Permanently paralyzed Human male capable of telepathy with nearby sapient subjects. Subjects within range can also have their thoughts “transmitted” with one another at SCP-041’s discretion.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-041 has been used to extract information from high-ranking Federal personnel.
Usefulness: 2/5
Item #: SCP-042
Codename: A Formerly-Winged Horse
Summarized Description: Equine subject with winged appendages. Appendages were removed by Foundation personnel to simplify containment. Displays a depressive personality and must be force-fed food and water and motivated with pain to obey instructions. Displays mind-affecting properties in attempts to convince personnel to neutralize it.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-042 is no use as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-043
Codename: The Beatle
Summarized Description: Vinyl copy of “The White Album”. Capable of communicating with subjects who play the 29th track. Theorized to hold the consciousness of Paul McCartney, although unconfirmed.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-043 is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-044
Codename: World War II Era Molecular-Fission Cannon
Summarized Description: Heavily modified World War II-era Howitzer. Any item placed in its barrel and fired will detonate at a mass-to-energy conversion ratio greater than 100%. Built by an/the Administrator.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-044 loaded with several tons of earth and fired into a city wall during an uncharacteristically difficult siege, terminating all resistance and causing massive damage to the city.
Additional Notes: SCP-044 blueprints have been obtained from the Administrator by the O5 Council and the item is to be mass produced. Further modifications for use as a space-based weapon are being considered.
Usefulness: 4/5
Item #: SCP-045
Codename: Atmospheric Converter
Summarized Description: Icosahedron composed of ice-12. Likely a 3-dimensional projection of a 4-dimensional hypericosahedron. Periodically rotates on multiple axes, causing minor seismic activity. When prevented from rotating, seismic activity will steadily increase. When gaseous nitrogen or argon come into close proximity with SCP-045, both substatnces will be converted into water and table salt respectively.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-045 placed on a Federal planet in a remote location and prevented from rotating. As of time of writing, SCP-045 has caused seismic activity reaching 9.5 on the Richter scale, causing massive damage. Planetary cracking is expected to occur within several weeks.
Additional Notes: SCP-045, should it be recovered after estimated XK-Class Scenario, is authorized for further use.
Usefulness: 4/5
Item #: SCP-046
Codename: “Predatory” Holly Bush
Summarized Description: Holly bush that consumes subjects who lay in its vicinity, lulling them to sleep with relief from physical/mental pain and feelings of relaxation and pleasure. Subjects are not compelled to sacrifice themselves and can resist temptations with ease. All subjects recorded to have been consumed by SCP-046 have willingly allowed the item to do so.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: As SCP-046 cannot compel unwilling subjects into sacrificing themselves for consumption, it is useless as a weapon and is to remain in containment.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-047
Codename: Microbial Mutagen
Summarized Description: Gaseous substance with mutagenic properties on microorganisms. 3 strains affected by SCP-047 identified. Propionibacterium 047-A causes severe acne and sepsis with 40% fataility rate. Streptococcus 047-C causes inflammation, sepsis, and endocarditis with 35% fatality rate. Clostridium 047-A cause severe damage to internal organs, most notably the colon, with near 100% fatality rate.
Battlefield Summary: All SCP-047-affected strains of bacterium cannot be used against xeno life and are to remain in containment. SCP-047 dispersed among Federal cities and encampments, causing several fatal “superbugs” to mutate.
Additional Notes: Caution is to be taken to prevent SCP-047 from coming into contact with Terran microorganisms.
Usefulness: 3/5
Item #: SCP-048
Codename: The Cursed SCP Number
Summarized Description: All SCP objects assigned the 048 designation have invariably become lost, stolen, or accidentally neutralized, thus gathering a air of superstition among Foundation personnel and has such been locked from further use to prevent morale from falling. Believed to be non-anomalous, as the file describing this phenomenon has yet to suffer any adverse effects.
Battlefield Summary: N/A
Additional Notes: SCP-048 is likely non-anomalous and no action is to be taken.
Usefulness: 1/5
Item #: SCP-049
Codename: Plague Doctor
Summarized Description: Male humanoid covered in organic growth resembling a traditional plague doctor uniform and mask. Subjects who come into physical contact with SCP-049 may suddenly cease all life functions if SCP-049 so chooses. SCP-049 often performs surgery on corpses - preferably Humans - and crudly reanimates them in an attempt to cure them of a presumably supernatural “Pestilence.” The nature of this Pestilence is unknown, if it exists.
Battlefield Summary: SCP-049 allowed to reanimate deceased xeno subjects for the Foundation war effort.
Additional Notes: SCP-049 willingly joined Operatin 5000 after declaring that the xenos were also infected with the “Pestilence.”
/////
[THE FOLLOWING IS FOR O5 CLEARANCE ONLY.]
[Does the Black Moon howl?]
[only when the White Sun rejoices]
[Does the Black Moon howl?]
[only when Waning]
[Does the Black Moon howl?]
[only when the Void calls forth]
[ACCESS GRANTED]
SCP-049’s declaration has confirmed that non-Human species are indeed also victims of The Entity. Complete destruction of the Federation is necessary.
/////
Usefulness: 2/5

I won't disclose its actual location, so if that's why you're here, sorry to disappoint. It's not time for that yet. However, I do think it's time to start getting the word out. I've noticed an increase in what I'll call "Antennas" lately, or people who can detect cross-planar phase shifts. Without getting into all the math (some of which I don't even know), this is basically a phenomenon which refers to entropy seeping into our universe from other realms or universes or whatever you want to call it. Simply put, people think our universe is a closed system to entropy, meaning that the disorder of any variable in our universe can only increase or decrease in direct proportion to other variables in that same system (the universe). Under this precept, we can establish rules like the Laws of Thermodynamics, and for most people, they're effective. But not for Antennas.
Put another way, if you throw a bunch of bouncy balls into a box, there are a number of different configurations that the balls could take on, with different speeds and magnitudes. You can calculate all of those if you have the right numbers. Now let's say you throw in another set of balls that you don't consider in your calculations of the initial set. Well, then you're not going to get an accurate picture of what's happening. Most people only see the first set and calculate based on that, but some people can see two, three, four or more sets.
You'll understand the concept better when I tell you the story, but I wanted to give you a primer on an important concept that will help you understand why this place, which I'll call "Area X", exists, and what the goals of the people who work there are.
Also note that I'm going to be using the alias "Trent" moving forward. Please refer to me as such in any direct messages.
***
Eighteen years ago I started working as an independent Home Inspector. I dropped out of community college after my first semester (not because I didn't find some of the subjects interesting, but because deference to a man or woman has never been my style) and started working some odd jobs. I did construction work for a couple years, then plumbing. I even drove a garbage truck for six months. I've always found pleasure in using my hands, and getting dirty was never a problem for me. Still, having a boss really dragged ass, so I spent my free time working on creating my own business. It took a few years and lots of savings, but I finally managed to get basic set of Home Inspection equipment: Tyvek coveralls, a cheap half-face respirator, voltage & AFCI/GFCI testers, CO2 and radon monitors, an IR camera, and telescoping mirrors in addition to the boots, safety glasses, electric gloves, ladder, and toolkits I already had on hand.
My buddy at the time was in the business, but he was moving off to the coast, so he helped me get set up and even introduced me to some of his clients. Of course, by that time I had already gotten my State license, but I still was a bit apprehensive to work with insurance agencies. I thought I could make a living working independently, inspecting for mold or sizing up a house for a prospective buyer. Eventually, though, I realized I should probably take every job available to me.
Easing into the business went about as well as it could have. The clients my friend referred to me were very satisfied with my work, and I was able to retain them. Then, in order to increase my reach, I hired someone on Fiverr to build a website for my company which led to a marked increase in traffic and conversions. About six months through, I began to get on a first-name basis with the boys and girls down down at Allstate and Progressive, and they fed me some of the bigger cases. In fact, I got so booked by year's end that I had to hire someone to help manage my schedule and the Excel spreadsheet with all my finances. I capped off a successful year with a 5-star Google rating and a trip to Ireland to visit some family and friends and get piss drunk. When I got back, it was the grindstone all over again, until the summer when I discovered… well, you'll see.
First off, I want to say that I was never one to believe in the paranormal. I grew up watching the movies and hearing the ghost stories round the campfire like every other kid, but it never struck a chord with me. If I can't touch it or see it or hear it, does it really exist? Probably not. So don't go thinking this was a scared man seeing his own shadow. That being said, I had this sense that something was off about this house when I parked along the curb and looked through a large window, perhaps two times the size of my van, to a dingy, dark foyer.
The entire neighborhood was stacked with upper-middle class domiciles, though it seemed like only two thirds of them were occupied, mostly by professionals who commuted to the City every weekday, and the rest were empty. As a man who understands real estate, to say this was strange would be an understatement. Still, I had no problem appraising the mini-mansion for a couple of newlyweds looking to enter the community. I did some research on the property ahead of time, and it seems that it was owned by a couple of old timers who had gone off the grid some time ago. The water and electric bill were both unpaid dating back to 2004 (it was June of '06 now). The bank had repo'd the house (which only had about 100k left on it) and held it for a year and a half before putting it back on the market. I tried to find out more about the old couple who vanished, but there was nothing in the news.
I stepped out of the van in my coveralls and grabbed my suitcase which had my mask, gloves, and eye protection in it. I liked to do a preliminary survey first, running an eye test on the exterior then interior before bringing out the big guns (that way I could identify the areas where I think there could be problems instead of running a metal detector over the whole damn ocean seaboard). I was about to do just that when the window caught my eye again. It felt uncharacteristic of me to be so occupied with this window, but I detoured to the front porch and peeked inside anyway.
Most of the furniture had already been moved out, meaning all that was left was a single three-seater couch, a couple candlesticks on the fireplace mantle, a pristine chandelier overtop a dining room table, and the kitchenware: an oven, gas stovetop, marble countertops, and an island. I could see into the living room very clearly with the afternoon light, but the dining room was dim enough that there were a few structures I couldn't quite make out in the distance. One of them appeared to be some kind of china cabinet or bookshelf—I figured it was the former considering where it was located. The other shadow looked kind of like a grandfather clock. Or at least that's what I thought until it moved.
When I say it "moved", I don't mean to say that it picked up and walked away. If you're not familiar with the Necker Cube, I suggest you search it up, because that kind of illusion is the best way to describe what I saw. At first I was seeing the grandfather clock in a certain way—pushed into the corner of the room—and the next second my vision "corrected" and it was maybe five feet to the left of its former position. I shook my head and looked again and saw the grandfather clock in its second orientation, standing in the center of the room against the wall. I figured I was just seeing things, but even so I spent a little extra time dawdling around the Egress window, taking notes, and delaying the interior inspection.
When I finally grew a pair and went inside, I walked straight to the dining room. Sure enough, the grandfather clock was stowed away in the corner of the room. I spent a couple minutes watching it with my pencil and travel notebook out. I'm the kind of guy that likes to collect hard data when the chips are down. Unfortunately, the clock apparently already had enough fun and was content with sweating me. Oh, well.
I fitted my pencil behind my ear and pocketed my travel notebook, then flipped the rest of the first floor lights on and completed my prelim. I concluded that everything was pretty standard. If anything, the house was in better shape than I'd expect considering it presumably hasn't been lived in for a couple years. I say "presumably" because one can never count out squatters, even during those times. Mainly I was expecting more dust build up and cobwebs than there were. Perhaps someone from the department had come by recently. It's unlikely, but possible.
I did the same check upstairs and it came back mostly clean. There was a bit of staining near the attic I wanted to check for mold. Based on its color, it was probably just a minor case of Aspergillus, but better safe than sorry. Then I got to the basement, and, well, let's just count out the idea of anyone dropping by. I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what I found.
The first thing that caught my eye was the long, slender body of a birch tree lying pale and dead across a large portion of the even larger unfinished basement's cement flooring. I had to do a double take to make sure I wasn't dreaming, but, yep, there it was. Its crown was sealed up in the wall with only its trunk hanging out, which made me think of those medieval pillory devices which locked up people's heads and arms. Then confetti-scattered around the tree and all over the basement floor was a minefield of broken glass and ceramic tangled up with a set of random objects. And when I say random, I mean random. There was an unfurled Somali flag (the blue one with a single star in the center), some packaged drinks and condiments branded with all sorts of different languages (I could only make out Gaelic and Chinese or Japanese, I couldn't quite tell), a broken dome-shaped security camera, an otoscope (the thing the doc uses to check your ears), Hot Wheels cars (okay that one isn't so strange), and the list goes on.
At that moment, I wasn't freaked out or disgusted. I was more or less just confused. I started walking through the rubble, trying to avoid the sharp fragments but pretty confident that my steel toed boots would crush most the pieces anyway, when I heard a clink just up ahead. I was able to spot the coin in time, just before it jingled to a halt atop an old Life magazine. I picked it up and noted right away its oval shape and bronze color—clearly not American made. I tried reading it, but not only was the language not English, it appeared to be so old that most of the lettering had been filed down. I looked up at the ceiling to see if it dropped from a shelf, but there was nothing that could have been holding the coin. I considered for a moment, looking around at the other junk, and had the crazy idea that maybe all this stuff just appeared here. I popped the coin in my pocket and headed back to the van when I stopped by the tree and realized something. It wasn't a birch tree—it was a palm tree. I just didn't realize because of how ashy and decayed the bark was.
Now at this point you might think I've been acting a little nonchalant for such a strange occurrence, and I don't blame you, but if you're gonna stick around with me that's just something you're gonna have to get used to. I guess I was just born with a screw loose, but I really don't scare easily, and I tend to look at everything pragmatically. If you dig deep enough, you'll always find another plausible explanation. That being said, I do want to get to the part about Area X, so let me give you the rundown on what I learned about this basement.
I ended up trekking back to the van and picking up my gear. I was no longer running the routine inspection, obviously, but I figured I might as well throw 30 thousand dollars of scanning equipment at whatever the fuck anamoly existed in that basement. Most of it came back negative. There was a bit higher-than-usual EM interference as picked up on the voltmeters, but nothing that screamed danger close. Still, it was enough for me to set up my volt testers and IR camera while muddling through the rest of the junk. I won't bore you with another list of items, but I did find one thing of value: a diamond necklace. And not just any diamond necklace, it was one of those Queen-wearing, multi-row, big-jeweled necklaces like out of some Historical Fiction movie from the thirties. I almost didn't pocket it because I'm used to expensive items being owned by someone… someone who might want it back. But I figured if there was ever a place the finder's keeper's rule applied, it was probably in this Quantum graveyard.
7 O'clock rolled around and I hadn't eaten. I'm a pretty bulky guy, carrying my share of both muscle and fat, and most people think that means I need to eat a ton but that's really not the case. Mostly I just get dehydrated easily, especially in the summer. That said, I was bordering on famished territory and considered heading out for a bite when I heard another sound. The first thing I did was check my scanners, and sure enough the voltage needle was fully spun to the right side of the dial. EM interference. Then I went to see what had dropped. I was able to pick the object out pretty quickly since I had spent the last 6 hours staring at the mosaic of a basement floor. It was a silver briefcase, like one of those out of a crime novel, and it was cracked open.
I had this sense then that I was standing at a precipice, and if I opened the briefcase and looked inside, I wouldn't be able to stop whatever would come afterwards. Part of me deep down knew that I was just that type of guy that had to know, and maybe this was my Hamlet moment where it would be a trait gone a step too far. But then again I didn't really believe in any of that sentimental bullshit, so I opened the briefcase.
The gun surprised me a little, but not as much as the piece of paper laid atop a case file reading in large black font, "FIND ME". I expected the envelope to have some missing person file in it, but instead there were all these schematics and blueprints for some kind of device. Whatever it was, it was pretty massive. Some of the lengths were hundreds of meters long. And what's more strange is based on the blueprint's locale, it appeared to be underground. I looked back through the pages a couple times, then checked the note—nothing strange there. The gun appeared to be a simple glock. I was no gun expert, but I had been to the range pretty regularly with my construction buddies, so I got used to the feel of a pistol and rifle and some of the different names; however, I realized pretty quickly it wasn't your standard glock when I couldn't find mag-release. That's when I noticed how light the gun felt. I tried to chamber a round, but again, there was no hammer. What the hell kind of gun was this?
I ended up throwing everything back in the briefcase, including the necklace, coin, and a few Koozies I found that were branded with one of my favorite sports teams (never let an opportunity go to waste). I put up all my shit back in the van and spun over to a local burger joint, got my fill, and went home. I made sure to draft an email to the prospective buyers, telling them the house had several patches of black mold and a bit of a rat problem before drifting off to sleep. Although I really didn't do much of that.
When I woke up, I took a cold shower and downed a can of Reign, then commuted to my gym and got a lift and some sauna time in before making the trip back to the house. I brought some extra supplies with me for some experiments I cooked up while not sleeping the previous night.
First, I had two camcorders set up on a couple tripods in either corner of the basement. I wanted clear footage of these mystery objects spawning in. Then I set up a voltmeter in a similar fashion, but I had a wire extending out of it on a circuit which fed to an alarm that would blare when the reading was over 250 volts. Upstairs, I rearranged some of the furniture so that the small number of tables, chairs, clock, cabinets, and other little pillows or vases I could find were scattered across the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Then I pulled up a lawn chair to the front porch window and waited.
I didn't have to wait long though. In about a minute, I started to notice some of the objects moving. It was strange. When a few of them would shift simultaneously, it was like looking at a holographic card that would change shape depending on where your eyes were in relation to the image. Every time I saw a shift, I felt an awkward feeling in my eyes. They went blurry for a fraction of a second, then there was a twinge of pain, as if my brain couldn't handle the contradictory stimulus. It didn't get more crazy than that though—until the alarm went off.
I had cracked open the small rectangular window in the basement to the side of the house so I would hear it. It took four hours and several strange stares from passersby walking their dogs before it rang, so I was a bit lost in my thoughts, but when I heard the beep I perked up fast. It lasted for maybe 5 seconds total, but what I saw was truly miraculous. The best way I can describe it is a pool of silver or gray or translucent light emerging in the foreground between me and the objects in the different rooms. A series of twisting tentacles sprouted from the gray octopus-like head and spun in a way that reminded me of that little kids ride at the amusement parks. Then the objects started to "heat up" is the way I describe it. Their position became relative, meaning they were here one second, there another, then they popped out of existence entirely. Suddenly the rooms were all empty, then they were full of things I had never seen before. Then five seconds passed and the octopus vanished and it was back to the same old objects in their usual places.
It took a few minutes to process what I saw, and even then I wasn't sure I really saw it. I went inside and looked around at my distribution of the house's furnishings. They were all there, intact. Then I went downstairs to check the cams. I rewinded a couple minutes and played it back, but there was no flying object to be found. Instead, there was some gray static that lasted half a second and then the object, a kid's treasure chest toy, was there on the ground. But you want to know the really strange part? I rewinded the tape again, and when I watched the footage back, the treasure chest was always there.
I later came to understand that these poppings in-and-out of our reality are only conceivable to a conscious mind that can track the interference patterns—not rote computational instruments. In fact, even most people can't do it (although everyone has at least a slight awareness of it, even if only subconsciously). Plus, locations like the basement of this house are very rare and kept under tight lock. That became obvious to me two days later when, after my normal morning routine, I pulled up to a driveway and curbside filled with unmarked government vehicles. Either bravely or stupidly, I pulled up to a few officers (they were wearing suits in 85 degree weather, so I assumed…) who were idling by the large fence of crime scene tape and asked them what the score was.
"There was a crime," said the short man with a unibrow.
"Oh, is that right? Damn shame. Someone break in? I have a niece who lives nearby, so…"
The man looked at his two compatriots, both of whom were wearing sunglasses and a "get this civilian fuck out of here" expressions. "Oh, yeah," he started in a reassuring tone that was so condescending it would have annoyed anyone except me, "we found a body. We think it was a homicide. Best to keep your kids away from here for a while."
I thumbed the stubble on my chin, my other hand outstretched on the wheel, and considered moving on, but my mouth had other ideas. "That right? But uh, isn't this house vacant? I mean, I don't remember no one living in it."
The short man, now tall with temper, said, "Yeah, some squatters. We think there was a dispute over some drug money. Nothing for you to worry about though, we got it under control. Now if you wouldn't mind moving along, we have a lot of work to do."
Oh, I'm sure you do, I thought, but only said, "Of course, sir, sorry for keeping you from your job." Then I rolled up the window and cruised on, keeping my eyes on the house which slowly diminished in the side-view mirror.
Luckily I had been smart enough to break down my camp and lug home all my equipment each night, so I didn't leave anything incriminating. I didn't move the furniture back, so maybe that would come back to haunt me, but considering the kind of shit going down in that house, I didn't think they would notice.
For any of you wondering about the conclusion of the house story, I went back a couple weeks later after the suits had left and the tape was taken down and confirmed that not only was the basement entirely cleaned out, but it was no longer exhibiting any strange properties. I looked for a story related to the house, maybe a made up murder of some kind, but there was nothing. That bastard lied to me and didn't even bother to cover his story up.
Now, in the aftermath of an event such as this, I really only had one of two options. I could forget it, move on, continue living life. The necklace was surely worth a fortune. I could sell it and have enough to retire, or at least hire enough people and expand my business large enough to retire within ten or so years. Or I could take all that money and invest it in my own PI business with only a single objective: finding out what those people knew, and why they were hiding it.
I think you know me well enough by now to guess which line of reasoning appealed more to me.
***
For the sake of brevity, I'm going to omit most of my encounters along the journey to discovering Area X. There's a lot to tell, and if it appeals to you perhaps I'd be willing to share at a later date, but for now I want to get this part of the story, the more proximal part, out in the open.
Three years ago, I discovered the source of what I'll call "The Receiver". This is the device that was schematized in the documents that I found in the briefcase. What it does is a complex answer, and how it does it is pretty much all speculation, but here's what I've been able to find out: this universe we live in is a node in a network of many other spaces. These spaces exist in higher dimensions that we cannot directly perceive, but using a conceivable analogy, just think about a flower with petals. The petals are these other dimensions which bleed into our world, which is at the center. However, it's not that pretty. We see the physical world through the lens of spacetime: sizes, speeds, etc. These other dimensions don't necessarily have space or time. In fact, what actually exists there, I couldn't say. The only data I have on them is from two sources: correspondence information and server data from the secret agency (which I'll call "the Organization") that keeps this under wraps, and first-hand experience with realms from these other entities, either directly (I experience it) or through the eyes of someone else with the same or greater abilities than I possess.
I referred to these people with abilities earlier as "Antennas", and I will continue to use the term. Antennas really come in three flavors, marked by the strength of their ability: weak Antennas, like me, are able to observe spontaneous interactions between our universe and other dimensions (phase shifts) when there is a strong force of collision like existed in the basement; moderate Antennas may see phase shifts occur at any point, and they usually are able to retain memories from across the different transformations; strong Antennas, and I don't know if they exist yet, but they are able to consciously interact with these other realms and cause phase shifts to occur.
I mentioned that moderate Antennas are able to retain memories from before and after a phase shift. Technically, all Antennas have this ability, but it's about degree. I can recall only very specific instances and without much detail. Moderates are usually able to pick out much more nuanced minutiae. At the lower end of moderate scale, most of those details fade or get fuzzy over time, but for the very strong Antennas, they hold onto almost everything. One other property that scales with strength is interaction with other conscious entities. Only a small percentage of moderates are able to do this. What's interesting is that these entities can possess (yes, like ghosts) people who aren't even antennas, but no one is aware of such possession at this deep of a level. I have several companions now, and only two have had interactions with these otherworldly beings. Not all of them are malevolent, some of them are whimsical or kind, but there are a fair share of demons out there.
Getting back to the point, Area X started as a government funded project in the 70's. At that time, they were focused on a few subjects: Artificial Intelligence, DNA sequencing, and psychedelics. Yes, they were part of the infamous LSD experiments. But they looked at these subjects through a common lens—there was something that the burgeoning tech industry, fueled by the advent of a commercial computer market, was missing. As the tech giants rose in the early 2000's and began to collect mass amounts of data, this other agency was decades ahead in a different metric, although it was completely (and still is) hidden from the public. Their efforts to understand psychedelic experiences led to a formalized method of understanding interactions between multiple realities. They built certain scanning equipment to detect anomalies like the one I found in the basement; although their tools were much more sophisticated and didn't utilize voltage readings. Then they ran tests in these areas. One area in particular is a hot-bed of phase shift interactions. That's where Area X is located (and the Receiver).
The Receiver is a giant electromagnetic orb that has trapped the kind of multi-dimensional energy that causes the phase shifts; since the Organization seized control of the lab, it's effectively become a map of the Earth in relation to these other worlds. For the past twenty or so years, the Organization has been studying this map, using the data big Tech companies have collected to essentially develop a Rosetta Stone for interpreting the meaning of the fluctuations in their scanning equipment. Recently, the public, though going the long way round, was actually pretty close to a breakthrough in this same department until recently when ultra-powerful LLMs surfaced, and the whole world began going down what I'd argue is the wrong rabbit hole of language processing. But I digress.
Area X is essentially a private military base built for defending the most impactful piece of technology ever invented. With the Receiver, the Organization now has the power to essentially predict any and all future outcomes, the only thing holding them back is the limitations of their own scanning equipment which will get better with time. To put it into perspective, the Organization has access to a kind of data allocation tool which in one day can produce over ten thousand times that the Big Data companies combined would be able to filter through in the next decade. You might think, then, that the problem is merely asymmetric power, and that is certainly a concern, but it isn't the main concern. The main issue is that this organization is actively recruiting (and kidnapping) Antennas from around the world in an effort to find or make one of them into a strong Antenna. In other words, they want a subject who is able not only to see the future, but to manipulate it at will.
balance to the world. I've been working on amassing resources, capital, and building my own team, and now I'm ready. You might ask why I'm posting this here. Wouldn't it be better to keep all this secret? Well, yes, it would be. But that's the problem. Nothing is secret anymore. They know about me and the others, and if I don't make a move, they will. In a way, this is a letter directly to the organization that I know, and I'm coming.
In a different way, I wanted to release this information to the public. There are lots of people out there waking up and realizing that the world they experience is not the one others experience. If you think you might be an Antenna, don't be afraid—you have a special gift that can be controlled. If you want more details on how to control it, or if you're interested in my mission, don't be afraid to reach out. This hasn't always been my life's work, but it is now.
At least until I die.

I won't disclose its actual location, so if that's why you're here, sorry to disappoint. It's not time for that yet. However, I do think it's time to start getting the word out. I've noticed an increase in what I'll call "Antennas" lately, or people who can detect cross-planar phase shifts. Without getting into all the math (some of which I don't even know), this is basically a phenomenon which refers to entropy seeping into our universe from other realms or universes or whatever you want to call it. Simply put, people think our universe is a closed system to entropy, meaning that the disorder of any variable in our universe can only increase or decrease in direct proportion to other variables in that same system (the universe). Under this precept, we can establish rules like the Laws of Thermodynamics, and for most people, they're effective. But not for Antennas.
Put another way, if you throw a bunch of bouncy balls into a box, there are a number of different configurations that the balls could take on, with different speeds and magnitudes. You can calculate all of those if you have the right numbers. Now let's say you throw in another set of balls that you don't consider in your calculations of the initial set. Well, then you're not going to get an accurate picture of what's happening. Most people only see the first set and calculate based on that, but some people can see two, three, four or more sets.
You'll understand the concept better when I tell you the story, but I wanted to give you a primer on an important concept that will help you understand why this place, which I'll call "Area X", exists, and what the goals of the people who work there are.
Also note that I'm going to be using the alias "Trent" moving forward. Please refer to me as such in any direct messages.
***
Eighteen years ago I started working as an independent Home Inspector. I dropped out of community college after my first semester (not because I didn't find some of the subjects interesting, but because deference to a man or woman has never been my style) and started working some odd jobs. I did construction work for a couple years, then plumbing. I even drove a garbage truck for six months. I've always found pleasure in using my hands, and getting dirty was never a problem for me. Still, having a boss really dragged ass, so I spent my free time working on creating my own business. It took a few years and lots of savings, but I finally managed to get basic set of Home Inspection equipment: Tyvek coveralls, a cheap half-face respirator, voltage & AFCI/GFCI testers, CO2 and radon monitors, an IR camera, and telescoping mirrors in addition to the boots, safety glasses, electric gloves, ladder, and toolkits I already had on hand.
My buddy at the time was in the business, but he was moving off to the coast, so he helped me get set up and even introduced me to some of his clients. Of course, by that time I had already gotten my State license, but I still was a bit apprehensive to work with insurance agencies. I thought I could make a living working independently, inspecting for mold or sizing up a house for a prospective buyer. Eventually, though, I realized I should probably take every job available to me.
Easing into the business went about as well as it could have. The clients my friend referred to me were very satisfied with my work, and I was able to retain them. Then, in order to increase my reach, I hired someone on Fiverr to build a website for my company which led to a marked increase in traffic and conversions. About six months through, I began to get on a first-name basis with the boys and girls down down at Allstate and Progressive, and they fed me some of the bigger cases. In fact, I got so booked by year's end that I had to hire someone to help manage my schedule and the Excel spreadsheet with all my finances. I capped off a successful year with a 5-star Google rating and a trip to Ireland to visit some family and friends and get piss drunk. When I got back, it was the grindstone all over again, until the summer when I discovered… well, you'll see.
First off, I want to say that I was never one to believe in the paranormal. I grew up watching the movies and hearing the ghost stories round the campfire like every other kid, but it never struck a chord with me. If I can't touch it or see it or hear it, does it really exist? Probably not. So don't go thinking this was a scared man seeing his own shadow. That being said, I had this sense that something was off about this house when I parked along the curb and looked through a large window, perhaps two times the size of my van, to a dingy, dark foyer.
The entire neighborhood was stacked with upper-middle class domiciles, though it seemed like only two thirds of them were occupied, mostly by professionals who commuted to the City every weekday, and the rest were empty. As a man who understands real estate, to say this was strange would be an understatement. Still, I had no problem appraising the mini-mansion for a couple of newlyweds looking to enter the community. I did some research on the property ahead of time, and it seems that it was owned by a couple of old timers who had gone off the grid some time ago. The water and electric bill were both unpaid dating back to 2004 (it was June of '06 now). The bank had repo'd the house (which only had about 100k left on it) and held it for a year and a half before putting it back on the market. I tried to find out more about the old couple who vanished, but there was nothing in the news.
I stepped out of the van in my coveralls and grabbed my suitcase which had my mask, gloves, and eye protection in it. I liked to do a preliminary survey first, running an eye test on the exterior then interior before bringing out the big guns (that way I could identify the areas where I think there could be problems instead of running a metal detector over the whole damn ocean seaboard). I was about to do just that when the window caught my eye again. It felt uncharacteristic of me to be so occupied with this window, but I detoured to the front porch and peeked inside anyway.
Most of the furniture had already been moved out, meaning all that was left was a single three-seater couch, a couple candlesticks on the fireplace mantle, a pristine chandelier overtop a dining room table, and the kitchenware: an oven, gas stovetop, marble countertops, and an island. I could see into the living room very clearly with the afternoon light, but the dining room was dim enough that there were a few structures I couldn't quite make out in the distance. One of them appeared to be some kind of china cabinet or bookshelf—I figured it was the former considering where it was located. The other shadow looked kind of like a grandfather clock. Or at least that's what I thought until it moved.
When I say it "moved", I don't mean to say that it picked up and walked away. If you're not familiar with the Necker Cube, I suggest you search it up, because that kind of illusion is the best way to describe what I saw. At first I was seeing the grandfather clock in a certain way—pushed into the corner of the room—and the next second my vision "corrected" and it was maybe five feet to the left of its former position. I shook my head and looked again and saw the grandfather clock in its second orientation, standing in the center of the room against the wall. I figured I was just seeing things, but even so I spent a little extra time dawdling around the Egress window, taking notes, and delaying the interior inspection.
When I finally grew a pair and went inside, I walked straight to the dining room. Sure enough, the grandfather clock was stowed away in the corner of the room. I spent a couple minutes watching it with my pencil and travel notebook out. I'm the kind of guy that likes to collect hard data when the chips are down. Unfortunately, the clock apparently already had enough fun and was content with sweating me. Oh, well.
I fitted my pencil behind my ear and pocketed my travel notebook, then flipped the rest of the first floor lights on and completed my prelim. I concluded that everything was pretty standard. If anything, the house was in better shape than I'd expect considering it presumably hasn't been lived in for a couple years. I say "presumably" because one can never count out squatters, even during those times. Mainly I was expecting more dust build up and cobwebs than there were. Perhaps someone from the department had come by recently. It's unlikely, but possible.
I did the same check upstairs and it came back mostly clean. There was a bit of staining near the attic I wanted to check for mold. Based on its color, it was probably just a minor case of Aspergillus, but better safe than sorry. Then I got to the basement, and, well, let's just count out the idea of anyone dropping by. I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what I found.
The first thing that caught my eye was the long, slender body of a birch tree lying pale and dead across a large portion of the even larger unfinished basement's cement flooring. I had to do a double take to make sure I wasn't dreaming, but, yep, there it was. Its crown was sealed up in the wall with only its trunk hanging out, which made me think of those medieval pillory devices which locked up people's heads and arms. Then confetti-scattered around the tree and all over the basement floor was a minefield of broken glass and ceramic tangled up with a set of random objects. And when I say random, I mean random. There was an unfurled Somali flag (the blue one with a single star in the center), some packaged drinks and condiments branded with all sorts of different languages (I could only make out Gaelic and Chinese or Japanese, I couldn't quite tell), a broken dome-shaped security camera, an otoscope (the thing the doc uses to check your ears), Hot Wheels cars (okay that one isn't so strange), and the list goes on.
At that moment, I wasn't freaked out or disgusted. I was more or less just confused. I started walking through the rubble, trying to avoid the sharp fragments but pretty confident that my steel toed boots would crush most the pieces anyway, when I heard a clink just up ahead. I was able to spot the coin in time, just before it jingled to a halt atop an old Life magazine. I picked it up and noted right away its oval shape and bronze color—clearly not American made. I tried reading it, but not only was the language not English, it appeared to be so old that most of the lettering had been filed down. I looked up at the ceiling to see if it dropped from a shelf, but there was nothing that could have been holding the coin. I considered for a moment, looking around at the other junk, and had the crazy idea that maybe all this stuff just appeared here. I popped the coin in my pocket and headed back to the van when I stopped by the tree and realized something. It wasn't a birch tree—it was a palm tree. I just didn't realize because of how ashy and decayed the bark was.
Now at this point you might think I've been acting a little nonchalant for such a strange occurrence, and I don't blame you, but if you're gonna stick around with me that's just something you're gonna have to get used to. I guess I was just born with a screw loose, but I really don't scare easily, and I tend to look at everything pragmatically. If you dig deep enough, you'll always find another plausible explanation. That being said, I do want to get to the part about Area X, so let me give you the rundown on what I learned about this basement.
I ended up trekking back to the van and picking up my gear. I was no longer running the routine inspection, obviously, but I figured I might as well throw 30 thousand dollars of scanning equipment at whatever the fuck anamoly existed in that basement. Most of it came back negative. There was a bit higher-than-usual EM interference as picked up on the voltmeters, but nothing that screamed danger close. Still, it was enough for me to set up my volt testers and IR camera while muddling through the rest of the junk. I won't bore you with another list of items, but I did find one thing of value: a diamond necklace. And not just any diamond necklace, it was one of those Queen-wearing, multi-row, big-jeweled necklaces like out of some Historical Fiction movie from the thirties. I almost didn't pocket it because I'm used to expensive items being owned by someone… someone who might want it back. But I figured if there was ever a place the finder's keeper's rule applied, it was probably in this Quantum graveyard.
7 O'clock rolled around and I hadn't eaten. I'm a pretty bulky guy, carrying my share of both muscle and fat, and most people think that means I need to eat a ton but that's really not the case. Mostly I just get dehydrated easily, especially in the summer. That said, I was bordering on famished territory and considered heading out for a bite when I heard another sound. The first thing I did was check my scanners, and sure enough the voltage needle was fully spun to the right side of the dial. EM interference. Then I went to see what had dropped. I was able to pick the object out pretty quickly since I had spent the last 6 hours staring at the mosaic of a basement floor. It was a silver briefcase, like one of those out of a crime novel, and it was cracked open.
I had this sense then that I was standing at a precipice, and if I opened the briefcase and looked inside, I wouldn't be able to stop whatever would come afterwards. Part of me deep down knew that I was just that type of guy that had to know, and maybe this was my Hamlet moment where it would be a trait gone a step too far. But then again I didn't really believe in any of that sentimental bullshit, so I opened the briefcase.
The gun surprised me a little, but not as much as the piece of paper laid atop a case file reading in large black font, "FIND ME". I expected the envelope to have some missing person file in it, but instead there were all these schematics and blueprints for some kind of device. Whatever it was, it was pretty massive. Some of the lengths were hundreds of meters long. And what's more strange is based on the blueprint's locale, it appeared to be underground. I looked back through the pages a couple times, then checked the note—nothing strange there. The gun appeared to be a simple glock. I was no gun expert, but I had been to the range pretty regularly with my construction buddies, so I got used to the feel of a pistol and rifle and some of the different names; however, I realized pretty quickly it wasn't your standard glock when I couldn't find mag-release. That's when I noticed how light the gun felt. I tried to chamber a round, but again, there was no hammer. What the hell kind of gun was this?
I ended up throwing everything back in the briefcase, including the necklace, coin, and a few Koozies I found that were branded with one of my favorite sports teams (never let an opportunity go to waste). I put up all my shit back in the van and spun over to a local burger joint, got my fill, and went home. I made sure to draft an email to the prospective buyers, telling them the house had several patches of black mold and a bit of a rat problem before drifting off to sleep. Although I really didn't do much of that.
When I woke up, I took a cold shower and downed a can of Reign, then commuted to my gym and got a lift and some sauna time in before making the trip back to the house. I brought some extra supplies with me for some experiments I cooked up while not sleeping the previous night.
First, I had two camcorders set up on a couple tripods in either corner of the basement. I wanted clear footage of these mystery objects spawning in. Then I set up a voltmeter in a similar fashion, but I had a wire extending out of it on a circuit which fed to an alarm that would blare when the reading was over 250 volts. Upstairs, I rearranged some of the furniture so that the small number of tables, chairs, clock, cabinets, and other little pillows or vases I could find were scattered across the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Then I pulled up a lawn chair to the front porch window and waited.
I didn't have to wait long though. In about a minute, I started to notice some of the objects moving. It was strange. When a few of them would shift simultaneously, it was like looking at a holographic card that would change shape depending on where your eyes were in relation to the image. Every time I saw a shift, I felt an awkward feeling in my eyes. They went blurry for a fraction of a second, then there was a twinge of pain, as if my brain couldn't handle the contradictory stimulus. It didn't get more crazy than that though—until the alarm went off.
I had cracked open the small rectangular window in the basement to the side of the house so I would hear it. It took four hours and several strange stares from passersby walking their dogs before it rang, so I was a bit lost in my thoughts, but when I heard the beep I perked up fast. It lasted for maybe 5 seconds total, but what I saw was truly miraculous. The best way I can describe it is a pool of silver or gray or translucent light emerging in the foreground between me and the objects in the different rooms. A series of twisting tentacles sprouted from the gray octopus-like head and spun in a way that reminded me of that little kids ride at the amusement parks. Then the objects started to "heat up" is the way I describe it. Their position became relative, meaning they were here one second, there another, then they popped out of existence entirely. Suddenly the rooms were all empty, then they were full of things I had never seen before. Then five seconds passed and the octopus vanished and it was back to the same old objects in their usual places.
It took a few minutes to process what I saw, and even then I wasn't sure I really saw it. I went inside and looked around at my distribution of the house's furnishings. They were all there, intact. Then I went downstairs to check the cams. I rewinded a couple minutes and played it back, but there was no flying object to be found. Instead, there was some gray static that lasted half a second and then the object, a kid's treasure chest toy, was there on the ground. But you want to know the really strange part? I rewinded the tape again, and when I watched the footage back, the treasure chest was always there.
I later came to understand that these poppings in-and-out of our reality are only conceivable to a conscious mind that can track the interference patterns—not rote computational instruments. In fact, even most people can't do it (although everyone has at least a slight awareness of it, even if only subconsciously). Plus, locations like the basement of this house are very rare and kept under tight lock. That became obvious to me two days later when, after my normal morning routine, I pulled up to a driveway and curbside filled with unmarked government vehicles. Either bravely or stupidly, I pulled up to a few officers (they were wearing suits in 85 degree weather, so I assumed…) who were idling by the large fence of crime scene tape and asked them what the score was.
"There was a crime," said the short man with a unibrow.
"Oh, is that right? Damn shame. Someone break in? I have a niece who lives nearby, so…"
The man looked at his two compatriots, both of whom were wearing sunglasses and a "get this civilian fuck out of here" expressions. "Oh, yeah," he started in a reassuring tone that was so condescending it would have annoyed anyone except me, "we found a body. We think it was a homicide. Best to keep your kids away from here for a while."
I thumbed the stubble on my chin, my other hand outstretched on the wheel, and considered moving on, but my mouth had other ideas. "That right? But uh, isn't this house vacant? I mean, I don't remember no one living in it."
The short man, now tall with temper, said, "Yeah, some squatters. We think there was a dispute over some drug money. Nothing for you to worry about though, we got it under control. Now if you wouldn't mind moving along, we have a lot of work to do."
Oh, I'm sure you do, I thought, but only said, "Of course, sir, sorry for keeping you from your job." Then I rolled up the window and cruised on, keeping my eyes on the house which slowly diminished in the side-view mirror.
Luckily I had been smart enough to break down my camp and lug home all my equipment each night, so I didn't leave anything incriminating. I didn't move the furniture back, so maybe that would come back to haunt me, but considering the kind of shit going down in that house, I didn't think they would notice.
For any of you wondering about the conclusion of the house story, I went back a couple weeks later after the suits had left and the tape was taken down and confirmed that not only was the basement entirely cleaned out, but it was no longer exhibiting any strange properties. I looked for a story related to the house, maybe a made up murder of some kind, but there was nothing. That bastard lied to me and didn't even bother to cover his story up.
Now, in the aftermath of an event such as this, I really only had one of two options. I could forget it, move on, continue living life. The necklace was surely worth a fortune. I could sell it and have enough to retire, or at least hire enough people and expand my business large enough to retire within ten or so years. Or I could take all that money and invest it in my own PI business with only a single objective: finding out what those people knew, and why they were hiding it.
I think you know me well enough by now to guess which line of reasoning appealed more to me.
***
For the sake of brevity, I'm going to omit most of my encounters along the journey to discovering Area X. There's a lot to tell, and if it appeals to you perhaps I'd be willing to share at a later date, but for now I want to get this part of the story, the more proximal part, out in the open.
Three years ago, I discovered the source of what I'll call "The Receiver". This is the device that was schematized in the documents that I found in the briefcase. What it does is a complex answer, and how it does it is pretty much all speculation, but here's what I've been able to find out: this universe we live in is a node in a network of many other spaces. These spaces exist in higher dimensions that we cannot directly perceive, but using a conceivable analogy, just think about a flower with petals. The petals are these other dimensions which bleed into our world, which is at the center. However, it's not that pretty. We see the physical world through the lens of spacetime: sizes, speeds, etc. These other dimensions don't necessarily have space or time. In fact, what actually exists there, I couldn't say. The only data I have on them is from two sources: correspondence information and server data from the secret agency (which I'll call "the Organization") that keeps this under wraps, and first-hand experience with realms from these other entities, either directly (I experience it) or through the eyes of someone else with the same or greater abilities than I possess.
I referred to these people with abilities earlier as "Antennas", and I will continue to use the term. Antennas really come in three flavors, marked by the strength of their ability: weak Antennas, like me, are able to observe spontaneous interactions between our universe and other dimensions (phase shifts) when there is a strong force of collision like existed in the basement; moderate Antennas may see phase shifts occur at any point, and they usually are able to retain memories from across the different transformations; strong Antennas, and I don't know if they exist yet, but they are able to consciously interact with these other realms and cause phase shifts to occur.
I mentioned that moderate Antennas are able to retain memories from before and after a phase shift. Technically, all Antennas have this ability, but it's about degree. I can recall only very specific instances and without much detail. Moderates are usually able to pick out much more nuanced minutiae. At the lower end of moderate scale, most of those details fade or get fuzzy over time, but for the very strong Antennas, they hold onto almost everything. One other property that scales with strength is interaction with other conscious entities. Only a small percentage of moderates are able to do this. What's interesting is that these entities can possess (yes, like ghosts) people who aren't even antennas, but no one is aware of such possession at this deep of a level. I have several companions now, and only two have had interactions with these otherworldly beings. Not all of them are malevolent, some of them are whimsical or kind, but there are a fair share of demons out there.
Getting back to the point, Area X started as a government funded project in the 70's. At that time, they were focused on a few subjects: Artificial Intelligence, DNA sequencing, and psychedelics. Yes, they were part of the infamous LSD experiments. But they looked at these subjects through a common lens—there was something that the burgeoning tech industry, fueled by the advent of a commercial computer market, was missing. As the tech giants rose in the early 2000's and began to collect mass amounts of data, this other agency was decades ahead in a different metric, although it was completely (and still is) hidden from the public. Their efforts to understand psychedelic experiences led to a formalized method of understanding interactions between multiple realities. They built certain scanning equipment to detect anomalies like the one I found in the basement; although their tools were much more sophisticated and didn't utilize voltage readings. Then they ran tests in these areas. One area in particular is a hot-bed of phase shift interactions. That's where Area X is located (and the Receiver).
The Receiver is a giant electromagnetic orb that has trapped the kind of multi-dimensional energy that causes the phase shifts; since the Organization seized control of the lab, it's effectively become a map of the Earth in relation to these other worlds. For the past twenty or so years, the Organization has been studying this map, using the data big Tech companies have collected to essentially develop a Rosetta Stone for interpreting the meaning of the fluctuations in their scanning equipment. Recently, the public, though going the long way round, was actually pretty close to a breakthrough in this same department until recently when ultra-powerful LLMs surfaced, and the whole world began going down what I'd argue is the wrong rabbit hole of language processing. But I digress.
Area X is essentially a private military base built for defending the most impactful piece of technology ever invented. With the Receiver, the Organization now has the power to essentially predict any and all future outcomes, the only thing holding them back is the limitations of their own scanning equipment which will get better with time. To put it into perspective, the Organization has access to a kind of data allocation tool which in one day can produce over ten thousand times that the Big Data companies combined would be able to filter through in the next decade. You might think, then, that the problem is merely asymmetric power, and that is certainly a concern, but it isn't the main concern. The main issue is that this organization is actively recruiting (and kidnapping) Antennas from around the world in an effort to find or make one of them into a strong Antenna. In other words, they want a subject who is able not only to see the future, but to manipulate it at will.
balance to the world. I've been working on amassing resources, capital, and building my own team, and now I'm ready. You might ask why I'm posting this here. Wouldn't it be better to keep all this secret? Well, yes, it would be. But that's the problem. Nothing is secret anymore. They know about me and the others, and if I don't make a move, they will. In a way, this is a letter directly to the organization that I know, and I'm coming.
In a different way, I wanted to release this information to the public. There are lots of people out there waking up and realizing that the world they experience is not the one others experience. If you think you might be an Antenna, don't be afraid—you have a special gift that can be controlled. If you want more details on how to control it, or if you're interested in my mission, don't be afraid to reach out. This hasn't always been my life's work, but it is now.
At least until I die.

Hey Entrepreneur!
I wanted to share the story of the past year and a half of my life - a tale of challenges, tech innovation, and a whole lot of snacks. This isn’t just about launching a product; it’s about solving a big problem that inspired an entire platform.
TL;DR: My buddy and I sold our previous snack subscription box company and made a cool thing

The Seeds of Discontent

At our previous company, my buddy Mike and I saw how powerful influencer marketing could be. Our business, delivering international snacks to doorsteps, was perfect for social media. But managing these influencer partnerships was a huge headache.
Each new campaign started with excitement but quickly became overwhelming. We dealt with many social media platforms, each with its own rules and metrics. Keeping track of everything felt like trying to solve a puzzle with pieces that kept changing. The tools we used were basic. They helped us send products and payments but didn’t offer much for managing or understanding the big picture.
Tracking our campaign performance was a real pain. With just a small team running our marketing, we were juggling hundreds of influencers at the same time. It was hard to keep an eye on everyone and make quick decisions. Plus, the data we got was often late and messy, making things even more frustrating.
This constant struggle showed us a big gap in our toolkit. We needed a solution that could make managing influencers easier and give us useful insights, something as dynamic and global as our product. This ongoing frustration planted the seeds for what would eventually become our new company.

Market Research: Finding the Pain Points

After selling our previous business, Mike and I took a six-month break. We explored different ideas, from unique apps to a Castle Crashers style game. But our experience working with creators kept pulling us back to marketing. We knew the challenges of influencer marketing needed to be addressed.
We talked to our network in the e-commerce space to see if they had similar problems. The feedback was eye-opening. Many businesses struggled with existing tools, which mostly acted as simple marketplaces, where interactions were brief and not very deep.
Even worse, the few ambassador tools available were expensive and limited. When I searched for an ambassador software tool that worked across all social networks, the options I found required scheduling demos days in advance. They often lacked direct API connections and supported only a few major social media networks. The starting prices were high, often around $5k per month, with costs going up as the program expanded.
This research not only validated our experiences but also showed us a strategic need for our own tool. We realized we needed a solution not just to fill the current gap but also as a key part of our marketing stack for future businesses. We were determined to build something that wouldn’t force us—or anyone else—to pay a crazy amount for effective influencer marketing.

Designing the Dream: Our New Business’ Blueprint

With a clear vision from our frustrations and market research, we set out to create our new business. Our goal was to build a comprehensive tool that would change influencer marketing. Here’s what we focused on:

• Comprehensive Integration: We made sure the tool we created works with the top 10 social networks in the US. This unified approach helps marketers manage campaigns across different platforms easily, without juggling multiple tools.
• Dynamic Engagement Tools: Engagement is key, so we developed real-time interaction capabilities. We built user-friendly native apps for ambassadors on the App Store and Google Play, allowing influencers to stay engaged and responsive. Brands manage their campaigns through a web-based company portal.
• Robust Analytics Engine: While our analytics engine gives deep insights, we know it needs continuous improvement. We designed it to evolve, offering ongoing updates to refine its capabilities and deliver actionable intelligence.
• Flexible and Fun Engagement: The points and rewards system was the most important and fun feature to develop. This gamification of the influencer experience encourages participation and loyalty, making marketing campaigns more engaging.
• Advanced Group Segmentation: We included the ability to segment ambassadors into groups. This allows brands to target certain activities and rewards to specific groups, enhancing the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Each feature of our tool we were creating was designed to address specific pain points we identified. Our goal was to offer a tool that was powerful, efficient, adaptable, and enjoyable for both brands and their ambassador partners.

Launching Our New Business: Embracing User Feedback

After about 18 months of design and development, we started the soft launch of our new business on May 1st. Opting for a soft launch allowed us to focus on real-time feedback and fine-tuning over making a big initial splash. This approach is crucial - not just for introducing our product but for understanding how it fits into the real world, where actual users rely on it.

Initial Rollout and Testing

Our launch a couple of weeks ago marked the start of our public journey. We released our new tool we created with ambassador apps on the App Store and Google Play, and opened our web-based company portal for business use. This phase is not about mass marketing but about engaging with our professional network and early adopters testing everything in real-world conditions. This includes real companies and creators, ensuring our platform is robust and responsive.

Iterative Feedback Integration

Feedback from these early stages is invaluable. We have set up multiple channels to communicate with our initial users to ensure they feel supported and heard. This ongoing dialogue is critical as it helps us identify and implement necessary adjustments quickly. Each piece of feedback is a step towards improving functionality and user experience.

Continued Development Based on Early Insights

Since we are still in the soft launch phase, our focus remains on refining the platform. A recent development was adding the Creator Hub and Company Center about a month ago—enhancements from recognizing limitations in our initial setup.
Creator Hub: The Creator Hub allows businesses to manage their ambassador relationships dynamically. Companies can discover and invite creators who match their interests and campaign goals, ensuring more personalized and effective collaborations.
Company Center: This feature allows creators to independently discover and apply to various ambassador programs, giving them the freedom to engage with brands that align with their interests.
These features aim to make the connection between companies and creators as seamless and beneficial as possible, accommodating a wide range of marketing strategies and campaign sizes.

How The Tool We Created Works: Streamlining Influencer Marketing

Our tool is designed to simplify and enhance the influencer marketing process for both companies and creators. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how our platform works:

1. Signup and Integration

- Companies can quickly create customizable signup forms. They can also invite new ambassadors directly from the Creator Hub that match their interests. This flexibility helps integrate Social Strudel into existing marketing workflows.
2. Ambassador Onboarding
- Creators apply to become ambassadors, download the Social Strudel app, and connect their social media accounts. This ensures that once approved, creators can start engaging with brand campaigns promptly.
3. Application Review
- Companies get notifications of new applicants and can approve or decline them based on their fit and relevance to marketing goals. This step ensures only the best ambassadors represent the brand.
4. Targeted Segmentation
- Companies can segment ambassadors into groups, allowing them to tailor activities and communications. This supports targeted marketing strategies and more personalized engagement.
5. Activity Management
- Companies set up new activities on various social platforms for ambassadors. Examples include:

• Instagram: Create a photo post featuring the brand’s latest snack box and use specific hashtags.
  
• TikTok: Develop a short video showing a fun unboxing of the product, encouraging engagement through likes and comments.
  
• Twitch: Host a live stream where the ambassador tries snacks from the box during a gaming session, discussing favorites with viewers.
  

- These are just examples, and activities can be tailored to fit different platforms and goals.
6. Real-Time Notifications
- Creators get notifications about new activities through push notifications and email. They can browse the app for available activities, ensuring they never miss an opportunity.
7. Submission and Verification
- Creators submit proof of activity completion directly through the app. This makes managing submissions easy and organized for companies.
8. Activity Approval
- Companies review submitted activities, approving or declining them based on quality and alignment with campaign objectives. This maintains high standards and ensures effectiveness.
9. Rewards and Motivation
- Upon approval, creators earn points, which can be redeemed for various rewards. This system motivates creators to produce high-quality content and stay engaged.
10. Custom Rewards Creation

• Companies create custom rewards, ranging from products, discounts, to unique experiences, or even cash. This flexibility allows brands to align rewards with their strategies and ambassador preferences.

11. Reward Notifications and Redemption

• Creators are notified of available rewards and can redeem their points. This keeps creators motivated and engaged.

12. Reward Distribution Management

• Companies are notified about reward redemptions and distribute rewards accordingly. This final step ensures creators are compensated for their efforts, and companies can manage reward distribution easily.

Looking Forward: The Road Ahead for Us

As we continue with our new business, we are committed to not just meeting but exceeding the evolving needs of digital marketing. We’ve only just begun to tap into our platform’s potential, and our roadmap is geared towards enhancing our service and expanding our reach.

Enhanced Integration Capabilities

We aim to expand our platform’s integration capabilities, adding support for social networks like WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, and Quora, and adapting to new emerging platforms like the anticipated Vine 2. By covering more platforms, we provide our users with tools to engage with audiences everywhere online.

Advanced Analytics and AI Implementation

Understanding the crucial role of data, we plan to enhance our analytics engine with advanced metrics and predictive analytics. By integrating AI, we aim to give users insights that reflect current trends and anticipate future behaviors.

Continued Focus on User Experience

User feedback is key and remains a cornerstone of our development. We are committed to refining the user experience based on real usage and feedback. This includes enhancing our mobile apps and ensuring the Creator Hub and Company Center are intuitive and robust. Both are still in early stages, and we are actively working to improve these features.

Expanding Educational Resources

To help users fully leverage the tool we created, we plan to expand our educational resources. This includes tutorials, best practice guides, and case studies for new users, and advanced content for experienced marketers to refine their strategies.

Final Reflections

If you've stuck with me this long through our story, thank you! Reflecting on this journey, it’s clear that every challenge and setback helped shape our vision and refine our approach. From the initial frustrations to the detailed market research, every step has been a learning experience. We're excited about the future and committed to improving our platform constantly to meet the evolving needs of our users and potential users. If you have any questions or feedback at all, I’d love to hear it! Your insights and support mean a lot as my partner and I continue to grow and innovate.
EDIT: Formatting

Neutral States Null Corp Looking For Pilots PVP-PVE-Indy-Hauling-Explo-Mining
Open to any wormholers looking for a new home! RIP
Come join the twisted love child of Orbital Wreckoning and Shiv Nation Militia in our fresh face-lift: Shiv Wreckoning [SHIVW] still with The Commonwealth. Alliance [CMWTH]
Looking for pilots who want to fly in null separated from the major player coalitions and expand our territory in our new home. Opportunities for anything you could wish to do in New Eden! ●PVP: Plenty! It's Null ○Monthly pvp prizes for top damage, highest value kill, highest number of kills and more! ○Training classes! Tackle/blops/hunting etc. ○Blops fleets ○Small gang/filament roams ○Alliance ops ○Corp projects for logi pilots because we love logi ❤️
●PVE: Angel Ratting sites ○PVE fleets ○Capital ratting ○Corp projects for NPC kills
●Indy: A huge part of our operation is stocking regional markets and building caps but we have the ability to build anything from containers to capitals ○Extensive blueprint library to get copies from ○Corp projects for Corp builds ○Custom Indy orders paying out isk for your manufacturing/reaction slots
Hauling: Logistics is a critical part of any nullsec group and we've got plenty to move! ○Nomad friendly, Minmatar isotope region
Mining: Come get your rocks off.. grid! ○Regular Mining fleets ○Rorqual support ○Ice mining ○Gas huffing fleets ○Corp buyback! ○Movie mining fleets, occasional mining fleets with a movie streamed in discord while we talk shit.
All pilots welcome as long as: -You've got at least 8m sp -Your toon is at least 60 days old -You must have comms! Discord for corp and TeamSpeak3 for alliance ops.
Come see what we're about! https://discord.com/invite/CtH22XWkbx

Neutral States Null Corp Looking For Pilots PVP-PVE-Indy-Hauling-Explo-Mining
Open to any wormholers looking for a new home! RIP
Come join the twisted love child of Orbital Wreckoning and Shiv Nation Militia in our fresh face-lift: Shiv Wreckoning [SHIVW] still with The Commonwealth. Alliance [CMWTH]
Looking for pilots who want to fly in null separated from the major player coalitions and expand our territory in our new home. Opportunities for anything you could wish to do in New Eden! ●PVP: Plenty! It's Null ○Monthly pvp prizes for top damage, highest value kill, highest number of kills and more! ○Training classes! Tackle/blops/hunting etc. ○Blops fleets ○Small gang/filament roams ○Alliance ops ○Corp projects for logi pilots because we love logi ❤️
●PVE: Angel Ratting sites ○PVE fleets ○Capital ratting ○Corp projects for NPC kills
●Indy: A huge part of our operation is stocking regional markets and building caps but we have the ability to build anything from containers to capitals ○Extensive blueprint library to get copies from ○Corp projects for Corp builds ○Custom Indy orders paying out isk for your manufacturing/reaction slots
Hauling: Logistics is a critical part of any nullsec group and we've got plenty to move! ○Nomad friendly, Minmatar isotope region
Mining: Come get your rocks off.. grid! ○Regular Mining fleets ○Rorqual support ○Ice mining ○Gas huffing fleets ○Corp buyback! ○Movie mining fleets, occasional mining fleets with a movie streamed in discord while we talk shit.
All pilots welcome as long as: -You've got at least 8m sp -Your toon is at least 60 days old -You must have comms! Discord for corp and TeamSpeak3 for alliance ops.
Come see what we're about! https://discord.com/invite/CtH22XWkbx

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I'm posting some old stories that I wrote maybe 6 or 7 years ago before I knew HFY existed so you may have read them before on WP or some other sub but they are mine. Also, obligatory "english is not my first language"
Calvin sat in silence, his gaze focused on the green dot flashing slowly on his console. The Council had kept their word. His comm interface had connected to a temporary relay satellite near Saturn. A special request that was granted to lift Earth's isolation sentence for a brief moment to relay a final message to the cosmos. Everything was ready, the message prerecorded the day before and final adjustements to the gift had been made a few weeks ago. Calvin pondered everything that had happened, every events leading to this moment, to humanity's last chance to stand on the centerstage.
It didn't start this way. When humanity first made contact with an extraterrestrial race, we were welcomed with opened arms. Our very first message was "we come in a spirit of friendship" Humanity's quick evolution and technological progress had already caught the attention of the Galactic System Alliance. Some of its members were concerned over the general violent tendencies demonstrated throughout human history but true to its benevolent mission, the Alliance had given humanity the benefit of the doubt. We were allowed outposts, territories, trading routes and even the newly created 328th seat on the Galactic Council of Representatives. Humanity was given a real fair chance to shine. And boy did we waste it.
The Galactic Alliance was over 5 million years old, some of its members could be traced back all the way to the founding days of the Alliance. It had brought about a previously unheard of, almost uninterrupted era of peace throughout the galaxy. Its rulings were generally both fair and just. A beacon of hope and justice into the dark cosmos. Humanity gave it its first civil war, less than 50 years after joining. 5 million years of peace, ripped apart in the space of a moment.
Humanity started off well enough. Outposts and trading were profitable and while human vessels were not as technologically advanced as other races, our ability to anticipate enemy movements and quickly adapt to volatile situations made us a prime candidate for galactic peacekeeping missions. Humans rapidly made a name for themselves as a deterrent to pirates and smugglers. The Galactic Council did not hesitate to authorize human settlements in sectors prone to hostile actions, knowing that humanity's presence would pacify a sector quickly. Humanity's image rose to a more favorable one and initial concerns and hesitations towards us slowly crumbled away. Unfortunately with the rise of humanity's standing, came a rise of its hubris. After all, humans will always remain humans; fickle, volatile, greedy.
Humanity became more and more demanding in its dealings with the Alliance. We constantly wanted more, became arrogant, took what we felt we deserved. The Council turned a blind eye when humanity moved in on turbulent territories and claim them for itself but before long, we had our eyes set on more prominent systems. With every outburst and hostile action, we only isolated ourselves further. Humanity's positive image quickly turned negative, and when backed into a corner, humanity turned vengeful. We convinced ourselves we were the victims and that in the end, it was us or them. Some members of the Alliance came to view our side of things, others were forced into servitude. A simple spark was all it took for a full fledge civil war to break out.
Within the span of only 3 years, the Alliance was on fire, divided, broken. Humanity's unmatched potential for warfare made it a formidable enemy but in the end our arrogance got the better of us and we lost. The consequences for our actions were harsh but justified. Given humanity's irrecoverable nature, we had been sentenced to erasing. All humans would be relocated to Earth, sterilized and left to die alone, the Sol system kept under a permanent military blockade. All mentions of humanity were to be removed from Galactic history and we would be forgotten, erased from existence. It was the second time only, in the entire Alliance's history that this punishment was handed out.
As a final gesture of good will, the Council had authorized a final message from humanity's last living representative to the members of the Alliance, to be distributed, but then erased. Looking up from his console, Calvin toggled the small switch that would send out the transmission to the satellite's internal memory, then end his life. He permitted himself a final smile, the Council would be seriously pissed... at first.
In the dark emptiness of space, the small satellite's memory indicator turned red, signaling reception of a message but unfortunately it was too far away to witness the small light flash from the thermo nuclear explosion that officially ended humanity's presence in the galaxy.
Captain Xandar was pacing back and forth across the small bridge of his scout vessel. While he was honored to be part of an official Council mission, he couldn't help but feel that he was potentially being sacrificed as cannon fodder. The Council may have granted the human's wish of a last message but it still feared a trap. Human's deceptive and violent nature would leave a dark shadow on the galaxy, slow to vanish. Humanity's first word to the Alliance, "Friend" had become a synonym of "deceit, treachery and naivety". The 20 large warships hiding just outside the limit of the Sol system did nothing to calm Xandar's nerves. While they were there to offer protection in case of a human trap, should things go south they would probably not hesitate to destroy Xandar's vessel if needed.
Captain, we are in range of the relay satellite. Systems confirm there is indeed a message on the internal memory. Initial scans show the data file is rather large but still looks clean.
Xandar sighed, the poor human schmuck probably went on a long tirade against the Alliance. A fitting end for such a violent race.
Very well lieutenant, download and scan the message. If everything looks good we'll transmit it to the Council and they can decide if it's worth sharing to the rest of the Alliance or not.
As soon as the young lieutenant opened the message file, all lights on the bridge went out, the quiet hum of the engines vanished and artificial gravity disengaged. Xandar was doing his best to maintain his composure while slowly drifting 2 feet in the air but as suddenly as it had vanished, artificial gravity came back and the emergency lighting activated, bathing the bridge in a reddish hue. On the main screen was a sole human, weak and frail in appearance.
Apologies to the commander of the Alliance vessel, I assure you that I meant no disrespect and no harm to your vessel and your crew. As authorized by the Galactic Council of Representatives, I hereby bring you a final farewell from humanity, as well as a final gift to remember us by.
Xandar was panicking, all restraint and stoic facade usually associated with his rank had vanished from his face, his eyes were white with fear.
Shit! The damn human played us like fool! Lieutenant, I want an immediate status report on the ship's systems. First officer, contact the fleet, there is no telling what we just exposed ourselves to.
Comms are down sir, unable to raise the fleet. We have limited access to the main computer and all blast doors have been sealed shut throughout the ship. She’s dead in the waters Sir.
Damn it! I want every exabyte of that datafile analyzed for any trace of a virus or even biological agents. We should have known better than to trust the humans to honor their word.
Xandar looked back to the monitor, the human had remained silent, probably anticipating the commotion that his message would cause. Xandar waited for the recording to resume.
Now, I assume the initial moment of shock is behind us so let’s continue. As I said, I bring you a final gift from humanity to all races and citizens of the Alliance. Fear not, though this final deception on our part may appear as vengeful, I assure you it is not the case. I knew the Council would never allow for this message to be shared throughout the Alliance, let alone our gift so I had to take some creative measures. Your analysis team is probably telling you about now that the 2 data files enclosed with this message are organic and they are correct though fear not, it is not a biological agent or a viral threat. Both files contain the DNA blueprints of Dogs. While we initially had dozen of sub-species, the complexity of this entire action limited me to only upload one specific breed. More precisely I give you the Retriever Labrador. I have enclosed blueprints for a brown-coated male and a golden-coated female. Though they are called man's best friend, I assure you they are nothing like us, to the contrary they are loyal, playful and innocent. They represent everything humanity has failed to be. They are our gift to you in the hope that you will one day forgive us for everything we have done. May they be a protector when evil threatens you. May they be love when hate isolates you. May they be a beacon of hope when darkness surrounds you. Treat them well. We did not deserve them, but hopefully you will prove yourself worthy of them.
The ship's systems came back online the very moment the recording ended. Lights rekindled across the bridge and the engines sprung back to life, filling the vessel with their low humming. Xandar looked over to the bridge crew, most of them still in shock and unsure of what exactly had happened. It was the young comms lieutenant that broke the silence first.
Sir, all systems are back online. Comms are back up and the fleet is hailing us, they want to know what the hell is going on. They are asking if we have been compromised.
Tell the fleet to remain on stand-by, we will need to assess the situation. First officer, give me a full systems check.
Sir, I'm detecting a massive power fluctuation from levels 3 through 7. Powers appears to have been rerouted to the auxiliary deck.
Tell engineering to stabilize the power levels and seal off the auxiliary deck
Controls are unresponsive Sir, power is being channeled to the backup biological replicators
What? Kill all power to the auxiliary deck, NOW!
We can't, the auxiliary deck is hooked up directly within the main generator and has its own dedicated safety bypass. It's meant to work even in the events of a catastrophic engine failure to insure the survival of the crew.
Shit! The human didn't do this by accident. He purposely automated his virus through the backup replicators knowing full well we wouldn't be able to turn them off. First officer, I need you to vent the atmosphere from the auxiliary deck's replicator room.
Controls are unresponsive Sir
Then blow the damn room out to space, do whatever is needed to stop this!
There is nothing we can do sir, we're completely locked out of the auxiliary deck. Security teams are waiting outside the replicator room but the system won't allow me to open the door.
Xandar was unsure how to proceed at this point. They had been compromised but calling in the fleet would mean immediate destruction. He pondered for a while but then made the decision to contact the fleet regardless of the consequences. He had a duty to insure the safety of the Alliance. He turned to the young lieutenant and gave the order to raise the fleet. His gaze was however quickly met with the panicked expression of the young comm's lieutenant.
Sir! The recording! It's transmitting itself to the fleet via our open commlink!
WHAT?
The fleet is no longer responding. I think... I think they're going through what we went through when we first opened the recording.
Xandar was in shock. The realisation of what was about to happen was slowly setting in.
If you're right son, that means the recording will activate their organic replicators as well and then transmit itself to the rest of the Alliance fleet. We've doomed the Alliance.
Sir! Replicators report completion of their programmed tasks.
Auxiliary deck controls are back online! Scanners indicate 2 life forms. Replicator room doors just opened on their own!
Xandar turned slowly towards his first officer.
Sir, there is a final message on the replicator console's screen.
---Protocol Goodboy1 successful
---Protocol Goodgirl2 successful
---May they show you the true meaning of the word "Friendship"
Bonus
It only seemed fitting that humanity's last action would be to blow trough bureaucratic redtapes and regulations to impose dogs on the galaxy (with the best of intentions of course). Calvin did promise no harm would come the vessel and its crew and that's been true... for the most part. There is definitly no physical harm and while psychological and/or traumatic consequences are a possibility (albeith a rather small one), you know... dogs will take care of that. It all works out in the end.
Well, except for the poor Glaxien crew members who turns out are deadly allergic to dog hair, and the Phlosaks whose skin reacts to dog urine as if it was acid (poor bastard got peed on his face when he lifted a puppy), and the Klaangorians who's very fragile and very vital lower mandible looked like the ideal chew toy for one young puppy. A very uselessly exposed lower mandible if you ask me. Not to mention the many planetary ecosystems that will be seriously messed up by the introduction of a new uncontrolled species.
In fact some would argue that those pesky government regulations were there for a reason, that with time, the Alliance could and would have experimented with the DNA blueprint in a controlled environment and then, given positive results, would have moved on to a gradual and supervised introduction of dogs in the galaxy.
But you know, that's just not the human way to do things. Better to rip the bandage in one go and hope for the best. Surely the Alliance can't fault humanity for what Calvin did, it was for the best, THEIR best and while in retrospect we are kinda sorry about the whole "accidental death by dogs" thing and ruined ecosystems, these are freak occurences, trivial, statistically benign. Like the great Cave Johnson once said, if I put these numbers into my calculator it makes a happy face.
You're welcome universe, we accept your most sincere gratitude and your apologies are much appreciated. You don't have to feel the need to mention it, we're totaly fine. In fact, please stop yelling at us.

Hello everyone! BigHedDjango here, tunes for this week to help you out.
Weekly photo: https://i.imgur.com/88KGCCS.png
All feedback on tunes is appreciated - good or bad. Specially when tunes are bad. At the end of the day I am just the mechanic and you guys are the racers. Do not hesitate irrespective of your tuning knowledge or racing skills!
Tuning method: 1. Stock look - stock wheel rims and size, no aero (unless absolutely necessary for handling and stability) 2. Tuned for automatic/manual players by not skipping clutch+gearbox upgrades 3. Max performance with max handling possible 4. All cars tuned vs. Unbeatable AI, tracks/weather conditions are now unknown since time travel no longer works. Since release AI has been inconsistent between many car types and weather conditions, not every car will win 10/10 races vs Unbeatable AI without rewind/restart abuse 5. Bodykit used if it does not hurt performance

___ 

Forzathon Weekly Challenge - Time to Play

2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray * Tune - 142 362 222 * Easy to use; Decent grip even in rain; Good braking; Lacks S1 top speed; 6-gears; Sigala wide body kit; Chevrolet rear wing; Custom rims; v1 * Event Lab BP - Easy Win Drag Strip - 812 084 897

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Trial - MX-5 Drive

Road Racing - Mazda MX-5 - A 800

NOTE: Try to block and slow down AI and help teammates in order to win. One player on the team needs to take at least P3 and slow down the AI for a guaranteed win

2016 Mazda MX-5 * Tune - 446 488 045 * Fastest option; v1
2005 Mazda Mazdaspeed MX-5 * Tune - 386 598 479 * Low A class top speed; v1
1994 Mazda MX-5 Miata * Tune - 686 056 119 * Lacks braking; Lacks A class top speed; v2 - rebuild, smoother, faster
2013 Mazda MX-5 * Tune - 159 091 037 * Low A class top speed; v1

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Event Lab 1 - Eagle Forest Raceway

Modern Supercars - A 800

2012 Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Spyder Performante * Tune - 171 863 878 * Playlist car; Good braking; Low A class top speed; Slowish car overall; Stock engine; True Purist; v1
2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Coupe * Tune - 575 887 945 * Tune by Naitsab243; Custom rims; Rear aero

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Event Lab 2 - Emerald GP Circuit

Retro Hot Hatch - B 700

1974 Honda Civic RS * Tune - 689 859 387 * FWD; Meta car; Meta tune; Lacks top speed; Wide body kit + Classic rear wing + Custom rims; Dry only; v2

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Seasonal PR Stunts

2010 Mosler MT900S * Tune - 106 016 211 * Superb grip; Good handling but oversteery; v3

Speed Trap - Northern Passage - Extreme Track Toys - S2 998

• Start at least 0.7 miles from the west

Speed Trap - Escarpment - Extreme Track Toys - S2 998

• Start 0.5 miles from the west. Turn in hard on final right hand corner, can even cut offroad

Speed Zone - Camino Del Cielo - Extreme Track Toys - S2 998

• Start at least 1.3 miles away on the north east road. Enter the east gate at full throttle, feather brake for first right hand corner and final hairpin only. You can also start max 1 mile from the west cause need to brake immediately upton entering the west gate
  

NOTE: All Championships are locked at Highly Skilled difficulty

Championship 1 - Picking Favorite

Road Racing - Forza Cover Cars - S1 900

2013 Dodge SRT Viper GTS Anniversary Edition (Maybe not an option) * Tune - 301 899 128 * Meta car; Meta tune; Good grip; Oversteer but no traction loss; * Lacks S1 top speed so sprints with lots of corners or circuits only; * Drag tires - great launch, weak at slow corners, tuned for wet roads as well; * Stock engine; Custom rims; Full aero; Rear diffuser; Sideskirts; v1
2013 Dodge SRT Viper GTS * Tune - 693 168 484 * Stock engine; v3
2014 Lamborghini Huracan LP 610-4 * Tune - 204 826 092 * Fast; Stock engine; True Purist; v3
2016 Lamborghini Centenario LP 770-4 * Tune - 156 811 181 * Stock tirebombs; Good grip; Excellent braking; 7-gears; Stock engine; True Purist; v2
2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS * Tune - 246 355 163 * Stock rear wing; Stock engine; v1
2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray * Tune - 142 362 222 * Easy to use; Decent grip even in rain; Good braking; Lacks S1 top speed; 6-gears; Sigala wide body kit; Chevrolet rear wing; Custom rims; v1

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Championship 2 - Going the Distance

Road Racing - GT & Super GT - A 800

2012 Jaguar XKR-S * Tune - 173 823 336 (v4)
2013 Aston Martin V12 Vantage S * Tune - 963 723 177 * Decent grip; Good top speed; Stock engine; Hot Wheels tune; v1
2010 Maserati Gran Turismo S * Tune - 547 023 206 * Lacks braking; Stock engine; v2
2017 Aston Martin DB11 * Tune - 153 787 435 * Stock engine only; v2
2021 Lexus LC 500 * Tune - 305 052 584 * Playlist car; Stock engine; v1
2019 Aston Martin Vantage * Tune - 404 086 715 * Downgraded to A class; Good handling but slow overall; Stock engine; v2

___ 

Treasure Hunt - Blame Impala

What to do: Using any Chevrolet Impala either get an Ultimate Wreckage skill or maybe lots of wreckage skills

___ 

RALLY ADVENTURE DLC

Seasonal PR Stunts

Speed Trap - La Cantera - Mustang - A 800

2018 Ford Mustang RTR Spec 5 * Tune - 589 436 345 * Start ~500 yards in the east dirt hairpin

Championship 3 - Mustang Rally

Night Rally - Mustang - A 800

2018 Ford Mustang RTR Spec 5 * Tune - 589 436 345 * Good mid-speed accel; Comfortable to drive; v2
1969 Ford Mustang Boss 302 * Tune - 246 848 148 * Superb; v2

___ 

HOT WHEELS DLC

Seasonal PR Stunts

Speed Zone - Supersonic Spiral - Lamborghini - S1 900

2016 Lamborghini Centenario LP 770-4 * Tune - 156 811 181 * Start at least 0.7 miles away on the north east track (try to spawn in small loop)

Championship 4 - It's Race-a-Bull

Speed - Lamborghini - S1 900

2016 Lamborghini Centenario LP 770-4 * Tune - 156 811 181 * Stock tirebombs; Good grip; Excellent braking; 7-gears; Stock engine; True Purist; v2
2014 Lamborghini Huracan LP 610-4 * Tune - 204 826 092 * Fast; Stock engine; True Purist; v3
2016 Lamborghini Aventador SuperVeloce * Tune - 124 905 282 * Arcade racing game car; Excellent braking; Stock engine only; True Purist; v2

___ 

Event Lab Blueprints!

Easy Win Road Sprint - 696 659 852
Easy Win Road Circuit - 177 632 200
Easy Win Dirt Trail - 991 376 926
Easy Win Dirt Scramble - 135 436 707
Easy Win Cross Country Sprint - 114 199 871
Easy Win Cross Country Circuit - 181 401 852
Easy Win Street Scene Sprint - 134 229 457
Easy Win Drag Strip - 812 084 897

___ 

Horizon 4 and 5 Tunes Archive!

https://www.reddit.com/useBigHeadDjango/comments/r4ptt6/forza_horizon_4_and_horizon_5_tunes_archive/

___ 

Thank you to everyone for your downloads, uses, likes, follows, shares and feedback! Check my in-game profile for more tunes. You can check my reddit profile for more content
📸 Also don't stop yourself from checking out my photos on the creative hub. Wow! What beautiful photos! 📸
Don't hesitate to ask if you need any help!
🛠️ I am open to requests for cars you might want me to tune! It would also help me understand FH5 tuning better. So let me know the car and class and I'd get back to you! 🛠️

___ 

Have a great week! 🥳

Hello everyone! BigHedDjango here, tunes for this week to help you out.
Weekly photo: https://i.imgur.com/88KGCCS.png
All feedback on tunes is appreciated - good or bad. Specially when tunes are bad. At the end of the day I am just the mechanic and you guys are the racers. Do not hesitate irrespective of your tuning knowledge or racing skills!
Tuning method: 1. Stock look - stock wheel rims and size, no aero (unless absolutely necessary for handling and stability) 2. Tuned for automatic/manual players by not skipping clutch+gearbox upgrades 3. Max performance with max handling possible 4. All cars tuned vs. Unbeatable AI, tracks/weather conditions are now unknown since time travel no longer works. Since release AI has been inconsistent between many car types and weather conditions, not every car will win 10/10 races vs Unbeatable AI without rewind/restart abuse 5. Bodykit used if it does not hurt performance

___ 

Forzathon Weekly Challenge - Time to Play

2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray * Tune - 142 362 222 * Easy to use; Decent grip even in rain; Good braking; Lacks S1 top speed; 6-gears; Sigala wide body kit; Chevrolet rear wing; Custom rims; v1 * Event Lab BP - Easy Win Drag Strip - 812 084 897

___ 

Trial - MX-5 Drive

Road Racing - Mazda MX-5 - A 800

NOTE: Try to block and slow down AI and help teammates in order to win. One player on the team needs to take at least P3 and slow down the AI for a guaranteed win

2016 Mazda MX-5 * Tune - 446 488 045 * Fastest option; v1
2005 Mazda Mazdaspeed MX-5 * Tune - 386 598 479 * Low A class top speed; v1
1994 Mazda MX-5 Miata * Tune - 686 056 119 * Lacks braking; Lacks A class top speed; v2 - rebuild, smoother, faster
2013 Mazda MX-5 * Tune - 159 091 037 * Low A class top speed; v1

___ 

Event Lab 1 - Eagle Forest Raceway

Modern Supercars - A 800

2012 Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Spyder Performante * Tune - 171 863 878 * Playlist car; Good braking; Low A class top speed; Slowish car overall; Stock engine; True Purist; v1
2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Coupe * Tune - 575 887 945 * Tune by Naitsab243; Custom rims; Rear aero

___ 

Event Lab 2 - Emerald GP Circuit

Retro Hot Hatch - B 700

1974 Honda Civic RS * Tune - 689 859 387 * FWD; Meta car; Meta tune; Lacks top speed; Wide body kit + Classic rear wing + Custom rims; Dry only; v2

___ 

Seasonal PR Stunts

2010 Mosler MT900S * Tune - 106 016 211 * Superb grip; Good handling but oversteery; v3

Speed Trap - Northern Passage - Extreme Track Toys - S2 998

• Start at least 0.7 miles from the west

Speed Trap - Escarpment - Extreme Track Toys - S2 998

• Start 0.5 miles from the west. Turn in hard on final right hand corner, can even cut offroad

Speed Zone - Camino Del Cielo - Extreme Track Toys - S2 998

• Start at least 1.3 miles away on the north east road. Enter the east gate at full throttle, feather brake for first right hand corner and final hairpin only. You can also start max 1 mile from the west cause need to brake immediately upton entering the west gate
  

NOTE: All Championships are locked at Highly Skilled difficulty

Championship 1 - Picking Favorite

Road Racing - Forza Cover Cars - S1 900

2013 Dodge SRT Viper GTS Anniversary Edition (Maybe not an option) * Tune - 301 899 128 * Meta car; Meta tune; Good grip; Oversteer but no traction loss; * Lacks S1 top speed so sprints with lots of corners or circuits only; * Drag tires - great launch, weak at slow corners, tuned for wet roads as well; * Stock engine; Custom rims; Full aero; Rear diffuser; Sideskirts; v1
2013 Dodge SRT Viper GTS * Tune - 693 168 484 * Stock engine; v3
2014 Lamborghini Huracan LP 610-4 * Tune - 204 826 092 * Fast; Stock engine; True Purist; v3
2016 Lamborghini Centenario LP 770-4 * Tune - 156 811 181 * Stock tirebombs; Good grip; Excellent braking; 7-gears; Stock engine; True Purist; v2
2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS * Tune - 246 355 163 * Stock rear wing; Stock engine; v1
2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray * Tune - 142 362 222 * Easy to use; Decent grip even in rain; Good braking; Lacks S1 top speed; 6-gears; Sigala wide body kit; Chevrolet rear wing; Custom rims; v1

___ 

Championship 2 - Going the Distance

Road Racing - GT & Super GT - A 800

2012 Jaguar XKR-S * Tune - 173 823 336 (v4)
2013 Aston Martin V12 Vantage S * Tune - 963 723 177 * Decent grip; Good top speed; Stock engine; Hot Wheels tune; v1
2010 Maserati Gran Turismo S * Tune - 547 023 206 * Lacks braking; Stock engine; v2
2017 Aston Martin DB11 * Tune - 153 787 435 * Stock engine only; v2
2021 Lexus LC 500 * Tune - 305 052 584 * Playlist car; Stock engine; v1
2019 Aston Martin Vantage * Tune - 404 086 715 * Downgraded to A class; Good handling but slow overall; Stock engine; v2

___ 

Treasure Hunt - Blame Impala

What to do: Using any Chevrolet Impala either get an Ultimate Wreckage skill or maybe lots of wreckage skills

___ 

RALLY ADVENTURE DLC

Seasonal PR Stunts

Speed Trap - La Cantera - Mustang - A 800

2018 Ford Mustang RTR Spec 5 * Tune - 589 436 345 * Start ~500 yards in the east dirt hairpin

Championship 3 - Mustang Rally

Night Rally - Mustang - A 800

2018 Ford Mustang RTR Spec 5 * Tune - 589 436 345 * Good mid-speed accel; Comfortable to drive; v2
1969 Ford Mustang Boss 302 * Tune - 246 848 148 * Superb; v2

___ 

HOT WHEELS DLC

Seasonal PR Stunts

Speed Zone - Supersonic Spiral - Lamborghini - S1 900

2016 Lamborghini Centenario LP 770-4 * Tune - 156 811 181 * Start at least 0.7 miles away on the north east track (try to spawn in small loop)

Championship 4 - It's Race-a-Bull

Speed - Lamborghini - S1 900

2016 Lamborghini Centenario LP 770-4 * Tune - 156 811 181 * Stock tirebombs; Good grip; Excellent braking; 7-gears; Stock engine; True Purist; v2
2014 Lamborghini Huracan LP 610-4 * Tune - 204 826 092 * Fast; Stock engine; True Purist; v3
2016 Lamborghini Aventador SuperVeloce * Tune - 124 905 282 * Arcade racing game car; Excellent braking; Stock engine only; True Purist; v2

___ 

Event Lab Blueprints!

Easy Win Road Sprint - 696 659 852
Easy Win Road Circuit - 177 632 200
Easy Win Dirt Trail - 991 376 926
Easy Win Dirt Scramble - 135 436 707
Easy Win Cross Country Sprint - 114 199 871
Easy Win Cross Country Circuit - 181 401 852
Easy Win Street Scene Sprint - 134 229 457
Easy Win Drag Strip - 812 084 897

___ 

Horizon 4 and 5 Tunes Archive!

https://www.reddit.com/useBigHeadDjango/comments/r4ptt6/forza_horizon_4_and_horizon_5_tunes_archive/

___ 

Thank you to everyone for your downloads, uses, likes, follows, shares and feedback! Check my in-game profile for more tunes. You can check my reddit profile for more content
📸 Also don't stop yourself from checking out my photos on the creative hub. Wow! What beautiful photos! 📸
Don't hesitate to ask if you need any help!
🛠️ I am open to requests for cars you might want me to tune! It would also help me understand FH5 tuning better. So let me know the car and class and I'd get back to you! 🛠️

___ 

Have a great week! 🥳

DAY: MAY 15, 2024

• 5-15-2024ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE PROCESSES WITHOUT SYMPTOMS. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? Everyone experiences aging in their own way, and factors such as genetics, lifestyle and environment play a role in this process. Some individuals reach the age of 90 or even 100 in good health, without medications or brain disease. But how do these individuals maintain their health as they age?
• 5-15-2024COULD A LOW-CAL KETO DIET HELP EASE ACNE? In a small pilot study, some young women looking to lose weight on a low-calorie keto diet got an unexpected benefit: Their acne began to clear up. “These findings represent an opportunity to control a skin disease that affects most teenagers and many adults at some point in their lifetimes, causing distress, embarrassment, anxiety and low self-confidence among sufferers, robbing them of their quality of life,
• 5-15-2024FIGHTING FAT AND INFLAMMATION: SCIENTISTS DEVELOP NEW COMPOUNDS The menthyl esters of valine (MV) and isoleucine (MI) are multi-faceted molecules with enhanced anti-inflammatory and anti-obesity activities. The discovery and development of such molecules can result in newer classes of therapeutic drugs to treat a wide range of metabolic disorders. Credit: Gen-ichiro Arimura from Tokyo University of Science Modified derivatives of natural products have led to significant therapeutic advances and commercial success in recent times. Menthol is a naturally occurring cyclic monoterpene alcohol found in various plants,
• 5-15-2024TREATMENT OPTIONS INCLUDE ALTERNATIVES TO CHEMOTHERAPY, EXPERT EXPLAINS Chemotherapy is usually the first treatment doctors try to treat lymphoma, including the two most common forms: non-Hodgkin and Hodgkin. But alternatives to chemotherapy are developing, as first-line treatments and as backup options, explains Stephen Ansell, M.D., Ph.D., hematology chair and hematologic oncologist at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. Lymphoma is a blood cancer that begins when a germ-fighting white blood cell, called a lymphocyte, mutates and rapidly multiplies
• 5-15-2024CHECKING YOUR BELLY BUTTON CAN TELL YOU A LOT ABOUT YOUR HEALTH Navels, belly buttons, innies or outies … whatever term you use, your umbilicus may have plenty to tell you about the state of your health. For some, they are the thing of nightmares—omphalophobia (the fear of belly buttons) is a real condition. For others, they are a fashion accessory to be shown off in a crop top, or decorated with a body piercing. Whatever your feelings about belly buttons, one thing’s for sure—it once joined you to your mother
• 5-15-2024STUDY FINDS H5N1 VIRUS FROM 2022 MINK OUTBREAK CAPABLE OF INEFFICIENT AIRBORNE TRANSMISSION Direct contact transmission, weight loss, and survival for ferrets infected with A/mink (H5N1). Four donor ferrets were inoculated with A/mink (H5N1) and 24?h later each donor was paired with a contact in the same cage. Nasal wash samples were collected every other day for 13 days, and weight loss and clinical signs were monitored. A, B display viral titers from donor and direct contacts,
• 5-15-2024STUDY SHOWS COMBINING JOYFUL ACTIVITIES WITH ‘SAVORING’ THERAPY SHOWS POSITIVE MENTAL HEALTH RESULTS AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE With rates of depression rising among young people on university campuses, a team of SMU researchers found that combining two different therapeutic approaches demonstrated effectiveness in improving students’ overall mental health. Their findings show that students receiving behavioral activation (BA) therapy augmented with savoring (S) experienced improvements in positive and negative mood. Behavioral activation is a therapeutic approach that alleviates depression by increasing engagement in meaningful activities,
• 5-15-2024AI-BASED SURGICAL PREDICTION MODELS HAVE LIMITS Prediction models generated by machine learning are being increasingly used in medicine to identify risk factors and possible outcomes, especially for total joint replacements of knees and hips—although researchers warn that machine-generated predictions are currently being drawn from a limited data pool. “Machine learning has great potential for processing ‘big data’ and has proved its undeniable capability, although it is not free of issues,
• 5-15-2024STUDY FINDS FRONT-OF-PACKAGE NUTRITION LABELING RESULTS IN HEALTHIER PRODUCTS A study finds that a food labeling system introduced by the French government in 2017 resulted in healthier products. The study of Nutri-Score, a voluntary labeling system that assigns a simple letter grade based on nutrition, is believed to be the first to examine how food manufacturers responded to the change. Using detailed product and nutrition data from 2014 to 2021,
• 5-15-2024EXPERT EXPLAINS PUBLIC HEALTH CONCERNS ON AVIAN FLU Using genetically engineered mice expressing a specific variant of HLA, researchers uncover the instrumental role of this protein in the development of drug eruptions. They found that when HLA binds to an antiviral drug, abacavir, it can lead to the formation of defective proteins, which trigger a stress response in the endoplasmic reticulum, ultimately cascading into drug eruption. This implies that HLA is involved in previously unknown signaling pathways and processes that go beyond its traditionally accepted role within the immune system.
• 5-15-2024EXPLORING THE MECHANISM BEHIND DRUG ERUPTIONS IN THE SKINUsing genetically engineered mice expressing a specific variant of HLA, researchers uncover the instrumental role of this protein in the development of drug eruptions. They found that when HLA binds to an antiviral drug, abacavir, it can lead to the formation of defective proteins, which trigger a stress response in the endoplasmic reticulum, ultimately cascading into drug eruption.
• 5-15-2024STUDY PROVIDES BLUEPRINT FOR HYBRID-VIRTUAL HOME VISIT MODEL TO SUPPORT PATIENTS WHO DO NOT LIVE CLOSE TO A HOSPITAL a team developed and successfully tested a hybrid-virtual home visit model that provides care to veterans who do not live close to a VA health care facility.
• 5-15-2024HOW SCIENCE IS CHANGING THE GAME IN SPORTS Digital twins of athletes allow athletes and coaches to evaluate performance and trial technique changes. It’s an open secret that the countries that win the most medals in the Olympics and Paralympics combine talent and technology. Athletes are preparing for the next three Olympics and Paralympics in Paris in 2024
• 5-15-2024STUDY REVEALS HOW PRACTICE FORMS NEW MEMORY PATHWAYS IN THE BRAIN The effects of optogenetic inhibition on WM task performance. a, The experimental set-up. b, The delayed-association WM task trial types; licking was assessed during the 3?s choice period, with early- and late-delays periods noted. c, Learning progress across eight sessions, measured on the basis of the percentage of correct responses. d, Learning session example
• 5-15-2024A MEDITERRANEAN DIET CAN EASE SYMPTOMS OF STRESS AND ANXIETY, SAYS STUDY It’s no secret that the Mediterranean diet is good for your health. Already recommended to reduce the risks of bowel cancer, heart disease, and dementia, new research shows that the Mediterranean diet can also reduce symptoms of stress and anxiety.
• 5-15-2024ENHANCING PATIENT RESPONSE TO CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY
• 5-15-2024LONGER SPRINT INTERVALS CAN IMPROVE MUSCLE OXYGEN UTILIZATION COMPARED TO SHORTER INTERVALS
• 5-15-2024NEW EVIDENCE FOR USE OF ANTI-INFLAMMATORY THERAPY FOR PREVENTION OF RECURRENT VASCULAR EVENTS IN STROKE
• 5-15-2024STUDY PAVES THE WAY FOR AN ACTIVE AGENT AGAINST HEPATITIS E
• 5-15-2024RESEARCHERS DEVELOP METHOD TO MONITOR PATIENTS WITH SPINAL MUSCULAR ATROPHY USING SOUND WAVES
• 5-15-2024INFERTILITY TREATMENT FOUND TO DOUBLE THE RISK OF POSTPARTUM HEART DISEASE
• 5-15-2024A PROMISING APPROACH TO INTRAOPERATIVE CANCER DIAGNOSIS
• 5-15-2024HOW ROGUE NEUTROPHILS HELP LUNG CANCER SPREAD
• 5-15-2024WOMEN PHYSICIANS ARE UNDERREPRESENTED AND FEEL LESS IMPACTFUL IN CANCER TREATMENT PLANNING VIRTUAL MEETINGS
• 5-15-2024ONLY 20% OF U.S. NONPROFIT HOSPITALS INVESTED IN HOUSING AS PART OF THE FEDERAL COMMUNITY BENEFIT MANDATE
• 5-15-2024NEW STUDY LINKS AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER TO DISRUPTED DEVELOPMENTAL DOPAMINE
• 5-15-2024STUDY FINDS SEVERE ISCHEMIC STROKES ARE RARE IN PATIENT POPULATION
• 5-15-2024CYCLIN D1 EXPRESSION MAY BE A BIOMARKER FOR PENILE CANCER
• 5-15-2024GUIDELINE ISSUED FOR PEOPLE WITH EPILEPSY WHO MAY BECOME PREGNANT
• 5-15-2024NEW CARDIAC RESEARCH COULD SAVE WOMEN’S LIVES BY IMPROVING DETECTION OF HEART FAILURE
• 5-15-2024PATIENTS REPORT SIGNIFICANT SYMPTOM REDUCTION WITHIN A SINGLE INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE ENCOUNTER
• 5-15-2024STUDY LINKS PROTEIN SECRETED BY BLOOD VESSELS TO DRUG-RESISTANT CANCER
• 5-15-2024RESEARCHERS EXPLORE THE ROLE OF OF TRANSPOSABLE ELEMENTS IN MYOCARDITIS
• 5-15-2024STUDY REVEALS IMMUNOTHERAPY’S POTENTIAL IN BOOSTING IMMUNE SYSTEMS OF OLDER INDIVIDUALS
• 5-15-2024CANADIAN HOSPITAL DATA SHOW LONGER, COSTLIER STAYS FOR PATIENTS EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS
• 5-15-2024SCIENTISTS WANT TO KNOW HOW THE SMELLS OF NATURE BENEFIT OUR HEALTH
• 5-15-2024STUDY FINDS TWO GENES OF THE GERMLINE ARE ESSENTIAL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRAIN TUMORS IN DROSOPHILA
• 5-15-2024EVALUATING A NEW GROUP TRAINING TOOL FOR THE PREVENTION OF DEMENTIA
• 5-15-2024RESEARCH CHALLENGES LINK BETWEEN MOTOR IMPAIRMENT AND BRAIN INJURY
• 5-15-2024RESEARCH CHALLENGES LINK BETWEEN MOTOR IMPAIRMENT AND BRAIN INJURY
• 5-15-2024CHIROPRACTIC ASSOCIATED WITH LOWER LIKELIHOOD OF TRAMADOL PRESCRIPTION IN ADULTS WITH SCIATICA
• 5-15-2024UNVEILING THE IMPACT OF JOB LOSS ON THE HEALTH OF IMMIGRANTS IN GERMANY
• 5-15-2024HEALTH CARE INTERPRETERS IMPORTANT FOR HEART ATTACK REHABILITATION, SAYS STUDY
• 5-15-2024RESEARCHERS FIND MICROPLASTICS IN CANINE AND HUMAN TESTICULAR TISSUE
• 5-15-2024ANTISEIZURE MEDICATIONS CAN PRODUCE LIFE-THREATENING REACTIONS
• 5-15-2024ADULTS WHO HAD DIFFICULT CHILDHOODS ARE NOT RECEIVING SUFFICIENT MENTAL HEALTH CARE, FINDS CALIFORNIA STUDY
• 5-15-2024AI MAY IMPROVE DOCTOR–PATIENT INTERACTIONS FOR OLDER ADULTS WITH CANCER
• 5-15-2024BLOOD PRESSURE DRUGS MORE THAN DOUBLE BONE-FRACTURE RISK IN NURSING HOME PATIENTS
• 5-15-2024PREVENTING PEDIATRIC FALLS
• 5-15-2024I’M PREGNANT. DO I NEED A MULTIVITAMIN?
• 5-15-2024TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION LINKED TO BODY MASS INDEX: STUDY
• 5-15-2024HOW DID THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AFFECT OLDER ADULTS’ TECHNOLOGY USE?
• 5-15-2024STUDY FINDS LINK BETWEEN BMI TRAJECTORIES AND FRACTURE RISK IN LATE ADULTHOOD
• 5-15-2024STUDY FINDS REDUCED RISK OF BREAST CANCER FOLLOWING BARIATRIC SURGERY IN WOMEN WITH HYPERINSULINEMIA
• 5-15-2024FEWER US OVERDOSE DEATHS WERE REPORTED LAST YEAR, BUT EXPERTS ARE STILL CAUTIOUS
• 5-15-2024PRE- AND POST-SURGICAL IMMUNOTHERAPY IMPROVES OUTCOMES FOR PATIENTS WITH OPERABLE LUNG CANCER, PHASE III STUDY FINDS
• 5-15-2024NEW METHOD USES TAU PROTEIN DEPOSITION PATTERNS TO PREDICT ALZHEIMER’S SEVERITY
• 5-15-2024OLDER NATIVE AMERICANS MAY EXPERIENCE HIGHER LEVELS OF COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT
• 5-15-2024RESEARCHERS DEVELOP INNOVATIVE PLATFORM FOR MODELING HUMAN MUSCLE DISEASES IN WORMS
• 5-15-2024CLIMATE CHANGE IS LIKELY TO AGGRAVATE BRAIN CONDITIONS, STUDY FINDS
• 5-15-2024NEW STUDY SHOWS CONTINUED HIGH EFFECTIVENESS OF HPV VACCINATION IN ENGLAND
• 5-15-2024FAT-ENLARGED AXILLARY NODES ON MAMMOGRAM MAY INDICATE HIGHER CVD RISK
• 5-15-2024NOVEL INHIBITOR INSIGHTS OFFER PATHWAY TO PREVENTING PXR-ASSOCIATED DRUG RESISTANCE
• 5-15-2024THE DOCTOR IS IN… BUT WHAT’S BEHIND THEM? STUDY REVEALS IMPACTS OF TELEHEALTH BACKGROUND SETTINGS
• 5-15-2024HIGH TELEHEALTH USE TIED TO INCREASED HEALTH CARE UTILIZATION, COST
• 5-15-2024NEW BIOMARKER IDENTIFIED TO DIAGNOSE ALZHEIMER’S IN ASYMPTOMATIC STAGES
• 5-15-2024U.S. DROWNING DEATHS RISING AGAIN AFTER YEARS OF DECLINE
• 5-15-2024STUDY FINDS ASTROCYTIC PH REGULATOR CAN REPAIR BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER, REVERSE BRAIN DAMAGE CAUSED BY ISCHEMIC STROKE
• 5-15-2024DISPARITIES SEEN IN CARBAPENEM-RESISTANT ENTEROBACTERALES BLOODSTREAM INFECTION OUTCOMES
• 5-15-2024WHY IS WHOOPING COUGH SURGING IN THE UK? FALLING VACCINATION RATES MAY BE THE ANSWER
• 5-15-2024CARDIAC REHAB IS A PROVEN BUT UNDERUSED THERAPY IN WOMEN, BUT TAILORED RESOURCES AIM TO CHANGE THAT
• 5-15-2024IRON FUELS IMMUNE CELLS—AND IT COULD MAKE ASTHMA WORSE
• 5-15-2024NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR CELL THERAPIES AND PERSONALIZED MEDICINE
• 5-15-2024HIGHER INCOME REDUCES STROKE MORTALITY RISK BY A THIRD, NEW STUDY SHOWS
• 5-15-2024SOME FORMS OF AUGMENTED BRAIN STIMULATION RECOMMENDED FOR MAJOR DEPRESSION
• 5-15-2024LOW TESTOSTERONE IN MEN ASSOCIATED WITH AN EARLY DEATH
• 5-15-2024WEARING FACE MASKS DID NOT REDUCE RISK OF COVID INFECTION AFTER FIRST OMICRON WAVE, RESEARCH SUGGESTS
• 5-15-2024BLUETOOTH TRACKING DEVICES PROVIDE NEW VIEW INTO CARE HOME QUALITY
• 5-15-2024RACIAL DISPARITIES IN CHILDHOOD OBESITY ON THE RISE IN STUDY OF NYC PUBLIC SCHOOLS
• 5-15-2024TWO DECADES OF STUDIES SUGGEST HEALTH BENEFITS ASSOCIATED WITH PLANT-BASED DIETS, BUT CAUTION URGED
• 5-15-2024TRANSCATHETER VALVE REPLACEMENT OUTCOMES SIMILAR TO SURGERY FOR SEVERE AORTIC STENOSIS
• 5-15-2024RECOGNIZING THE PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL TOLL THAT CARING FOR A LOVED ONE WITH A CHRONIC CONDITION HAS ON THE CAREGIVER
• 5-15-2024DIFFICULT WORK ARRANGEMENTS FORCE MANY WOMEN TO STOP BREASTFEEDING EARLY—HERE’S HOW TO PREVENT THIS
• 5-15-2024DAY-LONG WORKSHOP IN COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY FOUND TO EFFECTIVELY REDUCE DEPRESSION IN 16- TO 18-YEAR-OLDS
• 5-15-2024REPORT HIGHLIGHTS BIG GAPS IN CANCER OUTCOMES BASED ON RACE
• 5-15-2024NEW BLOOD TEST COULD HELP SPOT PREECLAMPSIA IN FIRST TRIMESTER
• 5-15-2024HALF-MATCHED FAMILY DONORS OFFER BEST OUTCOMES FOR HISPANIC PATIENTS UNDERGOING BONE MARROW TRANSPLANTS: STUDY
• 5-15-2024SCIENTISTS UNRAVEL GENETIC BASIS FOR NEURODEGENERATIVE DISORDERS THAT AFFECT VISION
• 5-15-2024INCLUDING MORE WOMEN ON HOSPITAL TEAMS YIELDS BETTER SURGERY OUTCOMES, NEW STUDY FINDS
• 5-15-2024RESEARCH SHEDS LIGHT ON HOW PROTEINS LINKED TO ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE INFLUENCE NEURONAL GROWTH
• 5-15-2024RESEARCHERS IDENTIFY NEW MARKER FOR BREAST CANCER PROGNOSIS
• 5-15-2024GETTING OUT AND ABOUT IN THE COMMUNITY MAY BE LINKED TO COGNITIVE FUNCTION
• 5-15-2024NOVEL TECHNIQUE HELPS PREDICT RISK OF A MENISCUS TEAR IN THE KNEE
• 5-15-2024CAN ROBOT-INSPIRED COMPUTER-ASSISTED THERAPY BENEFIT CHILDREN WITH AUTISM?
• 5-15-2024RESEARCH FINDS EXERCISE HAS A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON IMMUNE CELLS THAT SUPPORT BRAIN FUNCTION
• 5-15-2024CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES KILL 10,000 EUROPEANS A DAY: WHO
• 5-15-2024NEW TOOL CAN HELP SURGEONS QUICKLY SEARCH VIDEOS AND CREATE INTERACTIVE FEEDBACK
• 5-15-2024SCIENTISTS DISCOVER BLOOD PROTEINS THAT MAY GIVE CANCER WARNING SEVEN YEARS BEFORE DIAGNOSIS
• 5-15-2024HOW THEY IMPACT LIFESPAN IN VERTEBRATES
• 5-15-2024UN AGENCY AUTHORIZES SECOND VACCINE AGAINST DENGUE AMID OUTBREAKS IN THE AMERICAS
• 5-15-2024IF YOU’VE TRIED MEDITATING BUT CAN’T SIT STILL, HERE’S HOW—AND WHY—TO TRY AGAIN
• 5-15-2024RESEARCHERS DETERMINE THE MUTATIONS THAT PROTECT MICE FROM B-CELL CANCERS
• 5-15-2024UP TO 246 MILLION OLDER PEOPLE MAY BE EXPOSED TO HEAT RISK BY 2050 DUE TO GLOBAL WARMING
• 5-15-2024MORE RESEARCH SUPPORTS ANDROGEN TREATMENT FOR BREAST CANCER
• 5-15-2024UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE GUT MICROBIOME–BRAIN INTERACTIONS PLAY IN SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING
• 5-15-2024NEW STUDY IDENTIFIES MECHANISM OF IMMUNE EVASION OF SARS-COV-2 AND VARIANTS
• 5-15-2024RESEARCH SHOWS RECENT RELEASE FROM JAIL A BIG RISK FACTOR FOR SUICIDE
• 5-15-2024RESEARCH COLLABORATION DEVELOPS LIFESAVING ‘ARK’ TECHNOLOGY FOR CHRONIC KIDNEY DISEASE PATIENTS
• 5-15-2024FOUR IN 10 ADULTS WITH DIABETES REPORT TAKING A GLP-1 RECEPTOR AGONIST
• 5-15-2024NEIGHBORHOOD INEQUITY TIED TO MORE PEOPLE LIVING WITH VISION DIFFICULTY, BLINDNESS
• 5-15-2024CHILD MALTREATMENT LINKED TO EXTERNALIZING, INTERNALIZING BEHAVIOR
• 5-15-2024MOST SLOW RESPONDERS TO TIRZEPATIDE DO LOSE CLINICALLY MEANINGFUL WEIGHT
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Good morning everyone. So CPI is a 3.4. June of 2023, we had an amazing print of 3.0 Flat. I was pretty shocked and we had a good reason to rally… It did seem like we were ahead of schedule… Well we havent had a low print since! The end of 2023 many analysts were calling for between 6 and 8 rate cuts in 2024. I had been calling for 2… maybe 3… but the way things are going, we may get 0! Inflation is high still, GDP is running positive, unemployment is near 3.7-3.8%, earnings have been coming in good overall, near 5-6% earnings growth and 4-5% sales growth… the markets are at record highs…. This is not the data the Fed wants to cut rates… I do not see the Fed shocking the markets with another hike… but I see it is possible what they have been saying all along, while traders pushed false narratives..

RATES ARE GOING TO STAY HIGHER, FOR LONGER!

The Fed has said this for many months but the market refused to believe it… and to be honest, I had expected the economy to tank….
When rates are high the cost of the dollar is higher, when the cost of the dollar is higher, people cut back on spending…. When they cut back on spending, companies have lower sales…. Lower earnings… lay people off….. GDP goes flat to negative and 2 straight negative GDP is defined as a recession…. I am shocked… because my study of economics these facts are why I havent been full head on in the market. I am in about 70% cash.. I took some money out for real estate, doing serious renovations.. I also just closed on 2 properties last Friday… I met the Mayor of a small town last Friday and I am prepared to bid on a large piece of land from the town… If I get the land I will like to build a high rise building… Unfortunately for me, I had estimated that this building would be maybe 10 million…. But some architects have told me this will be higher than 20! I may have to liquidate at least 50-75% of my portfolio to build it [Long term accounts as well]… and once I get the plot of land I will know more… I have to send the architect to estimate and do blueprints once I have the land I want to build on. I am tired of renovations but every house I buy is 100-140 years old in those areas of CT. My passion is the market but the data doesn’t support me going all in…
In 2021, there were days I was in 90% stocks! It was crazy! As trader, having 50-60% stocks is good because you want that ammo in case of an emergency… I understand when you start and have a small portfolio that you do not have this liberty… So I understand..
Rome was not built in a day…. I started with 2,000 in 1994….
If data did support all these record highs and I wasn’t scared to trade I probably would hold off on the high rise building. The market is my passion… but I am diversified….
It would actually break my heart to sell these 3 positions:
GS 1,000 at 60 from 2008
JPM 1,000 at 30 from 2008
WMT 1,000 at 16 from 2008 [Split and now 3,000]
So I am trading carefully because of the data… and also I will find out in a few weeks if I can get the plot of land… it is about 1 acre.. I believe I can build a 30-40,000 SQ foot building with close to 100 units…

Some earnings since yesterday’s close:
UA 60 [Bad guidance though] LSPD 70 GAMB 75 GOOS 85 WMT 75
DDS 70 WMS 75 DE 70 [Bad Guidance] NICE 80 IQ 65 BIDU 80 [I don’t want Chinese ADRs!] ZTO 75 JD 80 [No Chinese for me] GRAB 60 GORV 50 CPA 75 BTBT 75
CSCO 80 RILY 55 CSCO 65


I made a bid for PYPL YOU SOFI and PERI… All I did was sell PSEC 5.50 that I got end of February at 5.65. If it goes higher I still have 5.90 block, if lower I can buy back. The 5.90 I got stuck in January. I have received months of dividends while I waited. I did not bid for AMC or GME puts… I was hoping they would go higher… Although I could have made some money… I guess I was disappointed because Tuesday morning AMC was 13+ and GME was 80+ . Even if they never see those prices again….. [Anything is possible but not likely] I was emotional upset that my orders did not fill for puts… They were small bets about 500 bucks… But for example.
GME Puts July 19^th 60 Strike are now 35
I was buying 1 Put for total of 500….. would now be 3,500
AMC Puts July 19^th 10 Strike are now near 6
I was buying 5 puts for about 550…..would now be near 4,000
Youd be mad too!
I don’t blame anyone for taking advantage of the volatility short or long… I wish everyone to make tons of money and to have the freedom they want!

5 Trade Ideas:
BILL – I had hoped to buy a 2^nd block at 55, but I chickened out, I still have 500 at 60.50.
The slower growth does suck, but I can still see why it should be 75 or so… Lowered growth to about 20%, earnings near 2.50… I can see why it should have close to 30x PE.. 2.50x30 = 75

PYPL – After good earnings and a new 52 week high, wham.. I did bid 62 the other day and almost got in, I want to keep trading this ticker, I believe fair value is near 80, but yes, it is no longer a growing business at near 7-9% growth

CAR CVS – These 2 have been horses for me, well CVS I started trading block 2, less than 2 weeks ago. I have traded it 3x for about 5 dollars total. 500 share blocks. I have 1 block at 84 so I am down 29 dollars…. But if you subtract the 5 I’ve made recently, I am cutting the losses… I have traded CAR since Feb 14^th, I started my trade with 12,375. [100 shares at 123.75] I have made near 10,000

PERI – I do have a block at 22, but I have been trading a 2^nd block, they will start a buyback soon

YOU SOFI – these are just 2 others, there are about 10 stocks in total I am watching

Man OPRX a couple of weeks was 8… now 14.. The last 2 earnings were very good, that is why I am speculating on PRCH, 1,000 at 3.75

The contents of this post are for information and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, accounting, or legal advice. ... By choosing to make a trade you are responsible for your own actions. Please do some due diligence. These are trades I am making and you can follow along. If you make a winning trade, I do not even expect a bravo or thanks but that’s fine, if you lose on a trade the same difference.. I do not even expect an upvote or reward… The Elite team is aware of the risks and volatility in the market.

Good luck everyone let’s make money. Share trades, ideas here during trading hours. Our main goal here is to make money so I hope we can help eachother. I will be in and out of here as well.

The new discovery feature “Feed”. It’s like seeing TikTok live. I love it can see all these big and small streamers without having to actively search for them. Best thing twitch has done for a while. Plus I got new followers and subscribers due to discovery and they just happen to stop by.
Well done twitch you’re finally following the blueprint of other successful social media applications.