Hello Campfire Tales! I am a huge fan of your channel and thought it would be a great idea to share with you one of my terrifying experiences/encounters as a former park ranger at Everglades National park. I I woke up bright and early to the sound of my alarm. I opened my eyes, having a positive, carefree attitude. It was almost as if I knew that that day was going to be a good day, but boy, was I terribly wrong..
I stretched and let out a sigh filled with positivity, almost as if my body was trying to butter me up for what was about to come. I rolled out of bed cheerfully and headed to the bathroom. I stopped in my tracks when I saw something peculiar in the toilet.
I quickly turned around and left the bathroom because I really didn;t want to deal with anything on such a positive day, but after a while of staring at my bed in wonder of what the thing i saw was, I convinced myself that despite the type of day i was having, I still needed to check out the peculiar thing.
I turned back around and walked into the bathroom to see the horrific scene of two yellow, inhuman eyes staring back at me. I screamed in fear and jumped back a few feet. I began to hyperventilate as I continued to stare at the two eyes staring back at me, seemingly into my soul.
I continued to stand there, labored breathing, trying my absolute best to comprehend the bizarre and foreign scene in front of me.
How… or who.. Or what… eyes are those?
I finally recollected myself and decided to take a few steps closer to the scene, but quickly turned back around when I realized just how risky a decision like that could be. I entered my bedroom and found a ski mask. I put the ski mask on, knowing that in reality it most likely wouldn;t protect me from whatever creature was in my toilet, but my philosophy was that something was better than nothing.
I made it back into the bathroom, where the scene was located, and took a few deep breaths to prepare myself for the sort of confrontation I was about to face. I took more deep breaths as I slowly inched closer and closer to the toilet, until eventually I was right back where I had been, standing on top of a toilet, staring at two yellow eyes.
There was something incredibly bizarre and terrifying about these eyes. If you were to look at them, they would look like a normal animal's eyes, but it’s almost as if a malicious energy is radiating off of them.
It certainly could have just been the principle of the situation that was making me feel this way, but I’m not going to brush off the malicious energy theory.
I realized I had been standing there, simply staring at the eyes for upwards of twenty minutes when I finally checked my watch. It was almost as if the eyes possessed a power to distort their victims' perception of time as they knew it. I could have sworn I was only staring at those eyes for thirty seconds, a minute at most, but no, somehow an entire twenty minutes had passed.
I quickly snapped out of staring at the creature and decided to try something. I closed the toilet and flushed the toilet. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth as I began to hear disgusting and horrifying loud noises, and then I heard nothing.
I opened the lid of the toilet and was incredibly relieved to see that the now familiar eyes were no longer there and staring at me. I truthfully had no idea how my plan had worked considering there was no way my toilet had the power to flush away a creature that big, but I was just thankful it was gone.
I stepped away from the toilet and turned on the shower. As I was waiting for it to heat up, a huge amount of disgusting, incomprehensible colored, black sludge came pouring out of the shower drain. I watched in horror for around five seconds until it finally stopped, and the water turned back to normal, and washed away the black sludge completely after around one minute.
Even after the scene was completely done with and the shower was back to normal, I couldn;t stop staring at the place where an incredibly horrific and incomprehensible scene had happened that I was now supposed to simply step into and embrace to get ready for work.
I knew that there was no way in hell I would be able to convince myself to go into the shower, so I simply exited the bathroom and locked the door from the outside using a chair in my room. I was so paranoid that I continuously checked behind me, every second or so, as I walked the very few steps needed to get to my closet which contained my work uniform.
I opened my closet door and screamed and felt intense fear for a split second when I mistook two yellow buttons on one of my shirts for the two yellow eyes I was unfortunately familiar with.
I decided to pick out that shirt , as a sort of way of exposure therapy to s,all, round, yellow objects, which I was aware I would now very unfortunately have a fear of for at least a good portion of the remainder of my life.
I put on the yellow shirt and looked into the mirror as I buttoned it up, feeling tense, feeling as if maybe this was a bad decision to make. I finally finished buttoning up my shirt, and I exited my bedroom and made my way into the living room which contained the front door. I opened the front door and embraced the chilly air, knowing today was going to be a rough day full of discomfort.
I adjusted the shirt on myself in the mirror, trying to gain some confidence to wear it. After a few minutes of doing that, I finally gained the confidence. I exited my room and entered the living room, and then took the few steps needed to reach the front door.
I turned the front door handle and embraced the warm spring air, knowing that today was going to be a rough one. I walked to my vehicle and opened the car door before getting inside and making myself cozy. My drive to work was around forty five minutes long, so at least that gave me some time to ponder about the situation that happened.
I sat in my car, almost crashing a few times, from thinking about the situation too much. Dozens of thoughts rant through my mind.
Am I crazy? Was it all just a hallucination?
What was that creature?
Will I see that creature again?
What came out of the shower head?
Am I safe to return to my home?
After nearly crashing into a car for the sixth time now, I decided to take my mind off of the bizarre creature as it was clearly not safe to think about in the midst of driving a few thousand pound vehicle.
After a while more of driving, this time without thinking about the incident, I arrived at my workplace. I pulled into the dirt parking lot that was next to the rangers office that I was assigned to on that day. I parked in my lucky parking spot and quickly exited the vehicle and I was soon on my way, taking the few dozen steps needed to reach the office door.
I made it to the office door and fumbled around inside of my pocket to find my keys. MY heart sank beneath the floor when I realized there was absolutely nothing in my pocket. It was then that I made the fateful and horrific realization that I had forgotten my keys all the way back at home, clearly having been too distracted by that creature to remember them.
I let out an audible and loud groan of frustration that caused a few nearby birds to fly away.
I was working the early morning shift today, and unfortunately I was assigned to work alone today, meaning there was no one to let me in. I knew that the late morning shift people would not arrive for four hours. It was then that I became aware of my two options: I could either wait four hours for the late morning shift workers to arrive on site and open the door for me, or I could drive forty five minutes there, and forty five minutes back, and then open the door for myself.
I let out one more audible and quiet loud goran of frustration, causing even more birds to fly away. I stepped down the steps that led to the dirt parking lot that was attached to the patio attached to the rangers office. I took the few dozen steps needed to reach my vehicle and I reached into my pocket, pulling out my car keys.
I stood still for a second and looked at my car keys in despair, wishing that I had remembered my other set of keys as well. I unlocked the car and got in the driver's seat. The drive home felt twice as long as it usually would have because of the pure anger and frustration I felt from forgetting my keys.
After a long and treacherous drive home, I finally made it. I parked my car in the driveway and stepped out of my vehicle. I walked the steps needed to reach the front door and turned the knob, only to realize the door was locked. I stood there in a paralytic state for a few minutes when the retaliation hit me that I had locked myself out of my own house.
I tried to think if I had hidden a spare key for myself, but I was always too paranoid about break-ins to do that. I screamed from the top of my lungs in frustration, causing all of the birds to fly away, and around four dogs to start a barking fest.
I felt a wave of embarrassment wash over me and I quickly took cover before any concerned neighbors could take sight of me. I decided to pull out my cell phone and call my boss.
I dialed in my Boss’s number, and he almost immediately answered.
“Hey! This is Mike, just letting you know I might not make it to work today or I might be a little late because I forgot the office key inside of my house, and I unfortunately locked myself out of my house.” I explained to my Boss, feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“Really? You call me about this now? You really think that we wouldn’t have a spare key hidden on the work site Mike?” It took me a few moments to register his words, but when he did, I felt a huge wave of stupidity wash over me.
“O-ooh my god.., I- I am so incredibly sorry.. Listen, I’ll head back right now and call you when I get there so you can tell me where the key is, and again, I am so sorry for all of this! Bye!” I explained before hanging up the phone and rushing to get back in my car.
I opened my car door and instantly turned on the ignition. I began to speed on the streets, ten miles over the legal speed limit. It wasn’t even like it mattered if I was late anymore, but I guess the anxiety and embarrassment fueled me to get there as quickly as I possibly could.
I thought about how different this day could have gone if I had just remembered to bring my keys, but what was the point in fantasizing about a reality that had not and will not ever happen.
After another long drive to work, I had made it. I pulled up into the dirt parking lot once again and parked my car in the lot closest to the building. I exited out of my car and pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. I dialed my Boss’s number.
“Hey! Where is the key?” I asked my boss.
“It’s under the doormat in front of the front door,” He replied.
I felt one more wave of stupidity and regret wash over me once I realized that all I would have had to do was check under the doormat and this entire mess would have been avoided.
“Okay.” I replied simply before hanging up.
I let out a sigh of frustration before walking the few dozen steps needed to reach the doormat. I pulled up the doormat, revealing two keys. I sighed again and picked one of them up. I placed the key in the keyhole and turned the doorknob. To no one's surprise the door opened. I turned the doorknob once more with my hand this time and embraced the air conditioned rooms.
I quickly went inside and shut the door behind me. I sat down at my desk and logged onto my work computer to see what work I had assigned for the day. It looked like ij was assigned to “Deal with an issue regarding the river, right next to the West trail sign. Before 11:00 AM.
I found it sort of bizarre how cryptic the task was, but I decided that it would be best to just get it over with as soon as possible. It was 9:00 AM, and who knew how long this task could take to complete. I sat up from my office chair and walked to the front door once again. I turned the handle and embraced the seasonably hot warm air outside.
I groaned as I stepped outside, the heat hitting me abruptly and like a wave.
I stepped down the few steps needed to reach the dirt parking lot and was on my way to the west trail. I knew the river well and was confused as to why it needed an issue fixed. After some time, I finally arrived at the westside trail. I was immediately horrified when I arrived at the river and saw what I was looking at.
Inside of the river, twice the size it had been this morning, were the two, eerily familiar, yellow eyes, staring into my soul. This time was different however, because the eyes were attached to something. The eyes were attached to an incredibly bizarre body that appeared half human half alligator.
I continued to stand there in shocked awe, staring at the eyes. I wondered about all of the dark secrets they held. Suddenly, The creature began to move. It was slow at first, but there was no mistaking that it was moving. Suddenly, the creature stood up on its legs, revealing the upper half of its incredibly bizarre and disturbing body.
“RUN!” The creature shrieked at me incredibly loud, causing the hair on my head to sway backward in the wind its mouth had created. After the initial shock wore off, I booked it behind me and began to run as fast as I ever had. It felt as if I were running for my life, probably because I quite literally was running away from something deadly.
I ran until each breath I took felt like there was fire in my lungs, and until my legs didn’t even feel attached to my body. I looked behind me for the first time and was horrified to see the creature gleefully sliding down a ginormous river that was inching its way towards me at an incredibly fast speed, and flooding the trail.
After ten more minutes of running, My lungs felt as if they were pure lava, and I had forgotten what legs even were. Finally, I made it back to the office. I reached the patio and instantly swung the front door open, letting myself inside instantly and closing and locking the door behind me.
I instantly ran to one of the windows in the building and watched as the mass of water quickly moved towards the office, with the bizarre alligator creature riding atop of it. I braced for impact as the water suddenly got very close, but after a while of closing my eyes and protecting my head, I realized nothing happened.
I opened my eyes and saw the creature staring at me from the window.
“Well, it looks like you beat the game. Fair play.” The alligator said in an incredibly disturbing voice before suddenly vanishing. I stood there in shock for a few seconds before collapsing to the ground from pure exhaustion and confusion.
The next few hours were a blur, I remember waking up feeling confused on the office floor as the sound of the late morning shift people arriving woke me up. I left work that day and completely ghosted everyone there and never showed up again.

Hi,
I wonder about the many companies advertised with. We have tested 3CX and I cannot imagine that these companies really use 3CX.
McDonalds, Ikea, BMW etc. only work with one phone book? They think it's OK if only one phone number (the mobile number) is passed to connected phones???
These are just two small examples. So many features are missing or not working properly.
I can't imagine that. Do you have an explanation why 3CX is allowed to advertise with these companies?
https://preview.redd.it/tzk9mdn5uopa1.png?width=1208&format=png&auto=webp&s=706a4fe0be102b5ef2a02991b14d15a15a64ac20

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https://preview.redd.it/42tpptrcuopa1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=056a9942a8ea1e7f44a3e5160d08116cabf160a9
Myth's Note: Today's meme is a little more esoteric than usual. I've summarized everything you'll need to know in point-form, and don't worry: you'll gain a new appreciation from the joke once you're finished with this thread.

• "Ah Shit, Here We Go Again!" is a meme-line from the protagonist ("CJ") of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
• The giant head to the left? That's Thomas Malthus himself.
• Behind him to the right is William Robert Catton, Jr., the author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change.
• The graph in front is essentially a simplified version of what ecological overshoot looks like in practice.
• For some odd reason, both Catton and the graph are overshadowed by Malthus ...

-
Last Wednesday, I had the good fortune to stumble upon an intriguing thread, a wonderful discussion on a recent article published in The Atlantic: The Malthusians Are Back (Archive Link Here). Now, it isn't often that I'm driven to rapidly prepare a commentary and critique on any given piece of writing, but this one truly took the cake. As I have previously stated on record, "there is so much that is factually wrong or misrepresented in this article that I am considering sending a formal letter to The Atlantic."
I say this as a credible writer with threads, commentaries, and publications in hand:

• The Overpopulation vs. Over-consumption Debate: Why Not Address Both? [In-Depth]
• "Good Job, Homo Sapiens!" & The Tragedy of Malthus
• Do you intend to have children? Why or why not? [In-Depth]

I'll walk back my words slightly, then: since it's Friday, I suppose that this will be my casual letter to The Atlantic (complete with meme). And so, today, I thought that we'd explore this piece together. Forgive me for any errors along the way; unlike the authors, I do not have the luxury of writing and researching these matters as my full-time profession, and this was prepared in my spare time over my last two evenings.
A sincere and full disclosure upfront, though: this is an entirely biased assessment, and I will be cherry-picking lines as I go piece by piece. And so, without further ado, let's begin:

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.
Malthus argued against aid to poor Britons on the grounds that they consumed too many of the nation’s resources. In making his case, he semi-accurately described a particular kind of poverty that we still refer to as the “Malthusian trap” today. Agricultural productivity in poor societies is not high enough to support the population without significant labor input, so most people work on small subsistence farms to feed themselves and their families. The inescapably linear growth in the food supply could never outstrip the exponential growth in human populations, he argued.
But human societies have proved repeatedly that they can escape the Malthusian trap. Indeed, agricultural productivity has improved to support a British population seven times larger than in Malthus’s time and a global population eight times larger. As a result of these stubborn facts, most Malthusian imitators haven’t come out and said they’re Malthusians. And instead of focusing on famine, they have tended to emphasize humanity’s destruction of nature.

This is almost a caricature that Catton was warning about in his book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change - something which I analyze carefully in one of my previous threads: "Good Job, Homo Sapiens!" & The Tragedy of Malthus. I'll quote the relevant part below:

The Real Error
Malthus did indeed err, but not in the way that has been commonly supposed. He rightly discerned “the power of population” to increase exponentially “if unchecked.” He rightly noted that population growth ordinarily is not unchecked. He saw that it was worth inquiring into the means by which the exponential growth tendency is normally checked. He was perceptive in attaching the label “misery” to some of the ramifications of these means. Where he was wrong was in supposing that the means worked fully and immediately. (That this was his error has not been seen by those who reject his views.)
Being himself under the impression that it was not possible for the human load to exceed the earth’s carrying capacity, Malthus enabled those who came after him to go on misconstruing continued impressive growth as evidence against, rather than as evidence for, his basic ideas. Carrying capacity was a concept almost clear to Malthus. He even sensed that the carrying capacities of earth’s regions had been repeatedly enlarged by human cultural progress.20 If he was not yet able to make clear to himself and his readers the distinction between means of enlarging carrying capacity and means of overshooting it, we do ourselves a serious disservice by perpetuating his shortcoming. And we do just such a disservice by continuing to mistake overshoot for progress, supposing drawdown to be no different from takeover. By erring thus we prolong and deepen our predicament.
Despite Malthus’s belief to the contrary, it is possible to exceed an environment’s carrying capacity—temporarily. Many species have done it. A species with as long an interval between generations as is characteristic of ours, and with cultural as well as biological appetites, can be expected to do it. Our largest per capita demands upon the world’s resources only begin to be asserted years after we are born. Resource depletion sufficient to thwart our children’s grown-up aspirations was not far enough advanced when our parents were begetting, gestating, and bearing us to deter them from thus adding to the human load.
By not quite seeing that carrying capacity can be temporarily overshot, Malthus understated life’s perils. He thus enabled both the admirers and the detractors of his admonitory writings to neglect the effects of overshoot—environmental degradation and carrying capacity reduction. In his analyses he assumed linear increase of carrying capacity. While this fell short of sustaining exponential growth of would-be consumers, it was, even so, a far brighter prospect than carrying capacity reduction.

Okay, now that we've pointed out the main errors of Malthus and the consequent faulty foundation of the authors' arguments (keeping alive a tradition of misunderstanding that Catton warned about decades ago), let's keep going:

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Oreskes draws attention to the same problem that Ehrlich did in his day: biodiversity loss associated with high-fertility, low-productivity societies caught in the Malthusian trap. Because subsistence farms have low yields, and because the farmers tend to rely on wood and other biomass for energy, they remain a major driver of deforestation, land-use change, and wildlife extirpation.
In Oreskes’s recent Scientific American op-ed, she acknowledges that her ideas have a tarnished legacy. “Population control is a vexing subject,” she writes, “because in the past it has generally been espoused by rich people (mostly men) instructing people in poor countries (mostly women) on how to behave.” Her workaround is to emphasize educational opportunities as a “reasonable” way to “slow growth.” In an email, Oreskes said that she does not consider herself a Malthusian and that she focuses on education “because we know that it can work, and unlike some other approaches it is good for women, and non-coercive.”

In addition to reading Naomi Oreskes' latest work (Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement - great read, by the way!), I have personally interviewed a French PhD student (Elias Ganivet) for his perspective (a contemporary understanding of overpopulation) on the matter a while back. In our e-mail correspondence, he provides evidence for the above-listed statements. Here's a quote from the man himself, a link to his published academic article, and my own thread on the matter:

Elias Ganivet (Growth in human population and consumption both need to be addressed to reach an ecologically sustainable future) as quoted by u/myth_of_progress in The Overpopulation vs. Over-consumption Debate: Why Not Address Both? [In-Depth]
"For instance, regarding climate change, I would slightly qualify the impact of population growth vs. consumption (the 10% richest are responsible for more than 50% of GHG emissions). [However], this is not true when you look at the environmental problems all together (pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, land-use change, climate change...). Thus, the main point is still the same: population and consumption are two faces of the same coin and we need to do as much as we can in both."

Right, up next: a paragraph which I've broken up, which includes a rapid fire list of incorrect statements:

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Rough contemporaries of Malthus, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, argued that improvements in economic productivity would allow humans to grow enough food to meet rising population levels, and they were right.

The article that they've provided for Marx and Engels is one that I've used myself for arguments in the past, and it's miraculous how they ignored exactly what is written at the bottom first page.

Marx's and Engels' Concept of Malthus: The Heritage of a Critique, Richard J. Wiltgen
To Marx and Engels, the primary problem with Malthus's population principle was that it was ahistorical. According to Marx (1967), Malthus had attempted to explain "'overpopulation' by the external laws of Nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production (Vol. 1, p. 529n). In a fragmentary note that Engels had intended to include in his Dialectics of Nature, he presented an analysis of Darwin that paralleled his and Marx's discussion of Malthus and capitalism. Engels (1964) stated that Malthusian overpopulation problems "do in fact occur at certain stages of plant and lower animal life" (p. 311). His discussion of Darwin reflects the complexity of the relationship he envisioned.

Now that Marx is out of the way, lets see what they have to say about Borlaug (I cannot comment on Vogt, as I'm unfamiliar with his work):

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Vogt’s pessimism lost out to the ingenuity of, among others, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning agronomist Norman Borlaug, as the historian Charles Mann recounts in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. Borlaug’s innovations in wheat and maize cultivation helped stave off the famines Vogt and other eugenicists had predicted.

This completely ignores what Norman Borlaug actually professed at his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, and it is actively advocating for a false representation of actual historical fact. As u/dr_seven states best: “[To them,] Borlaug is an icon, not a human; he didn’t have any views that are at all inconvenient.” To quote Borlaug’s own words directly, as an actual person and not a useful strawman (my emphasis in bold):

The Nobel Peace Prize 1970 - Acceptance Speech, Norman Borlaug
It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again. We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts. For we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction.
Man has made amazing progress recently in his potential mastery of these two contending powers. Science, invention, and technology have given him materials and methods for increasing his food supplies substantially and sometimes spectacularly, as I hope to prove tomorrow in my first address as a newly decorated and dedicated Nobel Laureate.
Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas.
There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind.

And finally, another comment in an attempt to discredit Ehrlich (they're really fixated on him, aren't they?) ...

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Ehrlich, infamously, lost a bet with the libertarian economist Julian Simon over resource scarcity. (Simon goes completely unmentioned in Ehrlich’s autobiography.)

I'm really glad they raised this point, as this is a frequent criticism to discredit Ehrlich. I'll let The Economist (image provided) do my work here to speak in his defense:

The Revenge of Malthus: A Famous Bet Recalculated, The Economist
Mr Simon duly won the bet. The economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s also contradicted Mr Ehrlich's wilder claims—that a billion people would starve to death and that, by 1985, America would be trapped in an “age of scarcity”.
But what if Mr Ehrlich had taken up Mr Simon's 1990 offer to go “double or quits” for any future date? All five have risen in price since the rematch was proposed. Furthermore, Jeremy Grantham of GMO, a fund-management group, points out that Mr Ehrlich would have won the original bet were it recalculated today (he is still alive; Mr Simon died in 1998). An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart).
The Cornucopians might argue that today's metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man's famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets.

Moving on ...

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Thanks to innovation and technological decoupling, an average American today is more than twice as wealthy as an average American was the year The Population Bomb was published, yet generates 30 percent fewer carbon emissions and uses 50 percent less land for their diet.

First, we need to look at this from the perspective of global per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions (national emissions that have been adjusted for trade), rather than production-based emissions. Outsourcing manufacturing to other nations, for example, is an extremely innovative way of reducing energy and material throughput in a national economy. Looks like the authors' claims might actually hold up to some degree here, but they also ignore the legacy of historical emissions by the developed West.
As for the "less land" claim, the data is provided here for interest (agricultural land per capita). However, one needs to ask the question - how did we improve crop yield per capita across the world over the past few decades?
The answer provided in this article sort of ignores the context of reality we live in - it's a miracle not only brought to us through globalization, but much more importantly, through the fossil-fuel bonanza that truly powered almost every aspect of the Green Revolution. It is not a trend we can continue to rely on well into the future. To quote the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization:

"Energy-Smart" Food for People and Climate - Issue Paper (UN FAO) [PDF page 14, paper page 3]
The ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s solved the food shortage problem at the time. This revolution was accomplished not only through improved plant breeding, but also by tripling the application of inorganic fertilizers, expanding the land area under irrigation and increasing energy inputs to provide additional services along the food chain. Today, the annual incremental yield increases of major cereal crops are declining and fossil fuels are becoming relatively more scarce and costly. Historical trends indicate an evident link between food prices and energy prices (Fig. 1). Further intensification of crop and animal production will be required to feed the world’s population, which is projected to expand to over 9 billion people by 2050. The report, “How to Feed the World by 2050” (FAO, 2009a) indicates that a 70 percent increase in food production compared to 2005-2007 production levels will be needed to meet the increased demand. This equates roughly to the additional production of around 1 000 Mt of cereals and around 200 Mt of meat and fish per year by 2050. These production gains are largely expected to come from increases in productivity of crops, livestock and fisheries. However, unlike the 1960’s and 1970’s green revolution, our ability to reach these targets may be limited in the future by a lack of inexpensive fossil fuels.

To paraphrase Catton: industrial humanity is a type of "detritivore" dependent upon the ghost acreage that non-renewable fossil fuels provide us. Ignoring matters of resource depletion and escalating EROI, we'll also see how long cropland per capita keeps up as climate change continues, and begins to fundamentally affect the stable climatic conditions required for human agricultural activities. For interest, here's Mark Lynas's take on what agriculture will look like in a 4 degree Celsius world.
Moving on ...

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Like Oreskes, the scientists at TOP and Population Connection insist that their proposed solutions to the population “problem” are non-coercive. They just want to nudge people in the direction of fewer people. Another of TOP’s priorities is to “reduce immigration numbers” to developed countries with low fertility rates. Additional ideas include proposals to lower government support for third and fourth children and for medical fertility treatments.
But Ehrlich said the same thing. “I’m against government interference in our lives,” he told an interviewer in 1970. How that sentiment squared with Ehrlich’s demands in The Population Bomb for “compulsory birth regulation” and “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children” remains unclear. And it didn’t stop powerful institutions from taking his warnings about overpopulation literally as well as seriously. As Betsy Hartmann recounted in her 1987 exposé, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, the Population Council, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and other organizations funded fertility-reduction programs that, in tandem with sometimes coercive government policies, led to millions of sterilizations in China, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. China’s one-child policy can be directly traced to Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome’s famous Malthusian screed warning of resource shortages and overpopulation.

In reference to the first paragraph, I think we can all fundamentally agree that, to quote myself from an earlier thread of mine, "we must find politically and socially acceptable ways to implement various non-coercive population policies to lower humanity’s impact on Earth’s biosphere and its natural wealth for the benefit of future generations and other species."
The second paragraph, however, is what we really need to engage with - it's a great point, and it needs to be addressed with principled sincerity and rigour. I have not read Hartmann, so I cannot pass judgment on that front; I can, however, pass judgment on the authors, as this quote appears to be lifted straight from yet another piece by Charles Mann (rather than working with Hartmann's material itself).
I will not contest their claims that coercive government policies led to millions of sterilizations around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, but I will note that this requires much further exploration than what the authors have prepared here today. However, as someone who believes in working with objective sources, I wanted to discuss some matters raised in a joint UN-WHO document titled Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: An inter-agency statement. As with all documents produced by the United Nations, this was a stellar read, and I fully recommend it to everyone. However, there's one specific argument I want to make today - that the authors are unfairly foisting the blame solely onto The Club of Rome. To quote:

Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: An inter-agency statement, UN-WHO Joint Document
During the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, coercive sterilization has been used in somecountries (including in Asia, Europe and Latin America) as an instrument of populationcontrol, without regard for the rights of individuals (57–59). A range of incentives or coercivepressures have been employed to secure agreement to sterilization, including offers offood, money, land and housing, or threats, fines or punishments, together with misleadinginformation. Under some government programmes, rewards have been provided forhealth workers who met sterilization targets, while those who missed the targets were atrisk of losing their jobs (7, 60, 61). People living in poverty, indigenous peoples and ethnicminorities have been particularly targeted by such programmes (7, 44, 61). In many countries, information is not made available in accessible formats and local languages, and informed consent is not obtained before these procedures are carried out (62). Moreover, these procedures may be carried out in unsafe and unhygienic conditions, without follow-up care(7, 60–62).
[...]
Special care must be taken to ensure that every person makes a voluntary and informedchoice regarding the use of any contraceptive method (3). This is particularly important forsterilization, since it is a surgical procedure that is intended to be permanent.
[...]
Accountability is central to preventing human rights violations and to ensuring that laws,policies and programmes are properly developed and implemented. Accountabilitymechanisms also assist in identifying individual and systematic human rights violations, asthey provide victims with an avenue to air their grievances and seek redress.
[...]
Accountability, however, rests with states, to prevent coerced sterilization, to explicitly prohibit such practices, to respond to the consequences of these practices, to hold the perpetrators responsible, and to provide redress and compensation in cases of abuse.

I'll state my point directly: abuses of state power are the responsibility of the government conducting said activities (not the Club of Rome and their tireless work), and should be openly condemned wherever possible. However, if the authors intend to continue their condemnation of The Club of Rome, then they must - by example and logical necessity - also condemn Norman Borlaug himself for the same Malthusian sins contained within his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptable Speech quoted at length earlier.
I would hope that the authors and I are firmly in agreement that this is not their intent; and so, commend both Borlaug and the Club of Rome for their innovative research to address the human predicament and alleviate suffering across the world. Furthermore, I would gladly welcome the provision of more primary sources to confirm their statements or anything else they produce and publish in the future again.
Right, let's finish up with the concluding statements by the authors (my emphasis in bold for one last discussion point).

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
And these concerns are being raised at a peculiar moment in human history. The total population of human beings on Earth is expected to peak and decline later this century, not because of war, famine, or disease, but because of secularly declining fertility. The challenge that nations including Germany, South Korea, Japan, and even India and China are dealing with today is underpopulation, not overpopulation. Migrants, particularly those who are young and skilled, will be crucial to generating economic growth in these countries. This makes the neo-Malthusian dismissal of technology, infrastructure, and growth particularly troubling. Supporting an aging population will require an economic surplus that has traditionally been supplied by a favorable ratio of younger workers in the labor force to retirees. As that ratio reverses, it is not clear how infrastructure maintenance and social-services financing will fare.
Given that the Malthusian dream—a peak in global population—is already in sight, one might think that single-minded efforts to further suppress population growth would wane. But the old population-control movement is still alive and well today.

https://preview.redd.it/k5a3mozfuopa1.png?width=1908&format=png&auto=webp&s=379a84ec449da81da71b46a4bfd7a547f56259f2
Despite all of my contention with what the authors have provided here today, they've made a remarkably great point that I'd like to explore. In a future defined by resource depletion and climate change in an increasingly inhospitable biosphere, how do we ensure that we are able to support an aging population in a future defined by the limits to growth? We're already seeing what's happening in France, but that pales in comparison on what is yet to come.
Future (and current) generations that will never enjoy the same quality of life as we do today, right now, so how on Earth can we possibly expect younger generations to calmly accept the burdens bestowed upon them by the older generations before them? When the reality of societal collapse truly sets in, and the costs of survival begin to escalate in a world of increasingly scarce resources, how can we honestly expect future generations to pay down the pensions (and debts) of those who left a ruined world behind for them to inherit?
For those of us who genuinely want to look forward to retirement, then we must genuinely embrace and consider this question and its ramifications. This inter-generational conflict that I've described is the greatest ticking time bombs in the developed world, especially if we do nothing to change the course of global industrial civilization for the benefit of all.
As an encore, one last quote:

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
As The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas put it, “Enough with the innuendo: If overpopulation is the hill you want to die on, then you’ve got to defend the implications.”

Enough with the misrepresentations: if criticizing perspectives on overpopulation is the hill you want to die on, then you've got to defend your arguments far more soundly.
And finally, to the authors: I don't want to breakthrough any more bullshit.

The Breakthrough Institute's Inconvenient History with Al Gore (2014), Paul D. Thacker (Harvard University - Edmond & Lily Safra Centre for Ethics)
While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a "progressive think tank."
[...]

If you enjoy today’s meme and article, and if you also share my insatiable curiosity for the various interdisciplinary aspects of “collapse”, please consider taking a look at some of other written and graphic works (like this piece) at my Substack Page – Myth of Progress. That said, as a proud member of this community, I will always endeavour to publish my work to collapse first.

Let me start by saying I’m breaching contract by sharing this. If the company’s lookouts link this post to me – which they will – I’ll be disgraced, and any chance at getting a job in this profession again will be out of the picture. I have the common sense to keep my name unknown, but all that’s gonna do is slow them down.
Keeping this hidden would be a crime against humanity of the highest order. You all deserve to know, as terrible as it is.
I work at an unnamed technological research company as, you guessed it, a researcher. In recent years, we’ve made astonishing advancements in developing technology that can interact with and harness tachyons.
Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light; that’s the most important part. They’ve been a subject of theoretical physics since the late 60s, but as far as public knowledge goes, they’re still just that. Theoretical.
But they are most certainly real. Well, not “tachyons” per se, though their behaviour is equatable. I won’t bore you with the technicalities, but the result of a particle travelling faster than light is that said particle is able to, effectively, travel backwards in time.
My other group members and I have been experimenting with these particles for the best part of two years now. We’ve made major advances, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
Yesterday, 23/03/2023, at 09:07 am, my equipment detected a tachyon signal. This was in the morning, mind you, and no tests had yet been carried out. From what I can tell, this signal originated – or, rather, will originate – from elsewhere.
Playing it out loud, it at first just sounded like a garbled mess of frequencies. But after observing the audio structure, I found it to be made up of thousands of tones, of which there were only two types – long, and short.
The realisation hit pretty quick. It was Morse code, or, at least, it could be interpreted as such. The most fundamental form of digital communication known to man. So, I ran it through an auto-interpreter a few times, and got a fully coherent message.
I refuse to believe that I’m seeing patterns where there are none. The chances are so astronomically low that I can’t feasibly consider it to be a random signal, especially considering I’ve never received one from somewhere outside the lab.
I’m going to copy over the translation here. I do not wish to instil panic, but please, spread this post. People need to be aware that this is a real possibility.
To whomever is reading this, prepare yourself.
Here it is.
[TRANSCRIPT BEGIN]
Hi.
My name is Tim Hermelle. Before I write down this account, I should insist that this is the truth. This is happening to us all right now. This is not a joke, prank, or an interactive project.
This is the truth. You HAVE to believe what you are about to read, for our sakes.
Okay, with that out of the way… shit, it’s getting closer. I’ll write down what I can before we’re pulled back to the city, to join the others. I hope enough context is given in my account for you to fully understand.
I live - lived - in the great city of Pharades (that’s Pha-ra-dees). The utopia of humanity’s future. Life was amazing. Every aspect brought joy and satisfaction to every person. No hunger, thirst, no overpopulation, pollution… a Nirvana if there ever was. The level of advancement may be difficult for some of you to believe
Work was optional, and automatons would fill the spaces left by those choosing to pursue their own personal dreams. Even so, a large number of people here still choose to have jobs, vocations I suppose. Healthcare was unparalleled, and not one person has died during my time here.
Everything major was decided by a vote. It was the perfect democratic system, but I’m no politician, so I wouldn’t be able to explain to you why that is.
Hell, we even had a collective vote to decide the next week’s weather every Sunday. That’s right, we’d taken control of the weather. Want to splash around in puddles, smelling the petrichor? Maybe get a tan on? You’d just have to go and vote for it.
Pharades was, without hyperbole, fucking beautiful. In between the city blocks, there were great swathes of woodland and meadows. Crystal rivers flowed underneath silver bridges, and leaves of every colour painted the landscape like polka dots.
And the city itself, well, they say nature trumps anything manmade in terms of beauty, but I disagree. The intricately designed towers were accented by all the most complementary colours, gold, chrome, red, blue, any combination you could imagine, it was here. Arches, spirals, and patterns of every variety adorned the structures.
The day in question was a Wednesday – not that days of the week held any particular significance anymore. I’d planned to meet with two of my buddies, Erin and Tuan, at our favourite coffee shop a couple of districts over, in the Wantania area.
Historically, the journey may have been arduous, or frustrating. Not now. Most people didn’t even use vehicles anymore – instead, the city had built a vast underground network of ever-shifting and rearranging tracks, called “Tubyrinth”. Each person owned a personal pod of sorts, customisable to any degree.
I input Wantania Central, and hopped inside. My pod contained a sofa and a minifridge, stocked up with my favourite drinks. The journey was always snappy. Each time, the underground superstructure would arrange a new and unique track to be used, direct to a reserved bay.
Just fifteen minutes later, I was stood under the vaulted, ornamental expanse of the station roof, a hundred or so feet above. I always stopped here to just stare upwards for a moment, absorbing the imaginative architecture.
After exiting the station, I was surprised to see that both Erin and Tuan were already waiting for me outside. The good kind of surprised, that slaps a goofy smile onto your face.
“Took you long enough!” Tuan chuckled, finding the irony in his own words hilarious.
“God, I know right?” added Erin, “I was worried I’d need crutches after standing out here waiting!”
“Well, heh, you’re not gonna like this next part,” I joked, and we set off down the street, laughing. Our favourite café was called “Beansmith’s Forge”. It was a cheesy, but endearing name, and the theme fit the three of us like a glove; as I said before, we’d been working on worldbuilding for our fantasy RPG, an immersive neurolink VR experience, where the player could design their own character and have a unique questline auto-generated out of a complex system.
We ordered brunch, and, of course, coffee. I won’t get into the details of our talks, but we quickly finished up, paid, and set off down Gerben Street.
The more exciting event of the day was our session booked at the aptly named Noji Box, something you could call an “anti-grav playground”. Admittedly, I’ve never fully known how it works, just that it involves paired wormholes, immensely powerful electromagnets, and a huge vacuum-chamber.
One thing I was always grateful for was that the automatons, who I saw working robotically through storefront windows, were withheld any accurate human likeness – I’m sure you’ve heard of the uncanny valley, so you’ll know what I mean. They fell just short of it.
All was calm on the walk, as to be expected. We made it to the Noji Box in good time, ten minutes before our session booking. I get it’s company policy to take everyone through the safety basics, but it was admittedly a little boring after many, many past visits.
The only real requirement was that you’d have to wear an “osteopatic suit”. No, osteostatic? Something about keeping your bones from floating away from each other, or from disappearing over time.
We were suited up, ready to enter “S.S. Slamdown”, when a sudden tremor shook the building’s foundations. Everyone shared the same puzzled expression – not once had something like that ever happened in Pharades.
The staff looked a bit stumped at first. I guess they never had to deal with a situation like this in the past. To our dismay, but unsurprisingly, our session was cancelled, and we were told that they would call us later to sort out a re-booking.
I had the strangest feeling when we left and began back down the road. Something similar to déjà vu, but not quite. Like nostalgia, but without the accompanying feeling of reminiscence or joy.
Trying to brush it off, I distracted my mind by humming a tune. I didn’t know what it was from, at the time, but I knew it was a stringed melody. A violin? Thing is, I wasn’t really humming it as much as hearing it in my head.
We rounded a corner, and Erin paused in surprise.
“Oh, that’s… hey, that’s Jeremiah! He’s been playing that fiddle the street over from mine for the past, what, two weeks? Come on, let’s go listen.”
I grew confused when we approached, only to hear the exact same melody that had just been looping in my head. Before I’d heard this guy playing. I don’t remember stumbling upon this particular street performer before this point.
We stood listening for a few minutes, then continued our walk. Thoughts no longer infested with that tune, I was hit with what I can only describe as a taste. The savoury taste of something on my tongue, complete with mustard and relish. Meat of some kind?
The concern started to flourish when we came upon a food truck, and Tuan asked if we were hungry. Sure, we’d just eaten at the coffee shop, but I could fit in one more tasty bite. He offered to pay, which we gladly accepted, and he returned with… hotdogs. With mustard. And relish.
My gratitude masked the ever-growing confusion within me. Was this just a weird coincidence, or something else? Did I know we were going to get hotdogs?
We wound up back at the station, where a feeling of detached sorrow welled up inside me, something you might feel after recalling a bad memory from which you’ve since recovered. I understood then that I would run into my on-good-terms ex inside. But, before we could enter, another rumbling tremor swept across the street, followed by the clamour of destruction and screams from inside.
A grey dust cloud plumed out from the entrance, sweeping us off of our feet. I saw Erin flipped face-first into the pavement, just as I caught my heel on the base of a stop sign. Yet another quake boomed underneath the asphalt.
The asphalt I was falling down onto… but the impact didn’t come. Instead of a hard surface, the sensation of falling went on. You know that feeling when you think there’s another step at the bottom of the stairs, only to find the floor instead? It was just like that.
The ground I fell upon wasn’t asphalt. It rang out as I collided, almost hollow-sounding. Metallic. Maybe it was just my head ringing, but without a doubt, I was not in the street anymore.
I sat up, and my palms confirmed I was on a metal floor, the kind with those diamond-shaped grips. Looking around almost caused a complete sensory overload, immediately. A multitude of flashing lights, screens, wires, buttons, and all sorts decorated the room. It looked not far off from the control room of an intelligence agency – at least, how they’re depicted in movies.
I got onto one knee and pivoted to look around. The tall man standing directly behind me almost led to a second fall, but instead I scooted backward frantically at the sight.
The man – well, I say “man”, but this person didn’t really have any distinguishing features. They were wearing a spotless black and white cloak of some kind, and a metal cage covering the upper half of their face, so that only their mouth was visible.
They stood still, not reacting to my show of surprise, then spoke in the most androgynous voice conceivable.
“How did you get in here?”
I scanned the room, finding that there were no obvious entrances anywhere around, like we were inside a closed-off box.
“I- uh, I fell over, a-and next thing I know – here,” I stuttered.
“Well, you shouldn’t be here, and there’s no way that you should be able to get here.”
I stood up, feeling a little more comfortable in the presence of this stranger, though not letting my guard down entirely. Now, I could see the pictures displayed across the screens – they seemed to be feeds of countless locations in Pharades, streets, woodlands, you name it.
“What… what the hell’s going on here? Who are you? Why are you spying on the city?”
The stranger didn’t seem amused, being pelted with questions, and held up a hand, gesturing me to stop. They let out a deep, held breath.
“Well, since you’re here, I may as well enlighten you. Take a seat.”
So I did. I sat in shock and disbelief for the next five minutes as the person answered all my questions, even the ones I didn’t know I wanted to ask. They introduced themselves simply as “Administrator”, but I chose “Admin”, to avoid the mouthful.
Admin proceeded to tell me the truth, as casually as one would talk about the weather.
It wasn’t real.
A simulation.
They told me we were inside a highly advanced, self-sustaining, supercomputer pod travelling through deep space, harvesting energy from ions extracted from the surrounding vacuum. Over a hundred trillion years ago, those living here now consented in having their consciousness imported to the device.
On top of the ion harvesting, power was supposedly generated from emotions experienced by a consciousness – the more intense an emotion or feeling, the more power generated.
I interrupted the monologue at this point with a question they hadn’t seemed to consider,
“Let’s say I believe what you’re saying. If this system’s been up for as long as you say, why did I only just have my 29th birthday, what, two months back now?”
“I understand your concern, but allow me to continue. Every 50 years, it is reset. All your memories are wiped and locked away until the moments when you would again make those memories. There are only a set number of people who were uploaded to the system, and their minds cannot simply be deleted if they were to die.”
Not only a simulation, but an endless loop? My brain felt like it might burst.
“Wait,” I said, “if we’re reset every time, and everything plays out the same… then, we can’t possibly have any free will of our own, right?”
“I suppose you could say that. But the illusion we, I, have worked tirelessly to maintain, gives the impression that you do.”
“Wh… what? So, the original me signed up for this? But I’m not him! I’m a copy, aren’t I? Do I have a choice in this?”
“There is no way for me to erase any person that lives here. Only if the pod itself is damaged or destroyed, can I, or anyone else, truly die. The Great Stellar Extinction has come and gone, and all that remains outside is cold, and dark. A handful of black and brown dwarves, and black holes. To my knowledge.”
The sudden feeling of intense, hollow loneliness filled up my chest. We were alone in a great black sea of nothingness. My slack jaw must have told Admin I didn’t have the capacity to speak.
“Over time, I have lost contact with the hundreds of thousands of other pods that were ejected from Earth all that time ago. Either they are too far now, or they met a destructive end. I can’t say which is the better, anymore.”
Absorbing the sudden truth, the emptiness evolved into anger.
“Let me get this straight. We, living our lives down there, are puppets to you? Is that it? Just an endless cycle of digital paradise, kept in the dark of all you’ve just told me? How can you possibly justify this?!”
“Calm down. Having your memories wiped is a luxury I cannot afford. Anyway, that’s only the preface of what I need to talk about. I’m sure you also noticed the tremors, down there?”
“The tremors? Oh, oh yeah. Sort of ruined my plans, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“I didn’t do anything. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Whatever the cause, it’s not within this pod.”
I took it all in. A system malfunction? Why did the Admin feel the need to share this with me?
“Is… is that why, maybe, that I could predict some of the things that happened afterwards?”
“It’s worse than I thought. The memory suppression seems to be failing.”
Both of us paused for a moment. The silence was deafening.
“I’ve been taking readings on the external sensors. There’s… something out there. An object. It’s been following us for a while now, but with no starlight left, I don’t know what it is. Space debris couldn’t move on its own accord like this thing is.”
“What are you trying to say?” I sputtered, the dread I felt deepening by the second.
“I’m saying that something has found us.”
My blood ran cold. Found us? What could have found us?
“Didn’t you say all the stars are dead? The universe is just darkness now. What could have found us? What?”
“I wish I had the answers, too. I don’t think we’re safe anymore. The most recent readings imply that whatever it is, it’s latched onto the pod somehow. Possibly-“
Admin was cut off by the loud screech of static from the speakers around the room. Their head shot up to the nearest corner in a manner that set me on a knife’s edge.
The tremors returned with a vengeance now, and the both of us were sent sprawling onto the floor. I didn’t fall through it this time, though. Sparks flew and monitors went offline.
I was about to ask what we should do, when the roaring static settled, and something else started to play.
An innocent, childlike giggle. Gurgled coos, infantile squeals of joy that pierced my eardrums like needles and left them ringing. Remembering the sounds that came from those speakers make my insides twist and yearn to escape my body, knowing what came next.
The laughter grew, and so did the tremors. The room started to collapse, wires and boxes raining down upon us. Well, not really collapse, no, but change. The far wall crumpled, like something on the other side assailed it with forceful impacts, and the room began to shrink.
As if that dark place wasn’t claustrophobic enough, the ceiling, walls, everything began to close in on us. All the while, the childlike giggling only grew in joy. I thought we were to be crushed and snapped by the pressure, when we were abruptly freed.
It had happened again. Pushed through the floor and spat out somewhere else. This time, I – we – found ourselves near a paved road leading out of one of the city blocks, into a green meadow which gave way to trees a ways down.
Something was terribly wrong. Only after brushing myself off and standing up did I become aware of the swirling darkness that replaced the once baby-blue sky, with its cotton candy clouds. A heavy and unsettling calm had fallen upon us, dampening the city’s brilliance. No more did sunlight gleam off the ornate spires and arches, replaced by a still, hanging shadow.
The eerie quiet was shattered by that godforsaken crackling, booming across the landscape, despite not a speaker in sight, again followed by those ill-belonging coos and cries. Accompanying the infantile sputtering came an uproar of cracking and crumbling, great impacts from deep within the city’s heart.
Both Admin and I stared in disbelief as distant buildings sunk into the ground, while others twisted and warped their way into the sky, as if made from soft clay. Some just disappeared entirely, leaving not a shred of evidence behind that they had ever been there, while their former inhabitants plunged from storeys above.
“It’s taken my place.”
Those four unprompted words shook me to the core of my being. The god of this world had been usurped.
“But why?” I found myself asking, “with what motive?”
Admin went to reply, but stopped upon seeing the great, pinkish masses floating up out of the streets, far ahead. We stared in bewilderment, trying to make out what they were. The chorus of screams hurried us to the realisation that the balls were… they were made of people.
Agonised, howling faces littered the fleshy abominations, while more objects rose around them. Structural beams, signposts, metal objects of every kind gravitated toward the amalgams of humanity, before their relentless assaults began.
Ripping, tearing, stabbing, slicing… it was already too much for my mind to comprehend. It garnered no reaction from myself other than stunned shock. Flesh and blood spewed from the masses, and orbited around them like the rings of Saturn, falling back in to haphazardly patch themselves back onto the wailing people.
My thoughtless attention was redirected as a frantic deluge of citizens fled the city, running down the street towards us. One by one, the exodus was halted, people seeming to stop in place abruptly, though the screams did not relent.
I couldn’t see what had stopped them until the crowd drew closer, where I saw an elderly man whip forward, foot stuck fast, instantly snapping his knee from the momentum. He let out a heart-wrenching cry as he fell down and looked to see what had stopped him.
Something that looked like roots, water pipes maybe, had erupted through the tarmac and coiled their way up his leg. I could see the strength draining in his eyes as they stood him back upright by force, wrapping around his entire body.
I watched in abject horror as he was raised off the ground, and each and every one of the old man’s limbs were bent and snapped at unnatural angles, shattering frail bones into dust.
His feeble cries were promptly silenced as a squirming metal tube forced its way inside his mouth, his eyes rolling back in unfathomable agony as the bulging mass forced its way down his throat, splitting his ribcage apart and allowing the organs within to slop out and float in the air, as if weightless. The whole process seemed to reverse itself in time, then repeat, over and over.
I could only hear the echoes of Admin’s shouts and the faint sensation of their grip on my forearm as they pulled me away from the mind-bending atrocity. My vacant body tumbled backward, sending both of us falling onto the grass.
Still I could only sit there, frozen. Somewhere off to the right, I saw a young woman pulling presumably her daughter along by the wrist, fleeing the hellscape of flesh and bone down a small alley. Her head spun wildly as she noticed the walls of the alleyway closing in around them.
She burst out into the open, but was yanked back, her grip fast. She turned in desperation, only to see her daughter, who couldn’t have been more than seven, being slowly crushed into a paste of bloody flesh and yellow fat. Her pitiful screams still ring in my ears, seeing her child suffer such a terrible fate.
Admin was finally triumphant in breaking my trance, and I rushed to my feet, stumbling before gaining my footing and bolting the fuck out of there. The childish giggling echoing out over the sky only served to push me forwards and away from that place.
“What the fuck is going on?!” I yelped, glancing over to Admin, hoping they could offer just the slightest of explanations.
“I have an idea, but we need to get somewhere first. You see that hill through the woods, right over there?”
“Hill? To the observatory?”
“There’s one last thing we can try to stop this. It’s a shot in the dark, but I can’t just stand here and fade away with the rest.”
High speed winds whipped the trees as we ran below them, leaves fluttering in a wild seizure. Air-splitting cracks sounded, so loud my ears began to ring once more, and I looked over my shoulder to see what they could have been.
Blazing spouts of fire shot down from the clouds behind, more akin to lightning than anything, striking the forsaken with white-hot temperatures. Even from a distance, I could see skin and flesh melt off of bones like candle wax, forming spiralling clouds of organic vapour.
In my distraction, I ran straight into a tree, and tumbled over, blood leaking from a small cut on my forehead. Admin skidded to a stop and pulled me up to my feet, and ran onwards, not waiting for a moment to ask if I was okay.
Neither of us were okay. That was a given now.
We reached the top of the hill without too much effort – seems it was programmed for everyone to have an above-average level of fitness, young or old regardless.
Admin frantically, but methodically, sifted through what appeared to be a large hoop of keys, searching for the one to fit the observatory’s door. I looked back over to where we had fled from.
The twisted buildings coiled toward the sky, gargantuan talons holding captive everyone I’d ever known. But there was something else. Far behind the city, in the distant hills and woodland, a great black wave that spanned the horizon was travelling towards us, eviscerating the world itself. All it left behind was an endless chasm of darkness, defying reality itself.
The tsunami came closer, before stopping at the city’s outskirts, leaving only a towering earthen spire of suffering, flaming bolts cracking down upon it.
“Admin, what is going on?!”
They paused for a moment, then continued working on the several locks barring our entry.
“Do you remember what I told you earlier, when you found me? How this system is able to keep on running, over the trillions of years?”
“…ions?”
“Yes, but that’s only the basis. I told you that emotional activity generates power, yes? The more intense an emotion, the more power generated?”
“What are you getting at?”
“This is pure theory, but I believe that whatever is out there is feeding off of the system.”
“Is that why all that was happening? The-“
I stifled a gag, recalling the horrors fresh in my memory.
“Again, it’s a theory. I don’t understand what it is. If the constraints of the universe are loose enough for something to evolve in its endless darkness, to predate on the last sources of energy within it… I don’t know. And I doubt we ever will.”
I stared out at the hellscape, speechless. Finally, Admin found the right key, yanked the door open, and pulled me inside by the arm.
“Hey!” Admin yelled, snapping their fingers, “I need you to be present for this. I am restricted in this world, I can’t break and reform things like you can. A failsafe, for if the power were to go to my head. Follow my instructions exactly.”
They told me how to break apart some of the technology in the observatory, and rewire it into a different machine. I had no idea what we were creating at the time, but complied nonetheless.
The finished product was a makeshift beacon of some kind, connected to the nearby terminal.
“Thank you. Now, type.”
“Type what?”
“Everything that has happened. Add as many details as you can, because we won’t have another chance to get this out there.”
“O-okay, what is this thing? A radio?”
“In a way. The observatory is one of the only places here that has a connection to the outside. I have used it more than once to observe the universe fading away. This setup will send our transmission as a unique, superluminal type of wave. Hurry, we can’t waste time chatting about this.”
And so, here we are. I don’t know who will be hearing this, if anyone at all.
I beg of you, consider how our advancements might be our downfall.
It’s almost here. I can hear the flaming bolts striking the forest, closer.
This is my account. Please save us. Please spare us.
Don’t condemn us as you have.
[TRANSCRIPT END]
There it is. I’ve revised the translation more times than I can count, and I’m sure there’s no mistake here.
Other readings imply that this message has travelled an unimaginably vast distance, and not only over space. Repeated triangulation only tells me this came from above, somewhere far away, among the stars.
I can feel the edges of my mind singeing. This can’t be proven as truth, nor can it be discredited. There’s no possible way to explain how this message came from our own planet.
I’m trying to be rational, but I think we need to consider future development very carefully. As a people, we have always rushed through our technological advancements at an incredible speed, not stopping to consider all the consequences that might follow.
If anyone will believe this, please spread it around. I have no doubt this post will be taken down the moment they find it. As for myself, I’ll be disgraced, probably. Stuck in a cold cell, most likely.
Spread the word. The fact that the higher-ups will attempt to conceal this is a cruel thing indeed, if any of it’s true.
Signing off.

Company Name	Title	City
HelioHire	Data Scientist	New York
HelioHire	AWS Engineer	New York
CHAUT. CO. Dept of Human Resources	Budget Director	Chautauqua
CHAUT. CO. Dept of Human Resources	Budget Director	Jamestown
CHAUT. CO. Dept of Human Resources	Director of Budgeting	Jamestown
CATT. CO. B.O.C.E.S.ATTN:ACCOUNTS PAYABLE	Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES See	Allegany
American Water	Veterans Preferred - General Manager - Military Services Group	Monsey
CATT. CO. B.O.C.E.S.ATTN:ACCOUNTS PAYABLE	Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES See	Olean
CATT. CO. B.O.C.E.S.ATTN:ACCOUNTS PAYABLE	Science Teacher	Olean
CATT. CO. B.O.C.E.S.ATTN:ACCOUNTS PAYABLE	Physical Science Teacher	Olean
Skidmore College	On Call Campus Safety Officer	Schenectady
American Water	Veterans Preferred - General Manager - Military Services Group	West Point
PDS Management Services, LLC	Pediatric Dentist	Albany
Bellerose Animal Hospital	Veterinary Technician	Bellerose
United Implant Dentistry PC	Prosthodontist	Cicero
Ark Veterinary Hospital and Urgent Care	Licensed Veterinary Technician	Henrietta
Assisi Veterinary Hospital	Licensed Veterinary Technician	Malverne
Skidmore College	Registered Nurse	Saratoga Springs
Advance Auto Parts	Commercial Parts Pro	Albany
BENCHMARK	Stable Attendant	Albany
Hale Akua Garden Farm	Experienced Farm Worker	Albany
CSEA Inc	Office Clerk	Albany
Alsco	Route Sales Representative 4 10 Commission	Albany
Vantagepoint AI, LLC	Software Sales	Albany
Orases	Custom Software Sales Executive	Albany

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings , feel free to comment here if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

Let me start by saying I’m breaching contract by sharing this. If the company’s lookouts link this post to me – which they will – I’ll be disgraced, and any chance at getting a job in this profession again will be out of the picture. I have the common sense to keep my name unknown, but all that’s gonna do is slow them down.
Keeping this hidden would be a crime against humanity of the highest order. You all deserve to know, as terrible as it is.
I work at an unnamed technological research company as, you guessed it, a researcher. In recent years, we’ve made astonishing advancements in developing technology that can interact with and harness tachyons.
Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light; that’s the most important part. They’ve been a subject of theoretical physics since the late 60s, but as far as public knowledge goes, they’re still just that. Theoretical.
But they are most certainly real. Well, not “tachyons” per se, though their behaviour is equatable. I won’t bore you with the technicalities, but the result of a particle travelling faster than light is that said particle is able to, effectively, travel backwards in time.
My other group members and I have been experimenting with these particles for the best part of two years now. We’ve made major advances, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
Yesterday, 23/03/2023, at 09:07 am, my equipment detected a tachyon signal. This was in the morning, mind you, and no tests had yet been carried out. From what I can tell, this signal originated – or, rather, will originate – from elsewhere.
Playing it out loud, it at first just sounded like a garbled mess of frequencies. But after observing the audio structure, I found it to be made up of thousands of tones, of which there were only two types – long, and short.
The realisation hit pretty quick. It was Morse code, or, at least, it could be interpreted as such. The most fundamental form of digital communication known to man. So, I ran it through an auto-interpreter a few times, and got a fully coherent message.
I refuse to believe that I’m seeing patterns where there are none. The chances are so astronomically low that I can’t feasibly consider it to be a random signal, especially considering I’ve never received one from somewhere outside the lab.
I’m going to copy over the translation here. I do not wish to instil panic, but please, spread this post. People need to be aware that this is a real possibility.
To whomever is reading this, prepare yourself.
Here it is.
​
[TRANSCRIPT BEGIN]
Hi.
My name is Tim Hermelle. Before I write down this account, I should insist that this is the truth. This is happening to us all right now. This is not a joke, prank, or an interactive project.
This is the truth. You HAVE to believe what you are about to read, for our sakes.
Okay, with that out of the way… shit, it’s getting closer. I’ll write down what I can before we’re pulled back to the city, to join the others. I hope enough context is given in my account for you to fully understand.
I live - lived - in the great city of Pharades (that’s Pha-ra-dees). The utopia of humanity’s future. Life was amazing. Every aspect brought joy and satisfaction to every person. No hunger, thirst, no overpopulation, pollution… a Nirvana if there ever was. The level of advancement may be difficult for some of you to believe
Work was optional, and automatons would fill the spaces left by those choosing to pursue their own personal dreams. Even so, a large number of people here still choose to have jobs, vocations I suppose. Healthcare was unparalleled, and not one person has died during my time here.
Everything major was decided by a vote. It was the perfect democratic system, but I’m no politician, so I wouldn’t be able to explain to you why that is.
Hell, we even had a collective vote to decide the next week’s weather every Sunday. That’s right, we’d taken control of the weather. Want to splash around in puddles, smelling the petrichor? Maybe get a tan on? You’d just have to go and vote for it.
Pharades was, without hyperbole, fucking beautiful. In between the city blocks, there were great swathes of woodland and meadows. Crystal rivers flowed underneath silver bridges, and leaves of every colour painted the landscape like polka dots.
And the city itself, well, they say nature trumps anything manmade in terms of beauty, but I disagree. The intricately designed towers were accented by all the most complementary colours, gold, chrome, red, blue, any combination you could imagine, it was here. Arches, spirals, and patterns of every variety adorned the structures.
The day in question was a Wednesday – not that days of the week held any particular significance anymore. I’d planned to meet with two of my buddies, Erin and Tuan, at our favourite coffee shop a couple of districts over, in the Wantania area.
Historically, the journey may have been arduous, or frustrating. Not now. Most people didn’t even use vehicles anymore – instead, the city had built a vast underground network of ever-shifting and rearranging tracks, called “Tubyrinth”. Each person owned a personal pod of sorts, customisable to any degree.
I input Wantania Central, and hopped inside. My pod contained a sofa and a minifridge, stocked up with my favourite drinks. The journey was always snappy. Each time, the underground superstructure would arrange a new and unique track to be used, direct to a reserved bay.
Just fifteen minutes later, I was stood under the vaulted, ornamental expanse of the station roof, a hundred or so feet above. I always stopped here to just stare upwards for a moment, absorbing the imaginative architecture.
After exiting the station, I was surprised to see that both Erin and Tuan were already waiting for me outside. The good kind of surprised, that slaps a goofy smile onto your face.
“Took you long enough!” Tuan chuckled, finding the irony in his own words hilarious.
“God, I know right?” added Erin, “I was worried I’d need crutches after standing out here waiting!”
“Well, heh, you’re not gonna like this next part,” I joked, and we set off down the street, laughing. Our favourite café was called “Beansmith’s Forge”. It was a cheesy, but endearing name, and the theme fit the three of us like a glove; as I said before, we’d been working on worldbuilding for our fantasy RPG, an immersive neurolink VR experience, where the player could design their own character and have a unique questline auto-generated out of a complex system.
We ordered brunch, and, of course, coffee. I won’t get into the details of our talks, but we quickly finished up, paid, and set off down Gerben Street.
The more exciting event of the day was our session booked at the aptly named Noji Box, something you could call an “anti-grav playground”. Admittedly, I’ve never fully known how it works, just that it involves paired wormholes, immensely powerful electromagnets, and a huge vacuum-chamber.
One thing I was always grateful for was that the automatons, who I saw working robotically through storefront windows, were withheld any accurate human likeness – I’m sure you’ve heard of the uncanny valley, so you’ll know what I mean. They fell just short of it.
All was calm on the walk, as to be expected. We made it to the Noji Box in good time, ten minutes before our session booking. I get it’s company policy to take everyone through the safety basics, but it was admittedly a little boring after many, many past visits.
The only real requirement was that you’d have to wear an “osteopatic suit”. No, osteostatic? Something about keeping your bones from floating away from each other, or from disappearing over time.
We were suited up, ready to enter “S.S. Slamdown”, when a sudden tremor shook the building’s foundations. Everyone shared the same puzzled expression – not once had something like that ever happened in Pharades.
The staff looked a bit stumped at first. I guess they never had to deal with a situation like this in the past. To our dismay, but unsurprisingly, our session was cancelled, and we were told that they would call us later to sort out a re-booking.
I had the strangest feeling when we left and began back down the road. Something similar to déjà vu, but not quite. Like nostalgia, but without the accompanying feeling of reminiscence or joy.
Trying to brush it off, I distracted my mind by humming a tune. I didn’t know what it was from, at the time, but I knew it was a stringed melody. A violin? Thing is, I wasn’t really humming it as much as hearing it in my head.
We rounded a corner, and Erin paused in surprise.
“Oh, that’s… hey, that’s Jeremiah! He’s been playing that fiddle the street over from mine for the past, what, two weeks? Come on, let’s go listen.”
I grew confused when we approached, only to hear the exact same melody that had just been looping in my head. Before I’d heard this guy playing. I don’t remember stumbling upon this particular street performer before this point.
We stood listening for a few minutes, then continued our walk. Thoughts no longer infested with that tune, I was hit with what I can only describe as a taste. The savoury taste of something on my tongue, complete with mustard and relish. Meat of some kind?
The concern started to flourish when we came upon a food truck, and Tuan asked if we were hungry. Sure, we’d just eaten at the coffee shop, but I could fit in one more tasty bite. He offered to pay, which we gladly accepted, and he returned with… hotdogs. With mustard. And relish.
My gratitude masked the ever-growing confusion within me. Was this just a weird coincidence, or something else? Did I know we were going to get hotdogs?
We wound up back at the station, where a feeling of detached sorrow welled up inside me, something you might feel after recalling a bad memory from which you’ve since recovered. I understood then that I would run into my on-good-terms ex inside. But, before we could enter, another rumbling tremor swept across the street, followed by the clamour of destruction and screams from inside.
A grey dust cloud plumed out from the entrance, sweeping us off of our feet. I saw Erin flipped face-first into the pavement, just as I caught my heel on the base of a stop sign. Yet another quake boomed underneath the asphalt.
The asphalt I was falling down onto… but the impact didn’t come. Instead of a hard surface, the sensation of falling went on. You know that feeling when you think there’s another step at the bottom of the stairs, only to find the floor instead? It was just like that.
The ground I fell upon wasn’t asphalt. It rang out as I collided, almost hollow-sounding. Metallic. Maybe it was just my head ringing, but without a doubt, I was not in the street anymore.
I sat up, and my palms confirmed I was on a metal floor, the kind with those diamond-shaped grips. Looking around almost caused a complete sensory overload, immediately. A multitude of flashing lights, screens, wires, buttons, and all sorts decorated the room. It looked not far off from the control room of an intelligence agency – at least, how they’re depicted in movies.
I got onto one knee and pivoted to look around. The tall man standing directly behind me almost led to a second fall, but instead I scooted backward frantically at the sight.
The man – well, I say “man”, but this person didn’t really have any distinguishing features. They were wearing a spotless black and white cloak of some kind, and a metal cage covering the upper half of their face, so that only their mouth was visible.
They stood still, not reacting to my show of surprise, then spoke in the most androgynous voice conceivable.
“How did you get in here?”
I scanned the room, finding that there were no obvious entrances anywhere around, like we were inside a closed-off box.
“I- uh, I fell over, a-and next thing I know – here,” I stuttered.
“Well, you shouldn’t be here, and there’s no way that you should be able to get here.”
I stood up, feeling a little more comfortable in the presence of this stranger, though not letting my guard down entirely. Now, I could see the pictures displayed across the screens – they seemed to be feeds of countless locations in Pharades, streets, woodlands, you name it.
“What… what the hell’s going on here? Who are you? Why are you spying on the city?”
The stranger didn’t seem amused, being pelted with questions, and held up a hand, gesturing me to stop. They let out a deep, held breath.
“Well, since you’re here, I may as well enlighten you. Take a seat.”
So I did. I sat in shock and disbelief for the next five minutes as the person answered all my questions, even the ones I didn’t know I wanted to ask. They introduced themselves simply as “Administrator”, but I chose “Admin”, to avoid the mouthful.
Admin proceeded to tell me the truth, as casually as one would talk about the weather.
It wasn’t real.
A simulation.
They told me we were inside a highly advanced, self-sustaining, supercomputer pod travelling through deep space, harvesting energy from ions extracted from the surrounding vacuum. Over a hundred trillion years ago, those living here now consented in having their consciousness imported to the device.
On top of the ion harvesting, power was supposedly generated from emotions experienced by a consciousness – the more intense an emotion or feeling, the more power generated.
I interrupted the monologue at this point with a question they hadn’t seemed to consider,
“Let’s say I believe what you’re saying. If this system’s been up for as long as you say, why did I only just have my 29th birthday, what, two months back now?”
“I understand your concern, but allow me to continue. Every 50 years, it is reset. All your memories are wiped and locked away until the moments when you would again make those memories. There are only a set number of people who were uploaded to the system, and their minds cannot simply be deleted if they were to die.”
Not only a simulation, but an endless loop? My brain felt like it might burst.
“Wait,” I said, “if we’re reset every time, and everything plays out the same… then, we can’t possibly have any free will of our own, right?”
“I suppose you could say that. But the illusion we, I, have worked tirelessly to maintain, gives the impression that you do.”
“Wh… what? So, the original me signed up for this? But I’m not him! I’m a copy, aren’t I? Do I have a choice in this?”
“There is no way for me to erase any person that lives here. Only if the pod itself is damaged or destroyed, can I, or anyone else, truly die. The Great Stellar Extinction has come and gone, and all that remains outside is cold, and dark. A handful of black and brown dwarves, and black holes. To my knowledge.”
The sudden feeling of intense, hollow loneliness filled up my chest. We were alone in a great black sea of nothingness. My slack jaw must have told Admin I didn’t have the capacity to speak.
“Over time, I have lost contact with the hundreds of thousands of other pods that were ejected from Earth all that time ago. Either they are too far now, or they met a destructive end. I can’t say which is the better, anymore.”
Absorbing the sudden truth, the emptiness evolved into anger.
“Let me get this straight. We, living our lives down there, are puppets to you? Is that it? Just an endless cycle of digital paradise, kept in the dark of all you’ve just told me? How can you possibly justify this?!”
“Calm down. Having your memories wiped is a luxury I myself cannot afford. Anyway, that’s only the preface of what I need to talk about. I’m sure you also noticed the tremors, down there?”
“The tremors? Oh, oh yeah. Sort of ruined my plans, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“I didn’t do anything. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Whatever the cause, it’s not within this pod.”
I took it all in. A system malfunction? Why did the Admin feel the need to share this with me?
“Is… is that why, maybe, that I could predict some of the things that happened afterwards?”
“It’s worse than I thought. The memory suppression seems to be failing.”
Both of us paused for a moment. The silence was deafening.
“I’ve been taking readings on the external sensors. There’s… something out there. An object. It’s been following us for a while now, but with no starlight left, I don’t know what it is. Space debris couldn’t move on its own accord like this thing is.”
“What are you trying to say?” I sputtered, the dread I felt deepening by the second.
“I’m saying that something has found us.”
My blood ran cold. Found us? What could have found us?
“Didn’t you say all the stars are dead? The universe is just darkness now. What could have found us? What?”
“I wish I had the answers, too. I don’t think we’re safe anymore. The most recent readings imply that whatever it is, it’s latched onto the pod somehow. Possibly-“
Admin was cut off by the loud screech of static from the speakers around the room. Their head shot up to the nearest corner in a manner that set me on a knife’s edge.
The tremors returned with a vengeance now, and the both of us were sent sprawling onto the floor. I didn’t fall through it this time, though. Sparks flew and monitors went offline.
I was about to ask what we should do, when the roaring static settled, and something else started to play.
An innocent, childlike giggle. Gurgled coos, infantile squeals of joy that pierced my eardrums like needles and left them ringing. Remembering the sounds that came from those speakers make my insides twist and yearn to escape my body, knowing what came next.
The laughter grew, and so did the tremors. The room started to collapse, wires and boxes raining down upon us. Well, not really collapse, no, but change. The far wall crumpled, like something on the other side assailed it with forceful impacts, and the room began to shrink.
As if that dark place wasn’t claustrophobic enough, the ceiling, walls, everything began to close in on us. All the while, the childlike giggling only grew in joy. I thought we were to be crushed and snapped by the pressure, when we were abruptly freed.
It had happened again. Pushed through the floor and spat out somewhere else. This time, I – we – found ourselves near a paved road leading out of one of the city blocks, into a green meadow which gave way to trees a ways down.
Something was terribly wrong. Only after brushing myself off and standing up did I become aware of the swirling darkness that replaced the once baby-blue sky, with its cotton candy clouds. A heavy and unsettling calm had fallen upon us, dampening the city’s brilliance. No more did sunlight gleam off the ornate spires and arches, replaced by a still, hanging shadow.
The eerie quiet was shattered by that godforsaken crackling, booming across the landscape, despite not a speaker in sight, again followed by those ill-belonging coos and cries. Accompanying the infantile sputtering came an uproar of cracking and crumbling, great impacts from deep within the city’s heart.
Both Admin and I stared in disbelief as distant buildings sunk into the ground, while others twisted and warped their way into the sky, as if made from soft clay. Some just disappeared entirely, leaving not a shred of evidence behind that they had ever been there, while their former inhabitants plunged from storeys above.
“It’s taken my place.”
Those four unprompted words shook me to the core of my being. The god of this world had been usurped.
“But why?” I found myself asking, “with what motive?”
Admin went to reply, but stopped upon seeing the great, pinkish masses floating up out of the streets, far ahead. We stared in bewilderment, trying to make out what they were. The chorus of screams hurried us to the realisation that the balls were… they were made of people.
Agonised, howling faces littered the fleshy abominations, while more objects rose around them. Structural beams, signposts, metal objects of every kind gravitated toward the amalgams of humanity, before their relentless assaults began.
Ripping, tearing, stabbing, slicing… it was already too much for my mind to comprehend. It garnered no reaction from myself other than stunned shock. Flesh and blood spewed from the masses, and orbited around them like the rings of Saturn, falling back in to haphazardly patch themselves back onto the wailing people.
My thoughtless attention was redirected as a frantic deluge of citizens fled the city, running down the street towards us. One by one, the exodus was halted, people seeming to stop in place abruptly, though the screams did not relent.
I couldn’t see what had stopped them until the crowd drew closer, where I saw an elderly man whip forward, foot stuck fast, instantly snapping his knee from the momentum. He let out a heart-wrenching cry as he fell down and looked to see what had stopped him.
Something that looked like roots, water pipes maybe, had erupted through the tarmac and coiled their way up his leg. I could see the strength draining in his eyes as they stood him back upright by force, wrapping around his entire body.
I watched in abject horror as he was raised off the ground, and each and every one of the old man’s limbs were bent and snapped at unnatural angles, shattering frail bones into dust.
His feeble cries were promptly silenced as a squirming metal tube forced its way inside his mouth, his eyes rolling back in unfathomable agony as the bulging mass forced its way down his throat, splitting his ribcage apart and allowing the organs within to slop out and float in the air, as if weightless. The whole process seemed to reverse itself in time, then repeat, over and over.
I could only hear the echoes of Admin’s shouts and the faint sensation of their grip on my forearm as they pulled me away from the mind-bending atrocity. My vacant body tumbled backward, sending both of us falling onto the grass.
Still I could only sit there, frozen. Somewhere off to the right, I saw a young woman pulling presumably her daughter along by the wrist, fleeing the hellscape of flesh and bone down a small alley. Her head spun wildly as she noticed the walls of the alleyway closing in around them.
She burst out into the open, but was yanked back, her grip fast. She turned in desperation, only to see her daughter, who couldn’t have been more than seven, being slowly crushed into a paste of bloody flesh and yellow fat. Her pitiful screams still ring in my ears, seeing her child suffer such a terrible fate.
Admin was finally triumphant in breaking my trance, and I rushed to my feet, stumbling before gaining my footing and bolting the fuck out of there. The childish giggling echoing out over the sky only served to push me forwards and away from that place.
“What the fuck is going on?!” I yelped, glancing over to Admin, hoping they could offer just the slightest of explanations.
“I have an idea, but we need to get somewhere first. You see that hill through the woods, right over there?”
“Hill? To the observatory?”
“There’s one last thing we can try to stop this. It’s a shot in the dark, but I can’t just stand here and fade away with the rest.”
High speed winds whipped the trees as we ran below them, leaves fluttering in a wild seizure. Air-splitting cracks sounded, so loud my ears began to ring once more, and I looked over my shoulder to see what they could have been.
Blazing spouts of fire shot down from the clouds behind, more akin to lightning than anything, striking the forsaken with white-hot temperatures. Even from a distance, I could see skin and flesh melt off of bones like candle wax, forming spiralling clouds of organic vapour.
In my distraction, I ran straight into a tree, and tumbled over, blood leaking from a small cut on my forehead. Admin skidded to a stop and pulled me up to my feet, and ran onwards, not waiting for a moment to ask if I was okay.
Neither of us were okay. That was a given now.
We reached the top of the hill without too much effort – seems it was programmed for everyone to have an above-average level of fitness, young or old regardless.
Admin frantically, but methodically, sifted through what appeared to be a large hoop of keys, searching for the one to fit the observatory’s door. I looked back over to where we had fled from.
The twisted buildings coiled toward the sky, gargantuan talons holding captive everyone I’d ever known. But there was something else. Far behind the city, in the distant hills and woodland, a great black wave that spanned the horizon was travelling towards us, eviscerating the world itself. All it left behind was an endless chasm of darkness, defying reality itself.
The tsunami came closer, before stopping at the city’s outskirts, leaving only a towering earthen spire of suffering, flaming bolts cracking down upon it.
“Admin, what is going on?!”
They paused for a moment, then continued working on the several locks barring our entry.
“Do you remember what I told you earlier, when you found me? How this system is able to keep on running, over the trillions of years?”
“…ions?”
“Yes, but that’s only the basis. I told you that emotional activity generates power, yes? The more intense an emotion, the more power generated?”
“What are you getting at?”
“This is pure theory, but I believe that whatever is out there is feeding off of the system.”
“Is that why all that was happening? The-“
I stifled a gag, recalling the horrors fresh in my memory.
“Again, it’s a theory. I don’t understand what it is. If the constraints of the universe are loose enough for something to evolve in its endless darkness, to predate on the last sources of energy within it… I don’t know. And I doubt we ever will.”
I stared out at the hellscape, speechless. Finally, Admin found the right key, yanked the door open, and pulled me inside by the arm.
“Hey!” Admin yelled, snapping their fingers, “I need you to be present for this. I am restricted in this world, I can’t break and reform things like you can. A failsafe, for if the power were to go to my head. Follow my instructions exactly.”
They told me how to break apart some of the technology in the observatory, and rewire it into a different machine. I had no idea what we were creating at the time, but complied nonetheless.
The finished product was a makeshift beacon of some kind, connected to the nearby terminal.
“Thank you. Now, type.”
“Type what?”
“Everything that has happened. Add as many details as you can, because we won’t have another chance to get this out there.”
“O-okay, what is this thing? A radio?”
“In a way. The observatory is one of the only places here that has a connection to the outside. I have used it more than once to observe the universe fading away. This setup will send our transmission as a unique, superluminal type of wave. Hurry, we can’t waste time chatting about this.”
And so, here we are. I don’t know who will be hearing this, if anyone at all.
I beg of you, consider how our advancements might be our downfall.
It’s almost here. I can hear the flaming bolts striking the forest, closer.
This is my account. Please save us. Please spare us.
Don’t condemn us as you have.
[TRANSCRIPT END]
​
There it is. I’ve revised the translation more times than I can count, and I’m sure there’s no mistake here.
Other readings imply that this message has travelled an unimaginably vast distance, and not only over space. Repeated triangulation only tells me this came from above, somewhere far away, among the stars.
I can feel the edges of my mind singeing. This can’t be proven as truth, nor can it be discredited. There’s no possible way to explain how this message came from our own planet.
I’m trying to be rational, but I think we need to consider future development very carefully. As a people, we have always rushed through our technological advancements at an incredible speed, not stopping to consider all the consequences that might follow.
If anyone will believe this, please spread it around. I have no doubt this post will be taken down the moment they find it. As for myself, I’ll be disgraced, probably. Stuck in a cold cell, most likely.
Spread the word. The fact that the higher-ups will attempt to conceal this is a cruel thing indeed, if any of it’s true.
Signing off.

Hello dear friends.
I think i made a huge and embarrasing mistake at work and i need your help with this. I feel so bad right now.
Normally i don't work at our office i work remotely but today i was at the company and i needed to use my personal laptop for a brief period of time to write and send something work related.
My laptop was on sleep, i opened it and used it for less than 30 minutes. Since it was on sleep, It started from where i left it last night. So my torrent client was active and i didn't realise that it was active. When i finished my work i realised that my torrent was working and it finished downloading some of movies and it was already seeding. The movies were... Not like the movies you can easily watch at work or while at public....
I'm no expert on tech, actually i don't have any extra knowledge about the field so i will try to give you the necessary information about it. I'm using company guest wifi service and it is not the one workers use. Workers use another service but in order to connect that service one should have a company laptop. So the other day IT department told me that i can use the guest wifi since i don't have a company laptop at this moment.
The company uses another wifi provider company's service for this. You should enter your phone number etc to login (The same wifi provider is being used at famous coffee shops around our town). So i entered my phone and entered the password they send to my phone number. Actually since i did this process the other day, it didn't even ask me to do it. It just connects automatically when i enter the last two numbers of my phone number.
Luckily, my VPN was on during this whole time. But i unwillingly downloaded and seeded some p*rn torrents with my personal computer through our companies guest wifi service (which was provided by another third party company).
I'm feeling so bad right now. Am i doomed? Should i tell the IT beforehand what i did unwillingly? I feel so stupid and ashamed right now. I saw people get fired because of things like this.
By the way, torrenting is not illegal in our country. Nobody gets a warning from the government because of torrenting. I always use VPN just because i want to feel secure just in case.

Let me start by saying I’m breaching contract by sharing this. If the company’s lookouts link this post to me – which they will – I’ll be disgraced, and any chance at getting a job in this profession again will be out of the picture. I have the common sense to keep my name unknown, but all that’s gonna do is slow them down.
Keeping this hidden would be a crime against humanity of the highest order. You all deserve to know, as terrible as it is.
I work at an unnamed technological research company as, you guessed it, a researcher. In recent years, we’ve made astonishing advancements in developing technology that can interact with and harness tachyons.
Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light; that’s the most important part. They’ve been a subject of theoretical physics since the late 60s, but as far as public knowledge goes, they’re still just that. Theoretical.
But they are most certainly real. Well, not “tachyons” per se, though their behaviour is equatable. I won’t bore you with the technicalities, but the result of a particle travelling faster than light is that said particle is able to, effectively, travel backwards in time.
My other group members and I have been experimenting with these particles for the best part of two years now. We’ve made major advances, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
Yesterday, 23/03/2023, at 09:07 am, my equipment detected a tachyon signal. This was in the morning, mind you, and no tests had yet been carried out. From what I can tell, this signal originated – or, rather, will originate – from elsewhere.
Playing it out loud, it at first just sounded like a garbled mess of frequencies. But after observing the audio structure, I found it to be made up of thousands of tones, of which there were only two types – long, and short.
The realisation hit pretty quick. It was Morse code, or, at least, it could be interpreted as such. The most fundamental form of digital communication known to man. So, I ran it through an auto-interpreter a few times, and got a fully coherent message.
I refuse to believe that I’m seeing patterns where there are none. The chances are so astronomically low that I can’t feasibly consider it to be a random signal, especially considering I’ve never received one from somewhere outside the lab.
I’m going to copy over the translation here. I do not wish to instil panic, but please, spread this post. People need to be aware that this is a real possibility.
To whomever is reading this, prepare yourself.
Here it is.
[TRANSCRIPT BEGIN]
Hi.
My name is Tim Hermelle. Before I write down this account, I should insist that this is the truth. This is happening to us all right now. This is not a joke, prank, or an interactive project.
This is the truth. You HAVE to believe what you are about to read, for our sakes.
Okay, with that out of the way… shit, it’s getting closer. I’ll write down what I can before we’re pulled back to the city, to join the others. I hope enough context is given in my account for you to fully understand.
I live - lived - in the great city of Pharades (that’s Pha-ra-dees). The utopia of humanity’s future. Life was amazing. Every aspect brought joy and satisfaction to every person. No hunger, thirst, no overpopulation, pollution… a Nirvana if there ever was. The level of advancement may be difficult for some of you to believe
Work was optional, and automatons would fill the spaces left by those choosing to pursue their own personal dreams. Even so, a large number of people here still choose to have jobs, vocations I suppose. Healthcare was unparalleled, and not one person has died during my time here.
Everything major was decided by a vote. It was the perfect democratic system, but I’m no politician, so I wouldn’t be able to explain to you why that is.
Hell, we even had a collective vote to decide the next week’s weather every Sunday. That’s right, we’d taken control of the weather. Want to splash around in puddles, smelling the petrichor? Maybe get a tan on? You’d just have to go and vote for it.
Pharades was, without hyperbole, fucking beautiful. In between the city blocks, there were great swathes of woodland and meadows. Crystal rivers flowed underneath silver bridges, and leaves of every colour painted the landscape like polka dots.
And the city itself, well, they say nature trumps anything manmade in terms of beauty, but I disagree. The intricately designed towers were accented by all the most complementary colours, gold, chrome, red, blue, any combination you could imagine, it was here. Arches, spirals, and patterns of every variety adorned the structures.
The day in question was a Wednesday – not that days of the week held any particular significance anymore. I’d planned to meet with two of my buddies, Erin and Tuan, at our favourite coffee shop a couple of districts over, in the Wantania area.
Historically, the journey may have been arduous, or frustrating. Not now. Most people didn’t even use vehicles anymore – instead, the city had built a vast underground network of ever-shifting and rearranging tracks, called “Tubyrinth”. Each person owned a personal pod of sorts, customisable to any degree.
I input Wantania Central, and hopped inside. My pod contained a sofa and a minifridge, stocked up with my favourite drinks. The journey was always snappy. Each time, the underground superstructure would arrange a new and unique track to be used, direct to a reserved bay.
Just fifteen minutes later, I was stood under the vaulted, ornamental expanse of the station roof, a hundred or so feet above. I always stopped here to just stare upwards for a moment, absorbing the imaginative architecture.
After exiting the station, I was surprised to see that both Erin and Tuan were already waiting for me outside. The good kind of surprised, that slaps a goofy smile onto your face.
“Took you long enough!” Tuan chuckled, finding the irony in his own words hilarious.
“God, I know right?” added Erin, “I was worried I’d need crutches after standing out here waiting!”
“Well, heh, you’re not gonna like this next part,” I joked, and we set off down the street, laughing. Our favourite café was called “Beansmith’s Forge”. It was a cheesy, but endearing name, and the theme fit the three of us like a glove; as I said before, we’d been working on worldbuilding for our fantasy RPG, an immersive neurolink VR experience, where the player could design their own character and have a unique questline auto-generated out of a complex system.
We ordered brunch, and, of course, coffee. I won’t get into the details of our talks, but we quickly finished up, paid, and set off down Gerben Street.
The more exciting event of the day was our session booked at the aptly named Noji Box, something you could call an “anti-grav playground”. Admittedly, I’ve never fully known how it works, just that it involves paired wormholes, immensely powerful electromagnets, and a huge vacuum-chamber.
One thing I was always grateful for was that the automatons, who I saw working robotically through storefront windows, were withheld any accurate human likeness – I’m sure you’ve heard of the uncanny valley, so you’ll know what I mean. They fell just short of it.
All was calm on the walk, as to be expected. We made it to the Noji Box in good time, ten minutes before our session booking. I get it’s company policy to take everyone through the safety basics, but it was admittedly a little boring after many, many past visits.
The only real requirement was that you’d have to wear an “osteopatic suit”. No, osteostatic? Something about keeping your bones from floating away from each other, or from disappearing over time.
We were suited up, ready to enter “S.S. Slamdown”, when a sudden tremor shook the building’s foundations. Everyone shared the same puzzled expression – not once had something like that ever happened in Pharades.
The staff looked a bit stumped at first. I guess they never had to deal with a situation like this in the past. To our dismay, but unsurprisingly, our session was cancelled, and we were told that they would call us later to sort out a re-booking.
I had the strangest feeling when we left and began back down the road. Something similar to déjà vu, but not quite. Like nostalgia, but without the accompanying feeling of reminiscence or joy.
Trying to brush it off, I distracted my mind by humming a tune. I didn’t know what it was from, at the time, but I knew it was a stringed melody. A violin? Thing is, I wasn’t really humming it as much as hearing it in my head.
We rounded a corner, and Erin paused in surprise.
“Oh, that’s… hey, that’s Jeremiah! He’s been playing that fiddle the street over from mine for the past, what, two weeks? Come on, let’s go listen.”
I grew confused when we approached, only to hear the exact same melody that had just been looping in my head. Before I’d heard this guy playing. I don’t remember stumbling upon this particular street performer before this point.
We stood listening for a few minutes, then continued our walk. Thoughts no longer infested with that tune, I was hit with what I can only describe as a taste. The savoury taste of something on my tongue, complete with mustard and relish. Meat of some kind?
The concern started to flourish when we came upon a food truck, and Tuan asked if we were hungry. Sure, we’d just eaten at the coffee shop, but I could fit in one more tasty bite. He offered to pay, which we gladly accepted, and he returned with… hotdogs. With mustard. And relish.
My gratitude masked the ever-growing confusion within me. Was this just a weird coincidence, or something else? Did I know we were going to get hotdogs?
We wound up back at the station, where a feeling of detached sorrow welled up inside me, something you might feel after recalling a bad memory from which you’ve since recovered. I understood then that I would run into my on-good-terms ex inside. But, before we could enter, another rumbling tremor swept across the street, followed by the clamour of destruction and screams from inside.
A grey dust cloud plumed out from the entrance, sweeping us off of our feet. I saw Erin flipped face-first into the pavement, just as I caught my heel on the base of a stop sign. Yet another quake boomed underneath the asphalt.
The asphalt I was falling down onto… but the impact didn’t come. Instead of a hard surface, the sensation of falling went on. You know that feeling when you think there’s another step at the bottom of the stairs, only to find the floor instead? It was just like that.
The ground I fell upon wasn’t asphalt. It rang out as I collided, almost hollow-sounding. Metallic. Maybe it was just my head ringing, but without a doubt, I was not in the street anymore.
I sat up, and my palms confirmed I was on a metal floor, the kind with those diamond-shaped grips. Looking around almost caused a complete sensory overload, immediately. A multitude of flashing lights, screens, wires, buttons, and all sorts decorated the room. It looked not far off from the control room of an intelligence agency – at least, how they’re depicted in movies.
I got onto one knee and pivoted to look around. The tall man standing directly behind me almost led to a second fall, but instead I scooted backward frantically at the sight.
The man – well, I say “man”, but this person didn’t really have any distinguishing features. They were wearing a spotless black and white cloak of some kind, and a metal cage covering the upper half of their face, so that only their mouth was visible.
They stood still, not reacting to my show of surprise, then spoke in the most androgynous voice conceivable.
“How did you get in here?”
I scanned the room, finding that there were no obvious entrances anywhere around, like we were inside a closed-off box.
“I- uh, I fell over, a-and next thing I know – here,” I stuttered.
“Well, you shouldn’t be here, and there’s no way that you should be able to get here.”
I stood up, feeling a little more comfortable in the presence of this stranger, though not letting my guard down entirely. Now, I could see the pictures displayed across the screens – they seemed to be feeds of countless locations in Pharades, streets, woodlands, you name it.
“What… what the hell’s going on here? Who are you? Why are you spying on the city?”
The stranger didn’t seem amused, being pelted with questions, and held up a hand, gesturing me to stop. They let out a deep, held breath.
“Well, since you’re here, I may as well enlighten you. Take a seat.”
So I did. I sat in shock and disbelief for the next five minutes as the person answered all my questions, even the ones I didn’t know I wanted to ask. They introduced themselves simply as “Administrator”, but I chose “Admin”, to avoid the mouthful.
Admin proceeded to tell me the truth, as casually as one would talk about the weather.
It wasn’t real.
A simulation.
They told me we were inside a highly advanced, self-sustaining, supercomputer pod travelling through deep space, harvesting energy from ions extracted from the surrounding vacuum. Over a hundred trillion years ago, those living here now consented in having their consciousness imported to the device.
On top of the ion harvesting, power was supposedly generated from emotions experienced by a consciousness – the more intense an emotion or feeling, the more power generated.
I interrupted the monologue at this point with a question they hadn’t seemed to consider,
“Let’s say I believe what you’re saying. If this system’s been up for as long as you say, why did I only just have my 29th birthday, what, two months back now?”
“I understand your concern, but allow me to continue. Every 50 years, it is reset. All your memories are wiped and locked away until the moments when you would again make those memories. There are only a set number of people who were uploaded to the system, and their minds cannot simply be deleted if they were to die.”
Not only a simulation, but an endless loop? My brain felt like it might burst.
“Wait,” I said, “if we’re reset every time, and everything plays out the same… then, we can’t possibly have any free will of our own, right?”
“I suppose you could say that. But the illusion we, I, have worked tirelessly to maintain, gives the impression that you do.”
“Wh… what? So, the original me signed up for this? But I’m not him! I’m a copy, aren’t I? Do I have a choice in this?”
“There is no way for me to erase any person that lives here. Only if the pod itself is damaged or destroyed, can I, or anyone else, truly die. The Great Stellar Extinction has come and gone, and all that remains outside is cold, and dark. A handful of black and brown dwarves, and black holes. To my knowledge.”
The sudden feeling of intense, hollow loneliness filled up my chest. We were alone in a great black sea of nothingness. My slack jaw must have told Admin I didn’t have the capacity to speak.
“Over time, I have lost contact with the hundreds of thousands of other pods that were ejected from Earth all that time ago. Either they are too far now, or they met a destructive end. I can’t say which is the better, anymore.”
Absorbing the sudden truth, the emptiness evolved into anger.
“Let me get this straight. We, living our lives down there, are puppets to you? Is that it? Just an endless cycle of digital paradise, kept in the dark of all you’ve just told me? How can you possibly justify this?!”
“Calm down. Having your memories wiped is a luxury I cannot afford. Anyway, that’s only the preface of what I need to talk about. I’m sure you also noticed the tremors, down there?”
“The tremors? Oh, oh yeah. Sort of ruined my plans, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“I didn’t do anything. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Whatever the cause, it’s not within this pod.”
I took it all in. A system malfunction? Why did the Admin feel the need to share this with me?
“Is… is that why, maybe, that I could predict some of the things that happened afterwards?”
“It’s worse than I thought. The memory suppression seems to be failing.”
Both of us paused for a moment. The silence was deafening.
“I’ve been taking readings on the external sensors. There’s… something out there. An object. It’s been following us for a while now, but with no starlight left, I don’t know what it is. Space debris couldn’t move on its own accord like this thing is.”
“What are you trying to say?” I sputtered, the dread I felt deepening by the second.
“I’m saying that something has found us.”
My blood ran cold. Found us? What could have found us?
“Didn’t you say all the stars are dead? The universe is just darkness now. What could have found us? What?”
“I wish I had the answers, too. I don’t think we’re safe anymore. The most recent readings imply that whatever it is, it’s latched onto the pod somehow. Possibly-“
Admin was cut off by the loud screech of static from the speakers around the room. Their head shot up to the nearest corner in a manner that set me on a knife’s edge.
The tremors returned with a vengeance now, and the both of us were sent sprawling onto the floor. I didn’t fall through it this time, though. Sparks flew and monitors went offline.
I was about to ask what we should do, when the roaring static settled, and something else started to play.
An innocent, childlike giggle. Gurgled coos, infantile squeals of joy that pierced my eardrums like needles and left them ringing. Remembering the sounds that came from those speakers make my insides twist and yearn to escape my body, knowing what came next.
The laughter grew, and so did the tremors. The room started to collapse, wires and boxes raining down upon us. Well, not really collapse, no, but change. The far wall crumpled, like something on the other side assailed it with forceful impacts, and the room began to shrink.
As if that dark place wasn’t claustrophobic enough, the ceiling, walls, everything began to close in on us. All the while, the childlike giggling only grew in joy. I thought we were to be crushed and snapped by the pressure, when we were abruptly freed.
It had happened again. Pushed through the floor and spat out somewhere else. This time, I – we – found ourselves near a paved road leading out of one of the city blocks, into a green meadow which gave way to trees a ways down.
Something was terribly wrong. Only after brushing myself off and standing up did I become aware of the swirling darkness that replaced the once baby-blue sky, with its cotton candy clouds. A heavy and unsettling calm had fallen upon us, dampening the city’s brilliance. No more did sunlight gleam off the ornate spires and arches, replaced by a still, hanging shadow.
The eerie quiet was shattered by that godforsaken crackling, booming across the landscape, despite not a speaker in sight, again followed by those ill-belonging coos and cries. Accompanying the infantile sputtering came an uproar of cracking and crumbling, great impacts from deep within the city’s heart.
Both Admin and I stared in disbelief as distant buildings sunk into the ground, while others twisted and warped their way into the sky, as if made from soft clay. Some just disappeared entirely, leaving not a shred of evidence behind that they had ever been there, while their former inhabitants plunged from storeys above.
“It’s taken my place.”
Those four unprompted words shook me to the core of my being. The god of this world had been usurped.
“But why?” I found myself asking, “with what motive?”
Admin went to reply, but stopped upon seeing the great, pinkish masses floating up out of the streets, far ahead. We stared in bewilderment, trying to make out what they were. The chorus of screams hurried us to the realisation that the balls were… they were made of people.
Agonised, howling faces littered the fleshy abominations, while more objects rose around them. Structural beams, signposts, metal objects of every kind gravitated toward the amalgams of humanity, before their relentless assaults began.
Ripping, tearing, stabbing, slicing… it was already too much for my mind to comprehend. It garnered no reaction from myself other than stunned shock. Flesh and blood spewed from the masses, and orbited around them like the rings of Saturn, falling back in to haphazardly patch themselves back onto the wailing people.
My thoughtless attention was redirected as a frantic deluge of citizens fled the city, running down the street towards us. One by one, the exodus was halted, people seeming to stop in place abruptly, though the screams did not relent.
I couldn’t see what had stopped them until the crowd drew closer, where I saw an elderly man whip forward, foot stuck fast, instantly snapping his knee from the momentum. He let out a heart-wrenching cry as he fell down and looked to see what had stopped him.
Something that looked like roots, water pipes maybe, had erupted through the tarmac and coiled their way up his leg. I could see the strength draining in his eyes as they stood him back upright by force, wrapping around his entire body.
I watched in abject horror as he was raised off the ground, and each and every one of the old man’s limbs were bent and snapped at unnatural angles, shattering frail bones into dust.
His feeble cries were promptly silenced as a squirming metal tube forced its way inside his mouth, his eyes rolling back in unfathomable agony as the bulging mass forced its way down his throat, splitting his ribcage apart and allowing the organs within to slop out and float in the air, as if weightless. The whole process seemed to reverse itself in time, then repeat, over and over.
I could only hear the echoes of Admin’s shouts and the faint sensation of their grip on my forearm as they pulled me away from the mind-bending atrocity. My vacant body tumbled backward, sending both of us falling onto the grass.
Still I could only sit there, frozen. Somewhere off to the right, I saw a young woman pulling presumably her daughter along by the wrist, fleeing the hellscape of flesh and bone down a small alley. Her head spun wildly as she noticed the walls of the alleyway closing in around them.
She burst out into the open, but was yanked back, her grip fast. She turned in desperation, only to see her daughter, who couldn’t have been more than seven, being slowly crushed into a paste of bloody flesh and yellow fat. Her pitiful screams still ring in my ears, seeing her child suffer such a terrible fate.
Admin was finally triumphant in breaking my trance, and I rushed to my feet, stumbling before gaining my footing and bolting the fuck out of there. The childish giggling echoing out over the sky only served to push me forwards and away from that place.
“What the fuck is going on?!” I yelped, glancing over to Admin, hoping they could offer just the slightest of explanations.
“I have an idea, but we need to get somewhere first. You see that hill through the woods, right over there?”
“Hill? To the observatory?”
“There’s one last thing we can try to stop this. It’s a shot in the dark, but I can’t just stand here and fade away with the rest.”
High speed winds whipped the trees as we ran below them, leaves fluttering in a wild seizure. Air-splitting cracks sounded, so loud my ears began to ring once more, and I looked over my shoulder to see what they could have been.
Blazing spouts of fire shot down from the clouds behind, more akin to lightning than anything, striking the forsaken with white-hot temperatures. Even from a distance, I could see skin and flesh melt off of bones like candle wax, forming spiralling clouds of organic vapour.
In my distraction, I ran straight into a tree, and tumbled over, blood leaking from a small cut on my forehead. Admin skidded to a stop and pulled me up to my feet, and ran onwards, not waiting for a moment to ask if I was okay.
Neither of us were okay. That was a given now.
We reached the top of the hill without too much effort – seems it was programmed for everyone to have an above-average level of fitness, young or old regardless.
Admin frantically, but methodically, sifted through what appeared to be a large hoop of keys, searching for the one to fit the observatory’s door. I looked back over to where we had fled from.
The twisted buildings coiled toward the sky, gargantuan talons holding captive everyone I’d ever known. But there was something else. Far behind the city, in the distant hills and woodland, a great black wave that spanned the horizon was travelling towards us, eviscerating the world itself. All it left behind was an endless chasm of darkness, defying reality itself.
The tsunami came closer, before stopping at the city’s outskirts, leaving only a towering earthen spire of suffering, flaming bolts cracking down upon it.
“Admin, what is going on?!”
They paused for a moment, then continued working on the several locks barring our entry.
“Do you remember what I told you earlier, when you found me? How this system is able to keep on running, over the trillions of years?”
“…ions?”
“Yes, but that’s only the basis. I told you that emotional activity generates power, yes? The more intense an emotion, the more power generated?”
“What are you getting at?”
“This is pure theory, but I believe that whatever is out there is feeding off of the system.”
“Is that why all that was happening? The-“
I stifled a gag, recalling the horrors fresh in my memory.
“Again, it’s a theory. I don’t understand what it is. If the constraints of the universe are loose enough for something to evolve in its endless darkness, to predate on the last sources of energy within it… I don’t know. And I doubt we ever will.”
I stared out at the hellscape, speechless. Finally, Admin found the right key, yanked the door open, and pulled me inside by the arm.
“Hey!” Admin yelled, snapping their fingers, “I need you to be present for this. I am restricted in this world, I can’t break and reform things like you can. A failsafe, for if the power were to go to my head. Follow my instructions exactly.”
They told me how to break apart some of the technology in the observatory, and rewire it into a different machine. I had no idea what we were creating at the time, but complied nonetheless.
The finished product was a makeshift beacon of some kind, connected to the nearby terminal.
“Thank you. Now, type.”
“Type what?”
“Everything that has happened. Add as many details as you can, because we won’t have another chance to get this out there.”
“O-okay, what is this thing? A radio?”
“In a way. The observatory is one of the only places here that has a connection to the outside. I have used it more than once to observe the universe fading away. This setup will send our transmission as a unique, superluminal type of wave. Hurry, we can’t waste time chatting about this.”
And so, here we are. I don’t know who will be hearing this, if anyone at all.
I beg of you, consider how our advancements might be our downfall.
It’s almost here. I can hear the flaming bolts striking the forest, closer.
This is my account. Please save us. Please spare us.
Don’t condemn us as you have.
[TRANSCRIPT END]
There it is. I’ve revised the translation more times than I can count, and I’m sure there’s no mistake here.
Other readings imply that this message has travelled an unimaginably vast distance, and not only over space. Repeated triangulation only tells me this came from above, somewhere far away, among the stars.
I can feel the edges of my mind singeing. This can’t be proven as truth, nor can it be discredited. There’s no possible way to explain how this message came from our own planet.
I’m trying to be rational, but I think we need to consider future development very carefully. As a people, we have always rushed through our technological advancements at an incredible speed, not stopping to consider all the consequences that might follow.
If anyone will believe this, please spread it around. I have no doubt this post will be taken down the moment they find it. As for myself, I’ll be disgraced, probably. Stuck in a cold cell, most likely.
Spread the word. The fact that the higher-ups will attempt to conceal this is a cruel thing indeed, if any of it’s true.
Signing off.

Enterprise Group, Inc (TSX: E OTCQB: ETOLF) (the “Company” or “Enterprise”). Consolidator of energy service (including specialized equipment rental to the energy/resource sector) emphasizes technologies that mitigate, reduce, or eliminate CO2 and Green House Gas (GHG) emissions for small local and Tier One global resource clients.
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The Company’s Q4 and 2022 YoY earnings against the equivalent periods of 2021 are nothing short of exceptional. And the Company said that Q1 2023 is also shaping up to be very robust.
Audited numbers don’t lie.
Take a moment and digest these stats. If you own the shares, you should be impressed. If not, consider a second look. Once viewed, take in the Company’s very recent Letter to Shareholders detailing the impressive growth potential of the Canadian Oil and Gas industry. Enterprise is a significant source of on-site infrastructure supply and management that facilitates growth.
Here are the numbers. The comprehensive earnings can be seen in Monday morning’s comprehensive Press Release (March 20/23). The most exciting stat compares the YoY 2021 per share loss of (0.05) cents to the equivalent 2022 gain of 0.05 cents: A 200% movement of an overall 10 cents.
Enterprise shares trade at approximately CDN$0.40. For Investors and Shareholders, the Company keeps its LinkedInpage up to date with articles, videos, and commentary. Consider a Follow.
As well, the Company’s YouTube page is very informative. There will be new videos later this week.
OVERALL PERFORMANCE AND RESULTS OF OPERATIONS
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(1) Identified and defined under “Non-IFRS Measures.”
(2) The Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy and Rent Subsidy Programs ended in October 2021.
To provide further comparability to pre-COVID operations, the Company has presented adjusted gross margin and EBITDA to reflect the results of operations without any subsidy programs.
Enterprise Group Growth Points: FY 2022
· Higher capital spending in the energy industry and increased customer activity levels have resulted in improved results. During the year, Enterprise secured additional supply and services agreements with three of its tier-one clients, contributing to improved operating results.
· The Company believes its stock remains undervalued as the Company’s book value is $0.68 per share. In addition, the Company has available tax losses of $0.17 per share and is developing a consolidated tax plan to utilize those losses. Management will continue to be aggressive in acquiring its shares.
· During the year, Enterprise secured additional supply and services agreements with three of its tier-one clients, contributing to improved operating results.
· During the year ended December 31, 2022, the Company purchased and cancelled 1,799,000 shares at $714,614, or $0.40 per share. These shares had a carrying value of $1.36 per share for $2,445,077, which has been removed from the share capital account. Since initiating the share buyback program, the Company has purchased and cancelled 10,057,500 shares at $2,391,560 or $0.24 per share.
· For the year ended December 31, 2022, the company generated cash flow from operations of $5,910,830 compared to $3,500,869 in the prior year. This change is consistent with the higher activity during the year — equipment fleet to meet customer demands.
· After year end on January 23, 2023, the Company’s common shares began trading on the OTCQB Venture Market under the ticker ETOLF. This listing will help to increase Enterprise’s visibility and accessibility to a growing audience of U.S. investors.
Bottom Line
There is the argument that Enterprise’s numbers are nothing short of extraordinary (use your own adjective). And the coming year, courtesy of increased Oil and Gas Capex spending, stellar management, and new clients with business expansion among existing, including Tier One concerns. As noted in the recent LTS:
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Over one year, the Company’s share price rose 40 plus percent, from 26 to 46 cents, a new high. For comparison, S&P lost 19.4%, the Nasdaq gained 8.7%, and the Dow was down almost 9%.
It seems the Company is gaining horsepower, eyeballs, and growth as well as a proxy for the exceptional CAPEX growth.
Stay tuned closely, as Q1 2023 is coming.

Asking on behalf of a friend:
I am reaching out to you in a difficult situation and requesting your help. Unfortunately, my mailbox was broken into last week, and my partner's and my driver's licenses were stolen. We immediately reported the incident to the police, credit bureaus, anti-theft department, and property management. However, despite our efforts, the police simply closed the case apparently because there was no CCTV footage available due to negligence of property management. To prevent any fraudulent activity, we put a fraud alert on our Transunion and Equifax accounts. Unfortunately, the thief is still changing our registered number and checking credit enquiry to obtain money from Cash for money or sometimes Costco Mastercard and tangerine online. We get all these alerts on our Transunion file, and when we called them not to change our registered number, they mentioned they cannot help us as the number is getting changed from the creditor end. I am writing to you to request your help if there is any way to block my driver's license from getting used. Service Ontario informed me over the phone that they cannot change the driver's license number as it will remain the same for a lifetime. I am feeling helpless and frustrated and am turning to you for any suggestions or advice you might have. If you have any experience with similar situations, please share your insights. If you have any suggestions or know of any resources that could help me, I would be extremely grateful.

The two most common issues that most businesses face are finding and hiring the best employees. Since the organization representatives are answerable for the association's general achievement, choosing them is fundamental. There is a vast candidate pool out there today who apply for jobs at random through a variety of portals. The department of human resource management, on the other hand, is in charge of selecting the best candidate for the position. Through programmatic job advertising, one can select the ideal pool of applicants for the position. So, Career Wallet Group has come up with this solution to discover a programmatic job advertising platform to make your work easier.
Another important factor in eliminating manual tasks is selecting a programmatic job advertising software that is already integrated with your ATS. In the event that all your HR advances are coordinated and synchronized, you can achieve all your work in one dashboard, and just counsel your foundation for more modest changes, setting new standards or different experiences.
Why Choose Career Wallet Group?
High-quality Candidates
Most occupations employing programming centers around arriving at just a huge mass of individuals. They are able to attract a number of applicants for the job as a result of this. However, there is no distinction made regarding the relevance or quality of candidates. In contrast, programmatic advertising divides job seekers according to your advertisement by utilizing cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence. Companies are able to reach out to job candidates of the highest caliber in this manner.
Completely Transparent And Reliable
Application-based programmatic job advertising works. They work on job boards and internet portals alike. In contrast to other advertising websites, this one does not operate on a pay-per-click model, in which the only information available regarding candidates' names is the number of times they have been clicked on the website.
Increases Productivity
Traditionally, HR managers eagerly await resume submissions, review each application, and then sort candidates who are relevant. It takes a lot of time and effort to perform this manual procedure. Currently, artificial intelligence by Career Wallet Group is utilized globally. Because the system automatically sorts through candidates and displays only those who are relevant, this helps to eliminate the entire manual process. This is thought to result in improved efficiency and productivity.
Employers and recruiters must take a different approach when using programmatic job advertising platform than they would normally: they must not simply aim to increase the number of candidates who see the ads. In point of fact, even when employing conventional job boards, this strategy is not recommended.
You can streamline and automate your advertising processes with job feed management services in US. Your programmatic platform, for instance, may be able to automatically place bids on ad space and keywords on your behalf.
You won't have to spend hours manually entering data to track the success of your advertisement because it can also track the results of your campaign automatically.
You and your team will save a lot of valuable time and resources by automating advertising tasks. This will allow you to concentrate on other business tasks.
As businesses experience a surge, they require employees and a pool of qualified candidates. HR administrators are stacked with the tension of recruiting new planned up-and-comers in mass. With automatic work promoting, this cycle has become a lot more straightforward, less difficult and more effective. The most recent artificial intelligence technology i.e. programmatic job advertising is used to assist in reaching the ideal candidate more quickly and efficiently.
About Career Wallet Group
The Career Wallet Group is a specialist recruitment technology company that manages a portfolio of leading international job aggregators and also offers cutting-edge white label recruitment technology. Our portfolio of market leading job aggregators help millions of jobseekers around the world find and apply for their next career move. We work in the UK, US. Canada, Australia and Ireland process up to 10 million jobs a day from recruitment companies and employers.

Unveiling the Enchanted Realm of MOBOX 2.0

As we approach the 2nd anniversary of the mystical MOBOX gaming platform, we embark on a journey through time, reminiscing about the magical achievements and milestones that have materialized within our ever-growing kingdom. This enchanting tale could not have been written without the steadfast dedication of the MOBOX community and our valiant team. With hearts full of gratitude, we reminisce about our past while boldly setting forth our grand vision for the upcoming year.
Two years ago, the MOBOX gaming platform emerged from the shadows and set foot on the Binance Smart Chain. Since then, we have traversed the path from obscurity to fame, now entering a realm of rapid development as we tirelessly enhance our platform and games. Our flourishing MOBOX ecosystem has evolved from humble beginnings to a vast, interconnected matrix teeming with depth and intrigue, boasting a trove of remarkable achievements. Among these treasures are 3.6 million unique wallets, a total value locked (TVL) of up to 440 million US dollars, over 2 million NFTs conjured, and a staggering 400,000,000 BUSD in NFT trading volume.
For the MOBOX team, this moment holds a special magic. Since 2018, we have successfully launched a multitude of influential game products in the Web3 realm. With the inception of the MOBOX platform, we have spent five enchanting years immersed in the Web3 domain. Bolstered by a steadfast team, abundant industry experience, and a relentless, can-do spirit, we have marched valiantly toward our goals. This unwavering commitment has ensured the absence of any major security breaches within our platform. Presently, we eagerly seek to collaborate with exceptional Web3 builders to further manifest the MOBOX vision and mission.

Check out what we achieved in 2022! “MOBOX 2022 Annual Summary” and join us in celebrating our 2nd anniversary as we continue to weave the spellbinding tale of the enchanted MOBOX 2.0 realm.

▣ Abstract
❖ MOBOX cross-chain deployment ❖ New NFT series — Dragon ❖ MOBOX World ❖ MOMOverse ❖ MOBOX Avatar 2.0 ❖ MOBOX game release plan ❖ MOBOX world ❖ MBOX Token economic model 2.0 ❖ MOBOX Fusion Hub ❖ MOMO Mart ❖ Roadmap ❖ Summary
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MOBOX Platform Cross-Chain Deployment

As part of the MOBOX multi-universe plan, the MOBOX platform has officially launched its multi-chain collaborative development strategy in its third year. It is no longer limited to single-chain development on the Binance Smart Chain. To achieve this goal, the MOBOX team is building cross-chain protocols for multiple mainstream public chains, to achieve collaborative operability of NFTs on different public chains, capture and endow more value to MBOX, and enhance MBOX ecosystem compatibility.
This cross-chain collaboration introduces MBOX into the Ethereum ecosystem for the first time, bringing new NFT series to Arbitrum. By integrating with Arbitrum, MOBOX can interact with a large number of Ethereum users and projects. MOBOX users can use their assets and NFTs on Arbitrum and interact with other projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. Similarly, Ethereum projects and users can also use their assets and NFTs on the “MOBOX platform”, “MOBOX games”, and “MOBOX services”.
Through cross-chain functionality and NFT interoperability, MOBOX plans to achieve cross-chain interoperability of all platform products and games. This will allow the use of NFTs from other blockchains on the MOBOX platform and MOMOverse, bringing more choices to users and creating opportunities to attract a more diverse user base and resource channels. It also establishes universal collaborative operability between blockchains and applications.
The first cross-chain gateway of the MOBOX platform will be established on Ethereum and its Layer 2 network, Arbitrum. This not only brings MBOX into the Ethereum ecosystem but also brings new NFT series to Arbitrum. Through cross-chain Arbitrum, MOBOX can interact with a large number of users and projects on Ethereum, achieving more collaborative operability. MOBOX users can use MOBOX assets and NFTs on Arbitrum and interact with projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. Meanwhile, projects and users on Ethereum can also use their assets and NFTs on the MOBOX platform, MOBOX games, and MOBOX services.
Cross-chain to Arbitrum is an important step for MOBOX to expand its ecosystem and realize its vision of creating an interconnected multi-universe. The MOBOX team will continue to collaborate with other mainstream blockchains to develop cross-chain protocols and provide users with broader interoperability and usage choices.
Cross-chain to Arbitrum will bring opportunities and convenience to more users and projects, helping the development of the entire blockchain ecosystem. Through the collaborative operability of MOMO NFT and other public chain NFTs, we will jointly promote the development and innovation of the metaverse.
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Enchanting MODragon NFTs: A Magical World Awaits

The MOBOX team is thrilled to unveil the imminent arrival of an enthralling new NFT series, the mesmerizing MODragon, set to grace the Ethereum Layer 2 public chain, Arbitrum. This bewitching NFT collection merges cutting-edge AI image generation sorcery, beckoning players into a realm of diverse gameplay and captivating interactive experiences within the MOBOX ecosystem.
This is the MOBOX art team’s first NFT creation that combines cutting-edge AI image generation technology. AI has great untapped potential in the creative field, and the MOBOX team plans to utilize this technology in production while ensuring compliance and not violating basic ethical standards. Additionally, the team plans to work with players to create content and participate in and promote the AI technology revolution in future community activities.
As the first phase of the MODragon NFT release unfolds, the MOBOX platform will bestow the gift of Genesis Dragon Eggs upon MOBOX players and devoted users of Arbitrum. These mystical eggs will soon hatch, unveiling the alluring MODragon NFTs that lie within. Keep a watchful eye on MOBOX’s social media and community for announcements detailing the enchanting airdrop rules.
The enthralling MODragon NFT series encompasses six elemental realms: fire, water, wood, earth, light, and darkness. MODragons that emerge from the Genesis Dragon Eggs will be blessed with one of these elemental affinities at random. As players venture deeper into this magical world, they may discover unique dual-element dragons and even the elusive four-element dragons in subsequent hatchings. Engaging gameplay, including hatching, battling, fusing, and nurturing multi-element dragons, will be unveiled in due course, showcasing the unparalleled interoperability of NFTs and adding an extra layer of enchantment to the game.
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This captivating NFT series promises to become an integral aspect of the MOBOX platform, bestowing endless joy and opportunities upon our cherished community. We warmly invite all MOBOX community members to delve into the wondrous and enigmatic realm of dragons and embark on a magical adventure like no other!
As the project steadily develops, there will be more cross-chain interactive gameplay in the future, including interaction with the BNB chain and MOMO players on the BNB chain.
Stay tuned to MOBOX’s official channels for more spellbinding updates on the MODragon NFTs. Thank you for your unwavering support!
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Welcome to the MOBOX World: A Dreamlike World of Infinite Possibilities

With the successful implementation of the MOBOX cross-chain protocol, our team now envisions a captivating MOBOX metaverse world inspired by the mesmerizing MOMOverse. As trailblazers in the WEB 3 domain, we began designing an innovative game four years ago that would revolutionize the blockchain gaming industry. This game empowers players with complete ownership of in-game assets, enabling them to craft and inhabit their very own fantastical multi-dimensional universes.
Our unwavering dedication is to create an immersive and rewarding experience for every player in an open, decentralized environment, encouraging each participant to contribute to community building as a member of a collective working towards a shared vision — an open multi-dimensional universe. As eternal game creators, we’ve identified a disconnect between participants and new social contracts within the existing gaming ecosystem. The MOBOX Universe brings players, designers, engineers, and creators together under a harmonious system of shared responsibilities and incentives.
Throughout the game development process, we’ve recognized the need for a more equitable operating model that breaks down the historical barriers between builders and participants, empowering everyone to create, nurture, enhance, and benefit from the fruits of our collective labor. We also strive to protect these efforts from the influence of intermediaries seeking access to distribution channels.
A fair and thriving community lies at the heart of our game’s future, and every step forward reveals the potential of this enchanting world. We are steadfast in our belief that this is the key to crafting a sustainable game, rich in content and deeply engaging for players.
In this new realm, we’re dedicated to building a truly digital universe that transcends gaming platforms, incorporating a wide array of services, applications, and tools for users to explore, play, and interact. Our grand vision includes allocating a unique continent to each mainstream public chain, home to their native populations. These continents will symbolize their respective public chains, fostering a distinctive digital ecosystem that facilitates communication between users across different public chains.
The MOMOverse, a colossal floating island situated at the center of this world, will feature diverse terrains such as land, floating islands, oceans, and enigmatic creatures. Players can claim a piece of land, build their dream homes, and engage with fellow inhabitants. They’ll have the chance to construct airships, journey to uncharted continents, engage in epic battles with hostile fleets, or trade with merchant fleets voyaging the world.
The MOBOX team is devoted to integrating all products, services, and games on the MOBOX platform into this digital universe. This boundless world teeming with possibilities will allow users to create digital assets, construct homes and cities, develop games and applications, and interact with others. We believe this digital world will not only offer users an entertaining and creative space but also become a genuine social platform that fosters open communication and collaboration between various public chain ecosystems.
Our dream is to cultivate a truly open and equal community in this digital realm, where everyone has the opportunity to participate and create their digital value. Regardless of your public chain affiliation, you’ll discover a sense of belonging and connection here. The MOBOX team will continue to work tirelessly to advance the development and enhancement of this digital world, delivering the ultimate experience and services to our users.
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Embracing MOMOverse: A World of Adventure Awaits

We are thrilled to announce the seamless integration of MOMOverse’s home into the MOBOX Universe. This fusion will provide players with a grander worldview, inviting every MOMOverse resident to delve into a more diverse and vivid world.
Upon the integration of MOMOverse’s home, players can establish their domains, rise to prominence as influential lords, and vie for minerals, resources, and land for their forces. Our team has devised numerous innovative tools and gameplay features, alongside richer background stories and engaging quests.
These elements will allow players to create and explore more freely within the game. Players can enhance their economic power by establishing guilds and constructing buildings, as well as acquiring more treasures and resources by venturing into uncharted territories on the map.
We are confident that this integration process will inject more excitement and challenges into the MOBOX Universe and MOMOverse. We eagerly anticipate unveiling more surprises for our community and players in future updates. Together, let’s expand this boundless world of endless possibilities.
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Introducing MOBOX Avatar 2.0

MOBOX Avatars are the magical embodiments of your virtual self within the wondrous realm of the MOMOverse. As unique manifestations of your digital essence, they bridge the gap between our world and the extraordinary MOBOX digital dimension, where your Avatar will captivate and inspire fellow adventurers.
In the mesmerizing metaverse, an Avatar serves as the cornerstone of all enchanting experiences, and our dedicated team cherishes this responsibility. The initial MOBOX Avatar 1.0 incarnation faced a number of challenges, such as lackluster color perception, limited facial features, subpar model accuracy, and insufficient image differentiation. With MOBOX Avatar 2.0, we’ve conjured a realm of dazzling improvements, including more vibrant colors and striking contrasts, intricate facial features and expressions, smoother contours, and a fully-realized three-dimensional model, ensuring each character stands out from the crowd.
Best of all, players possessing a MOBOX Avatar will be gifted a brand new Avatar 2.0 airdrop, enveloping you in the magic of our enhanced creation. The MOBOX Avatar 2.0 project is nearing its final stages of enchantment and is slated to debut alongside the world map version, inviting you to embrace your dazzling new digital identity within the MOMOverse.
Prepare to be spellbound as we eagerly anticipate the arrival of the “new” you in the ethereal world of the MOMOverse.

MOBOX Game Release Plan

Boasting over a decade of experience in traditional game development and publishing, our team is well-equipped to explore and innovate within the realm of Web 3 gaming. Our financial resources are more than adequate to support our long-term endeavors in this area. In the coming years, we will prioritize the signing of top-tier games with development investments exceeding tens of millions of dollars for release on the MOBOX platform. Additionally, we will actively collaborate with industry leaders to bolster the MOBOX ecosystem’s growth.
In 2023, MOBOX plans to launch three games. Here is some publicly available information about some of them:

New SLG Game — “Dragon Battlefield”

Game Introduction: This game will transport players to an exhilarating world of warfare, where they can assume the role of a formidable commander, lead their army into battle, manage their own city, and amass and train a powerful arsenal of mechanical dragons to secure victory for their empire. By upgrading their city, army, and mechanical dragons, players will attain greater power and triumph in more battles.
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2. Large MMORPG Game — “Project M”
PROJECT M will be the first ever DAO designed and developed MMORPG game on the blockchain. Every major step in the design and development process will be decided through the day including game mechanics, game name, game assets, game skins and more!”
Game Introduction: This is a thrilling MMORPG set in a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by a catastrophic event. In this barren world, resources are scarce, and various monsters and dangerous creatures roam the land. As a survivor of the apocalypse, players must face endless danger and challenges. To survive, players need to explore, battle, and produce to obtain the necessary resources for survival and a safer living environment.
To survive and thrive, players need to work together. You can choose different career paths, such as melee, ranged, healing, and mage, each with their own skill paths and growth attributes. By working hard to improve your strength and building a powerful alliance with other players, you can become a force to be reckoned with.
The core gameplay of the game is cooperative real-time combat and rich storyline missions. Players will accept missions from various organizations in the world, team up with other players, and gain experience and rewards. The game provides an open world where players can explore the wasteland, find hidden treasures and relics, unlock powerful skills and equipment, and improve their combat abilities and attributes.
In this open world, players can explore and create their own unique gaming experiences. The game content is rich, and social functions are also well-developed. In this apocalypse, it requires the wisdom and courage of players to protect and continue human civilization, which represents knowledge and creation.
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RPG game — “King of Chaos”

Set in a world teeming with challenges and adventures, “King of Chaos” depicts a realm where magic reigns supreme, and time travelers from various eras and dimensions bring with them an assortment of technologies and knowledge. The Empire Knights represent the traditional ruling class.
Players will embody a warrior, venturing and exploring the tumultuous world, completing an array of tasks and challenges, and unearthing hidden secrets and treasures. The game’s core features include combat, exploration, leveling up, equipment, and synthesis. Players must amass experience and wealth through battles, explore diverse terrains and settings, locate equipment and materials, enhance their skills and attributes, and ultimately ascend to the title of King of Chaos.
In combat, players can select different skills and equipment and combine them to devise the optimal battle strategy. Each character possesses unique skills and attributes, requiring players to choose the most suitable character for combat based on varying situations and enemies. Simultaneously, players can also team up with others to challenge formidable bosses. A range of thrilling adventure quests awaits players, beckoning them to explore and conquer.
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MBOX Tokenomics 2.0

1. Burn
The MOBOX platform is expected to burn about 135,000,000 MBOX tokens (the portion of the planned total production in the second year that has not been produced), which is equivalent to 60% of the planned total production in the second year.
2. Adjustment
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1. The daily output of MBOX in the MBOX-BNB LP mining pool has been adjusted. (As Shown Above)
2. The daily output of MBOX collected by MOMO has been adjusted from 50,000 MBOX to 40,000 MBOX.
3. The output of MBOX produced by the D.S.C trade and the prosperity of the MOMOverse home will remain unchanged.
4. Although the output of MBOX produced by MOMO NFT has been adjusted, the basic consensus that MOMO is the core output of MBOX has not changed.
5. It is expected that the updated MBOX output will meet the expectations of the third-year plan in the MOBOX white paper.

3. New Application Scenarios

1. Cross-chain staking
2. New liquidity staking
3. Use and consumption in the MOBOX world
4. Used in the new Dragon NFT series gameplay
5. Used in the new MOBOX games “Dragon Battlefield” and “End of the World Storm”

4. Explanation of MOBOX Team and Strategic Investment Shares
In the current market environment, many companies face operational difficulties and pressures. In contrast, the MOBOX team has significant differences from other projects. First, in addition to receiving strategic investments from Binance Labs, the team has a stable source of income, including platform profitability, cooperation, and investment returns. These revenues are sufficient to support the team’s development and expansion plans for at least five years, so there is no need to sell any MBOX tokens to survive. Second, in order to achieve MOBOX’s grand vision, we will continue to attract outstanding talents in the industry and negotiate with top Web3 investment institutions to prepare high-quality resources, sign high-quality AAA-level games, and expand the ecosystem.
We firmly believe that the MOBOX platform has the potential for long-term and sustainable development. With the continuous development of products and market expansion the MOBOX ecosystem will become stronger and more dynamic, creating more value for MBOX holders.
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MOBOX Fusion Hub

After completing the integration with multiple mainstream Layer 1 public chains and related Layer 2, MOBOX will launch its final version. We call it the Web 3 Games ultimate solution — MOBOX Fusion hub. Our platform is ready to provide game developers with a series of SDKs and APIs specifically tailored for blockchain games to help them develop and release games based on web 3 technology.
Currently, our Fusion hub platform has launched the first internal test version for game teams and studios related to MOBOX. We expect that games on MOBOX will be upgraded and managed through this platform. The official version of MOBOX Fusion Hub will go live after performance stabilization and large-scale testing.
We believe that blockchain technology and NFTs will play an important role in the future of the gaming industry, and our platform will be one of the pioneers of this trend. Our vision is to become the preferred platform for game developers and contribute to the development of the future gaming industry. At the same time, we will continue to improve and perfect our platform to ensure that we are always at the forefront of the gaming industry. The fusion hub platform will have the following main features:
1. Compatible with Multiple Layer 1 Public Chains
Compared to other GameFi projects, the MOBOX Open Platform can be compatible with multiple Layer 1 public chains, including but not limited to BNB chain and ETH chain. This allows our game developers to choose the underlying public chain that best suits their projects.
2. MOBOX SDK & APIs
The MOBOX game platform provides game developers with a series of easy-to-use development tools to help them quickly build their games and seamlessly integrate them with our platform. Our platform provides the following main functions:
Mature smart contract API: We provide preset smart contract APIs to help game developers quickly write and test game-related smart contracts and use them to process transactions and other game logic.
NFT SDK support and integration: We provide easy-to-use NFT integration SDK to help game developers quickly create their own NFTs and integrate them into the game. Based on blockchain technology, using NFT as the economic currency in the game ensures the fairness and security of the game. In particular, people building NFT dApps will be able to use MOBOX’s built-in NFT market and API services to build a “plug-and-play” market for Web 3 game assets and related NFTs, providing better liquidity.
Risk control: Our platform will use multiple security measures to protect the security of the game and users. We will use multiple security measures including preventing DDoS attacks, cryptographic protection, user identity verification, and asset risk control, to ensure the security and fairness of the game.
Developer funding support: Our platform will provide support funding for game developers through MOBOX METAFund to help them launch and develop their game projects. We believe that supporting developers is the key to realizing our vision.
Developer split NFT: The MOBOX platform not only provides developers with the best revenue distribution model but also provides them with flexible support that is almost instantly credited to their accounts receivable, ensuring that developers have the necessary funds to continue their best development work and help them develop excellent games.
After successfully releasing a game on the MOBOX platform, developers will receive a special non-fungible token (P-NFT indicating) their ownership of the released game. All income generated by the game will be recorded on the blockchain to ensure complete transparency between the platform and developers. The P-NFT smart contract also serves as a revenue sharing agreement between the platform and developers, automatically transferring the income earned by developers according to the agreement to their MOBOX wallet.
Ready-to-use MOMO library: Thanks to the interoperability of MOMO NFTs, they can be used across different public chains and games. Game developers can choose from the high-quality MOMO NFT library and immediately use them in their games, saving a lot of time and money for teams and independent developers, and providing the necessary resources and strong support for their game development work.
MOBOX Community Support: The MOBOX platform provides developers with all possible support, including marketing. Through effective community management, continued platform marketing, and the addition of important ecological partners, the MOBOX platform community provides developers with a powerful marketing channel. This includes fully functional nodes on the MOBOX platform, increasingly active social media, and social media activities through our ecological partners.
By combining the above SDKs and APIs, our platform provides game developers with a better development and publishing experience as well as a wider market and support. Our vision is to become one of the leaders in the future game industry and provide developers with a more fair, transparent, and highly secure game platform.
3. MOBOX Wallet 2.0 — MOBOX Seed Wallet — Securely Sow Your Seeds, Unleash the Power of NFT Gaming!
MOBOX Wallet’s new version will focus on providing a one-stop solution for Web 3.0 game users. Here are the key features of MOBOX Wallet:
NFT Management: MOBOX Wallet is a wallet designed specifically for the gaming market. It helps NFT holders showcase all their unique ERC-721 and ERC-1155 collectibles and game assets in a more efficient and convenient way. MOBOX players can browse and filter all their MOMO NFTs in the new version wallet and quickly list or gift specific MOMO to friends.
EIP 4337 Features: MOBOX Wallet empowers Web 3 Games by combining some new features proposed in EIP 4337. For example, the Social Recovery system allows multiple users to recover the owner’s access to an account, reducing the risk of permanent loss of funds.
Diverse Gas Payment: MOBOX Wallet supports diverse gas payment methods. Game players can use different tokens or even off-chain credit cards for payment, eliminating the need to purchase cryptocurrencies in advance for NFT transactions.
Pre-approval for On-chain Transactions: MOBOX Wallet supports pre-approval for on-chain transactions to increase the smoothness of Dapp and provide a more user-friendly on-chain process.
Bundle Transactions: MOBOX Wallet supports bundle transactions, allowing game players to bundle multiple on-chain operations together. With just one signature, all the necessary transaction processes can be completed, increasing transaction efficiency.
Subscription Mode: MOBOX Wallet supports subscription mode, allowing developers to subscribe to specific events or data updates. When these events or data updates occur, the MOBOX network automatically notifies developers, helping them achieve real-time data synchronization and notification more easily.
Through these features, MOBOX Wallet provides better management and on-chain experience for game developers and NFT holders, and contributes to the development of Web 3 games. We believe that MOBOX Wallet will become one of the essential gateways connecting the traditional gaming market and Web 3.
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MOMO Mart: Bringing the Magic of MOBOX to Life

As part of our commitment to expanding the MOBOX brand and reaching a wider audience, we’re excited to introduce MOMO Mart, a unique retail venture that merges the online and offline worlds. Our goal is to share the essence and values of MOMO NFT with a diverse range of consumers, while offering a tangible experience for trendy toy enthusiasts.
We’ll be launching an exclusive MOMO NFT physical blind box collection, which features exquisite packaging and a diverse array of captivating characters. This product is designed to not only ignite the passion of the MOBOX community but also draw in more trendy toy aficionados to join our growing family.
MOMO Mart’s inaugural brick-and-mortar store will proudly showcase the core values of the MOBOX brand and MOMO NFT. Our design team has meticulously crafted each character, ensuring top-notch quality that leads the industry. Moreover, interactive zones within the store will allow visitors to truly immerse themselves in the enchanting world of MOMO NFT. We’re actively scouting prime locations around the globe to establish our immersive shopping and interactive experience for trendy toy enthusiasts worldwide. We’re eager to explore the potential of Web 3 and the trendy toy market through this strategic endeavor, ultimately bringing even greater value to the MOBOX community.
▣ Roadmap Timeline
2023 Q1 — Research and testnet deployment for cross-chain solution
2023 Q2 — Burn 135 million MBOX
2023 Q2 — Update MBOX tokenomics
2023 Q2 — Test MOBOX game open platform for targeted developers
2023 Q2 — Provide MOBOX game access to game development SDK & API
2023 Q2 — Deploy MOBOX 2.0 to Ethereum and Arbitrum cross-chains
2023 Q2 — Release Dragon NFTs for MOBOX 2.0
2023 Q3 — Release MOBOX 2.0 World Map
2023 Q3 — Launch gameplay related to MOBOX 2.0 World Map
2023 Q3 — Launch “Dragon Battlefield” game on MOBOX platform
2023 Q4 — Launch “End of the World Storm” game on MOBOX platform
2023 Q4 — Launch “King of Chaos” game on MOBOX platform
2023 Q4 — Launch MOBOX game Fusion Hub
▣ Summary
We have Introduced our three-phase plan for the MOBOX game open platform. We aim to “connect multiple mainstream public chains,” “construct a multi-chain digital world,” and “establish a collaborative multi-chain MOBOX Fusion Hub.” These plans and updates will enrich the MOBOX platform, providing both players and developers with an enhanced gaming experience and trading environment.
The launch of the Fusion Hub SDK & API will deliver numerous benefits to the MOBOX platform, including multi-chain integration, cross-chain asset bridging, seamless market API, MOBOX Wallet 2.0, and much more. These features will not only elevate the user experience and security of MOBOX games but also drive the growth of Web 3 gaming.
To realize our vision, we will steadfastly implement these plans. By harnessing cross-chain technology and NFT interoperability, we’ll create a unified multi-universe rather than separate games. Our team will collaborate with other leading blockchains to develop cross-chain protocols that enable MOBOX assets to traverse different blockchains and facilitate the use of NFTs from other blockchains on the MOBOX platform.
Our ultimate goal is to forge a truly interconnected meta-universe — the magnificent MOMOverse. ✨⭐️☄️💥
Please note: WEB 3.0 is a highly variable and risky field. The information provided in this announcement is for reference only and should not be used as a basis for any investment or decision-making. Before making any decisions, please conduct sufficient research and evaluation on your own and proceed with caution.

Element79 Gold Corp (CSE:ELEM) (OTC:ELMGF) (FSE:7YS) ("Element79 Gold", the "Company") is pleased to announce its engagement of has entered service engagements SLM Mining Services (“SLM”), a technical mining service provider with extensive experience working in Peru and the Andean Region, for the work plan building up to commencing ore extraction operations at the Lucero High Grade Previously-Producing Gold-Silver Mine, SLM will work in conjunction with the Company’s operations team. The duration of the contract with SLM is 3 years.
Overview of SLM Mining Services
SLM provides a wide range of management and development services for mining projects. SLM Mining Services is committed to developing and managing mining projects from its early stages, covering activities such as target identification, geological exploration, economic valuation, integral management, surface land agreements with local owners, and dealing with regulatory permits pertaining to mining activities, among others. All activities performed by SLM are under the highest industry standards to create value for mining projects by integrating local stakeholders, protecting the environment and building strong relationships at all levels. SLM team has many years’ experience working on the discovery, development and operations of multiple mining projects throughout the Andean region.
Overview of the Engagement
The Management Services Agreements include that SLM will appoint a general manager for the Lucero project, provide an office in Lima, Peru for administrative and address for domestic tax purposes and back-office services such as project logistics, procurement and day to day operations. The Agreements also include site visits and exploration work at the Lucero site over the coming 6 months and Community Relations Services, ensuring one senior member that will be assigned to maintain good relations with the local stakeholders in the Chachas district in the region surrounding the Lucero Project and to conduct all the works needed to obtain social license permitting for operations to commence.
James Tworek, Element79 Gold’s CEO comments: “SLM is a key piece in the plan to bring Lucero back into production. SLM’s past and upcoming boots-on-the-ground work at Lucero and community relations with the local Chachas group along with our in-house Operations team will greatly assist in advancing the project toward cash flow generation. We will release our development plans shortly as well as the results of these programs as they progress.”
About Element79 Gold
Element79 Gold is a mining company focused on gold, silver and associated metals. Element79 Gold’s main focus is on two core properties: developing its previously-producing, high-grade gold and silver mine, the Lucero project located in Arequipa, Peru, with the intent to bring it back into production in the near term; and its flagship Maverick Springs Project located in the famous gold mining district of northeastern Nevada, USA, between the Elko and White Pine Counties. Maverick Springs hosts a 43-101-compliant, pit-constrained mineral resource estimate reflecting an inferred resource of 3.71 million ounces of gold equivalent “AuEq” at a grade of 0.92 g/t AuEq (0.34 g/t Au and 43.4 g/t Ag) with an effective date of Oct. 19, 2022 (see news release October 20, 2022, available on SEDAR). The acquisition of the Maverick Springs Project also included a portfolio of 15 properties along the Battle Mountain trend in Nevada, which are non-core to its primary business focus. In British Columbia, Element79 Gold has executed a Letter of Intent and funded a drilling program pursuant to acquire a private company which holds the option to 100% interest of the Snowbird High-Grade Gold Project, which consists of 10 mineral claims located in Central British Columbia, approximately 20km west of Fort St. James. The Company also has an option to acquire 100% interest in the Dale Property, 90 unpatented mining claims located approximately 100 km southwest of Timmins, Ontario, Canada in the Timmins Mining Division, Dale Township. The Company is analyzing the non-core Nevada projects, The Dale Property and Snowbird Property for further merit of exploration, sale or spin-out. For more information about the Company, please visit www.element79.gold
For corporate matters, please contact:
James C. Tworek, Chief Executive Officer
Email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
For investor relations inquiries, please contact:
Investor Relations Department Phone: +1 (613).879.9387 Email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])