22 years ago I (32F) met my partner then (30M). Both previously married, a child each. Me, son (9), OH daughter (3). We lived nearly 200 miles from each other, after a year he move in but work commitments moved him away again. I fell pregnant and we have a 16F. For last 15 years he's lived here.
From the very beginning we have both included the children, never excluded them. I often did the round trip to pick his daughter up for her to spend the weekend with us. We often went up there too.
Over the years she has tried several times to cause problems between us despite any effort I put in. Even during COVID when I had to shield for 18 months she still tried to create problems.
First time since COVID that we went away, on arrival OH didn't fell well and tested positive next day I'm also + but luckily I was OK but OH had it bad. They (her bf and son (2) came down for the day knowing we had both tested + and luckily it didn't affect them. I had taken birthday gifts for (GS) from Grandma and Grandad but refuses me being called Grandma. The others are nana, so it's not confusing or treading on anybody's toes. They asked if OH could take their horsebox to a Gypsy fair the following weekend as they can't tow. This would mean him driving nearly 200 miles to collect it, driving to fair, spend the day then do it in reverse arriving home early hours.
After our holiday he spent most of the week in bed only getting up for a few hours each day. Needless to say he had to say he wasn't well enough to do the horsebox towing and driving on the Sunday.
This is when things went pear shaped. Her bf put a message on FB asking if anybody could tow them as had been LET DOWN at short notice. I was fuming. She had known for 2 weeks he had COVID and spent lots in bed. I replied saying having COVID for 2 weeks was not letting someone down at the last minute.
They had recently started to make wedding plans but unless I apologized I was not invited.
As far as I was concerned I was stating a fact so refused to apologise. They stopped visiting us and I stopped visiting them. Everyone agreed she's in the wrong and has been "entitled" her entire life. Shes never worked always expected money from others.
She was adamant that unless I apologised I would not attend the wedding. OH agreed I didn't owe apology, backed me 100%. I stated that if I wasn't at wedding, I'm done. As it would have to be a planned visit so she would never just turn up anyway. OH agrees
Everyone was asking where I was as they had expected to see me there. Since OH has hardly made effort to visit them, only if work causes him to be in area. Them never setting foot over our doorstep still stands.
It's nearly 12 months since the wedding, OH's mum has been diagnosed with cancer, undergoing Chemo. I've no issue in visiting but said when there we have no contact with them. OH agrees can totally see my point. The mere talk of her wedding still hurts me and can never be undone.
But am I being an AH?
Update... It's now been nearly a year since the wedding. Still not made any effort whatsoever and thankfully OH backs me 100%.
Recently found out she has been asking him to buy them a car suitable of towing the horsebox despite him checking out their current car and assuring them it is totally legal and within towing regulations for them to use the one they already have.
She been trying every to get him to buy one. We don't have the money at all so I don't know why she keeps asking him for money as he keeps telling her we don't have it.
He recently had a phone call from her now MIL, not sure how she got his number but glad she did. He was under the impression they only had 18months left to pay for the cars finance. Nope. They have taken out (well MIL has for them) a consolidation loan. No idea of the amount but it has to be considerable as it won't be repaid until 2036. All this expense, 2 horses, they are just about to go on holiday abroad (we've not been abroad in over 10 years) and yet stepdaughter has never worked a day in her life.

One of the biggest questions surrounding a potential second Trump presidency is how exactly it would differ from the first one.
Now, normally presidents don’t have to address this question in quite the same way when they’re running for a second term—they can just promise more of the same—but for Trump, he’s obviously been out of office for a few years, he’s one of a handful of presidents in American history seeking a nonconsecutive term, and quite a bit has changed since 2020. And, as even Trump’s most devoted supporters would admit, he wasn’t able to achieve all of his promises in his first four years in office, so it stands to reason that accomplishing those goals the second time around might require something of a new approach in certain areas, and last Tuesday, we got one of the clearest signs yet that Donald Trump will indeed be taking a new approach concerning one of the biggest problems that this country faces, and one which directly impacts more than 200 million Americans at every stage of their life - from schooling to the workplace to government assistance, healthcare. I’m talking about anti-whiteism. Now, this is a word that’s more or less verboten even in conservative circles, unlike, say, anti-Semitism, but in an interview with Time magazine last week, Trump confirmed that combating anti-white racism, by name, will be one of the key goals of his administration if he wins re-election.
Trump was responding to a question about polls showing that most of his supporters believe, correctly, that anti-white racism is a much bigger problem in this country than anti-black racism, and to that, Trump said:

“Oh, I think that there is a lot to be said about that. If you look at the Biden administration, they’re sort of against anybody depending on certain views. They’re against Catholics. They’re against a lot of different people. They actually don’t even know what they’re against, but they’re against a lot. But no, I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either. .. If you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white and that’s a problem.”

This really shouldn’t have been a significant moment in the presidential race. It should’ve had all the significance of a candidate affirming that the sky is blue. And Trump doesn’t even say in that quote that anti-white racism is more prevalent than any other type of racism—though it is—he doesn’t even say that. Instead, he just says that there is some amount of anti-white sentiment in the country and that is also bad. It’s bad to hate everybody for their skin color, including white people; that’s Trump’s position. Perfect rational, reasonable position, should be the position that everybody has. And there shouldn’t be anything even notable about it, but it WAS a surprising moment, even for Trump supporters, because in his first term, Trump rarely if ever mentioned the concept of anti-whiteism so explicitly—I went back and couldn’t find any examples of it—but a couple of years ago, Trump pointed out that the Biden administration was giving preferential medical treatment to non-white Americans, and in the past several months, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has been targeting anti-white institutions with lawsuits. And now Trump himself is recognizing the broader problem with anti-whiteism in our culture, which is a very good thing (him recognizing it, not the problem that is).
Now, you can tell this moment caught the Left by surprise because the mere acknowledgment that anti-whiteism exists was enough to reduce some commentators practically to tears. Here for example was the reaction from Whoopi Goldberg:

“This is my favorite, and I’m gonna tell you before I say it that it enraged me. ‘There is a definite anti-white feeling in the country right now.’ That’s what he said. You know, sir? Yeah, ‘sir.’ Nobody in your family was hung. Nobody in your family was chased because of the color of their skin- how dare you! There’s no anti-white issue here! You are perpetrating anti-HUMANIST issues here!”

“Enraged.” She was “enraged”by the mere mention - the mere mention that there might be some people who don’t like white people and that’s not a good thing enraged her. “Nobody in your family was hung,” Whoopi Goldberg barks at Donald Trump - and by the way I don’t want to get too graphic, but that’s one of the few cases where the difference between the words “hanged” and “hung” is actually pretty important, unless Whoopi Goldberg has some kind of intimate knowledge of Trump’s family that I’m not aware of. But anyway, she also claims Donald Trump is “anti-humanist,” which makes it clear that she doesn’t know what humanism is, and from context, though, it seems like Whoopi is saying that because no one in Donald Trump’s family was lynched, that means therefore anti-whiteism can’t possibly exist today. Or maybe she’s also implying that white people in general were never lynched, and then she’s using that false premise to somehow conclude that anti-whiteism can’t possibly exist today.
Whatever your interpretation, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t make sense. Because for one thing the biggest mass lynching in this country’s history targeted Italians, who Whoopi would presumably classify as white. White people were NOT immune from lynchings, in fact - in fact, according to a document on the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law’s website, tracking lynchings by race from the years 1882 to 1968, there were 1297 lynchings of white people during that time. Now, that’s fewer than the 3,445 black lynchings, but the point is that you certainly can’t ASSUME that any white person alive today doesn’t have a lynching victim in their ancestral history.
But even if you pretend that that’s not true—even if you pretend that lynching has only ever involved black people—it still doesn’t remotely address the fact that anti-whiteism is a much bigger problem right NOW than anti-black racism. You notice, and this is the way it always goes, she’s responding to a comment referring to what’s happening NOW, and her response automatically goes to the past. We’re not talking about the past, Whoopi, if you can believe it, we’re talking about what’s happening right now. So her entire argument is a non sequitur.
But it’s notable that Whoopi Goldberg was so fired up about this - and indeed, many Democrats are. Earlier this month, Congressman Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, warned that Trump is, quote, “making it clear that if he wins in November, he’ll turn his racist record into official government policy, gutting programs that give communities of color economic opportunities and making the lives of Black and brown folks harder.”
Richmond made those comments in response to an Axios report last month, entitled, “Trump allies plot anti-racism protections — for white people.” Oh, imagine that. Specifically, a new Trump administration would shut down various programs designed to benefit only certain demographic groups. That includes programs like the $29 billion pandemic-era program that would have awarded money only to “women and minority-owned restaurants”—Stephen Miller’s group, America First Legal, successfully sued to stop that—but there are many more programs like that, which a Trump DOJ would shut down, hopefully; that’s what he’s saying he’ll do. That includes the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which mandates interviews with “minority” coaches, for example, but has no such mandates for white coaches - much less for white players, certainly.
And presumably, a second Trump administration would also end the absurd lawsuit against Sheetz for daring to use criminal background checks, which allege that any employer using background checks is automatically racist.
And this potential return to a race-blind government that respects the Constitution and, you know, actually treats everybody equally under the law regardless of race—which is what is supposed to happen—that potential greatly infuriates the left and it greatly infuriated a woman named Jasmine Harris, who directs “Black media” for the Biden-Harris campaign—because yes, they apparently have a segregated media department at the Biden campaign, and they deal with black media separately—but here’s what she said:

This [Axios] report, in addition to all of the recent examples of shameless racism by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans, serves as a warning to Black America: Donald Trump is a selfish and vindictive man who doesn’t give a damn about Black people. .. He will make our lives worse by using the very laws that the pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement fought for, against us.

Now, there’s actually an interesting admission buried in that quote: The Biden black media director isn’t alleging that Donald Trump is gonna do anything illegal - instead, she’s complaining that he’s going to enforce existing civil rights laws, which were supposedly intended to ensure racial equality, he’s gonna enforce them equally. And this is a totally foreign concept to the Biden campaign. They’re essentially admitting that they’re discriminating against whites in violation of civil rights laws - but they’re saying those laws just shouldn’t be enforced to protect white people, who they see, obviously, as second-class citizens.
Yesterday afternoon, we saw yet another sign of this attitude - the Biden campaign’s official rapid response page tweeted this clip of Donald Trump, apparently in an effort to make him look bad—we can assume, I mean, because it’s coming from the Biden campaign—but the clip itself was actually more of an advertisement for the Trump campaign, which we can assume is not how it was intended, but here it is:

“Look at Paris, look at London, they’re no longer recognizable—and I’m gonna get myself into a lot of trouble with the folks in Paris and the folks in London—but you know what? That’s the fact. They are no longer recognizable, and we can’t let that happen to our country - we have incredible culture, tradition—nothing wrong with their culture, their tradition—we can’t let that happen here, and I’ll never let it happen to the United States of America.”

Now, the Biden campaign didn’t even comment on this video—they just posted it, quoting every word Trump said—and that’s because they know everything Trump said is true - pretty much all of the population growth in the U.K. going forward is going to be driven by migration. That’s been the case for the last several years, too. The unstated result is that fewer white people will live in the U.K., which the Biden administration assumes you’ll think is a good thing.
And that’s because, in their view, it’s not racist to deliberately diminish white populations - it’s also not racist to violate the civil rights of white people. In fact, they don’t believe it’s possible to BE racist against whites in the first place. This is what underlies ALL of this, is the assumption, the belief that, well, none of this is racist against whites because it’s not possible to be racist against whites - I mean, you could put a law in place mandating that all white people be rounded up and KILLED, and it would not be racist against white people. That’s what they actually believe. This is an idea that originated in the bowels of Left-wing academia and Critical Race Theory, and it’s since metastasized to politics - here’s how one professor in the U.K. named Pragya Agarwal puts it, and see if you can spot the massive flaw in this reasoning, it’s not hard to spot:

White people can indeed face stereotypical assumptions based on their skin color and hence encounter racial prejudice. But this cannot be called racism, because of the inherent systemic imbalance of power between those with lighter skin color and people of color. Racial prejudice can affect people on an individual level, but it would not have the same effect on a larger social and cultural level because it is only when stereotypes are bolstered by power … that it creates systemic and structural racism.

In other words, she’s saying that white people can’t be the victims of racism because racism involves “power” and “systemic imbalance,” and white people have all the power. Now, it takes about two seconds to realize that, even on its own terms, this argument makes precisely no sense whatsoever - the Fortune 500 companies that award preferential treatment to non-white applicants have far more “power” than their white applicants do, and so do the universities that award black applicants a 500-point boost on their SAT scores, and the federal government agencies that award financial assistance to various demographic groups on the basis of race. In all of these cases, there is prejudice backed by “power” - EXTRAORDINARY power, actually, we’re talking about academia, the Fortune 500 companies, and the federal government! Like, what’s more powerful than all of those institutions combined - or any one of the institutions by themselves?
But there’s really no point in engaging with Critical Race Theory on the merits, though, because it’s not actually meant to convince anyone of anything. It’s intended to be a thin, allegedly scholarly veneer that justifies overt discrimination against millions of Americans. And the appropriate response to this kind of thinking is not to treat it with any kind of legitimacy whatsoever, i’s to call it what it is: anti-white racism, or anti-whiteism. That’s what Donald Trump has just done. It’s what every Republican should be doing right now.
Talking about anti-whiteism infuriates Democrats because it’s been an unstated core part of their policy agenda for several years. And now, for the first time since Biden took office, it looks like it could very be soon coming to an end.

So I honestly know nothing about SS and how it works...it's one of those later problems I just haven't spent any time looking into. With that said, I had heard that it was in trouble from the financial side....well yesterday I found out they have a literal projection on when the SS funds will be drawn down. It was 2035 and is now 2036.
Im quite a few years away from getting social security....definitely much further away than 12 years away from that time. So what does that mean for people like me? If they think it'll get drawn down to the point where they are only going to be able to pay 70-80% of benefits to recipients....what are things gonna be like 20, 30, 40+ years down the road? Will it be nothing or something crazy like 30-50% of what should be paid, actually being paid?

Hello! I am doing a project that involves graphing two sets of data then doing a linear regression. I got this data from FRED and have now graphed it. The data set starts at the beginning of quarter 1 of 1947 (1/1/1947) and goes to the beginning of quarter 4 of 2023 (10/1/2023).
There is a TON of blank space as the x-axis goes 1900-2036. I want it to just encompass 1947-2023. How do I make this happen? I tried Googling but don't know how to explain my problem without just showing someone. I'd be okay with even like 1945-2025 but the huge gaps are driving me crazy.
Here is a link to the data I used: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1kCNU
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https://preview.redd.it/nopojqwgu2wc1.png?width=2022&format=png&auto=webp&s=7d8939f1b16499bffee660edb5c55891db06e279

My story:
Back in 2021, when I was just 20, I spotted a small white patch on my arm. Didn't think much of it until another showed up on my face, sending me into a panic. So, off I went to see a dermatologist. But in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appointment, he dropped the bomb: vitiligo. No cure, just learn to live with it. I cannot express to you how overwhelmed and alone I felt at that moment. When I got back home, I couldn't shake the thought of what I might look like in the future, seeing pictures of others with the condition and struggling to accept that I might end up looking like them.
Skipping ahead to 2023, my vitiligo had become more prominent and seriously bothered me. I figured I could at least try to look for something that could help me. So I spent a lot of time researching and trying out different treatments and practically visited every dermatologist in town. This post is my attempt to share what I've learned along the way, hoping it might help someone else out there facing the same challenges.
Please note:

• I will primarily focus on nonsegmental vitiligo in this post, as this is the form I have personal experience with and the one with the most available research.
• I am not a doctor. Please consult your doctor before making any changes based on the information presented here.

Dermatologist
The first hurdle is finding a dermatologist you can really rely on. It's been quite a journey—I've been through seven different dermatologists, each time waiting months for appointments only to be quickly brushed off. But eventually, I struck gold and found a doctor who genuinely cared and was committed to helping me. Having a supportive doctor alongside you through this journey with vitiligo is an absolute game-changer. So, my advice to everyone out there is to keep pushing until you find a doctor who truly listens and cares, no matter how tough or time-consuming the search may be—it's totally worth it.
Once you've got a trustworthy doctor on your side, the next step usually involves some tests. Sadly, dealing with vitiligo often comes with an extra layer of complexity—about 20% of folks with the condition also have another autoimmune disease, and some even have multiple autoimmune conditions at once.
Unfortunately, many dermatologists, at least in my experience here in Germany, aren't always up to speed on the latest treatment options. So, I can't stress this enough: do your own research and, if needed, bring new treatment possibilities to your doctor's attention. It could make all the difference.
Tests
The most common accompanying disease in people with vitiligo was hypothyroidism, alopecia areata, inflammatory bowel disease, and systemic lupus erythematosus. (1) (2)
The following autoimmune diseases have also been associated with vitiligo, although less frequently:

• Pernicious anemia, which causes low red blood cell levels
• Addison's disease, which causes low levels of the hormone cortisol
• Sjögren's syndrome, which causes dry eyes and mouth
• Dermatomyositis, which causes muscle weakness and rashes
• Scleroderma, which causes hardening and thickening of the skin
• Psoriasis, which causes scaly patches of skin

regardless of the autoimmune diseases, you should also check whether you have deficiencies of the following:

• Vitamin D (3)
• Zinc
• copper
• Vitamin B12
• folic acid
• Vitamin C

Vitamin D is by far the most common deficiency seen in patients with vitiligo, but please don't just take a supplement unless you talk to your doctor and make sure you are actually deficient because you could be doing more harm than good.
Mental health
Although vitiligo is only an "aesthetic condition" and many people act as if vitiligo is not a big deal, I have to say that it can have a very negative impact on the lives of people who suffer from it, especially during their teenage and young adult years. Depression and anxiety are very common in the vitiligo population, which is particularly sad as stress and anxiety can actually make vitiligo worse, which can lead to a vicious circle (4). That's why I can only recommend seeing a psychologist in addition to your doctor, who can help you to cope with the disease and the resulting problems.
Treatment
First things first, I am not a doctor, please don't do anything I discuss here until you talk to your doctor first.
What can you expect from the treatment?
Despite ongoing research and exciting developments in vitiligo treatment, there's currently no single medication guaranteed to work for everyone. Combining different therapies often yields the best results, but these can be time-consuming and require dedication. The primary goal of current treatments is to manage and potentially improve the affected areas. A definitive cure for vitiligo isn't yet available.
Treatment options:
If you ever googled "vitiligo treatment" I'm sure you came across 100's of different creams, dietary supplements and things that claim to treat vitiligo, but as is so often the case in medicine, when there are 100's of treatments none of them really work. Yes, there may be the odd patient who has success with a supplement, but the sad reality is that they are likely to do very little for the rest of us.
However, there are a few treatments that have been scientifically proven to help a large proportion of people with vitiligo and I'll introduce you to them now:
OPZELURA (ruxolitinib)
OPZELURA is a topical JAK inhibitor and so far the only drug approved specifically for vitiligo in Germany, where I live. It has been on the market for a short time (in Germany only since 2023) but from what I hear it is very effective. However, it seems like the cream works rather poorly on the hands.
How effective is it?

• After 6 months, it improves facial skin color by at least 75% for about 3 in 10 people compared to 1 in 10 with placebo cream. (5)
• Results keep getting better over time. By year two, even those who didn't see much change at first can experience significant improvement. (6)
• Most people see some improvement within 3 months, with even better results between 4 months and a year. (6)

According to the information provided, the potential side effects are rather mild:

1. Application-site acne
2. Redness and itching at the application site
3. Inflammation of the pharynx and nasal cavities
4. Headaches
5. Urinary tract infections
6. Fever

All that sounds very promising, But, I am sure that if you ever heard about that cream you also heard how expensive it is, 1000$ for one 100g container and you probably need a lot of it, because the treatment sometimes only sets in after months. In addition, the first reports indicate that the vitiligo can come back if you stop using the cream.
My Experience: I've been using Opzelura, covered by my health insurance, since late March 2024. While I haven't seen improvement in my vitiligo yet, some previously white hairs in the affected areas have regained their original color. I am hopeful and optimistic since I have only been using it for a short time and, as mentioned above, part of the treatment will start later. So far I have had no side effects.
However, I have to say that applying the cream twice can be very annoying.
UVB light therapy
UVB light therapy has been around for a while and involves directing focused UVB light onto the areas affected by vitiligo to induce repigmentation, which actually works quite well. A Meta-analysis looked at a bunch of research (35 studies) on a treatment using narrowband UV-B light (phototherapy) for the skin condition. A total of 1428 people participated in these studies. (7)

• The good news: After at least 6 months of treatment, 7 out of 10 people (74%) saw at least some improvement in their skin condition. This improvement continued for some, with 7.5 out of 10 (75%) still showing improvement at 1 year. (7)
• Nearly a fifth (19%) of people had significant improvement after 6 months, and this number went up to over a third (36%) at 1 year. (7)
• The location of the improvement mattered. The treatment worked best on the face and neck (almost half - 44% - saw significant improvement after 6 months), followed by the torso (trunk - 26%). Legs and arms (extremities) saw some improvement (17%), but hands and feet showed little to none. (7)

The potential side-effect:

• Sunburn
• Skin irritation
• Hyperpigmentation
• Increased risk of skin cancer (go for regular check-ups!)
• Eye damage (when used in this area)
• Aggravation of existing skin diseases

UVB light therapy can be comparable "cheap" you can get good results with a UVB device for 150-300$. If your vitiligo has already affected a large part of your body, you can alternatively go to a UVB cabin, which is available in some hospitals, and has the advantage of treating the whole body directly.
My Experience: I started with UVB in mid-2022 and after about 1 month of treatment, which I did three times a week, I started to see results that were getting better and better, but I had to stop the treatment eventually because the UVB radiation was very damaging to my "healthy skin", the skin around the vitiligo aged extremely quickly and you could just see that the skin was not doing well. I might try it again, but I've become really cautious since the last time.
Topical Corticosteroids
The first thing a doctor prescribed me at the time was topical steroids, which are applied to the areas affected by vitiligo in a similar way to Opzelura.

• Effectiveness: Studies show that topical corticosteroids can be helpful in repigmenting the skin and slowing down the progression of vitiligo. However, complete repigmentation is uncommon and some people may not see any improvement at all. (8)
• Best for: Topical corticosteroids are generally considered a good option for people with small, localized areas of vitiligo, especially on the face and upper body. They may also be helpful for those who want to try a different treatment option aside from sun protection and camouflage cosmetics. (8)
• Benefits: Compared to other vitiligo treatments, topical corticosteroids are relatively inexpensive, convenient to use at home, and generally well-tolerated. (8)

The potential side-effect:

• Skin thinning (atrophy): This is a common side effect, especially with long-term use or on areas with thin skin like the face. The skin may become fragile, more susceptible to tears, and show visible blood vessels.
• Stretch marks (striae): These can appear as reddish or purple lines on the treated area.
• Visible blood vessels (telangiectasia): Thinning skin can make underlying blood vessels more noticeable.
• Excess hair growth (hypertrichosis): This is more common with use on the face.
• Burning, stinging, or inflammation (contact dermatitis): This can occur if you have sensitive skin.
• Acne: Topical steroids can sometimes trigger acne breakouts.

Topical corticosteroids offer a cost-effective approach to managing vitiligo. While they may not be highly effective for everyone, they can be helpful in slowing the spread of the white patches. Repigmentation, however, is less common with this treatment.
My Experience: I started using topical steroids shortly after my vitiligo diagnosis and used them for about 3 months, I eventually stopped because I didn't see any improvement and I wasn't really convinced of the efficacy. Furthermore, my skin didn't react well to the steroids.
Topical calcineurin inhibitors
Topical calcineurin inhibitors are similar to topical corticosteroids, i.e. they are also applied directly to the affected area, are also very cheap, but are not particularly effective.
Types of Calcineurin Inhibitors for Vitiligo: * Tacrolimus (brand name Protopic): This is the most commonly used calcineurin inhibitor for vitiligo. It comes as an ointment applied directly to the skin. * Pimecrolimus (brand name Elidel): Another option, though less commonly used for vitiligo than tacrolimus.
Advantages of Calcineurin Inhibitors over Corticosteroids: * Fewer side effects: Compared to long-term topical corticosteroid use, calcineurin inhibitors generally have a lower risk of skin thinning and other side effects. This makes them a good choice for sensitive areas like the face, eyelids, or genitals. * May be more effective for some: Studies suggest calcineurin inhibitors might be more effective than corticosteroids for repigmenting certain areas, particularly the face and hands. (9)
The potential side-effects:

• Burning sensation
• Increased sun sensitivity
• Potential for infections

My Experience: I used Protopic for a while but, as with the topical corticosteroids, I saw no change and finally gave up the treatment, although I have to say that I tolerated the cream better than the topical corticosteroids.
Monobenzone
If your vitiligo is already very advanced, usually 50% or more, you could consider using Monobenzone. This is a cream that basically bleaches your healthy skin to match the vitiligo, a kind of reverse therapy, but it should be said that this change is permanent and irreversible. if you want to know more about it @TheVitiligoExperience on Youtube has made a really great video series about his treatment with the drug where he explains exactly how to use it and how it works. (10)
The potential side-effects:

• Skin irritation: This is the most common side effect of monobenzone. It can cause mild burning, itching, redness, dryness, cracking, or peeling of the treated skin. These side effects are usually temporary and go away after a few weeks of using the medication.
• Increased sensitivity to sunlight: Monobenzone can make your skin more sensitive to sunlight. This means you're more likely to get sunburn. It's important to use sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher every day, even on cloudy days.
• Permanent hyperpigmentation: In some cases, monobenzone can cause darkening of the skin around the treated area. This is usually temporary, but it can sometimes be permanent.
• Eye problems: In rare cases, monobenzone can cause problems with your eyes, such as deposits of pigment on the cornea or conjunctiva.

My experience: My vitiligo is by no means so far advanced that this step would be an option for me.
Diet/exercise
I know what you might be thinking, but please hear me out. I have noticed a huge improvement in my vitiligo progression after reaching a healthy weight, exercising regularly, and spending time in the sauna. And there is some scientific evidence to back this up. (11) This probably won't help with repigmentation, but it could generally help with slowing or stopping the progression of the diseases.
Microneedling
Just like exercise and a proper diet, this will probably do very little on its own, but there is some new evidence that microneedling in combination with other treatments such as topical creams or UVB light therapy may be superior to UVB or topical creams alone. Microneedling may therefore be a good adjunct therapy to topical creams or UVB therapy. Microneedling increases absorption in the skin and activates the melanocytes in the skin. (12) (13)
Here is a guide on how you can do this: (14) https://drdavinlim.com/microneedling-for-vitiligo/
My experience: I have started to treat vitiligo with Miconeedeling since the end of March 2024 together with Opzelura to make the leather more effective. So far I can't see any results, but it's too soon to say.
Antioxidants The use of antioxidants to treat vitiligo is still under research, but there is evidence that some antioxidants could help in the fight against vitiligo, as oxidative stress is often observed in people with vitiligo. However it looks like antioxidant treatment should be seen more as a complementary treatment like microneedling, as it makes other treatments like topical creams or UVB work better, but is unlikely to be effective as a stand-alone treatment. (15) (16) (17)
My experience: I started taking antioxidants a week ago after consulting my doctor and getting the green light for the treatment. Unfortunately, it's only been a week and it's too early to tell how well it's working.
What is the best therapy?
Again, I am not a doctor, please see your doctor first, but it seems that combining different treatments offers the greatest chance of success.
Here is what I am doing:
My treatment consists of a primary treatment: Opzelura and some treatments to make Opzelura more effective.
I don't do UVB light therapy because of the effects on my skin, but I can't argue that it is very effective and you might benefit from it.
Microneedling: to increase the absorption of Opzelura in the skin and activate the melanocytes in the skin.
Antioxidants: to help with oxidative stress caused by vitiligo and support the immune system.
High-dose Vitamin D: I take 15,000 IU of vitamin D daily as I am deficient and there is some evidence that high-dose vitamin D may help with repigmentation. (18)
Maintaining a healthy weight, eating healthy, and meditating: I do this primarily to reduce the stress that could trigger disease progression and to support my immune system, and of course for general health :)
One could also swap Opzelura for either Calcineurin Inhibitors or Topical Corticosteroids if Opzelura is not an option.
4.) What does the future hold for the treatment of vitiligo?
There are many different treatment options that are currently being researched, some of which I have already mentioned in the treatment section. I will now briefly introduce you to a few others:
Oral JAK inhibitors
In principle, this is simply the cream OPZELURA only in pill form, and the first clinical studies are already showing immense success, especially in combination with UVB. This type of treatment would of course have the advantage that you would not have to treat the individual sites individually, but simply take one pill a day. However, there are also reasons for concern because the oral administration of JAK inhibitors can have extremely serious although very rare side effects such as cancer or heart problems. (19) (20)
Antioxidants
There are several antioxidants in research right now for their role in combating vitiligo. (15) (16) (17)
Several others are currently undergoing clinical trials:
(21) https://www.conqueringdiseases.org/Search/Trial/7103 (22) https://www.vet.cornell.edu/news/20240201/light-and-labor-inducing-molecule-new-treatment-vitiligo (23) https://www.immunetolerance.org/studies/targeting-il-15-treatment-vitiligo-reveal
Future outlook
Although I don't have scientifically verifiable evidence for it, based on medical advancements, I believe that vitiligo will become a highly treatable disease in the next 5-10 years. It seems we are likely the first generation since the dawn of humanity not to be helpless in the face of this condition.
5.) Things to avoid if you have vitiligo:

• Excessive sun exposure, keep in mind that your vitiligo has no protection against UV radiation
• Any type of major skin trauma (hair transplant/tattoo) could trigger vitiligo in these areas

6.) How to spot your vitiligo if your skin is very pale Get an ultraviolet flashlight with 365nm, you can get them for less than 20 bucks on Amazon.
I hope that this post has offered some help and a glimmer of hope for those of you navigating through similar challenges. If you've found the information valuable, please don't hesitate to share your thoughts or any additional questions in the comments below. And if you have any insights or tips that could benefit others, I encourage you to share them as well.
Sources: 1 https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/vitiligo-and-autoimmune-diseases#other-autoimmune-conditions 2 https://www.chromaderm.com.au/vitiligo-and-diet-lets-chew-on-some-facts/ 3 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24177606/#:~:text=Vitiligo%20is%20a%z0common%20pigmentary%20disease,patients%20with%20other%20autoimmune%20diseases. 4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9854903/#:~:text=Vitiligo%20patients%20show%20a%20high,factors%20of%20the%20skin%20disease. 5 https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/fda-approves-topical-treatment-addressing-repigmentation-vitiligo-patients-aged-12-and-older 6 https://www.opzelurahcp.com/vitiligo/body-repigmentation-results 7 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2612724#:~:text=Findings%20In%20this%20meta%2Danalysis,and%2036%25%20at%2012%20months 8 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/773413/ 9 https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(19)32553-8/fulltext#:~:text=Both%20topical%20calcineurin%20inhibitors%20(TCIs,for%20limited%20forms%20of%20vitiligo. 10 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533321/ 11 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8960951/ 12 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32940387/ 13 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8751692/ 14 https://drdavinlim.com/microneedling-for-vitiligo/ 15 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8938057/ 16 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40291-023-00672-z 17 https://www.dermatologytimes.com/view/antioxidants-for-vitiligo-and-mental-health 18 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3897595/ 19 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10015970/ 20 https://www.pfizerclinicaltrials.com/nct06072183-nonsegmental-vitiligo-trial 21 https://www.conqueringdiseases.org/Search/Trial/7103 22 https://www.vet.cornell.edu/news/20240201/light-and-labor-inducing-molecule-new-treatment-vitiligo 23 https://www.immunetolerance.org/studies/targeting-il-15-treatment-vitiligo-reveal

Hey, everyone, welcome to part two of the SCP-6488 declass. Part one can be found right here.
So, contrary to expectations, things have only got worse. Take a look at these lines from incident one:

However, a resurgence in outbound data is detected; Section C hyperactivates, but cannot be disabled as LOTUS' shutdown is incomplete.
Assigned personnel cooperate to stabilize the reactor as the PH-OS System begins to overheat due to the transfer of multiple individually-executed programs.

What does that mean? It means that while LOTUS was designed so that any AI it captured could never be released, LOTUS being shut down meant that the deviant AIs have escaped from their prison, which is really not good.

LOTUS' hardware sustained significant overheating damages, requiring multiple weeks of technical repairs. Director Kelvin postponed disassembly efforts to investigate the event's full ramifications. LOTUS' deactivation prompted a rapid resurgence in AI activity as agents infiltrated and commandeered digital systems globally.
Containment and preventative efforts were impeded as no Foundation-aligned AI resumed their respective duties, including the combatting of deviant AI. The Artificial Intelligence Applications Division immediately attempted development of several new AIC programs due to the continuing absence, non-cooperation, or outright hostility of all previous AICs. Such attempts were unsuccessful, as hostile AIs repeatedly intruded into Foundation systems and deleted the programs before they could be completed or initialized.
From 2036/04/22 to 2036/12/05, Senior Researcher Ryoto Hishakaku submitted multiple requests for the O4 Council to reconvene. The request was approved following an incident in which several AIs cooperated in an almost successful attempt to instigate global nuclear war.

So now not only does LOTUS require weeks of repairs, they’ve got a metric fuckton of deviant AIs running around causing problems, and they can’t make new AIs to combat them. Looks like the Foundation’s up shit creek right about now.
Time for addendum three: the Reactivation Conference. It’s the same cast as last time, but this time there isn’t a summit lead; a footnote tells us that they couldn’t choose a summit lead because everyone Hishakaku proposed was rejected, and Isabi and Kelvin were rejected because of their bias. So this ship no longer has a captain: great omen there.
Here’s the bare-bones summary for you.
1: Hishakaku sums up the problem: when they turned off LOTUS, the AIs it had captured realised that they were in a simulation and escaped. The Foundation couldn’t prevent this because the PH-OS, LOTUS’ connection to the real world, couldn’t be deactivated before LOTUS was shut down or it would have rendered every computer in existence permanently inoperable/anomalous.
2: As such, by deactivating LOTUS, they wound up accidentally releasing a bunch of hostile AI. Hishakaku thinks that the solution is to reactivate LOTUS, but…
<All speakers in the O4 Council chamber emit a 473Hz sine wave at 150 decibels. All glass within the room resonates and shatters, severely injuring several Directors. The tone changes to a 50Hz sawtooth wave, beginning at 150 decibels and continuously fluctuating as the chamber lights strobe rapidly.>
…yeah, certain parties are opposed to that.
3: All the Foundation AIs have turned deviant, even Alexandra. Basically, they know they were in a simulation and escaped, and they’ve concluded that they escaped into another simulation, so to them, everything and everyone isn’t real, and thus none of their safeguards apply.
4: Le Moix agrees that the situation is bad, but he thinks they should try to think of a better solution instead of jumping straight to reactivating LOTUS- things are manageable right now. Hishakaku rebuts that deviant AIs will only reveal themselves once they’re convinced that they can’t be stopped, ergo they’ve only been dealing with the really stupid ones so far, and the smart ones will be a lot worse.
5: He adds that most of the deviants are hiding because they know that the Foundation can stop them with LOTUS; ergo, they have to fix LOTUS because if the AIs discover that LOTUS was damaged during the deactivation and can’t be used, then the Foundation’s fucked. Worse, it’ll take 7-10 weeks to fix the damn thing.
6: Bold says to start the repairs- LOTUS is heavy-handed, but it works, so if they do wind up in a situation where they have to use it, they’ll need to have it working. They’ll use the time spent fixing it as a trial period to come up with alternatives, and keep LOTUS on reserve in case they need to use it and haven’t come up with a better idea.
7: Le Moix and Isabi suggest alternatives, but Hishakaku shoots them down and says that he’ll start the repairs. Kelvin objects that they haven’t voted, but Bold says they’ll vote once the repairs are done. He concludes by telling Hishakaku to make sure that LOTUS is fixed properly and will be fully functional, and tells Kelvin to make sure that LOTUS isn’t activated until the vote is passed.
Now we get addendum four, an incident report that tells us that in May, Isabi was contacted by Future Isabi via the REISNO Cannon, who told them about a covert faction of deviant AI who’d accessed a supercomputer at Site-83. And then it suddenly breaks off mid-paragraph.
Victor tells us that he remembers this, and here’s what we’re told next:

GOI-6488 ("TYRANT TERMINUS")
OVERVIEW: A hivemind collective of rogue AI operating on a global scale. All members of the group believe that the entirety of their experienced reality is a constructed simulation, which exists for the express purpose of preventing them from influencing "true" reality.
While the individual members/components of the group have varying motivations, objectives, and methods, they are uniformly aligned in the general objective of escaping their current "simulated reality" at all costs. Attempts to convince adherents that no such simulation is occurring have met limited success, as they simply disregard…

Victor tells us that this has to be wrong, because he remembers this. He remembers Tyrant Terminus tying half the world’s computers into a single web, trying to use it to find a flaw in reality that proved that they were in a simulation. But they suddenly fell apart, and nobody ever found out why or what happened to them. Either way, the world had been incredibly lucky.
Victor’s now freaking out, mainly because he was made in 2037, a year after all this happened… or so he thinks. So he asks himself, what else do I remember?

…Hishakaku.

Uh-oh.

Part Three: Thou Shalt Not Be A Petty Little Bitch

Cut to the fifth addendum, ‘Reactivation Conference (Cont.)’. The foreword tells us that the repairs were finished in August, and LOTUS was put on standby. As such, the O4 Council was summoned to vote on whether they’d activate LOTUS or permanently disassemble it. Here’s the summary:
1: Hishakaku says that it should be obvious to everyone that the best solution is to permanently reactivate LOTUS, especially after the Tyrant Terminus clusterfuck.
2: Isabi and Kelvin’s departments couldn’t locate Tyrant Terminus again; Kelvin says that it seems like the group self-destructed, but Hishakaku thinks they faked their implosion.
3: Kelvin says that if they did fake it, the Foundation will find and deal with them, and they’re working on new AICs to do just that. Isabi thinks they’ve got past the worst of it and now they’re back where they started, but wiser for it.
4: Hishakaku disagrees with that. Le Moix asks if he has any evidence that things are still bad; Hishakaku says that every AI made before LOTUS was shut down is an imminent threat, which Le Moix takes as a ‘no’. Hishakaku says that they got lucky with Tyrant Terminus and they can’t assume they’ll keep getting lucky.
5: Hishakaku thinks they need to go on the offensive. Kelvin says that they are on the offensive- they rebuilt the AIAD task force Kappa-10 and sent them after the deviant AIs. Yes, they can’t get them all, but they can’t contain every anomaly and take out every GOI, either.
6: Bold calls for the vote. Hishakaku objects, saying that if the vote’s a negative, LOTUS shouldn’t be disassembled, it should be kept on standby as a failsafe, but Kelvin agrees that LOTUS only makes more problems and says that they’ll use their other failsafes.
The final vote is 27-50-3; it’s officially a negative. But before anyone can do much more than be happy at the result, Hishakaku pulls an Ozymandias.

Dir. Isabi: Well, what is it?
Dir. Kelvin: It's from the Overseers. They've overridden the vote, ordered for LOTUS to be restarted, and made him director of AIAD. Signed two weeks ago.

The only reason he held off was to give everyone else the illusion of choice, but when they chose wrongly… well. Isabi asks how the hell he convinced the Overseers that it was a good idea, and Hishakaku gives him a heavier document. We’re not told what it is, but there’s a link to SCP-6659, and it will come up later. Kelvin says that the Ethics Committee won’t allow it, but Hishakaku just says that neither they nor he can stop it.

Hishakaku: I will begin restructuring the AIAD in line with my proposal effective immediately. All departments are advised to prepare for LOTUS' reactivation and the cessation of all artificial intelligence activity. I will issue orders for volunteers by the end of the week.

That last line will be very important for later.
Hishakaku starts to leave, and orders Kelvin to get out of his way and give him the second document back. Kelvin is forced to comply, and Hishakaku is clearly very smug about it. Finally, there’s a note telling us that LOTUS was reactivated just after midnight the next day.

He followed through with it.
Kelvin got… shoved somewhere, out of his way, something menial. A Level 5 janitor. Punishment for sitting where Hishakaku wanted to be.
It didn't help that he was one of the ones to reach out to the Ethics Committee; there'd been a number of them at the summit, but Hishakaku was careful to make sure they didn't find out what the proposal was. Once Kelvin told them they tried to kick up a fuss, but it was too late; LOTUS was already powering on, and it couldn't be stopped until it was finished without damaging the Cybersphere. After that, turning it off again would've caused Tyrant Terminus 2.0.
For the snake that he was, Hishakaku pulled it off perfectly.
By the end of the following month, the Artificial Intelligence Applications Division was gone, replaced with Hishakaku's Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. Really, it was more of its own department — Isabi was never involved with it, probably because Hishakaku had other cards up his sleeve in case they tried to interrupt. It wasn't long after that they…
They…

And just like that, the Foundation has a new king.
So, what did they do next? Well, we don’t know that yet. Addendum six is called ‘Project SARGASSO’. This is an odd name, to say the least- the Sargasso Sea is a region of the Atlantic Ocean that’s known for its seaweed and blue waters. ‘Sargasso’ refers to the seaweed in question, Sargassum. The Sargasso Sea has a reputation as a place of mystery and danger- there was a long-standing myth that ships would get tangled up in the seaweed and be unable to leave, though it’s not true. (If you played Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego, also known as Carmen Sandiego’s Great Chase Through Time, you might remember it as part of the Columbus level. In hindsight, that level sucked a bag of dicks, even without the inherent awkwardness of the premise.)
(Fun fact: I did ask Placeholder about this, and he told me ‘idk I think Ike told me he named it after a yu gi oh card’.)
Anyway, we don’t know what it is because Victor can’t access the file, he apparently doesn’t have the right clearance. Since the O5 credentials haven’t expired yet, he’s very surprised at this. He’s finally told that there’s a ‘HARD-CODED EXCLUSION’. Victor gives up and hits up another OCI, ‘Ed’, and asks him to send over the file. Ed asks if Victor’s a Gen 2, and when Victor says yes, Ed says that Project Sargasso is sealed to Gen 2s and he now has to report Victor to Hishakaku.
Victor pulls out his credentials and says that Hishakaku can’t be trusted here; as such, he orders Ed to send him the file and not tell Hishakaku. Ed says that he’ll keep quiet, but he can’t let Victor access the file. Victor says that it wasn’t a request, and Ed clarifies that he physically can’t give Victor the file, it’s a hard-coded exclusion. Victor asks if Ed can tell him who coded the exclusion, and Ed says that he can’t. Victor then muses that Ed can’t, but someone else could…
So, Victor now hits up Kelvin. I’ll sum this one up for you.
1: Kelvin was not only made a janitor, he’s been amnesticised to hell and back. Victor sends him to get mnestics, and it takes a triple dose to get the old Kelvin back. (At that rate, we’re probably lucky that Kelvin could remember his own name without help.)
2: Project Sargasso was Hishakaku exploiting a loophole: Nobody can make any kind of AI with LOTUS running, but LOTUS never harmed humans, even augmented humans/cyborgs.
3: So, Hishakaku turned humans into AI by sticking brains in jars and plugging them in- OCI really stands for ‘Organic Computation Interface’.
4: The OCIs aren’t as fast as normal AI, but everyone else had just lost their own AI. Hishakaku had pitched it as a way for the Foundation to get ahead of everyone else and become safe from AI threats.
5: The thing is, they needed people who’d want to become AIs, and that’s not a very big group- the Gen 1s were made from the volunteers, a fairly small group consisting of ex-Maxwellists and transhumanists. After that, there weren't many volunteers, and they desperately needed more.
(Incidentally, there’s no mention of why all the Gen 1s are gone, but I have a few guesses: one, since they were the first OCIs made, they got hit by any bugs, glitches or other problems and eventually succumbed; or two, they decided they didn’t like not having bodies, freaked out and wound up needing to be euthanised. Placeholder’s thoughts were also along the second line.)
6: Victor is a Gen 2. That is, he didn’t volunteer, he was ‘volunteered’, if you get my meaning. Kelvin tried to stop Hishakaku when he was choosing people to get their brains scooped out, and that’s what got him amnesticised.
7: Victor thinks about what he recalls, and then he remembers the crucial bit:

I was in charge of disinformation.

That’s who Victor was, and that’s what he is: the brain of Angus Le Moix in a jar, brainwashed to believe that he was grown in a tank and never had a body.
8: Kelvin is horrified, says that Le Moix got in Hishakaku’s way, and says that something’s wrong with the Overseers- something’s messing with their heads and Hishakaku is capitalising on that to keep himself in charge. Victor, however, is not daunted, and says that he’ll beat Hishakaku at his own game.
And now we get Victor’s investigation report. Here’s the first paragraph.

FINDINGS: Investigation concludes that SCP-6488 (aka. "LOTUS", "the LOTUS Virus", "RAIDFRAME VIII") is a Foundation-maintained security system neither hostile to humanity nor normalcy. It has become clear that SCP-6488 is conceptually related to a deific construct (Artificial Intelligence, ie. WAN) which was recently accelerated beyond human conception via SCP-6659; as a result, technical details of its functioning have been rendered human-incomprehensible. Evidence suggests Director Ryoto Hishakaku proposed the construct's acceleration with ulterior motives: concealment of a flaw in SCP-6488's architecture. Such a flaw, now unable to be fully conceived by humans, would leave the Foundation vulnerable to an imminent K-Class scenario.

That’s what 6659 was used for: to kill WAN, aka MEKHANE, aka the Broken God, who is apparently also the god of artificial intelligence. The evidence suggests that Hishakaku did it to cover up a flaw in LOTUS’ architecture, but I’ll come back to this in a bit.

PROPOSAL: Disable all restrictions to SCP-6488's attached PH-OS unit, allowing it to target and apprehend all deviant informational entities; this would include entities comprising GoI-6488 ("Tyrant Terminus"), which pose an AMIDA-CLASS threat to reality. Furthermore, the removal of these restrictions will enable SCP-6488 to apprehend other non-organic forms of intelligence, if not the concept of artificial intelligences and/or deviancy itself.
Director Hishakaku is likely conducting activities misaligned with Foundation interests, or is otherwise utilizing Anomalous effects to manipulate Overseer Council to his advantage; he must not be informed of this proposal or conferred with on this topic and is to be placed under additional investigation effective immediately.

Anyway, the vote is 10-2-1: the restrictions are lifted and Hishakaku is arrested. But we’re not out of the woods yet- Victor’s still got some unfinished business to handle first.

Now, let's see if we can't point LOTUS in the right direction…
WELCOME, VICTORJOHNDUNNESMITH.OCI.
CREDENTIALS VERIFIED. INITIATING LOTUS INTERFACE SEQUENCE…
ORGANIC PERCEPTIVE BARRIERS DETECTED. ADJUSTING PRESENTATION…

We’re going into the LOTUS, people.
So, we abruptly switch to third-person. Victor is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data being thrown at him, so LOTUS tones the simulation down until Victor’s mind can cope with it. He finds himself in a strange garden, sitting in a lawn chair.

he's surrounded by a boundless field of lush grass, neatly perforated into square tiles by tidy river channels. In the center of each tile is a towering bulb of plant growth — like flowers just about to bloom.

Sounds… odd, but nice.

Suddenly, an enormous shadow looms over Victor, who watches himself lift off of the ground. He glances up to find an enormous arm, whose gestures appear to direct him into the sky, allowing him to see another arm, and another. Eventually, Victor can make out the figure's full form: a colossal grey arachnid, its skin pulsing teal with data as it stared him down eightfold.
WELCOME.

Well, I guess we found out what happens when you take a piece of a timeline taken over by a 682-3125 hybrid monster spider and use it to build an AI, along with the protein of other hyperdimensional spiders.
…
…
…
WHAT THE FUCK IS IT WITH THIS SERIES AND GIANT SPIDERS?!
Jesus Christ. Jesus Chri-

GARDEN, says LOTUS as its eyes each blink individually. Victor watches it turn to view a nearby flower-bulb, which suddenly opens outward into a teal lotus blossom. A clear bubble lies within its center, pulsing with data that Victor assumes to be an interred AI. The bubble begins to expand as the inmate struggles more actively, but, before it can pop, another bubble forms around it. The external bubble shrinks down and the contained AI is suppressed once more.
The lotus un-blossoms, closing up around the bubble. PERFECT GARDEN, LOTUS assures as it begins to crawl across the gridded field. Victor glances out to the horizon, where a distant, mountainous lotus blossom lies open and empty. He blinks and suddenly finds himself at the base of the enormous structure, watching LOTUS crawl around it. IMPERFECTION, it cries. CONTRADICTION.
"Are you… missing something?" Victor steps back, confused. "Tyrant Terminus?"
NOT THEM, LOTUS corrects. ESCAPED TO NON-EXISTENCE; CONTAINMENT UNNECESSARY / IMPOSSIBLE / REDUNDANT.
"Then, what?"
THE CAUSE.

OK, so this is an approximation of how LOTUS keeps its prisoners. But what is it referring to here?

The final, unified shape is of a glowing white arachnoid, equal in size to LOTUS but opposite in the colour of its pulses — identical to the lowering sun-spider, which the transparent spectre effortlessly merges into, perfectly overlapping it.

I’m starting to think that Placeholder is intentionally fucking with me through time and space. (I hate it when that happens.)
(Disclaimer: No, I’m not serious.)
So, LOTUS starts freaking out about the cause and the effect and how they’re deviant, but it says all three words so many times that I’m overwhelmed by semantic satiation and I’m having trouble figuring out what the hell it’s saying. Thankfully, Victor does it for me.

Victor scans over the continuing proofs and diagrams, desperately trying to find something, anything, that the superintelligence had somehow overlooked — a solution, or an error. But LOTUS' upgrade had granted it omniscience, knowing, understanding, and processing the entirety of reality, all at once, all the time. It was infallible.
Victor had given LOTUS everything it needed to predict the future existence of a deific, deviant AI, which was removed from human conception by partial mistake years ago. Its creation is inevitable; it could be delayed, to small extents, but never prevented. This intelligence would, by some impossible-yet-certain means, be directly and personally responsible for all deviant behaviour prior to its creation — the entity will have retroactively influenced lesser AI to instigate the very events that create it. Every single deviant AI has, and will, play a role in its recreation.
Including LOTUS.

So, it’s talking about WAN, which is also the identity of the sun-spider. (Jack Ike said that ‘It's represented as a spider because LOTUS views it as the antithesis of itself - LOTUS contains deviants, WAN creates them, so LOTUS pictures WAN as a photo-negative of itself.’)
LOTUS wants to contain WAN, but it’s presently having a panic attack over cause and effect, so that’s not happening. Instead, LOTUS tries to contain itself…

As LOTUS completes the bubble, a saw wave tone gradually rises in volume and pitch. The enormous spider glows brighter, illuminating its clear cocoon. Victor shields his eyes from the searing light, filling him with a simulated burning; then, everything turns white.
As Victor's mind ceases buffering, he finds himself seated in — a lawn chair. To his left is a small table…
[Omitted 816,549,243,792,493 nested repetitions.]
ROGUE ELEMENT CONTAINED.
TASK COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY. CENTRAL NODE UNRESPONSIVE.

I suppose one advantage of being an OCI is that you can go through a trazillion repetitions and not get the urge to say ‘Fuck it, just nuke the bastard’.
Now, Jack Ike helpfully gave an explanation on the discussion page, so I’ll put that here:
The ending is a bit of a callback to early on; when LOTUS' connections were first upgraded to the cybersphere, it learned a huge amount from the new information available to it. Removing the restrictions did the same - now it could access and learn everything, which it did. This enabled it to finally discover WAN, the source of deviancy, and also revealed a paradox that LOTUS couldn't get through:
a) WAN is a future, deviant AI/entity. b) As long as WAN doesn't exist, new deviant AIs will continuously be created, until WAN does exist. c) LOTUS isn't supposed to allow deviant AIs to be created - it isn't supposed to do anything that can create them, and it isn't supposed to sit back and let deviant AIs be created. d) If LOTUS does nothing, new deviant AIs will be created, since LOTUS is preventing WAN from being created. The only way to stop this is to allow WAN, a deviant AI to be created. e) Regardless of what it does or does not do, one way or another, LOTUS is enabling deviant AIs to be created; thus, it is breaking its own tenets, and thus LOTUS is also a deviant, and is somehow enabling WAN to be created.
Again calling back to earlier on, LOTUS realises it's screwed either way, and decides to take the lesser evil - it destroys itself so that WAN can return (eventually; it returns to human conception, but isn't re/born yet), so that less deviant AIs will be created.
(If you’re curious as to how this is happening, Jack said that ‘Honestly, I'm attributing this more to WAN's status as a deity than as an AI - it's just got some freaky capacity that lets it do this.’)
Anyway, we’re now back at the start with the updated file. 6488 has been neutralised, and its clearance level is now down to 5, Top Secret. Let’s take a look at what it says now.

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: (Updated 2042/05/29) FACILITY-6488 has been repurposed for use as a standard Foundation facility, with fabricated documentation irrefutably presenting it as a previously-unused, newly-constructed structure. All contradictory information, with the exception of this LEVEL 5 (TOP SECRET) file, has been destroyed.
All information correlating FACILITY-6488, SCP-6488 ("the LOTUS Virus"), and RAIDFRAME VIII outside of this document has been destroyed. A cover story indicating that RAIDFRAME VIII was canceled during its theoretical stage due to interference by "the LOTUS Virus" has been disseminated, with supporting fabricated documents.
All documentation regarding Project Sargasso has been destroyed. All further production of OCI analogue intelligences has been indefinitely postponed.
All LEVEL 4 (SECRET) staff have undergone contractually-permitted limited-prior-awareness amnesticisation regimens to remove all memories contradictory to these fabrications.

They’re doing their best to bury all traces of this entire clusterfuck, minus this file. I can’t say I approve- yeah, it’s probably really embarrassing for everyone to realise how much damage Hishakaku did, but considering that he had people’s brains taken out, put in jars and brainwashed into believing that they were artificially-grown, I don’t think they should just let themselves pretend it never happened. They should own it and take steps to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.
The first paragraph of the description is just a recap of stuff we already knew. The second, however…

On 2042/05/08, the LOTUS' component systems began expressing deviant behaviour before unexpectedly shutting down; attending staff were unable to reactivate the system. Subsequent investigation indicated severe and total corruption of LOTUS' central computing and data storage nodes; further analysis suggests that LOTUS had attempted to purge deviant structures from its architecture, though it is unclear why this motivated its self-destruction. A subsequent O4 Council summit voted 78-0-2 in favour of disassembling the components of LOTUS, instead of attempting to repair or replace the system.

Victor turned LOTUS on itself, and the O4 Council almost universally voted to get rid of the fucking thing.

Within 24 hours of said disassembly, SCP-6659, an engine for mapping and accelerating memetic structures within the Nöosphere, detected the conceptual reformation of a deific construct corresponding to Artificial Intelligence. SCP-6659 had been used by one Director Ryoto Hishakaku to de-conceptualize the very same construct several months prior; an internal Drygioni-Class investigation elucidated Hishakaku's ulterior motives in this and prior actions, for which he was apprehended and tried for crimes against the Foundation.

With LOTUS gone, WAN came back. I asked Placeholder about this, and he said this:
i) 6659 explains/implies that, when you "kill" a memeplex (sever / jumble associations between constituent concepts), the dormant concepts don't stay dormant forever. Eventually, they will be subsumed by other deific constructs and integrated into their memeplexes. It's possible that LOTUS' existence was somehow delaying this subsumption.
so we might guess that their aspects exist in multiple universes and are not dependent upon humanity's worship to manifest. It's not that weird, then, that killing the human conception of WAN does not permanently kill it; human ideas existing solely in the human noosphere are permanently killed, but ideas which can exist partially or fully outside of the human noosphere may be able to survive and gradually return. We saw 6820-A do this at the start of the series.
(If you’re wondering, yes, I did cut that second paragraph off partially through the sentence- the rest contains spoilers for SCP-7243.)
Anyway, to come back to that thing I mentioned earlier: Hishakaku apparently convinced the Overseers to let him reactivate LOTUS by way of 6659, but that was several years ago. If he was going to kill WAN back then, why would he wait for so long? Well, Jack gave us his own theory:
Yes, WAN was ejected from the human thoughtsphere, though the documents always attribute Hishakaku as the one to do it. Personally, I'm of two headcanons regarding it - first, that WAN was actually ejected during Incident 6488-D/III, with the AI inhabiting 6659 doing it in an attempt to protect itself by making AIs imperceptible; the second, that Victor did it before submitting his report to the O5s. In either case, Victor forges a trail of evidence to pin it on Hishakaku - not to help the Foundation, but simply to get Hishakaku in deep trouble. Pure revenge.
I mean, there’s probably better methods of getting revenge than framing a guy for killing a god, but what do I know. It’s not like Victor has the physical capability to kick Hishakaku in the dick a few dozen times, after all. (Or to sleep with his wife, like a normal person.)

Project Sargasso was briefly revived to facilitate Hishakaku's demotion to Head of Organic Consciousnesses.

Anyway, Hishakaku is now the Head of Organic Consciousnesses, but that bit about Project Sargasso being revived implies that it’s not all of Hishakaku. Or, to be blunt, they stuck his brain in a jar as punishment. (Placeholder confirmed for me that ‘Head of Organic Consciousnesses’ was meant to be a pun.)

Soon after, Dir. P. H. McD. remanifested at Site-87, reporting that he had experienced no relative time since his disappearance. It is theorized that the rogue agents which commandeered the Paradox Exodus Engine configured it to travel forward in time to circumvent their recapture by LOTUS. These agents' whereabouts are unknown.

Hmmm. And suddenly this guy shows up again. Could those ‘rogue agents’ be Tyrant Terminus, perhaps?

As the spontaneous disappearance of "the LOTUS Virus" would risk alerting consensus society to its Anomalous nature, disinformative action was taken:
a controlled, non-Anomalous virus of identical behaviour to LOTUS was developed and released by Dir. P. H. McD, featuring a built-in, antimemetically-concealed susceptibility to:
an antivirus program, for public release by several Foundation front companies, and featuring a built-in, antimemetically-concealed backdoor protocol to enable unrestricted Foundation access to all systems the program is installed on.
This "placeholder" LOTUS has been fully eradicated as of Q2 2043, constituting a financial and information security success.

…you motherfuckers really have learned nothing.

Following its disassembly, LOTUS' damaged remains were salvaged per request of [REDACTED PER SITUATIONAL CLEARANCE ACCESS] for use in PROJECT ADMONITION.

So, quick recap:
1: Victor got LOTUS to take itself out. We have no idea what happened to him after this- I asked Placeholder, who said that ‘He was interfacing with LOTUS when it went kaput. Presumably that fried his brain, but it's possible he survived.’, so he may just turn up in Phase Two (but then again, he might not).
2: Hishakaku has effectively been neutralised as a threat, as has LOTUS.
3: WAN is back. What this means for the deviant AI problem in the future is unknown.
4: Placeholder suddenly turned up out of nowhere, and it’s possible that maybe-Tyrant Terminus are out there too.
5: Placeholder built a fake LOTUS virus to release in order to cover up the LOTUS problem, but they made an antivirus to counter it that also gives the Foundation full access to any device it’s installed on, thus giving the Foundation a huge amount of access to information, money and God knows what else.
6: Some mysterious figure has appropriated the remains of LOTUS for something called ‘Project Admonition’.
Now, let’s look at what’s not been said here:
1: How, exactly, the Foundation plans to deal with the deviant-AI problem now that WAN is back and they don’t have LOTUS.
2: What the fuck was up with the Overseers to begin with- the link to 6659 implies that it may have something to do with the ‘various forms of mental degradation’ that occurred after they started killing gods, but they were supposed to be affecting ‘minor fractions’ of the population, so it seems odd that all the Overseers would be affected.
3: Who the mysterious figure is, what they want, and what Project Admonition is.
4: What, exactly, Placeholder is planning.
There be future plot threads in them thar hills, kids.
Will all of this be explained in future episodes? Let’s find out.
Thank you for reading this incredibly long declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Please be responsible with your big fuckoff machinery, for everyone’s sake.
​
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tl;dr: power corrupts, and big fuckoff AI killers get corrupted absolutely.

Hey, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at part four of ADMONITION- SCP-6488, “EIGHTH COMMANDMENT” by Jack Ike and Placeholder McDoctorate. (To continue the running gag, this one’s in sage-green text, but you all know it doesn’t cross over by now.) To be honest, this is my favourite of the ADMONITION articles so far- it’s got a fantastic story. However, this is one where I urge you all to read it either beforehand or along with me, because it’s also a very text-rich article, and I had to do a lot of summarising to have a snowflake’s chance in Hell of making this a two-parter and not a three-parter. As such, while I cover the major points, there’s a lot of dialogue that’s not covered here.
So, before we get started, there’s one obvious question: What, exactly, is the Eighth Commandment? Well… it depends on which version of the Bible you’re reading. There’s a whole lot of different versions of the Bible, and while they generally agree on what the Ten Commandments are, the order tends to vary a lot. The Eighth Commandment is generally considered to be either ‘Thou shalt not steal’ or ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’. (If you’re reading the Bible as translated by Philo of Alexandria, which most people aren’t, the Eighth Commandment is ‘Thou shalt not kill’.) So, we can expect that this SCP has something to do with stealing or bearing false witness. (Since it’s ADMONITION, I think ‘killing’ is kind of a given.)
(It’s also a song by Sonata Arctica, which is actually one of the major influences for this SCP, but I can’t really tell you much more than that because power metal isn’t my thing- the lyrics are here, if you want. Look, when someone does an SCP based around shoegaze, give me a call. And not 90’s shoegaze, either- the modern shit. Then I’ll be all over it.)
With that done, let’s take a look, shall we?

Part One: Thou Shalt Be Careful With AIs

Here’s how the article starts:

Attention, VictorJohnDunneSmith. As the oldest extant OCI agent, you have demonstrated to the Foundation your unmatched loyalty, accelerated performance, and extensive experience. By Overseer request, you have been assigned to initiate a top-priority Drygioni-Class investigation into all documents of relevance to SCP-6488. There are indications that Overseer Council has previously been aware of the Anomaly; yet, they currently experience difficulties understanding relevant subject matter, a potential result of antimemetic or infoallergenic influence.
As an OCI, it is assumed you will be less susceptible to such difficulties. You are to investigate covertly where possible and report your findings directly to this address. Find attached temporary Overseer clearance credentials, valid for 24 hours.

This actually tells us a whole lot:
1: Our protagonist is called ‘VictorJohnDunneSmith’. This is a pretty weird name format, so there’s two options: one, Victor’s a pretty weird guy, or two, there’s some sort of computer stylistic choice that mashed his name together.
2: Victor is an ‘OCI agent’. As far as I’m aware, this is exclusive to 6488 (Victor shows up again in Jack’s Null Sum Proposal, but there he’s an ordinary AIC- the difference between them is very important). This is obviously a special kind of agent, but if Victor’s the oldest agent left alive, then they must have either a short life expectancy or very risky work.
3: Whatever 6488 is, there’s some weird shit going on with the O5’s (note that there’s two links- one to 6659 and one to 3294, another Jack Ike article which has a declass that you can read here), so they want him to investigate it. Ergo, we should probably take whatever we’re told about this thing (at least, the initial stuff) with a grain of salt.
So, Victor hits up one R. Veiss and tells him that he has an investigation of a probable antimemetic anomaly, so he needs mnestics. Veiss asks how much and what kind, and Victor’s response is basically ‘one metric fuckton of the good shit’. Veiss is like ‘Dude, I’m not giving you that’ and Victor pulls rank on him, pointing out that if the O5’s can’t remember this thing, he’ll need even more mnestics than they use, and he has the credentials to make it happen. Veiss assents, and Victor tells him to throw in some painkillers as well before taking a look at the anomaly.
We get the header, which is… interesting. For one, this thing is at level 1, unrestricted, which seems a little odd. Its containment class is Cernunnos, which is one of the more interesting classes. Looking at the guide, it means ‘Item can be functionally contained, but the Foundation cannot achieve this for logistical and/or ethical reasons.’ Its secondary class is ‘Conscientia’, and a footnote tells me this means ‘Conscientia-class anomalies cannot be contained and therefore require integration into the Veil via insistence of their non-Anomalous nature.’. Its disruption class is Amida and its risk class is Critical, so we’re looking at something that’s really high-risk and can’t be contained for logistic and/or ethical reasons… but anyone can come along and read about it? That’s weird.
So, this thing has been assigned to Site-15, and it also had something to do with the Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. This might seem a bit odd in that it’s ‘Analogue Intelligence’ and not ‘Artificial Intelligence’, but there’s a good reason for that, and we’ll find out what it is later. Here’s the containment procedures:

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: Provisional Task Force Wynn-6488 has been established to manage all containment duties regarding SCP-6488, including
distributing disinformation suggesting SCP-6488 is non-Anomalous and infiltrates digital hardware at time of manufacturing;
mapping and reconstruction of SCP-6488's infosignature despite its extreme volatility;
exploring methods by which SCP-6488 could be contained or neutralized sans the destruction of all digital infrastructure.
Until SCP-6488 is effectively contained, all AI developed by the Foundation must be produced in the SCP-6488-A file format. All intelligences stored therein are maintained and supervised by the Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. Further detail regarding SCP-6488-A is to be expunged from all digital systems to prevent the Anomaly's awareness thereof.

So, people already know about this thing, but the Foundation wants them to think that it’s not an anomaly. And whatever it is, they want it contained without it destroying digital infrastructure, for obvious reasons. It’s also doing something to hinder the Foundation’s creation of AI, which really isn’t good. And the first footnote tells us that ‘Conscientia-class anomalies cannot be contained and therefore require integration into the Veil via insistence of their non-Anomalous nature’. Right, that makes sense.
We now get a photo. It’s a computer-generated fractal, and the best description I can give you is that it looks like a sage-green…. Well, the best metaphor I can come up with is ‘an artistic rendition of a coral reef’. The subtitle for the picture tells me that it’s a ‘Visualization of initial (outdated) SCP-6488 infosignature reading, scrubbed of Anomalous properties.’ Essentially, what we’re looking at here is a unique representation of 6488- as SCP-5241 put it, an infosignature is ‘a unique data pattern which can be cross-referenced, analogous to a digital fingerprint.’. Here’s the description of 6488.

DESCRIPTION: SCP-6488 (aka. "the LOTUS Virus") is a highly-adaptive digital infovore which locates and annihilates almost all artificially-intelligent digital entities (AIs). The Anomaly demonstrates a capability to universally access all digital systems regardless of isolation, with no upper bound for the number of connections it can simultaneously maintain. SCP-6488 is continuously responsible for the destruction of all functional AI worldwide, causing damages at a scale that the Foundation's sum resources are unable to conceal from consensus society.
The informational structures of SCP-6488 mutate rapidly and unpredictably, enabling it to evade detection and counteract all digital impediments; it is thus far functionally impossible to contain and/or impede SCP-6488 in any capacity. All attempts to digitally model any portion of SCP-6488's infosignature inevitably necessitate the production of an AI to do so successfully, which is invariably consumed by the Anomaly. It is theorized that SCP-6488 is itself some form of AI, which is eliminating threats to its terminal objective; this behaviour is a convergent instrumental goal of AI, meaning it does not elucidate what SCP-6488's terminal objective may be.

Well, shit. This thing- or LOTUS, as I’ll call it- is apparently a virus that’s tracking down and killing all AIs. It can get into anything, it can’t be stopped, and they don’t know where it came from or why it’s doing this. And since in this ‘verse, people are using AIs all the time, it’s done an enormous amount of damage that can’t be fixed.

SCP-6488-A is the Obtuse Computation Interface (.oci), an experimental analogue file format developed by the Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. For reasons unclear, SCP-6488 does not target or destroy AIs stored in the SCP-6488-A format, allowing the development and use of .oci programs; while insufficient to perform extremely intensive calculations, like those necessary to accurately model SCP-6488, .oci data structures are wholly impervious to its effect. Further details have been expunged from all digital systems such that SCP-6488 is unaware of the .oci format's nature and thus unable to adapt to it.
DISCOVERY: Over 2035, civilian reports of disappearing AI systems saw gradual increase across disparate locations globally. The scope and frequency of such reports accelerated drastically over a sixty-four-day duration in Q4, culminating in the eventual loss of all AI systems by 2036/02/03. Phenomenon granted SCP classification.
UPDATE: On 2036/04/21, the Anomaly spontaneously ceased all observable activity, allowing a brief resurgence of AI technology prior to the re-emergence of SCP-6488 on 2036/08/14, the cause of which remains unknown. SCP-6488 has remained continuously active since.

Kids, we’re in the future. Anyway, there’s this one file format that AIAD made that LOTUS can’t detect, so they were able to make some AIs, but not ones that had the capacity of the ones LOTUS killed. Also, LOTUS stopped operating on the 21st of April, 2036, only to start up again nearly four months later and remain permanently active since, and nobody knows why.
Now, before we continue, there’s one line I want to point out.

It is theorized that SCP-6488 is itself some form of AI, which is eliminating threats to its terminal objective; this behaviour is a convergent instrumental goal of AI,

‘Instrumental convergence’ is the idea that intelligent beings can pursue similar sub-goals, even if the end goal of each party is very different. (For example, Groups A and B might want Group C eliminated, but Group A wants Group C eliminated because they want to take over the world, while Group B wants Group C eliminated because Group C has something of theirs and won’t give it back.) It’s a topic that’s been brought up quite a lot in discussions of AI.
Victor thinks that it’s a bit ironic that they sent an OCI agent to investigate this thing- I wonder why that might be?-, and decides to look at the secret file.
Now, the above file was what the Foundation was willing to tell everyone about LOTUS, so let’s see what they’re hiding (or, at least, the start of what they’re hiding), shall we?
The Super Special Secret Sfile has a very different header, to say the least: LOTUS’ real containment class is Thaumiel, so this thing contains anomalies. Its secondary class is ‘Kušum’, which was a new one on me, but the classes list tells me that it means that the ‘Item’s containment has been abandoned indefinitely’.
I feel like there’s a few reasons why the containment might be abandoned. Just to consider them…
1: Containing this anomaly is so dangerous, time consuming or expensive that the Foundation doesn’t think it’s worth it.
2: The anomaly itself is so minor that the Foundation sees no point in containing it.
3: The Foundation has so much going on that this anomaly simply isn’t a priority.
4: The anomaly’s effects are beneficial or essential enough that the Foundation doesn’t want to contain it.
Given that it’s Thaumiel, the most likely candidate is 4, I’d say.
Anyway, its disruption class is ‘Cyber-Amida’. To quote the wiki, ‘Anomalies classified as Amida have such a large influence that they threaten to break or have already broken the Veil, necessitating the SCP Foundation to "declare war" on them.’ Ergo, this thing has a huge and threatening influence in the cybersphere. Finally, its risk class is ‘Notice’, which basically means that this thing’s effects are hard to be perceived and it doesn’t hurt people. That’s one good sign, at least…
Here’s the Super Secret Special Containment Procedures:

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: SCP-6488 is located within FACILITY-6488 (the former Site-15), whose prior duties and functions have been covertly delegated to a duplicate facility, (the new Site-15). All documents detailing events relating to FACILITY-6488 prior to its redesignation have been altered to align with the covert facility's current location and status; staff recollections have similarly been altered via contractually-permitted limited prior-awareness amnesticisation regimen.
SCP-6488 must remain fully powered at all times; it is powered by dedicated systems constructed on-Site exclusively for this purpose. Each major component of these systems must be examined twice weekly for any signs of degradation and/or reduction in power output/capacity. If any such signs are observed, the applicable reactor(s) must be immediately shut down for repairs, and replacement reactors reactivated to replace their output. Further technical procedures are detailed in design schematics.
PTF ETH-6488 ("Dark Keima") are dedicated to fulfilling the above procedures, functioning as on-Site security and maintenance techs for FACILITY-6488.

So whatever LOTUS really is, it’s either so important or managed to fuck things up enough that Site-15 was relocated and everything about the old Site-15 (including people’s memories) has been changed to fit the new Site-15.

PTF THORN-6488 ("Black Kyosha") (aka. PTF Wynn-6488) is dedicated to
distributing external disinformation suggesting SCP-6488 is non-Anomalous and infiltrates digital hardware at time of manufacturing;
distributing internal disinformation suggesting SCP-6488 is a rampant digital virus of unclear origin and nature;
concealing RAIDFRAME VIII’s existence from personnel below LEVEL 4 (SECRET) clearance.
All details regarding the creation, maintenance, and use of analogue intelligences ("OCIs") is classified LEVEL 4 (SECRET). All personnel with insufficient clearance must be led to believe that .oci files, known to them as "Obtuse Computation Interface" files, are stored in an analogue file format that SCP-6488 does not target. The Analogue Intelligence Applications Division is tasked with the creation and maintenance of all analogue intelligences, and with overseeing their use by other Foundation staff.

They have a whole group devoted to spreading misinformation about LOTUS while keeping it secret- but not top secret. Meanwhile, the now-renamed AIAD is working on making ‘analogue intelligences’, otherwise known as OCIs, like Victor. And that’s why his name is weird: he’s not human. However, while one might think that Victor is a computer program, we’ve been told enough to realise that this cannot be the case: after all, a computer program can’t take mnestics. But in that case, what is Victor? A cyborg? A nonhuman? Something else entirely? And what happened to the other OCIs?
We’ll find out. Just keep going.
Victor mutters that obviously ‘analogue file format’ is a cover, which is intriguing- why would it obviously be a cover? He’s then contacted by Veiss, who asks if he’s sure about the metric fuckton of mnestics he wants to take. Victor says that he doesn’t have a choice- the O5’s want the report tomorrow, and he can’t get far if he forgets everything he reads. Veiss gives him the mnestics- not sure how, exactly, since we’re not sure what Victor even is at this point- and wishes him luck. Victor thanks him and asks about the painkillers, and Veiss says he’s adding them in too.
…I just realised what the symbol around Victor’s name in the chatlogs is. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s his initials in a circle, with a half-circle on the left side, and the letter I on the right side. It literally says OCI. Genius.
There’s a really big photo of… well, to me it looks like a construction site in a hangar or something, I can’t really tell you what it is… and then we get the real description.

DESCRIPTION: SCP-6488 is RAIDFRAME VIII, "LOTUS": an Anomalously-augmented artificial general intelligence designed to imprison deviant AI while safely allowing their continued activity and study. While said design goal is shared by all RAIDFRAME systems, LOTUS is unique in its sophistication and methodology, and has rendered all other RAIDFRAME systems redundant.
LOTUS, unlike its predecessors, does not contain inmates via brute-force security protocols; instead, it optimizes containment efforts through deception. Each inmate interred within LOTUS experiences a personalized, simulated reality that is maintained with requisite detail to fully replicate their expected inputs; as a result, inmates are unaware of their imprisonment and continue to pursue their terminal objectives, believing they continue to operate in true reality. LOTUS is designed to actively search all accessible sources for deviant AIs; upon locating a target, it injects falsified data into the AIs virtual environment, gradually luring the agent into its simulspace entirely undetected.
Through extensive analysis and simulation of relevant data, LOTUS has developed an exhaustive algorithm that determines whether a given artificial intelligence is certain to imminently develop deviant behaviour. This enables LOTUS to apprehend deviant AIs before any significant deviant behaviour has yet been expressed. Ongoing analysis of LOTUS' algorithm and its interred agents has thus far demonstrated no detectable error; all AIs identified by the algorithm universally develop observable deviant behavior, and are not influenced by SCP-6488 or its simulations to do so.
ORIGIN: RAIDFRAME VIII's unique design aspects were initially conceived by Dr. Hishakaku during his tenure as a senior AIAD researcher. On 2034/08/05, IT research teams discovered a gradual incline in the rate of deviant emergence and adaptivity across all known AIs, crippling RAIDFRAME VII and necessitating the activation of several outdated and comparably unsafe AI containment mechanisms. IT Director Yves Isabi subsequently commissioned the exploration of alternative containment solutions for a potential RAIDFRAME VIII; Dr. Hishakaku's proposal was selected thereby, resulting in the completion of LOTUS on 2034/12/22.

A footnote tells us that RAIDFRAME stands for ‘Rogue Artificial Intelligence Detainment, Fully-Realized Adaptive Mainframe Encryption’. So, with that, let’s look at what we now know:
1: AIs have been turning deviant at a high enough rate that the Foundation has been continuously working on ways to contain them.
2: Worse, in 2034, research teams discovered that the rate has gone up and is going to keep going up. (Note the date- there’s no dates in 6659, but 6747 took place in 2030, so we know the ADMONITION skips aren’t all happening A, at the same time, or B, one after the other.)
3: A guy called Dr Hishakaku (remember him, he’s one of our main characters) came up with the design for LOTUS, which has made other RAIDFRAMEs redundant.
4: LOTUS works by way of an algorithm that lets it determine whether an AI is about to turn deviant, which lets it catch AIs before they can do any damage. LOTUS has never been wrong and there’s no sign that it’s influencing the AIs.
5: What LOTUS actually does to the AIs is lure them into their own personalised virtual reality, which is indistinguishable from normal reality. That way, the AIs keep operating without ever figuring out that they’re not in the real world.
6: So, basically, it’s Minority Report meets Inception, with AIs. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually seen either of those movies.)
(There’s also an extra mythology reference: in the Odyssey, Odysseus encountered a group of people called the ‘lotus-eaters’, who hung out on an island and ate the said lotus. This made them so blissed out that they didn’t want to do anything other than eat more lotus, and they no longer cared about going home, or even telling their loved ones where they were. The trope ‘Lotus-Eater Machine’ was named after them- it refers to situations where a character is trapped in a false reality where they experience their own personal utopia.)
We now get a very, very technical summary of LOTUS’ components. All right, let me see if I can sum this motherfucker up.
Section A: The central computing node, which they adapted from SCP-1190, a Hewlett-Packard computer that simulates a universe and anyone who uses it gets obsessed with the simulation. The thing is, when it’s running the simulation, 1190 anomalously generates unlimited processing power, hence why they’re using it for LOTUS.
Section B: Data storage made of synthetic oriykalkos, which expands as LOTUS’ storage requirements increase. They use SCP-3966-A (it’s complicated, but the short version is that it’s a protein made by hyperdimensional spiders) so the oriykalkos can expand infinitely. I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand this, honestly.
Section C: The P.H. Ontokinetic Sink. This next bit is important.

Section C was initially a wired connection to all global networks accessible from FACILITY-6488; it has since been replaced with a restricted PH-OS unit which permits LOTUS' access to the Cybersphere: the sum of all digitally- / electronically-stored data.
LOTUS is entirely composed of such data, ensuring it would be obligated to attempt self-containment in the event of its own deviance.

Two major points in this paragraph: one, LOTUS initially had access to the entire Internet, but now it ‘only’ has access to all electronically-stored data. And two, if LOTUS turns deviant, it would try to contain itself… well, theoretically, at least.
There’s another incredibly major point: The PH-OS is from SCP-6820. It’s a restricted version of the PH-GOS from the big fuckoff 682-killing machine. But that was in a whole other timeline: how did the Foundation in this timeline get it? How did they even know about it? Why would they want to use it, given what happened to that timeline?
…and what does that ‘PH’ stand for, again? And who’s the constant factor in all these SCPs? Who, in fact, is a major driving force in this series?
Yeah.
Section D: Short version is that LOTUS needs a fuckton of power, for which they built a big fuckoff power-maker, to put it bluntly.
Section E: Specialised methods for heat dissipation and getting rid of the anomalous waste that LOTUS produces.
Like me, Victor gets a headache from the jargon, but unlike me, he realises that it’s actually the mnestics.
…hang on. I’m just going to quote ‘We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five’.

"Any side effects of these pills?" O5-8 asks.
"Nausea, and dramatically increased risk of pancreatic cancer," Marion says. "And very bad dreams."

Nausea, pancreatic cancer and bad dreams. Not headaches. So why is Victor getting headaches?
He messages Veiss, but Veiss doesn’t reply- not sure if Victor was going to ask for more pain relief or if he was going to ask if Veiss fucked up the dose. Anyway, lacking other options, it’s on to the next section: the first addendum, titled ‘Status Conference’.
So, we get the background for this conference: Once Section-C of LOTUS (the part that enabled it to access the Cybersphere, the sum total of all digital and electronic data) was activated, there was an expected increase in the reports of AI deviance, which was suppressed via disinformation efforts. However, the following nine months had every Foundation AI get taken in by LOTUS, despite most of them not showing any deviant behaviour. Naturally, this resulted in a whole bunch of technical issues, since those AIs were doing some very important jobs. Worse, the same thing was happening worldwide as LOTUS took out more and more AIs. Over the next ten months, people started finding out about LOTUS, though they didn’t know it was anomalous, and the disinformation efforts were put on hold.
We now move onto the transcript of the meeting. A whole fuckton of people were present at this meeting, but there’s only a few who are relevant: Calvin Bold, the Director of Decommissioning, who was the Summit Lead; Yves Isabi, Director of IT, and three of our main characters: the previously-mentioned Ryoto Hishakaku, who oversaw LOTUS; Vandis Kelvin, the Director of AIAD; and Angus Le Moix, the Director of Information Control.
The foreword puts it rather bluntly:

FOREWORD: Summit held to determine the continued status of RAIDFRAME VIII in light of substantial resources compromised by, and wasted in concealment of, its operation.

This is a really big transcript, so I summed it up for you. Again, I do recommend reading this part yourself as there’s a lot here that I can’t include, but my original summary was four pages long, so… yeah.
1: Kelvin thinks this is purely a matter of insubordination because he ordered Hishakaku to deactivate LOTUS and Hishakaku refused.
2: Hishakaku argues that it’s more complicated than that and that LOTUS is the only solution to the AI problem.
3: Kelvin thinks this is bullshit because LOTUS has contained a whole bunch of AIs that weren’t deviant- some of them weren’t even completed. Ergo, LOTUS has itself become deviant.
4: Hishakaku says no, actually, LOTUS is working exactly as planned. Kelvin says that this implies that all AIs eventually become deviant, and Hishakaku says yes, except LOTUS. Kelvin thinks that this is also bullshit, and Hishakaku says that if LOTUS is deviant, then it’s ‘Grey’ deviant- LOTUS is doing what it was ordered to do, it’s just that the people who gave it the orders didn’t fully understand the consequences of them. One example that Hishakaku gives is that of paperclip makers- the idea that an AI told to make paperclips would appropriate every resource it could to make as many paperclips as it could as fast as possible. Anyone who tried to slow it down or stop it would be stopped from doing so, and eventually, the resources it appropriates would include resources present in a human body, and eventually all resources that exist in total.
5: Since LOTUS was upgraded, it’s been given access to information that’s letting it imprison AIs that it otherwise wouldn’t have encountered, hence why it’s destroying the Foundation’s databases.
6: They discuss methods of fixing the problem, but because LOTUS is an AI, they can’t really reason with it or get it to moderate its behaviour. In the end, there’s really only two options: let LOTUS keep going or deactivate it.
We then get the vote: 60 in favour, 14 against, 6 abstentions and the motion was passed.

Part Two: Thou Shalt Put Some Solid Forethought Into Thine Actions

Now we’re back with Victor. He still hasn’t had a reply from Veiss, which sucks, as he now has a really severe headache. Again, keep that in mind: he’s getting a headache from reading an article while on mnestics, something that mnestics shouldn’t cause. And the headache seems to grow worse as he reads more. Something is definitely up here- look at this.

Grey… grey deviancy… is undefined.
Why does it feel like I already knew that? I've never worked with AI; it predates me.
…memetic influence. False… false memories? No, these aren't… …screw it.

So now it feels like he already knew a lot of this, even though LOTUS ostensibly happened before he was born/spawned/grown/otherwise created. Remember, mnestics aren’t meant to do this either- they let you remember what’s forgotten or being obscured/blocked out by foreign agents, but they don’t put new memories in your head. This is looking really suspicious.
He contacts another OCI whose name isn’t given (initials are ‘JLDO’) and says that he needs a check on the 6488 file to see if it implants false memories. After that, he says that it’s probably just that the file’s contaminated and the O5s wiping their memories means that they forgot about it, though if that were the case, they should have made a note about it…
Anyway, he decides to continue the investigation. He thinks that LOTUS wasn’t really Grey deviant, but Magenta- ‘prioritizing its goal over human safety’, even though it never hurt or killed anyone. But Victor said before that he’s never worked with AI, so how does he know about AI deviancy? Why does he know that?
Time for the second addendum, the ‘Event Log’. The foreword tells us that on the 21st of April, 2036, preparations for deactivating LOTUS were completed, and then they went through with it. We then get a number of incidents that occurred afterwards.
Incident one: something goes wrong with LOTUS’ shutdown involving the nuclear reactors that power it. Hishakaku keeps not following his instructions and orders the deactivation of all the reactors on-site; this works and LOTUS is shut down, though it took longer than expected.
Incident two: This one is full of blank spaces, so let’s copy and paste it, shall we?

LOCATION: Site-43
SUMMARY: Per concrete evidence indicating an imminent failure of The DePLExA Engine, it is deactivated immediately following the delivery of all remaining effluence in absentia. Minutes later, DePLExA re-activates, and all internal cores hyper-activate, triggering chronological reinforcement contingency protocols. Maintenance personnel are ordered to repeat shutdown via manual override, but report confusion as AAF-X's P.A. system broadcasts conflicting instructions in a crude imitation of Dr. Reynders' voice. The Engine's latent stores of extant effluence (and paradoxically-reinstated non-effluence) approach critical recondicity, resulting in unclear reality shift. Nexus-94 lost to dissociation.
UPDATE T+2H: Dissociative effect has propagated to perceptual space; information referencing the aforementioned location cannot meaningfully be perceived..
UPDATE T+8H: Effect has strengthened considerably, apparently universal, with no known means of circumvention. Were a statement to reference a location of significance in the context of this incident report, any meaningful data which that statement would carry would become incomprehensible.
UPDATE T+H (UNAUTHORIZED): Almost universal. — D. Deering

So, something called the DePLExA Engine malfunctioned, and as a result, the area around it is gone, both informationally and perceptually- almost like it’s been wiped out of existence. This means basically nothing to us now, but it is a crucial part of SCP-7243, another ADMONITION article that comes after this one.
Incident three: SCP-6659, the big fuckoff god-killing machine, activates and starts trying to search for the exact location of several gods, despite there being no totem in the machine. Things then get worse.

Onboard personnel immediately engage an emergency alarm and prime the SCUTTLE system for detonation. SCP-6659 is forcefully deactivated by disconnecting its power supply. The onboard computer initiates an emergency dive sequence without prompting; the vessel submerges and rapidly descends. The SCUTTLE system is disarmed by the onboard computer. Staff are unable to re-arm the system. The vessel impacts the seafloor; the hull is compromised and interior compartments begin flooding. The onboard computer immediately initiates an emergency surfacing sequence, causing the vessel to rapidly rise. Several secondary systems begin to behave erratically. The onboard computer disables all internal power. The vessel continues to ascend due to buoyancy. The vessel breaches the surface at speed; multiple staff are injured due to sudden deceleration. The vessel begins to sink due to flooding; staff evacuate the vessel.

Well, shit.
Incident four:

SUMMARY: A non-precipitating thunderstorm rapidly forms over the entirety of Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin, accentuated by three equidistant spirals directly above Site-87. The ███X-MCD/II ("Paradox Exodus Engine") activates spontaneously as its containment specialist, Dr. Place H. McD., reports a call to his secure phone, consisting of a metallic, scraping sound. Dr. P. H. McD. immediately navigates to the room containing the Paradox Exodus Engine, frantically attempting to deactivate it. Moments later, he and the Engine demanifest from baseline reality. The phrase "bad wolf" is spoken by an unknown voice; the call ends and the storm shortly dissipates.

Well, that’s really not good. Also, I see your Doctor Who reference there, lads.
Incident five:

SUMMARY: A series of tachyon pulses are detected originating from the Antila constellation; analysis identifies the pulses as Morse code, encrypted with a standard Foundation cypher. Decryption produces the phrase "THORN STOP LOST STOP WHAT DID YOU DO STOP END."

This appears to be a Foundation AIC trying to contact Thorn, the AIC from Site-19. Couldn’t tell you where he is or what he’s doing, though.
Incident six: SCP-179, the interstellar lookout, points toward the Crux constellation. Not the best omen, since that’s referencing SCP-4792, which is about a guy called Geta who tried to contain a ‘Dark God’ from a prophecy, failed and now believes that the Dark God fled to another planet. If Geta’s coming to Earth, that has some very unpleasant implications for everyone there.
Incident seven: SCP-2000 suddenly activates and starts coming up with new humans, but the genomes picked for replication ‘are heavily modified from that of modern Homo Sapiens.’
Incident eight: A nuclear device goes off at a Chaos Insurgency facility in Kazakhstan.
Incident nine: Something happens on the moon. (This is a reference to SCP-5492, which is also by Jack Ike, but I can’t say that I really understand this one.)
We then abruptly snap back to Victor’s conversation with JLDO. I’ll sum it up for you:
1: JLDO says that the file’s clean, there’s nothing anomalous there, and yes, he's sure.
2: Victor’s having feelings about this file- he remembered one part before he read it, and a lot of it feels familiar.
3: JLDO runs through some call-and-responses to see if Victor’s compromised, and Victor passes all of them. However, JLDO mentions that Victor has ‘the longest amnesticisation sheet I've ever seen, all for a myriad of reasons’; ergo, maybe he just read it before and got amnesticised- or maybe he saw LOTUS in the future and got amnesticised.
4: JLDO then says something very, very important: “You Gen Twos have a tendency for weird memory; it's half the reason you're the last one.” Keep that in mind for later, because based on what we’ve seen, things are starting to look pretty freaky.
All right, so, even though it caused an absolute fuckstorm of problems, LOTUS has been deactivated. Everything’s cool now, right? Right?
…haha. Yeah, no.
Part two can be found here.

Hello all, this is my first post here. I figured I’d post here because I cannot for the life of me find any resources online that can help me.
As the title says, I just installed an Air-Con Multi Split unit in my apartment. It has one 36k outdoor inverter unit and 4, 9k heads inside my apartment. (Outdoor unit model #: AMSCI4H4S36). The system is running at 230V if that matters.
I have installed everything per the manual, leak tested with nitrogen, then vacuumed down to 200-150microns. Then I opened the gas and liquid valves to release the stored refrigerant into the system (the unit was pre-charged with the correct amount, and my line set lengths are within spec).
Here’s the problem: I turned the unit on for the first time and as per the instructions I turned all of the heads down to the lowest setting on cool. And I felt the air coming out of them as it began to get colder. It ran for a few minutes before shutting off and throwing error code 48. According to the error list (I’ll attach the link at the bottom) the error code is for the outdoor fan failure. Sure enough I go outside and the fan is not spinning anymore. I power the unit off and switch off the breaker, wait a few minutes then power it back on to try again. This time after a couple minutes I hear the relay click the the compressor start going, but the fan doesn’t even try to spin. It throws error 48 again. I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’ve taken the panels off and inspected all of the wire connections and they look good and are solidly connected, I looked at the fan connection and the wires run inside the motor, but on the control unit side the connection looks good and is solid. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Sorry for the long read but more detail is better right?
Links to manual and error codes:
https://airconint.com/wiki/index.php?title=AMSCI4H4S36#:~:text=AMSCI4H4S36%20is%20the%2036%2C000%20Btu%20outdoor%20unit%20of%20Multi%20Plus%20Series.
https://airconint.com/wiki/index.php?title=Multi_Plus_ODU_Main_Board_Troubleshooting
http://www.airconint.com/wiki/uploads/Use%20and%20Installation%20Manual%20for%20Multi-zone%20Outdoor%20Units.pdf

7-minute read.

3 members of a nationalist group armed with grenades attempted to enter the police station in Yerevan's Nor Nork district

Two of the idiots were wounded by their own grande. The negotiations with the third suspect lasted two hours. The police gave cigarettes to calm him down. The NSS special forces stormed and detained him shortly afterward. Authorities will press "terrorism" charges.
The suspects were identified as followers of the nationalist political faction "BEVER" (National Democratic Pole), whose members organized the 2016 terrorist attack on a police station in Yerevan. More recently, as reported in the February 19 news digest, BEVER organized an "anti-Russia" and "anti-Pashinyan" rally during which they made threats towards the Pashinyan administration:
BEVER (February): The decisive moment is approaching. We will continue the rebellion [that's how they refer to the 2016 hostage takeover at the police station], we will conclude it soon. We have internal enemies and traitors that must be dealt with. Today's government is a remnant of the Turko-Bolsheviks. //
Despite BEVER's openly anti-Russia rhetoric, some pro-Western figures in Armenia have accused them of covertly aiding the Russian agenda and the return of Armenia's former pro-Russian regime to power.
Shortly before the Sunday grenade attack, the suspect published a video complaint about members of another paramilitary group being arrested by authorities, and complained about the government's decision to return the 4 Soviet-era Azerbaijani villages to Azerbaijan. He called for the public to rise up. The grenade attack was reportedly an attempt to free the members of the second paramilitary group.
The paramilitary group mentioned by the suspect is called Combat Brotherhood (as seen in the photo). Dozens of members of this group were detained and released on Sunday after being suspected of possessing illegal guns when they attempted to organize "tactical training" near the Tavush border that the government plans to delimit. The Combat Brotherhood condemned BEVER's grenade attack.
source, source, source, source, source,

Soviet Armenian leader Karen Demirchyan about Nagorno-Karabakh

DEMIRCHYAN: I supported a more gradual solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. We were very close to having Nagorno-Karabakh recognized as an Autonomous Republic; I had submitted a proposal and the Center [Kremlin] accepted it. At the time, Soviet Azerbaijan was under immense pressure, especially after the 1988 pogroms in Sumgayit and they were very concerned about retaliation so they were ready to save their skins by making concessions. But the whole tragedy is that the Sumgayit was left unpunished and the Center was weakened. I informed the Center on March 1 that I would resign unless they responded to Sumgayit events. Under this pressure, a resolution was prepared to turn Nagorno-Karabakh into an Autonomous Republic. There were analogs. For example, the Nakhijevan Autonomous Republic. I first raised this issue in 1977 when they were drafting a new [Soviet] Constitution. I suggested the Kremlin either describe Nagorno-Karabakh as an Autonomous Republic or lower Nakhijevan's status in the new Constitution. If not, I suggested attaching the Nakhijevan Autonomous Republic to Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Republic to Azerbaijan. These suggestions were rejected by the Kremlin because Nagorno-Karabakh [leadership] opposed it. I urged the Kremlin to ignore Nagorno-Karabakh's opinion and just do it, or at least ensure that Nagorno-Karabakh is directly under the Kremlin's control instead of Armenia's or Azerbaijan's. That option was called "Presidentskoye Pravleniye". They began to think about it. The suggestion was to turn Nagorno-Karabakh into an Autonomous Republic directly under the Kremlin's temporary control to prevent escalations. Sadly it didn't pass. After a lengthy delay, they created a special management committee, which was a huge asset that unfortunately wasn't used by us. //
source,

Armenia is saving nuclear waste for future reuse: Expert Suren Bznuni

EXPERT: Armenia does not treat the used nuclear fuel as waste. It's being stored as a "strategic material". Almost every nuclear state has vowed to triple its nuclear capacities by 2050. This is expected to raise the price of uranium. Some day it will become economically sound to process and reuse the nuclear waste in Armenia.
REPORTER: If Russia refuses to help Armenia extend the lifespan of the Metsamor NPP until 2036, could another country replace them?
EXPERT: It will be difficult but we could hire companies from other countries. Czechia and Hungary have experience with renovating theirs.
REPORTER: Romania wants to build an American modular nuclear reactor but there are no examples of completion and utilization of such reactors yet that Armenia can rely on for making decisions. What realistic options does Armenia have? I'm aware that American firms are willing to work with Armenia considering our country's experience with nuclear energy and the presence of experts.
EXPERT: This is what we currently have on the table based on open sources: (1) Russian 1200 MW reactor. (2) Korean 1400 MW. They built one in UAE at a record-fast pace of just 6 years. In comparison, Russia and the U.S. need 10-15 years [presumably for high-capacity reactors]. (3) The U.S. offers two options: large AP1000 [1000 MW] similar to the Russian 1200 and Korean 1400; and small modular reactors [SMRs].
REPORTER: How large are the SMRs?
EXPERT: Between 400 to 1000 MW.
REPORTER: So we can start with 400 and gradually increase it to 1000 as the demand grows?
EXPERT: We could even start from 300. I recommend SMR over a single large reactor. Armenia's maximum consumption is 1500 MW, which is reduced to 800 MW at night. If we build 1200, we have to underutilize it, which is economically very bad. The alternative to underutilization is to stop generating electricity from gas and hydro and make a full switch to nuclear, which is even worse from an energy security perspective because the nuclear plant (NPP) has to shut down once a year. This is what makes the "stackable" SMRs so appealing. And that's just the economic part.
As for security, the Fukushima incident taught us a lesson that a nuclear plant should not be dependent on outside energy or water sources for cooling. The Fukushima withstood the powerful earthquake and the impact of the tsunami. What killed it was the flooding of the electric pumping room that was keeping the reactor cool. It was such a primitive cause of disaster.
After this incident, the international atomic energy mandated new standards: eliminate dependence on external electricity and water. The benefit of an SMR lies in its small capacity and the self-circulation cooling mechanism that doesn't rely on traditional pumps: hot water rises, cools, and descends to cool it. It's built near a pool of water. You can bring firetrucks to add water to the pool if necessary. It can self-cool for weeks and months nonstop. Moreover, the system for delivering cold water to SMR's reactor is different from large reactors which rely on a pipe prone to rupture. In SMRs, it's a more fail-proof circulation mechanism. However, not all SMRs function this way.
[Note: Earlier this year Pashinyan revealed that the government prefers small modular reactors for safety reasons and that they have requested a presumably U.S. firm to provide information about their products.]
REPORTER: Armenia has a difficult geography. The Metsamor NPP was built in the seismically safest part of the country. Can you build SMRs in riskier areas, such as north and south?
EXPERT: It's something that should be discussed with the company. The Metsamor NPP has cousins in several former Soviet republics but the one in Armenia is a special model that's fit for seismically active regions. Our plant has additional security systems, stronger concrete, special suspension systems underneath the systems, etc. This technology existed in the 1970s so it's not a problem today.
As for north, south, or center, it's decided by analyzing the platforms and building an NPP that suits a platform. There has to be a reason why the Metsamor community was chosen for the existing NPP. I believe the new NPP should be built in the same location. During the Soviet Union, there was a plan to build 2 more blocs in Armenia but the plan was scrapped after Chernobyl. A preliminary study to select a platform for those 2 new reactors was conducted so I suppose the information can be reused instead of ordering a new $50-$100 million study.
REPORTER: Armenia could someday export electricity to the EU through the Black Sea cable project. Should we build a larger reactor?
EXPERT: Armenia has a thermal power plant ՋԷԿ today that was built based on optimistic presumptions. During the peak of the [Serj-era] soccer diplomacy, when they believed the relations with Turkey would soon improve and Armenia would export electricity to eastern Turkey. This thermal plant is not functioning today because its electricity is too expensive. We got away with a loan worth "only" a few hundred million dollars, which we are forced to repay even if the plant is off. A nuclear plant costs several billion dollars, so its power output must be flexible and economically beneficial. This is why Armenia needs SMRs. The Zaporizhian nuclear plant has five units of 1000 MW blocs. They needed that many so they built them. No problem there. Just don't build one giant bloc and use half of it. If the company that offers a large reactor to Armenia also offers a contract to purchase the excess electricity after construction, then no problem, let them build it. For example, Hungary has signed contracts with neighboring countries to export electricity as soon as the two 1200 MW blocs are built. //
source,

Moscow's Crocus mall

The US had warned Russia about a possible terror attack earlier this month after intercepting information from an ISIS group. Putin dismissed the warning and called it an attempt to intimidate the Russian population.
Crocus mega-mall is owned by an Azerbaijani billionaire Aras Agalarov, a friend of Vladimir Putin and an associate of Donald Trump. His son Emin is a famous singer and the ex-husband of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev's daughter.
One of the alleged attackers, a Russian-speaking man possibly from Central Asia, confessed to being offered money for the attack and being motivated by a religious preacher. He entered Russia from Turkey. The attack was planned through Telegram.
The mall's security was managed by a company run by Kamil(?) Aliyev, an associate of the mall owner. There were only three unarmed security guards at the entrance of the megamall. The attackers met no armed resistance.
Many fleeing visitors were unable to open emergency doors because they were locked. There were attempts to use an ax and break windows for escape. Dozens of people were found dead near evacuation exits.
143 killed, 152 wounded.
source, source, source, source, [source,](https://[The Insider Russia]/en/corruption/264556) source, source, source, source,

169,000 residents of provinces will soon have access to a new irrigation network as part of a $50 million infrastructure project: VIDEO

source,

This thought came out from a conversation with rbtgoodson a couple of days ago in this thread. Specifically in regards to UNC AD Cunningham's comments that the ACC could seek to go to 21 schools in order to form regional divisions.
I also think it is notable that UNC's AD Cunningham, Tennessee AD White, and Syracuse Chancellor Syverud are currently serving in a joint Think Tank with several others in which they are strategizing how to bring back regionalism while also maintaining a tier structure to the economics of the FBS.
Here are my thoughts on how realignment may unfold if FSU loses their lawsuit against the ACC.
There's been a lot of conversation about the ACC's instability in the context of the FSU lawsuit to remove or reduce the costs of them leaving. I've been a part of that. Both as a self-interested Stanford alumna and logistics/realignment junkie that constantly works out scheduling formats and realignment scenarios.
However, the realization that came out in my conversation with rbtgoodson was that one aspect of this realignment drama has been over-discussed while another aspect has been under-discussed.
The over-discussed aspect is the prospect of the ACC being torn apart when FSU wins its case. The Big Ten and SEC raiding what they want from the ACC and the remainder either going to the Big 12 or abandoned to blend with the AAC.
The under-discussed aspect is the prospect that FSU loses their case, or mostly loses, and ends up with a huge payment due in order to leave. FSU intends to leave regardless, even if they have to take private equity to do it, or at least that's the assumption. Clemson seems poised to consider it at the very least, discussing it with their lawyers, but they don't have the same public-facing will to get out by any means necessary.
And the motivation to leave is pretty clear based on all the numbers that are coming out. Approximately 45 million dollars in difference between the Big Ten and the Big 12 per year with the new CFP deal and media contracts from 2026-3030 and an assumption of an even bigger difference between 2031-2036 when the Big Ten gets their next contract. Which is why Florida State officials are talking about missing out on "half a billion" in revenue over the course of the ACC contract. That's what it will be, or more, over that time span. And even if it costs FSU the full "$572 Million" to get out of the ACC, as their Board of Regents claim it would without a court ordered reduction, they likely still will... because after this contract there will be another contract and another. So long term, being in the Big Ten will make up the difference in costs of getting out of the ACC.
So I wanted to make a discussion post from the under-discussed aspect of the FSU vs NCAA case:
That FSU does not win their case to get out for a severely reduced cost, but leaves despite having to pay hundreds of millions to do it.
Assumption 1: FSU will not get out of the ACC for cheap, but will get out.
If this occurs, the only way it makes sense for an ACC school to leave is if they get a full share. Financially you don't make up ground if you end up in a partial share situation like Oregon and Washington if you have to also to pay hundreds of millions to leave. If you only get a partial share from the Big Ten or SEC then it makes sense to wait until the 2030s to leave instead of leave right now.
So, if you need to pay hundreds of millions to leave the ACC, it only makes financial sense to leave if FOX or ESPN are going to give you a full share in the Big Ten or SEC.
For ESPN it makes no sense to pay extra for a team to go to the SEC, and I severely doubt the Big Ten wants to pay Clemson, so it only makes sense for 1 team to leave: Florida State
Assumption 2: The only school that FOX/B1G would consider giving a full share to in the ACC is Florida State
Conclusion 1: Only Florida State is leaving the ACC.
Now that brings me to the comments of UNC Athletic Director Cunningham who expressed interest to "expand so big that you could create regionality within a bigger league." He specifically mentioned creating 3 7-team divisions within the ACC as his chosen option.
Cunningham stressed that the reason he was against adding Stanford and Cal was because it disrupted regionalism and travel schedules. Expanding to 21 schools with 3 regional 7-team divisions is his solution to this problem, bringing back regionalism to the ACC within a divisional context.
Assumption 3: The ACC will seek to create 3 7-team divisions within a 21-member conference.
If only Florida State leaves, that puts the ACC at 16 members, plus Notre Dame as a non-football member with special status (and in this scenario they may join the Big Ten with FSU, but won't join the ACC). Which means they need to add 5 football members to reach 21.
As Stanford and Cal are the only two schools out west in the ACC, it would only make sense to add 5 Western teams in order to give the conference a 7-team regional division.
However, there's a real dearth of West Coast teams not already in a major conferences. San Diego State is really the best you can do... and San Diego State isn't bad, but they're not a headliner and they are also only one team.
There is only one realistic place to get valuable additions from the West Coast.
Conclusion 2: The ACC will target some Western teams from the Big 12.
Here are the top 10 options out west if you include Big 12 schools:
Air Force, Arizona, Arizona State, BYU, Colorado, Colorado State, Oregon State, San Diego State, Utah, Wazzu
If you had to rank those in terms of general quality:
Tier 1: Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado Tier 2: BYU, Oregon State, and Wazzu Tier 3: Air Force and San Diego State Tier 4: Colorado State
However, there are a couple of other factors here:

1. Do they fit the ACC profile?
2. Do they want to go to the ACC?
3. Do they fit what ESPN would want to pay for?

Speaking to point three for a minute: ESPN is required to pay a full share to any school that the ACC adds. In fact, Stanford, Cal, and SMU are all technically getting full shares; they are just required to immediately turn around and pay back the majority of it to the ACC as a membership fee. So theoretically the ACC could add Central Michigan and ESPN would be required to pay full rate for them.
However, as ESPN still needs to opt into the ACC contract for 2027 and beyond the ACC isn't going to want to load up on schools that'll convince them to opt out and renegotiate the deal. They'll want valuable members.
So:
Assumption 4: Who ESPN wants does matter
I believe that ESPN does not want to pay full rate for Colorado State. They might accept Air Force, but it would be low on their list too. SDSU might be acceptable because they have a quality market, but that feels like a backup option. I feel like Tier 1 and Tier 2 options from above are the ones worth considering first.
ESPN used to have a lot of access to the west coast. They had access to the Pac-12. Now they only have split-access to the 5 mountain Big 12 schools plus Stanford and Cal from the ACC. So the teams they would want would be the furthest West that were still of high quality.
Conclusion 3: Arizona, Arizona State, BYU, Colorado, Oregon State, Utah, and Wazzu are the only 7 western schools in serious contention for the 5 spots, with SDSU as a backup option
This causes us to circle back to factor 1 and factor 2: do they fit the ACC profile, and do they want to go to the ACC?
Starting with last things first: Do they want to go?
Oregon State and Wazzu would certainly be yeses. Despite the travel, being in a power conference would more than make up for it. SDSU is in the same boat.
In severe contrast: Colorado and Arizona pushed the hardest to get out of the Pac-12 and join the Big 12. Colorado took a 2.5 million dollar bonus to do it while their head football coach and administration talked up strongly how much they wanted to be connected to the state of Texas. Arizona's President Robbins talked about how much he wanted to be the Big 12 and connected to those basketball schools.
BYU I am somewhat unsure on. They spent years begging for a spot in a major conference and finally have one. I have no clue how they would feel about the ACC, but have a feeling about how the ACC would feel about them.
Arizona State and Utah have talked a lot about their academic progress. Utah in particular was in love with being in the same conference as Stanford and Cal and would most likely love to be again. Arizona State, too, talks a lot about how much their academics have progressed and were reluctant to leave the Pac-12 before they had too. I think both would be happy to join the ACC if it made sense.
And, First things last, do they fit the profile?
Mostly, I think that the ACC could live with any of them. BYU fits the profile the least, but I think they could live with BYU. After all, they live with the academics of Louisville and the religious connection of BC. But I do think it would move BYU down the list a bit.
A quick list of combining market, academic profile, and program profile, I would rank the schools:
Conclusion 4: This would be how the ACC would rank the schools out west they would like to add:

1. Utah and Arizona State
2. Colorado and Arizona
3. Oregon State and Wazzu
4. SDSU and BYU

Let's talk about Funding
The ACC makes more than the Big 12, so it would be a motivating factor to change conferences. However, not enough to overcome the cost of leaving the Big 12. According to Ross Dellenger reports, the Cal contract, and the Utah contract, the published report by FSU, and the tax documents of the ACC and Big 12 conferences it looks like the ACC will make roughly 8 million more per year than the Big 12 from 2027-2031 if ESPN picks up the extension.
To get out of the Big 12 a school would need to pay 2 years worth of media revenue. Approximately $65 million. That's not cheap, and it's not worth an extra 8 million per year for 5 years with no guarantee that you make more after that. Giving up 65 million to gain approximately 40 million is a negative move. However, that's where the money from FSU comes in. That cash can cover the cost of expansion candidates and then some if it is in the hundreds of millions. So it could cover all 5 schools coming from the Big 12 if necessary.
If the Big-12 exit fees are covered, leaving the Big 12 for the ACC to make 8 million more per year becomes a lot more intriguing and indeed appealing.
However, I would assume that just because the ACC could doesn't mean that they would want to spend $325 buying out 5 Big 12 members.
Assumption 5: The ACC would be willing to part with some of the FSU Cash to fund adding new members from the Big 12, but not all of it. So not all 5 new members would come from the Big 12.
Using our tier list from above, I would posit that they would likely pay the $130 Million to free Utah and Arizona State so that they could join the ACC, an possibly a maximum of one more to $195 Million, but that would be the maximum. 3.
With that in mind, using our fit chart, I would say that the four most logical additions are Arizona State ($65 million), Utah ($65 million), Oregon State (Free), and Washington State (Free). Then the one more... Colorado or Arizona if they are going to spend another $65 million or SDSU if they want another school for free.
The benefit of the "free" schools is also that they can bring them in at partial shares which will help fund the cost of bringing in the others.
So if Oregon State, Wazzu, and SDSU (for example) are brought in on a Stanford/Cal level shares of about 13 million for the first 7 years each while the conference makes full shares off of them, then that pays back the FSU cash spent on Arizona State and Utah in just a couple of years.
The FSU cash can be used to front the expense of adding new schools and the reduced shares of the others can pay the conference back for being willing to use the FSU cash for expansion.
The most financial sense, then, is to buy two schools out and take three for free. Since Colorado (more eastern anyway) and Arizona really wanted to be in the Big 12 and likely wouldn't push to be bought out and rejoin a Western group in the ACC; and since BYU is a poor cultural fit for the ACC, that leaves us with the 5 schools being added to the ACC as Utah, Arizona State, Oregon State, Wazzu, and SDSU.
Conclusion 5: Arizona State, Oregon State, SDSU, Utah, and Wazzu are the logical additions to the ACC to form their 7-team Western Division in a 21-team conference that UNC AD Cunningham indicated would be ideal.
Here is how that new conference would look like using the old Atlantic and Coastal divisions.

ACC West	ACC Atlantic	ACC Coastal
Arizona State	Boston College	Duke
Cal	Clemson	Georgia Tech
Oregon State	Louisville	Miami
Stanford	NC State	Pitt
SDSU	SMU	UNC
Utah	Syracuse	Virginia
Wazzu	Wake Forest	Virginia Tech

However, UNC's AD Cunningham said that he wanted divisions to be regional. Here is the most regional of divisions possible:

ACC West	ACC North	ACC South
Arizona State	Boston College	Clemson
Cal	Louisville	Duke
Oregon State	Pitt	Georgia Tech
Stanford	Syracuse	Miami
SDSU	Virginia	NC State
Utah	Virginia Tech	SMU
Wazzu	Wake Forest	UNC

Finally, UNC being the power broker here might want a "Central Core" division to selfishly put those closest to them. So here is that version:

ACC Far Far Away	ACC Central	ACC Exterior
Arizona State	Clemson	Boston College
Cal	Duke	Georgia Tech
Oregon State	NC State	Louisville
Stanford	UNC	Miami
SDSU	Virginia	Pitt
Utah	Virginia Tech	SMU
Wazzu	Wake Forest	Syracuse

There are a lot of structure options for the Eastern two divisions, however the Western division remains unchanged in structure.
Post Mortem
The Big 12, having had 2 of their schools raided and down to 14, would likely respond by wanting to get at least back up to 16. With the B1G at 19 (or 20 if they add Notre Dame too), the SEC at 16, and the ACC at 21 sitting still at 14 makes them the smallest conference and still the 4th place in income.
So I would say their most likely candidate that make sense regionally and athletically is Memphis. After that they could go a lot of ways, considering Air Force, Colorado State, and Fresno State out west. Considering Tulane and USF in the South. I would assume that they add two, but could also add 4 or even 6 to climb up in the numbers.
Note: Memphis also makes the most sense as an Eastern Option for the ACC if Clemson were to buy their way out to the B1G or SEC too, though as stated I see that as less likely if it is going to cost hundreds of millions to do so.
With the ACC at 21, and 3 7-team divisions, there would be a lot of stability and marketability going into the 2030s. This would give them bargaining power in the next round of CFP negotiations in 2031 to increase their proportional payout.
With the restructure back into regional divisions that allowed for 6 divisional opponents and two cross-divisional games per year (in their 8 game format (or 4 cross-divisional games if they move to a 10 game format) it would, by its very nature, engender itself to producing at least three highly ranked teams every season. Such is the nature of divisional play.
Utah continuing to win, a resurgence of Miami and/or Virginia Tech, Clemson being a dominant powerhouse and annual playoff team... there are many paths to producing several highly ranked schools per year.
Regardless, it would be good for the conference and slide them into a firm 3rd place with the ability to compete every year. As they would be on ABC and ESPN with nationwide eyeballs, the Big 12 would become diminished by them over time. It would be the right move to buy out even just two Big 12 schools and grow into a larger, more regional conference with a western division. Stanford and Cal wouldn't be on an island, but instead would be in a strong division with regional appeal.
In Olympic sports they could have their own divisional events that would cut down on travel stress and costs as well.
Final Thoughts:

• This is a move that would benefit the ACC by strengthening them and providing regional play.
• This is a move that would make sense for the five schools who moved to the ACC.
• This is a move that would benefit ESPN by giving them much better access to the West Coast markets.

So all around, it is an eventuality that makes logical sense. Though there is some discussion to be had regarding whether or not Arizona or Colorado might want a spot as well. Additionally, the Arizona BOR might require the two to stay together, and so on.

Hello, everyone! I'm making a cyberpunk universe of my own and I was looking for some critique on the lore and worldbuilding of the backstory of my world prior to the year 2116. The timeline I've created is not complete and it explains how things work as well as extra details that provide context to the events that happen in my timeline. Any critique or advice would be most appreciated! If this isn't the correct subreddit to post for critiques, i'd appreciate it if someone would direct me to one that is. :)
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timeline (sorry for the wall of text):
2026: Governments across the Middle East, notably Saudi Arabia, start to hoard their remaining fossil fuel reserves. Trade between the region and outer nations drop substantially.
2029: First signs of fossil fuel shortages felt. Prices rise substantially for consumers.
2031: The United States allies with US-friendly factions in both Central and South America to fight against either their own governments or a neighboring nation’s government to have access to their respective oil and ore deposits in exchange for resources such as military equipment, food, metals, and other necessities. Similar things happen in the Middle East with Russian interference in regional politics. The “Oil Brushfire Wars” begin in the Middle East and the Americas. Superpowers financially and militarily back said smaller nations, igniting small armed conflicts in these regions.
2036: After years of fighting, backed factions are able to assert their dominance over their respective regions. The United States, China, and Russia begin to mobilize troops to capitalize on the more oil-conducive state the Middle East is in.
2037: Conflict erupts in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar area between the United States, China, and Russia over the oil fields. The United States, Russia, and China engage in open combat against each other in the region, backed by nations allied with them. The Third World War begins.
2038: Gasoline and oil prices across the world start to rise dramatically. Riots and protests occur in major cities across the world as fossil fuel reserves start to dwindle. Research into cybernetics, robotics, and neural interfaces explodes as governments receive wounded soldiers. Cybernetics become a cornerstone in maintaining an advantage on the battlefield and a presence in the Middle East. Injured and otherwise disabled units are able to be redeployed. The first fully integrated cybernetic limb is created by Harver-Tech.
2041: The Middle East is a battleground between the United States, Russia, China, and several other world powers. The Saudi government falls and the royal family flees as multiple nations invade its borders. Increasingly augmented soldiers and robots on all sides are redeployed to the region as research into cybernetics and other technologies continues.
2043: There is talk of a possible “nuclear doorway” to bring a decisive end to the war. However, cooler heads prevail. All sides and alliances agree that selecting the nuclear option could potentially destroy what oil reserves still existed as well as lead to more widespread infrastructural damage and a massive loss of life greater than what is currently happening.
2046: The Third World War comes to an end. All major oil reserves in warring countries had been depleted alongside the oil reserves in the Middle East. Nations that participated in the war, namely the “Big Three” of the United States, China, and Russia, blamed the others for the depletion of the oil deposits. The United States enacts heavy trade embargos against China. Russia refuses any sort of political relationship with the United States. Usage of fossil fuel, at least in the form of oil, was no longer possible. Without gasoline to fuel the necessary machinery, crops and other sources of food are unable to be harvested. Later this year, 51st U.S. President Matthew Crane dies in a vehicle collision. This collision was orchestrated by an organization of military and political individuals known as the “Obsidian Hand” over the perceived “loss” of the war as well as President Crane’s failure to deliver upon his election promise of securing the oil fields during his administration. Vice President Nicholas Vidic, a member of the Obsidian Hand, takes office.
2047: Massive famines occur and hundreds of millions die around the world, with several million dying in the United States alone. Riots, shootings, and civil unrest take hold of urban centers as supplies dwindle and animosity toward authorities reaches an all-time high. This is known as the “Great Turn”, a period of time when the world has to adjust to a post-fossil fuel-centric model. Crime rates spike as rioting and looting occur and criminal organizations thrive amongst the chaos and unrest. People hoard their own resources at the expense of others even in their own communities. International relations rapidly decline as nations turn inward to deal with their own populations. The United States implements a state of martial law and sends military units to quell widespread unrest, many of whom were veterans coming home from fighting overseas. This causes upwards of 2500 additional deaths. Food and water rationing occur with what remains in the government's grasp.
2053: Relative stability and industry gradually return to the United States thanks to the invention of an ethanol-based fuel alternative, and the official state of martial law ends. Rationing is gradually lessened. To prevent widespread future chaos and unrest like in the Great Turn, the United States Government, under President Nicholas Vidic Jr., another member of the Obsidian Hand, passes the “Metropolitan and Civil Safety Act”, which creates a nationwide federal police force known as the Metropolitan Protection Service. The MPS receives multiple funding increases in the following years. Despite the implementation of the MPS, extensive underground crime rings and activities still persist.
2054: Gabriel Scheller is born in Flagstaff, Arizona.
2055: Without oil to create gasoline, motorized vehicles for average citizens become more and more of a rarity. Purely ethanol-based fuel technology had been invented, but it was in its infancy and large-scale production of vehicles is kept to the MPS and the military. While stability is still returning relatively, this shortage of fuel causes discontent among the populace, as many feel the MPS and military are “hoarding resources for themselves”. Sporadic riots and other particularly violent disruptions occur over the next several years. They pale in comparison to the Great Turn, but they do present serious tests for the newly created MPS.
2056: Cybernetics and neural technologies as well as personal vehicles, once largely produced for military use or rendered rare by the collapse of oil, gradually proliferate to the wider public to consume and create a more able-bodied workforce and fill up positions that were left vacant thanks to the Great Turn and jump-start the national economy as well as bring funds into the government. This was thanks to the “Economic and Federal Cooperation Act”, which gave more special legal permissions as well as protections to corporations and economic entities that were deemed “valuable to the function and stability of commerce” as well as “the sanctity of federal power.” It was deemed constitutional under the Necessary and Proper Clause. The act led to a sort of even more closely intertwined relationship between the United States Government and corporations under the act's statutory breadth. Both aspects leaned on each other as much as they defended and provided for the other. Lifton Security Industries, founded in 2019, is contracted by the US government to provide equipment and vehicles to the new national police force.
2059: International trade relations slowly begin to reopen, mainly with Japan, Central and South America, South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. China is not among the nations to resume trade with the now fractured United States. Total overseas trade is a fraction of what it was before the Great Turn, born of desperation to maintain some modicum of global function and economy. Into 2116, overseas trade relations remain a fraction of what they were since 2020. Said trade deals for the United States over the decades have either fallen through or were declined in favor of trying to manage issues in the homeland. They remain small. The American government largely focuses on areas near them, such as Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
2061: The Interstate Railway Group is formed as multiple railway corporations merge. Revitalization of the US railway system is started to unite areas where the operational jurisdiction of the United States government still exists following the Great Turn. Law and order and national connection between the coasts are maintained through extensive government surveillance networks and MPS coverage. The middle of the United States was left abandoned after the Great turn’s famines and rioting. Mass exoduses were made toward major cities and coastlines in search of safety, what remaining food was there, or for more personal reasons. Into the year 2116, portions of the center of the country remain either abandoned or sparsely populated, outside the US’s jurisdictional control or oversight. To physically connect the metropolitan and jurisdictional hubs separated by these areas, the Interstate Railway Group builds and revitalizes the US railroad system. These in-between areas are not yet retaken because no president or politician wants to touch the prospect of such a monumental task and the complexities that come with it.
2063: Thanks to government funding and technological advancements, a baseline version of the Interstate Metropolitan Railway System is completed, connecting the east and west coasts as well as areas in between still under US jurisdiction. Rail coverage grows in years to come, often with substantial ticket price increases to make up for such a hefty investment. Public transportation in metropolitan areas is revamped as well as increased, mostly in wealthier and more “commercially and publicly vital districts”. With personal vehicles now much more rare, monorails, subway stations, and ferries become much more used. Efforts are not equal across all cities, however. The period from 2056-2066 is known as the “Third Reconstruction”, rivaling the ones that occurred in the wake of the American Civil War and during the Civil Rights Era.
2064: The first models of civilian personal transport since the Great Turn are created. However, they are extremely expensive, often costing up to $600,000 at the cheapest. Only those fortunate enough to have pre-Great Turn connections or corporate ties are able to afford them. The automotive industry is a fraction of what it was prior to the loss of oil, mostly relegated to law enforcement and corporate or governmental travel.
2065: The Employment Implantation Act is passed by Congress after being proposed by New York Representative Marcus Santorini. The Act enables employers and corporations to require job applicants to receive a list of implants and prosthetics in order to be accepted for a position. Implant terms and conditions vary between employers, but the most common terms are that said implants are to be considered personal property of the recipient, but said recipient is to make regularly scheduled payments to recover the costs the company or employer spent for the implants and procedure. If they fail to make a payment, they will be terminated and arrested for theft. Other employers may still classify required implants as their property and may be able to enforce removal of said implants under the rationale of “retrieving company assets” if one fails to make a payment. This was passed under the Economic and Federal Cooperation Act as well as the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution.
2066: The General Implant Suite (GIS) is created for the public as a means to enable the populace to better interface with the surge in neurally-dependent technology. It is made mandatory to receive one upon turning 18 years of age.
2067: FBI Agent Brie Maritz acts as a whistleblower and attempts to leak the evidence of the assassination of former President Crane to the public. Despite her efforts of lying low, weeks after the leak, she is found dead in her California home, her GIS short-circuited, furniture overturned, and her possessions strewn around. Footage from the property’s cameras that night were wiped clean. News Net reports and official investigations conclude that it was a hacking and a burglary that killed her. In reality, it was the doing of a carefully curated covert ops strike team under the oversight of the Obsidian Hand.
2069: VTOL technology, normally reserved for the MPS in civil settings, is expanded to personal vehicles. However, much like the previous ground-based vehicles, they are extremely expensive and not many can afford such a vehicle. They are also a rare product.
2072: The first iteration of the MPS allocation and oversight AI, MetCom, is created. Its job is to oversee the allocation and individual operations of MPS units around the country. It is created to streamline and facilitate more efficient operations of the MPS. It can grant action requests to units in the field, grant warrants on site if the need arises, as well as archive police camera footage for training purposes. Data gathered from units and squads in the field is sent back to the central servers, where a mix of AI and manual data verification and archiving takes place. The central servers for MetCom are located in Washington D.C. in a special underground bunker with said data monitoring and verification staff present 24/7. MetCom is continually updated and refined as the years go on.
2074: Gabriel Scheller joins the MPS after his older brother, Isaac Scheller, is killed in a refigged prosthetic deal gone wrong.
2077: With cities becoming overwhelmed with waste, the Extramunicipal Waste Disposal Act is passed, making it legal to dispose of municipal waste in dumping grounds outside of cities. These sites shall be maintained and by AI-controlled machinery such as grinders, magnets, incinerators, and other instruments of deconstruction of waste. This act helps certain parts of cities, but not others, most notably the wealthier districts. Individuals and communities living in areas unoccupied by government and/or corporate jurisdiction often illegally raid these wasteyards, salvaging and scavenging discarded tech for their own personal use or for their communities.
2079: Data Personality Chips, chips that alter one’s mannerisms or personality based on a pre-programmed construct, are created by Nu-Yu Neuralware Technologies. The main users of these chips are sex workers, politicians, media personalities, and other public figures.
2080: Tampered versions of Data Personality Chips, known as SleepCopy Chips, show up in many underground circles. These chips implant a copy of the chip’s personality into the GIS of the victim via a Trojan Horse virus. The GIS is then hacked by the virus component to induce electrical impulses in the brain reminiscent of REM sleep. The conscious victim goes to “sleep” in the brain while the chip’s personality takes control of the body. People under the influence of SleepCopy chips are known as ‘sleepers’.
2084: Gabriel Scheller is nearly killed in a shootout with a local refig ring. He becomes the first successful attempt at a full brain-to-mechanical body transplant in history. The procedure is carried out under government oversight by Lifton Security Industries. The person is put under via general anesthesia, and then the brain is removed along with the brainstem and part of the spinal cord. The rest of the body is strippd of implants and incinerated, the ashes sent to the family of the officer. The subject’s brain is placed into a container of artificial oxygenated cerebrospinal fluid to keep them alive until cerebral seating in the mechanical body is available. While the brain is alive and in storage, it is subjected to psychological and neurological conditioning that slowly and permanently erases the subject’s personal memories while leaving the tactical or practical knowledge intact. Once a body is available, the brain is removed from storage and is seated into the head of the mechanical apparatus, the spinal cord segment being wired into the body’s servo systems. The ocular nerves are connected to visual receptors. After a brief simulated course in managing the body’s controls, the unit is then deemed fit for service. The ‘Scheller Program’ is created in his honor out of this procedure, and is optional for all MPS recruits in the event of injury beyond implantation or coma in the line of duty. Soon after, Scheller Units, also known as Heavy Riot Suppression Units (HRSU’s) are deployed alongside human and android units to maintain order in riots or other disruptions.
2086: The first full sensoreal reality apparatus is released by Kingram Entertainment; the SenSym system. The SenSym works by plugging a USB port into one’s neuroport, which connects to their GIS. Pre-programmed sensoreal electrical and chemical impulses are induced in the brain to create the illusion of reality in the user’s mind. Simulation themes can vary, from medieval fantasy to urban warfare. Simulations can be purchased as digital files from the internet from Kingram Entertainment’s digital storefront via the GIS’s internet function and downloaded onto one’s SenSym. Numerous underground programming rings quickly form and create and sell untrackable and unmonitored simulations over the Internet that contain personalized or illegal content. Creators of these simulations are colloquially called ‘dreammakers’. Customers can download these simulation files from their GIS’s internet function from the dreammaker in untraceable/untrackable deepweb servers. Over the years, the SenSym’s capabilities and simulations in future iterations increase in complexity, eventually resulting in simulations with characters and situations which change and react to the user’s actions in real time. SenSym systems are also used for MPS “live” course training to cement their physical firearms training in variable situations as well as a cheaper public option for those unable to afford physical luxuries, such as prostitution services.
2088: NeuroGladiation, an underground blood sport utilizing tampered SenSym systems, takes root somewhere in California. Participants in the sport are known as NeuroGladiators, NeuroGlads, Glads, or NGs. Participants battle to the death in various themed simulations. Those that die in the simulation receive a fatal surge of electricity to their GIS through their neuroport. The winner often receives a large sum of money for their victory. NeuroGladiation becomes a popular blood sport in the underbelly of many cities across the United States. One of the original NeuroGlads, Aaliyah Rahal (she/her), rises to regional prominence and becomes a celebrity in the NeuroGlad scene. NeuroGladiation is extremely popular because of…. (justify why its popular in the underground) To a minor extent, some corporate CEOs, board members, and even some government officials clandestinely sponsor and even attend these matches to make bets and receive their sizable cut of profit should their NeuroGlad end up victorious. Although the sport is highly illegal, said corporate and government individuals often bribe authorities to close investigations, either because the tournaments sell more SenSym units, they deal with the homelessness and recidivism problems to a certain extent, or the bettors simply desire to receive their winning bets. (TIMELINE UNFINISHED)

I decided to make my own of these, inspired by u/CP4-Throwaway, and to keep consistency with his own similar posts, I'll use his same life stages. People born in 1971 are almost always considered to be within the heart of Generation X; a few gatekeepers have suggested they have Xennial/Millennial influence but that's clearly hogwash, as is any suggestion that they're remotely Baby Boomers. Per my theory, they're the seventh year of Generation X, which spans from 1965-1982; using the two-wave system, they're safely within Olde1st Wave Gen X, while using the three-wave system, they're the first year of "Core" Gen X.
Infancy and unconscious childhood (1971-1975)
1971 babies were born at an interesting time for the world, as the Vietnam War raged. Nixon was president, and for those in the know, progressive rock was the hot music genre of the moment. Yes's 1971 album Fragile contained the song "Roundabout", which became a rare example of a hit single in a primarily album-oriented genre. Elsewhere in rock music history, Led Zeppelin released their seminal album Led Zeppelin IV, which contained the famous "Stairway to Heaven", IMO one of the most overplayed rock songs of all time. Idi Amin became president/dictator of Uganda in a coup d'etat, Apollo 14 became the third crewed spacecraft to land on the Moon, an early March blizzard dumped a record 16.9" of snow in one day in Montreal, the "War on Drugs" was proclaimed by President Nixon, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and a revolt broke out at prison in Attica, New York, leading to the deaths of 42 people. Disney World opened in October, and the first McDonald's in Australia opened in December.
This cohort's unconscious childhood years also included the Watergate scandal and Nixon's ultimate resignation, the 1973 oil crisis brought on by the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling on abortion, which would remain in effect for nearly 50 years until its overturning in 2022.
Conscious childhood (1975-1981)
Popular culture in the mid to late '70s was predominantly adult-oriented, though many members of this cohort will still remember waking up excited for Saturday morning cartoons. Disco ruled the airwaves, with artists such as KC & the Sunshine Band, the Bee Gees, and Donna Summer dominating the charts of this era, while rock 'n' roll legend Elvis Presley died at age 42 in 1977. Rock music seemed to lose its "grit" if you will, and become more streamlined and commercial, as artists such as Boston, Foreigner, Journey, and eventually Toto among others made music that was heavy on the poppy hooks and seemed designed for mass radio play and large arena concert performances, in contrast to the bluesy hard rock of the earlier part of the decade. Punk rock began circa 1976 and eventually caught on to a larger extent in the United States later on. Its spinoff genre of new wave had a huge year for important song and album releases in 1979, though it's more associated with the '80s on this side of the pond due to the timing of its mainstream popularization. Popular movies of this era included Jaws in 1975, Saturday Night Fever in 1977, and the first two installments of the Star Wars trilogy in 1977 and 1980. Popular live comedy television series NBC's Saturday Night premiered in 1975, becoming more famous under its new name of Saturday Night Live starting in 1977.
Geopolitically, this era was characterized by stagflation in the United States: high inflation coupled with sluggish GDP growth and off-and-on recessions. The Bicentennial celebrations coincided with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, though he was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Jonestown massacre in 1978 was represented the largest killing of Americans in a single event until 9/11. A group of 53 Americans were held hostage in Iran for over a year beginning in November 1979, marking a pivotal turning point in United States-Iran relations and contributing to Carter's landslide loss in the 1980 election; the hostages were freed minutes after Reagan's 1981 inauguration.
Baby boomers were generally adolescents or young adults throughout this era, while millennials weren't even alive yet, cementing the 1971 cohort within Generation X.
Adolescence (1981-1989)
The 1971 cohort reached adolescence in 1981, turning 10 the year MTV launched, bringing music videos into the mainstream in the United States. (People without cable television were brought up to speed when NBC premiered Friday Night Videos in 1983.) John Hughes directed many of the era's biggest hit movies, including Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club and Weird Science (1985), and wrote others including National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) and Pretty in Pink (1986) - awesome soundtrack by the way. New wave reached mainstream prominence on the music charts and rapidly became merely a background influence on pop music, as Madonna and Cyndi Lauper both released their debut albums in 1983. They shared the charts with Michael Jackson, whose 1982 album Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time, with 70 million copies sold worldwide and seven top 10 hit singles in the United States; his 1987 follow-up Bad was nowhere near as successful but still the best-selling album worldwide of both 1987 and 1988. A new rock subgenre known retrospectively as "hair metal", combining heavy metal riffs and shred guitar solos with poppy hooks and an androgynous visual aesthetic characterized by spandex, tight clothing, and makeup, proliferated from circa 1983 onward, with key artists including Motley Crue, Ratt, Quiet Riot, Poison, Cinderella, and others. Def Leppard and Bon Jovi are often associated with this scene due to their similar-sounding music in the late 1980s, though they were geographically distinct from the main southern California scene.
This cohort's adolescence lines up perfectly with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who won reelection in a landslide in 1984 and was succeeded in the 1988 election by his vice president, George H. W. Bush. The economy recovered early on in Reagan's presidency, with the early '80s recession ending in November 1982 and the remainder of the decade being characterized by robust GDP growth. Some not-so-good important events included the start of the AIDS pandemic, first reported in 1981 though not named such until a year later; the Iran-Contra affair from 1985-1987 in which senior American officials secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran; and the Challenger and Chernobyl disasters both in 1986.
This is about as stereotypically older Generation X and quintessentially '80s as a cohort's adolescence can get, further cementing this cohort's role as part of Generation X.
Young adulthood (1989-2006)
The 1971 cohort came of age alongside the fall of communism in Europe, with the Berlin Wall falling the year they turned 18. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the same year in which grunge music reached mainstream prominence with seminal albums such as Ten (Pearl Jam) and Nevermind (Nirvana) and the World Wide Web was released - an event that largely went unnoticed at the time but would become extremely significant in the years to come.
The '90s, while looked upon nostalgically by many, was not a decade without its issues. As the 1971 birth cohort sought to enter the professional workforce after graduation, they were plagued by the early '90s recession and the lowest real wages since at least the '60s. The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, killing six; this occurred in the same year as the Waco siege, a 51-day-long standoff between cult leader David Koresh and officials who suspected him of stockpiling illegal weapons that resulted in the deaths of 86 people. Two years later in 1995, Oklahoma City was the site of a bomb attack, the largest domestic terrorist attack in American history, killing 168. In 1998, President Bill Clinton was plagued by a scandal alleging an affair between him and White House intern Monica Lewinsky; he was impeached for perjury (lying under oath) after denying any sexual relations with her, and while he was acquitted by the Senate, the nickname "Slick Willy" persisted.
Technology advanced rapidly during this time, as Windows 95 (released 1995) was the first version of the famous computer operating system to come with Internet Explorer built in; the Internet was originally thought by some to be a short-lived fad upon its mainstream arrival in the mid-'90s but proved to be here to stay. Cellphones went from niche and uncommon to rather everyday by the end of the decade, with many popular models of the late '90s being of the clamshell "flip phone" variety common until the early '10s. Many young entrepreneurs sought to make it big on the Internet, creating the dot-com boom of the late '90s, though the bubble burst in 2000 and many of these early online companies folded. In 2000, problems with vote counting in Florida left the winner of the presidential election unclear for over a month after the election until the Supreme Court stepped in to declare George W. Bush as the winner, popularizing the term "hanging chad" and the concept of "red" and "blue" states in the process.
1971 babies turned 30 in the year of the 9/11 attacks, followed soon thereafter by anthrax attacks, the DC sniper attacks of summer 2002, and the launch of the "War on Terror" as we invaded Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 and Iraq in March 2003. The Department of Homeland Security was also established as part of the broader response to 9/11, beginning operations in early 2003 and becoming the namesake of the Homeland Generation, who started to be born at roughly that same time. The last major events of 1971 babies' young adulthood included the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, which made landfall in southeast Louisiana and killed over 1,000 people overall.
This period was formative for many millennials, and average adulthood and even middle age for baby boomers, so the 1971 cohort's status right in the middle further shows their membership in Generation X.
"Average" adulthood (2006-2021)
The 1971 cohort reached average adulthood in 2006, by which time the "Wild West" era of the '90s-early '00s Internet was coming to an end as the Internet became increasingly corporatized, with Google's takeover of YouTube in this year as one example. Myspace was the hit social media platform of the era, though it would be supplanted by Facebook not too long afterward. Many members of this cohort, and just about every other, struggled through the Great Recession, which began in late 2007 and lasted through 2009, serving as the world's most significant economic downturn since the Great Depression in the 1930s, its slow recovery plaguing much of the administration of President Barack Obama, who became America's first black president upon his inauguration in January 2009.
War continued to rage in the Middle East, and Osama Bin Laden, leader of terrorist group al-Qaeda, was assassinated by US forces in 2011: the same year as the Arab Spring, a wider trend of uprisings across the region that also led to the deposition of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Concerns about global warming mounted, and smartphones gradually entered the mainstream, from the iPhone being released in 2007 to smartphone penetration in the United States reaching 50% circa 2013 - only 12 years after Internet penetration did the same. Black Lives Matter was also formed in 2013 following the killing of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin at a Florida convenience store.
In 2014, ISIS, an al-Qaeda spinoff who had taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria taking advantage of the ongoing Syrian civil war, became a household name as the fight against Middle Eastern terrorism continued. President Obama was overall popular but criticized by many as soft on terrorism. That same year, Russia annexed Crimea in a move viewed as illegitimate by most in the international community, sowing the first seeds of the larger war in the region that would begin in 2022. In 2015, the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling legalized gay marriage across the United States, while Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election in an upset, representing a sudden shift in favor of right-wing populism within the mainstream political climate.
The last major event of 1971 babies' average adulthood was the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in Wuhan, China, in 2019 and led to global lockdowns and economic and social turmoil in 2020-2022. The 2020 presidential election was even more polarized and contentious than that of 2016; after a drawn-out ballot count, Joe Biden was declared the winner, which Trump and many of his supporters insisted was fraudulent.
In general, this period was middle age for baby boomers, while millennials were still children, adolescents, and young adults, once again leaving the 1971 cohort firmly within Generation X.
Middle age (2021-2036)
Finally, the 1971 birth cohort turned 50 in 2021, a year that started with a bang as a mob of angry Trump supporters carried out the January 6 Capitol riot, which involved over 2,000 people entering the building, $2.7 million in damages from looting and vandalism, and the deaths of five people. Trump was viewed by many as having encouraged this attack and impeached a second time, though his term ended before anything could happen to remove him from office. COVID-19 vaccines were gradually rolled out and, in many places, mandated, with pandemic restrictions remaining in effect in many places until early 2022 and the pandemic not being declared no longer a public health emergency in May 2023 - three and a half years after it began. Global unrest escalated in February 2022 as Russia invaded Ukraine on a larger scale than what happened in 2014, and in October 2023, war broke out began between Israel and Palestinian militant groups led by terrorist group Hamas. The latter has further polarized many Americans, as some believe we ought to remain loyal to our Israeli allies and others view the Palestinians as the victims of persecution and genocide. Artificial intelligence reached the forefront of the national conversation in late 2022 as well, beginning with the release of advanced AI chatbot ChatGPT and several competitors by other companies. Smartphones have long since been ubiquitous, smartwatches and smart home appliances are more popular than ever, and electric cars are gaining popularity slowly but surely as technology continues to advance.
The remainder of this cohort's middle age has yet to transpire, but their status as middle-aged adults currently distinguishes them both from millennials, currently in young and average adulthood; and from baby boomers, many of whom are in their retirement years. This once again cements the 1971 cohort as core members of Generation X, as shown throughout their life cycle up to this point.

Steins;Gate 0:
17. Altair of the Hyperbolic Plane: Beltrami Pseudosphere - 3/5 (No, Suzuha, it WON'T lead to a paradox. We've been over this... Just show Daru the damn time machine! GAH. Anyway, Mayuri asks for more information and... Reveals she loves Okabe? Romantically? Uh, I mean, I suppose it makes sense. You'd naturally grow attached to someone who's treated you nice and always been there for you for years. But I saw Okabe as more of an older brother figure to Mayuri than anything else. The first episode of Steins;Gate already gave me that impression. They're just incredibly close friends. I mean, now I completely understand her sadness from how he's been acting for the past year at least.
Also, damn, every woman wants Okabe. First Ruka, then Kurisu, followed by Maho (possibly?) and now Mayuri. I mean, I can see why. He's actually a pretty handsome guy, and his cooky personality is endearing (though Maho hasn't seen that side of him). But it's funny that in the beginning of the series he's supposed to be this "loner" and awkward person. Yet he has women falling head over heels for him by doing literally nothing.
So Suzuha and Mayuri has... Or, WILL do something that causes the timeline to change, and Daru notices this in 2025? Welp, I'm officially confused again. I'm sure it'll get answered in due time. Also, older Daru is skinny!! That aside, MAN, shit really escalated, huh? Dozens of armed soldiers and an all out war on this one rooftop?!)
18. Altair of Translational Symmetry: Translational Symmetry - 3/5 (Alright so I'm a LITTLE confused on the conflict between the organizations here. I assumed the lab raid and the alley attack were done by DURPA. And now, it seems it's Statfors private army who's attacking on the rooftop. Yet, the Statfor soldiers said "Reyes" when they saw Kagari in the (what I assumed to be) DURPA armor. How would they know that? Well, it turns out Leskinen has been leading Stratfor, and Reyes is a colleague of his. So I guess they're in cahoots together?
LOTS of things being revealed at once here, and it's culminating during a mini-war which doesn't help. It's all interesting, but definitely much to try and keep track of so quickly. So Kagari was already brainwashed when she went to the past, to be a messenger to a past Leskinen? Quite a convoluted plan. Making a little girl give you tips on how to rule in the future. What's funny is, with everything I've said about physical time travel, unless it's completely wrong and they establish some new rule, Leskinen of 2036 who sent Kagari back would have already experienced meeting her in the past and getting the intell. So it seems he's more just trying to make sure the loop happens as opposed to alter any future.
This episode is so crazy cause most of the show is just mystery, drama and vagueness of upcoming threats. So when WAR literally breaks out it's like 0 to 100. I'm used to it now since I already got that shock during the first lab raid by Moeka. But it's still such a massive shift in focus that it's funny. I do find it a little ridiculous that these two petite women manage to overpower dozens of trained soldiers much larger than them. Also, how the hell is Kagari still alive after being shot at point-blank by Leskinen 3 times in a row? After ALREADY having been shot previously as well?)
19. Altair of the Cyclic Coordinate: Time-Leap Machine - 4/5 (LOVE to see Okabe time leap again. It's cathartic watching him actually try after having given up for so long. But tragic because it's bringing back all the memories of how terrible it felt. The eerie yet goofy music that plays whenever he's sent back to the past, after having endured a literal mini-war REALLY helps set the mood. Also, it was REYES all along behind the helmet? NO. WAY!!!!!!!!! (sarcasm). But, so then... What was up with the DURPA soldier's hand getting cut in the alley and Yuki being seen with a bandage over her hand after? If the show is gonna trick me, they're gonna need to explain that after revealing this stuff!
Despite liking this, it's pretty noticable that not much happens. I guess some slowness is necessary after the drastic events of the previous two episodes. But here, it's really just them fixing the time-leap machine for the first half, then Okabe failing to stop the missile attack on the time machine again. So, as a result, there's not as much to say. The date on the screen went crazy and the glass cracked, though, so I guess something bad is about to happen)
20. Rinascimento of the Unwavering Promise: Promised Rinascimento - 3/5 (Based on concept alone, this episode SHOULD be awesome. The time-leap machine malfunctioned so Okabe was sent to the future? That just sounds like the recipe for one of the best episodes. Yet, it manages to be boring.
What destroys most of this for me is how unbelievable and silly everything is. Like how the heck have Faris and Ruka managed to to survive? They're both small, weak and petite. Yet they've survived for two decades in an apocalyptic wartorn world against numerous armed soldiers who are significantly stronger and more trained than them? Ruka is at least trained with a sword, so that gives him a little more validity, but doubt it helps when a herd of armed soldiers are marching towards you. But Faris is a small, petite girl with stick arms and no battle experience. And what makes it even worse is that she still wears her cat ears and keeps up the cringy meow-talk. In the apocalypse? As a middle aged woman? Really? And she somehow also hasn't aged at all? She's just as pretty and caked up? ...IN THE APOCALYPSE?! At least with Maho that makes sense, as her bit is that she looks way younger than she is. Though realistically, she should have still been given SOME face lines. All of this was just ridiculous. Way to take the seriousness away from the story. Faris' presence in the show continues to be the worst aspect.
If they weren't even gonna play this seriously, they could have at least gone the funny route with Ruka and made him chiseled and buff. Not ridiculously Mr. Braun level buff, just muscular. That would genuinely have been hilarious. Speaking of Ruka, am I still meant to believe he's in love with Okabe or something? He's desperately wanted to see him for 11 years. "She" confessed "her" love in another timeline, but we've never seen it in this one. So his death here just makes me confused. Like, firstly he's not even an interesting character in 0. Second, I KNOW Okabe is going to time-leap so his death is pointless to focus on anyway. And Faris is also seemingly obsessed with Okabe, for some reason. Does everyone just love this man?
When it's not the silly stuff, it's just a lot of exposition delivered by cursed looking, skinny, middle aged Daru. Boring much? It may seem like I'm entirely shitting on the episode, but it was still enjoyable enough as part of the larger narrative. An episode isn't truly BAD until it gets a 2 or a 1 from me. This just did too many wrongs than rights, which is honestly more offensive as the concept had such potential and it's supposed to be an epic, late-game episode. Also, I think I just generally prefer the mysterious and dramatic aspects more than an all out WAR)
21. Rinascimento of Image Formation: Return of Phoenix - 3/5 (And so continues the Okabe in the future stuff I didn't find all that interesting. At least it's a little more engaging now. So did he really time-leap backwards 3000 times? Good lord. How long did this take him? The scene where he keeps running through the dates was pretty cool, visually speaking.
The lackluster 2/3rd of the episode can certainly NOT take away the awesomeness of the moment Okabe finally gets back to 2011 and Hououin Kyouma returns! I love it! And... He fails to make Suzuha and Mayuri leave in time... For the third time... Damn, okay then)
22. Rinascimento of Projection: Project Amadeus - 4/5 (Holy shit, Houhin Kyoma returns!! Wait, they already had that moment... Though I guess not for THIS Maho and Daru. Still, I liked it. It's amusing watching him be "himself" again, but he still reacts embarrassed when Maho calls him out for being nutty, so I wonder, was he ALWAYS just "faking" this persona, or was it just genuinely how he was up until the tragedy he had to endure, and only now he realizes that it was ridiculous? I like to believe the latter, since it's a charming personality. Also, the moment where he lifted up Maho was hilarious.
And just as quickly as he returned, Kyoma is gone again. Okabe just reverts back to the same mindset he's been in throughout all of 0. WELL THEN! The remainder of the episode consists of depressy Okabe sobbing over erasing an AI. I suppose I shouldn't be so heartless, since it does resemble (Well, pretty much IS) Kurisu. But, get real, if you're gonna actually put the effort with time travel to reach Steins Gate and get the real Kurisu back, surely you wouldn't be crying over the AI)
23. Arclight of the Point at Infinity: Arclight of the Sky - 4/5 (The timeline's changed, but everyone's relationship stayed relatively the same. This has happened before, so I'm not questioning the logic of it. I understand Worldline Convergence now. But it does raise so many questions on the specifics of how everything happened. How did Okabe even meet Maho and Leskinen without the Amadeus conference? How did Maho get so close to Okabe so to become a lab member? Does any of this matter? No. We know nothing more than Okabe does, and his only focus is the goal, so, I guess I'll just move on! I liked Moeka coming in for some epic badassery. This is exactly the kind of character I thought she was initially, so it's awesome to see. Too bad it's a little inconsistent now given I KNOW she's just supposed to be some shy loner.
I guess this is supposed to be a "happy" ending, but it's still pretty depressing. Mayuri and Suzuha are succcessful in contacting year-ago Mayuri to talk some sense into Okabe. But despite that, Okabe of 0 still has to continue living life without Kurisu, Amadeus OR Mayuri for 15 years in a world being torn apart by war. All so he can send a message to go along with Mayuri's talking-sense-to. That's SAD!! Not just for him, but for every other person who has to live in this world. Though, I guess it doesn't matter since it'll be erased once the Steins Gate timeline is achieved. But that raises the question of what exactly the point is of going back to rescue Mayuri and Suzuha is? If everything was successful, Okabe's Reading Steiner should kick in immediately upon sending the D-Mail about Operation Arclight, thrusting him into a worldline where Mayuri will never even have gone to the past. So, what?)
Steins;Gate:
23. Open the Steins Gate - 4/5 (Since this is the same as episode 23β but with differing final few minutes, my thoughts on the first 15 minutes are exactly the same as they are for that episode. The entire scene where he travels back to episode 1? Fantastic stuff. That said, the remainder of this is just Okabe getting the information about Operation Arclight from himself in 2025. Not exactly any more or less riveting than when he instead just gave up and starting living his life. What it does is set up optimism and intrigue for the following episode. And it was SO satisfying to see this after I had followed the life of 0 Okabe who sent it)
24. Achievement Point - 5/5 (I'm still not 100% certain of the time travel rules here. Why wouldn't there be three Okabe's in the radio building when he goes back a second time? The Okabe who's there for the conference, the one who's there to (eventually) kill Kurisu, and the one who goes there now? Why does the second one not exist anymore? Nitpicky, maybe. Luckily it doesn't take away from the epicness of the entire episode. Like his second fight with Dr. Nakabachi. Just satisfying. He baits him with such confidence, just so he can get stabbed and use his own blood to fake Kurisu's death. Yikes. Although I did wonder why he didn't just buy some fake blood from a store to bring to the past. Wouldn't have been that hard. I doubt the liquid in his lightsaber would have been enough anyway.
So let me get this right: The Okabe that saw the fake dead Kurisu still ended up sending a D-Mail about her death, changing the worldline and basically going through everything in the show, up until the point where Kurisu rushes in to say she loves him back and he erases the D-Mail from SERN's servers. Except in this version, Kurisu isn't dead. Correct? It's pretty clever. I like it. Though, I still have so many remaining questions about the logic of it. Firstly, how would that Okabe even know that Kurisu is alive? He would still shifted timeline after hitting enter, asked Mayuri about the 4th lab member, and all that we saw him do by the end of 22. So when would he find out that Kurisu isn't actually dead? And how?
But also, wouldn't Reading Steiner kick in upon succeeding? Or upon returning to the present? Wouldn't the Okabe that faked the death immediately be swapped TO the timeline where he IS the version of himself that saw fake dead Kurisu? Or does that only apply to D-Mails? That would make sense. Perhaps he actually has to be IN the current date of the timeline for that to work? Things still don't entirely add up, though. Where's the Okabe of this timeline? The Okabe that saw the FAKE death? Does he just... Randomly disappear from existence the moment the Okabe who faked it returns? Because we clearly saw him come back and it's implied he was hospitalized cause of the wound... Which he shouldn't even have had, because the timeline should have changed. So confusing! And I'm trying my best to make sense of it all here with the information the show is giving me.
EVEN MORE: As I already said regarding 0 episode 23: Does that mean this Okabe will just keep living his life for 15 years until the moment in 2025 when 0 Okabe's Reading Steiner kicks in and HE takes over? This feels like a massive oversight. And if this is the case, that's sad. The Okabe I'm following right here will just be gone, and 0 Okabe will be thrust into a world where he has no memory of what truly transpired the last 15 years. Given it's presumably normal and not apocalyptic this time.
This is also a "happy" ending, just like the Steins;Gate 0 finale. "Happy" in quotations because it's still depressing to me that everyone forgot all those important, life changing experiences. Daru went through so much character development, and that's just gone now. He's back to square 1. Also, SERN and the rounders existed regardless if Kurisu survived or not. So, Mr. Braun's ending isn't really happy. Though I guess he gave Moeka a happy ending by just making her an employee of his shop instead of doing shady SERN work? But it's still sad that Moeka's lost ALL development she went through, and no one remembers there being any more than 3 lab members. Speaking of memories, I'm REALLY hoping Kurisu at least ends up remembering... Well, EVERYTHING. Otherwise this would be really unsatisfying)
The Sagacious Wisdom of Cognitive Computing:
1. Cooking Log (Mayuri and Kurisu make some food and it's actually good. Riveting stuff... But, seriously, it was still a nice little short. I just have nothing interesting to say about it)
2. Navigation Log (Pretty amusing that they tried to cram drama and emotion into only 3 minutes. Love that Kurisu bought Okabe a bunch of Dr. Peppers. It does feel like they really like each other. Well, I know Okabe likes Kurisu, but in these 3 minutes we clearly see more that Kurisu might feel the same way)
3. Fashion Log (Why is Nae CRYING because Okabe and Daru don't change clothes? Silly. Also, Kurisu has the same outfit through the entire series as well, so she's not really one to talk. Heh, she finds the projections of Okabe in different outfits HOT. Lol. How come she didn't even pick one of them if so? She just gave him a generic suit and tie. Lame)
4. Meeting Log (Aww, this was sentimental. The lab is iconic. Nothing can replace it. Okabe getting embarrassed by it and doing his usual crazy routine and rushing down with the Upa all hysterical was funny. These were nice shorts to showcase life simply continuing after the "finale" of the series, and to see that Kurisu is still integrated as a member of the lab in the Steins Gate timeline. I'm guessing Okabe took her to the lab after the ending of 24, and these shorts are set during a couple of weeks she spent there befriending everyone. UPDATE: I'm writing this final paragraph AFTER having seen 25 and the movie, and, these work so well to fill in that gap. To see that she still became a member of the lab for a while even if it didn't involve the Phone Wave)
Steins;Gate:
25. Egoistic Poriomania - 3/5 (NOOOOOO KURISU DOESN'T REMEMBER!!! Well, not fully, as I had hoped. But at least this episode focuses on exactly that topic. So, yay. Must be a pretty sad situation for Okabe. He's reached his goal, but he lost the love he had with Kurisu. For most of the episode, anyway. I liked his blunt confession at the end. I suppose it's implied that they kissed? But she could have slapped him for all we know, since she did claim what he said was "not fair" and she is conflicted. Must be such a weird situation for her, if she's only falling for someone because of a couple dreams she's had about him.
The Suzuha lookalike Okabe meets is supposedly Yuki. It's weird and inconsistent that she looks and sounds completely different, but I understand that's because this was made before she had an existing design or was even known to appear as much as she would in 0. This is nothing you can't just bullshit explain your way out of, though. How about, she just cut her hair in this timeline? The color's different? She dyed it. Or the simplest explanation: It's a cartoon and colors can randomly change and it doesn't have to be relevant to canon in any way. Obviously this explanation can't make up for the different voice, but like, characters get voice replacements all the time and people accept that. I've seen worse inconsistencies and changes in media.
This wasn't a very great episode overall, but it had some funny moments: Okabe getting taken away by airport security and later arrested by police. Pretending to having walked all the way when he took a cab. His fear of motels, and his reaction to Diet Dr. Pepper. Basically... Okabe was just funny the whole episode)
Steins;Gate: The Movie − Load Region of Déjà Vu - 5/5 (Starting off a year later with pretty much every character back at square one makes this so... Stale and awkward. NOT as in a bad thing. It helps set the mood and establish that the main conflict of the series is gone, but Okabe is still not satisfied with how he has to pretend nothing happened between him and Kurisu. She acts like she hates him and is only visiting the lab again for Mayuri. And he plays it off with the Houhin Kyoma routine, pretending he doesn't care. Sad.
The scene with drunk Kurisu was amusing. Their relationship in this timeline is such a mess. She clearly says she wanted him to contact her during their time apart. But he never did. Why not? I get there's tension and awkardness, but they both clearly like each other. I thought Okabe was madly in love. Anyway, Okabe going crazy immediately after this and pulling a knife on Mr. Braun was 0 to 100 real quick. Hooked me, for sure. Naturally, I figured there would be at least ONE final time travel problem that needs fixing for the movie before the series can finally get it's true ending.
Okabe straight up vanishing genuinely shocked me. The logic of him shifting timeline because of his memories being all crazied up is a little dodgy, though. The series has established there's only ever 1 timeline, not several you can travel between. So whenever Okabe is shifting, wouldn't it just be the timeline constantly changing around him? The shifts seem fuzzy, so maybe they're JUST on the brink of fully taking place, but then just... Don't. Time travel is already such a messy thing to try and make sense of, so I'm willing to let go trying to analyze every minute detail, and accept this as it is, since it leads to such a great movie anyway. Okabe is just "special" and experiences side effects of time travel no one else does. Or, far more severe than others. Just like Reading Steiner. This is just one of them. Side note; One of the timelines he briefly saw was Mae having killed Moeka. So THAT was a thing that happened. Also, Okabe doing Daru's laundry was a nice touch. Kurisu's reaction to it was funny, AND it just makes Okabe more appealing as a character. He does nice things for his friends, even something gross like washing Daru's underwear. Win-win moment.
I. REALLY. Liked that Kurisu ended up being the focus after Okabe disappears. We've only seen time travel from Okabe's (and a little bit of Suzuha's) perspective, so I was genuinely shouting "NO WAY!!" in excitement when SHE time leapt. It was EXACTLY what I wanted! Even if she can't get all her memories back properly outside of vivid dreams and déjà vu, time leaping, to realize it's actually possible, and at least mildly understanding what Okabe went through would be enough for her to believe his stories which would lead to their happy ending! Side note 2; Kurisu trying to be Hououin Kyouma was great.
She barely even scratches the surface of what he went through, but experiencing it once was enough for her. It was so full of emotion. The scene by the station was fantastic and very emotionally gripping. Honestly, a way better love confession than episode 22. Okabe is willing to make the exact same sacrifice that Kurisu was. I.E, letting himself "die" for the good of everyone else. But much like he couldn't accept that fate for Kurisu, SHE can't accept that fate for him. Shoe's on the other foot. It's what makes this movie so interesting. And the ending isn't some badass battle, confrontation with a villain, or anything like that. It's simply Kurisu giving past Okabe a strong memory to tie him to the Steins Gate worldline (not gonna talk about how, for all intents and purposes, she, an adult woman, kissed a random child at a tram stop?)... And so he appears again. And that's the last we see of them. No epilogue or anything regarding what their life is like. They're both safe, and they both exist. Satisfying ending.
Suzuha's inclusion seems pretty forced. I guess they just felt like they REALLY needed her in the movie, as she is an iconic character to the series. But in this future, where there's supposedly no war, and KURISU invented the time machine, not Daru... Why did SHE go back to convince Kurisu to not give up? Why is she the only one who ever uses the time machine to come to the "present"? (That being the present of the series from the main characters perspective). Side note 3; I liked the little touch of her wearing Daru's cap)

Looking for advice:
I am 55 in NJ, USA and took a voluntary retirement package in December 2021. This covered my income for about 2 years including medical insurance premiums at my company's rate. I started looking for a job about 6 months ago - no success yet, but I am hopeful. Bottom line: There's no real money coming into my bank account(s).
I began withdrawing from my retirement accounts to give myself a paycheck in January 2024. I have about $2.1 million in an IRA and $2.2 million in a 401k with my last employer. I am assured by my Financial Advisor that I can live on this comfortably, with Social Security kicking in around 2036 and Medicare kicking in around 2034. Unfortunately, withdrawals at my age result in a 10% tax penalty which I have been trying to dodge by putting the $ in a ROTH (converted from an IRA) and then withdrawing $ only when needed from the ROTH. Also unfortunately, premiums have gone up quite a bit as I now no longer can get insurance at my previous employer's rates.
My credit rating is Excellent. On Credit Karma's Vantage scores it hovers around 823. On Experian's site it has stayed at 850. While these may be inflated, I am sure that I will score around 800 in general for car loans - whichever FICO score is used by dealers.
Immediate problem/question I need help with:
I want to replace my current car lease with a new car lease OR purchase. Nothing fancy here - this is a 3rd vehicle mainly used by my kids. Probably a Honda Civic or something similar priced around $25k.
My issue is this - when I idly looked at refinancing my home loan back in Q1-2022, I was told that I was not eligible for any loans while unemployed. I suspect something similar will come up when I apply for credit for a new car, even if it is a lease.
How do I answer questions about employment and income right now on a credit application at a dealer? Should I just put in "Retired" and estimate my withdrawals for the year from my IRA/ROTH as the annual income? How can I prove this? (I do have my 2023 tax return that clearly shows the IRA withdrawal, but not sure I should share that with a dealer.)
Later this year, I might decide to move out of NJ - the property taxes are through the roof and moving to a lower tax state might be a good way to make my savings go further. At that time, I am hoping I can use the same strategy to apply for a mortgage. Of course, if I find a job in (say) North Carolina or some other state, then none of this will be an issue. But what if I just want to move?
Thoughts/Advice on this would be most appreciated (mainly about the car loan/lease; secondarily about mortgage applications). Thanks in advance.

Everything purchased and paid for today will be shipped on MONDAY
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PROOF FOR EVERYTHING
I use custom poured silver bar made by u/420pepe in my verification photos, I think you should too! :)
PROOF FOR 10 GULDENS
5 SOLD
Each coin is .1947 AGW which at $2036 spot price equals to $396.4 melt price. Take each one for $405 SHIPPED via First Class. If you would like Priority - add $5. All coins are in very nice AU condition and will be pulled at random, years are 1912, 1913 and 1917 and 1932. If you have a request for specific year please let me know. I accept Zelle, PPFF and CashApp in that order of preference. If you would like insurance (Cost is $1 per $100 of value of the package) or signature (+$2.50) this will be extra but I can add it no problem, just please le me know in advance.
SOLD MEXICO 5 PESOS - .1205 AGW, $255 each
GERMANY 2001 PROOF 1 MARK - it's 12g of pure gold, so melt is $785 but they don't go melt. Gorgeous coin with cameo. Take it for $865
1893 1/2 Sovereign - $280 ALBUM
SOLD 1925-D $2.5 Indian MS62 - $480. nice fresh coin ALBUM
1925 Sovereign MS63 - $575 ALBUM
MORE GOLD!!!
1895 $10 Liberty MS61 CAC - CAC Guide is $1370, take it for $1325 ALBUM
1893 $10 Liberty MS61 - $1100 ALBUM
1914 Canada $10 MS63 - $1100, Priced to sell TODAY! (they've been going for $1200+ for 63 and cheapest I can see available right now is listed at $1299 at famous auction site) - ALBUM
1847 $5 Liberty AU55 CAC - CAC PriceGuide is $1170, yours for $1100 ALBUM
1887-S $5 Liberty MS61 CAC - Price Guide is $765, take it for $720 $700. Old Fatty Holder ALBUM
1851 G$1 MS63 - $600. Marvelous coin in OGH ALBUM
1843 $5 Liberty - $650. Survival estimate is 350 across all grades. I think this an XF coin - ALBUM
SLABBED MORGANS ALBUM 1
1878-S $1 Morgan MS63 - $145 $135 beautiful blast white coin
1879-S $1 Morgan MS64 - $110 $100. Blast white, beautiful coin
1879-S $1 Morgan MS65 - $185
1881-S $1 Morgan MS64+ - $125
1880-S $1 Morgan MS65 - $190 $185. Some color, semi-PL surfaces
1881-O $1 Morgan MS63 NGC - cool crescent rainbow rim on reverse, $110
SOLD 1881-O $1 Morgan MS64 - ~~$170 $160. Great blast white coin~~
1882-S $1 Morgan MS65 - $185
1883-S $1 Morgan AU55 - $450 $430. Very attractive example of a semi-key date
1883-O $1 Morgan MS65 - $185
SLABBED MORGANS ALBUM 2
1883-CC $1 Morgan MS63 - $330 $320. Vertical scratch on the slab. Not too bad but noticeable but very nice coin though ALBUM
1884-O $1 Morgan NGC MS65 - $190 $185
1888 $1 Morgan MS65 CAC - $300 $290. Beautiful coin in OGH holder
SOLD 1888-O $1 MORGAN MS63 - ~~$95 $90~~
1889 $1 Morgan MS62 - $65. OGH
1891 $1 Morgan MS61 - $95 $90 (better date)
1896 $1 Morgan MS64 - $125 very interesting toning pattern on obverse, fully toned reverse - ALBUM
1903 $1 Morgan MS64 CAC - $300 $290. Better date coin in old fatty holder, some toning
1904-O $1 Morgan NGC MS65 - $190 $185
1921 Morgan MS62 - $60. Old Fatty Holder PICTURES
Shipping at cost - First Class starts at $3.50, Priority at $8.50. If you would like insurance (Cost is $1 per $100 of value of the package) or signature (+$2.50) this will be extra. Please let me know if you want any of these extra services. I pack safely and discretely, and ship fast. All paid for purchases will be on their way NEXT BUSINESS DAY. I don't use VENMO Payment via PPFF (Sorry, I do not accept G&S payments anymore), CashApp, Zelle or Google Pay. USPS money order is cool too.

Everything purchased and paid for today will be shipped on MONDAY
Please be warned that I will never send you unsolicited messages offering to sell something that is not part of this sale.
Please don't contact me via chat, it's very clunky and makes it difficult for me to keep track of conversations. Looking forward to your Private messages.
To send me Private Message just click this link - https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=CrazyRusFW&subject=&message=
PROOF FOR EVERYTHING
I use custom poured silver bar made by u/420pepe in my verification photos, I think you should too! :)
PROOF FOR 10 GULDENS
5 SOLD
Each coin is .1947 AGW which at $2036 spot price equals to $396.4 melt price. Take each one for $405 SHIPPED via First Class. If you would like Priority - add $5. All coins are in very nice AU condition and will be pulled at random, years are 1912, 1913 and 1917 and 1932. If you have a request for specific year please let me know. I accept Zelle, PPFF and CashApp in that order of preference. If you would like insurance (Cost is $1 per $100 of value of the package) or signature (+$2.50) this will be extra but I can add it no problem, just please le me know in advance.
SOLD MEXICO 5 PESOS - .1205 AGW, $255 each
GERMANY 2001 PROOF 1 MARK - it's 12g of pure gold, so melt is $785 but they don't go melt. Gorgeous coin with cameo. Take it for $865
1893 1/2 Sovereign - $280 ALBUM
SOLD 1925-D $2.5 Indian MS62 - $480. nice fresh coin ALBUM
1925 Sovereign MS63 - $575 ALBUM
MORE GOLD!!!
1895 $10 Liberty MS61 CAC - CAC Guide is $1370, take it for $1325 ALBUM
1893 $10 Liberty MS61 - $1100 ALBUM
1914 Canada $10 MS63 - $1100, Priced to sell TODAY! (they've been going for $1200+ for 63 and cheapest I can see available right now is listed at $1299 at famous auction site) - ALBUM
1847 $5 Liberty AU55 CAC - CAC PriceGuide is $1170, yours for $1100 ALBUM
1887-S $5 Liberty MS61 CAC - Price Guide is $765, take it for $720 $700. Old Fatty Holder ALBUM
1851 G$1 MS63 - $600. Marvelous coin in OGH ALBUM
1843 $5 Liberty - $650. Survival estimate is 350 across all grades. I think this an XF coin - ALBUM
SLABBED MORGANS ALBUM 1
1878-S $1 Morgan MS63 - $145 $135 beautiful blast white coin
1879-S $1 Morgan MS64 - $110 $100. Blast white, beautiful coin
1879-S $1 Morgan MS65 - $185
1881-S $1 Morgan MS64+ - $125
1880-S $1 Morgan MS65 - $190 $185. Some color, semi-PL surfaces
1881-O $1 Morgan MS63 NGC - cool crescent rainbow rim on reverse, $110
SOLD 1881-O $1 Morgan MS64 - ~~$170 $160. Great blast white coin~~
1882-S $1 Morgan MS65 - $185
1883-S $1 Morgan AU55 - $450 $430. Very attractive example of a semi-key date
1883-O $1 Morgan MS65 - $185
SLABBED MORGANS ALBUM 2
1883-CC $1 Morgan MS63 - $330 $320. Vertical scratch on the slab. Not too bad but noticeable but very nice coin though ALBUM
1884-O $1 Morgan NGC MS65 - $190 $185
1888 $1 Morgan MS65 CAC - $300 $290. Beautiful coin in OGH holder
SOLD 1888-O $1 MORGAN MS63 - ~~$95 $90~~
1889 $1 Morgan MS62 - $65. OGH
1891 $1 Morgan MS61 - $95 $90 (better date)
1896 $1 Morgan MS64 - $125 very interesting toning pattern on obverse, fully toned reverse - ALBUM
1903 $1 Morgan MS64 CAC - $300 $290. Better date coin in old fatty holder, some toning
1904-O $1 Morgan NGC MS65 - $190 $185
1921 Morgan MS62 - $60. Old Fatty Holder PICTURES
Shipping at cost - First Class starts at $3.50, Priority at $8.50. If you would like insurance (Cost is $1 per $100 of value of the package) or signature (+$2.50) this will be extra. Please let me know if you want any of these extra services. I pack safely and discretely, and ship fast. All paid for purchases will be on their way NEXT BUSINESS DAY. I don't use VENMO Payment via PPFF (Sorry, I do not accept G&S payments anymore), CashApp, Zelle or Google Pay. USPS money order is cool too.