Jolly niger bank

Everyone needs a 6IV Ditto :)

2014.04.05 11:28 Everyone needs a 6IV Ditto :)

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2014.03.10 20:45 dijondog DittoGiveaway - Ditto is Love! 6IV & 0 Speed Ditto Giveaways!

#Welcome to /DittoGiveaway! DittoGiveaway is a subreddit focused on hosting giveaways for breeding Dittos: 6IV 0 Speed 0 Attack. **GEN 8 Pokemon Sword & Shield!** Please read our subreddit rules and wiki before posting. *Send a Modmail if you would like to host a Ditto Giveaway.*
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2013.05.02 23:38 hazyanlazy Pictures of people from the reddit community from around the world

Post a picture of yourself and or your friends, family, pets then say in the title of your post the country you are from or living/staying/visting and we can try to get one from every country in the world!
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2024.05.21 03:33 J-Chapman Old News – Mob Murder at Doherty Hotel

Old News – Mob Murder at Doherty Hotel
Clare Sentinel 1938-05-20
ISAIAH LEEBOVE SHOT AND KILLED HERE SATURDAY EVENING
JACK LIVINGSTON, OIL PROMOTER HELD IN CLARE COUNTY JAIL TO ANSWER CHARGES OF MURDER
Byron Geller, Clare Attorney, Also Suffers Wounds from Same Gun
Shooting Affray Takes Place in Grill Room of Hotel Doherty
https://preview.redd.it/ltshe0ldbo1d1.jpg?width=2178&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7e3f0c339a91ece65d1dd9be86ef77b00488d739
The city of Clare and community was thrown into a stage of excitement last Saturday night when it became known that Isaiah Leebove, 42, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Mammoth Producing and Refining Corporation of this city, had been shot and killed and Attorney Byron Geller had suffered two bullet wounds in the left thigh at the hands of Jack Livingston, 45, also an oil promoter, who has made his home occasionally at the hotel for the past eight years.
The shooting affray took place in the grill room of Hotel Doherty at 10:15 o’clock. Mr. and Mrs. Geller had taken a seat opposite each other at a table in a booth at the west side of the room. A few minutes later Mr. Leebove and his nephew, Sam Braunstein, entered and shared the booth with them. At this time Mr. Livingston who was sitting at a table with a Mr. and Mrs. Marr near the center of the room, excused himself and left. A short time later he returned and resumed his seat. In the course of a few minutes he again left his chair and stepping quickly to the booth occupied by the four people fired three shots in succession at Leebove.
One of the bullets passed through Leebove’s left arm into his chest, piercing a rib, into his heart and completely through the body. Another passed through his left forearm and through the fleshy portion between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It is thought that it was this bullet that entered Mr. Geller’s thigh, glazing the pelvis bone. The third bullet is thought to have inflicted the flesh wound in the upper part of Mr. Geller’s leg.
With the words “Jack! Jack!—why”, Mr. Leebove fell from his seat to the floor and died instantly. At this point Mr. Braunstein jumped to his feet and grabbed Livingston's arms and held them up so as to prevent more damage at the same time forcing him toward the door of the lobby. Here Livingston turned the butt of the gun away from him and handed same to Harry Wehrly, assistant manager of the hotel.
During this time Mr. Geller had dropped to the floor and crawled on his hands and knees to the south side of the room and several minutes elapsed before it was discovered he had been injured. After his wounds had been examined, he was rushed to the Clare County General Hospital where late reports are to the effect that he is recovering nicely.
After being taken to his room by bellhop Stanley Parish, Livingston's first request was that he send his father a telegram and it was during the wording of this that Chief of Police William Dunlop came in and made the arrest, which Livingston talked calmly and without regret as to his act. When informed that he had also wounded Mr. Geller he stated that he was sorry, that he considered Mr. Geller his friend and would not harm him for the world.
Accompanied by Mayor Dunlop, the Chief of Police ushered Livingston to the rear of the hotel where Sheriff George Bates, his deputy Robert Caster and state police took charge of the prisoner and rushed him to the county jail at Harrison.
Coroner A. N. Friz removed the body of Mr. Leebove to his undertaking rooms and impaneled a jury consisting of Wallace Johnson, John Kesckman, Paul Koch, Leo Brown, Frank Irwin and Alex McKinnon for an inquest that was held in the auditorium of the city hall Monday forenoon. Eight witnesses were summoned, but only two were heard, Mrs. Byron Geller and Dr. B. J. Sanford, who with Dr. F. G. Slattery performed the autopsy Sunday forenoon. After being out nearly three-quarters of an hour, the jury returned with a verdict of “Isaiah Leebove died as the result of a gunshot wound which pierced the heart.”
Mr. Leebove's body laid in state in the Doherty Funeral Home for a brief period Sunday evening and was then taken by funeral car to Pittsburg for the funeral services and interment on Tuesday. Samuel Garfield and C. W. Clark attended the rites and acted as pallbearers.
Mrs. Leebove, wife of the slain man, was driven to Mt. Pleasant Monday morning, where she boarded the private planed of Walter L. McClanahan for the flight to Pittsburgh, Pa.
Acquaintances of Leebove and Livingston state that trouble has been brewing between the two men since they severed business connections several years ago. Livingston has maintained a room at the hotel buying and selling oil leases. He was a jolly nature and delighted in practical jokes. Both men have many friends in Clare and throughout central Michigan.
Attorney Byron Geller, former reporter for a Detroit newspaper, and twice assistant attorney general, came to Clare about April 1st and entered private practice in the offices vacated by Attorney Theo. G. Bowler. About three weeks ago he was united in marriage to Miss Elizabeth Geller, of this city, who is almost constantly at his bedside. During his short stay here he has made many friends who join in wishing him a speedy recovery.
Samuel A. Braunstein was born in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he attended school. He was graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1928, and was connected with a prominent Pittsburgh investment company until 1934, when he came to Clare as office manager for the Mammoth Petroleum Corporation. He is at the present time Vice President of the Mammoth Producing and Refining Corporation. During his residence here he has won many friends and is admired for his efficient business methods.
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Isaiah Leebove was born in Pittsburgh, November 27, 1894, where he received his primary and high school education. He was graduated from the law school of Cumberland University, Lebanon, Tenn., and was admitted to the bar by the Texas Supreme Court, July 3, 1916.
Mr. Leebove practiced law in Texas and Oklahoma until November 20, 1921, when he moved to New York City. He was admitted to the New York bar June 7, 1922, and among the numerous endorsements was one from Associate Justice William Pierson of the Supreme Court of Texas. He was also endorsed by Louis H. Solomon, a prominent New York attorney, who had retained Mr. Leebove as counsel while investigating oil properties in Oklahoma.
The high class recommendations given Mr. Leebove by prominent attorneys who had known him intimately, have him entry into the leading circles of his profession, and he entered into partnership with a prominent law firm having offices on Fifth Avenue. He never severed his connections with this firm and has often been called to the city for purposes of consultation and advice.
Mr. Leebove's contact with the oil industry in the west gave him an intimate insight into that business and he came to Michigan during the early days of the oil development in this section. He interested himself in some of the drilling projects in the wildcat territory to the north of Clare and also in the proven field in Vernon, located four miles to the south of the city.
Several years ago Mr. Leebove purchased the home of Walter Pettit, known as “Wildwood,” and he has added to the bungalow until it has become one of the finest of modern residences in this section of the state. Improvements were under way on this property at the time of his death. The original ten acres that he purchased has been landscaped and improved and is a show place of this section.
He purchased addition acreage and there is a game preserve on the property that is well stocked with all kinds of native wildlife.
Mr. Leebove has been very successful in his business and the Mammoth Producing and Refining Corporation, which he organized and of which he has always been the directing head, is the largest independent producer east of the Mississippi River. The company occupies for its offices the entire second floor of the Citizens State Bank building.
Last December, Mr. Leebove purchased the Clare County Savings Bank building and up until the time of his death had not revealed his plans in this investment.
Mr. Leebove had always been affiliated with the Democratic Party but his public activities in politics were limited to the campaigns of former Governor William A. Comstock, whom he regarded as one of his best and nearest friends. He often expressed himself to his friends as being entirely uninterested in any office or political position.
Mr. Leebove was quiet and unassuming in his appearance and manner and made few close associates. He kept his own counsel and was loath to giving out information of his business affairs.
He was interested in the welfare of the community in which he made his home and contributed generously to all civic programs and undertakings.
Mr. Leebove gave much to charity but never advertised the fact and would not permit any publicity of his gifts. Last Christmas, Mr. and Mrs. Leebove gave hundreds of dollars in clothing and food to needy families and children of this community.
In the death of Isaiah Leebove, this city has lost one of its most loyal supporters. The esteem and respect in which he was held in this city was shown about two years ago when some interests in the state assailed his reputation and a special meeting of the City Council was held and a resolution expressing confidence in his honesty and public-spiritedness was unanimously adopted by that body.
The body laid in state in the Doherty Funeral Home for a brief period Sunday evening and was then taken by funeral car to Pittsburgh for the funeral services and interment.

submitted by J-Chapman to Clare_MI [link] [comments]


2024.05.21 01:29 Kaenu_Reeves Empty Continents: Outer Banks Turned Pirates

This is a loosely connected set of stories that are mostly to enhance the early periods of Empty Continents, specifically right after the Vanishing.
You see the full forum here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/empty-continents.553057/
Or a more easy-to-read version here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/empty-continents.553057/reade
On June 29th, 2028, an infamous deal would be made between the United States Provisional Government and the people of the Outer Banks.
Here is what it says:
“On this day forth, the people of the Outer Banks Republic, comprised of Hatteras and Ocracoke Island alongside the alliances of Roanoke Island and Bodie Island, will be acquired as a territory of the United States Provisional Government in exchange for one-fourth of all US navy ships being given to the Outer Banks islands for protection, alongside one-fourth of all future acquired ships.”
It was signed by Edward Tress, the leader of the Outer Banks Republic, and Collin Prancer, a young and naive government official. One look at this deal and it can be assumed that the USPG was majorly ripped off. A naval officer supposedly screamed at Collin Prancer for 10 minutes straight after learning about this deal.
However, it was not as bad for the USPG as it first seemed. It fueled their ever-growing desperation to take control of the East Coast as fast as humanly possible. Not only that, but it gave them a useful territory in the South, allowing them to finally eye the valuable Naval Air Base in Key West. With the large amount of new Naval ships, Edward Tress and James Stonn organized the Tress-Stonn Armada, better known as Blackbeard’s Boys.
They were undoubtedly a privateer force- they engaged in piracy and were directly given ships by the USPG. This proved to be extremely valuable (if not a bit controversial), as after the Vanishing, many cargo ships, both sailing and docked, were suddenly left with no destination. This made them easy pickings for pirates, and no pirate group in the Atlantic was more feared than Blackbeard’s Boys. They found undefended cargo and merchant ships, quickly hijacked them, took a big piece of the loot for themselves, and sent the rest to the USPG. The ships themselves were either reused as transport boats or salvaged for fuel and metal.
Over the years, Blackbeard’s Boys adopted various classical ideas of pirate culture. James Stonn created a set of pirate codes that were more egalitarian, Jolly Roger symbols were found on every boat, and sea shanties were common when sailing. However, some pirate stereotypes were not adopted- parrots were impossible to find, and burying treasure was usually seen as a stupid idea. Blackbeard’s Boys would also assist in the USPG’s battles against the Minutemen, gaining a reputation as ‘noble outlaws’.
submitted by Kaenu_Reeves to EmptyContinents [link] [comments]


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submitted by BigSignificant9501 to u/BigSignificant9501 [link] [comments]


2024.05.18 21:24 BigSignificant9501 The Best IPTV Provider this year

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submitted by BigSignificant9501 to Thebestvadvise [link] [comments]


2024.05.16 20:03 wroseto12 Pine Creek Trip Report - 5/13-5/14 2024 - Ansonia to Slate Run

If anyone is interested - I wrote a trip report from a recent trip a buddy and I did earlier this week. I highly recommend this trip if you’re in the area, it was well worth the 4 hour drive for us.
A co-worker and I from an outfitter down in Southeast PA decided to plan a trip to Ansonia, PA to Paddle Pine Creek. We planned the trip mostly out of the Keystone Canoeing book by Edward Gertler and information on the PA DCNR website. We originally planned to do a 2 night, 3 day trip. Pine Creek runs through a beautiful section of PA’s Grand Canyon, and is known for its beautiful views, good water, and amazing trout fishing. We met at our local outfitter at 6am to pick up our boats and get in the same car. By 6:30 we had our boats strapped down and our gear loaded and we hit the road. We stopped at wawa for sizzlis, energy drinks, nerd gummy clusters, and jolly ranchers which would serve as our road trip sustenance (we decided to eat super healthy this trip ;)). We had a 4 hour drive ahead of us which actually took a little bit longer since we stopped about halfway through for gas and a shit break. Aphex twin was the soundtrack of this road trip. At about 11am we rolled into the parking lot of Pine Creek Outfitters (PCO). Inside we were met with very helpful and knowledgeable staff, we also purchased a map there which ended up being super helpful as the maps we had from Keystone Canoeing weren't quite as detailed. The employees at PCO said the creek is pretty self explanatory but there's only one section we should be worried about which was Owassee rapid, they told us to just keep left and hug the bank. PCO directed us to a public canoe access no more than a quarter mile down the road where we would start our trip. We were on the water by noon and the views were not great at this point, as there was a large overcast and we were not quite in the depths of the . We had a quick flat paddle for about a mile or two until the water got going, and at about 12:30 we stopped to check the map. At this point we knew Owassee was coming up and we wanted to make sure we weren't surprised by it. The map noted that Owassee was preceded by a cabin with notable arches which we passed probably around 12:45. We pulled off towards the right side of the island at Owassee as PCO noted that the left side is known to have some killer strainers. We scouted Owassee for the next 15 minutes or so and crapped our pants. We were super nervous, this was the biggest water that either of us had run in a canoe before, let alone with all of our camping gear in our boat. The most daunting section of Owassee was a set of massive boulders to the right side of the channel which all of the water pushes you towards. Immediately following Owassee is a massive set of wave trains that I would (totally unprofessionally) eyeball to be 3-4 foot standing waves. Immediately preceding Owassee are a couple of flat boulders which are hard to see from the water so we were happy to scout and get a good look at it. I’d guess that at this water level Owassee was easily a Class 2+ or 3. We decided to take a line which stayed left pretty much the entire way until the big wave trains following Owassee where we could cut over to the right. At this point we headed back up to our boats to run it. It was a little sketchy, but not as bad as we thought it would be, a couple back paddles and keeping your bow pointed toward the island and you will be okay. The wave trains following Owassee were a little hectic, and we ended up taking on some water, especially me in my Heavy Old Town Discovery 168. We pulled off to the right after the Wave Trains to bail our boats and have a celebratory Miller Lite and Croissant (godly combo). We were in front of this awesome cabin called “Tiadaghton Lodge”, the cabin had a sweet foot bridge that crossed the river to allow for access to the cabin from the rail trail. At this point the sun had come out and we were officially in the heart of the PA Grand Canyon, the views were spectacular and it was just an overall phenomenal day outside. Once we were back on the water, we were super pleased with the flow. It was consistent Class 1’s with sprinkled Class 2’s pretty much for the rest of the day, it was a super enjoyable paddle and a pleasant challenge from the barely Class 1 water we were used to. We were now in the heart of the canyon and the views were just breathtaking, the vast canyon extending on either side of the creek really makes you feel small, and it was insane to think that this wildly different terrain was still in PA. The canyon was lined with awesome waterfalls that were really pleasing to see and hear along the way. Around probably 2 or 3 we stopped for a bathroom break and lunch. Up to this point we had only seen about 4 other people and none of them were on the river, 2 were riding horses and the rest were just hikers along the rail trail. By around 4pm we took a smaller channell to the right side of an island which turned out to be a good choice as we found an awesome little campsite here. We finished up clocking about 10 miles that day. There were two fire rings and a weird but cool table made by balancing a rock on top of a cut down tree stump, pretty cool. We spent the next hour or so setting up camp and then we relaxed in our hammocks until around 6 when we decided to make a fire and get dinner started. We struggled with starting a fire because of the rain that morning and the day before, but we got it started just enough to cook our food. I made Bombay Potatoes with Rice and some canned chicken and Owen (My coworker) made turkey sausages and canned tamales. We also made some warm fresh bread with some dough I had made when we got to camp. After eating we went into a food coma for a little until we decided to really make the fire big. We got it going probably for about an hour when we finished off all the miller lites we had brought. At this point we went to bed. I slept super well and was definitely warm enough despite only having a 50 degree bag, which is something I was worried about. I’m used to hammock camping, so having a tent was a super nice luxury to have. We woke up at about 7 or 8 am and took our morning nice and easy. We had planned to do an easy 15 miles this day and camp out at a campground in Cedar Run where we would try and figure out a ride back to our car. We took it easy, and ate instant oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and bacon spam along with instant coffee. It was an awesome breakfast although I could almost feel the heart attack from the spam. I definitely recommend Starbucks Via instant blonde roast for anyone looking for a good camping coffee option. I've been loving it so far, especially given that it's instant coffee. After breakfast we chilled in our hammocks by the water for about 15 minutes before we packed up camp and were back on the water by 10am. It was another beautiful day, atleast to start and the views were still just as stellar in the heart of the gorge. We had another nice stretch of river to start. We passed an awesome waterfall which I can’t remember the name of almost right after we left camp. We pulled over at about 11am to pee, make coffee and filter some more water. We pulled off next to this awesome waterfall that I used to wash some of my dishes from earlier and collect water that I could filter later on. We paddled for another 30 minutes or so until we saw a bald eagle chilling in a tree overhanging the creek. We stopped paddling and took out our phones to get some awesome videos of it. The eagle took off and flew around us and then up river with the crows in tail. It was an awesome experience. At this point the water chilled out for the most part, besides one more notable rapid called thread the needle, it was a super fun little bend and reminded me of a rapid back home. About an hour after this, the overcast came back and the wind really started to pick up. At this point the grand views from the gorge really seem to chill out as we started to enter civilization again. We passed the town of Blackwell and a nice little campground on our left side, there was a nice little canoe access there with some people hanging out and fishing. This would have been a good spot to end the trip if you just wanted to see the gorge. After Blackwell we passed Rattlesnake Rock where we saw some Mennonites hanging out and we asked them for some of the lore on the rock. They said that it was named by loggers back in the day when they found a ton of Rattlesnakes on it. The rest of the way was pretty mediocre water and we really ended up fighting the wind. We also passed a kayaker here who said that slate run (where we planned to get out) was only about an hour away. He ended up being wrong as it was about two hours but we paddled on, deciding to end the trip a day early and drive home that night. There were two more notable rapids before getting to slate run, one which must've been a Class 3 was notable due to the MASSIVE wave trains and a huge boulder hidden behind a standing wave, it must’ve been 4 foot standing waves we paddled through. The second was right before slate run, right next to a campground. Massive wave trains which swept you towards these massive undercut rocks which were super sketchy. These rapids were fairly easy to navigate as you can kind of avoid them altogether and were most likely larger than usual due to the rain the days before. We pulled into Slate Run at about 2pm. A local informed us that Slate Run is one of the best spots for trout fishing in the entire country, there was even a hotel basically just for trout fishermen across the creek from the We had no plan for a ride back to our care so we talked to some people at the Slate Run access asking for a ride. We also went up to the general store to ask some employees there. We got ice cream which was fantastic and then called PCO for a ride back. They weren't too happy with us as they usually require a reservation for their shuttle service and were getting ready to head home for the day, but they nonetheless gave us a ride. We made some coffee and instant ramen while waiting for the shuttle to arrive. Our shuttle driver was super nice and helpful and even took us the long way back to show us this cute little town of Wellsboro. She even offered us jobs in exchange for cheap NRS gear after seeing how easily we threw our boats around. She also showed us the way to get to an awesome lookout over the whole canyon. Overall I highly recommend PCO for any trips and if we ever come back will definitely be using them again, awesome people. After getting the car and boats loaded up, we headed up the canyon to checkout the canyon from the top. It was breathtaking, and a super cool and different perspective from what we saw from the water. After leaving the overlook we headed home. Stopping at Mcdonalds for some food along the way, and we rolled into the parking lot at about 11pm. Overall this was an awesome trip and highly recommended for anyone looking for awesome water, amazing views, or great camping. We will definitely be coming back.
submitted by wroseto12 to canoecamping [link] [comments]


2024.05.16 19:04 BigSignificant9501 Euro championship 2024 is coming, don t miss it

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submitted by BigSignificant9501 to Thebestvadvise [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 11:16 VictyLusi [H] Gen (1-8) RNGs, BDSP Legends/Eggs RNGs, (Shiny) SV/SWSH Pokémon/Breeding, Shiny Manaphy, RNGed Dittos, Shiny Jirachi, XD/Colo RNGs and Ribbon services, Vivillons, Items, Code redemptions, and Shiny GO Lgnd/Myth. More inside [W] PayPal

[svirtual]

FT
(Maybe some of the Pokémon won’t be available at the moment) Shiny Celebi 12€, Shiny Meltan 25€, Shiny Melmetal 20€, Shiny Genesect 6IVs (No PoGO Sticker) 35€. Shiny Zapdos, Moltres, Articuno, Entei, Raikou, Lugia, Groudon, Giratina, Reshiram, and Kyurem are available for 7€ each. Shiny Azelf 10€, Shiny Uxie 15€. Darkrai and Deoxys (Normal, Attack, Defense or Speed) 10€ each, Shiny Deoxys (Normal, Attack or Defense) and Shiny Darkray 20€. Shiny PokéBall Latias Lv 11, Shiny PokéBall Latios Lv. 8 35€. Zarude 30€ and Shiny Mew 60€ (Fixed OT)
I also have self-obtained regular PoGO Darkrais. 5€























*Using Moving Key HOME copies PkBank data. As I have Dex completed you will register all of them even if I transfer only 1 Pokémon. That works to get Original Color Magearna (Just Gen 8-9 Pokémon left) Also Forms and Shiny will be registered too. (No Shiny Locked Pokémon entries anymore, I fixed that)


-Custom OT/Lang Playthrough (6€ Base/DLC1, 10€ Base + DLC1, 12€ Base + DLC2 Paradox, 15€ Base + both DLCs). If you want all Legends from the game (DLCs included) price would be 25€ in total (28€ with Pecharunt*) *I will use 2 different saves because completing Pokedex would be easier in a CFW switch for Ursaluna BM/Paradox but I cannot use Online so the Mythical Pecha Berry and Pecharunt have to be caught in another Switch
-Miraidon/Koraidon 5€ (Custom OT Playthrough). Training service included. Treasures of Ruin are 1€ each, 2,5€ if both specific IVs and Ball.
-Ogerpon, Okidogi, Fezandipiti, Munkidori and BM Ursaluna. 4€ each (15€ in total if you want them all)
-Terapagos, Iron Crown/ Iron Boulder or Raging Bolt/Gouging Fire. 5€ each (12€ in total if you want them all from 1 specific version)
-5IVs, -SpAtk, 6IVs, 5IVs 0Atk, 5IVs 0Spe SPA/JP Dittos. 1-4€ each
-Training: Level, Nature (Mint), IVs (Bottle Caps), EVs, TM/EM Moves, and Tera Type change. 0,5€ each
-Shiny Breeding: Ball, IVs (4-5), EMs, and Nature. You can request Pokémon as Shiny Eggs. 5€ each (If you ask more than 3 the price would have a discount)
-Shiny Paradox Pokémon: Ball (Training service included). 6€ each (3€ if you ask for more than 3)
-Vivillon services. I can get any Pattern but the most plenty I have are Marine, Sun, Jungle, High Plains, and Continental. We can use Union Circle so you can catch them yourself (as many as you want). 3€ each Pattern. For Shiny ones, the service is only available if they are caught by myself, not in online UC mode but I can do custom OT services (4€ each)


-BDSP custom OT/Lang playthrough 6€
-Normal Legends: 2€ Each (Nature and 3-4IVs), 6€ (Nature + 5-6IVs)
-Shiny Legends: 6€ Each (Nature and 3-4IVs), 12€ (Nature + 5IVs)
-Shiny Arceus 10€ (Nature and 3-4IVs), 14€ (Nature + 5IVs)
*If you buy more than one Legend, the price will be cheaper (Less 5IVs ones)*
-Shiny Perfect Eggs 2€, Normal Perfect Eggs 0,5€


-ID 017759: Safari Ball Jolteon, Ultra Ball Drifblim, Premier Ball Diggersby. Master Orbeetle, Dive Ball Ditto, Luxury GMax HA Charizard (Level 50 & 80), Safari GMax HA Venusaur(Level 50), Friend GMax HA Venusaur(Level 80), Dream GMax HA Blastoise (Level 50) and Master GMax HA Blastoise (Level 80)
-ID 220961 Star Shiny: Poke Ball Skuntank, Poke Ball Glalie, Ultra Ball Galvantula, Heal Ball Clefable. Star Shiny Dream GMax HA Blastoise (Level 80)
-Star Shiny Poké Ball Linoone OT Asce ID 875609

-Zacian/Zamazenta customized (Ball, Nature(Mint), IVs(Bottle Cap), TAG and OT) 4€
-Kubfu/Urshifu customized (Nature (Mint), IVs (Bottle Cap), TAG and OT) 4€
-Crown Tundra Legends: Calyrex, Spectrier, Glastrier, Swords of Justice, Keldeo, Dynamax Adventure Legends; 5-6€. Regis, Galar Birds, Cosmog; 2-4€. Customized (Ball, Nature(Mint), IVs(Bottle Cap), TAG and OT).
Ready 3€: Jolly Master Ball Zacian OT Lusi ID 551981, Quirky Master Ball Calyrex OT Lusi ID 871386, Hardy Poké Ball Calyrex OT Lusi ID 098775, Bashful Heavy Ball Calyrex OT Lusi ID 972832 and Dream Ball Rash Eternatus OT Shield ID 909190.



“Any Pokémon from Gen3-7 would be traded through PkBank, HOME, Switch or Files”


-WISHMKR Jirachi 7€ Normal/12€ Star Shiny
-CHANNEL Jirachi 12€ Normal/14€ Star Shiny/16€ Square Shiny
-JP Ageto Celebi 9€ Random/15€ with Nature






-You can ask for Shiny, any IVs Spread, any Nature, custom OT, and Language Tag (Playthrough price not included)
-Tags already available: SPA-JPN, OT LUSI- Lusi


-I can breed all Vivillon Patterns less than 3 due to I created a new save file with the Region of my PAL DS changed. The only ones I can’t breed are Elegant because it is only for Japanese DS Regions and Modern/Savanna because they are for American DS Regions.


Spreadsheet with all FT and Prices:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uR9jqdMsJmfI69z05oj1XFrKhuScdrqe2yh4bY7_8lQ/edit?usp=drive_link
[ref]https://www.reddit.com/pokemonexchangeref/comments/hruzjp/uvictylusi\_exchange\_reference/
submitted by VictyLusi to Pokemonexchange [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 01:48 IBrokeTheTV From banking to international finance ??

Career Crossroads: From Banking to Global Finance
I'm 22, just out of a decent university, but my grades weren't the top (3.0 gpa). For the past two years, I've been putting in around 25 hours a week at a small bank branch since my sophomore year. They've given me a bunch of important tasks like scheduling appointments and handling financial transactions, wires, accounts, safety deposit boxes, etc. I think I'm pretty good at what I do, and I pick things up quickly. People say I'm personable and great with clients. But I'll admit, I struggle with staying organized, and motivation can be a challenge sometimes.
Now I'm at a bit of a crossroads – deciding whether to stick with my part-time role at the bank or take on a full-time teller position. However, what I'm really passionate about is working in the international finance scene! I'm fluent in English and French, and I'm working on my Spanish because I have a real passion for languages. I have the legal right to work in the EU, which is where I'd like to start. But I'm also eyeing opportunities in growing African countries like Niger, Rwanda, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Does anyone have any advice on how I can make this transition? Whether it's specific roles, companies, or licenses, I'm open to any suggestions that could help me chase my ambitions. Thanks in advance !!
submitted by IBrokeTheTV to jobs [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 00:41 IBrokeTheTV Career Crossroads: From Banking to Global Finance

I'm 22, just out of a decent university, but my grades weren't the top (3.0 gpa). For the past two years, I've been putting in around 25 hours a week at a small bank branch since my sophomore year. They've given me a bunch of important tasks like scheduling appointments and handling financial transactions, wires, accounts, safety deposit boxes, etc. I think I'm pretty good at what I do, and I pick things up quickly. People say I'm personable and great with clients. But I'll admit, I struggle with staying organized, and motivation can be a challenge sometimes.
Now I'm at a bit of a crossroads – deciding whether to stick with my part-time role at the bank or take on a full-time teller position. However, what I'm really passionate about is working in the international finance scene! I'm fluent in English and French, and I'm working on my Spanish because I have a real passion for languages. I have the legal right to work in the EU, which is where I'd like to start. But I'm also eyeing opportunities in growing African countries like Niger, Rwanda, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Does anyone have any advice on how I can make this transition? Whether it's specific roles, companies, or licenses, I'm open to any suggestions that could help me chase my ambitions. Thanks in advance !!
submitted by IBrokeTheTV to FinancialCareers [link] [comments]


2024.05.12 16:15 PoisonedWhispers [Part 2] An analysis of the behaviour that leads to misinformation on the subreddit and in general; methods to curb this; and other malarkey.

The Short Version can be found here.

Part 1 can be found here.

Example 5 - There's more to a BBC YouTube title

Returning to this dastardly subreddit, for my next example, points 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 are relevant. OP provided a screenshot of a BBC YouTube title, stating: "Israeli hit squad dressed as doctors kill Palestinians in hospital." Per point 2, by failing to immediately link to the video, or immediately mention what the video contains, folk could come away with the conclusion that the BBC never reports that these were militants. In other words, some might believe that the misreporting here extends past the video title, when it does not, and this could be avoided by providing salient details sooner rather than later. This submission was made during the temporary ban, and I thought it was interesting enough as a case study to come back to.

Example 6 - Oxfam's full position

For this submission/meme, points 1, 2, and 6 are relevant. I saw that we weren’t going to get good-faith engagement with the entirety of Oxfam’s position here on why they initially opposed airdrops, and I attempted to outline the full extent of their views so that it can be critiqued appropriately. This meme is not too dissimilar from some Twitter leftist fixating on one short clip of Destiny during one of his heated gamer moments; his actual positions aren’t being engaged with, and it’s intellectually dull. There’s more to Destiny’s positions than a twenty-second clip; there’s more to Oxfam’s position than the one tweet. The fact of the matter is that there’s a long series of tweets here, and while the tweet OP chose to highlight is risible, is dumb, and is insufferable, we are more than capable on this subreddit in being more nuanced and fair when it comes to our criticism.
As I highlight, there were some concerns here that were not entirely unreasonable. At the time of my comment, there weren’t yet any reports on injuries due to airdrops. These reports appeared in the following days and weeks, where Gazans were killed when a parachute in an airdrop failed to deploy, and some drowned in their attempts to retrieve parcels that landed in the sea. Retrospectively, I wouldn't say that aid should not have been airdropped merely because it would result in these deaths, but a fair assessment of Oxfam here at the time should have taken these concerns into account.
Oxfam’s associate director also endorses a Twitter thread where some prescriptions are given on how ought this aid delivery be facilitated. He recommends that the Gaza port be reopened, and to open more crossings. The Biden administration recognized that airdrops would not sufficiently alleviate the problem of being unable to get sufficient quantities of aid distributed, and while the port was not reopened, Biden did announce that a temporary port would be built. Further, Israel approved the reopening of the Erez crossing.
The misinformation in OP’s post stems from the fact that folk will be disinterested in reading the twitter thread or any additional threads where they might have elaborated on views. Out of the thousands that interact with the post, a significant chunk will come away with the incorrect belief that Oxfam’s opposition to airdrops was merely due to what was stated in the meme. That is misinformation being propagated — not the most egregious, Hamas-esqe level of misinformation in the world, but misinformation nonetheless.

Example 7 - NYT: Bananas, or Cool as a Cucumber?

For our final example points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are relevant; it’s the whole shebang. To give a quick recounting here, Hobbitfollower isn’t the only masochist that might, occasionally, choose to exclusively sort by new. When I saw the submission, I read the article, and I was a bit annoyed that the Jerusalem Post article doesn’t even link to the mission report that I was interested in reading. I searched for it, posted a link to the report in the very first comment of the thread as surely my fellow dggas would also like to read the report, and then I, well, read the report.
When I returned back to the thread, I quoted favourably from the mission report to support another individual's comment. (I would again quote from it in another thread the next day to highlight why Israel struggled to acquire forensic evidence.)
But as I scrolled down the thread I came across the subject of our example; 50 upvotes, no article linked, and clearly a charged comment. Consider the steps involved to truly engage with this comment; one would need to:
  • Click and read the article.
  • Search for the mission report.
  • Read the mission report (as some folk probably won’t wanna read 20 pages right off the bat).
  • Search for the NYT article; bypass the paywall (which is trivially easy nowadays but is still a barrier, and people are lazy); and read the article.
This is a very charged thread: there are going to be a large group of pro-Israel folk browsing this thread, frustrated and irate as bad memories are invoked of all the times they’ve had to deal with or seen pro-Hamas folk engaging in rape denialism. In much the same way a leftist sub is not going to be interested in a dispassionate analysis of an Israeli strike with high civilian collateral damage, this sub — at times — will struggle to calmly assess the subject matter. An expected behaviour isn’t necessarily the correct behaviour — the actions we believe one ought to take.
When a misleading tweet goes viral, the damage has already been done, as a considerable amount of people won’t see the subsequent Community Notes that might be slapped on it. Likewise, some of the thousands who see OP’s highly upvoted comment will think, “Oh, this has a lot of upvotes, I guess it must be true. How horrible of the NYT to frame this as a both sides issue”, and thus misinformation has spread. This incorrect belief will mold their perceptions of the NYT. When they encounter more reporting by the NYT on I-P in the future, they might even think back to this moment: “Ah, I remember when these bozos tried to say that the Israeli accusations were the same as the Palestinian accusations.”
I also referred to OP’s comment as disinformation. In every example discussed so far, I don't assume malicious intent. I just begin with the foundation that a mistake was made, and I don’t enmesh myself by throwing out accusations of lying. In this case, however, OP has indirectly acknowledged that I was correct, but they still haven’t bothered to edit their original comment. Once again, this comment is a really good example of point 1. I obviously also disagree with their conclusion, and the process by which they’re arriving at their conclusion is still very flawed — and other people are simply going to adopt their conclusion while not even attempting to reach there by their own independent assessment. If you see someone quote from an article, and they don’t even link it, and the comment is very charged, I would encourage y’all to seek out the article yourself; you may come away with a different interpretation.
I'm sure you've seen this meme before: "I'm just waiting for Destiny to comment on this so that I know what to think 😎." We meme about it, but there is, of course, an undercurrent of truth here, as we have confidence in Destiny's ability to research, and thus we feel comfortable adopting his beliefs and opinions. It's nice not having to do the research ourselves. Lazy fucks.
This applies to Reddit comments you see as well. Don't just adopt the conclusion of someone else because their beliefs align with yours and they're speaking with authority. Do the legwork yourself; be mindful of The Six Points; and you might find that someone on your own side is actually spreading misinformation, or is espousing an opinion that you disagree with.

Purgatory

I was perma-banned some time after my previous comment for a comment I made in a different thread. Before I get to that in the next fuck-me-who-knows-how-I'm-gonna-write-that-I'm-so-fucked section, I did want to bring up two final examples.

Example A - Haaretz and Amputations

For Example A, points 1, 3, 4, and 5 are relevant. Obviously, I can’t attempt point 6 because I was banned. Now, I actually agree with OP as I share their skepticism towards the notion that these amputations are “routine”, but referring to the article as a "fake story" is too strong, and, as always, their process here is flawed. The claims they make here about the Haaretz article and CNN article are misleading, but it is immediately upvoted because it feels right, particularly because the first reply just poisons the well. Haaretz did not speak to an anonymous person, they are reporting on a letter they have seen written by a doctor and sent to senior Israeli officials; the doctor did not justify the claim that the event is routine based on having seen only two amputations, that's merely the amputations they saw in the week they wrote the letter (but the phrasing here is ambiguous, as the doctor could be referring to the handcuff injuries as being the "routine" event); and the IDF did not confirm or deny all the claims, but gave a fairly standard, boilerplate response instead. The misleading claims in this comment was eventually addressed — and, as I’m sure you’re irritated by the repetition by now, the goal of this post is to turn this “eventually” into an “immediately.”

Example B - Wikipedia and Devious Editing

For Example B, points 1 and 5 are relevant. I want to be very careful with this one as I don't want to be misconstrued. Similar to the previous example, I mostly agree with their conclusion that these Wikipedia pages can be very flawed, and partisan editors can tarnish the objectivity that we wish could be maintained across all articles. However, you know the drill by now, point 1. There’s much to be said about the infamous “24-hour window” debacle, and I made a submission a while ago on this. I think there are parts of this story that both the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel crowd get wrong — but the latter is generally more correct, and I would agree with OP here that the information here is, at the very least, incomplete.
However, per point 5, the articles they are critiquing are not linked. How many people here actually sought out the two articles referenced here? As I’ve already demonstrated, we know how many misleading or false claims you can get away with before they’re finally addressed. A user in that thread made some edits to the contentious lines in question in the Wikipedia article. This was the Wikipedia article at the time OP’s comment was made. OP quotes this section:
Prior to the raids, Israel had called for the more than a million people living in the north half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate during a 24-hour window, while Hamas instructed those residents to stay put.
The two citations here are a Reuters article and a Politico article. The Politico article is arguably redundant, but it’s not being cited because it’s supposed to make a statement about a 24-hour window; it’s being cited to support the statement about Hamas:
Hamas is complicating the situation, urging residents to stay in their homes.
The Reuters article also mentions this:
“We tell the people of northern Gaza and from Gaza City, stay put in your homes, and your places," Eyad Al-Bozom, spokesman for the Hamas Interior Ministry, told a news conference.
Contrary to what OP said, both articles use the word “evacuation” at some point. The first part of the quote from the Wikipedia page is supported by this statement in the Reuters article:
On Friday Israel gave more than a million residents of the northern half of Gaza 24 hours to flee to the south to avoid an onslaught.
In a follow-up comment OP claims that the archived link, which pulled the earliest version of the Reuters article available, does not support the line. This seems to have been an error on the part of whoever chose this hyperlink. When the Wikipedia article first mentions calls for evacuation, this was how the Reuters article cited looked like at the time; regardless of the veracity of the claim, the article did support what the Wikipedia page mentions.
To reiterate, OP is completely correct about this pernicious problem with Wikipedia. It’s just that in this example, I don’t think it qualifies as a case of those darn pro-Palestine editors back at it again. The nuanced position here is pretty difficult to get to, and I don’t think the editors wrote this line in the interest of distorting the truth to serve their own side.
Example B.5: A better yet slightly flawed post on Wikipedia and Euro-Med Monitor
This post about how Hamas supporters are influencing Wikipedia does better in terms of substantiating their claims — but there are issues here that I would have loved to address, and there is a good critique on OP’s prescriptions that was buried at the bottom. Unfortunately, OP has been suspended from Reddit. If you’re reading this mate, call me 🥺.
There are a lot of hyperlinks in OP’s post (lol, sez fucking me), and it’s completely reasonable that someone won’t feel inclined to click every single one; that’s not an expectation I would ever demand. From going through the post, there are several small critiques I would have made (e.g., while I don’t believe the Mondo article should have been cited, OP claims that in the article, “The only people criticizing Wiesel here is the author of the opinion piece.” FWIW, the article does reference and cite a Haaretz article, and a Foreign policy article, both of which levy criticism against Wiesel), but I’m just going to focus on this line:
In fact, it is owned by a man named Ramy Abdu, who is a literal Hamas lobbyist.
If you’re going to call someone a literal Hamas lobbyist, that is definitely a link I’m clicking. What I know about Abdu is simply what I can assume about his beliefs from various tweets I’ve seen by him over the past several months; but I’ve never looked into their background other than being aware of their position at EMM. Upon opening the link I see… a 2013 article about Clare Short. From reading the article, it looks like OP missed some steps in outlining how they arrived at their conclusion, and I saw only a few people inquiring about this. To fill in the steps on what I presume OP wanted to say, from the article they linked:
Moshe Ya’alon, former IDF chief of staff, outlawed the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR) – a Belgian non-profit organisation that lobbies on behalf of the Hamas-led Gaza Government – using emergency defence regulations.
I haven’t looked into CEPR, and they obviously disputed the lobbying charge; I’m just going to take the claim at face-value. In 2011, Abdu was assistant director of the CEPR, and still held a position there for several years. They've since left the organization, but per point 1, if this is how OP arrived at the conclusion that Abdu is a “literal Hamas lobbyist”, I think it could use a bit more work, with additional clarification on what they mean by lobbyist here. I’m sure they can do it, it just happened to not be in this post.
I'm not going to harp on about point 5 here as I only apply that to incidents where a claim is made; one or two articles are linked; and then no one reads them, assuming the claim must be true as long as articles are provided. I would literally never make the prescription that if someone writes an effort-post, we must click every hyperlink to fact-check. I mean, it's not like I would have any other motivation for saying that... sweats profusely 🙄
Just to make one final point on EMM, it is a rubbish outlet, and any time I encounter one of their articles, I roll my eyes knowing I’m going to get some outlandish claim where I can find fuck-all for corroboration from other outlets. However, sometimes there is corroboration, where EMM was the first to notice that the IDF labelled a bicycle as an RPG in the drone footage they published, and then the NYT confirmed the finding (except for the other stupid claim made in the tweet.) But anyways, these moments are astronomically rare.

Example C - A Mysterious Royal Website (What a weaselly little --)

Okay, I lied, one final example as it’s interesting to see how people here parse articles and headlines, but before I address the example, let me talk about Reuters headlines.
Reuters headlines
They’re not always consistent on this front, but I generally like how Reuters writes their headlines. A Reuters headline will often contain the phrase “US says”. [30] [31] [32] What I’m expecting in the article when I see a headline containing this phrase is some official representing the Biden administration outlining what their particular policy, position, belief, etc., is on whatever the subject matter may be, or some action they took which makes it clear what their position is. In the given examples, we have statements from Biden, Blinken, the US military, and so on. Sometimes the US officials remain anonymous, sharing information in private briefings.
If there isn’t an official statement by the US available on a matter, the headline might use the phrase “source says” to talk about ongoing developments. [33] [34] “Reuters will use unnamed sources where necessary when they provide information of market or public interest that is not available on the record. We alone are responsible for the accuracy of such information.” [35]
Relevant to Example C, Reuters uses the same guidelines for “Saudi Arabia says” [36] [37] and “sources say” for information relevant to Saudi Arabia. [38]
Israeli outlets, A royal family website, and Saudi sources: An amusing chain of events
Keeping the previous section in mind, when I came across this version of a Jerusalem Post article posted to this subreddit, you can imagine what I’m expecting here — particularly because this would be momentous news to see Saudi Arabia make a public statement that they helped defend Israel. Instead, we get reporting on what Saudi Arabia’s royal family said on their website, and what a source connected to the Saudi royal family told KAN, another Israeli outlet — and we don’t get links to either of them. If there was no statement on the royal family’s website, this would have been a bad headline to write based on what this source said. Unfortunately for the JP, there is no official website for Saudi Arabia’s royal family. You’ll see in the current version, they remove the reference to that website, and also add the following line:
The Al Arabiya news site said sources had informed it that Saudi Arabia had not participated in the interception of Iranian drones and missiles.
Here’s the article by the Saudi state-owned outlet, which is essentially their mouthpiece to deny the ongoing report. I24news, however, didn’t get the memo:
Saudi Arabia publicly acknowledges role in defending Israel against Iranian attack
While Jordan had openly disclosed its role in the defensive maneuver, Saudi Arabia's acknowledgment came in the form of a summary on its official website
When I first saw the JP submission on this subreddit, I bookmarked it for later to come back to and find the sources, as it’s not the first time I’ve seen dubious reporting from KAN news. I was also curious if anyone in the thread was going to highlight some of the discrepancies in the article, and, well, shoutout to this keen reader! Fact-checking the JP article slipped my mind, but thanks to a comment I saw on another subreddit, they correctly pointed out that the website referenced was not affiliated with the Saudi royal family, and thus the article the JP and other Israeli outlets had presumably read should not have been taken as an official statement. Christ, this is obvious from the very first line:
A source from the Saudi royal family, who prefers anonymity, converses with the Kan public broadcaster. The individual subtly acknowledges Saudi Arabia’s supposed involvement in thwarting Iranian attack drones bound for Israel the previous evening, citing that Saudi Arabian airspace automatically intercepts “any suspicious entity”.
The same figure takes a swing at Iran, accusing them of instigating a conflict in Gaza. This, they suggest, is a deliberate attempt to unravel the progress established towards normalizing relations with Israel, as per Kan’s report.
In the words of the official, as put forth by Kan, “Iran is a nation that endorses terrorism, and the world should have curtailed it much earlier.”
Why would the official Saudi royal website use an anonymous source within the royal family to make their public announcement, and why would they quote what the official said to an Israeli outlet?!
It’s fascinating to see this play out: the supposed source spoke to Kan News; Houseofsaud presumably sees this and makes an article on the Kan segment; the JP sees this article and the segment, poorly reads it, and then cites it and the original Kan segment; outlets like the Daily Wire pick up on the story from the JP; and then on it goes, spreading like wildefire, before the Saudis take note (“oh fuck, oh fuck, where are these reports coming from?”) and disseminate a message denying that any “official” website publicly confirmed their involvement. The Saudis are involved, and they’re keeping tight-lipped about the extent of their involvement.
Just to quote one more line from the i24news article because it’s shockingly poor:
The post subtly hinted at Saudi Arabia's involvement in intercepting suspicious entities in its airspace, highlighting the kingdom's proactive stance in safeguarding regional stability.
This is written based on this line from the HouseofSaud article:
A source from the Saudi royal family, who prefers anonymity, converses with the Kan public broadcaster. The individual subtly acknowledges Saudi Arabia’s supposed involvement in thwarting Iranian attack drones bound for Israel the previous evening, citing that Saudi Arabian airspace automatically intercepts “any suspicious entity”.
It’s the individual/source who is being subtle, not the post itself as i24 news mentions.
Anyways, this is not a case of misinformation by the subreddit. There's nothing wrong with posting a JP article, and this is easily the least offensive Example, but point 5 is nicely relevant here. I thought y'all might find this to be interesting, particularly because some people probably still believe that Saudi Arabia has publicly acknowledged their involvement, and maybe that could be someone reading this section. It's also another example where, because I’m banned, I can’t offer a bit of nuance. stares intently at 4THOT
It’s a shame Destiny didn’t finish reading the article, I’m curious what he would have said. He speculates that the report was from intelligence or monitoring, but moves on before finishing the article; it’s also the updated version of the article, without the tidbit about the Saudi royal family website.

Finito

I'm going to close out this section here. There's always more to include, more examples that demonstrate the aforementioned points, but I'd rather focus on my own comments instead of threads where I was unable to contribute my thoughts. There's been a plethora of discourse here surrounding the campus protests, and maybe those are still ongoing if I manage to post this at a sooner date. For completely legitimate and fair justifications, all of these threads are going to be very charged; and maybe upon reading this post some of y'all might feel more inclined to analyze these situations dispassionately, mindful of cases where the reporting might not be the greatest.

Example D - A Late Fact-check (Still lying, dude!)

I fucking lied again, there’s more. Literally the day after I finished writing the above paragraph, a new example popped up that I can’t resist the temptation to include. Stop giving me material! As I spoke of above, the campus protests have resulted in a charged atmosphere on the subreddit, which means that this post stating that a “Jewish-Israeli family’s restaurant was targeted in a hate crime” is immediately catapulted to the front page. The biggest problem here is that, per point 2, the presentation of the post led folk to believe that this was a recent event because OP had omitted the date this took place, and this led to one user to thoughtfully suggest that it might be worth setting up a GoFundMe to help the owners with the repairs.
To reemphasize the point I’ve made throughout this post, I’m looking to incentivise better behaviour to occur sooner. It took nearly 10 hours before one jolly chap came along to do the fact-check. Naturally, had I seen this post while browsing arnew, I would have done the same, and so would a couple other users here as well who are good for this sort of thing — and that's unfortunate that I’m saying a “couple” instead of “many.” There is no curiosity amongst everyone who interacted with this post to inquire into the event; not even something simple as requesting OP for an article. So folks, always ask for a source if OP doesn’t provide one just so you have a bit more context. (Also, I am fascinated with the anecdote OP attached to this post. Did they just make up their credentials?)

Example E - Hebrew Sources and False Confidence

This is a wonderful example to close out this section because it exemplifies so many of the problematic behaviours that I have demonstrated in this post. I was only made aware of this thread because a user here DM'd me a link to the thread. I will refer to the individual posting misinformation in the comments as "OP", and I'll refer to the submitter of the post by their username, Sylmd. The rebuttals to OP are excellent, and I will focus more on the behaviour here.
Sylmd posted a submission doing a quick lil' fact-check on a Destiny tweet, noting the fact that he seemed to have misread or misremembered a particular report. I say "seemed" here in case Destiny was referring to some other report or article he had read, but that seems unlikely as he has referenced this report in several of his debates, and the report was the subject of his previous tweets. Regardless, it was a small mistake, and apart from failing to immediately link the tweet and the report (link your sources you silly goose), Sylmd's post is civil, calm, and makes no accusations of malicious intent.
According to OP, Destiny was actually right, and 300+ IDF soldiers were in fact injured. Now, there's so much that is astonishingly problematic with OP's comment, and I gotta... mention it all! Sorry!
Naturally, they don't ever quote from their sources, which means it's on us to try and find the relevant sections. OP claims that the articles linked will demonstrate that 380 Israelis were injured -- despite the fact that Sylmd is obviously doing a fact-check on how many Israeli soldiers were injured, and that's literally the subject of Destiny's tweet.
Whatever, I'm sure the articles at least "discusses around 380 injuries"? Fuck no they don't! There's no mention of this figure anywhere, and OP somehow racks up 50 upvotes when they accuse Sylmd of lying after they correctly point this out. Did these people actually read the articles, find this magical 380 figure, and think, "Grrr, Sylmd you mendacious scumbag, I see through your Hamas propaganda." Sylmd was sitting at -31, one hour after the thread was made. (If you refer back to Example 2, you'll see that I felt compelled to make a submission when I saw a user was being downvoted for correctly pointing out that an article did not prove a particular claim.)
It gets worse. Apparently, you have to "click through all the links in these articles buddy." Well, okay, that's pretty elaborate, how silly of us not to realize this. OP wants us to open up nine Hebrew articles, translate them, and then tally up the number of casualties. Problem? Surely we get to the 380 figure if we click through all the hyperlinks in the article? Fuck no we don't! And even if we did, this is the most blisteringly cumbersome way to prove a claim. The sheer condescension in OP's comment is equivalent to that of a Twitter leftist: "It's not my job to educate you honey, you must read the literature."
So where does this mysterious figure come from? Well, as Sylmd correctly pointed out (before OP mentioned it), they are grabbing this figure from Hebrew Wikipedia. Sylmd doesn't provide a link to the article in question, so I will provide it here, and as you can see, the two articles that OP linked came from this Wikipedia page. I'm not convinced OP actually read either of these articles.
That's not all. They then linked a report in Hebrew in their edit. Where did they get this report from? It's not on the Wikipedia page, maybe this is something they have bookmarked? Nope, they got it from another user in the thread! After all is said and done, they still somehow racked up 270 upvotes for this awful rebuttal, and they were, "Proud to take a blast for defending the truth."
Do I even need to mention the points here? It's an authoritative comment; the linked articles give an "aura" of being correct; and there's confidence in all their comments.
To quote from Example 1:
Anyways, since I began this post it looks like the upvotes and downvotes on the original comment have since shifted. Mashallah. It's the behaviour I was describing before: all the low-effort garbage gets upvoted first, and then other people break the circlejerk and try to add nuance. But it would be nice if the nuance was added first and foremost without the need for tedious fact-checks.
That still holds true today.

Consistency and Principles

Do I only address misinformation from the pro-Israel side? Not that it should matter, but no, I will address misinformation from the pro-Palestine on this subreddit if I see it and I feel like addressing it. I was irritated to see muppets like Rob Rousseau spread conspiracies about a "suspicious link" between ISIS and Mossad, and I encountered a user here who was sprouting similar conspiratorial nonsense. You’ll notice that (1) I was blessed to be called a “Reddit pseudo intellectual libtard” (not wrong, not false, this hurts bro); and (2) I apply the exact same methodology here as I do for the examples of misinformation I've addressed elsewhere — which isn’t to say I’m doing anything commendable here. I just read the articles, trying to find the primary sources where relevant, and then see if the “reporting” accurately conveys what was said or written.
However, digging up the original source can be a time-consuming endeavour, and compounded by the fact that I might not speak the relevant language — which means that there was a case where I inadvertently made a comment containing misinformation. A couple months ago someone requested a steelman of the argument that Israel is conducting a genocide against Gazans; I offered one, and to support the case I used a misquote taken from a Bloomberg video which omitted a crucial part of Yoev Gallant’s statement: the reference to Hamas, and thus radically changing the context of the statement. I hold myself to the same principle when it comes to curbing misinformation, and I was more than content to edit my comment to ensure it did not propagate further than it already had.
Some of you eagle-eyed readers might recognize this Gallant quote, as it made a very marked appearance within… South Africa's genocide case against Israel. Here, that salient reference to Hamas is also omitted, and the accompanying footnote cites the same Bloomberg video that I did. As I wished in another reply, Bloomberg did indeed take the video down eventually. Now, I can be excused for my mistake as I’m not making the positive case outside of my steelman. For South Africa, this is unbelievably shoddy work when you're officially bringing a genocide case against another state.
Anyways, I've gone through many examples in this schizo-post, and it's entirely possible that I've made an error at some point; the irony is not lost on me. Feel free to point these errors out. I might not agree with your assessment, but I'm always willing to hear the arguments.

Prescriptions: The Six Points (Déjà vu)

I'm going to end with The Six Points because that's the focus of Part 1 and Part 2. As previously mentioned, this post is not intended to demonstrate that the misinformation the pro-Israel crowd spreads is as egregious as the misinformation the pro-Palestine spreads, whether in general or on this subreddit. While misinformation from the pro-Palestine crowd slips by every now and then on the subreddit, I would make the case that, generally speaking, it is quickly addressed. In my experience, however, I was finding quite a few cases of misinformation from the pro-Israel crowd were taking a concerning amount of time to be addressed; and in the interest of ensuring that it does get addressed in a more timely manner, I believe the following prescriptions would be helpful to keep in mind when browsing the subreddit:
  1. Value the process just as much — if not, more — than the conclusion.
  2. Be wary of how the presentation of information or the omission of pertinent information can lead to the inadvertent spread of misinformation.
  3. Be aware of how “charged” topics/threads lead to poor reasoning that lacks dispassionate analysis.
  4. Be aware of how pre-existing beliefs about an individual or organization alongside the usual biases leads to a reluctance to fact-check, where claims are taken at face-value because they feel right.
  5. Link the article. Read the article. (Thoroughly.)
  6. Redirect criticism to areas where it will be the strongest.

Click here for Part 3. Warning: you might get stung by a bee 🐝

submitted by PoisonedWhispers to Destiny [link] [comments]


2024.05.11 18:11 Joshh170 Steam Starts Auto-Refunding Ghost of Tsushima

Steam Starts Auto-Refunding Ghost of Tsushima
Steam has started issuing automatic refunds to some of its users who pre-ordered Ghost of Tsushima. The move is a response to Sony's decision to shorten the list of markets in which it plans to sell the Ghost of Tsushima PC port.
This whole ordeal started with the recent Helldivers 2 drama over mandatory PlayStation Network account linking. Following significant fan backlash, Sony decided to drop the PSN account requirement for playing the PC version of the game, which it originally wanted to enforce retroactively, despite the fact that Helldivers 2 was being sold in over 100 countries not supported by its online service. But even before the company officially walked back on that decision, it had already started delisting Helldivers 2 from Steam in many regions lacking PSN support, which is a process that is still ongoing as of mid-May.
Steam Auto-Refunds for Ghost of Tsushima Started on May 10
The controversy has apparently affected Sony's future Steam publishing plans, as the Japanese gaming giant has already started delisting the Ghost of Tsushima PC version in select countries on May 10, less than a week ahead of its release, due to an identical PSN account requirement. Valve's response to that move arrived within hours, with the company now issuing refunds to people who pre-ordered the game before the publisher decided to delist it from their country. As reported by third-party tracker SteamDB, the current wave of refunds appears to be automatic, so anyone who pre-purchased the game from a delisted country can expect to get their money back soon, if they haven't already.
PC Gamers Unhappy With Mass Delisting of Ghost of Tsushima from Steam
Refunds or not, the move has already incurred significant criticism from fans, who were unpleasantly surprised by the fact that they wouldn't be able to buy the long-awaited PC version of Ghost of Tsushima. "This is one of the most anti-money moves I've ever seen a company make," wrote one user on Twitter.
Hundreds of other people shared similar negative sentiments in response to the mass delisting. Twitter user Kyren Cross also bemoaned the manner in which they had received their refund, stating that they got their money back in the form of a Steam Wallet top-up instead of having it returned to their bank account, which was used for pre-ordering the game.
Game Rant's review of public data available via the Steam API suggests that Ghost of Tsushima has so far been delisted from 180 countries on May 10. Around that time is when Sony also delisted the Steam version of Helldivers 2 from even more markets in yet another blow to PC gamers.
Ghost of Tsushima Steam Delisted Countries List
Afghanistan Aland Islands Albania Algeria American Samoa Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua and Barbuda Armenia Aruba Azerbaijan Bahamas Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bonaire/Sint Eustatius/Saba Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Bouvet Island British Indian Ocean Territory British Virgin Islands Brunei Darussalam Burkina Faso Burundi Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Comoros Congo Cook Islands Cuba Curaçao Côte d'Ivoire Democratic Republic of the Congo Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Dubai Egypt Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Faroe Islands Federated States of Micronesia Fiji French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon Gambia Georgia Ghana Gibraltar Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guernsey Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Heard and Mc Donald Islands Holy See (Vatican City State) Iran Iraq Isle of Man Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kyrgyzstan Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lesotho Liberia Libya Lithuania Macau Madagascar Malawi Maldives Mali Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands (Antilles) New Caledonia Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island North Korea North Macedonia Northern Mariana Islands Pakistan Palau Papua New Guinea Philippines Pitcairn Puerto Rico Republic of Moldova Rwanda Réunion Saint Barthélemy Saint Helena Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Martin Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Sint Maarten (Dutch part) Solomon Islands Somalia South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands South Sudan Sri Lanka State of Palestine Sudan Suriname Svalbard and Jan Mayen Syria Tajikistan Timor-Leste Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu U.S. Virgin Islands Uganda United Republic of Tanzania United States Minor Outlying Islands Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Viet Nam Wallis and Futuna Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe
submitted by Joshh170 to GameGeeks [link] [comments]


2024.05.11 14:31 pdkt Guess it had a different meaning in those days...

Guess it had a different meaning in those days... submitted by pdkt to funny [link] [comments]


2024.05.10 11:58 Tough-Train5991 Scammer alert. took 3 4⭐️s

Scammer alert. took 3 4⭐️s submitted by Tough-Train5991 to Monopoly_GO [link] [comments]


2024.05.10 03:31 Blake_S2k Officially got scammed for the first time, on Mercari of all places...

Officially got scammed for the first time, on Mercari of all places...
https://preview.redd.it/wfzqmnzg5izc1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f489caeba9a06a7c5c6a75e33b23fdf35ca2b0f7

*** JDily4201 = scammer ***

**UPDATE #1** - It took almost 20-22 hours for them to get back with me via their inquiry request form on their website. I provided tons of photo's, comments, and references to what I shipped vs what I got in return. They accepted my inquiry and fully refunded me minus the shipping charge lol BUT it was in the form of Mercari Credits aka, you must buy shit off Mercari.
**UPDATE #2** - Asked them if I could transfer the credit to a form of my payment method as I don't intend on using Mercari again and have no will to buy items off here at the moment either. They kindly transferred the credit to my balance and I was able to transfer it to my bank account.
**Final Comments** - This listing and item that I sold I was simply being nice and trying to help someone else out and let them enjoy a perfect Topre Keyboard, Although I had it listed for $299 I really had about $400 in it and another 10-12 hours of my own time meticulously going through it. This definitely makes me reevaluate some things but I simply just blame Mercari, they are still pretty new with what they are doing, it is a nice place to sell things considering their conditions but I do believe in due time they will be making drastic changes because of issues like this. If people continue to scam / forge fake accounts etc Mercari themselves will be losing a lot of money which will in turn force change. Thank you all for the kind words and comments.
Original starting story from this post:
Sold an immaculate / heavily modified Realforce R2 RGB Topre keyboard that was brand new but gone through and modified to sell so someone else could enjoy it.
I package everything immaculately for any and all orders, I spend a lot to just go the extra mile to have flawless deliveries for the buyer.
Anyway, the guy bought it, I messaged him to let them know I dropped it off the same day, after about 4-5 days it finally delivers and I wait another 1-2 days and they still have not sent me feedback so I kindly messaged them "Hey, hope everything arrived okay for you?" - Still no reply for another day or so and then I get a notification on my phone that someone wants to return an item. I go and try to message the guy only to see that he has me blocked.
I shit you not, instead of my huge box with my keyboard that's $300 it's a tiny ass envelope with literal trash in it. Some used kids candy thing, a Jolly Rancher, the LID to a Woodwick candle, a ball of aluminum foil and some type of McDonalds sauce lol. I legit laughed when I opened the package.
After reading tons of other people going through similar scenario's I don't have high hopes that anything will be done or made right on my end. If that's the case I'm simply just not going to use Mercari anymore. Things like this is going to catch up to them eventually if they do not have the sellers back.
I sent them an inquiry 5 minutes after I got the item with about 7-8 different pictures, the return label doesn't even have my name spelled correctly and the address is entirely wrong, it also does not have a tracking number on it. It looks like they edited it in Adobe. UPS ended up applying their stickers and information about forwarding the mail to me somehow. I sent this all to Mercari about 3-4 hours ago so we will see.
submitted by Blake_S2k to Mercari [link] [comments]


2024.05.08 18:44 NathanHarker_5408 The Death of Haruki Fujita by Nathan Harker: A Short Story

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.
submitted by NathanHarker_5408 to cosmichorror [link] [comments]


2024.05.08 18:41 NathanHarker_5408 The Death of Haruki Fujita

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.
submitted by NathanHarker_5408 to WeirdFictionWriters [link] [comments]


2024.05.06 16:00 First-Statement-3848 Why on earth is it called Jollyes?

I’ve never really noticed this pet store before. And at first I couldn’t believe it. “Jollyes”. Not “Jollye’s”. Not “Jollies”. Nope.
Joll-yes.
Why is it called this? Why did they decide that the pronunciation is “Jollies”? Why has my Bank Holiday been ruined?
submitted by First-Statement-3848 to AskUK [link] [comments]


2024.05.04 04:45 myninten-mythos [H]gen 7 etc event[W]PayPal

[svirtual]
Hello. Have a good trade!
Gen7 Unclaimed event will resume. I decided it would be better to trade them, except for the collection.
Trade FC and IGN for each Gen
Home/switch all event proof name:myninten-mythos
HOME event
Event
1.The receiving date is within the period from the start to the end of distribution.
  1. It's constantly being updated, but it's also on sale.(video proof)
  2. No save manager etc was used.(ALL Event)
  3. If you are interested in Language Tag or characteristic, please ask in the comments. Note: Language lock events are also received for other language save data.
◯SV Event
Serious.modest.Lonely.calm.
Lax.Modest. * JPN tag Snorlax プロカビ 240223 video self-redeemed 1 for $10
◯SWSH Event
List←Zarude dada zarude, Shiny Celebi, mythical22, Kibo Pikachu Lost video proof.
Mr.Mime,Ponyta,Meowth,Corsola
sold out tag:kor
※Due to inventory issues, there is only 1 set left for the $22 sale.
Lucario,Sirfetch'd,Gengar,Dragonite,Dracovish
sold out tag:kor
BDSP event
jpn.spa.
◯PLA event
Tag:JPN
Tag:JPN
Gen 7 Event
1.)Pokemon Bank→HOME moving key only.(Available until the end of Pokémon Bank service)**
. Language Tag and Met Date and Nature comment plz.
①lang tag: ②data: ③Nature:
PAL event
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e92nyBSIxmg-LN_8y1t7g2fn4J8_MuGjjvd38DK-3ps/edit?usp=drivesdk
Unclaimed Event
Tag:1xENG,1xFRA
Tag:JPN
Tag:ENG
lang tag: JPN ENG
Tag:CHS Note: The glare is terrible because the photo was taken outside.
Tag:JPN Crobat Mightyena Honchkrow Cofagrigus
stock Tag:JPN
Tag:JPN/ENG/CHS/CHT
Tag:JPN/ENG/CHS/CHT
Tag:JPN/ENG/CHS/CHT/FRA/SPA/GEITA
Tag:spa/geita/fra/chs/cht
Tag:JPN
Tag:JPN,ENG
Tag:FRA/GEITA/CHS/CHT/SPA
Tag:JPN,ENG
Tag:JPN ,ENG
Tag:JPN,ENG
Tag:JPN.ENG
Note:Payment method:Please in currency USD Only (Not JPY)
[Refences]([https://www.reddit.com/pokemonexchangeref/comments/a2u2s0/mynintenmythos\_reference/\]
submitted by myninten-mythos to Pokemonexchange [link] [comments]


2024.05.03 14:16 AbdoN2000 الذين يعترفون بالكيان الصهيوني كدولة. منهم دول عربية 😱

الذين يعترفون بالكيان الصهيوني كدولة. منهم دول عربية 😱 submitted by AbdoN2000 to SaudiForSaudis [link] [comments]


2024.05.03 14:04 Otherwise-Candle-987 En çok harcayanlar.

En çok harcayanlar. submitted by Otherwise-Candle-987 to veYakinEvren [link] [comments]


2024.05.03 06:58 heynishant Recognition of Israel by country

Recognition of Israel by country submitted by heynishant to MapPorn [link] [comments]


2024.05.02 05:06 DickiusButticus Cool Stuff on Marketplace

Cool Stuff on Marketplace
The title is obviously a joke but wtf man! If you look these things up it literally says the N word on the back. Not sure if it’s in all of them but it’s there. I would post the picture of what it says on the back but I don’t wanna break any rules.
submitted by DickiusButticus to TriCitiesWA [link] [comments]


http://rodzice.org/