Scary Monsters

A few years ago a thing was going around on the internet called Cicada 3301. It was a phenomenon that got all of us in college (com sci geeks that we are) really excited. It required the work of teams of people to get far with it and it was shady. No one knew what it was about. People all over the world were throwing ideas back and forth about who could be behind it. Most believed CIA or MI6. Other people assumed it was a religious group of some sort as a lot of the material involved that. Unfortunately, we heard about it late on and before we had hardly got interested it was over. Someone had solved the mystery and the whole thing went dark.

Similarly when I was a lot younger there was 2005 World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood Incident. World of Warcraft can't really be said to be a continuous MMO. Each expansion changed it in some fundamental way. However, at this point in the game it was version 1.12 (the original). Much of the game's core mechanics were flawed and this allowed for some very interesting things to be done (exploited). In 2005 a new dungeon was released called Zul'Gurub. It was a 15 person instance. Note the word: Instance. It was supposed to be self-contained space. It was NOT. Wonderful things happened as a result of this! Corrupted Blood was a Damage Over Time spell (DoT). It did considerable damage, somewhere around 1500. A person could only take a little over 3000 max at that time. After infecting one person it would go off and infect another. This caused quite the challenge for healers. All of this was fine and people learned to deal with it. That was... until someone's pet was infected. Rarely did healers pay any concern to a person's pet. One day someone, we don't know who, put their pet away in storage before leaving the instance. This was essentially the same as putting the pet away into a portable hole in DnD. When they took their pet out again... the world died. Literally. Hundreds of thousands of people died... This was so much like a real life plague that FEMA asked Blizzard if they wouldn't mind doing the event again. FEMA found the event much like their projections of how a real life plague would unfold. Blizzard declined...
If you lived through this event it was an amazing experience. Players had absolutely no idea what was going on. Most simply walked into a city and discovered people laying dead all over. Many others fled. Some had the disease. By the time it was all over NPCs and Players had the disease to such an extent Blizzard had to do a hard reset of the system going back to a point where the disease had never occurred in the first place. I remember watching hoards of people fleeing out of a teleport area that was NEVER used before then. Especially in such large numbers. They had no idea even what they were fleeing from. Some believe that another faction was invading. Some believed someone had trained world bosses into the capital cities. All anyone really knew was that people were dying.
And it got really spooky when instant messages stopped working. I was part of a large healer outsourcing guild. We had people all over the world, but one by one we started losing contact with them. This was before the age of voice chat and a lot of people weren't so coordinated as to use instant messaging outside the game. So literally, what was happening in the game was the only way to know. And what we knew was that half our guild had simply gone missing. They weren't answering messages and that was eerie. This went on for about six hours.
The Horde (I was Alliance then) - one of two major factions that didn't share the same language ( couldn't understand each other's text) - assumed we had done this to them. We assumed the Horde had done this to us. One of two continents had gone completely off the grid. Anyone that went there vanished. No messages. No warning. Gone.
Blizzard had turned off the other continent to try to isolate the plague on our server. We didn't know that. However, both Horde and Alliance had slowly figured out we were too disorganized to be doing any attacking. We used tricks in the system's flawed text filter to code what we were trying and not trying to do over to Horde players and vice versa. Eventually we both came to the conclusion that we should band together, take a region, cut it off from anyone who might harm us, and basically kill anyone and every who showed up. The region we finally chose to do this was called Winterspring. It is a bottlenecked region. It was the only region with one way in by foot: a tunnel on the south east most boundary. There was also a single landing zone: we killed anyone who landed there. You could resurrect at the graveyard nearby so it really didn't matter. If you caused any problems we killed you until you stopped. For the rest of the night both Horde and Alliance held this little cold back end of the world and as far as I know we're the only organized group to have survived it without infection until the server shut off for us too. We NEVER knew the cause of the event. We never were certain anything we were doing was remotely addressing the problem as we didn't know what the problem was.

I feel like Elite is just on the verge of such a moment. There's rumors going around that there are Fake Humans (whatever that means). There are videos of weird ships for months now:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxuv0CMqQ_s&feature=youtu.be
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--mLpP4RII8

Galnet got in on it.
3. https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/31-JAN-3302

Unknown Objects
Barnacles
The arrangement of asteroids...

So, something's out there.

Here's the question:
- Do we want a monster we can see?
or
- Do we want a monster we imagine?

I want to imply the differences here very strongly:

During the making of the original Jaws the shark was supposed to be able to do all kinds of things. FORTUNATELY the salt water broke the shark. Repeatedly. All the time. They ended up having to recreate the movie to IMPLY the shark. VERY, very, rarely did it do anything or get seen. And THAT, made the film.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaRwTxKB2E

The same thing happened with Alien:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJXaEN8F4Q

Black Angel uses this effect by the length of scenes to imply importance. Video 1. above is similar in texture. There is the slow regard of the subject in question; and thanks to digital technology, unresolvable.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L8pHKP-vv4

Lastly, Kairo. This film makes use of the implied so much the entire film itself is a masterpiece. Probably the Library Ghost is most relatable, as a character is able to run to the very spot it was seen and yet not find it despite being in broad day light for all to see in a convincing way.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibrY5NCaB0M

Most important of all... for every instance that the implied arises you can talk yourself out of it. This really burns the nightmare fuel. "DID something just happen or not?"

For instance... was video .2 a graphical glitch... or not?
Similarly, I am out by Heart and Soul Nebula and a few weeks ago my entire hud shut off. Everything. When I got it running again I couldn't get my scanners to work. I couldn't jump. I was basically in a ship that I could steer and that was that. What caused this? I have absolutely no idea. I slowly had to reset system by system the entire loadout of my Asp. I turned things off, I turned them on, I turned them on in different combinations. I set my fire groups again. And slowly, slowly, I was able to start jumping. And each jump I lost my nav-lock to the next system. So I had to go back and turn all of that on. Basically, my whole ship's computers just gave up! Now, I'm sure this was some bug of the game. It eventually fixed itself to the point I could limp around one jump at a time, but I had to get onto the forums here and try to talk my way through resetting my fire groups to fix it.

That... was so realistic to an actual computer crash I seriously began to wonder if I hadn't found some sort of easter egg.

Also, the experience immediately above reminded me so much of the fabled stories of extraterrestrial encounters: You know the ones. The power turns off on the side of the road - the person wonders what is going on - a shadow passes over the road - above a blob of darkness more black than black lumbers by in ominous silence.

For me, I was having nightmares of flying into the anonymous black hole now that my hud was on the fritz and I couldn't find anything around me except by eyeballing it... but that moment is one of the best I ever had in this game.

I make this post because I believe it can be simulated and it raises fun inspirational ideas for possible content in the future down the road. But again...

Here's the question:
- Do we want a monster we can see?
or
- Do we want a monster we imagine?

This is a game, so both (maybe), but how? Ideas?
 
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That was a much more complex and interesting thread than I had expected.

Incredibly interesting, by the way, I had not heard about the WoW thing.

Regardless, I need coffee to reply to this in any meaningful way. For now, I think the answer is both.

Edit - expanded.

Has coffee now.

First, I think we need both. We've had some disease type stuff going on already, with stations and systems locked down, or permits required. The thing is, of course, is that game is really about ships, not so much people (for now, anyway), so the disease thing isn't really going to work out so well. Or a tleast, not yet. Maybe when atmospheric landings are possible, on habitable planets, ther emay be the chance of some sort of microbe, bug or virus being taken by the explorer back tot he bubble, causing havoc and chaos.

There has also been the whole UA story arc. And I still, for the lif eof me, have no clue why some player roup didn't go mad delivering UA's to Sol and Achenar - it woul dhave been quite amusing to see the two greatest powers have their home systems shut down..

As far as monsters, I really hope that Thargoids, as a start, will first appear as sightings that confuse and cause suspicion. Far enough away that you can't get a good look, but close enough that you know it ain't a human ship.

There are, also, the mysterious locke doff regions of space, I've stumbled across one just today, this one appear to be a sphere of about 1000LY diameter, but there are some that are known to be much larger. What lies inside? We know not...

Now, the biggest problem with a computer crash, as you described, is that most, if not all, would put it down to a bug and file a report. It would be very, very difficult to tellt he difference between a bug and intended gameplay. FD would pretty much have to lay out the details, and that would spoil the surprise.

Now, back tot he monsters we can and can't see, I'd also like to think it will be a bit more complicated than that.

I would like to think any alien race (or alternate human civilisation, for that matter) that were to be a potential threat, would not just be "blanket bad guys". I'd like to see factions, powers and so forth within those civilisations that you could be on good or bad terms with, and being on good terms with one may, by default, put you on a kill on sight list with the other.

Also, I think all "invisible" threats woul dhave to become visible at some stage, as otherwise the story line just drags on and people get bored. There are already people bored with the UA and barnacles storyline, because, let's be honest, it is dragging on, and we don't actually even know if the next stage of the story is there to find or not.

Anyway, very interesting topic you've thrown up, I think.

Z...
 
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Sure thing, bring them!

Hope that these monsters will be scary and sooo dangerous, that we all will have to join our forces. All social elite networks will be super active, most of people discussing how to stop plague/aliens, crazy ideas, human fleet armadas, point strike operations...

Aw crap, need more coffee
 
I need coffee too!
I was thinking about this last night actually, but your postis much better than the kinda of rubbish I post at midnight!

But to answer your question, we need both.
I for one, would love to be out doing my thing, then my ship unexpectedly shuts down. Then weird stuff happens, that you can't see, but you can hear.
Like wierd groans, bangs, etc.
Maybe even have shadows or silhouettes flick across in front of you.
Then a pause.
Then boom, everything powers up again, really fast and loud, scaring the hell out of you. It's done in most horror movies. Lol

It would also be cool, if these encounters turn hostile, to come across distress signal sources of ships, but when you drop it, it's already freshly destroyed, like, still breaking up. And maybe, just see 'something' high wake out.

On top of that, scanning the high wake can link you to a system that no known ship can jump too in a single jump...

Creepy stuff!
 

Deleted member 38366

D
I feel like Elite is just on the verge of such a moment. There's rumors going around that there are Fake Humans (whatever that means). There are videos of weird ships for months now:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxuv0CMqQ_s&feature=youtu.be
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--mLpP4RII8

The 1st Video shows the typical Positioning Error of Players docked in Stations (even happens on Outposts) as seen on other Clients.
Docked Ships suddenly warp upto 7-10km outside the Station and continue to rotate with the Station - however 7-10km out, giving them extreme angular velocities at this distance.
Seen this in many many Places and it's plain a known bug.
(the moment such a Player hits Launch, you'll see this "floater" warp instantly back into the Station, do the rotation of the Pad and be a completely normal contact again)

The 2nd Video shows the bugged lensflare FX. Known bug, the "black square". Seen it all over the place.

PS.
Although I've already read way too many "uhh, you better be prepared now!" Warnings on past updates...
Well, Drew threw out yet another Warning.

My take on it all : wait and see.
At the current speed of "Storyline" development, we might see an Alien Threat sometime around Season 4 maybe. At least that's how it feels like to me ;)
But so far my approach of "No action required until proven otherwise!" has proven to work like a charm.
Been on countless wild goose chases and followed countless vanity fair/fake/meaningmess GALnet articles and fake hints... Learned my lesson.
 
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Going to reply more as I have time:
@ BongoBaggins - Of course we're the monsters. We're human.
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I'm a bit of a nutter on how I game.

- I will watch a video on someone's ship builds, I'll ask for help on a forum, but I absolutely refuse to read a Reddit post.
- I'll watch Turjan because he is really funny.
- I'll watch Obsidian Ant because I love the sound of his voice, mellow take-it-all-in outlook, and it-will-get-here-when-it-gets-here attitude. Plus he has a real love for the right stuff that gets me logging in again.
- To me, digging to much into the game beyond that (for me) MUST come from direct experience.

For me all games come down to: "How much is there to explore?" > "Community" > "IQ point requirement 120 or higher to play" > " Good story " (Galnet is perfect for this)... not too much work for the devs, but eye on the ball with what's going on... " > " Diversity of play-style choices " > " Practicality of utility features to make the game play " | < STOP > | "What the game IS "

For me, the best game I have ever played was Dark Age of Camelot ... in large part because Sonya Thomas was this single individual who wrote daily update blogs of things going on with this or that about the game. Her posts were displayed as the primary text right down the center of the log in website to the game - For YEARS. This made the game devs appears to be actively engaged with the community and there was a real human person out there at the other end who we all got to know.

In one form or another Elite: Dangerous seems to satisfy all of these core things for me. The only thing I will not do myself is go out of the way to find Developer information if they haven't bothered to put it on their own game's website. Simple fact is, I'm loyal to them... they have to show they are loyal to me. If they're loyal to their money... well... Goodbye.

This tends to work out very well for me finding games I like - as again, I'm here in it for the direct experience.

But here's the rub... Direct Experience isn't really always all that direct. If you notice with the Disease situation that took place in World of Warcraft at no point in time was ever actively aware of what the true threat had been. This created, in my imagination and others experiencing it with me - a much larger imagined scenario than it actually was. " We had to use our brain thing. " As a result of using our " brain thing" the Horde imagined we had done this to them (the plague) so they showed up at our capital to kill everyone... got the plague themselves... died... and then got logged off too early to report "Hey, it wasn't the Alliance!" A few hours later another... much smaller army of gorilla fighters showed up harassing us for while until they realized our paranoia was up as high as theirs. It wasn't until then that we stopped trying to kill each other from an imagined threat by each other, scratch our heads a bit, and commit to the joint idea of getting the &#% out of dodge. Our "tactic" was reactionary and wholly primitive. We ran to the furthest, highest, coldest, most isolated place we could think of and killed anyone that came near us. It worked... but... not because we knew what we were up against. All we managed to do was figure out how to create a situation where we could see the punches being thrown.

What I imagine would work spectacularly well for Elite would be something similar to this where the rumors start, then build, and sort of use all of the ideas listed here in various suggestive ways to just scare the heck of out everyone.

Imagine how the Shadow War went in Babylon 5.
1. This alien race is first spotted mysterious while in Hyperspace.
2. Pictures are taken of unknown ship(s)
3. People speculate
4. Brief encounters are made with other unknown ships(s)
5. People sepculate
6. Other unknown ships are seen

Here's an imaginary scenario of how this would look in Real Life currently:
1. This alien race is first spotted mysterious while in Jump------- (which is extended to include this freakish visual 0.02% chance of happening).
2. Pictures are taken of unknown ship(s) ------- (every idea listened above would be hilarious, fun, frightening, and awesome)
3. People speculate -----------(youtube and forums go nuts)
4. Brief encounters are made with other unknown ships(s) ------------(more of idea 2 except this phase is to reinforce... nah you aren't cracked... but still be extremely rare, just part of the game now)
5. People sepculate ------------(youtube realizes 'there really is stuff in this game beyond the bubble (and now happening in it!) ... shuts down the content drought debates
6. Other unknown ships are seen ------------------ (raises more questions about life, the universe, and everything...

And essentially that kind of thing revitalizes the game indefinitely.

And this all doesn't have to be one type of race of creature. There could be Drone Swarms, colonists that just went bonkers, Cylons, Vorlons, and every other creature from Zebelkanuzi. Realistically it could be done with just 12 new ships models that are using various translucent imagery or other distortions to mess with confidence as to what was definitively seen. Graphics like... if you can see the front of the ship you can't see the back and all of it is made of some photon-bending alloy so it might have something of the same appearance as the black holes do now.

Again this is all just completely tin foil hat madness, but we're in space. More mushrooms and onion head please.
 
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Going to reply more as I have time:
@ BongoBaggins - Of course we're the monsters. We're human. - How are we the monsters though?

@ Zeeman - I agree with you, but "how"? We know the why. There has to be a way to communicate to be people what's happening is part of the game: how?

@ CMDR_Cosmicspacehead - This idea is a "how". It answers "how" it could happen.

@ FalconFly - discussion of the video's content (and explanation) is an example of youtube and forum threads discussion... because imagine what this would have been like had that actually been an sighting of an anonymous ship?


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Okay getting back to this finally: 2016 - 5 - 12

- Starting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMoaD6ONvg
Turjan's Travels #15

I was trying to think of how to word what I am trying to talk about when it showed up this video.
Boring vs. Not Interesting

Indigo Shaped Gas Giant - Not Boring
Indigo Shaped Gas Giant - Not Interesting

I think this entire post comes down to the lack of cerebral engagements within Elite: Dangerous.


=======================================containing and expanding the argument slightly======================================

In general you have to look at a game from a meta-level.

Let me define that quick: Alfred North Whitehead - Process and Reality. Metaphysics is an architectural platform for which concepts and ideas are hung (as to encapsulate) for the purpose of pedagogical furtherance.

When I use the wording "meta-level" I mean as Turjan has demonstrated in this video. There is a firm clear distinction (metaphysic) of two central ideas (encapsulations) which are given names "Not-Boring" and "Not-Interesting" thereby creating a pedagogical (logical) narrative format to discuss the boundary of missing content in Elite Dangerous.

This is very useful. By taking the time to do this (and you can see doesn't take much effort once you know the linguistic architecture and logical architecture (metaphysic).

We need more discussions like this.

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I'll go out on a limb here to say this is an area which Science Fiction has always failed. Telling the Developers that we have a great idea is interesting, I'm sure, for them, but not helpful. We have to be able to understand why these ideas have so fundamentally failed at all points and times before in Science Fiction writing.

Typically Science Fiction ends up the trash heap of social commentary.
- Battlestar Galactica ~ religious and luddite fantasies
- Ender's Game ~ dangers of information control and propaganda
- Mass Effect ~ Messianic
- Babylon 5 ~ Messianic and other religious overtones
- Star Wars ~ Messianic
- Starcraft ~ Messianic, Texan, misogynistic

Even Star Trek does get to completely escape saved only by its focus on individual social issues against a wider backdrop of a probable future. See, Star Trek has so far managed to stay out of the trap by positing the question, "If I put this ideology, dogma, or other sacred something against this back drop what happens?" That's forward thinking because often as not the backdrop acts like a spotlight the shows all the holes in the absolute confidence something is initially displayed with by the protagonists (not always Federation).

By contrast Stargate: Atlantis went around a galaxy culture by culture with guns and strong convictions; the teams doing a lot of harm and eventually having to flee the galaxy entirely.
Stargate SG1, again, in contrast, was largely clueless, hopelessly outmatched, and constantly asking for help.

Star Trek: Voyager was probably the best demonstration of contrasts between the ideology of having that outstanding perfect crew verses the horribly flawed mess that they all were. Consequently this might be the best of the Star Treks in my opinion for that reason.


Star Trek only had a few meta creatures: The Borg, the Q, the Traveler, and a various entities like Guinan which had some how managed to go beyond the point of being able to go extinct for any reasons known to science: Type 2 civis or beyond.

And this is where I say Science Fiction tends to fail. All games can be shooters. All games can be horror games. Only a few games can be the original Silent Hill where your radio squawking was the cause of sudden hysterical crying. I genuinely believe when you eliminate this sort of thing from the human science it flips out. This is why you get the belief in UFOs, Sasquatch, and all sorts of stuff. Variously this is why good Sword and Sorcery books rarely completely remove the fantasy enemy demon phenotype to all lands save a single region. For instance, it is very rare to find a person who has not read Wheel of Time: Eye of the World and enjoyed it. However, when the mythology finally confirmed that all of the fantasy creatures were contained to just a single mountain range at the far north corner of the world the collective 'meh' from the fan base was powerful. It's still easy to find many people who quit after book 4 because they realized this. Whereas Lord of the Rings, Warhammer, and Game of Thrones continue to maintain that the "unknown" is an encounter.

Again, Wheel of Time did very good with continuing to deposit the unknown. Historical artifacts from across the ages were frequently encountered by characters (both knowingly and unknowingly). This is similar to traveling through Europe. Sometimes a stone is just a stone in some anonymous forgettable farm country. Other times that same forgettable farm country once housed am expansive Roman villa: that ditch you stepped over to get there wasn't Roman however, that was Etruscan. That's two thousand years from us and another thousand from Rome. By comparison, hiking across New England in the United States requires a really keen eye to notice the depth of history in the landscape: a squire patch of trees different from all the others to say where a farm had been a hundred years before, curiously flat groove across a hilltop where a road had been before Eisenhower "got the farmer's out of the mud". Most of the US is a ruin of cultures, which the US seems entirely averse to; possibly some explanation of its ever growing and continuous identity crisis and therefore obsession with material things.

Asking the Devs to replicate all of that complexity is very hard. EVE tried to do that and it ended up looking and feeling like Wasteland: Corporate-America; flat, bleached, lifeless, horrifying and populated. It brings up images of ai by the Shadow 33xx are invoked playing EVE - a universe without hope and pointless.

Elite: Dangerous's community kind of needs to decide what flavor of dark horror it needs.

Similarly how much cerebral content do we want? By Cerebral I mean things like the readout on planets from Mass Effect. Voice Attack somewhat fills out this role, if you have a voice. Otherwise (as far as I know) you can't turn on Voice Attack whatsoever so all of that depth in the game goes flat. Simply being able to text my ship questions would go a long way toward enjoying the game during the long hours of exploration. A single encounter with even one mysterious object should have happened by now. Maybe that's our fault and somewhere in the bubble we missed something, but so far there's been no sightings of a Black Knight satellite, no mysterious lights not bug related, and while all of the goings on with the Unknown Artifacts and Merope are interesting it might be a generational gap that the community is kind of lukewarm to the whole thing.
It may be that because we know procedural generation is possible with planets we expect the same sort of thing to go on with alien encounters, mysteries of the universe, and generally delivering dimensional to what is presently a very 2D.


Presence of Development

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Pace of Development
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But seriously, we're way better off than Bethesda Games.
"Please insert CD 1 to fire weapons."
"Please insert CD 2 to retract modules."
"Data readouts are located on CD 3 file heading..."

Or we could be playing EVE:
"Open travel options"
"Select travel options"
"Engage ship travel options"
"Watch ship travel ...options"
... die from sheer boredom.

Or StarCitizen:
"We have PvP and Graphics!"
....congratulations?

Probably the best kind of cerebral-horror is the kind where you know some things have consequences. For instance, in Silent Hill the radio going staticy meant that something horrific was about to happen. It was also probably going to be boarderline hysteria inducing. However, frequently the radio static was meant to mess with your mind. Nothing bad actually happened. In the same way the siren going off across the entire town was nerve wracking because something was happening, but the confirmation by way of creature revealing itself or death wasn't always there. And that's why it is cerebral. Sometimes there is a confirmation of the other by direct visual and then face-munching terror. Other times there was only the visual... and that's all that visual was supposed to do... help you change your underwear. Still other times there was just the radio having a fit.

All of this is replicatable in Elite. The radio comms could come on full of static. Uncomfortable sounds might come out of it. Or scanning could ping a scan back making the inside of your ship resonate eerily. If you're paying attention something making your ship resonate meant your ship was hit by something, otherwise no sound in space. Yet, if you can't see the something on the globe or nav... that's freaky. Maybe nothing shows up on your glove display, but in contacts under button 1 you would get a string of numbers and letters... In other words, the ship detected something, but it doesn't have enough data to do more than spit out space-DOS.

But again, this is like the most superficial of ideas. It could be expanded on quite a lot.

The Town Siren could actually be a galactic communication broadcast (to limit of the nav beacons.) Of if the Bubble is N(2)ly where N is any number < Limit of Bubble size then N(2)^0.N might be the distance outside the Bubble we could receive the transmission. Unless our computers have some sort of Quantum Entanglement ...like being made of heart cells and half the cells are back inside the Bubble somewhere.
 
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Woah, what's going on at the end of your post? Did you get mind controlled by the thargoids? Is your post a working example of how to induce fear? :0
 
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Great post. I like the thought of ships failing.

It's about time someone showed up to collect their Barnacles though.
 
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