# THE SILVER CRESCENT ## MARCH 2020, ISSUE 3. ### "A Free Press for a Free Internet." ### QUINTUPLICATE CONFEDERATION, Editor. ### MINIWA, Publisher. ### FLOWER, Treasurer. *The content in this issue may be reproduced at will, except for matter specifically marked "copyright"; attribution is kindly requested if you find the content useful.* ## COMMUNITY NEWS. ### FUN WITH .F A new feature has been added to Miniwabot. Everyone who was in the Discord or in TSUKICHAT will welcome the return of .f, a command that takes the input and uses Google Translate to translate it into every language, then back to English, and feeds it back out to the user who queried it. It is a neverending generator of hilarious memes and wacky phrasings, as experience and memory fondly show. This feature was implemented on the 29th of February, but dln_ has already married and divorced the bot, a new meme (deng!) has been created through the awesome power of spontaneous garbling, and hi-jinks and shenanigans have proliferated galore, to the great benefit of our morale. The reincarnation of a beloved feature has not been without its kinks. Due to community overuse of this enjoyable feature, Google rate-limited the bot because it was sending too many requests. In response, now it only sends one request every 5 seconds. ### THE "CANCER RAINBOW" BUG A weird bug in the H'nyro skin has got all of us in a bundle. It started on the 16th, when Yori and Flower noticed that names in Discord that were carried by the bridge to Matrix via IRC displayed, in Yori's words, a "cancer rainbow", that is a constant change in color. Quintuplicate explained that this was simply mIRC colors, and displayed as intended in IRC and with the desktop Matrix client, so it must have been a problem either with the H'nyro skin or the website itself. Following that, Yori hounded Sanya into fixing it, but she explained she didn't put it in. When he asked Miniwa, he simply added "rainbow colors: its [sic] a feature" before the topic of Toxspace. Quintuplicate has asked Kneesox to get rid of the mIRC colors, and recommended people who do not want to see the rainbow colors use the desktop client. The matter was at long last resolved on the 18th, when Kneesox disabled rainbow colors altogether. ### TWO NEW CHANNELS THIS MONTH Two new channels in Miniwatrix were created this last month: one channel called "weird", dealing with "spooky stuff", and another anime channel. Plastic runs both of them, and they will prove a worthy addition to our dizzying array of channels, which includes politics, history and law, statistics, and yes, even hentai. ### GOT A NEWS TIP? **Contact us** at silvercrescent[at]protonmail.com and get subsidized ad space! ## CRESCENT DAY, CRESCENT TIME! Andre and Sates are trying to revive our NationStates region, "Seycelles". Genosad has created a Systemspace message board on ProBoards. He expects it to be temporary until we can host an imageboard. Amadeus is writing an article about the TSUKI Project. Sanya has created a new website. Protected behind a password, it boasts a "mirror" of the TSUKI Project Compendium, information about learning Synapsian, and a conversion table from Life to LFE time. 1888 is writing a paper about Systemspace. Plastic is making an imageboard. It will be a general board unrelated to Systemspace. ## HELP WANTED. ### Writers - Writing news stories - Coming up with "Puzzles" and "Trivia" ### Copyeditors - Proofreading and formatting articles ### Correspondents - Collecting notable and interesting community happenings for the "Crescent Day, Crescent Time" column - Reporting on stories for the "Community News" column Needed Give back to the community, hone your writing and people skills, and have fun along the way! Apply **today** at silvercrescent[at]protonmail.com ## PRIVATE ADVERTISEMENTS. ### ADVERTISE WITH US and get access to an audience of almost ***fifty*** penniless autistic NEET's! - $1 for every 100 words of text, or 250 characters of ***area*** (length * width) of any ASCII art illustrations, ***not*** how many characters are actually used, or part thereof. - This rate is a maximum, and may be waived or reduced at our sole discretion. - We reserve the right to reject or request modifications to all advertisements. - Send Bitcoin Cash to bitcoincash:qq9ncyspj2k6uj7tmhyez0pgshr2r0gaasse0wsccg - Contact us at silvercrescent[at]protonmail.com if you would like to donate any other currency. ## PUZZLES. ### ANSWER KEY TO LAST ISSUE'S PUZZLE Surprisingly, the answer is **only one**. Why? Because two or more kids did their homework, then a random choice of any two children would have the possibility of having both kids in the selection having done their homework. Congratulations to dln_ for solving the puzzle! ### THIS ISSUE'S PUZZLE You put 1,000 pounds of peaches into an industrial fruit dryer. When you load them in, the peaches are 99 percent water. When you take them out, the peaches are 98 percent water. How much do the peaches weigh now? Send us your answer at silvercrescent[at]protonmail.com, and get $5 of subsidized ad space if you get it right! ## TRIVIA. ASCII has no "cent" sign because in the 1970s when it was made, inflation was so heavy they thought it would soon be superfluous. There is a village called Champ, Missouri with only 12 people. The liver grows back if a part of it is removed. In 1896 the Big Island of Hawaii wanted to secede from the rest of the islands because they felt they were insufficiently represented at Honolulu. ## LITERARY LUNACY. - The following classes of works are accepted: poetry, skits, short stories, essays, song lyrics, and serialized parts of novels and plays, of any genre, relating to any subject except political or religious. - All submissions must be in English only, and contain no promotional content. - Submissions shall not exceed 1,000 words; exceptions are available on a case-by-case basis where the word limit would seriously detract from the merit or quality of the work. - All work will be deemed released into the public domain UNLESS you explicitly indicate otherwise, and provide an email address for contact regarding permissions. If one is not provided, the one you sent it with will be used. - Send it to silvercrescent[at]protonmail.com. ### THE SWORD OF THE WILDERNESS. *An Alternate History.* By Quintuplicate Confederation. *continued from last issue...* C. GUYANESE GOVERNMENT ACTIONS ON THEM PRE-GEDALIAH In the latter part of 1976, for heretofore unknown reasons, the Burnham administration recorded a notable uptick in the number of pro-West and pro-U.S. policy decisions taken. (1) This naturally meant that the Guyanese government's first target was the Peoples Temple that subsisted within its frontiers. As Guyana’s constitution mandated respect for Western-style Property Rights (2), and there was no doubt that the Peoples Temple had lawfully and consensually purchased the land upon which Jonestown was built (3), Prime Minister Burnham could not simply expropriate the land. But Burnham discovered that a California district court had ordered Jim Jones to surrender custody over a child named John to his biological father. (4) He instructed a magistrate’s court in Kaituma, very close to Jonestown, to issue its own writ to enforce the Californian decree. Thanks to a constitutional amendment that allowed the executive to remove judges for "incompetence", which in practice meant resistance to the executive will, (5) the writ was done very quickly and published in all local newspapers. (6) Jones ignored the writ and an arrest warrant came out of the Georgetown High Court for contempt of court. Burnham swiftly placed a $100 local currency reward on his head, far too insufficient to justify the risk of being killed by his many fanatic followers. Burnham declared the airspace above the commune a no-fly zone, and forbade entry to everyone who intended to settle in or travel to Jonestown. "Food in, people out," was his name for his new strategy for dealing with Jonestown: for every 1,000 pounds (40 sacks) of rice delivered to Jonestown, one person had to leave Jonestown and Guyana forever. Children counted for 500 pounds, young men for 2,000. The U.S. Ambassador to Guyana expressed concern that the citizens of Jonestown were getting a less-than-ideal caloric intake due to the ”Food In, People Out” policy. He scheduled a negotiation between Jones and Burnham at the U.S. Embassy, Georgetown, which he offered to mediate. Jones declined to personally attend the negotiation, instead sending an adopted son Jim, Jr. The negotiation went through very smoothly, with both sides unexpectedly willing to make compromises. The arbitration of the Ambassador was only needed on a few occasions. After six hours of calm talks, the final accord, called the Jones-Burnham Memorandum, was signed and is as follows: "ACCORD BETWEEN REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLES TEMPLE AND GUYANA. The Parties express their gratitude to the United States Ambassador to Guyana for his willingness to host and mediate the drawing up of this Accord. Guyana agrees— (a) To send the Peoples Temple 1,000,000 pounds of grain without any conditions or encumbrances. (b) To not intervene in the lawful land purchases, voluntarily concluded contracts with private citizens, or the other internal matters of the Peoples Temple. (c) To do everything in its power to ensure that no extralegal surveillance of the Peoples Temple takes place. (d) To send such amount of staple foods as may be required for the sustenance and relief of the Peoples Temple. (e) To permit immigration into Guyana of members of the Peoples Temple under the same terms as other citizens of the United States, and importation into Guyana of all goods purchased by the Peoples Temple. The Peoples Temple agrees— (a) To hold all persons in their power bound to the laws of Guyana in the same manner as they would be held to in the rest of Guyana. (b) To turn over to the authorities in Guyana all weapons and ammunition in its possession except one rifle and one revolver and one hundred rounds for each shall be allowed to every male between fifteen and forty-five years of age. (c) To permit inspection by duly authorized agents of Guyana of all goods being delivered for its use. The Parties rededicate themselves to the respect of the principle of Religious Freedom, on which this Accord is fundamentally based. The Parties agree to be entirely truthful in their dealings and representations to each other. FOR THE PEOPLES TEMPLE Jim Jones, Junior Authorized Plenipotentiary Representative FOR GUYANA Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham Prime Minister I attest that representatives from Guyana and the People's Temple met at the United States Embassy at Georgetown on February 9, 1978, and concluded this Accord in triplicate, one for each party, and with me as depositary of the last copy, after conferring with each other, all on that same day. —WITNESS: JOHN R. BURKE, UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO GUYANA." (1) See Guyana Series Correspondence No. 1960. (2) See Sec. 11, Chap. 25, Acts of 1970 (pp. 467-468, vol. 3, Rev. Stat. of Guyana 1971.) (3) Att.-Gen.'s Advice to the Government Regarding the So-Called "Peoples Temple", printed for internal Department of Law use 1976, DOL Circular 1976-100. (4) Order No. 1 in Case No. 645/1976, Family Court Div. 14. (5) See Sec. 3, Chap. 41, pp. 243-245, The Stat. of the Rep. of Guyana, 1st (1975) Sess. of the 7th (1975-1976) Leg. of Guyana. (6) For example, see Kaituma Gazette, vol. 4, issue 47, p. 5. *to be continued...* ## OPINION. ### We need a public web presence It is truly gladdening to hear about the message board opening, and progress being made on the imageboard. It underscores the importance of what caused us to succeed in the first place: a public web presence. Far be it from my wish to have everything migrants do tied to Systemspace in some way. That would be making us what we are not, a religion. After all, someone at the airport doesn't make where they're flying to part of their identity. Still, a cursory search through the 4chan archives will show clear as day that if migrants don't dominate the discussion on the TSUKI Project, then Apollo and Initiate will. I do not believe in censoring them, but I do believe that there is no place facing the open web where we (1) won't be grossly off-topic or (2) won't be censored by Apollo. That's why our own space is so important. It doesn't have to be about Systemspace, in fact it's better if it's not. But if the topic of the Project does come up, we have to be prepared to defend ourselves against the gross misrepresentations of our ideas made by Apollo. Even Heaven's Gate left behind two guys to maintain the website and tell humanity about them after their mass suicide. I'm sure we can and must do better than a bunch of guys who castrated themselves because they thought this'd take them to a higher evolutionary level.