sugarvalves [1963573] —
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Find out what's coming this Valentine's Day, where you can find free Love Juice, which player is about to set off a nuke, and why this year's V-Day might be the bloodiest yet!
Valentine's Day is approaching fast, and in Torn City, that means it's time to stock up on Love Juice, say goodbye to your loved ones, and start learning to love those white hospital screens. But how much do you know about Valentine's Day in Torn City? When did it start? Why has it changed so much? And is there anything new coming this year?
Let's answer these questions and more by taking a look back at the history of the Valentine's Day event. And to do so, we must first explore the story behind its main ingredient - Love Juice.
Pictured: Image courtesy of Aedstar.
A Brief Squirt
Love Juice was originally developed in the 1970's by the Performance Ribaldry Network as a "liquid fluffer" for use by its adult movie stars. When taken, Love Juice serves to lower the human body's energy requirements during lovemaking, while also increasing the speed and dexterity of your thrusts. Later, due to a fatal misunderstanding on the set of Full Metal Jack-It, PRN executives discovered that Love Juice also reduces the energy needed to perform acts of violence too.
Performance Ribaldry tried to capitalise on this discovery by selling Love Juice commercially, initially marketing the product as a sex potion aimed towards loveless, married couples. When this didn't work out, they attempted to hawk Love Juice to insurrectionist-types as a form of patriot fuel by purchasing ads in the back of David Icke books.
Pictured: The Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist and former Hereford United goalkeeper later banned said adverts after PRN refused Icke's demands to create a turquoise edition for children.
Unfortunately, Love Juice gained a reputation as a modern-day snake oil, as its users reported little to no effect when using the drug. Sales of Love Juice were subsequently discontinued, and yet, the product remains popular among Torn citizens and on PRN's movie sets to this day. So is Love Juice a placeboner? Not on your nelly.
tl;dr: Love Juice doesn't work most of the year.
What's In There, Daddy?
The primary component of Love Juice is Banglotsatime, a chemical extract drawn from the anal glands of the Patagonian Filth Weasel. The chemical's effect upon the body's ability to use energy efficiently only becomes active in the presence of a large volume of human reproductive pheromones, hence why Love Juice worked on the sets of A*s Wide Shut, Analyze P**s, and Requiem for a Cr**mpie, but not on your parents' wedding night.
Pictured: The character of Weasel in The Suicide Squad represents Hollywood's most accurate depiction of the Patagonian Filth Weasel.
Research by Retcon Industries later revealed that Banglotsatime requires a varied dose of human reproductive pheromones in order to activate fully. This explains why Love Juice is most potent on and around Valentine's Day, as many couples and single men like to mark the occasion through the performance of sexual acts. And when said acts are discharged, the resulting cloud of diverse human love-smell permeates across the entirety of Torn City, with disastrous effects.
tl;dr: Love Juice is active from 12:00 TCT Feb 13th to 12:00 TCT on the 15th.
Spill The Beans
Love Juice returned to the public eye back in 2018, when a shipment destined for the PRN movie lot broke open at the Torn City Docks. The spillage resulted in a Torn City Police Dog Handler being aggressively romanced by his own canine companion, and in the confusion that followed, several crates of Love Juice were stolen by Torn citizens.
Thankfully, news of Love Juice's capability to reduce one's attacking energy requirements spread slowly, and Valentine's Day 2018 was something of a non-event. But by V-day 2019, the Torn public was well aware of what Love Juice could be used for. PRN chose to rerelease the product for general sale amid the ongoing Insurgency war versus the JF factions. As a result, more than 250,000 attacks were made on the 14th of February 2019 - the highest in recorded history... at the time.
Questions were raised as to why the Performance Ribaldry Network encouraged violence in Torn City through the release of this product. Some suggested they did so because members of their board held shares in Eaglewood Mercenary, whose shareholders stood to benefit financially through an increase in sales of armaments.
Another theory suggests that PRN simply wanted more people to make love, with the hope being they would create future users of Love Juice in the process - or, at the very least, they'd videotape their efforts and post them on the PRNhub website. Nobody is quite sure whether either of these explanations is accurate, or indeed interesting.
What we do know is that the free distribution of Love Juice increased the length of our annual Valentine's Day massacre from 24 hours to 48, and so it remains today.
tl;dr: Love Juice may be found on the City Map at the Docks from 12:00 TCT on Feb 13th to 12:00 TCT on the 15th.
Hate Breeds Hate
Following a backlash from concerned citizens groups, the formula for Love Juice was changed one year later to make it more "family friendly". Love Juice: Love & Hate edition was released just before Valentine's Day 2020, with this new variant said to imbibe its users with feelings of sympathy and nurture towards their fellow citizens, as opposed to inspiring them to rip out their neighbors' throat with a set of salad tongs.
But Love & Hate did quite the opposite. While its amended recipe did make people more likely to help others by reducing the mental energy required for reviving, Love Juice's propensity for inspiring acts of efficient evisceration remained. Even worse, Torn's people now had even more targets upon whom they could act out their most violent fantasies, as their victims were now revived within minutes of being put into the hospital.
This situation wasn't helped by the fact that the Performance Ribaldry Network
once more posted free stocks of Love Juice on the docks throughout the 48-hour event. The 250,000 attacks we endured in 2019 increased to nearly 450,000 as a result, and this rose even further in 2021, despite Love Juice undergoing yet another recipe change.
tl;dr: Love Juice reduces the energy cost of reviving and attacking.
Performance Issues
In 2021, the Torn City authorities decided that the Valentine's violence was too much. But rather than banning Love Juice outright, Chedburn ordered PRN to dilute their formula in order to weaken its effects. Torn's most unhinged citizens were up in arms over this so-called nerf, and took to renaming the product as Like Juice, Love You Like A Brother Juice, and Can We Just Do Hand Stuff I'm Really Tired I've Got A Headache And Work In The Morning Juice.
Yet despite this change, the violence increased once more, with more than 600,000 attacks registered on the 14th of February 2021 alone - this isn't including attacks that took place during the 12 hours either side of the event either. And with Torn's population increasing year on year, and supplies of Love Juice rising too, one wonders whether the trend will continue.
Will Valentine's Day 2022 come to our office and bring us a bouquet of violence, before taking us out to a nice fancy meal at a restaurant called death, and persuading us to wear that sexy little thing they bought us called blood? Perhaps so, as we can confirm that no changes have been made to the Love Juice recipe this year.
tl;dr: Love Juice reduces attacking and reviving energy costs by 10.
How About A Cosy Night In?
This will be the first Valentine's Day since February 2021's medical changes, and the numbers from City Hall indicate that attacking trends are on the up since then, meaning this year's event could be the most blood-soaked yet! Valentine's Day is also a popular time of year for chaining, and with the ability to perform 50k chains unlocked late last year, it is thought that many factions will push for their first 50k while Love Juice is in effect.
However, we must also factor in the effect of Ranked Warring upon Valentine's Day, with many in disagreement over whether its impact will be positive or negative. If nothing else were considered, factions would likely be keen to enlist into Ranked Warring this week, in the hope that their war would be scheduled for Valentine's Day and they could use their Love Juice stocks to good effect.
But for those whose wars are scheduled outside of the event, Valentine's Day could prove an unwanted distraction, and factions might explicitly forbid their members from using their energy ahead of their scheduled Ranked Warring commitments. It's also possible that some factions are holding off from Ranked Warring altogether until Chedburn's much-anticipated changes to its matchmaking system are announced.
tl;dr: We think Valentine's Day might be bigger than ever before, probably, maybe.
The Glow Of Love
The last thing to consider this Valentine's Day is how irradiated you are willing to get in the name of respect. In the forums, TiredSaladlego ran a poll asking players which faction should be the recipient of his Dirty Bomb. TiredSaladlego hinted that he might activate his nuclear device on Valentine's Day, and in an interview with The Times, he confirmed that this remains his intention.
"Valentines, the massive amount of people online will guarantee a lot of civilian hits." - TiredSaladlego
But which faction will be his target? TiredSaladlego told the TCT the answer to this question, but we have agreed to keep it a secret... for now. However, we can confirm that it will be one of the following factions:
Subversive Alliance
PT-Family
Chain Reaction
Everyone will have their own opinions on who it is likely to be, and which faction deserves it most, but we at the Torn City Times are saying nothing - we saw how salty SA got at bogie last time. Except, we can say one small thing, because TiredSaladlego did tell us a few more things that we weren't sure if we were allowed to share. Let's do it anyway.
The first revelation is that TiredSaladlego was offered a "hefty sum of money from a CURRENT SA member" to Dirty Bomb their own faction. TSL wouldn't elaborate as to who this was, or how much they offered, but the fact that they were described as a current SA member rules out the likes of Ohadik, who was the subject of scandalous rumours earlier this week.
The second, and potentially illuminating revelation, is that a member of the M family, who wishes to remain anonymous, has paid TSL $25 billion to choose the target for him. Monarch's name was conspicuously absent from the list TSL gave us, despite the fact that they came top of his poll with 34% of the vote. But it seems that the butterflies will escape a radioactive fate this weekend, with one of their members having paid handsomely for the privilege.
tl;dr: SA, CR, or PT are getting nuked on Monday.
Pretty Pictures Wanted
In the latest round of Community Events, the Performance Ribaldry Network has asked Torn's citizens to help them create a new advertising campaign for their flagship product. Rare and expensive items are on offer to those who place in the top three in this competition, with entrants asked to record a 30-second audio or video advert suited to the radio, internet, or television.
Pictured: The Valentine's Community Event prize pool
The competition description for the advertisement event includes links to several archived newspaper articles which contain a great deal of lore on Love Juice. This article has attempted to recap much of this backstory, and we'd like you to use this information to create an ad that is both amusing and informative - the handful of entries we've had so far are outstanding.
There are two other Valentine's Day competitions running alongside the advertisement contest. The Bake What You Love competition asks players to cook, bake, or otherwise create a culinary item that depicts something they love about Torn City. DedeSilver wrote to the Community Manager to ask if they could enter something that is a beverage and is fried. I have no idea what a fried beverage would look like, but to clarify the rules, you may enter anything that is vaguely edible.
Our final Valentine's Day competition is the traditional Valentine's Card event. The standard of entries in our drawing contests is often freakishly high, so please make sure you put in a great deal of effort to your hand-drawn or digitally designed card, lest you wish to be as disappointed as Duke's right hand on V-Day. These competitions run until midnight on the 20th of February.
tl;dr: Win expensive stuff by entering our Community Events before Feb 20th.
Let's answer these questions and more by taking a look back at the history of the Valentine's Day event. And to do so, we must first explore the story behind its main ingredient - Love Juice.
Pictured: Image courtesy of Aedstar.
A Brief Squirt
Love Juice was originally developed in the 1970's by the Performance Ribaldry Network as a "liquid fluffer" for use by its adult movie stars. When taken, Love Juice serves to lower the human body's energy requirements during lovemaking, while also increasing the speed and dexterity of your thrusts. Later, due to a fatal misunderstanding on the set of Full Metal Jack-It, PRN executives discovered that Love Juice also reduces the energy needed to perform acts of violence too.
Performance Ribaldry tried to capitalise on this discovery by selling Love Juice commercially, initially marketing the product as a sex potion aimed towards loveless, married couples. When this didn't work out, they attempted to hawk Love Juice to insurrectionist-types as a form of patriot fuel by purchasing ads in the back of David Icke books.
Pictured: The Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist and former Hereford United goalkeeper later banned said adverts after PRN refused Icke's demands to create a turquoise edition for children.
Unfortunately, Love Juice gained a reputation as a modern-day snake oil, as its users reported little to no effect when using the drug. Sales of Love Juice were subsequently discontinued, and yet, the product remains popular among Torn citizens and on PRN's movie sets to this day. So is Love Juice a placeboner? Not on your nelly.
tl;dr: Love Juice doesn't work most of the year.
What's In There, Daddy?
The primary component of Love Juice is Banglotsatime, a chemical extract drawn from the anal glands of the Patagonian Filth Weasel. The chemical's effect upon the body's ability to use energy efficiently only becomes active in the presence of a large volume of human reproductive pheromones, hence why Love Juice worked on the sets of A*s Wide Shut, Analyze P**s, and Requiem for a Cr**mpie, but not on your parents' wedding night.
Pictured: The character of Weasel in The Suicide Squad represents Hollywood's most accurate depiction of the Patagonian Filth Weasel.
Research by Retcon Industries later revealed that Banglotsatime requires a varied dose of human reproductive pheromones in order to activate fully. This explains why Love Juice is most potent on and around Valentine's Day, as many couples and single men like to mark the occasion through the performance of sexual acts. And when said acts are discharged, the resulting cloud of diverse human love-smell permeates across the entirety of Torn City, with disastrous effects.
tl;dr: Love Juice is active from 12:00 TCT Feb 13th to 12:00 TCT on the 15th.
Spill The Beans
Love Juice returned to the public eye back in 2018, when a shipment destined for the PRN movie lot broke open at the Torn City Docks. The spillage resulted in a Torn City Police Dog Handler being aggressively romanced by his own canine companion, and in the confusion that followed, several crates of Love Juice were stolen by Torn citizens.
Thankfully, news of Love Juice's capability to reduce one's attacking energy requirements spread slowly, and Valentine's Day 2018 was something of a non-event. But by V-day 2019, the Torn public was well aware of what Love Juice could be used for. PRN chose to rerelease the product for general sale amid the ongoing Insurgency war versus the JF factions. As a result, more than 250,000 attacks were made on the 14th of February 2019 - the highest in recorded history... at the time.
Questions were raised as to why the Performance Ribaldry Network encouraged violence in Torn City through the release of this product. Some suggested they did so because members of their board held shares in Eaglewood Mercenary, whose shareholders stood to benefit financially through an increase in sales of armaments.
Another theory suggests that PRN simply wanted more people to make love, with the hope being they would create future users of Love Juice in the process - or, at the very least, they'd videotape their efforts and post them on the PRNhub website. Nobody is quite sure whether either of these explanations is accurate, or indeed interesting.
What we do know is that the free distribution of Love Juice increased the length of our annual Valentine's Day massacre from 24 hours to 48, and so it remains today.
tl;dr: Love Juice may be found on the City Map at the Docks from 12:00 TCT on Feb 13th to 12:00 TCT on the 15th.
Hate Breeds Hate
Following a backlash from concerned citizens groups, the formula for Love Juice was changed one year later to make it more "family friendly". Love Juice: Love & Hate edition was released just before Valentine's Day 2020, with this new variant said to imbibe its users with feelings of sympathy and nurture towards their fellow citizens, as opposed to inspiring them to rip out their neighbors' throat with a set of salad tongs.
But Love & Hate did quite the opposite. While its amended recipe did make people more likely to help others by reducing the mental energy required for reviving, Love Juice's propensity for inspiring acts of efficient evisceration remained. Even worse, Torn's people now had even more targets upon whom they could act out their most violent fantasies, as their victims were now revived within minutes of being put into the hospital.
This situation wasn't helped by the fact that the Performance Ribaldry Network
once more posted free stocks of Love Juice on the docks throughout the 48-hour event. The 250,000 attacks we endured in 2019 increased to nearly 450,000 as a result, and this rose even further in 2021, despite Love Juice undergoing yet another recipe change.
tl;dr: Love Juice reduces the energy cost of reviving and attacking.
Performance Issues
In 2021, the Torn City authorities decided that the Valentine's violence was too much. But rather than banning Love Juice outright, Chedburn ordered PRN to dilute their formula in order to weaken its effects. Torn's most unhinged citizens were up in arms over this so-called nerf, and took to renaming the product as Like Juice, Love You Like A Brother Juice, and Can We Just Do Hand Stuff I'm Really Tired I've Got A Headache And Work In The Morning Juice.
Yet despite this change, the violence increased once more, with more than 600,000 attacks registered on the 14th of February 2021 alone - this isn't including attacks that took place during the 12 hours either side of the event either. And with Torn's population increasing year on year, and supplies of Love Juice rising too, one wonders whether the trend will continue.
Will Valentine's Day 2022 come to our office and bring us a bouquet of violence, before taking us out to a nice fancy meal at a restaurant called death, and persuading us to wear that sexy little thing they bought us called blood? Perhaps so, as we can confirm that no changes have been made to the Love Juice recipe this year.
tl;dr: Love Juice reduces attacking and reviving energy costs by 10.
How About A Cosy Night In?
This will be the first Valentine's Day since February 2021's medical changes, and the numbers from City Hall indicate that attacking trends are on the up since then, meaning this year's event could be the most blood-soaked yet! Valentine's Day is also a popular time of year for chaining, and with the ability to perform 50k chains unlocked late last year, it is thought that many factions will push for their first 50k while Love Juice is in effect.
However, we must also factor in the effect of Ranked Warring upon Valentine's Day, with many in disagreement over whether its impact will be positive or negative. If nothing else were considered, factions would likely be keen to enlist into Ranked Warring this week, in the hope that their war would be scheduled for Valentine's Day and they could use their Love Juice stocks to good effect.
But for those whose wars are scheduled outside of the event, Valentine's Day could prove an unwanted distraction, and factions might explicitly forbid their members from using their energy ahead of their scheduled Ranked Warring commitments. It's also possible that some factions are holding off from Ranked Warring altogether until Chedburn's much-anticipated changes to its matchmaking system are announced.
tl;dr: We think Valentine's Day might be bigger than ever before, probably, maybe.
The Glow Of Love
The last thing to consider this Valentine's Day is how irradiated you are willing to get in the name of respect. In the forums, TiredSaladlego ran a poll asking players which faction should be the recipient of his Dirty Bomb. TiredSaladlego hinted that he might activate his nuclear device on Valentine's Day, and in an interview with The Times, he confirmed that this remains his intention.
"Valentines, the massive amount of people online will guarantee a lot of civilian hits." - TiredSaladlego
But which faction will be his target? TiredSaladlego told the TCT the answer to this question, but we have agreed to keep it a secret... for now. However, we can confirm that it will be one of the following factions:
Subversive Alliance
PT-Family
Chain Reaction
Everyone will have their own opinions on who it is likely to be, and which faction deserves it most, but we at the Torn City Times are saying nothing - we saw how salty SA got at bogie last time. Except, we can say one small thing, because TiredSaladlego did tell us a few more things that we weren't sure if we were allowed to share. Let's do it anyway.
The first revelation is that TiredSaladlego was offered a "hefty sum of money from a CURRENT SA member" to Dirty Bomb their own faction. TSL wouldn't elaborate as to who this was, or how much they offered, but the fact that they were described as a current SA member rules out the likes of Ohadik, who was the subject of scandalous rumours earlier this week.
The second, and potentially illuminating revelation, is that a member of the M family, who wishes to remain anonymous, has paid TSL $25 billion to choose the target for him. Monarch's name was conspicuously absent from the list TSL gave us, despite the fact that they came top of his poll with 34% of the vote. But it seems that the butterflies will escape a radioactive fate this weekend, with one of their members having paid handsomely for the privilege.
tl;dr: SA, CR, or PT are getting nuked on Monday.
Pretty Pictures Wanted
In the latest round of Community Events, the Performance Ribaldry Network has asked Torn's citizens to help them create a new advertising campaign for their flagship product. Rare and expensive items are on offer to those who place in the top three in this competition, with entrants asked to record a 30-second audio or video advert suited to the radio, internet, or television.
Pictured: The Valentine's Community Event prize pool
The competition description for the advertisement event includes links to several archived newspaper articles which contain a great deal of lore on Love Juice. This article has attempted to recap much of this backstory, and we'd like you to use this information to create an ad that is both amusing and informative - the handful of entries we've had so far are outstanding.
There are two other Valentine's Day competitions running alongside the advertisement contest. The Bake What You Love competition asks players to cook, bake, or otherwise create a culinary item that depicts something they love about Torn City. DedeSilver wrote to the Community Manager to ask if they could enter something that is a beverage and is fried. I have no idea what a fried beverage would look like, but to clarify the rules, you may enter anything that is vaguely edible.
Our final Valentine's Day competition is the traditional Valentine's Card event. The standard of entries in our drawing contests is often freakishly high, so please make sure you put in a great deal of effort to your hand-drawn or digitally designed card, lest you wish to be as disappointed as Duke's right hand on V-Day. These competitions run until midnight on the 20th of February.
tl;dr: Win expensive stuff by entering our Community Events before Feb 20th.
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