Raithe

For that interesting social news:

Ah, Japan. https://themindcircle.com/kei-truck-garden-contest/

The last season of Alias was kind of worth it for the Arvin Sloane and Jack Bristow moment. Actually thinking about it, Sloan's journey over the whole series of villain, redemption, ally, protective father turned villain once again in loss (with a touch of obsession) made one of the more interesting and well done character arcs in tv land.

Hey, it was a glorious Jeremy Irons having fun with overacting.

For the random awareness... Chris Pine to Star in 'Dungeons and Dragons' Movie for Paramount - Variety

Heh, I wonder how long before they do put in some way to alter your hair style in game? - "I can switch out my arms, my heart, I can replace chunks of my body with cybernetics as I wish... but I can't get a hair cut..."

Your mileage may very. I mean, sure, I've sunk over 50 hours into it since Thursday, so I'm enjoying it. Then again, I'm using a fairly recently zoomed up PC so I don't suffer too much of the glitches. It's atmospheric, it's got a sprawling city, it's got some mixed emotions to some of the side-gigs and assorted ups and downs. It's got a lot to engage in if you like that, but it is very much a first person RPG game, so don't expect a hyped-up shooter feel, or a car driving feel.

Well, that gave me very little information of any relevance, and 20 minutes of him ranting about the harassment of reviewers for daring not to give something a score over 9 out of 10. I'm glad I only had that running in the background while I was doing other things, or I'd feel that was 20 minutes badly spent.

Hm. First game breaking bug I've encountered. The "Lighting Strikes" mission starts, I get in the car with Panam, and then it goes into an infinite loading screen. Guess I'll go try out a few other missions before re-trying it. Edit: I also like that they have an in-game reason for why you're solo-ing the majority of things. A conversation with Rogue where she points out that your first big-leagues mission went catastrophically wrong, your partner died, your fixer died, all the people associated with it died, and you're the last person standing. So either you're a dangerous liability or you have bad luck and no superstitious merc will work with you, hence no fixer will ask a team to include you in it. Of course, this has a slight lack of coherency in that by the time she told me that I've already raised my Street Cred to 50. But then again, there seems to be the Street Cred reputation for access to things, and that "story" reputation that only goes up with certain key missions.

One thing that has been mentioned is that they aren't actually going to try to do a "book a season" type of story arc. Since it's a little unrealistic to try for 14 seasons, there is going to be some mashup and re-ordering of plot-lines and sub-plots for the tv adaption. So no "Eye of the World" season, or "Dragon Reborn" season. Just "Wheel of Time"...

Well, as I recall from a few CyberSecurity things I attended a couple of years back, about 70% of organised cyber-crime in the world traces back to Russian groups, and about 60% of cyber-espionage traces back to Chinese groups. It's surprising how effective and efficient you can be with those tools without having to be a big, rampant, economical giant.

That was pretty much the definition of a high-paid, high-stress Executive deciding to slum it for thrills. The whole thing was somewhat disturbingly sleazy, and a little bit off-putting.

Since it's more game company news than game specific, but did you folks see that CD Project Red have already made back the money they invested in Cyberpunk? Apparently the eight million pre-orders and day one sales earned them over the cost of producing the game. So the company made the decision to actually pay all bonuses rather than hold them to the criteria of critic / metacritic review thresholds. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projekt-changes-developer-bonus-structure-after-buggy-release

It's the small things. Talking a guy down from rabid cyberpsychosis PTSD, persuading him he shouldn't turn into lone assassin / terrorist as he should remember being an honorable soldier... Then you turn away, walk through a door and suddenly Boom from behind, turn around, and find the guy had decided to instead commit suicide. It's cyberpunk. It's rare to get a clean right/wrong approach to things.

"A more wretched hive of scum and villainy..."

Progress and style choices...

I have to admit, my tendency to try sneaking and hacking through most missions the Fixers ask me to do tend to result in not improving my Asssault/Handguns/Blades skills. So I'm roaming around for the police intervention stuff for the casual violence and get those skill points earned...