For the base game I was annoyed that every fucking weapon I found along the way was either a dex weapon or intelligence scaling magic weapon, when I'd gone strength/faith. Every dungeon I'd come out with either new spells, a new casting staff, or an intelligence weapon
By the time the game really starts giving you good faith scaling stuff and faith spells, the game's reached the point where most enemies and bosses are resistant to faith
At some point I'll probably try again and just not do the strength route again
At least two admitting to crying watching Biden's performance. So many talking about needing to get drunk or high to the cope with the outcome of the debate
Most of them are starting to realize that Biden is old and not firing on all cylinders, and that the Democrats are in deep, deep trouble with the election if their candidate can barely sound coherent during the debates. One person quietly said that Biden was making Trump look sane by comparison
Then the debates as to who could even replace him began. AOC? Too young. Bernie? Too radical. Clinton no because the GOP hate her. Harris? Maybe that's why she's been out of the spotlight, so she can take over without any scandals. Newsom wasn't even floated but RFK was
Watching some people I know have live meltdowns as they were confronted with the reality of this living corpse as their nominee has been fucking hilarious
Watching them consider if RFK should take over was even funnier
The Democrats are a ratchet for the political spectrum in the US
Biden isn't a leftist but he's as left as the Democrats will get going forward. Like a ratchet, the Overton window slides right and then stops leftward at whatever the current Democratic president is, in this case Biden
The next one won't be Sanders, won't be AOC, won't be some surprise other SocDem candidate. The next one will be either Biden 2.0 or further right, and on and on
At best, Democrats are absolutely toothless. Plenty of red states are passing abortion outlawing and anti-queer laws, and the Democrats haven't done shit. "Oh but the President is limited in what he can do" "oh but the senate, the Democrats will be filibustered" who gives a fuck. They haven't even raised their heads from their desks, let alone done any attempt to fight for these rights. All they're doing is preventing the laws from getting worse at a federal level, if that, and that'll change immediately on the next election regardless of who wins
There is no "going from there". Voting for a candidate is inplicit support of everything the candidate does. You cannot vote for a candidate and then pick and choose your support, they don't give a fuck, all they care about is that they won on their platform. Biden will not move any left from his position, Democrats literally never have been pushed left. Any time there's left pressure, they call it loony leftist behaviour and go run to the Republicans for some bipartisan crackdowns
A lesser evil is still an evil, especially when the lesser evil really isn't that much lesser
Shadowrun 5 is the one I know best and unfortunately a lot of that's changed
Specifically, Essence is now tied to your magic ability and maximum social limit. The maximum Magic stat you can have is tied directly to your Essence, and the calculation for it and the social limit round down to the nearest full number, not caring about the decimal
So even if you were to get say, cybereyes to offset a character's blindness or poor vision, which I believe is 0.50 essence cost, you go from your 6.00 maximum to 5.50, but every calculation takes it as going to 5.00. One point isn't a crippling loss for a build but starting from <5 and you'll start to have trouble doing anything magic or social
Absolutely fantastic pod, devoured the entire back catalogue recently. Their Andor episodes rocked
I think the problem is that Pondsmith and others inspired by him still use the word "humanity" for it
In Cyberpunk RED, only implants that take you above and beyond what a human can do begin to affect your "humanity" score. Replacing a limb or getting cybereyes to allow someone blind to see doesn't make anyone less human anymore in terms of game mechanics - you don't get hit with a "humanity" penalty for it. If you start loading up on cyberware that begin to push you into the realm of (often violent) superhuman - implanted weapons, a reflex booster that basically makes everyone move in slow motion - that's when the stat begins to be affected, and even then it's meant to represent an alienation from others rather than becoming ontologically less human
It's a sight better than Shadowrun where even an implant that lets you taste food better will materially make you impure and less able to tap into the purity of magic, but it is still problematic. I think there's definitely a story that can be told in cyberpunk about being able to pay to become literally superhuman, and how that would inevitably cause class divide to be a literal physiological divide - imagine a world where every rich kid is literally smarter and faster and stronger than anyone else can ever hope to be unless they also paid up. The problem is most cyberpunk writers are lib as fuck and can't even begin to think about class properly, so instead of a discussion about alienation and paying to become superhuman, we get this garbage about becoming subhuman for modifying The Divine Form
You're absolutely right. I wouldn't mind seeing it explored in fiction and fantasy in particular, which seems to me like the perfect genre to explore those dynamics. The only other story I can think that does it also features a sort of throuple, though the two women have a more sisterly relationship while both are in a romantic relationship only with the male (the Honorverse series)
I hope with queerness and non-heteronormativity becoming more "mainstream" (well, talked about more openly outside of niche spaces) that we'll start to see more of an exploration of what being poly means
Our intrepid hero has joined the plucky rebellion! The rebels are a ragtag group of the downtrodden and the oppressed, fighting against the tyranny of the current leadership (but don't you dare give them any actual political ideology as a basis, they need to be generally "Rebels"). They don't seem to have concrete plans, but they talk a lot about change and fighting for the people
Uh oh! Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader's soldiers. They're shocked! How could they do this? Don't they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would've done the same to them
Oh no! Our intrepid hero was there for the deposing of the tyrant. The tyrant was executed by the rebel leader and assumes control, then immediately turns into the McCarthyist nightmare of Stalin. Now our hero has to save the kingdom from the rebels, who have turned evil by their taste of power!
Basically fucking hate how rebellion and rebels are portrayed in media. It's almost like a psy op how often rebellions are thinly veiled anticommunist propaganda, and how rebels are often portrayed as being as bad or worse as the current tyrant, they just hide it better
Just off the dome I can think of the Avatar series multiple times, Bioshock Infinite, and the Hunger Games series but I know it's basically ubiquitous
"If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we're no better than them"
The related trope of the hero not killing the villain after the villain has spent a whole story possibly killing, and the hero themselves just probably killed a ton of nameless goons to get to the villain, drives me up a wall
I take it you didn't see the Maleficent origin story movie that does in fact give her a tragic history and grievance
I recently read a fantasy novel called Silver Under Nightfall that has to be one of the first proper poly novels I've ever seen
The main character has an obvious attraction to a woman, and a confused lust for her husband. Both the husband and wife are into the main character. It's not high literature but I had a blast reading it anyway
combining alcoholism and the stock exchange with a bar game
Oh for real VA-11 Hall-A is finally getting its sequel?
in real life
Cyprus is loaded with NATO spy bases and SIGINT shit, because of its location near to the Middle East
0% chance she actually did any of those to earn a living
I don't doubt she held those positions, the same way a bored retiree becomes a cashier - something to pass the time with that she could quit whenever she felt like without consequence
I haven't had a single job where I haven't had to undergo weeks of training and months of building muscle memory to become adept at, yet every fucking job posting seems to demand years if not decades of experience and dedicated expensive training programs/education/certification, even for the most basic shit
Like what the fuck for? Give me a week's crash course and let me loose, there's nothing about 80% of (non-specialist, I'm obviously not talking about doctors or engineers or whatnot) jobs that someone can't figure out on the fly
They're actually against code in a lot of places these days specifically because they're hard to grip and turn for anyone with reduced grip strength, and a pain to open with occupied hands
If a house has them they can stay, but for renovations or new builds a lot of people are going with regular paddle style door handles
This is so comically evil that if I wrote it into a cyberpunk novel people would complain that it's too much of a parody
Monitoring, however, was not easy. For one thing, we had a hard time finding out what was really going on in China because doctors and scientists there appeared to be afraid to speak openly, for fear of retribution by the Chinese government.
Meanwhile you just know that if China had given detailed reports with precision breakdowns of every case in every province with tracking numbers and as much data as humanly possible, this ghoul would go full 
and accuse them of obfuscating data
Oh wait
This basically fucking happened
