truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
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Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Anyways I'm still absolutely feral about Azik at the end of Volume 2.
I mean I would like to point out that we have not seen Klein contact Azik since before the whole Tingen thing went down. In fact, we see Klein consciously choosing Not to contact Azik the whole time.
Meaning there's a good chance Azik still thinks Klein is Dead.
And yet when he gets a message in Klein's handwriting, the only word written on it being "Help!" He's there no more than a minute or two later. No questions asked.
Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.
Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"
It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.
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i just find it frustrating in general to see people mindlessly assume that the highest quality of information about newly studied medical conditions can only be found in what they call "research." (Do not get me started on what they mean by this and what level of understanding they have of various types of studies or how to read them.)
When, if you know enough about how this actually works, the reality is that highly self-educated patients are going to be your best source of high quality information about a majority of medical conditions, illnesses, or disabilities. Advocacy groups are formal organizations... made up of highly self-educated patients.
Which is to say. hello is it me you're looking for
I think the "joke superboss that looks exactly like a tutorial mob" trope from JRPGs could be productively adapted to all tabletop RPG settings. D&D campaign setting where the highest-level character in the world is a random goblin living in a fishing hut on a river just outside the player characters' home town. There's no complicated backstory explaining why this random goblin is like a 25th-level ranger – they just are.
Cyberpunk game where after many travails the player characters finally get to meet the leaders of the Resistance, and in addition to the expected cyborg rock stars and such, for some reason the shopping mall security guard the GM used to demo the stealth mechanics way back in session one is there.
Assume we're talking about the basic sort of setting D&D implies. There's exceptional people with exceptional powers, large and prosperous kingdoms bordered by swathes of monster-infested territory, and remote hamlets whose inhabitants somehow have a +1 Flaming Sword lying around for anyone willing to brave the conveniently nearby loot-filled dungeon.
This isn't what real-life history looked like. But the inaccuracies cancel out, and a remarkably coherent picture results.
Start with the heroes (a term used without moral valence). They swoop in, save the day, rescue the kidnapped children, slay the troll, and get rich doing it. I don't need to explain this bit to you, it's the literal foundational premise of the game.
But heroes don't always succeed. For every village saved from a rampaging giant or a covetous dragon, another wasn't. There's probably a lot of dispossessed peasants around, because that's an inevitable consequence of a setting where monsters exist and regularly threaten small villages.
But then the heroes enter the picture again, now rich, tired, and eager for retirement. For some, that retirement involves getting away from larger society: they seek solitude, to revisit a place of great beauty or mystery, or maybe simply because this hero has made some powerful enemies.
Except such a hero doesn't just want to buzz off to the middle of nowhere: he might be a swordmaster or an archmage, but can he darn socks? Can he make cheese? Can he even build himself a house? No, those are jobs for the peasantry. Of which there are quite a few around, as we've previously established.
So the hero liquidates a few assets, sets up an expedition, recruits some vagrants, and establishes a manorial settlement wherever they feel like it, clearing out weak foes when necessary.
(and more often than not, this village is established near a dungeon or magical locale the hero previously explored, either to allow the hero access to some local resource or for simple familiarity's sake)
For a time, there's peace. The peasants are still peasants, but their heroic overlord is powerful and invested in their survival, so all things considered they do pretty well. But as you might conclude from the continuous existence of quote unquote wilderness, this state is not stable.
The hero dies, and suddenly their peasants are dealing with all the security issues that their isolation brings. The farmers have found themselves in an adventure-friendly environment. Even so, most are loath to leave and return to the landless underclass; for most families, being part of it lies within living memory, and even subsistence farming compares favorably still.
But the hero's death has also brought a windfall of magic items; enchanted blades, potions, wands. Untrained laborers will have little success using them... but the sort of mercenary who could solve your problem is always looking for better magic loot. This is typically the step where your average adventuring party comes in.
This situation rarely ends well. The stopgap measures fail, the reserve of magic items dries up, population shrinks to zero as villagers die or flee, the cycle begins anew. All that remains is a ghost town with a run-down wizard's tower looking out over it: on the whole, it mostly served to redistribute items from established to aspiring heroes.
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If you subscribe to this model, think about the following questions when worldbuilding a Threatened Remote Village!
-Who used to protect this town from the sort of thing currently endangering it?
-Did that protector fill any roles beyond killing monsters? Did a retired cleric act as healer, a ranger as bowyer? Who filled the resulting voids?
-What magic items did the protector leave? What broader legacy can be seen?
-The settlement is presumably quite recent; who or what did it replace?
-Why would a hero choose to settle here, of all places? Are there magical or mundane locations of great importance or beauty close by? Does some supernatural being dwell near?
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One thing I find interesting about Star Wars is that some parts of the worldbuilding have begun to make more sense to me over time due to developments in the real world.
In the expanded universe there’s an abundance of isolated planets with barely any contact with the rest of the galaxy, whole worlds of ruins of ancient civilizations, a profound lethargy and a lack of dynamism. All of this makes more sense if you conceive of the Star Wars setting as existing in a state of long-term population decline. Galactic civilization as a whole is below replacement rate, and whatever energy that spurred sapient species to expand into the galaxy as a whole is thousands of years past (like, 25,000 in the old EU).
There’s probably been ups and downs since then, but the trend has been downwards. Everything is old and busted, the era of interconnection in the galaxy is gone because trade and exchange is less profitable by the year, and the seemingly intractable social and economic problems that result drive the political instability of the films.
Incidentally, if it wasn’t for Coruscant and a couple of other city-planets, you could plausibly just make the Star Wars galaxy a very empty setting, with planetary populations rarely breaking seven figures. Naboo doesn’t exactly look densely settled and all the other planets we see in the films are even emptier. The small size of the Clone Army might not actually be that absurd.
With birth rates across the world trending downward and much of the developed world below replacement rate, something like this minus the sci-fi aspects might be a plausible-but-not-worst case scenario for the future politics of the developed world.
In addition, the poor state of knowledge in the galaxy, and the fact that so many bits of EU material involve treasure-hunts for knowledge, make sense in a setting which has had thousands of years of digital records. We’ve had them for less than half a century and we’re already running into problems of data being lost due to file incompatibility, storage failures, corruption, poor archiving etc.
What must it be like after ten centuries? Or a hundred? If you were an archivist in the setting, would you prioritize modern history and navigational maps, or similar material from a thousand years in the past? If that happens enough times, you end up in the scenario where the directions to one specific ancient industrial planet only remain in a single library on an agroforestry world on the other side of the galaxy.
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the removal of physical media is not the inevitable progression of improving tech, its like the removal of the 3.5mm jack: purely a result of profit
physical games still account for about 1/5th of all sales of video games
but by only selling digital games sony can be the ultimate arbiter of their price.
they can stop you lending games and force another sale instead. they can stop the sale of second hand games and keep prices artificially high. they can set any price they want and that will be your only option.
I know it's also a very good acting method for faceless but in situations like this his personal reasoning for being shameless is hilarious 😭 ok so what if gehrman sparrow humiliates himself? What has that got to do with me, sherlock moriarty? And so what if sherlock is suspected? I, gehrman sparrow, have nothing to do with it. Anyways, I'm actually klein moretti, so really I have nothing to do with it. Moreover, I'm actually actually zhou mingrui, so none of this is any of my business.
klein really said keep those empty frames, if nobody's in then then no one is to blame, lmao
