Kalbear

It's mostly that the original background was written in the 80s and envisioned the world of Cyberpunk in 2020. There is a LOT of source material and background based on that, and I don't think they wanted to retrofit it or throw it away. And a lot of it is very much anachronistic - it's a view of the near future as written in the 80s in the US. So Japan's zaibatsus are obviously going to be a massive power, the Soviet Union is always going to be around, China is going to be kind of...there, but nothing special, and the rest of the world is largely nonexistent or inconsequential aside from resource grabs and exploitation. I think it's good in a lot of ways that they did do it this way - it gives them more freedom, a more rich background, and allows for the tech to just go kind of nuts (like we thought it would in Cyberpunk) without having to worry about being too actually close to the real world. But there are jarring things there too. The biggest one that still bothers me is the racialization of the gangs and those stupid-ass names they have - which are basically lifted from the source material and make me cringe. Makes me a little sad they didn't go with one of my favorite expansions - the Cybergeneration one - where in just 7 short years nanotech goes fucking insane and gives people superpowers. But they wisely nerfed that and went back to the solos and runner system instead. I guess? But it's still not a big deal as far as what we understand today - especially given that there has been, like, virtually no attempt to make things particularly less polluted or less environmentally damaging. It is almost certainly too subtle. I get that's not what they were going for, but any world where gas stations are a thing in 2077 (even if they're using ethanol, which is still going to decompose into CO2) is going to have some bad times from a climate change perspective. Japan is a lot more than just Arasaka. Most of the cyberware is Japanese. The most developed area in the town is the Japan town area. The general culture has tons of Japanese links to it - the food, the fashion, the graphics, the music. The cars are still quite Japanese too. There are even digs to how the Arasaka properties in night city are just trash compared to the luxury of Japan.

Link to this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67144061 In particular some of the important sources there I've not seen as easily are the the number of people sheltering in that courtyard was stated by people unrelated to Hamas. They also state that the injuries that they saw were consistent with shrapnel and burns. That corroborates well with the idea that many people were seriously injured but probably could have lived if they had received medical attention.

Then you didn't look very hard. This was a speech he gave to Israel in Jerusalem in 2013, very close in time to where were are now.

I believe that, but that's not my point. Do you think that 500 thousand people are going to gather in one place right now? That's where I'm saying critical thinking comes in. Do you think that Israelis - who have been trained for the last 15 years on how to deal with shelter and how to practice safe behaviors in the middle of a rocket assault - are going to go en masse to one area while there is a war going on? It doesn't take a lot to make it very clear that this was not correct. But it's what people want to think, so they spread it. And it did happen - just back in March, as part of the protests against the changes in the judiciary.

The big difference between then and now is that the Twitter algorithms and showcase have been heavily modified to favor bluetick users (which are now usually a sign of WORSE information) and highlight posts that will drive more engagement. It means there's a lot more crap to wade through - and more importantly there's a lot of money to be made as a producer of said crap. Put it another way - Twitter used to be more reliable than Facebook. It is less reliable now.

It was not, but the cpu for it was relatively decent anyways. This was a machine I bought in 2021 so I could take the 3070 out of it and put in a new machine, and we took the old machine's gpu and put it in this. But it had a not awesome hdd for storage and with more recent games that just won't fly any more.

The person you're referring to is an Israeli influencer who as far as I can tell has no formal relationship with the government. I don't know why you didn't bother looking that up but it didn't take me very long. Their views are as worthless as anyone else's. I don't see how this refutes anything I said. Note that I didn't say anything about the veracity of the idf or the US or hamas - the rule applies regardless of the side. And again, the most important thing is to be extra cautious when it triggers your biases the most. That is when you are less likely to think twice and most likely to share quickly.

I just helped my daughter with perf stuff for bg3, and the big one that helped the most was putting it on an ssd. Even a sata ssd made a massive difference, especially in baldurs gate (the city). We also got a 3070 (from a 1050). The extra memory is probably a big help there. That put everything at ultra settings with great performance. But the ssd was the biggest win, by a large margin. Prior to that some areas were just not even playable.

No, they were not saying it was shrapnel. The primary story they've said is that a rocket launch went astray and hit the area. I will reiterate again - if you care about the truth and about good information you have to be careful. You especially should be careful about news that confirms your biases most. You ESPECIALLY should be careful from anything on Twitter; my current rule of thumb is to assume any one who I have not followed for years is full of shit, and find original sources for any reporting from those people that I do normally trust (because they can be duped too).

And it's bullshit. Thought I recognized that shot. Seriously, use some critical thinking hete. Do you think half a million israelis are going to gather anywhere right now? https://www.indiatoday.in/fact-check/story/fact-check-video-of-sea-of-israelis-protesting-against-netanyahu-is-old-2449870-2023-10-16

More importantly they're hitting an open courtyard with a thousand people in it. It doesn't take a very powerful attack to do major damage to unarmed, uncovered civilians.

I don't think you should swallow anything that Israeli officials have said; they have repeatedly been shown to be disingenuous, especially when they act poorly. I'm simply saying that all of this 'well they're obviously not getting their stories straight' and a bunch of the news reports that are contradictory are not really helpful other than producing outrage. I guess if that's what you want, fine, but there are a lot of people out there that are very interested in making sure that you do not get facts straight.

Eh. I think this is both a problem of Twitter being short and people losing context. Israel had already told everyone to evacuate, hospitals included. They've been doing that for a few days. The evacuation warning as far as I can tell was not urgent to the hospital. Really, everyone needs to calm down a bit and wait. This is another breaking news event with a lot of people very invested in twisting things to their viewpoint and there will be a LOT of garbage news floating out there. Use your heads, use your best judgment, don't believe things and especially don't believe things right away which confirm your biases.

Ah. That's true but somewhat immaterial. More pointedly a hospital courtyard isn't good to launch from any way because you have to go straight up, and a place with over a thousand people sheltering while waiting for help isn't good because they'll notice. And the people of Gaza know full well to get the fuck out of dodge if a rocket is launched from their area. The idea that hamas used a hospital as a launch site without any hospital staff or any of the thousand people noticing is an obviously stupid one.

I have no idea what relevance that is to my point or why you were responding to me.

No, the courtyard of a hospital was not being used to launch rockets.

Going back a bit on Egypt's responsibility and letting people through - one big issue there is that the border crossing of Rafah is a very heavily regulated crossing on both sides - and Israel has bombed the fuck out of the Gaza side. The Egypt side is actually open as normal, but it doesn't matter because effectively no one can cross over at this point. And Israel keeps bombing it.

I think a way you could do something like this is by doing it similar to Johnny - have it be an entirely different character experience. Imagine it was like GTA 5, where you were popping in on several character's stories that were interleaving, and advancing them all differently at times. Or just have it as a couple one-off things that you do similar to the braindance experience.

There are a fair amount of places to improve, IMO. A bigger variety of quest behaviors and things would be good, having more vertical places to explore and rewarding that sort of gameplay would be good, having your background matter more would be very nice (IMO, corpo is the only one that really makes a big difference in gameplay and it's kind of profound what giving V a background of wanting to get back at Arasaka does, especially compared to Johnny). Vehicles are still very unsatisfying to drive - they're better, but still largely trash. Still decently racist in the enemies and the stereotypes there. And as usual it would be good to have more of your actions change things in the game a bit more than they do, though I guess that's part of the message - that fighting the system doesn't actually change anything and if you want real change you've either got to get out of the system entirely (the Nomad ending) or you need to vastly change the environment that the corps exist in. Still, not entirely satisfying there. But these are all real quibbles. The biggest problem prior to 2.0 was that the combat was just kind of there and not super fun - you were vastly more powerful than basically anyone and enemies were pretty boring as a rule - but all of that has been made significantly better. It reminds me a lot more like playing either Spider-Man - zipping around the city via dash and diving down on enemies to strike fear - or the spiritual successor in every way to Deus Ex and its satisfying combat. Both are great. Another thing s that the world of Cyberpunk is weirdly anachronistic now. That's not really a fault of CDPR or anything and they did a good job extrapolating a world where the Soviet Union is still around, Japan is this weird mega powerful nation, China is a nonissue, global warming isn't a thing of note. There are no streaming things - people still broadcast TV and radio and talk about scheduling times! But that's not a huge deal, just one of those weird alt-futures like Fallout.

It takes very little time to google pound of flesh and get its antisemitic connotations. This isn't some random person making a comment in their workplace and getting written up for sensitivity; this is a person who does political commentary and does so for a very large audience (albeit in a supposedly humorous way). This should have been caught by editorial as well - that's one of their primary jobs - but ultimately if you have that kind of job it's on you to educate yourself, and ignorance is no real excuse. ESPECIALLY when the subject matter is so sensitive right now. Again, no sympathy in this time and age.

Yeah, I get that too. Just a standard crash reporter that's being too zealous about exit codes.

Shockingly jokes made against one group aren't always acceptable when used against another. No sympathy here.

They also specifically state that the existence of Israel is null and void, that none of the people that are existing there have any rights to that land, and they will take any and all means necessary to fulfill that goal. I guess it's not quite the 'we are only going to be happy when all Jews are dead' but I don't see how Israel is going to be particularly happy with a country that has as its core viewpoint "Israel can never ever exist". More to the point, why would Israel accept that?

I mean, that is the choice that Gazans made. It wasn't a great election but it was an election and Hamas won with a plurality at least. And then Hamas did what it did - then and now. With that out of the way what are the clearer next steps?

I'm comfortable saying that the government of Israel's stated policy won't change to say something like 'eliminate all Palestinians'. I don't honestly know, but in general there's a rule of thumb with us Jews - when someone tells you who they are, believe them. (it was first said by Maya Angelou, but it's still a very good point). As to the counterfactual we literally have historical record of the Arab league attempting to do just that. Several times! The governments of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and several others were not disempowered or in the minority. This isn't a super fringy view! I mean, I don't know who you're arguing with. I agree! I think that the best solution for Israel and for the region is to give Palestinians their own legitimate country. But you can't do that in any reasonable way to Israel with Hamas as the primary governmental actor. Maybe you can do it with some kind of Marshall plan (I'm very skeptical of that), maybe you can do it with a timetable and specific met goals to statehood, but there is no reasonable way that Israel is going to give a statehood to Palestine with Hamas under control of it - nor should they. Or...I mean, I guess they could, but all they would do is continue to blockade it, ruin it, and make people miserable and dead - and I don't think that's what you want, either. Because it's important? I don't know that it would just require their marketing to change, but it matters - and it especially matters when you're talking about a difference between a democratic country and an authoritarian one. It especially matters when you're allied with other democratic nations. I agree that Netanyahu's policy has been to basically boil the frog slowly and just try and get away with whatever he can - and that is horrible - but here's the thing - he doesn't have to be in charge. And that's not been the entire policy of Israel's history forever. I think we're both in agreement that what we need is regime change in both countries. The difference is that with Israel that can in theory happen with a vote. That isn't the case in Gaza with Hamas. I don't know why that's absurd; that's been a common behavior of many conquered nations in the past. It's what happened with Germany and Japan after WW2, it's what happened with Afghanistan and Iraq. You don't have to make it perfect, but having some rules of law to ensure that things don't revert so you don't have to go in there and blow shit up again should be something you actually would applaud, I'd think, if you want to avoid Palestinian and Israeli death. Because the alternative to it is to just give them the ability to put into power anyone they want - and that may mean Hamas or something worse. Is that really what you want to give them the choice to make? I didn't say that and I think you're deliberately misreading me. Hamas has the power in Gaza to decide on running elections or a democracy or whatever else they choose. I've said repeatedly that Israel is an occupying power in Gaza, but one of the things they have been hands off on is the means of government and leadership there. For the last 15 years Hamas could have had elections if they wanted to. They didn't. Now, I really want you to notice that I did not say that the Palestinians could have had elections. I don't think that's the case; from what I can tell Hamas locked the place down pretty well and ran things much like a gang. But the choice was on Hamas. Of course now it won't be. Hamas won't be permitted to control Gaza any more. It will be up to Israel to decide for Palestinians what the government looks like (or even if there will be one) and who will be in charge.