Nacarbac [any]

The nitty-gritty of Shadowrun’s version is actually pretty good - it’s not actually the soul that is harmed by augmentation, it’s “the ability of the soul to recognise its material-plane anchor”. Thus most purely restorative things like cloned limbs or corrective surgery, and such don’t have an Essence cost (or it’s minimal), as there’s no sudden disjoint - the astral form was always that way, or organically changes at a rate it can follow.

Essence loss has no real effect on characters IIRC (some effects on getting magic to work on you, maybe a bit of social stuff but with the same “probably the social phenomena of being a walking killing machine, and forgetting to turn off your Wired Reflexes in public” rather than soul damage), until the point that your astral form no longer recognises your body and falls off. This isn’t presented morally, it’s just a metaphysical phenomenon that can be understood in-setting and therefore addressed.

Advanced tech and magic was slowly beginning to understand how to create augmentations that respected this - geneware, symbiotes, nanotech, to begin with - and had even begun to work on a way to restore that connection (via using the Metahuman Vampiric Virus, which is capable of Essence restoration somehow).

The only real EEEEVIL cyberpsychosis was from the Cyberzombies, a crude and classically corporate black project on “we wanna make supersoldiers but they die if we stuff too many guns in their skull” where they “solve” the problem by getting Blood Mages to staple their dissolving astral form back into their should-be-corpse and add Forced Memory Stimulators to try and constantly trick them into thinking they’re alive in between killing sprees. It’s pretty fucked.

But I stopped caring about keeping up with Shadowrun with 4E (because of the embezzlement from writers, and subsequent scab takeover of the setting), so who knows how they present it nowadays…

I have vague memories as a teenager reading The Night’s Dawn books under the desk at school, getting really embarrassed by the multi-page hardcore sex scenes and the protagonist being, uh, a pretty bad person.

There’s just something about Doorstop Sci-fi books that seem to lead their writers into trying their hand at fancy space smut.

It contrasted to Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince series, which I read around the same time, where (IIRC) it’s either wholesome romance or very obviously intended as something deeply unhealthy… although there was a lot of that!

If there’s anything Star Wars loves it’s an excuse to rerelease something - they can do the New Digitally Remastered Rogue One, with frame-by-frame AI-aging effects added on.

…it won’t look great though.

The perfect TTRPG worldmap.

Agreed, but e-scooter rollouts have basically fuckall integration with the existing infrastructure/forms of travel in a city or with standard driving education.

While they’re great in theory, they should be being introduced as part of a massive overhaul of personal transportation infrastructure, education, and regulation… or at least some supervision with actual teeth behind it. But we’re probably past the age of doing stuff like that, so as is it’s just letting random companies step in to extract money while impinging on the rough grey area created by existing safety systems.

Eventually that’ll work itself out, sure, but in much the same way that we started mandating lockout switches on Giant Blending Machines after The Incident With the Giant Blending Machine.

It might be like those defence contractor adverts - there’s a couple of actual individual people that they want to appeal to, either socially or politically, so they make some mild public gestures to show that they’re also cool. The public are irrelevant.

Or yeah, the vast egregore spirit of the company just thinks “This behaviour set appears to be popular, but is contested, therefore invest minimally in aesthetic appeasement”.

Land of the Lustrous - some uncountable time after humanity dies out, a small island is host to a group of ageless nongendered humanoids born from the earth who are occasionally terrorized by washed-out parodies of Buddhists from the Moon. One of them, Phosphophyllite, is deeply unsatisfied with their life…

Gorgeous art. I don’t think explaining too much is a good idea, but it’s **really **worth a read.

Battle Angel Alita - in the Scrapyard, a post-apocalyptic dumping ground enslaved by the floating city of Salem/Tiphares, a smashed up cyborg head is found by a cybernetic doctor. He successfully reawakens them, Alita, though she has lost her memories. He takes her in as a surrogate daughter, but the violence and nihilism of the Scrapyard brings back some elements of her past in the form of her skill with one of the most sophisticated cyborg martial arts.

Alita’s character grows up and develops over several decades - and those changes aren’t always “good”. The first series takes place over about 14 years, and she spends several of those in a really unhealthy headspace - while there’s a fuckton of combat, the story values her development as a person far more (though it does timeskip past an idyllic “four years spent playing keytar in a crusty cyborg dive bar” to the next bit of chaos).

A really detailed art style that just loves all manner of mechanical and biological details. Great worldbuilding with really solid scifi makes the various bits of superscience far more plausible than it should be and characters who actually live their own lives offscreen.

Inferior flat mothership = naaaaah.

A petty reason, I’ll admit, but it’d mildly irk me every time I had to use it - and there’s nothing worse than being mildly irked. Not even being fully irked.

Darning is super easy to do at an “ugly but functional” level, and then it does seem to reward the extra effort of getting skilled and creative quite well with all those neat patching styles (though I’m still in the ugly but functional stage).

the brotherhood guy is exactly the type of facist dudebro the brotherhood would create

True, but that just makes him a weirder choice, because he brings essentially nothing to the story - his character development has been mostly him falling for Lucy, therefore coincidentally doing Good Thing, and looking glum when asked “what if the Brotherhood… is the Brother-no-good?” because his character is written as ignorant and uncommunicative, leaving him incapable of expressing reasons or arguments for his actions (outside of the excellent acting - his expressions as he relishes his newfound power were perfect).

…wait, he’s just the first ten minutes of Finn from Star Wars dragged out over a season.

It would have also worked much better with Q’s common refrain that Picard isn’t special. Showing that all his other lives would have had equal value, and he just happens in this one to be The Captain.

It’s pretty much the same principle as how every major character gets to be a captain of their own ship, “everyone wants to be a manager, and if they don’t become one they’re underperforming”.

Pesto - wild garlic time is about now, and it’s very easy to make, but you could probably do it with garlic bulbs, it’ll just be very intense.

Roasted garlic is nice - just like onions, leave in the skin alongside other stuff.

Yeah! Almost every magic-caster setting has an awful undercurrent of inequality where mages rule the “muggles” pretty much effortlessly, and any protagonist starting low is actually just elevated to hang with the cool masters of magic.

Or it could go the Technomancer or Case of the Toxic Spell Dump direction, where magic and wonder are as subject to being ground up to oil the gears of capital as anything else and the most common career for a young mage is decades on the Industrial Enchanting factory line, churning out flying sportscarpets or assembling Wands of Kill Insurgent.

It’s not a story the Confucians would tell you.

“Thought experiments” can end up that way when there’s no actual experiment done as a result to test it out, or after it gets released into the wild. The enduring use of P-Zombies or simulation theories.

If you can get a proper Lion’s Mane extract (that is actual fruiting body and not one of the scammy “100% of the mushroom” ones), I’ve found it really helps with various kinds of brain fog - a bit like caffeine, but subjectively feeling more like “health” than “energy”.

With GPS and weather monitoring, you can be charged by the minute for RainModePro, which uses unique WeatherSeal (closes windows) technology dynamically to keep you dry*. Guaranteed**.

Requires Internet connection. Product wll disable rain seal if verification is not confirmed during weather event.

*Dryness is a state of mind.

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I am catching up with y’all after discovering one simple trick: the Internet Archive is not blocked at work, so while standing idle at the desk I can tab over and read old photocopies of Capital.

Halfway through Ch4 in a few weeks, I’m rather pleased with myself.

Or “henshu shita the X in your head (TL: henshu shita means redacted)” for that old anime sub feeling.

It’s fine, but the manga is better - the author does some great worldbuilding that you’ll only see in the manga end notes and whatnot.