TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]

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

Biden is exceptionally ornery, and incapable of being reasoned with when in that state

It’s funny to me (in a sad way) how this shit is the only way to see Biden becoming lucid and coherent

Man slurs and stumbles and mumbles his way around 90% of the time, but the moment anyone pushes back he goes into full attack dog mode before reverting to brain pudding ten minutes later

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

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

I remember a solid week of absolute pearl clutching and fainting that China was about to deorbit and drop a used booster rocket onto some random (white) city in the world… A year ago? Two now?

China had obviously calculated the trajectory for it to land in the ocean like every other space agency in the world, but the news was going feral about how China was going to just drop it on people and kill thousands out of carelessness

And then the booster splashed down into the water as China said it would. You had a few libs sniffle and go “w-well it could’ve missed a-a-and landed on Australia!” and then that was it. No reckoning with the story, just buried it

And much like with the excessive camber that a lot of people think is cool on cars (where the wheels flare out sideways), pre-loading a desert truck is usually pretty subtle, only a few inches up and down. Noticeable but functional

Lots of street trends like the Carolina Squat and Stancing take these concepts and jack them up past 11 into pure ridiculous territory

Reminds me of those “brief retrospective” style videos that are 2-8 hours of basically regurgitating the plot of a game and quests verbatim, no analysis or retrospective at all

Didn’t Facebook release a study on this spooky Russian disinfornarskaya or whatever, and it turned out to have been basically a single percentage of all Trump related content?

the kind of guy who has a girlfriend because guys are supposed to have girlfriends. everything is an obligation/responsibility

According to an interview with him, he literally sees his time with his girlfriend as transactional, that he considers every hour spent with her as being an hour he’s lost money because he’s not making content

No, I don’t. He represents the worst of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He runs a staunchly conservative, queerphobic nation that’s put a number of my friends in real material danger simply for existing, and they can scarcely tell me about it because of how tightly the state cracks down on that

How history will view him depends on how the war shakes out and who you’re asking and why. He’s been a leader - or around the reins of power - for a very long time, and I don’t see him as innocent or blameless in the events that bring us to the invasion. This was a collision thirty odd years in the making, and Great Man Theory fucking sucks as an analysis of history

You uh

You wanna expand on that or are you going to pretend you got an epic mic drop own

Because I have no fucking clue what you’re trying to say