But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.
A negative decentralisation of research into redundant and insular walled gardens, alongside techbro cults? Clearly this is a precursor to the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Semi-serious, because I would like it: The most anarchic of creatures are the cat and the various cephalopods, and thus the highest awards possible are a lil' sleepy cat pin, octopus tentacle holding a hammer, or cuddlefish.
Earth Defense Force 6. It's great - wave after wave of mysterious monsters (ants, wasps, spiders), basically humans (frog-people), and hideous non-humans (greys), now with more robots and terrifying demon gods.
But it's one to play after playing Earth Defense Force 5, because it does have an actual plot - well, a mashup of monster b-movie tropes that somehow manages to be impressively grim and cheerfully absurd. It's just that it mostly assumes you've played EDF5 as it only cherry picks a few notable line. A lot of levels are some of the better levels of EDF5 with a twist, and since the game itself isn't a dramatic upgrade in mechanics (though there are a lot of little improvements) it's not worth skipping 5.
It does need more Crazy Space Laser Lady GOD though. She's the best.
British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch reportedly missing after yacht sinks off Sicily
The name of that ship? The Bayesian.
I am currently in the habit of wearing a (far too warm) hat to hide my earbuds at work, so, you're absolutely correct.
I can't quite pin it down, but maybe the BG3 characters felt a bit "glossy" compared to Owlcat's? Or perhaps it's a side effect of voice acting making complex conversations drag, and lose a lot of the descriptive depth that text allows - not that they did a bad job of it!
I didn't really like any of the characters in WotR or BG3, but in WotR they felt more interesting - ah! Part of it was definitely that all the BG3 characters were like a parody of inappropriate backstories, "You would know me as Fuckslayer the Legendary Badass, Level 1", "I'm actually an Archmage, but I got knocked out in a cutscene and all my XP fell out of my pockets".
Yeah, it just isn't happening without a massive cooperative effort over generations. Not just the time for each generation of volunteers to be monitored, but also the work needed to address age-related entropy that isn't purely "lifespan" - no point splicing yourself into tortoise-person if you spend the next three hundred years as Joe Biden.
That's a selfless undertaking for tens of thousands who will never see the benefits and might suffer some real nasty side effects. Leaving aside whether or not it should be done in the first place, it's just not compatible with the Rich Man Afraid of Hypothetical Screaming Void impulse which drives modern life extension nowadays.
Switching it around on the theme of misuse - motivation and praise might sometimes fit as violence (though one whose damage is probably delayed temporally). Army Recruiters seeming to be a very easy example.
Well, they do tend to be designed to be resistant to that kind of thing - and some sorta fancy bunker buster would probably disperse the fissile material anyway. Certainly a big ol' not good, but criticality depends on having enough mass in close proximity, so it's similar to how you can blow up a nuclear missile with an interceptor safely-ish.
Setting an oil facility ablaze is going to be much easier and have worse health effects in the vicinity.
I'm most of the way through Vol 1, and it got a lot more engaging. The mass of repetition and minor variation to establish concepts mostly ended (and when it comes up it's in much smaller chunks) and it got into some infuriating and fascinating historical analysis. Perhaps try skipping to those chapters to see if they work for you?
Well GM engagement is supposed to be a big part of GURPS/HERO chargen, to make sure that nonfunctional or inappropriate characters dont happen unless part of the campaign tone is supposed to be having fun with that.
It was part of the series of prototypes for 4E. As they were near the end of the 3.5 run they started loosening up and experimenting, though of course someone (Mearls? I forget) got into power and scrapped the entire 4E project for their own pet idea.
It's an old one, but Roadside Picnic and its loose movie adaptation STALKER are both very good. Not quite a "true" post-apoc as it'd be today, in that The Zone is a small place in a "normal" world that the protagonists choose to enter, but they certainly confront the ending of "what came before" through an Event of sudden and total alienation.
The Earth Abides is also good, a very early story about the aftermath of a superplague. Life goes on, and humans remain human.
Yeah, Station Eleven is good. Just the backdrop of "traveling storyteller caravan that has a regular circuit of villages who support them" being a thing that can exist is such a dramatically optimistic (realistic, even) view of humanity compared to the norm.
And "parts" also includes whatever salvage piles they have, to see if they can rig up a compete thingumabob.
It just became a way of admitting to their being all talk, but that being good actually. Not even incremental material change, just incremental change in the "discourse", which will (if you're a good voter) lead to it.
Storywise, Keanu Reeves fucked it up. Playing it again after getting bored, for the Phantom Liberty expansion, I liked his character a lot more - while it barely ever tries to do more than a surface-level "I hate corpos because they're mean and not cool, which is why I'm mean and cool", it's not like he's actually wrong.
But having him there surely took away vast amounts of care from everything else - the really easy example being how Jackie, the starting Best Bud, is totally sidelined by wanting him out of the way for More Keanu.
spoiler
well, flatlined
But what they do with More Keanu is mostly just More Bitter Quips with V slowly going from "you're literally the biggest loser in history, you fucking nuked Arasaka and it did nothing" to "hmm, interesting" - while Jackie's dream was a nihilistic heroic fantasy, it's one that actually could change into something pretty cool over the game, and unlike V he has an actual personality and sense of the world, which is vital to cyberpunk. Even JC Denton had something of a soul, and his flatness and distance were deliberate things done to him by his childhood and training - he could carry a conversation and be the one saying the most interesting part of it.
Phantom Liberty is a big step up in writing and delivery, and it even manages to give V some vague ideology... alas not particularly good ones.
spoiler
A: I'm a cool mercenary but I will DIE for the President of the New United States. Being CIA-ish is cool, sometimes you gotta make hard choices and stuff.
B: I'm too cool to be trusting, but like, I'll kill a lotta people for you Madam President. Being CIA-ish is cool, but none of you seem happy.
Optional: Songbird, I have known you for about five minutes of conversation and I wuv you, your very obvious lies are a Big Surprise somehow.
The ending was kinda neat, albeit totally stupid. Killer end credits song. Would have been a great movie (since it's basically Escape from Night City), and they used Idris Elba with much more restraint. Needed a Snake Plisken cameo.
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...