sbv

I'm thinking of running a Cyberpunk RED campaign. My group has played D&D together for about five years now.

Any suggestions or advice on running the game? Are there any game play or mechanics tips that would help people coming from D&D?

The year is 2094. The month is Compuary, which is a new cyber-month they added just for doing hacker stuff. The bio-scum of Circuit City festers under the iron fist of Consolidated Omnibotics and its army of synthoid enforcers. At the city's peak, under the crystal dome, incredibly wealthy and genetically immortal CEOs call shots and pull strings. And they do sex stuff up there as well. Down here in the Dirt District, the rest of us scrape by swapping garbage and doing crazy future drugs called stuff like NitroNerv and Tums 2.

My name is Darpa Killblade, and I run with the baddest crew of low-life neurojackers around. There's Fishy Ramirez, fastest hacker on the net. There's Baltimore Airport, lab-grown to be a swimsuit model but programmed to kill. There's Crusty Silverware, biological warfare expert and black-market wizard. And then there's me: the owner of Circuit City's coolest jacket.

We've just been handed the biggest contract of our lives: Infiltrate the dome and take out Harvard Pubence, the president of cops. Our reward? One thousand bytes, which are our money now because we use computers so much. That's enough to skip this shithole and start somewhere new.

Tonight, Pubence is guest of honor at the 9th Annual Rich Perverts' Ball. My team is jacked up on Tums 2 and ready to roll the dice. So I've just got one question for you, scum.. …are you in?

What you should not do:

Experts have for years pointed out that’s a bad idea – and now Apple is officially warning users not to do it.

“Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone,” the company says in a recent support note spotted by Macworld. Along with the risk of damage, testing has suggested uncooked rice is not particularly effective at drying the device.

What you should do:

If your phone isn’t functioning at all, turn it off right away and don’t press any buttons. The next steps depend on your specific circumstances, but broadly speaking: dry it with a towel and put it in an airtight container packed with silica packets if you have them. Don’t charge it until you’re sure it’s dry.

"It feels like something went really wrong," said Aubin, who chaired the King Edward Task Force. "Here's something that we had in Ottawa that was super unique, and we lost it."

It's all the more painful to compare those images with the King Edward Avenue of today. Picnics have given way to open drug use, the lovers' path replaced with a median lined with panhandlers instead of elm trees.

The timber satellite has been built by researchers at Kyoto University and the logging company Sumitomo Forestry in order to test the idea of using biodegradable materials such as wood to see if they can act as environmentally friendly alternatives to the metals from which all satellites are currently constructed.

Since the congregation took naloxone training in March, there’s been seven outside St. Albans. But that number is quite modest. At the drop-in centre beneath the church, where some of Ottawa’s most afflicted seek daytime refuge once the overnight shelters close, they’re doing at least one [naloxone application] a day.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller ... said there is a correlation between the influx of international students and temporary workers and the housing shortage in this country

It sounds like they're going to crack down on "colleges" fleecing international students:

He said he plans to demand that provinces, such as Ontario, stop licensing substandard colleges offering a poor experience to international students and said he may consider refusing study permits if they do not clamp down on colleges churning out international graduates like “puppy mills.”

The documents, obtained through an access to information request, consist of dozens of pages of communications between officials at Alberta Health, the government ministry, and Alberta Health Services, the provincial health authority. They show that, in addition to ordering AHS to remove references to specific vaccines, the government instructed the health authority to limit information on vaccine benefits and efficacy.

and

Public health experts have said these paltry [vaccination] numbers are partly to blame for the fact that Alberta’s hospital wards and emergency department waiting rooms are now overflowing with patients. The Globe and Mail reported last week that some doctors have said the situation is worse than it was during the height of the pandemic.

I don't know how these things usually work, but it seems like overreach for elected officials to tell public health officers how to do their jobs.

2,147,483,365 rounds of ammo
pull the trigger, 
miss the player, get shot in the head,
2,147,483,364 rounds of ammo in the gun

A litigious developer doesn't like it when people call him out.

And he's done it before:

In 2010, Banks's company Pan American Properties filed a million-dollar lawsuit against two Charlottetown residents who had appealed a permit to allow a hotel to be built in downtown Charlottetown.

...

The commission said Pan American "showed disrespect for the legislated role and mandate of the Commission as a quasi-judicial body...