???

Only bet I ever won was the only one I ever really took, because I knew I couldn’t lose. I was discussing Colombia with someone (we’d both been there) and they forgot Colombia has both an Atlantic and a Pacific coastline. We bet on it, and since I know world geography on the continental scale nearly by heart, I won the bet.

I wouldn’t have even taken that bet if I had a 75% chance of winning, because I bet $100 but was broke. Never bet on even the slightest uncertainty if you can’t afford to pay, it’s not worth it. Fortunately, I’d been to both over both coasts of Colombia on planes, seen Colombia on all sorts of maps and globes, and reality is consistent enough that coastlines on a map don’t change until the real world changes first plus a delay to update the maps, and internet failure would just mean the bet was off. I had basically no chance of failure and the guy would have been pretty patient in the 0.0000000~0001% chance a freak accident occurred.

Obviously nothing is guaranteed, but if your chance of winning is lower than your chance of dying or having your life permanently ruined if you lose, you’re better off walking away. And that’s why I never liked the Golden Saucer type games in Pokémon and Neopets, one spin really is just one spin for me, win or lose, because if I don’t win the first time on a luck based “game” then I see it for what it is… an obvious con.

Yeah, if it’s 50% then I’d take the bet but the game is never that generous. As they say, the house always wins.

The terrorists in that case managed to outlast a billion/trillion $ anti-terrorism budget, I don’t think the US had much negotiating power or a choice to not negotiate in that case. Ironic considering how many times that it’s been the other way around.

YES, because OP is typing words that can be misconstrued as being a shill or a bigoted asshole. I’m smart enough to recognize it if you point it out, but I’m not fucking psychic, and I’m the kind of person who believes in dream prophesies so that just shows that neither potential delusion nor intelligence have anything to do with people misreading things online. It’s just human and technical limitations, but your italics are clear so: if you don’t want people to be annoyed at you, maybe respond without being condescending.

Huh, wasn’t expecting the kid with a PC but they got that part right. In 1999 I was super into neopets.

But I remember we did it. “Okay, Brian, the record’s five. The record’s five… Okay ready? Go!”

It’s also 2023 and I’m sick of pretending what happened didn’t happen just because the internet doesn’t like hearing about it.

Well, they are, but it’s a story and a very cerebral one. Of course it has a lesson to learn from.

At least it wasn’t being woke or preaching about the end times of a 2000 year old prediction. It really does become an issue when the aesop anvil doesn’t need to be dropped.

See the difference is that morality has almost completely broken down in CP2077. What did V have to do between the prolog and tutorial to get a nice apartment and a reliable car? Those assholes at the meat packing plant where you get the robot sure don’t look like they have any qualms even if V does.

Also, we still have an ecosystem and efficient oceanic transport. Climate change and a rogue AI that controls a global oceanic swarm of self replicating sea mines mean that the pizza is gross because pigs are extinct (they use tuna) and all overseas cargo is transported by air.

People still care about their friends, but that’s it. Even if internet in CP2077 was global and filled with punks and not just a NetWatch-policed glorified municipal Teletext, do you think anyone would give a shit about the world they live in on a chat site?

It’s also heavily implied that successful cyberpunks are vastly outnumbered by idiots who were in over their heads from the start and it cost those amateurs their lives. Those that succeed and become even slightly known, including V, are often exceptionally skilled individuals.

I wish I could go back in time, “buy” those kids and raise them in safety and comfort. This is not an okay “joke” OP, and I see people are finally starting to realize what I realized in 2017 after watching that shitty movie “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” that literally drove me to insanity.

A lot of people don’t care about children, instead seeing them purely as a burden unless the child is forced to work. It’s disgusting and rooted entirely in overly conservative values.

Many who don’t fit into the above category are simply sexist and hate kids as being the result of either “being a traitor to your gender” (if you’re female) or “pussy whipped” (if you’re male).

This seems to have been the majority view since at least 2015, though I only noticed it when I realised children were being cast exclusively as villains, victims of the villains, or heroes who are forced to “grow up” over the course of the story. If proof is needed, I can provide a list of not one, not two, not three, but 33 different stories that do this and almost all of them are either made in the 2010s or became popular in some way in the 2010s.

Because nobody made a Steam Deck until 2020. Everyone plays video games now and have for years, and unless you have a console, the only way to play 99% of video games is using Steam’s windows version or a specially adapted Linux .

Don’t get me wrong, the moment that Windows 11/12/etc. outright requires logging into a Microsoft account (Protip: As of this writing, using the email “no@thankyou.com” and submitting a blank password forces Windows 11 to let you make/log into a local user account) to use it, I’ll be installing Steam OS on my OneXFly, and it’s why I don’t use my “free” upgrade to 11 on my Windows 10 gaming desktop. I just don’t think you realize how big a deal compatibility really is for gaming.

Yes, but that’s because it motivated them to strike. That’s basically the less violent version of a riot.

I build rail networks and cities in most of the games I play. There’s something cathartic about building that’s different from the catharsis of destroying or stealing.

As for CP2077, I actually like that they included cars because it’s a dystopia. If cars, stroads and limited access motorways are the worst transport system ever, which they very much are, use them exclusively in dystopian future worlds and you’ve basically driven home the point easily. Of course, the fact that there’s a metro system in Night City would cut into that, but clearly the people there have bought into carbrain like nothing we see in real life, judging by the disdain going on a date by train gets and the description of how the saying in Cyberpunk’s world is de facto “Bread, Circuses and Automobiles” since the 1950s.

If anything, their over reliance on cars is a very anti-car artistic statement.

NO! That poor kitty! 3 :<

Or breaks the glass on the Brownian flux capacitor.

…actually, what is the flux capacitor for, really? My theory is that it IS a real capacitor and thus related to energy storage/discharge.

I swear they should have run a virus scan or CCleaner or something on that thing. Even the Glitch Techs don’t have a holodeck THAT buggy!

I tailored my answers to that assumption. It’s a reality, even if a heavily-manipulated one, and the person(s) inside the simulation are as real as we are, given the description of “perfect simulation”.

So you’d created a clone slave of yourself. Ehrm… I’m not sure how to tell you this but…

Well, at least you actually want to have a beneficial legacy. That’s better than we can say about Zuckerberg, Trump or Musk.

Calculating… 404, problem “Entropy” not found. Please check the new information from the James Web Space telescope for possible reasons.

(look up “Trillion Year Old Universe” and realize that if true, that’s just how old the currently observable universe is, and reality as it is could be eternally going through cycles of stellar death and birth and would have always existed with no beginning)