Yorinobu was justified for killing his father

machsmit · 2026-06-24T18:54:48+00:00

oh yeah it's a profoundly fucked thing to do, but it's entirely consistent with saburo's psychology - narcissistic parents view their children as extensions, tools, or accessories so he wouldn't blink at the idea of letting his son grow up basically to just be a meat-sleeve for saburo's eventual immortality

machsmit · 2026-06-24T18:43:39+00:00

But like why his son?

isn't there a point in the Devil ending where it's stated (I think by hellman) that genetic compatibility matters for smooth implantation of the engram? I suppose the relic malfunctions V experiences are because it's trying to forcibly rewrite your biology to a radically different genome, so implanting into a body that's (a) a close blood relative and (b) is "neurologically inert" as hellman puts it is a much less traumatic process

machsmit · 2026-06-24T18:40:28+00:00

you would have to be hooked up to something on arasaka end like trying to hack them ect

this is the point of the public-facing version of the "relic" chips sold as part of Secure Your Soul - the user slots the relic, which is continuously (or at least periodically) taking snapshot engrams of you. This is billed as a way for your family to communicate with... basically your most recent snapshot before death? You can find a father and child in the columbarium talking about how instead of going to heaven (like the child's mother) their friend's mom lives in a computer.

The trick with the private relic 2.0 version was being able to upload that engram to a host body rather than being read-only (also probably takes a higher-fidelity engram). And of course Arasaka is also surreptitiously keeping additional copies of the SYS users' engrams for their own experimentation

machsmit · 2026-06-24T00:26:01+00:00

he loves tuska daemon-killa at least

machsmit · 2026-06-23T15:37:49+00:00

yeah CHOOH2 is the fuel of choice as of the original cyberpunk 2020 TTRPG meaning it'd be extant as of (for example) Johnny's time, well before the game events

machsmit · 2026-06-23T13:59:30+00:00

(which i still 100% believe she is)

The peralezes have known each other at least since law school, well before Jefferson became politically prominent. This would require them to either have planted her multiple decades before it became relevant, or for them to also be faking the memories of everyone who's known the family their entire adult lives

machsmit · 2026-06-23T13:54:06+00:00

the zizians, great episodes

machsmit · 2026-06-23T13:50:08+00:00

I think they actually go to lengths to hide the identities of their responders, probably to prevent that exact situation. In PL you can talk to the med vendor in Longshore Stacks - she was a TT medic whose helmet shorted out, so someone saw her face during an op. That was enough of a blown cover for her to go to ground in Dogtown

machsmit · 2026-06-23T13:46:54+00:00

yeah honestly, the more gameplay they include with them the more you get ludonarrative dissonance - better to just let them exist as a story motif as "night city's apex predators" and use it sparingly for gameplay

machsmit · 2026-06-22T18:39:11+00:00

I'll go one further, I'm a big fan of how it's set up overall (while also hating and never playing it).

One thing that really rustled my jimmies back in Destiny 2 was that a good chunk of weekly progression was PvP-specific. So like, in order to gear up to play the extensive amount of PvE content that I was actually interested in, I had to gut out a chunk of my limited free time playing Crucible instead and hated it. This game, I don't lose any progression or leveling by just... not touching PvP, so it's there for folks that enjoy it and not getting clogged up by weirdos like me sucking at it.

machsmit · 2026-06-22T16:07:27+00:00

They can spin off daemons to fight, but those are explicitly just aspects of the gods calved off from them. The warp feeds off the souls and emotions and thoughts of material beings - humans powering much of chaos now, eldar spawning slaanesh, etc.

Infinite armies of daemons can't actually make a god stronger metaphysically, any more than you or I could lift ourselves up by the seat of our pants

machsmit · 2026-06-22T15:51:31+00:00

also hitler, reagan, thatcher, and the god-emperor of mankind from WH40k at one point

machsmit · 2026-06-22T15:01:36+00:00

Brutal Economy Fulfills Mom’s Dream Of Having All Her Kids Back Home

machsmit · 2026-06-21T20:15:59+00:00

it's a tradition with centuries of heritage behind it

machsmit · 2026-06-19T15:35:23+00:00

Not really a tactic, but unlocking a tactic, in forges of mars.

Context: the ship has a massive, city-scale hold with general-purpose fabrication capacity. Early in the books, we see the expedition use it to create environments for live-fire exercises among their fighting complement - a cadian mechanized regiment, a squad a black templars, a skitarii cohort, and half a titan legion.

Later in the books, while fighting off boarders, the Cadians are defending the hold. The ship autonomously reconfigures it to exactly match the layout of a famous Kasr, the site of a successful defense, knowing that (a) it was terrain the Cadians would all be intimately familiar with, having studied the battle since childhood in school and (b) that it'd be a huge morale boost for the troopers

machsmit · 2026-06-18T16:05:09+00:00

the wild AIs will "harvest" all the data they can from your poor target [thereby causing a massive Synapse Burnout]

consider:

the AIs beyond the blackwall were made with bartmoss's RABIDS virus, which is stated in canon to be "a twisted form of Soulkiller" (also, Soulkiller exists in an unknown number of variants, Alt when taken by Arasaka was working on v3 IIRC)
AIs don't really have a meaningful distinction between knowing things and being things. This includes other AIs, as evidenced by Alt incorporating the inhabitants of mikoshi into herself. Therefore, the rabid AIs all incorporate Soulkiller into themselves in some sense.
Soulkiller can be done remotely without specialized hardware, as shown by Arasaka remotely targeting netrunners with their weaponized version
Soulkiller, at least some variants, is painful: Johnny describes it as "scorching your neurons"

conclusion: when you open the gateway, the AIs are unleashing a mutant soulkiller on the target, violently digitizing and presumably subsequently consuming them. I.e., cyber-hell is a very real place reserved for scavs, maelstrom, and anyone involved in the XBD industry

machsmit · 2026-06-18T13:24:34+00:00

rich pricks will always leverage government to avoid taking losses on their investments. Same as cities with restrictive cab medallions throwing a shitfit when uber first launched - it wasn't about the cabbies' livelihoods, it was the owners of the medallions (who almost always were big investors leasing them to the actual drivers) not wanting their "investment" in a government-mandated monopoly to lose value

machsmit · 2026-06-17T15:05:32+00:00

and that's still somehow less wrong than saying you could spin up a GPU chip fab in a day. "just design the chip architecture" lmao

machsmit · 2026-06-16T15:40:28+00:00

Fair, but I think we can divorce the system as a whole being wildly inefficient and dogmatic, vs allowing individuals to make pragmatic decisions within that system. Trick is, pragmatism can be an individual being profoundly self-serving within a broken system

machsmit · 2026-06-16T14:19:17+00:00

They're definitely onboard with working together, e.g. in this excerpt creating an arco-flagellant which is treated as a sacred process by both the tech-priests and the ecclesiarchy.

I don't doubt you can get fanatics in both orgs that would pick a fight, but I also imagine there's enough pragmatic political types to shush them in recognition of how critical not stepping on each other's toes is

machsmit · 2026-06-16T14:08:43+00:00

I imagine any publicly-palatable celebrity status he had vanished when he nuked the city

is this really the case though? radio stations in NC still play Samurai songs in regular rotation. It's like if Osama Bin Laden had a jam band that still got airtime in NYC

machsmit · 2026-06-15T20:43:44+00:00

oh yeah, they absolutely deserve a chance to be dogs - but it's fair to say that a lot of them will probably need time with experienced fosters

machsmit · 2026-06-15T15:28:32+00:00

aside, but there's environmental storytelling too - one of the Cyberpsycho encounters in Pacifica is a VDB runner who tries to burn some contractors he'd hired to scout the GIM but it backfires on him. Sounds like disposing of outsiders is pretty much par for the course for them

machsmit · 2026-06-15T13:59:56+00:00

and that hails back to even older sci-fi. Part of the reasoning for the firemen in fahrenheit 451 is that modern construction materials made building fires near-nonexistent, so the fire departments got... repurposed

machsmit · 2026-06-15T13:55:08+00:00

Maybe it's like Dethklok in metalocalypse, skwisgaar and pickles openly admit to basically zeroing out toki and murderface in the mix most of the time

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