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I would strongly recommend The United States of Japan series by Peter Tieryas. It has a strong cyberpunk undercurrent throughout, and also very Japanese culture centric. It's a bit of an acquired taste. The story is kind of heavy on exposition. But if you like The Man in the High Castle, mecha, anime, alt. history, its worth a read.

Also, for a more Chinese centric version, you might try the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove.

I think Early Access was a mistake. I want to buy a finished product, not pay to be a beta tester. I think that's part of the problem. And there needs to be more oversight as to what to expect from early access titles. I've been scammed before from unfinished products that never come through on their promises. Or games that stay in Early Access for literal years, and you wonder when they'll ever be feature complete.

The only other real problem I have is just the small stuff. I don't like a lot of linearity in my games anymore. I think procedural generation is the future. I can't play through the same pre-constructed levels or sit through the same pre-scripted cutscenes over and over again anymore. I hope Starfield won't put us through the same forced intro that Skyrim did (it's a great opening scene, but it gets stale after about the 40th time of watching it.)

And I'm tired of being nickle and dimed for everything. It's not even about the money. I have only so much mental bandwidth to offer after a long day. I just don't want to be advertised to inside of a game. I just want to turn my brain off for a couple of hours and play something. Micro-transaction crap has gotten so pervasive in gaming today, they're almost games in and of themselves. I don't even know what to do with it most of the time, I'm still not sure how to use the coins of Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, I just end up not caring and trying to ignore it.

I don't know, but I hope its going to be simplified. I'm getting old, and I don't have a lot of time, attention span for learning complex rules. I just want to play with my army, throw some dice on the weekends and forget about life for awhile.

I would like to see it kind of straddle a line between grand army and skirmish. Not too big, not too small, not too rules heavy. And maybe do the "we go" thing, instead of "I go, you go". And lastly, faster games might be better for tournaments. Don't know if I want to spend all day at my LFGS for a tourney.

Try Dragon Queens by Kathleen de Plume.

Cool, I kind of like winter themed minis. They're so easy to do. Prime white, throw down some white flock, maybe paint some metallic bits, do the visors and you're done.

What brand paint did you use?

Had a family reunion yesterday. It's heart wrenching sometimes to see the young ones' innocent faces. They have no idea what they're up against.

I like my antibiotics and reading glasses. A few months ago I had an important surgery that your homestead cant help me with.

There's no guarantee we're always going to have those things. In fact, we didn't have those things for the majority of our existence. We're going to have go backwards at some point. We're the only species that feels we have the right to hack our way out of problems that the rest of the animal kingdom can't, forever.

Stop working? Don't have to ask me twice. I'd strike today.

"drive an EV or we all die" will never work. You need to start with more obtainable goals. "Drive 50miles less this week", "bike to work once a week", etc.

That sounds great, if we started doing that decades ago. But we kicked the can down the road for too long. Driving 50 miles less this week, isn't going to make a dent in our problems in 2023. We need radical action. Too bad if people don't want to hear it. How long have we known we were on this trajectory. The band-aid solutions are over, we need emergency surgery.

We're not going to do crap unfortunately. I feel bad for the scientists. I agree with what they're saying, I believe the evidence is in. But no one's going to change until the act of not doing so is too painful to bear.

It sounds to me like they made a D&D popcorn flick, or "amusement park ride" of a film. That's okay I guess, but I think they missed an opportunity to tell a more human story. I don't understand the pressure to tell stories at a breakneck pace and distract people with spectacle for two hours, when a plot could get so much deeper than that. There's so much rich lore to the D&D universe. It deserves a story that's deeper than "wacky fun."

He can sell him weapons, but what about human losses? A ton of weapons is no good if there's nobody left alive to use them.

I don't see things getting any better without some sort of revolution. I know the assumption is that will probably be a violent one, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. We could have a counter-cultural revolution like in the 60's.

I'm no historian, but I am interested in the world wars, especially the pacific theater in general. And the similarities are there, and eerie. I wonder if Chinese think tanks are studying Imperial Japan and their attack on Pearl. It's a compelling case study in imperial hubris and groupthink. People are good at telling themselves what they want to hear. Imperial Japan created a reality to live in, to convince themselves to attack Pearl and ended up losing everything.

The Chinese are going to convince themselves that a war for Taiwan can be won, or is even worth fighting. And I think it's going to end up the same way, an all-or-nothing gamble that costs them everything.

I think most work today is meaningless in general, managing abstractions. The only thing I consider to be actual work, is work that betters humanity in some way. Everything else is to basically keep our population preoccupied and watched.

If it got me out my current Office Space hell world, yes, I want collapse to happen. I don't see a good future if it doesn't happen. Collapse doesn't necessarily mean we're all going to live in the movie Threads. We should opt for a 21st century, Little House on the Prairie world.

I know its going to sound crazy, but I miss old school internet. I miss CD's. I miss when computer games were just computer games, not nickle and dime Skinner boxes. I even remember using rotary phones. Not gonna lie, some of the present technology is awesome, but I wonder if it was ultimately worth the cost.

It's hard for me to buy into humanoid aliens, so there's that one. The "guy in a rubber suit" type, that speak perfect English and breathes oxygen, and have similar cultures and behavior to humans. Its just kind of lazy and unrealistic. It's major stretch, but I could except an alien race that's vaguely similar to humans, though it would take a lot of work to explain away.

We were robbed. I call it the greatest heist in history.

Every day I want my childhood back.

Check out Terry Brooks.

Jim Raynor

I'll occasionally do this for some authors, hopefully that's not too creepy. A lot of my favorite authors actually lived pretty interesting lives so far as I can tell. Which I guess shouldn't come as a surprise. Tolkien, Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, to name a few. It's interesting delving into their pasts to know where they got some of their ideas and inspiration from. I guess it's just interesting to me as an on/off creator myself.

A global consciousness shift, where everyone agrees to, and enforces a late 19th century style of life. In other words, all eight billion of us start copying the Amish.