Uncle Mike

I haven't looked into it, but I thought I saw that it was more of a simple miscommunication during the filming. The actors thought the scene would cut before the kiss, so didn't actually do it, and the director wasn't paying attention. So, now we have the technology to patch that fuck-up without inviting everyone back for reshoots.

There's non-lethal Quickhacks too. And there's a cyberware targeting mod that makes your normal guns non-lethal. But yeah, the Cyberpsychos do tend to be a bit of a Benny Hill chase and shoot to a certain extent.

I'm on the Beta. No issues here so far, as far as I can tell. But I think I mostly leave it in Rest mode.

Rainmakers, those Matterweaves (or whatever they're called) that drop the Enhancement cores, probably a few others. Just change the baseline drop rates if they're not right.

Perhaps it would have crashed the database with a divide-by-zero error.

I think in general, Bungie's RNG is terrible. If you end up in an instance where it's stuck on the wrong numbers, the event never spawns. Then you leave and come back, and the new instance just has that one time after time. Same with loot or strikes in the playlist and everything.

If the inner box couldn't hold the contents, it's hard to see how they'd ship it to you.

In my experience, IP addresses don't change all that much naturally. Your home router renews its DHCP lease well before it expires. Blocking spammers and similar by IP address still works on forums like this! I'm not saying that they don't collect the MAC of the gateway or something, but I'd be surprised if they needed to.

They don't have to do anything nefarious. The very act of being able to stream the client the video content means they know the internet-facing IP address of wherever it's being used. That's all you need to establish a "home" over time. You don't even really need to know anything about where it is. Just that they view, for example, 60% of their content from one IP address and the rest distributed randomly across what will be 4/5G, wifi, other people's homes etc. Then you just flag any address that consistently appear and are allocated to fixed-line ISPs as being suspected sharers.

The bridge building one was just excellent watching from start to finish. Loved it.

It obviously wouldn't be that easy, but I do think the "divest COD" remedy is likely the least effective, if the goal is to somehow ensure everyone gets it. How much of COD's success is the brilliance of the game, and how much is Activision's support sledgehammering it into the public consciousness every year? How much does belonging to that giant behemoth a benefit that you can't replicate outside? I don't care one jot for COD, so don't really know any of that. But I did see the difference with Destiny inside and outside of Activision, and they really clearly and visibly started struggling to produce the volume of work they needed to do, and generate the income they needed for a good while after they left.

What a fucking crock there from Kotick. Regardless of your views on the merger, him trying to plead that Activision are shit, actually (his final words), and also pretending to be surprised that Sony aren't all that interested in exploring "future opportunities" with a company that's shortly due to be owned by their main competitor and likely see the entire exec team leave seems like not a genuine argument. Should Sony be investing in loads of deals now to tie up all the Activision content so they end up like they were with Deathloop and Ghostwire? I imagine it wasn't in their plan when they obtained those exclusive deals that everyone knew they'd be on Game Pass exactly a year later. And trying to do that sort of work would quite undermine the Sony argument anyway, wouldn't it? It's weak argument from someone who should be better at this sort of thing? I assume Kotick's quite personally invested in getting the deal through - the price tag seems very generous given 2023's outlook, and presumably he'd be expecting a massive golden goodbye. But it's just a third company (after MS and Sony) all crying in public about how shit and meaningless their companies are from a Zoom call on their gold-plated toilets.

Yes, I had a Chill Clip Aurvandil drop the other day (the other perk is crap and I can't recall, but Chill Clip is obvs desirable.) Presumably the Rhulk Fusion (Deliverance?) can also roll with it? If you were drowning in the Umbral Engrams, you can focus Omolon weapons at the Star Chart and really grind out an Aurvandil that way, but boy would it likely be painful.

Ikelos submachine gun. For either a Feeding Frenzy/Frenzy roll, or with Voltshot. Fire and Forget, maybe? All these weapons are largely optional anyway. We're about to get a presumably sizable new set with Strand synergies and so on. No-one needs to grind anything they don't want to.

I do not have a Bound Presence, sadly. They're quite the rare drop for me.

I think I'm left to acquire Drang (one red bar remaining, so 3 Containments max) and the Arc Linear Fusion from Season of Pirates (Sailspy Pitchglass?) - 2 patterns remaining, so a couple of Expeditions and maybe a Ketchcrash or two to grind the ingredients for that. Then I've largely gotten everything I think looks worthwhile, at least. As someone who'd skipped a lot of Pirates, I actually found earning the upgrade currency retrospectively really easy - a lot of the sub-requirements in that season had just auto-completed during Seraph, so it almost all just fell out. I don't think I'd relish going back to the Psi-Ops season at all. Thoughts and Prayers. (Is Thoughts and Prayers already a Destiny gun? It should be.)

The proposed remedies are amazing. Allow it to go through, but then divest the Call of Duty portions Allow it to go through, but then divest all of Activision Allow it to go through, but then divest all of Activision and Blizzard Block it. and MS apparently don't want to be held to maintain COD parity by the regulator:

Uncle Mike's theory of thread length: truly great content ends up with surprisingly short threads, because there's no discussion to be had. "This is brilliant!" "Yes it is"

PSN is having issues tonight (we had to quit a Destiny raid because two of our team lost entitlement - they are not the primary user - and it seems the authorisation service is broken) so I'd perhaps try again tomorrow anyway.

3 Containments to buy a focussed red bar, plus first Opulent Key gets a random red bar, plus first Bound Presence too. So it might not be too much of a grind? But yeah.

I don't really think anyone's been personally called out for saying that they'll buy the game. And there certainly were people who took sufficient umbrage at Blizzard's scandals to find Diablo IV a less attractive prospect.

Yes, that's the default. I suspect that the craftables will turn up somewhere. Maybe the Exotic kiosk?

I really like Tears of Contrition. It makes a great noise.