Climate Town & Not Just Bikes collaborating on how parking minimums destroy both the environment and cities

For those that for whatever reason love the world of Shadowrun and never picked up the PC games, currently a huge discount as part of the Steam summer sale.

If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.

You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.

I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they're turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they're activated.

Just so people are aware, Kbin users will not see your comments or get your votes.

If you comment on a Kbin post, only other users on sh.itjust.works will see it. We are effectively defederated due to this bug. This affects all instances on 0.18.0, as far as I understand it.

There doesn't seem to be a general-purpose atheist community yet, so here is the closest thing. I hope this link fits in with your community! If not, fully understand if it's deleted.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/508825

> This was an experienced group, and had been through quite a few runs by this point. After many runs working up the ladder, they'd managed to piss off all the local cops in Seattle, which was a perfect hook to pull them into the London Falling campaign. After that, they'd worked for most of the major corps by this point, so I wanted to do something in South America with Aztechnology. > > As a starting point, I ran a wetwork run. Nothing too crazy for this group at this stage of development. Get in to a AA corp HQ, kill a high-level executive, get out. What I wanted to happen is that they'd talk to an NPC in the room clearly signalling that she was impressed and wanted them to do a job for her. > > Oh boy, never count on your players to act rationally. They do the job pretty much as expected: decker gets into the security systems, face gets them through the front door, street sam sniper set up on the building across the road, and they finally get to the point where they can open the bulletproof windows for support fire as they go for the target. > > Face & mage go into the room, bullshit a bit with the target about some computer troubles, data tap goes on, decker opens the glass, target goes down. The NPC says she's impressed with the work and wants to give them a commlink number, maybe they'll call it if they want some higher pay. > > I barely get out "Impressive..." before the player playing the street sam says "I take the shot". > > "What shot?" > > "The shot on the witness" > > "Hey, just giving you a heads up here as the GM, she's offering you a..." > > "Don't care, I'm taking the shot. She's a witness." > > So, they excavate the brain cavity of the connection to this big campaign I had planned in South America, and had to sit down and re-do most of the setup for it. > > Maybe it's my fault? I can't exactly blame my players for being paranoid after instilling it into them xD

This was an experienced group, and had been through quite a few runs by this point. After many runs working up the ladder, they'd managed to piss off all the local cops in Seattle, which was a perfect hook to pull them into the London Falling campaign. After that, they'd worked for most of the major corps by this point, so I wanted to do something in South America with Aztechnology.

As a starting point, I ran a wetwork run. Nothing too crazy for this group at this stage of development. Get in to a AA corp HQ, kill a high-level executive, get out. What I wanted to happen is that they'd talk to an NPC in the room clearly signalling that she was impressed and wanted them to do a job for her.

Oh boy, never count on your players to act rationally. They do the job pretty much as expected: decker gets into the security systems, face gets them through the front door, street sam sniper set up on the building across the road, and they finally get to the point where they can open the bulletproof windows for support fire as they go for the target.

Face & mage go into the room, bullshit a bit with the target about some computer troubles, data tap goes on, decker opens the glass, target goes down. The NPC says she's impressed with the work and wants to give them a commlink number, maybe they'll call it if they want some higher pay.

I barely get out "Impressive..." before the player playing the street sam says "I take the shot".

"What shot?"

"The shot on the witness"

"Hey, just giving you a heads up here as the GM, she's offering you a..."

"Don't care, I'm taking the shot. She's a witness."

So, they excavate the brain cavity of the connection to this big campaign I had planned in South America, and had to sit down and re-do most of the setup for it.

Maybe it's my fault? I can't exactly blame my players for being paranoid after instilling it into them xD

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/336160

I'm only including the overall review, not the chapter-by-chapter breakdown because I hit Lemmy's character limit twice, and I cba to split it into multiple sections again. Just click the link above if you want to see the full breakdown.

> TL;DR: The book is overall pretty good. It's not a literary masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but the chapters that work, work really well. There are also chapters that are awful, and you should just straight-up ignore. There are also some very questionable editing decisions that mean you have to cross-reference things across both ends of the book, but this is something that can be overcome by taking notes and assembling a timeline yourself. This started as a review, but ended up being more of a GM guide on how to use the book. I hope nobody minds terribly.

>Overall, this book is really all over the place. Some terrible editing decisions, an awful chapter that should have never made it past the draft stage, and some questionable organizational decisions, but the chapters that work really work. I think it’s well worth it just for the Detroit Rupture/Detroit Now and UCrASh chapters. There’s lots of potential shadowruns here, and if the official timeline is too tight and you want your players to see more of this important moment in UCAS history, you can always tweak the timeline yourself to lengthen or shorten it. I really do think there’s a lot of value in this book, but it is a bit of a slog to get to it.

SPOILERS. THERE WILL BE MANY SPOILERS. DO NOT READ IF YOUR GM IS PLANNING TO RUN THIS

TL;DR: The book is overall pretty good. It's not a literary masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but the chapters that work, work really well. There are also chapters that are awful, and you should just straight-up ignore. There are also some very questionable editing decisions that mean you have to cross-reference things across both ends of the book, but this is something that can be overcome by taking notes and assembling a timeline yourself. This started as a review, but ended up being more of a GM guide on how to use the book. I hope nobody minds terribly.

Caveats: I am not going to be doing a deep lore analysis here, I'm just taking everything at face value and talking about the usefulness of the material to a gamemaster. I would classify my knowledge of Shadowrun lore as pretty decent. I'm not one of those amazing madlads that know every character and historical event in Shadowrun lore, but I know enough to get by and give my players an immersive experience and get the "feel" of Shadowrun right.

I'm gonna be doing this chapter by chapter, and giving my thoughts and practical tips on each.

Snafu

As an introductory short story acting as a springboard to understanding the next chapter, it's not terrible. Although the Starship Troopers style "They're everywhere! Oh god the bugs!" is very hammed up and the milspeak is a bit wrong and jarring, it gets the message across. This was a useful read to get the feel of Ravenheart and her relationship to Ares, and Damien Knight's goals in Detroit. It also sets up the underground tunnels that the bugs are using to ambush Ares personnel quite well.

Also, just as a small note before going into the next chapter, I've seen quite a few people accuse this pair of chapters of being Chicago Bug City 2: Electric Boogaloo. I disagree. There's enough new stuff and different twists on it that it really does stand on its own. It builds off the events of Chicago quite naturally (from the Ares point of view at least).

Detroit Rupture

Basic rundown: Ares has been experimenting with possessing insect spirits with human souls. They're doing this to try and control some of the bugs, as a weapon against other bugs (Alpha Merges). They attract a whole bunch of bugs to Detroit via unknown methods, and then of course the controlled bugs go rogue and start killing everyone (who had the bright idea of using psychopaths and/or murderers to pilot those bugs?!?). Lots of fighting, a few b-plots (like Ravenheart's renegade Firewatch crew and the 61st Independent Rangers), and then Damien Knight gets murdered by mysterious space laser. Arthur Vogel blows up most of the remaining board members in a false flag and becomes the new head of Ares. Official coverup story is that anti-Ares terrorists wrecked the city and Ares bravely fought them off.

So... where to start. This was the hardest chapter to pull all the dates out of and assemble into a chronological order, mainly because a lot of it split between this and the "Detroit Now" chapter. Make sure you read that chapter after this one, then go back to "Blackout" (you'll see later why you should skip over "Ghost Army" entirely).

The characterizations of Marv & Co. were pretty cool, and I used Platinum Trollgirls as the players' base of operations. There's quite a lot of interesting RP moments, clashes of worldviews and a general "Fellowship of the Ring" vibe you can get with shadowrunners, legal mercs and ex-corp military under one roof. Over the course of their time in Detroit, with player help Ravenheart made her own little army of Ares Firewatch defectors in the basement, and my players had a lot of fun, sad, and weird interactions with various ex-Ares military folk.

I kinda went hard on the idea of the split between loyalty to Ares and loyalty to Ravenheart for the ex-Ares soldiers, which made every scene where they had to work with the party against Ares very tense. I even made one a full-on Ares spy reporting to Damien about Ravenheart's whereabouts. Ravenheart is now a pretty important and integral contact for my players, and I'm glad I managed to make it work. The 61st were harder to use for me... they ended up feeling more like hired muscle, which I guess they are? I could have put more work into them, but they worked in the role.

I'm a big fan of the "This Just in: Motor City Mayhem!" section of this chapter, and actually copied it, formatted it, and had them find it on a corpse while doing a patrol of the area. It's a short transcript of a reporter in over her head trying to report from the front lines who doesn't make it (in my version at least). Was a nice humanizing moment for the party that underlined the fact that not everyone left in the city is an experienced fighter. I ended up editing the final entry of the first half because I didn't want to add any more b-plots, but if you want to expand the ghoul vs. ghoul stuff into a full run you definitely could. Of course, I didn't use the second half later in the chapter about the finale, but you could easily have her as an NPC, and/or have her show up at the finale.

I'm going to skip over a lot of detail about the Apex teams, the Alpha Merges, how Latvian Gambit was supposed to work vs how it played out, but you can read the book yourself if you want the details. Long story short, it's pretty useful stuff that you can sprinkle in as clues to your players as to what's going on at a big picture level while they're scrambling about trying to survive.

The 4-way standoff that happens between the bugs, Ares, Ravenhearts' irregulars and the Alphas is an amazing opportunity to do any b-plots or wrap-ups you want to do before the big finale. I used it to let them have a close encounter with a wounded Alpha to try and give them a few more clues as to how they worked and what they are (obviously they just shot the thing without talking to it because "bug scary, shoot scary bug" :P) and some helping out of the locals so they could feel a bit more heroic than your standard shadowrunners. I also had them set up a signal booster on top of a building to report to their fixer, and had an Ares-affiliated shadowrunner team try and murder them. It's always nice to reinforce the idea that your players are not the only shadowrunners in the world when possible and practicable.

You could do the finale a bunch of different ways: having the players defend the Platinum Trollgirls, having them at Ares Tower, off doing some spec-ops stuff to track down Otto Hendricks (big boss insect shaman) and assassinating him, but I chose to have them at Ares tower, with Ravenheart swooping in to save the day and saving the lives of people who think of her as a traitor. Was a fun moment, and the near-misses on blue-on-blue as the Ares soldiers eventually go "Fuck it" and ignore orders to shoot at Ravenheart to have the help vs the bugs was fun for all.

Whichever way you do it, make sure you really sell the gravity and the insanity of what happens to the tower, and the fact that this mysterious space laser attack just killed one of the most powerful metahumans on the planet.

Ghost Army

After starting with probably the best chapter, time to go to the worst. Oh boy do I think this chapter is just hot stinking trash. The book would have been improved a lot if they had just deleted the whole thing. For obvious reasons, I did not use this chapter and I recommend everyone else pretends it doesn't exist.

Sandwiched in-between a huge city-wide battle between 4 sides that ends in a climactic event that will be felt by one of the big ten, and a string of mysterious EMP attacks that leave millions without power, water and making food a problem long-term, is a bunch of no-name soldiers going missing due to a paracritter. That's the whole chapter in a nutshell. There's a paracritter. And it killed some soldiers. That's the whole thing. They describe this as a UCAS Corps, which if it's anything like the current US Corps, means tens of thousands of troops. The transcription is from the point of view of the poor schmuck sent to find out what happened to them, as his recon squad is slowly whittled down. Now, I think it's a perfectly reasonable spooky run setup, but the difference between a recon squad mysteriously going missing and up to 80,000 soldiers going missing is pretty big. This whole thing makes no sense, doesn't connect at all to anything around it (with the exception of some handwavy "3rd corps went missing" single sentence in the next chapter), and is just plain stupid.

This might still be usable if they went into any detail over what the paracritter is and how it deleted tens of thousands of soldiers from existence without a single one managing to radio in to say that something is sus. It doesn't. It just basically goes "lol superpowerful paracritter, figure out how it works and what it does yourself". It's absolutely stupid no matter which way you look at it.

I hit the character limit for posts, continuing in a comment below.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827

Hello! Friendly neighbor over at sh.itjust.works popping in to lend a hand. Here's a very useful set of instructions and tips that have been floating about, I hope you find it useful too.

You can ignore the "How to Join Lemmy" part if you're already happily set up on pathofexile-discuss.com, but the rest'll still be useful.

> (These instructions are for using Lemmy in a browser. If you are using an app, some steps may differ.) > > ## How to Join Lemmy > > To use Lemmy, you need to be a member of one instance from the list at https://join-lemmy.org/instances. You will still be able to see content from anywhere, but the instance you choose will determine: > * What URL you use to log in to Lemmy, > * What content shows on the homepage when you select "Local" or "All", > * Who moderates your instance, and > * What rules you agree to when you sign up. > > Choose an instance that matches your interests, language, and region. (If you want more information about an instance, you can tap its "Join" button, which will show you its current homepage in the main view and its description in the sidebar. You can also check the tables here and here.) Please avoid joining instances that are already crowded (1K+ users/month). If an instance gets overcrowded, it can start running slowly or experiencing downtime, so choosing an uncrowded instance will give both you and others a better Lemmy experience. > > Once you have decided on an instance, tap its "Join" button to open it and then tap "Sign Up" in the upper-right corner. Fill out the form and wait for your account to be approved. > > When your account is approved, log in and customize your profile and settings. If you change your language settings, select "Undetermined" in addition to any languages you speak so that you can still see posts and comments that are not tagged as being in any particular language. > > ## How to Find and Subscribe to Communities > > There are four ways to find communities through Lemmy: > > 1. To browse communities that others in your instance are already subscribed to, tap the "Communities" tab at the top of the page and choose the "All" scope. Tapping on a community name will open it through your instance. > > 2. To browse communities across all instances, visit https://browse.feddit.de/. Tapping on the community's name will open it, but probably not through your instance (in which case the page will say that you are not logged in). Instead, follow these steps: > > a. Copy the community's URL or remote name. You can use the copy button next to the community name, you can open the community outside your instance and copy the URL from your address bar, or you can open the community outside your instance and copy the remote name (which will look like !community@instance.tld) from the sidebar. > > b. In your instance, tap on the "🔍 Search" button in the upper toolbar. > > c. Make sure that you have chosen "All" for each of the four filters: "Type", "Scope", "Community", and "Creator". > > d. Paste the community's URL or remote name into the search field and tap "Search". > > e. One of the results should be the community shown as an icon, a name, and a subscriber count. If you do not see it, or it is buried too deep in the search results, try changing "Scope" to "Local". If that does not work, you may need to wait a bit and try again. > > f. Tap on the community in the search results to open it in your instance. > > 3. If you want an experience similar to Reddit's r/all, visit https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Hot/page/1, which aggregates from these communities as described here. As in Option 2, you can copy and search for a community's URL to open it in your instance and subscribe to it. > > 4. If you don't see a community by browsing, subscribe to <https://lemmy.ml/c/findacommunity> and make a post about what you're looking for. > > Once a community is open in your instance, subscribe to it by tapping on the "Subscribe" button at the top of the sidebar. It will then appear in the "Subscribed" section of your "Communities" tab, and its posts will show on your home feeds. > > Can't find a community you're looking for? If your instance allows it, you can create the community yourself by tapping "Create Community" in the upper toolbar. >

The simple version of that wall of text is if you're the first person on your instance to subscribe to a community:

1. Get the URL (for example, https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy)

2. Go to the Communities page

3. Search for that URL

4. Change all search options to "All" (even "Communities")

5. Click the federated link it gives you (for example, https://pathofexile-discuss.com/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml)

6. Click subscribe

Also, there's a new project for finding communities across instances! lemmyverse.net is a REALLY cool and easy way to find communities that you might want to subscribe to!

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

We've been defederated. Were there that many trolls/assholes on our server? What on earth happened while I was asleep?

> hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one: > > ##### we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary. > > --- > > we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below). > > an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain. > > aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to: > - these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior; > - the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances; > - our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in; > - and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for > > as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this: > > > There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe. > > > > Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo. > > and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision. > > this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities. > > thanks for using our site folks.

You can subscribe to this like any Lemmy community with the following:

!cs@kbin.social

https://kbin.social/m/cs

cross-posted from: https://mastodon.scot/users/Stoat/statuses/110544618609672068

> startrek.website is a partnership between /r/StarTrek and /r/DaystromInstitute from Reddit, they've both locked their subs over there for good. Follow @startrek for all your Trek needs. 🖖 :trek: > > \#StarTrek

I thought I'd share this funny story as it's easier to write than the Cutting Black review (coming soon).

It was the first session for a bunch of new players. I did the run I normally do for chummers: kill a gang leader called Chumkicker, frame another gang by copying their signature style. So, they decide to frame the Leather Devils as they have a bike fancy enough to make it work.

Their plan isn't bad, but I spot a pretty obvious hole in it and keep it to myself. They have the decker set up on the street corner to mess with smartlink systems and stuff, they have the mage make a big enough distraction to pull them out of the building, and they have the street sam & rigger do the actual drive-by.

The mage does the distraction (trid phantasm) from inside his car, and drives off as soon as the gang members start coming outside to investigate.

The street sam & rigger come roaring down the street, and while the decker is data spiking all the smartgun systems, they get the mark and roar off.

The decker is now alone, on a street corner, with no exit plan and the entire gang looking around for anybody associated with the hit.

What follows is a looney tunes escape, where he gets shot twice while summoning his scooter (yes, scooter. He blew all his starting nuyen on the best cyberdeck money could buy), and hops on and tries to drive away. Unfortunately, he doesn't have pilot ground vehicle trained, so he's rolling like 2 dice each combat round trying to gain speed. He eventually critically glitches and abandons the broken scooter, and tries to run on foot. He also does not have Running trained, btw.

While all of this is going on, the rest of the party has met up, starts high-fiving (the players knew what was going on, kudos to them for staying in character and not metagaming), and one of them asks "Where's the decker?". They all turn pale as they realize what happened, and get back on their respective vehicles trying to rescue him.

By the time they get there, the decker's been shot a few more times, managed to lose them for a few combat rounds in a crowd but is bleeding profusely, and another shot finally knocks him out cold (burned edge permanently to not die). As he's laying there, with the gang members coming to finish him off, the rest of the party roars in, starts a short gunfight and rescues him.

Moral of the story: have an exit plan for everyone.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/21515

> Some surprising, but valid, python syntax examples.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/21515

> Some surprising, but valid, python syntax examples.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/49984

> Very well-made detailed maps, but the costs add up quickly if you're a regular user. I'm not a gigantic fan of paying 1-4 USD for each individual map a-la-carte rather than paying for a pack. > > However, there are cough alternate means of acquiring these maps on certain sites using certain peer-to-peer download protocols. > > Please remember to be reasonable though: if you like the products and feel it adds value, support the artists.

Very well-made detailed maps, but the costs add up quickly if you're a regular user. I'm not a gigantic fan of paying 1-4 USD for each individual map a-la-carte rather than paying for a pack.

However, there are cough alternate means of acquiring these maps on certain sites using certain peer-to-peer download protocols.

Please remember to be reasonable though: if you like the products and feel it adds value, support the artists.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/49155

These are perfect for Shadowrun

> An excellent map pack I use quite often. If you're not using foundry, you can get the maps here. > > His work is awesome. If you use them and have the spare money, please consider contributing to his work.