In case you ever find yourself in the Charybdis system in Starfield, because you followed a distress signal and are now on a mission called “Operation Starseed”, here’s some info I wish I had when starting that mission:
During that mission, there might come a point when you side with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and you have to kill some other leaders. If this happens, only kill those other leaders, not the random colonists shooting at you. If you kill even one of them, the whole settlement will go hostile after your post-battle talk with FDR. This is because you now have a bounty in that settlement. You can solve that issue by entering the following console command when they all go hostile: player.paycrimegold 0 0 00299F72
Be aware that the console is only available on PC. It can be activated by pressing the ~ key. Also, if you use that command, your saves will be classified as “modded” which means you won’t be able to get any achievements on those saves anymore.
With the release of today’s episode, The Private Citizen will hopefully return to weekly episodes, released every Wednesday. The podcast returns with an example of what happens when well-meaning, but clueless people get to decide how to run a society.
→ The Private Citizen 157: When Well-Meaning People Make the Laws
Germany tried to make its laws against child pornography stricter and it backfired spectacularly. Now, lawyers and judges are desperately trying not to enforce these laws as the government scrambles to fix them.
This is an extremely smart blog post. You should read it.
→ Евгений Кузнецов: The Right to Be Forgiven
The whole situation reminds me of a rural village I once visited. It didn’t have more than a dozen houses, and those families lived there basically forever. Everybody knew everyone, everyone’s parents and grandparents, everyone’s lies and cheats, everyone’s mistakes and betrayals. They had to forgive each other eventually, or their life as a community would become impossible, so they did, and went on living with each other, despite still knowing all those things about each other.
The world resembles that village now. Everybody knows and remembers everything about everyone, or at least can get that knowledge from Uncle Internet the next minute, sometimes even without asking. So we can turn to those villagers for a good way to cope.
What we actually need is a right to be forgiven.
People who know me will not be surprised that I am looking forward very much to Starfield coming out. Fallout 3 was one of my favourite games of all time and I’ve put just about 2000 hours into Elite: Dangerous before finally losing interest in that game. So I was planning on pre-ordering Bethesda’s upcoming blockbuster and I’ve taken off the first week of September to stream it as close to 24/7 as I can get.
But, as it turns out, I will actually also be reviewing this game for heise online. Which means that I’ll actually get to play it now. I just can’t talk about that until my review comes out.
I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years!
I have refocussed my daily newsletter, which hasn’t been daily in quite a while now anyway, to concentrate more on what I seem to be spending most of my time doing: analysing and criticising the press and its reporting of the news. To better reflect what the publication is about, I’ve also rebranded it to Eye on The Press.
→ “The Sleepy Fox” Is Now “Eye on The Press”
When I became a journalist over a decade ago, I did so because I love writing and because I thought I could do a better job at it than most of the people I saw covering the news at the time. A lot has changed since then. And not for the better. Journalists of all creeds and colours have become obsessed with writing about what should be, instead of what is.
The press is enormously powerful. In many ways, what becomes recorded history is not what actually happened, but what was reported to have happened. Journalists shape not only the opinions of society, in the information age, they shape reality itself. Like everyone else, politicians and leaders get their view of what happens around them from the media. If the press is convinced that a problem exists, or that something that is happening is a danger to society, sooner rather than later, so will everyone else. Including the ones who have to power to do something about it — as misguided as that may be.
That is why I think it is only prudent that someone should watch what the press is up to. And report on it. This publication exists to, in my small way, do my part in this. I might not see everything and I might not have enough time to cover all the things I do see, but I feel it is very important to at least try. And as someone who has had intimate experience in the trenches of daily news journalism, I at least know how the game is played and what irregularities to watch for.
Notebook Sketch LXIII-2
I watched the Babylon 5 episode “Acts of Sacrifice” (S2 E12) last night. In this episode, G’Kar tries desperately to convince the other governments to give military aid to the Narn. In an earlier episode, the Centauri launch a surprise war on the Narn after years of mutual hostility and several border skirmishes.
It occured to me how good of an analogy this plot is for the current war in Ukraine. The reasons both Sheridan and Delenn give, on behalf of the Earth Alliance and the Minbari government respectively, on why they can’t intervene directly in the war – however unjust and terrible it might be – ring true today as much as they did in 1995. Oh how I wish our politicians would watch intelligent shows like this. It might inspire them to do better and reality wouldn’t be such a sorrowful mess. <*>
→ Grim Deep Blog: Machine Learning to the Rescue?
Trying to automatically transcribe my handwriting …could have gone better
“Moderate high temperature warning” – back in the day, we called this “summer”. And we didn’t warn people about it, we were happy and enjoyed it.
What even are “moderate high” temperatures? That whole concept doesn’t make any sense! 
D&D Journals from Field Notes
A review of the excellent Field Notes journals for Dungeons & Dragons players and dungeon masters.