T w e n t y S i d e d

The first act of Cyberpunk 2077 concerns the story of a heist gone wrong. While that’s bad for the characters, it’s good for us in the audience. The setbacks and twists in the heist are what kick off the rest of this excellent story. But what if everything had gone to plan? What would happen to the characters next?

I originally wanted to make this article about how CR Projekt RED bungled the development and release of Cyberpunk 2077. Like, people criticize the company for releasing the game “too early”, which makes it sound like the leadership just made one mistake. But the reality is far worse than that. I could spend a few thousand words cataloging all of the foolish mistakes that management made long before they decided to release the game.

But the truth is that I’m just not feeling it. Maybe in a future article, but I’ve been raging at corporate foolishness for a long time now and I’m in the mood to do something fun. And by “fun” I mean speculative fan-wank story analysis. 

I guess I should mention that we’re going to spoil the entire first half of the game here. I think that’s pretty obvious from the premise of the video but I just wanted to make that extra clear. 

Anyway. The heist… 

What if it Worked?

Now, in terms of story structure this wouldn’t make sense because the heist is the first act of the story so of course it has to go wrong. But let’s forget about that and just see what would happen.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Cyberpunk 2077: What if the Heist Worked?”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Someone asked me to explain this nonsense with GameStop and this Reddit vs. Some Hedge Fund stuff. There are a ton of explanations in the form of facecam YouTube videos, but if you’d rather read than watch a person talk for fifteen minutes then answers have been hard to come by.

The media is baffled and can’t seem to break it down for the non-experts. You can jump over to Reddit and try to follow the chaos, but the explanations are lacking in context, dense with technical jargon, and filled with in-jokes. There really isn’t a newbie-friendly way to get a handle on things. 

I absorbed some financial knowledge during my time serving on the front lines of the Dot-Com bubble. I am nowhere near an expert and there are still details of this story that are beyond me, but I have a rough grasp of the basics and I think I can break it down for the uninitiated. So that’s what I’m going to do. Here is a short, jargon-free overview of what this mess is.

First off, we need explain what it means when people talk about “shorting” stock.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Reddit vs. Wall Street”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.