#Operatives

[torchwoodtwo]

[tempestuous-tempest]

Here's some of my most used operatives in Watch Dogs Legion without explanation minus one:

The last one is a random politician named Edward that I made a member just to dress him up as my character "Edward Porter" as if Eddie was actully in a game and in Legion.

[honourablejester]

Starfinder Character Concept: Aballonian Noir Detective

Continuing our theme of Pact World character concepts. We’re gonna take an odd sidestep and head to Aballon, the heat-blasted metallic machine world closest to the Sun. Because, and I’m not fully sure why, you’d think Absalom Station would be the first choice for a noir detective, but there’s something about a robot noir detective moving through the dark underbelly of a mechanical utopia. Aballon’s undercities and ice wells, the melting-pot mixed-race areas built in the cooler, more sheltered craters while the machine megacities built over top of them, offer some interesting stalking grounds for a noir detective. Aballon’s Insight Array and universal social support (once you accept your assigned role) is also a bit of an interesting backdrop to criminal motivations and investigations. I don’t know. It called to me. So.

Dusty Brown. A rumpled android detective with a gentle mien who moves through the mean streets and high speed magnetic rails of Aballon’s undercities.

Character Concept: Dusty Brown, Aballonian Noir Detective

Name: Dusty Brown

Age: 87

Starting Statistics:

Strength 10, Dexterity 16, Constitution 11, Intelligence 14, Wisdom 14, Charisma 8

Starting Skills:

Ranks in: Acrobatics*, Bluff*, Computers*, Diplomacy, Engineering*, Perception*, Mysticism, Piloting*, Sleight of Hand*, Stealth*

Specialisation Skills (Skill Focus plus auto rank per level): Culture*, Sense Motive*

Race: Android

We’re gonna be a synth detective, doll. Yes, Nick Valentine is a significant chunk of the starting inspiration for this character. Will Flat Affect and a charisma flaw have an impact on our success with social skills and Sense Motive particularly? Possibly. But we’re an operative, so we’ve got the skill ranks to compensate, and I want an android noir detective.

And not just an android. We’re going to be an Aballonian android. We’re gonna be a rumpled android detective working the mean streets and high-speed magnetic rail systems of the machine world’s undercities. Even in a logical utopia where food and lodging are (usually) guaranteed, people still have passions, and ideologies, and desires, and hatreds. No matter where you go, someone there will wind up dead, or something there will wind up taken. There’s all the work in the world for a private detective, even on a world with vast near-omniscient AI running the show. So one day the self-named Dusty Brown stepped off the mag-rail and hung up her shingle as a PI in Striving’s Lors Emphyria undercity. She wasn’t exactly assigned that role, the Insight Array didn’t offer it as a suggestion, but she wound up getting a stipend anyway, so maybe the machine overlords think she’s doing some good.

I think I’ll swap out the android’s Upgrade Slot for the alternate Nanite Upgrade and take Rebooting Nanites. Dusty’s a hard girl to keep down.

Description:

On the shorter side for an android, Dusty Brown is a stocky woman of about 5ft, with grey eyes and dark brown skin with circuit-seams that glow a dull silvery-grey. She tends to wear dark, sensible clothes over light armour, but does allow the small affectation of a nice long trench coat. A girl’s gotta dress for the role, after all. She tends to favour non-lethal weapons, usually keeping a trusty pulsecaster in its holster under her coat.

Theme: Street Rat

I did look at Paranormal Investigator, just to double down on the detective idea, but Dusty’s not really a paranormal sort of girl. Street Rat, with its urban underworld vibes, is more her style. She didn’t start out with a nice stipend from the Insight Array. She’s made her way without a safety net for a long time. So she knows how things roll down here. She’s a noir detective, not a paranormal one. Mean streets are where she lives.

Class: Operative (Detective)

I mean it had to be. Operative has a whole specialisation ready-made for our concept. And I’m not going to say no to a whole bunch of skills, either.

And we are going to be aiming more in a skill-monkey, explorer, truth-seeker sort of direction, more than combat. Dusty prefers to be non-confrontational, non-lethal. The fact that she has the charisma of a brick (or, well, a robot) doesn’t necessarily help in this regard, but she tries. Her streets might be mean, but she doesn’t want to emulate them. She wants to help piece together what’s gone wrong, so that people can start helping fix it. There’s probably a reason the Insight Array was happy enough with the role she picked for herself. She jumped the gun, but it might well have arrived at a similar conclusion itself.

For that reason, I think I might pick up Scoundrel’s Finesse for her first feat. A noir PI should be able to throw a punch, and she’ll try that well before she graduates to more lethal options. I might also give her a Restraining Spinneret augmentation, give her options to tie people down and try to negotiate where she can. Is she good at negotiating? Not necessarily. But she’s gonna try.

Summary:

Mostly, I just wanted an android noir detective? And then I was noodling around worlds with large android populations, and Aballon caught on things in my brain. Honestly, Aballon would be a fascinating world to run an urban mystery campaign on. I mean, lots of Pact World worlds would be great for that, Verces, Absalom Station, the Sun, but Aballon has an interesting ‘rugged flawed utopia’ sort of angle to it. Machine logic, mining rights, synthetic liberation, organic enclaves, high-speed mag-rail networks (I know I keep mentioning these, but they do a lot for the cyberpunk imagery on Aballon, and that doesn’t hurt the noir vibes at all) … There’s a lot to work with.

So. Dusty Brown. A tired, rumpled, uncharismatic android noir detective who’s just doing her best to help. Heh.

[never-quite-buried]

Nope now it’s at the point that i’m shocked that people off tt don’t know what’s going down. I have no reach but i’ll sum it up anyway.

SCOTUS is hearing on the constitutionality of the ban as tiktok and creators are arguing that it is a violation of our first amendment rights to free speech, freedom of the press and freedom to assemble.

SCOTUS: tiktok bad, big security concern because china bad!

Tiktok lawyers: if china is such a concern why are you singling us out? Why not SHEIN or temu which collect far more information and are less transparent with their users?

SCOTUS (out loud): well you see we don’t like how users are communicating with each other, it’s making them more anti-american and china could disseminate pro china propaganda (get it? They literally said they do not like how we Speak or how we Assemble. Independent journalists reach their audience on tt meaning they have Press they want to suppress)

Tiktok users: this is fucking bullshit i don’t want to lose this community what should we do? We don’t want to go to meta or x because they both lobbied congress to ban tiktok (free market capitalism amirite? Paying off your local congressmen to suppress the competition is totally what the free market is about) but nothing else is like TikTok

A few users: what about xiaohongshu? It’s the Chinese version of tiktok (not quite, douyin is the chinese tiktok but it’s primarily for younger users so xiaohongshu was chosen)

16 hours later:

Tiktok as a community has chosen to collectively migrate TO a chinese owned app that is purely in Chinese out of utter spite and contempt for meta/x and the gov that is backing them.

My fyp is a mix of “i would rather mail memes to my friends than ever return to instagram reels” and “i will xerox my data to xi jinping myself i do not care i share my ss# with 5 other people anyway” and “im just getting ready for my day with my chinese made coffee maker and my Chinese made blowdryer and my chinese made clothing and listening to a podcast on my chinese made phone and get in my car running on chinese manufactured microchips but logging into a chinese social media? Too much for our gov!” etc.

So the government was scared that tiktok was creating a sense of class consciousness and tried to kill it but by doing so they sent us all to xiaohongshu. And now? Oh it’s adorable seeing this gov-manufactured divide be crossed in such a way.

This is adorable and so not what they were expecting. Im sure they were expecting a reluctant return to reels and shorts to fill the void but tiktokers said fuck that, we will forge connections across the world. Who you tell me is my enemy i will make my friend. That’s pretty damn cool.

[chetungwan]

I've been real busy lately because it's December and I work at the post office, so of course I am

But that doesn't mean I can't show up with an unprompted PSA

Hey! Have you ever mailed a letter to Santa Claus? Have you ever wondered what exactly happened to that letter? Well wonder no longer! If it had a stamp and a return address, then odds are that it ended up on the USPS's Operation Santa page!

Every year, the USPS collects letters to Santa Claus, and processes them to black out any identifying information. Last names, addresses, things like that. Then, the letters are posted on the Operation Santa webpage and people can adopt the letters.

Once you adopt a letter, you can buy gifts for them, wrap them up, and package them. Then you get a barcode from the website, and bring them to a post office. The clerk there will scan the barcode, which prints out a label with the address on it, and sends out the gift.

It's anonymous on both ends, and is generally just. A really nice thing to do.

I highly recommend it if you have some money to spare this year and want to give a kid a moment of magic this year

It's one of those things that the post office just happened to be positioned to do, and ended up knocking it out of the park. Unfortunately, I don't think they advertise this nearly well enough, and most letters end up going unanswered

Hopefully, a few more will be answered this year

[miametropolis]

last chance to evacuate

as you may know, israel has begun its ground operation in rafah. they dropped leaflets last night ordering people to evacuate, and bombing in east rafah has already begun.

The border is about to become unreachable.

Rafah is trapped.

We have literal hours until no-one, all the GoFundMe's you've scrolled past, all the people desperately begging on TikTok, will be able to escape.

Give now. Give whatever you can.

I am fundraising for the Odeh family, which is only 3k away from meeting its goal.

you will not get another chance.

GIVE HERE

[gurutrends]

NSCDC Boss Commends Citizen Cooperation, Tasks Operatives on National Security in the New Year

NSCDC Boss Commends Citizen Cooperation, Tasks Operatives on National Security in the New Year He also commended the dedication of State Commandants, Heads of Formations, and Zonal Commanders in advancing the Corps’ mandate to protect lives, property, and critical national infrastructure. Dr. Audi emphasized that the Corps’ successes are largely due to the credible information and trust Nigerians…

[sailoreuterpe]

Using the bathroom in general is a human right and should be enshrined as such and I'm not joking. Too many groups of people are denied bathroom breaks or the use of bathrooms entirely--disabled people, blue-collar workers, children, homeless people, prisoners, students, the elderly. I'm surely missing other groups. Not using the bathroom when needed can cause serious, long-term damage, not to mention death. Free, clean, accessible bathrooms should be available everywhere. It's fucking cruel to deny someone the use of the bathroom, regardless of the reasoning. I'd rather every student in the world goof off and every homeless person make a mess and every worker "steal company time" than let one person suffer because they're denied the right to fucking pee in peace.

[abedallahmusallam]

Emergency: Help Abedallah and his family to Evacuate From GAZA WAR

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #276 )✅️

https://gofund.me/c358a1a5

Dear Humanity,

Please read this as if I'm a member of your family. maybe your brother, son or a friend and as if my family who's under death now is yours.

My name is Abedallah, a fresh graduate who wants to be a doctor like his role model, his father.

A student who was supposed to start his university and achieve the dreams he worked for but found himself losing the city he's living in, his house and losing any hope of a better future with it.

And after a alot of studying in Tawjihi ( The final level at high school before joining university), the war had another plan.

The story started since childhood, when every one I have knowen called me doctor.

This continued till I reach to the final grade at my school grade 12 (Tawjihi).

In this time, I felt that everything should be real, I can do it, I started to study

and work hard from begining to end, no sleep, no rest, all these things to achieve my goal and make my dream a real one.

The hard year has finished, then two week of fear waiting.

After this, the result came, it’s 99.4, I ranked the third in my country.

Since the war on Gaza strip started, we struggled alot, when we were at home at the beginning of the war the Israeli occupation bombed many houses around us, then we were displaced to Rafah because of fear and at the first day suddenly we heard the sound of many blasts,cracking glass and screaming women and children, they blew up a residential square near us.

After two months, I returned to khanyonis, but not to our home.

I live in tent becuse the israeli occupation burned my house completely, nothing left.

I feel that I lost and continue to lose every thing, this war made my dreams, hopes, my beloved things and my beautiful house burned and disappeared.

The single wish for me at this time is waking up from this nightmare and everything goes back to what it was.

Help your brother to get out of this disaster, rebuild his house and complete his education and realise his dream of becoming a doctor.

[auckie]

https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1765391777580912958?s=20

PLEASE GD IF YOU LOVE AND WANT TRAINS

[389]

Speed Ratliff as the Boom Operator for SAW (2004)

[immaculatasknight]

Political assassin in the crosshairs

[funkyboxofinterests]

Sometimes Raph misses being small

[essektheylyss]

"must a story have conflict?" yes. hope this helps <3

[neverreallythoughtaboutthefuture]

Inspired by this post.