RoyalRoad
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I ended up splitting off some of 8 into 9 based on feedback. The story I've thought of will end on 10, and then it's back to the drawing board for me. I'm not sure if I would continue with this universe or come back with another idea, let me know if you have an opinion either way.
I'll start posting these onto a site I found called RoyalRoad in addition to reddit. I won't take donations, but it does seem like it has nice utilities to manage all the stories even if the audience is smaller. Any advice on this welcome too.
And as always, I'm still a new writer trying to improve. Feedback about the story or my writing are all very welcome, and I read every one of them.
Galactic Credits weren't technically a currency yet. They had a lot of GCs in the bank, but as the aliens would say, that's just numbers on a screen. You couldn't pay rent and taxes with GCs, not yet.
As some human traders switched to exclusively buying goods from the market, they paid hard earned Dollars in exchange for virtual GC, and that became the revenue stream. This revenue balanced out almost perfectly with sellers who were instantly cashing out.
For every Dollar that someone paid GC to convert to credits, only about 95 cents would be asked to be paid out by a seller trying to withdraw their GCs for cash.
The transaction fees that GC made on every transaction can be visualized as credits disappearing into an untouched locked account. This was effectively a profit for GC, because it meant less credits that had to be exchanged for $. That 5% margin was a steady Dollar revenue stream that they could safely cash out.
But because all the humans needed to pay bills and taxes, they would withdraw their money almost immediately, which meant that they would always be stuck around that 5% margin. Unlike a regular bank, they couldn't make a lot of investments.
That's when the universe decided to give them a break.
Or rather, their interests had aligned with the self interest of some very rich people who had just started paying attention.
At first, the financial systems on Earth did not care much about GCs. They were used in spaceports all around Earth, and space was very exciting, but it was inaccessible to most people and the actual trade volume was a small percentage of total businesses done on Earth.
The aliens directly made a few people very, very rich, mostly traders and GC. But what were of more interest to financial institutions were the reverse engineered alien technology products that they predicted were coming shortly. At the same time Sarah and her friends were trying to fix a famine, the human economy was booming.
Like GC, banks were in the business of selling gold prospecting equipment, not looking for gold themselves.
Naturally, banks started allowing deposits and withdrawal of GC. This wasn't unusual. Banks have no issues holding onto cryptocurrency and non-USD currencies for customers' savings accounts. That was their business, after all. There were some costs, but it was generally a good business: fat transaction fees led to fat profit margins.
In the case of GC, banks needed to charge their customers a high transaction fee because GC itself charged a high transaction fee. This was bad for business. Not many people kept their credits in other banks because GC itself was a bank and they kept their money in there just fine without having to pay an even higher transaction fee.
They were understandably unhappy about several of their wealthier customers keeping a lot of money in another bank, but not enough to want to choke out GC's business. That would be killing their golden goose that is the booming alien knockoff economy.
So when GC decided to raise liquidity, as they would need to do to continue to bankroll a multi-planetary relief mission indefinitely, the banks saw an opportunity. Or rather, VISA did.
It was an incredibly generous offer: VISA would treat Galactic Credits like Dollars and allow full convertibility on their own network, in exchange for GC waiving their entire transaction fee for bank transfers. Their lawyers didn't want GC to go ahead and print money without limits, so they put a contingency that allowed them to cut off GC whenever they wanted and clauses that allowed for regular auditing.
Sarah and her friends thought about it, but not for very long.
Galactic Credit became no longer the only bank that could deal in credits.
Credits were now freely transferable between banks.
Now, you could pay taxes in credits converted to USD.
Which meant people stopped withdrawing their Dollars from GC immediately, and GC could "borrow" that money to pay for supplies, equipment, and then use some to invest in companies on Earth.
It was like a limited run of fractional reserve banking.
The aid operation to Gak continued.
"Isn't this technically a blatant violation of minimum wage laws?" Asked Sarah over the FTL video comms, the crisp and quick quality of which was a testament of how much human infrastructure had been shipped into Gakrek orbit, "doing some quick maths with the average fuel and maintenance costs here… it looks like we're basically paying the space traders only about $10 for every hour of shipping they do for us."
Kathleen Bryce, GC's head counsel shifted uncomfortably in a conference room chair 50 light years away, though her immediate reply indicated she had indeed thought the problem through, "Not if anyone asks."
She continued, "the short story is nobody has tested the courts to see if aliens working for us in space are subject to California employment and labor regulations, or federal minimum wage laws, or perhaps, even no laws."
"What's the long story?" Jen asked, slightly interested.
"We're pretty sure they're at most contractors, definitely not employees. Cali Prop 22 took care of that. The spaceport is probably considered international territory, or else the traders would be considered 'illegal aliens' every time they landed," Kathleen did a little chuckle at that most unoriginal pun around the GC legal team watercooler, "In which case, the lower federal minimum wage applies. Or maybe it's not even international territory, maybe it's some new thing. Too many edge cases to descri-"
"Ok," Sarah said after a moment, "it'll probably look bad though."
"What will?" Jen countered, rolling her eyes, "that they're being asked to voluntarily work just above cost to help save a billion hungry aliens, a problem that, let's not forget, most people in the galaxy think they helped create in the first place? Give me a break. There's fifty thousand Red Cross workers working for free on Gakrek and you're telling me we-"
"Ok, ok, we'll save this discussion for later, interesting as the implications are," Stearns interrupted, "until the labor board starts sniffing around, we'll let Legal deal with it. The other item I wanted to get to today is what we're going to do for Gak in the medium and long term."
"Right, the immediate crisis is over, but the moment we pull our people out and stop sending food constantly, the Gaks are back to square one in two months," Sarah returned to her presentation, "over the past two weeks, our models keep having to be revised down on the future of Gakrek farming. Their climate system has been dramatically spiraling downwards for decades now. With this disaster: the out of control burning and flooding, the trashed ecosystems, and the Gaks literally selling off their farming tools to squeeze out some more fruits from traders, they added up to one conclusion: traditional subsistence agriculture is no longer viable on Gakrek."
Here she put up a chart on screen. There were two lines. There's a straight horizontal line, marking the average calories that healthy Gaks needed, and then there's a quickly plummeting line denoting the drastic decrease of Gak agricultural productivity over time. They crossed about ten years ago. The meaning was clear.
"It's increasingly obvious that all Gak food will need to be shipped in from offworld sources until we completely overhaul their agricultural economy," Sarah continued.
"What kind of overhaul are we even talking about?" Benny chimed in. He owned a good portion of the company, but rarely came to these executive meetings. Today, he was making an exception for his son Benny Jr, who was on the view screen with the rest of the offworld team on Gakrek.
Stearns replied, "in a word: industrialization."
"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," wrote Ted Kaczynski, known more famously as his press nickname, the Unabomber. When this was published in the Washington Post in 1995 in response to a threat, a number of people thought he was making a lot of sense.
It made all the headlines, inspired countless hours of political debate, and gave a major boost to anarcho-primitive ideas in the academic sphere.
But as many historians knew, his ideas were not wildly original. Industrialization, like every major economic change, created winners and losers. Sometimes there were more of one, and sometimes the other.
In human society, previously skilled workers, usually guild craftsmen who made up the upper-middle class of late feudal Europe, became the biggest losers of industrialization as their labor was replaced by machines that could do what they did at hundreds if not thousands of times faster. Without skill, without rest, and without emotion. Some of them were so angry, they even went out and smashed the machines, but mechanization continued anyway.
The biggest winners of the Industrial Revolution were the subsistence farmers who made up the vast majority of lower class workers in feudal Europe. They went into cities, to work mind-numbingly boring jobs, doing the same thing day after day, on risky and dangerous assembly lines for excruciatingly long hours. Many got injured. Some died. A few were even children.
And yet mostly, they did so willingly.
That's not because they were all tricked, under some grand illusion that factory work was comfortable, safe, and enriching.
It was because subsistence farming on its worst day was a hecking nightmare.
The Gaks were living it.
"Why can't we just build a tractor factory there then?" Sarah demanded.
In her mind, tractors were synonymous with food. She'd been on a road trip through the American Midwest once, on the way to the Yellowstone. There, she'd seen rows of gigantic tractors plowing fields, endless food from horizon to horizon. To Sarah, the massive scale of the corn fields of America was just how industrialization was done.
"Because tractor factories depend on a thousand different parts. Who's gonna make the tires? Who's gonna make the motors? Who's gonna make the onboard computer?" Stearns explained, "and who's gonna bring them gasoline to keep running? And each of those components have a thousand factories to make them, and each have dependencies on thousands of other factories! It would literally be easier to move Los Angeles onto Gak than it would be to help them mass manufacture tractors."
Sarah made a facepalming gesture, but Stearns cut her off before she launched into despair, "there actually is a much easier solution to this problem."
"On Earth, most economists agree that the most efficient way to send foreign aid to areas that consistently couldn't produce enough food is not to send them food; it's to send them money so they can buy food, or if they have good soil, they can buy some tools to grow their own," said Stearns, leading Sarah to the obvious conclusion.
"But they don't use money here, we can't just send them money!"
"Exactly. So let's talk about that."
Gordorker's family had finally cleaned up his house from the dust storm. The broken roof was re-tiled as best as he could. His children had helped on some of the menial tasks, but that's what children were for.
It was nice to have purpose again.
The humans had said that their mission would be here for months, maybe years, but Gordorker was not so naive to believe that he wouldn't have to work for food again. He was certainly not so stupid to take this to mean he should be lounging around all day.
Winters on Gakrek were not bad in terms of freezing people to death, but the dry winds would not allow crop planting until spring again.
Next time, he would have 21 mouths to feed, not including his, and he'd have to get the fields plowed without poor Grunger. He was lucky he had so many children.
Traders Only
New Thread: Bohor spaceports have just banned bartering!
Body: If your friends want to do any business at Bohor, they better get themselves a GC Terminal fast! The Bohor are banning barter at their main port. You will only be able to conduct trades by credits starting in a few days!
Comment: Whaaaaat? Are you crazy??? Only two of my friends have Terminals. How is everyone else supposed to make a living?!
Comment: Get a Terminal lol
Comment: We told you guys last week this was gonna happen if you assholes keep holding up the line with your obnoxious rare fruit peddling. Newsflash, we don't care about how exotic your stuff is on Bohor. Just unload it. We weigh it, read the price list for food items, do the math, you get your credits, and you're out of there in minutes. You want air filters? We've got air filters for 2,800 GCs, no haggling, no bartering. If you don't like it, someone else will take it. Don't waste our time! -- Bohor Spaceport Management Team
Comment: Hey Bohor, have you considered maybe getting a Terminal yourself so that everyone else don't all need to get one just to get some fuel?
Comment: I'm selling air filters for 3,000 GCs in orbit above Bohor for traders who don't have Terminals.
"Our plan for the leasing model for the Terminals is not going to work," Sarah observed.
"Yup, the famine crisis on Gakrek is forcing our hand," admitted Stearns, "and we'd expected a much slower rollout to bring the aliens on board over the course of years, not weeks. In hindsight, it was obvious how this was different to how humans popularized credit and debit cards in the 1970s. We were replacing cash, which was just slightly inferior to a card, but with the aliens, we're replacing their entire dumpster fire of an economy. We earned a lot of goodwill with our relief effort and the galaxy is buying in."
"So what, we just abandon the original timeline and move to phase two immediately?" Asked Sarah.
"Exactly right. When the iron is hot, you gotta strike it," replied Stearns, "we'll give the merchants already with Terminals an option to opt out of their lease and switch to the new devices, but I doubt most will. Our internal data shows that they've universally been getting their money's worth out of those."
"Are our manufacturers even ready to handle the inevitable barrage of orders?" Asked Jen, eager to move onto the logistics and technology discussion.
They were not.
Version two of the offworld trading terminals were actually a downgrade to the original Terminals. The originals were prototypes, modified out of consumer tablets that cost hundreds of dollars to produce.
The new ones, branded Mini Terminals, were basic card readers with pin pads and a tiny OLED display, attached to a now mass produced FTL antenna you could get at RadioShack for $3.99. There wasn't even a thermal printer for receipts.
The whole device costs no more than $20 to make on a mass production line in Vietnam. GC was going to sell it at cost in credits.
Galactic Credit had prepared supply lines to ramp up production, ready to start rolling them out in a couple years. They've made a test batch of tens of thousands of units sitting in storage, but did not expect to need to start actually selling them for a while.
Carefully made plans were abandoned, schedules were expedited, employees in SE Asia worked overtime, and the company took on extra cost to push the schedule up.
It still wasn't enough.
On day one, all reserve units sold out. Some of the well connected human traders, unburdened with a strong conscience or ethics, bought them by the truckload as they were leaving their warehouses. They sold them at a large markup at the spaceport.
That was not very cash money of them.
GC sent a representative to the spaceport to let traders know that they were out of stock, but more would be made available shortly. Customers should just wait a week for the prices to come down.
The scalpers instantly sold out anyway. The alien traders lucky enough to be on the non-relief landing pads filled their cargo with the Mini Terminals.
Then, those traders sold them at a markup at other ports. And so on.
By the time the Mini Terminals reached average spaceport merchants on the other side of the galaxy, they were being sold for almost half the price of the original tablet Terminals.
By the end of the week, the craze died down. These electronics really were cheap and easy for human factories to make, and many of the production lines just needed time to start the machines. Prices returned to normal, and the average merchant could afford them with a bit of honest work and savings.
The Gakrek Spacelift was slowing down. The turnaround time had been increased to a leisurely 10 minutes, and the Livermore space traffic controller was occasionally allowing non-relief traders to land at open pads, which Zikzik was doing now.
Zikzik needed to refuel, but apparently that was still only allowed for the landing pads that had been designated for relief. He called up the Livermore port manager, pointed to his number one position on the relief pilot leaderboard, but she just shrugged her shoulders and said apologetically, "rules are rules".
Oh well, he could always refuel at Olgix on the way.
As he landed in Olgix, he realized this was the first time he landed at a non human or Gak port for at least a week.
He greeted the Olg who was running a reactor fuel line to his ship with a nod, and asked, "how much fruit to full?"
The Olg took one look at the sign on his booth, and said, "you know we also take credits on Olgix now, right?"
A little surprised, Zikzik took out his card and terminal and allowed the Olg to swipe his. He'd used his Terminal when doing exchanges with other traders, but this was the first time he'd been to a non-Earth port where goods and services could be paid for using his credits.
"That's 295.50 GCs, pleasure doing business with you."
Grob was one of the wealthier Gaks in the world. The famine had affected everyone, but he and his wife did not have to go hungry because the spaceport management made sure to keep feeding the people that kept the mobs at bay.
Everything else stopped working though. He used to pad his income by making sure that the vendors at the spaceport knew exactly who was protecting their livelihoods. Only very rarely did new ones not cooperate.
Grob really wasn't a bad Gak, but he did what everyone else in his position also did. This was just how business was done on Gakrek. You didn't get to survive to become a security guard family if you didn't do that. Another Gak would come along, take your place, and do what you didn't want to do anyway.
When the humans arrived, things changed. They started peddling these credits business, which he'd seen some of the traders used.
Of course, he didn't think much of it. Instead of getting goods, you just get a card, and use the card to trade for food and items? Seems unnecessarily complicated.
He'd heard that they charged a cut just for you to use the card, a concept that he was intimately familiar with and in no hurry to be subjected to. The humans had insisted on giving one to him and setting it up. Which he had to do because they were in charge now, but that was fine by him. Just because he had a card didn't mean he had to use it right?
A few days later, when he was on a patrol route at the spaceport, checking off the vendor stands, one of the luxury item vendors asked him if she could pay her next cycle's fee with her card because she had traded away all her wares.
"You gotta make sure to save wares for me next time," he'd told her, "but I'll take it this time." He ruffled through his backpack to find the card, handed it to her, and she inserted it into her machine, typed in her code, and showed him that it had deposited 18 GC into his account.
Hoping that she didn't stiff him, he went on with his route.
"Let me say this again," Zarko said at the edge of his patience limit, "you can trade these credits for food on Earth. Lots of food, shiploads of food. So much food, everywhere."
"But I don't have a ship," whined the spare parts vendor at the spaceport, "why don't you just bring food with you next time you want my parts?"
"You can exchange credits for food from some of the other traders that come down here too! Some of them have the new Terminals now, look, that guy over there, he takes GC," Zarko was almost shouting while pointing at a fellow Zeepil food merchant who had a I ❤️ GC sign on his booth across the spaceport.
This was frustrating. Every time he came across one of these less traveled planets he had to explain himself to these yokels all over again.
The vendor looked over skeptically and said, "how do I know that you two aren't working some scam together?"
That was it for Zarko. It had been a long day, this guy wasn't making it any shorter, and he had just been accused of being a dishonest trader. It was probably because of his species. Just because he was a Zeepil didn't mean he was a scammer!
He internally cursed the unjustified stereotype of his people and blew up at the racist:
"Listen to me very carefully. You're going to give me the secondary fuel modulator. You're going to walk over to the food merchant over there. Then you're going to swipe this card over here, on his machine. He's going to give you at least a month's worth of food. And if you don't, I'm going to leave a one star review on your spaceport on Traders Only, and nobody is going to come back here to trade anything with you ever again, got it?"
The vendor whined some more under his breath, but eventually relented. The threat had sounded real.
He got plenty of food. Whatever scam these Zeepils were running, they didn't rip him off this time at least. Whatever.
Zarko was fuming as he took off. Didn't these ignorant primitives know that a liquid currency to facilitate free and fair exchange of goods and services was obviously the bedrock upon which a modern economy needed to be built?
When Grob got home from work, he handed his wife the credits card saying, "hey darling, one of the luxury traders gave me her protection share using the card. I trusted her because she normally always pays on time. Did I get scammed?"
His wife was a teacher at a nearby school. Ever the practical one, she asked, "oh, how much did she put on it?"
"It said 18."
She did some math in her head and replied, "yeah that sounds about right," and to his surprise, she pulled out a card and said, "I got one from the humans at the school too, and I used it to buy a new pair of shoes for you!"
He tried them on. They weren't very fitting shoes, but neither were his previous pair so he couldn't complain. They did seem very well made even though the little holes in them seemed to be a design choice.
Pretty soon, he noticed that the other guards at the spaceport started extracting their share of protection fees using cards too. Oh well, if everyone else was taking fees with a card, he supposed it couldn't hurt if he did it too. It somewhat lightened his load on patrols, which he didn't mind at all.
Besides, his blue shoes were really pretty. He was not sure why there was a big check mark on its side though.
"They're doing what?!" Sarah asked, her temper threatening to go off.
"It's a protection racket. A practice as old as time. The security guards have basically been taking a percentage of the vendors' wares, and recently switched onto using cards to take payment. It's been going on forever and it's probably just how they do things there. Using cards is pretty innovative of them, I'll give them that," Jen said, "but it made it pretty easy for us to track down all of them. Should we revert the transactions?"
"No, probably not," Sarah said, calming down and seeing a slight head shake from her head counsel Bryce, "but we need to make it clear to them that they can't be allowed to do that anymore."
Grob wasn't sure how to feel about the cards anymore.
The humans had found the practice of protection fees distasteful, and they'd warned that anyone caught doing it again would face severe consequences. They made their point pretty clear when one of the other guards was made an example of: her card stopped working. She had to get a new one that didn't have any of her credits in it!
On the other hand, the humans also made the spaceport authorities start paying them with credits, which was good because now they were being paid on time and Grob knew he didn't have to worry about not being paid as long as the humans were there.
His wife had been buying them new clothes with credits she was getting paid as a teacher too. One of his human friends had giggled when she saw his shirt, which apparently said "2016 NBA Champions Golden State Warriors". He wasn't sure what was so funny about that, but it was a very comfortable shirt.
Maybe this whole credits thing wasn't as ridiculous as he thought at first.
By the universal inheritance path known as "dibs", Gordorker inherited his neighbors Gyuotin and Gyuovin's farmable land and possessions. They didn't have much.
Trinkets, gadgets, and a bunch of junk. It was mostly items that couldn't be traded for food during the worst periods of the shortage. With his immediate food needs taken care of by the relative abundance of food items the humans have brought, Gordorker thought perhaps he should go buy a stasis box with the trinkets he got from his deceased neighbors.
When he arrived at the offworld market, he saw a high end luxury merchant proudly displaying some fresh new wares from offworld, including a number of stasis boxes. These were apparently new ones made by humans. These were slightly bigger than the ones he'd have before, but he'd brought his neighbors' life possessions, so he thought maybe he'd be able to trade for one of those with some haggling.
Gordorker started laying out his items on the table, but the trader cut him off, hastily saying the weirdest thing he'd ever heard from a trader in his life, "no barter, credits only." The merchant then pointed him towards a human tent.
A human volunteer, his nametag said Marco, asked his name and gave him a shiny card, then told him to memorize 6 numbers. "As the head of your household, you have also been given a small stimulus by the GC corporation," he said.
Then Marco took him to a junk trader stall, where he gave the trader all his items. Marco showed an increasingly confused Gordorker how to insert his card into a small machine slot to "receive payment".
Marco guided him back to the merchant selling stasis boxes. Gordorker was instructed on how to insert his card and enter his pin code, which he mastered with no difficulty.
Marco then took him to a farm tools stall, where Gordorker repeated the same process with a steel plow, a small box of "semi-dwarf wheat seeds", a long garden hose, and a hand pump, all loaded onto a brand new wooden wheelbarrow.
"BAL: 12.50," the small screen had read.
Gordorker was not sure what unnatural ritual he had taken part in, but he was in possession of the most farm tools he had ever been in his life and he had the stasis box he was looking for.
"Alright, that should be enough. Make sure to keep the card safe and remember your 6 digit code. Ask a volunteer if you need to know what the tools do.."
Gordorker put his card in his stasis box. Then, being the prudent Gak he was, he wrote down his pin code and put it in the box as well.
Whatever else it did, he was sure one of his descendants could probably find a use for it in an emergency one day.
In hindsight, there were obvious economic side effects for Earth becoming a mass producer of everything from food to cheap consumer electronics, the reverse engineering of millions of years of alien tech, and ripping down the barriers that the barter based economies of the galaxy had erected.
A young forward thinking economist wrote a whole journal article about it with a typical economic study title: "Development Osmosis: Capital Outflow, Argentina, and Extreme Poverty in Offworld Economies".
Three other economists read the pre-print as part of the peer review, who all sent him an email saying something along the lines of "wow, this gave me a lot to think about. Somebody important should read this!"
Nobody else did, for a while.
It didn't make the news.
The reference to high yield semi-dwarf wheat seeds in the story refers to the research of Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Norman Borlaug. Borlaug noticed that stalks of wheat that are too high yield would bend and then break their stalks, so he solved that problem by breeding these plants with dwarfed plants. Shorter stalk, supports more wheat. His work in improving food security in developing nations is credited with saving the lives of over a billion humans. A real life HFY.
The next chapter's working title is:
Rising Tide
RoyalRoad
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TL;DR - I use the craft beer industry as a way to understand Capitalist Propaganda, how Capitalism and Socialism are inextricably linked to each other, and how through the use of propaganda, companies use the "illusion of choice" to coerce you into believing that you prefer the products that are most favorable to them. In order to change this into the consumer's favor, you need to be an informed consumer in the free market, and raise class consciousness to overthrow the tyranny of Capitalist Propaganda, that is called "Marketing".
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You can't understand Capitalist Propaganda unless you have a solid understanding of what Capitalism is beyond the literal definition of the word, which is just an abstract ideal. Propaganda plays off of the discrepancies between the ideals of Capitalism, like the free market, which is another abstract ideal, and the reality of Capitalism in practice in America, which can be characterized as Trickle Down Economics. Capitalism sought to be a pragmatic alternative to its economic predecessors, a fact which drives Capitalist Propaganda. However, through layers of abstraction throughout the years, it has become more of a religion, as critics refer to the increasingly ideological concept as "Supply Side Jesus", meaning you give all the money to the rich, it'll trickle down to the poor, and they can "vote" on the actions of the capitalists through monetary interactions in the free market.
Capitalist Propaganda is engrained in America, because at the time of our founding, Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations", which is considered the Bible of the Free Market. This groundbreaking work utilized Newton's Laws of Physics, which were en vogue at the time, to describe how interactions in the marketplace would balance each other out, just as the laws of Newtonian Physics do.
The very noble purpose of Wealth of Nations was not create the oligarchy we have today, but to do the opposite. He wanted to describe a system that would protect individual freedoms and be truly democratic. Just as Lenin and Stalin bastardized the works of Marx, so too have capitalists in America bastardized the intentions of Adam Smith.
Capitalism and Socialism are best learned side by side, in my opinion, to avoid falling into the trappings of either ideology that our brains like to do. Which one is better? It depends on the market, but the answer is almost always somewhere in between.
Through learning how Socialist concepts can be applied to problems in Capitalism, you can cut through the propaganda and will see for yourself that these problems can be solved if we just drop the labels and do what's best for society and the individual. The problem is always finding the proper balance.
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WHAT? CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM ARE JOINED AT THE HIP?
Yep. You can never live in a pure economic system. Purity is always an illusion. If you want something to be pure, you have to put a lot of energy into making it that way. Nature likes to mix stuff up. This is why ideologies around racial purity and fascism always fail. There are people who want a "pure" economic system, but they are usually the people at the top and would only get richer from more purity while the rest of society loses freedom and slowly starves.
In a nutshell, Capitalism promotes laws that benefit those with money, while Socialism promotes a safety net that benefits everyone. Every single human is born into Socialism. As a baby, you need food, someone else works for it and gives it to you, but then at some point, you are expected to exchange labor for capital, and buy your own food. See? The two are forever bound as the yin and yang. You can also grow your own food, but for that you need land, which is capital.
These interactions are very tricky. I only want to tell you enough so that you can start to see Capitalist Propaganda, because right now, you're like a fish in water that can't see water. I often use this line to describe a person who can't see their own homegrown propaganda. The best way I found to study Capitalism is by relating it Socialism, the "air" above the "water" of Capitalism, if that makes sense.
I always find it best to look at a microcosm to understand these concepts. And today, that microcosm is beer.
Mmmm....Beeeeeeeeeerrrrrrr.....
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CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
Before I poison your mind with my own propaganda, picture you're on vacation and you walk into a bar and want to order a beer. If you really want to understand the power of propaganda in your own life, really think of this before we break this all down. Really think, what makes you decide which beer to order? Do you like to look at the labels on the tap or bottle? That's obvious propaganda. It has absolutely nothing to do with the taste or quality of the beer itself, but sways your opinion toward logos you've seen before, which is why you see so many beer advertisements, which means that money that could've gone into quality is instead going into propaganda, and you're already biased towards an inferior product. Interesting. You really can't help being swayed by marketing, but at least you can be conscious of that fact, and that's important in order to be an informed consumer.
Do you ask the bartender for a recommendation? Why would you do that? You don't know the bartender any better than the beers in front of you. How do you know they aren't paid more to offer you a beer that sucks and is 12 years old and the owner wants to get rid of it? Do you ask for a certain style of beer? Do you ask for a local beer? And once you finally narrow it down to a few choices, do you ask for samples so you can make up your own mind? You should always do this. Then we get into "flavor propaganda", which we'll discuss later. Jeez. Did you every realize there was so much complexity behind being an informed consumer and just ordering a simple beer? Maybe you'll give in and just tell the bartender to pour whatever. Choice is difficult sometimes.
If you really visualize this and take a minute to let this sink in, you'll start to understand how external forces hijack the processor in your mind to manufacture desire through the illusion of choice. However, your health and enjoyment of the beer is not the goal for these external forces, they only want you to purchase. The perfect example is fast food. They know their product sucks, but they know you'll keep buying it, but that doesn't keep them from lying about how delicious it is in their ads. There is far more at play behind the curtain. There is a science behind addicting you to things, this is reinforced by a corporate tax and subsidy system that contorts the free market pushing centralization of production through homogenization and use of chemicals to hide the homogenization, and simply because there is more than one option, they make you feel like you have choice. This, in a nutshell, is how the illusion of choice works in the free market. It's not about what YOU want. The producer manipulates you to think you want what they have. Through this, they deceive Americans into buying products with a list of ingredients that a person would never freely choose to consume. So if you want to order a beer with no shit in it, then you're shit out of luck in America. You could in Germany, but we'll discuss that later.
While you're standing at that bar, you aren't conscious of the fact that your interests are in direct opposition to those of the bar owner's. Capitalists hide this fact with their perfect smiles, but Marx described this in detail. You want the best beer for the cheapest price, and the bar owner wants to sell you the cheapest beer at the highest price you'll pay. It doesn't stop there. The bar owner flips roles in the same situation with the beer distributor, who does the same with maybe another level of distribution, and continues to the brewer, then goes to the brewer versus supplier, supplier to farmer, and even though you'd think it stops there, the farmer has to deal with suppliers of equipment and seeds, and on and on.
Add to this list their auxiliary staff of HR, drivers, managers, brewers, bottle/keg makers, and of course owners, none of them care whether you actually like the beer you're drinking as long as you keep buying more. That's the big driver here.
Did you ever realize that every time you buy a beer, your own capital is partially responsible for creating and sustaining all of these jobs involved? You, my dear beer drinker, are the true job creator. Budweiser can brew all they want, it means nothing without buyers, who are the true engines of capitalism. Instead, you're treated as a rube by suits in a boardroom somewhere.
Capitalist Propaganda tells us the billionaires are job creators, but this is a lie. Jeff Bezos can't drink enough beer to sustain all these jobs. So why do we let him hoard all the money? Wouldn't the economy do better if we spread out Jeff's money so more people could buy more beers and more jobs would be created? According to Socialist Economics, yes. That's actually, quite simply, a Socialist Free Market. Did you even know that existed? The power hungry greedy people who are too lazy for manual labor go to such great lengths to make sure you don't learn it. They want you to think that only Capitalism allows you choice in the market. I'm sure you can guess why they say that.
Capitalism maintains itself by exulting the wealthy who use their economic power to punch down. The only way this system won't fall into fascism and fail is if the consumers start to punch back. Where Marx envisioned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as they usurped power from the Bourgeoisie, a modern alternative is just teaching people to understand the system we live in, so that we can just start making changes in the way we live and to whom we give our money.
See that? Capitalism and Socialism can get along nicely, so long as the consumers are informed.
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CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE ALIENATION OF LABOR CAUSING LONELINESS IN SOCIETY
What I described within the previous section is what Marx called "Alienation of Labor". Each step in the process of making your beer is isolated from the others, so no one feels ownership over the end product or a true connection to the consumer, or job creator. Even the bartender selling it is alienated from the profit of their labor in serving the beer, so they only focus on the service aspect of giving you the beer, because that is where they earn their tip. They can't really fix anything about a shitty beer other than to offer you a different brand. The capitalist owner is usually not there. Their only interaction is setting the rules for everyone in the bar to follow, and pay themselves more than everyone who has to follow those rules. This is part of the conflict between the classes. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just pointing it out. The bar owner themself has to spend money on propaganda to attract customers that could be spent in other places, so has to find ways to cut costs. Unfortunately, they buy cheaper beer...and this is why you end up with IPAs. No one is connected to the products, so they only look at prices and find the cheapest, passable product. This is the race to the bottom of Capitalism.
Compare this to when brewpubs were a new thing. The brewer would come out and talk to you about the beer, you would give feedback that could effect future batches and it connected everyone to each other through commerce. It makes business "social" and I think nearly everyone enjoys that, but it is losing out in competition with chain breweries that enforce isolation and make cookie cutter propaganda and cookie cutter business models so they can turn owners into managers and suck all the profit back their corporate headquarters and offshore accounts. They kill the experience and make everything transactional. And all the kitsch they hang around their cookie cutter chain bar is just to hide the fact that no one in that place cares about anything other than not getting fired. Everyone is effectually alienated from everyone else. It's worth a read to check out this page on Marx's Theory of Alienation.
This alienation is the root of a lot of misery in society. Humans are communal animals forced to live in a society of individuality and alienation. As they mope around, they seek an escape. And that is why advertising is so nefarious. It seeks to manipulate you in that state. Imagine driving home from your alienating job to you empty home, but looking up and see a billboard with bunch of actors laughing and drinking beer. They take pictures that make these actors look like friends. It's just for show. They aren't selling beer to those laughing people in the picture. They're tempting lonely people to drown their sorrows. Capitalist Propaganda is used so your brain doesn't understand what it wants. It wants friends, then sees the words Bud Light. So when the bartenders asks...Make it a Bud Light. Look at how much money they spend to manipulate and capitalize on people's suffering.
Propaganda in Communist countries is controlled by the government, so it's clear who the enemy of your freedom is. Capitalist Propaganda hides behind the layers of complexity of the same economy you rely on to survive, so you never know what's propaganda or where it's coming from. Marketers find every way imaginable to get their disinformation in front of your eyes, even enlisting your friends on Facebook in annoying MLM schemes. Propaganda invaded everything that can be legally monetized. It's in the media, and not just commercials anymore. There's product placement, stories injected into the news, and even movies and social media created an entire industry of "lifestyle propaganda", telling you how to live your life and indulge in overconsumption. It's REALLY hard to get away from Capitalist Propaganda. There is so much money and research behind it and so much depth, even this long post is only barely scratching the surface. I just want to open your eyes to it.
I can't make you see all this. No one can. I can only describe it as best as I can. What you will experience when you understand this is what I call "Economic Enlightenment", similar to what Marx called "Class Consciousness". Once it happened to me, the world looked amazing, and the shitty propagandists selling us false hope all look like clowns in a very odd circus of vanity, despair and mediocrity.
Once I understood this, I saw clearly how we are increasingly trapped in a form of Corporate Slavery, led by seriously ridiculous oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, who thinks he's the reincarnation of Augustus Caesar or something. That's why he has that haircut! This is a guy who stole a company and hired "screen psychologists" from Las Vegas to get you hooked on Facebook the same as casinos do with slot machines. He wants to be the funnel for propaganda throughout the world. He wants to be the kingmaker, decide what people buy, who they like, what views they hold. He can only do this because so many companies spend so much money to put their propaganda on that platform. They can only have this much money because the free market is not actually free. It's bought and paid for on platforms like Facebook and Amazon. The money that was supposed to "trickle down" is instead being spent on Capitalist Propaganda on these platforms, to get the proletariate to trickle their money up through endless, nonsensical online purchasing and local businesses who send the town's money to people who can't do anything with it but buy up properties that increase your rent and cost of living.
When people get drunk on the power of propaganda, they forget the lessons of the past. Propagandists always fall prey to their own delusions over time. In reality, your life is better without Facebook. There isn't anything on there that is healthy. Even if you just want to talk to a few friends, you are going to fall for the propaganda there. You can't help it. And if your bar advertises on Facebook, just think, that money could've gone into purchasing higher quality beer then sold at the same price, instead of going to Mark Zuckerberg so he can drop $30 million to buy the houses around him so no one can spy on him while he spies on you. You really gotta watch out for a guy who combines spying and propaganda all into a single app and thinks he's going to bring 200 years of peace to America. History is littered with knuckleheads like that. It's best to get off Facebook and encourage everyone else to do the same. Zuck only wants to lead himself to the Promised Land, and he's using your ignorance to fuel his own delusions by deluding you into thinking you want what he has to offer.
Let's get back to beer.
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IPAs AND THE FREE MARKET VS THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM
I like beer. When I worked in Germany, it was easy to walk into a bar and, like Farva, just order a liter o' beer. Often, there would only be two choices, light color or dark. As a matter of fact, even at the most famous beer festival in the world, Oktoberfest, people mostly drink the same standard type of beer, and no one complains about the lack of choice. It's quite easy. You can order with one finger. No need to see a menu or ask what's in it. It's simply beer. This worked for centuries. Consumers are fine with it. Prost! Have you ever shared a story like this and people say, "Oh, that would never work in America. Americans want choice." Yeah. Because we are flooded with Capitalist Propaganda.
So if consumer choice isn't pushing for a selection, why would a free market call for it? Imagine there are two bars and one of those bars says "30 beers on tap" and the other doesn't. You're more likely to choose it, and the other bar will have to compete in some way, often by copying. This forms trends, and people mistake this for something customers wanted. Trends are always marketing. Don't believe me? What happened to fidget spinners? So now you have a bunch of beers that no one asked for, yet will now demand. Competition creates more Capitalist Propaganda to create demand for something you never even wanted, but makes you think you do. And that's the best propaganda. You think you are thinking for yourself. This is the fallacy of consumer choice.
If you want to understand just how important that last paragraph is, consider this, "consumer choice" is the same propaganda they used to get you to carry around a device that spies on you 24/7 and sends that data to people you don't know, and you can't stop it, can you? You chose that. You wanted it. Not only that, but you paid $1,000 for the device to opt into their spying program, for the privilege of being mind controlled by the propaganda their AI selects for you. Did you read the Terms of Service? As bad as you may have thought Communist Propaganda was, Capitalist Propaganda is far better, and far stealthier. You believe you have freedom of choice. But your only choice is usually take it, or leave it. Oh, you need it for work? Maybe find a different job. Or just succumb to mass surveillance, and next year, you can drop another grand on a device with a marginally better camera.
There is a way to free yourself. You just have to understand the nature of propaganda. It took me a while, but I eventually broke free. Under Socialism, there would be laws against the exploitation of consumers. Capitalist Propaganda tells you that this takes away your freedom. This is a lie. Regulations give you the freedom to not have to worry whether the beer you're drinking has poison in it.
Germany has a lot of regulations on beer. It has the Reinheitsgebot (purity order), a law passed in 1516 that states that beer can only consist of water, hops and barley. Note, this is a different use of the word "purity" from earlier, as beer is itself a mixture of things. Historically there have also been regulations where beer could only be sold regionally, so no matter what part of Germany you were in, you only got a certain brand of beer at the bar, but it didn't matter because they all had the same ingredients. They could make wheat beers or unfiltered, but they were generally variations of pilsners and lagers. One meaning of the word "Lager" in German is "storage", meaning the beer was brewed in a way that it could be stored, allowing them to brew in bigger batches and store it.
Lagers use a more complex brewing process, so only larger breweries would make them, but this worked because of protected territories. America has a similar system, because each state has its own regulations on alcohol, but this is changing as corporate lawyers fight to homogenize the rules favorable to them, but the consumer loses control. Big brands tend to be lagers as they have general appeal to a wide audience. Did you notice this is the second time I pointed out that corporations create homogeneity? Without regulations, corporations create Fascism. That is why I tell people that we already live in the NWO but corporations rule the world instead of governments. Why do you think so few conspiracy theorists make this connection? Propagandists are paid a lot of money to keep even our small community confused about the reality of what's happening. Now, check out conspiracy and you'll see what I mean. They are spreading propaganda for the NWO over there and don't even know it. I tried to point that out and they finally banned me. Oh well. They'll figure it out in their own time.
In America, in 1978 it became legal to brew beer at home. This is what led to the explosion of new beers in the US decades later. Americans don't have purity laws, so could test new recipes. But people didn't generally like IPAs before, so how did they become so popular that they control 30% of the market? Marketing, of course. Create the market and tell people what they want.
IPA stands for India Pale Ale. It was invented by the British as an easy way to make a beer that they could drink in India. People only drank it out of necessity, as the other beers couldn't make the trip. IPAs are very easy to make and very forgiving, because if you mess it up, it already tasted bad anyway. As people started trying to get into microbrews, they often didn't have the capital to make lagers at small scale, and also wanted a simpler process so they didn't have to hire or train expert brewers, IPAs are cheap and easy to make at smaller scale.
In order to make it drinkable, brewers experimented with many different flavorings. This created a cult following of craft IPAs, where people would drive hours to stand in line for hours to try the newest concoction. The trendy nature of the craft beer world kept people training their palate to adapt to the taste of an IPA, making people start to actually like them. The flavorings made people think they were different, so even if they didn't like it, marketing tactics kept people coming back to try the latest blend. Your palate can adapt A LOT. Swedish people love Surströmming, but watch this video of Americans trying it for the first time. They tried to get me to eat it several times, but I would rather sit in a sauna until Tuesday to avoid smelling it while watching them eat it. It really smells that bad.
IPAs enticed people with popular, aromatic ingredients like bananas and pineapple. This is what I call "flavor propaganda". It's not bad in and of itself, but it can be easily misused to cover issues with quality or hide the taste of preservatives. Since we don'e have laws like Germany, you're left to rely on the knowledge and honesty of the bartender to find out. They don't make this info readily available, which is another form of Disinformation.
So if you think you actually like IPAs, just remember, you are just like a Swede eating rotten fish. A lot of propaganda went in to making IPAs popular, but it's the cheapest, easiest product to make that can be sold at the highest price, so they become popular. This is what business students call a business plan. To overcome the bad taste, IPAs were marketed as "classy" to shame you if you choose the more expensive to produce and more appealing pilsners and lagers, which were given a bad name due to being associated with major brands like Bud Light. This makes it harder to market microbrew lagers, which can only fetch a certain price due to association. And this is what is referred to as the "race to the bottom" in Capitalism.
Instead of trying to innovate ways to produce the beers you want, they just figure out how to get you to pay more for an inferior product, just like they do with BBQ. They make you think you want it. From this you can understand why "food" is full of junk that you wouldn't feed your dog. Whatever legal poison helps cheapen the product is considered "smart business", another propaganda term designed to hide the reality of doing immoral and harmful things to other humans for profit. If you make money on it, it's good. As if there aren't better choices we could come up with if there truly were a free market with an informed consumer.
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STRENGTHEN THE FREE MARKET BY BEING AN INFORMED CONSUMER
We don't need a Communist Revolution to make positive changes, so take off your ski masks and put your Antifa flags down. I like microbrew culture and still enjoy IPAs, but understanding the marketplace is how I do my part as an informed consumer and job creator to help create the world that I want to live in. I encourage you to do the same. Vote with your dollars. Don't let the Zuck-type sociopathic, corporate people in a distant land decide what you consume by looking at ads on his platform. Visit local breweries and talk to the brewmaster. Don't reinforce alienation from labor. Connect with the people who make the things you buy. Support independent entrepreneurship. These are the paths to a brighter future where we share in the abundance of wealth.
Discover Economic Enlightenment for yourself and realize that We The People are ultimately in control. Wealth inequality is greater than it was in France before the French Revolution. Don't let this train take us into the depths where another Lenin will arise and spend the night shooting people.
How you choose to spend your money today is what decides what will become the society of tomorrow. And remember, you always have the choice to buy nothing at all. I never saw a billboard that said that.
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LET THEM DRINK BEER!
I hope this gave you a glimpse behind the curtain of Capitalist Propaganda. Propaganda isn't just political, it has invaded everything and it's at full blast right now. I hope you can piece together how Capitalist Propaganda is actually designed to make you subservient by controlling what you want so they can maximize their own profit and teach you to accept whatever they offer, the homogenization of choice. However, your life is your own and you should remain in control of all aspects of it, including your desires.
Richard Wolff is an economist who studied at three elite universities in America and discusses how he was not able to even learn about Socialist Economics in the ivory tower, even though Capitalist Propaganda calls universities leftist. He found no department in America that is even willing to teach it or study it. Capitalist Propaganda censors these ideas, especially at the university. People in power don't want the serfs to learn about themselves. Check him out on YouTube. You'll realize that unchecked Capitalism leads to Fascism and Slavery, which is why they want to get rid of the minimum wage, so that we can return to sharecropping which is already increasingly happening in America under different names, like "student debt", "mortgages" and "insurance". Don't you think it's odd that a person has to go into debt so they can generate profits for corporations who really ought to be paying for this education themselves? If you have to go into debt before they'll hire you, it's much easier to negotiate against you.
If you want to see other examples of propaganda, check out this random tweet from one of America's Top Capitalist Propagandists. These are very odd pictures, and the only thing I can see in them is that they must be promoting those outfits, likely the blue dress, maybe those men's outfits as well. One thing you know is that she didn't become a billionaire by letting any single opportunity to enrich herself at the expense of others pass her by. I didn't look it up, but I am certain they sell that blue dress, or whoever does paid her to post this.
That's the main reason celebrities use social media. It's marketing. Their whole schtick is to sell garments made in a sweatshop in a foreign country by people who can't even afford a beer to Americans who are facing bankruptcy and homelessness themselves.
Read the replies of the tweet. These people have influence that vastly outsizes their understanding of their impact on the world. There are guillotines in the comments. There usually are. I'm seeing them a lot lately.
This type of propaganda is everywhere. And it's destroying America. Just like propaganda led to the demise of Nazi Germany, we could be looking at the same thing, but worse. It could start off as famine.
If you're having trouble deciding between the beers you are being offered, it's probably because you don't want anything at all, in which case the proper choice is: nothing. Or, try tap water. Maybe you're just thirsty. Now ask yourself, when you envisioned yourself at a bar, did you ever think to order water instead? Did you entertain the idea that you didn't even want a beer. That's the power of suggestion.
What if the rest of the world just cut America off from the means of production outsourced to areas with cheap labor? We would have our own famine and likely war. And if we have a revolution here, with the masses in the country being so disinformed about everything and not having any sort of class consciousness at the moment and instead stuck in alienation, the leader that rises here will likely lead to something horrifying. And we censor ourselves from pointing out the simple fact, that the only way America will survive is to tax the deluded royalty like Kim and Mark back to reality, so they can't indulge their reckless, childish delusions by selling off the very fabric of our nation to the highest bidder.
That doesn't make me a Socialist, that just makes me honest.
Enjoy your beer!
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Thanks for reading and I hope I helped you understand how you can empower yourself. I'm excited about the one I wrote for Election Day tomorrow to keep our NOPOL spirits up while all the politics clouds the airwaves. Cheers!

"Some Simple tips for CD devs to make CP2077 feel more alive in upcoming DLCs (Please read)
First off, this game was an aesthetic treat and compared to GTAV, it is indeed much more "dense" with the core areas so much more beautiful in that regard... But no game is perfect, nor is it realistic in this decade to expect a full "city simulator" for any dev or in any game, so that's not what I'm expecting out of Night City not even under the most ideal of circumstances... That said, there are plenty of room for improvement, bug fixes sure, but also beyond that I'd like to see more in the upcoming DLC's that make NightCity more alive, not even necessarily newer and larger maps, but just practical added-elements and additional functional components that would go a long way towards making the city appear more 'alive', and immersive and dynamic and all that was illuded to but never fully manifested...
So in terms of most bang for buck and the low-hanging fruit (80/20 principle):

TRANSPORTATION

1) Bring back (or rather develope for the first time) the promised subway system... this shouldn't be that hard to do... it would add an element of connectivity of the different parts of the city... Leave fast travel as an option, for those that want to ride the train shouldn't be forced to use loading screens
2) Air taxi(s) -- in the age of Telsa self driving cars, hyperloops, drone taxis we should have plenty of automated air taxi options in the world of CP2077, basically like the taxi hailing component in GTAIV (Liberty City) except the player can hail an air taxi that lands close to where he is standing, he gets in, and then chooses any destination and it automatically flys him to the location, while allowing him to look out the windows and enjoy the night city from above / higher perspective... this is simplier than simply giving the player ability to fly hovercars/etc since an air taxi is just from point to point and its trivial to code a system that flys the player from any point in the city to any other point without crashing into any buildings... we've seen NightCity from the ground, now lets see it from the sky!
3) Rented transporation -- user pays to be able to rent jet packs, hoverboards, scooters at different locations in the city so he can use a public transportation but on a personal level... for the jet packs cap a max height so that its still basically hovering at or around slightly above ground level, giving the user the discretion of travel but not allowing him to fly or scale above buildings etc... this requires money to rent and if the equipment is damaged, lost, stolen or not returned properly the users bank account will be deducted for the amount ( see #ECONOMY)

INTERIORS

1) Skyscrapers with observation deck -- in every major city there is a theme like this, take Seattle for example you can visit the tallest building in Seattle downtown and go up on the obs deck and see the city view from high above, I would say incorporate some options like this where user can enter some of the taller buildings in NightCity, ride up the elevator to the higher decks and see the city from that view... maybe even add a floor with fine dinning where user can take a friend/date/group to the restuarant and eat while enjoying watching the scenery of the nightcity below etc...
2) All major buildings enter-able (is that a word? lol) with at least a ground lobby.... right now most of the buildings are just fake exteriors, nice to look at from the outside but completely fake and empty with no insides... Due to system restrains its not practical to simulate every room of every floor of every building in nightcity with furnished interiors and real windows and all that... but at least make the first floor /lobby area of every large and major building enter-able so that the character can walk in and out of them... for certain buildings you may want to make a working/functional lobby elevator that leads to an underground garage and/or allows the user to ride the elevator to above ground higher floors of the building... or have the elevator only allow certain floors to be accessed and furnish these floors with realistic settings/environment and this can tie in nicely with the job/work/career paths discussed in #ECONOMY section with gives you the office space to put a number of companies in which the user can find and switch jobs and work in corporate paths etc... for example allow the user to customize and decorate his own "office/desk", and if he has a window office, then that would provide another unique view/scenery of nightcity from above ground perspective, one that can only be gotten from working at that particular company/job, and gives him an incentive to work late to see the city from nighttime while burning the midnight oil
3) Multiple apartments, the user should be able to pick and choose from a vast selection and array of living arrangements and this necessities a lot of hotel/condo/apartment options which means these buildings need to have interiors and furnished and environments fully built out...

ECONOMY

1) Ability to find and work a job, with multiple career paths and with ability to move up in the corporate world... this provides the user with a stead stream of income for which he can use to buy fancier cars, to move into newer and better apartments /condos etc.. and to buy fancier items like designer cloths and the suches... not to mention to spend on fine dinning in high end restuarants which can tie in nicely with going on datings, impressing women with luxury cars and expensive meals and "date nights out" at elaborate events.... basically there has to be a purpose and meaning to making more money, and the process of making more money has to be derived from a job or work or career of some sort as the main component...
Have a real economy with unemployment, inflation, commodity prices, and all of that impact and influence and affect the user in his everyday life... for example if a major terror event or pandemic causes the Nightcity to suffer an economic depression for a few months then its possible the company that the user is working at has to lay off people and he gets canned and has to downsize to a smaller apartment, loses his girlfriend/wife, and then has to find another lower paying job and stuck in the downward cycle for a few years until he is able to win the lottery (#GAMBLING/SPECUTLATION/BETTING) or his luck somehow changes...
Everything should cost money, it costs money to rent an apartement and it should also cost money to eat and drink... basically he user has to spend money to eat otherwise he will starve to death... and the user has to keep paying rent every month for whatever apartment he resides otherwise he gets evicted and could even become homeless and have to live in one of those nasty tents in tenty city or under a highway bridge etc etc
Grocery stores, restuarants, movie theaters, hotels, and shopping malls... There should be at least a few convinennce stores, shopping malls, restuarants and other retail places spread throughout nightcity, this is a component and element of the economy as well as a means for the user to spend all the hard earned money he worked towards... for example if you give a homeless a few bucks he should be able to use it to spend at a store on the corner to get something to eat and then that makes him happy because he is no longer so hungry... there should be a tie in for economy, money, and the ability to exchange that for goods and services (barber, tatto artists cough cough) and associate these goods and services to emotional feelings of happiness and satisfication for both the user /player and the NPCs...

SEASONS

There should be a distinction between autumn/fall, spring, summer, winter etc... This gives a big cycle sense of passage of time that cannot be simulated with the current day/night cycles along... in the winter the sun should rise and set at different times/angles than the summer...
In addition, I'd like to see an accurate night sky map/ stars. NightCity takes place in SoCal, its trivial to map the nightsky for the year 2077 in the SoCal area... even in the latest Flight Simulator 2020 the stars are now accurate at night...
Ability to choose LIVE weather based on current user location (see Flight Simulator) so say its raining in Dallas Texas where a user is playing, then in NightCity it will match that and we raining in the game as well... also ability to customize weather on-the-fly in real-time (see Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020) and have that instantly change in the game without reloading...
Along with seasons I'd like to be able to see holiday celebrations for example Christmas time espeically... I want to hear holiday music and see buildings decorated with Christmas lights and the jolly spirits of it all... Think the ambiance and environment of say Polar Express, bring that alive to Night City for Xmas...

MINI GAMES and other Microcosm

There is a "Go" board in Chinatown... but its fake... and the players aren't even attempting to play Go... See what Google Deepmind did with AlphaGo, Facebook made an OpenGo that they open sourced... there is also LeelaZero and KataGo free AI engines that have already been trained using deeplearning/machineAI to be far better than the Go masters... the same applies to Chess by the way... but I didn't see a Chess board in Night City yet... in any case all these board games the computer AI can now master... make these games playable in NightCity, so the user can watch two NPC's play a round of Go/Chess/etc (Ai vs Ai) or can join and sit down and take a seat and play against an NPC a real game of Go/Chess, (or in the future if CP gets a multiplayer than humans can play against one another etc) basically a microcosms and games-within-a-game....
Spotify/Netflix/youTube integrations... I'd like to see the user have a portable/personal mp3 player or app on his virtual smartphone that allows him to link to his personal -reallife- spotify account to listen to music while in the game... also on the TV screens at home to be able to watch netflix movies while in this virtual apartment chilling with his date/friends... and things like YouTube integration would be nice... maybe even pornhub integration....
Other simple games like darts, bowling and even toys like RC cars or DJI drones... give the use the ability to fly drones (check out DJI Simulator) or operate rc model cars etc... basically toys that he can buy at electronic stores or corner outlets that he can then use these toys in real life for any variety of enjoyments... this also ties into #ECONOMY and why its important to have a good job /career that pays good money!

GAMBLING/SPECUTLATION/INVESTMENTS/BETTING

Have some form of virtual casinos in the game, NightCity reminds me of Vegas, yet not one slot machine and not one means to gamble or bet? How about the ability to play the stockmarket, bitcoins, and make bets and well as go gambling, cards, poker, etc this not only provides a form of entertainment but also gives the user a way to quickly win / lose a lot of money and for the risk takers they may wish to invest their money in high risk high reward speculative stocks in the stock market instead of immediately spending it on a new apartment, new car, new tech gadget etc etc... this would also tie back to #ECONOMY since the more the user earns the more income he has to spend on gambling/stocks and the better the economy does the higher his stocks return on investment...

ROMANCE/RELATIONSHIPS

Should be able to court any pretty woman on the streets, to walk up to her and say hi and have a path/chance to a dialogue that leads to setting up a first date... and following that if it goes well can progress to more dates and evetnually her moving in with the user and eventually even having a kid, getting married, and the works... each female NPC should have a male preference and a threshold of compatiblity... so that for example if on the first date the guy is cheap and takes her to low end resturant, doesn't have a nice car to pick her up with, and otherwise seems like a low life then she wouldn't process/continue with him... whereas if he is already established with a multimillion apartment, supercar, takes her to most expensive restuarant in NightCity, then I could see her going back to his place on the first date and maybe even getting pregnant right then and there that night etc..."

Note: This takes place in a non-COVID world, because what would the Rumble be without a crowd?
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Since 1988, the spectacle known as the Royal Rumble has graced the world every January, the winner receiving a World Title match of their choosing at WrestleMania, and oftentimes also the main event slot at the Show of Shows. With the 31st of January quickly approaching, the road to 2021’s Men’s Royal Rumble match is on, and with one lucky wrestler having the opportunity to challenge for either the WWE or Universal Championships, it’s every man for himself. 30 spots are open, but who will fill them? That will be settled in the weeks following TLC, in the build to the Royal Rumble…
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RAW

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WWE Championship
December 21st, 2020
2020 has been quite the breakout year for one Drew McIntyre, the 2x WWE Champion coming off a successful title defence at TLC against AJ Styles and The Miz in the eponymous stipulation, the latter cashing in unsuccessfully, only to be returned his briefcase the following night due to the cash-in being claimed illegitimate. Looking for one final challenge to push himself before his year comes to an end, McIntyre puts out an Open Challenge for his title on the TLC fallout edition of RAW, marching out in the main event of the night to receive his opponent. His call is answered by none other than the Limitless, Keith Lee!
With two previous matches against the Scottish Terminator ending in indecisive means, he looks to finally put an end to the questions and pounce the champion out of his reign. The two wrestle a true hoss-fest as they slap and chop the meat off of each other, stiffing each other with headbutts amongst other debilitating strikes. A Future Shock DDT from the champ fails to put the final nail in the coffin, Keith giving Drew arguably the closest match of his tenure as champion ever, having him on the ropes time and time again, even delivering a freakish Avalanche Spanish Fly! Catching the Claymore, Lee goes for the Spirit Bomb, but he’s clocked in the back of the head by The Miz’s Mr. MITB briefcase for the DQ!
Miz & John Morrison roll Lee out of the ring, before laying into Drew, Miz attempting to cash-in for the second time in consecutive nights, only for Lee to rise up on the apron and bash their heads together, before pouncing them out of the ring with fury in his eyes. Once more, he’s been screwed of his opportunity to put down Drew, the champion and challenger almost coming to blows again after the match, but the show ultimately closes on the shot of the two staring each other down.
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December 28th, 2020
Continuing on from RAW’s ending the previous week, McIntyre and Lee charge out immediately, wanting to finish matters off, only to be interrupted by Miz & Morrison once more, but to their chagrin, they’re followed out by AJ Styles & Omos, Sheamus, and Riddle too, until the ring overflows with people laying claims to Drew’s title. Before anarchy can break loose though, a solution is proposed by Main Roster Official Adam Pearce. With the Rumble quickly approaching, not only do they need to find a challenger for the WWE Title, but they also need to find RAW representatives in the 30-Man extravaganza. Calling back to Survivor Series, he reminds that RAW won the Men’s 5-on-5, as well as the night overall.
Unlike previous years, there’ll be a reward for those efforts. Along with RAW being promised more entrants into the Rumble than SmackDown, next week, there’ll be a #1 Contender’s Battle Royal to crown Drew’s challenger for the Rumble – but there’s a twist. As Lee, Styles, Sheamus and Riddle were all part of the winning side in the Men’s 5-on-5, they have an opportunity to opt out of the BR and instead be guaranteed a late entry into the Rumble! Without second thought, Styles retracts his name from the BR, claiming that the main event of WrestleMania has his name written all over it, and after what Miz pulled at TLC, he’s not going to risk his title shot being stolen again via cash-in.
As for the other 3, they think otherwise, still willing to toss their names into the hat, Lee wanting to settle business with Drew as soon as possible, Sheamus traumatised by his 2 second elimination in his last Rumble appearance and Riddle suffering similar fates last year. Styles cackles in their faces, the flat-earther ironically claiming to be the wisest of them all, stating that he’ll eager watch as they all fall on their faces and end up being eliminated at his hands in the Rumble.
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January 4th, 2021
With the WWE Champion watching on from commentary, the BR unfolds, the aforementioned Lee, Sheamus and Riddle in the running, as well as other names such as Randy Orton after his victory over The Fiend, MVP looking to bring home all the gold to Hurt Business, Miz & Morrison out to stir anarchy, Mustafa Ali backed by RETRIBUTION with Ricochet following close behind, Jeff Hardy joining his Hardy Bro, and even a dark horse pick in Angel Garza, who heads to the ring with a new fire in his eyes, ditching the depths of the 24/7 Title to chase the top prize.
The Survivor Series 3 put on strong performances, tossing people out left and right, looking to make their risky play count, whilst Ali uses RETRIBUTION to his favour, also establishing himself as a threat. Orton slithers in the background, doling out RKOs here and there, whilst Garza puts on one heck of a breakout performance himself. As MVP slyly eliminates Hardy, Riddle makes him follow suit, leaving Hurt Business in shambles, proceeding them to cost him the match for revenge! Ali makes a play for Ricochet to join RETRIBUTION, but an RKO from Orton disposes of him, before Garza gets an upset over the One and Only, shattering his dreams!
The Final 4 boils down to Lee, Sheamus, Orton and Garza, until an unexpected name joins the party as this theme hits. IT’S ANDRADE! Since being kicked to the curb by Garza, El Idolo has been brooding on the sidelines, but he has returned, making a beeline for Angel as he clotheslines him over the ropes and to the outside, the two brawling to the back as the match continues, 3 remaining. Orton takes the fight to his opponents, dropping them with RKOs, but before he can eliminate them, he find that he isn’t the only one to be haunted by past demons though, as the lights go out.
When they come back on, a look of surprise fills his face as he comes face-to-face with a headless Rambling Rabbit! Turning around, he sees Mercy the Buzzard, Huskus the Pig Boy to his left, Abby the Witch to his right, all relics from his assault on the Funhouse last week, and standing on the apron is THE FIEND! Orton goes to strike, only for The Fiend to collapse, revealing to be a mere stuffed version, the distraction allowing Lee to pounce Orton out of the ring and eliminate him! It’s now down to just two, as Lee and Sheamus go head-to-head!
After a close match, Lee heads to the ropes as he goes for the Doomsault, but before he can scale to the top turnbuckle, his eyes lock with Drew’s, who stands up from commentary, the slight diversion of attention allowing the Irishman to eliminate the Limitless one, earning a shot for the Rumble, Lee forced to wait another day as he stares holes through the WWE Champion, who lifts his chin high in the air whilst Sheamus celebrates in the ring. Despite their eliminations though, Lee, along with Riddle, confirm their entries into the Rumble on RAW Talk.
Confirmed entrants (so far): AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle
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Hurt Business/The New Day/The Hardy Bros
December 28th, 2020
8 days removed from Hurt Business defeating New Day to win the RAW Tag Team Championships from them, the quartet claim that Rumble will see them clean sweep as the United States Champion Bobby Lashley tosses his hat into the Rumble, his worthiness not needing any questioning with his 4+ months long tenure as champ, but as for the new RAW Tag Team Champions Cedric Alexander & Shelton Benjamin, they have a qualifier scheduled against another team who also want in, Kofi Kingston & Xavier Woods of The New Day out to get back at the duo that took their titles at TLC.
With the two teams 2-2 against each other, it’s sure to be a close match as they come to blows, proving to be rather familiar with the other’s offense, the match based more around counters and scouting deadly moves. With MVP barking orders from ringside and Lashley patrolling the quarter, HB seem to have it in the bag, only for The Hardy Bros to run out, running a distraction after what went down between the sides last week, allowing New Day to come back from underneath, Kofi surprising Cedric with a Trouble in Paradise, New Day punching their ticket to the Rumble as HB are left fuming!
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January 11th – 25th 2021
After HB returned the favour the previous week in the BR, the 8 men collide in a series of match-ups, featuring Hardy defeating MVP to also qualify for the Rumble, the deck stacked against Lashley as he happens to be the only member of his faction making it through. However, January 31st doesn’t roll around without the Hurt Business having the last laugh, defeating New Day & Hardy Bros in 8-Man Tag action, before laying waste to them as they pose with their titles over their bodies, Lashley assuring his teammates that he’ll bring home the victory.
Confirmed Entrants so far: AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy
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Andrade/Angel Garza
January 11th, 2021
The WWE Universe is buzzing following Andrade’s emphatic return to RAW the previous week, costing Garza the Battle Royal after a standout performance from the latter. Due to being unfairly eliminated last week, Garza receives a second shot at reaching the WWE Championship as he and Andrade face off in a Rumble qualifier, killing two birds with one stone as they also get to settle their differences in the ring.
Both men show off their Lucha Libre talents as they take it to each other, vitriol for one another fuelling their wrestling, proving that there’s much more on the line in both men’s mind than just the Rumble spot. Angel teases the Wing Clipper, but thinks better of it, wanting to rub salt in the wounds as he goes for La Sombra instead, only for it to backfire as El Idolo fights free, scoring a Wing Clipper of his own, before floating over into La Sombra for the 3 count! The taste of revenge is sweet for the third generation superstar as he finally gets one back over his rival, qualifying for the Rumble!
Confirmed entrants (so far): AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy, Andrade
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Randy Orton
January 11th, 2021
Paranoia grows stronger by the week for the sadistic Orton, as after leaving the Firefly Funhouse in a mess two weeks ago and teasing lighting Alexa Bliss on fire, his past came creeping back and spoiled his shot at earning a shot at the WWE Championship last week. Yearning to take out his pent up aggression on someone, he taunts Hall of Famers on Legend’s Night (takes place on the 11th instead), trying to get into their heads, only to bury himself further in his own as The Fiend continues living rent free inside.
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January 18th/25th, 2021
In attempts of distancing himself from The Fiend and taking his mind off things, he announces his entry into the Rumble, channelling his frustrations towards becoming 15-time World Champion. Despite this, he’s still not excused from the voices in his head over the following two weeks, at one point hallucinating Alexa Bliss watching him as he looks in a mirror, only to turn around and see nothing there, as well as claiming to hear the Fiend’s laugh in a visit to Dr. Shelby, proceeding to lay out the Doc with an RKO as he struggles to maintain his mental state, the hopes of even making it to the Rumble waning.
Confirmed entrants (so far): AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy, Andrade, Randy Orton
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Ricochet & RETRIBUTION
January 11th, 2021
Another competitor who found himself falling short in the WWE Title #1 Contender’s BR was Ricochet, the One and Only keeping his spirits sky high as he soars into the following RAW, being granted a Rumble qualifier. Pitted against a fellow high-flier, he takes on Humberto Carrillo, who puts on a good showing against the former United States Champion, but after a respectable bout, Ricochet secures a spot in his second Rumble. After the match, he’s confronted by RETRIBUTION, who surround the ring, Ali stepping inside to come face-to-face with Ricochet, who watches him intently.
Ali cuts a promo about how Ricochet can’t outrun them, no matter how much he tries, because as much of a superhero he is, they are inevitable, so one more time, he extends his hand to a man he’s loved and respected, requesting him to join RETRIBUTION so he can save him with his light, not wanting to leave a brother to rot in the darkness. Ricochet refuses though, to which Ali chuckles and nods his head, before blasting him with a Superkick! He sicks RETRIBUTION on the One and Only, who tear him apart and leave him a broken mess.
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January 18th, 2021
Following the events of the previous week, Ricochet demands a rematch with Ali, but to his chagrin, the Shining Light refuses, stating that he had his chance, twice. But if vengeance and darkness is what he craves so desperately, perhaps he’d be willing to defend his Rumble spot against RETRIBUTION? Willing to do whatever to get back at Ali & co., Ricochet hastily agrees, but as the graphic of a Gauntlet fills the screen, one must wonder if he’s made the biggest mistake possible.
As he heads to the ring, his first opponent comes in the form of Slapjack, the Black Swan showing off his gifted agility and strength as he guns a flying Ricochet out of the air, but a crafty roll-up allows Ricochet to advance! Next up, he faces Mace, the former offensive tackle spearing through his foe, preventing him from taking flight, but a Wrecking Ball Dropkick into the crowd and a Diving Meteora gets the RETRIBUTION member counted out! Fatigued but still raring to go, he faces his third adversary in T-BAR, the most physically imposing of the quintet taking advantage of the wounded Ricochet by beating from pillar to post, but in his blind rage he goes for a chair, mauling his smaller opponent for the DQ, but with one more opponent to go, Ricochet’s run is over as Ali claims the easy pinfall, taking Ricochet’s Rumble spot!
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January 25th, 2021
With RETRIBUTION’s leader securing a spot in the upcoming Rumble, Ali delivers a sermon warning the locker room of what’s coming for them in 6 days’ time, signalling to a replay of the fallen angel that was Ricochet deciding to fly too close to the Sun. Though taped up, the One and Only makes his way out, calling Ali for a coward for not facing him like a man, stating that if Ali truly is the man he claims to be, he’d face him right here, right now. But unlike him, he doesn’t want Ali out of the Rumble. He wants to be in there with him, so he can have the satisfaction of being the one to throw him out. Ali calls him foolish for challenging, but accepts, 3-0 over him in recent weeks.
And so, the two face-off, Ricochet clearly in a bad way from the opening bell, allowing Mustafa to make quick work of him, going for the 054, but he eats Ricochet’s knees! The One and Only sparks a comeback, giving Ali hell to pay as he dishes out his signature aerial offense. As he heads to the top for the 630° Senton, RETRIBUTION attempt to interfere, only for Ricochet to change direction and wipe them out with a Shooting Star Press! Rolling back inside the ring, he gets spiked with a Tornado DDT, Ali heading back up to the top for an 054, but he misses, allowing Ricochet to finally land the 630° Senton and avenge his losses to his former friend, earning his way back into the Rumble! As the two stand-off after the match, it’s clear that tensions are running high between the two heading into Sunday.
Confirmed Entrants so far: AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy, Andrade, Randy Orton, Ali, Ricochet
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The Miz & John Morrison
January 11th, 2021
After both men fell short in the WWE Championship #1 Contender’s BR, a backstage segment reveals Mizter MITB & JoMo in Pearce’s office, demanding spots in the Rumble as they display their extensive resumes, Miz even attempting to bribe him. Whilst Adam turns down the money, he does grant them positions in the Rumble, showing them to the vending machine filled with entry numbers in capsules, the two cranking it with glee as two capsules slide out, their respective fates sealed inside. However, their hearts and expressions sink as they open them up, seemingly drawing poor numbers, before taking it out on Pearce, claiming he rigged the machine.
Adam states that the #30 spot has already been drawn by someone else, but if they’re unsatisfied with theirs, he can remove them from the Rumble if that’s what they’d prefer, to which Miz & Morrison decline, but are clearly unhappy as they storm out of his office. Upon slamming the door shut, Morrison asks Miz what they’re going to do, not wanting to be humiliated like last year in which both didn’t even last a cumulative minute, to which Miz responds that if they won’t be given good entries, they’ll just have to take them instead. Next week, the hunt for #30 begins!
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January 18th, 2021
Over the course of Monday Night, the two scour the backstage area, featuring a series of skits in which they aim to find and stealing the #30 spot from whoever owns it. The first person they bump into is Elias, who’s singing a song about his entry into the Rumble and how he’s going to win. Questioning what number he drew, the Sinister Songster shoos them off, only for Morrison to catch a glance at his slip, Miz giving him an inquiring look, but Morrison shakes his head, Elias not holding the number they’re after. Continuing their hunt, they run into Keith Lee, but continue to run as the Limitless One scares them off, unfinished business between the parties after the duo cost Lee his WWE Title shot.
In the final skit of the night, the exhausted and frustrated pair slump down on a bench when suddenly 24/7 Champion R-Truth runs in from out of nowhere and hides behind the two as a pack of wrestlers hunt him down for his title, Truth only popping out as the coast is clear, looking relieved, only to jump as the voices of MnM startle him, thinking they were mannequins at first. He goes to sprint again, but the duo reassure him that they’re not after his title, instead hoping that he had word on who owned the #30 spot in the Rumble, to which Truth exclaims ‘There’s a Rumble match coming up? When, where?’, before crouching and whispering into their ears ‘Is Paul Heyman going to be there?’, resulting in groans from Miz & Morrison.
Knowing it was pointless believing Truth had answers from the start, they shoo him off, only for a glint to appear in Morrison’s eyes as he says ‘on second thoughts…’, before trying to roll up Truth for his title, only for Truth to kick out and run for his life, yelling ‘I knew you was after my title!’, Miz & Morrison left alone to continue what’s looking to be a wild goose chase.
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January 25th, 2021
6 days left till the Rumble, the two try their luck once more as they roam about backstage, finding dead end after dead end, until a mischievous and hopeful look fills their faces as they come across AJ Styles, who’s confirmed to have a good spot in the match. They play buddy buddy with the Phenomenal One, Miz distracting him with a conversation whilst Morrison tries to manoeuvre Styles’ entry slip out of his back pocket, only to be caught in the act by Omos, who grabs the two by the throat and sends them packing. As MnM finally come a halt after running from Omos, Morrison claims that it’s a lost cause, complaining that they’ll never find it, only for Miz to suggest the two heading over to SD in case someone there has it, John agreeing.
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January 29th, 2021
Returning to their old home of Friday Nights, they meet old foes… but just old foes, their lengthy history of bad-mouthing everyone doing them no favours. They even split up to search solo in hopes of covering ground faster, but disaster strikes at the eleventh hour as the loud commotion is heard, Miz stumbling across the fallen body of Morrison, blood trickling from his mouth! Miz demands his partner to name who left him in such a state, promising to give them the beating of their life, to which John croaks ‘Number 30’, before whispering the name into Miz’s ear, who freezes upon hearing the mystery man.
Miz responds that there’s no way he’s stepping into a Rumble with ‘them’, to which Morrison weakly nods, saying that they have the MITB briefcase anyway, so one way or another, the Mania main event will be theirs. As medical personnel cart Morrison away, Miz yells ‘Two free Rumble spots for whoever wants them!’, before tossing them into the air and running away. Lumbering from across the corridor is Otis, who picks up one of the numbers off the ground, his eyes transfixed on it as he waddles away with a spot in the Rumble. As for the other, a tall figure in a biker jacket walks into shot, their tattooed arm reaching down to grab the slip reading ‘#11’, a satisfied grunt heard from their hooded face as they walk off into the distance with a spot in the Rumble…
Confirmed entrants (so far): AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy, Andrade, Randy Orton, Ali, Ricochet, Elias, Otis
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SmackDown

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Universal Championship
January 1st, 2021
The New Year over on the Blue Brand is kicked off by the Head of the Table and his posse, the Universal Champion Roman Reigns, flanked by Jey Uso and Paul Heyman, entering the ring as replays of his title retention over Kevin Owens the previous week in a Steel Cage match fill the screen. Whilst his tactics were questionable, Jey interfering and handcuffing the Prizefighter to the cage to allow Reigns a clear path to victory, Reigns doesn’t give a damn – the title remains with the Tribal Chief.
Grabbing a mic, Roman claims that thanks to Jey listening to him, 2020 became the greatest year of his career, consistently being featured in the main event with showstealers. 2021 is only going to get better for the 3 of them, as he plans to carry his title right through WrestleMania after not getting the opportunity to compete last year. Before he can continue though, he’s interrupted by Owens, Reigns stating that it’s embarrassing how Owens keeps coming back even after he’s been put down multiple times.
Owens responds that if Reigns really did his job of ‘putting him down’, then he wouldn’t still be here. If Reigns did his job, then a lot of people still wouldn’t be here, signalling to the back as members of the locker room empty out. Daniel Bryan, Big E, Rey Mysterio and more all fill up the stage, standing side-by-side with Kevin, who claims that all of them are sick and tired of Reigns’ rule. Cheap victory after cheap victory, the name ‘Head of the Table’ is apt because he’s just a block of wood without the legs that are Uso and Heyman underneath him, cheating him to retentions. They all want a piece of him, and they’re here to take it.
Reigns cuts him down, calling him a disappointment to his family. When you revolt against your Tribal Chief, you revolt against his family as well, and he’s not going to stand for that disrespect. All these people want cracks at him? Fine, he’ll whip them all into shape, but not one by one. He doesn’t have all day listening to the blabbering of the ignorant. In tonight’s main event, Owens can bring whoever he wants to face him & Jey, no strings attached. Kevin accepts the match, before turning to Bryan in a backstage segment, who’s also had recent issues with the duo, setting up a huge tag match for the main event!
Fast forward, Reigns & Jey make their entrances first to show that they’re in control of the place, standing in ‘their’ ring as they await the arrival of the rebels. Owens is out next, staring the two down as he enters the squared circle, before Bryan’s music hits… only for no one to make their way out. Kevin paces about, getting anxious, but he isn’t kept waiting much longer as the titantron cuts to Bryan laid out backstage, a figure in a fur collar jacket standing over him, back to the camera They turn to reveal… SETH ROLLINS! The SmackDown Saviour cackles as Reigns & Jey jump Owens, a Superkick, Superman Punch and Spear putting down the Prizefighter as the show closes on Reigns, Jey, Heyman, and Rollins standing tall.
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January 8th, 2021
After the shocking ending to the previous week’s show, the plot only continues to thicken as Reigns and co. kick off the show, only this time accompanied by a sneering Rollins, Roman getting on the mic as customary, before claiming that in war, there are those that are with you, and those against you. For those against him, he feels truly sorry for them, because they’ll never learn that no matter what tricks they try to pull and what hope they try to muster up, the ending is always the same.
Last week, Rollins came to that realisation and decided to fight for as he says ‘the greater good’, putting the fantasies of Bryan on hold – the man who lies to himself in saying that he’s a better wrestler and fighter than him. Owens suffered the same fate, left on the mat once more, just like any future rebels will be. Rollins chips in, claiming that it’s good to be back with his brother, feeling at home for the first time since he had his own followers that once fought alongside him too.
To their collective frustration, they’re interrupted by Owens’ music, who appears on the stage once again, but this time alone. He claims that Reigns can belittle him all he wants, but he won’t disappear until Roman breaks him. None of them will. Reigns chuckles as he looks around, saying that it doesn’t look like ‘they’ had the balls to show up, only for Owens to shake his head with a smirk on his face. Suddenly, a cascade of competitors storm out from the other side of the arena, led by Bryan, causing Reigns and company to scramble from the ring, Reigns seething as the ‘YES!’ Movement takes over the ring, before turning around to Owens who cheekily shrugs his shoulders.
Reigns gets in Owens’ face, demanding him to spit out what he wants, to which Kevin points to the title. Through gritted teeth, Roman acquiesces, before spitting that Owens should be careful what he wishes for, because he might just get it.
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Royal Rumble Qualifiers
January 15th – 29th 2021
Whilst the Rumble card shapes up with a match between Reigns and Owens confirmed for the show, everyone else’s attentions turn to the Rumble. They all want shots at the Universal Championship, but the road there isn’t an easy one. Cesaro & Nakamura earn spots after defeating Street Profits thanks to their rivals Dolph Ziggler & Robert Roode interfering, only to return the favour as Bryan defeats Dolph Ziggler and Mysterio defeats Robert Roode, a Tag Title bout between them shaping up for the PPV. Rollins makes his way in after a victory over an old rival in Dominik Mysterio, whilst Jey defeats Chad Gable, before a few more names make it in, Sami Zayn defeating Kalisto, Murphy putting down old tag partner Wesley Blake, and King Corbin laying Apollo Crews to rest, the 30-man match filling up.
Confirmed entrants (so far): AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy, Andrade, Randy Orton, Ali, Ricochet, Elias, Otis, Cesaro, Shinsuke Nakamura, Daniel Bryan, Rey Mysterio, Seth Rollins, Jey Uso, Murphy, King Corbin
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Big E/Sami Zayn
January 22nd, 2021
Intercontinental Champion Big E has been on a roll since being separated from New Day, channelling the absence of having his brothers by his side towards finding singles success. Reaching the first checkpoint on the Christmas edition of SmackDown when he defeated Sami Zayn to win the IC gold, the hunt for reaching the top continues. After being involved in the revolt against Reigns, E sparked a mini-feud with Crews, leading to a match for E’s title in which he retained. With the Rumble around the corner, the IC Champ heads to the ring and thanks the fans for all their support in recent times, but it appears he isn’t satisfied just holding the IC Title. To prove himself, he needs more, and by that, he means the Universal Championship. So, he officially declares his entry into the Rumble!
He states that he aims to become the first person to hold the IC & UV titles simultaneously, and for that, he needs everyone to channel their power of positivity into him one more time. Unfortunately for him though, the power of negativity comes storming out from the back, Zayn ranting about E winning the title being all part of a conspiracy against him, before stating that he shouldn’t even deserve to be in the Rumble considering Zayn actually qualified for the match whilst E just gets handed everything. E tells him the ring is open if he wants to back up his words, only for Sami to step down, claiming that he knows all of E’s tricks by now, he’s not stupid. He’s not going to give him what he wants, but next week is different though, because next week, he exposes E for the fraud he is, E staring him down with defiance.
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January 29th, 2021
As E heads to the ring for a non-title rematch against Zayn, Sami makes his way out next, but with a mic in hand, saying that he made a few complaints to management for his unfair treatment, and they came through with a proposal. If he defeats E tonight, he gets to enter the Rumble after him, so no matter what, E can’t take advantage of a tired Sami, because it’s common knowledge that the only reason he won last time was because of Zayn entering the match fatigued after carrying this company on his back for so long, not even being given Christmas off like he deserved.
E shrugs off the chicanery of Zayn, seeing right through him by now, but the gears keep turning in Sami’s mind as he stalks his way to the ring for their match. Zayn tries every trick in the book that he can think of, baiting E to the outside, trying to get him counted out, leverage pins and even a low blow attempt, but the New Day member overcomes all the obstacles. Picking Sami up for the Big Ending, E accidentally knocks back into the referee to momentarily knock him down, Sami taking advantage and slipping behind to tease a low blow, only to make a grab for E’s title via the diversion, slamming the mat with it before tossing it into E’s hands as he drops to the mat, the referee turning around to see a knocked out Zayn with E holding the title over him!
E tries to convince the referee of what actually happened, but the ref doesn’t want to hear any of it, ruling it a victory for Zayn by DQ, the Untouchable rolling out of the ring and ecstatically racing about ringside, finally tripping up E. The Champ is red as Zayn cheats his way to victory, but all he can do is stare down Sami as he realises that his chances of winning the Rumble may have just gone down.
Confirmed Entrants (so far): AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy, Andrade, Randy Orton, Ali, Ricochet, Elias, Otis, Cesaro, Shinsuke Nakamura, Daniel Bryan, Rey Mysterio, Seth Rollins, Jey Uso, Murphy, King Corbin, Big E, Sami Zayn
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Daniel Bryan/Seth Rollins
January 23rd, 2021 (Talking Smack)
One of the prominent feuds on the Blue Brand aside from the Universal Title picture heading into the Rumble is between Bryan and Rollins, Daniel not brushing off the attack from Seth that easily. With both men qualifying for the Rumble, they make appearances on Talking Smack, Bryan bringing up how he’s done almost everything there is to do in the WWE except win the Rumble, and year after year that goal has nagged at him. Having been in 3 his entire career, he’s gotten closer and closer to winning each time, most recently setting the record for the longest performance in the match whilst making it to the Final 3.
But that isn’t good enough for him. He not only wants to win, he needs to win. No doubt both Reigns and Owens are talented, and whoever walks out of the Rumble as champion, it doesn’t matter to him, but what matters to him is that he knows that he’s both the better fighter and wrestler than them, so by the end of WrestleMania, it should be him holding high the Universal Title, and it will be him. He turns as he hears laughter in the distance, Rollins taking a seat further along the table, proceeding to question Bryan.
He asks him which Bryan is he sitting across from. The Bryan he once looked up to when they wrestled on the indies, or the one he has to now look down to find. Since returning, what has Bryan done beyond holding the WWE Championship for a while 2 years ago? He’s just been taking up space someone else could be using. He failed to win the Universal Title, he failed to recapture the Intercontinental Title, he failed to win Money in the Bank again, he failed to even qualify for Survivor Series, and that’s all just in the last year.
Meanwhile, the man he’s looking at is a former Rumble winner, a former Universal Champion, the man who brought prominence to the IC Title while Bryan vacated it after only one defence. Since Bryan’s return 3 years ago, he’s far surpassed Daniel, and he’ll continue to do so. If they meet in the Rumble, he wants the Beard to remember, his fantasy never came true when the fans begged and pleaded back in 2014, and it still won’t come true when he’s in the match 7 years later.
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January 29th, 2021
The following week, Bryan is shown to be seated backstage on his own, pacing about as he thinks over Rollins’ scathing words, which seem to have truly left a mental imprint. Otis and Gable enter the scene, Gable having been training Otis for the Rumble in recent weeks. Noticing Daniel’s demeanour, they tell him not to dwell on Seth’s words, reassuring him that he has what it takes to win the Rumble. He’s former multi-time WWE Champion after all, but Bryan cuts them off, saying that it’s always ‘former’ attached in front of his accomplishments. He has nothing to prove his claims at the moment beyond his wrestling. He’s never won the Rumble, but guys like Rollins have.
Gable clasps Bryan’s arms, whilst Otis starts massaging his back, not realising Chad was trying to have a serious moment, stepping back as he realises, Gable tells Bryan to stop worrying about others. This is his time to shine, this is his moment. They’re going to be right behind him through it all, but he needs to believe in himself, just like he and everyone else did at WrestleMania XXX. Bryan nods a thanks, before Gable offers that they go find out his entry number in the match, the trio heading to Pearce’s office with the machine.
As Bryan cranks it, out pops a capsule with a number, but before he can take it, Rollins bursts in through the door, taking him out with a steel chair, before laying into Gable and Otis as well! Adam attempts to control the situation, but Seth threatens him with the chair, causing him to back off, before Rollins takes Bryan’s capsule. An even wider grin fills his face as he pops it open, before pulling a slip of his own out his pocket, dropping it next to Bryan’s fallen body, saying ‘Good luck champ’ as he cackles and walks off, Daniel heaving his body up enough to see the number. #1
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???
January 29th, 2021
As the final show before the Rumble is about to go off air on the visual of Bryan with the #1 slip pressed in his hand, it cuts to a video package of sorts, rapidly cutting from pictures of death and decay to a bleak darkness, before the sound of bones snapping and incantations being whispered in reverse takes over. Candles are put out then relit by the same hand, stained glass is shattered then fixed back together by the same leg. A tattooed individual puts on a suit, before removing it by the same hand, and then, they come to a halt, sitting down cross-legged, their face shrouded in darkness as they look to the camera.
A familiar voice that hasn’t been heard in months reverberates around the room, the figure talking about how the world is cursed place. It melts and moulds you into what it wants you to be, blinds you with false promises, tells fables of good and evil. But there’s no real distinction between the two. He’s been left isolated in the cold for too long, stripped bare of everything that was once his. He’s no wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s here to reclaim what was taken from him. The end is here. Allow yourself to… fade to black.
They look up at the screen as light finally hits their visage, holding a slip with #30 in their hands. Aleister Black is in the Royal Rumble.
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Confirmed Entrants (24): AJ Styles, Keith Lee, Matt Riddle, Bobby Lashley, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Jeff Hardy, Andrade, Randy Orton, Ali, Ricochet, Elias, Otis, Cesaro, Shinsuke Nakamura, Daniel Bryan, Rey Mysterio, Seth Rollins, Jey Uso, Murphy, King Corbin, Big E, Sami Zayn, Aleister Black

Hello friends and welcome to my money diary (*in Safiya Nygaard voice*). I wasn’t expecting to be nervous to post this, but I am. I’m looking forward to any comments or constructive criticism y’all have! Also COVID disclaimer, I did see several friends in person this week. Nearly all of us work from home and the cases in my county are fairly low. This is a personal choice and I know I could do a better job of limiting my exposure, but I weigh the risk/pay-off of physically interacting with my friends and this diary reflects my level of comfort. I continue to monitor the cases in my area and will adjust my exposure accordingly.
Edited post to add my job, arguably one of the most important parts of the diary: I work in accounting and have my CPA
Trigger Warning: Mention of anxiety
Section 1, Assets and Debt:
401(K): $21,392. I have 20% of my paycheck going to my 401(K) ($480 every 2 weeks) and it is matched up to ½ of 6%. Hopefully within 10 years, my salary will increase enough to where the 20% will be enough to max out every year.
Roth IRA: Approximately $3,000. My dad typically gifts me $500 for my birthday and Christmas into my Roth IRA. Once I get my emergency account fully funded, I would like to max this out each year, but for now the money has been solely contributed by my dad.
Savings Account: Honestly, I have less than a few hundred dollars in my savings account. I used $4,000 this summer to get LASIK and that kind of drained this account. It is my main priority right now to get my Emergency Fund/Savings up to $15,000. I want to have my credit unit savings to be around $5K for easily accessible funds, then the remaining $10K in Ally online savings bank or CDs, depending on my timeline of major purchases.
Checking Account: $2,003. My paychecks go to this account, which is also used to pay all my bills. I will probably wait until this account gets up to $5,000, then start to transfer money into my savings.
Credit Card Debt: $0. I pay this off in full every month on auto-pay.
Student Loan Debt: $0. I am lucky and grateful that with a combination of scholarships and parents/grandparents financial support, I left college with no student loans. Scholarships covered approximately 30% of the costs and my family paid for the remainder of my 3 years in undergrad and 1 year in graduate school for my Masters.
Robinhood Investments: $3,185. I started this account a few months ago and invested around $1,700. It has almost doubled in value, but could obviously change at any time. I want to invest more, but know that my Emergency Fund is priority before this. However, if there is another stock crash, I will be buying all the stonks on sale.
Acorns Investments: $4,883. I started this account over a year ago and was investing $5/day as well as rounding up all my purchases. I recently put this on hold in order to save more liquid funds.
Other Investment Account: Approximately $15,000. I don’t typically count this money as my own because it is remaining money leftover from my college fund. It is in my name, but fully funded by my family. I meet with an investment advisor annually to choose how I want this invested. When the time comes for my wedding or a home purchase, I will use the funds in this account. I also used around $5,000 to purchase furniture with some of the money in this account a few years ago when I got my first apartment.
Equity: N/A for now, but I do plan to buy a home eventually.
Section Two, Income:
Income Progression: Nothing too exciting, I started this job almost two years ago at $48,000. I had one raise the first year of working. Typically, I would have an annual raise, but due to COVID there was no raise this year. I usually get a small bonus each year as well, around 3-5% I’m hoping for a more substantial raise next year when I am promoted.
Monthly Job Take-Home: $1,280 (after 401K, tax deductions) two times a month
Side Gig: I sell my clothes on Poshmark and make anywhere from $0 - $150 a month. I’m trying to slim down my closet because I only wear about 20% of my clothes regularly. I typically ‘re-invest’ my earnings back into clothing purchases on Poshmark. I also do paid research studies on Prolific, a British survey website. Over the past year, I’ve made around $500 from doing surveys during lunch breaks or while watching TV. I should cash out again soon because the exchange rate of British Pounds to USD is pretty good right now. I don’t have a ‘goal’ for this money, I just like seeing it accrue and the surveys are pretty interesting.
Section Three, Expenses:
Rent: $900. I live in a one-bed, one-bath with my cat. There is no pet rent fee here, bless up.
Wifi: $50. I have Greenlight, which works really well and is fairly reasonable.
Cell Phone: Work pays.
Gas/Electric: Usually around $50. This will likely be higher in the winter, but I’m unsure what it will cost because I haven’t lived here during the winter before.
Car Fees: I pay about $670 every 6 months for car insurance. My car is paid off and I plan to drive it for at least another 5 years (hopefully!). I have other expenses occasionally like oil changes and regular maintenance.
Health/Vision Insurance: On my parents until 26!
Dental Insurance: I have my own for dental and I believe it is $6/paycheck, deducted pre-tax?
Gym Membership: Pre-COVID, was spending $159 on a gym membership (ridiculous on my salary, I know). It’s suspended due to COVID and I am going to cancel once the freeze is over.
Pet Fees: I buy most of my cat’s necessities on Chewy which I 10/10 recommend. Having heavy boxes of litter delivered to my doorstep is better than carrying it from my car, although I do feel sorry for the delivery drivers. I spend about $35-50 a month on my cat, but I don’t include this as a monthly expense because it varies.
Spotify/Hulu Combo: $9.99/month
Netflix: Dad pays
Acorns Subscription: $1.00/month
Magazines: I randomly used airline points that were going to expire for a slew of magazine subscriptions like People and Shape. I feel bad about the waste of paper but I do enjoy reading them.
Section Four, Diary:
Day One, Tuesday:
7:45: My first alarm goes off and I press snooze. My cat jumps on the bed for snuggles and then reminds me that he is starving and needs to be fed immediately or he will die. I get up, feed him, start my Keurig, and turn on my work laptop. I also put in eye drops - I got Lasik this summer and still need to put in eyedrops a few times a day.
10: I’m not feeling too productive today - for some reason, if I have less work, I feel less inclined to do it. My friend tells me to read the MD Reddit post about 5-year plans and it gets me starting to think about my own. Career-wise, I want to reach manager level by then in my current company and likely starting to look for new jobs that will come with a pay boost. Money-wise, I want to have a solid savings account that will go towards a down payment on a house.
10:50: I finish my coffee, which is cold now, and eat several handfuls of veggie straws - they are so addicting and I probably shouldn't be sitting with the bag open next to me. I usually do intermittent fasting and eat starting around noon, but I didn’t have dinner last night so I’m starving. I get ready for a meeting I have at 11.
12: The meeting wrapped up a bit early and I reset my computer for some required update. I turn on YouTube and make Trader Joe’s beef and broccoli (the BEST) for lunch with some wild rice. It amazes me how the package says it makes 6 servings because I can usually only get 4 out of this bag. Alas, I add some crushed red pepper and eat with chopsticks. I also do some Prolific surveys during my lunch break - these are research study surveys run by a British website. It’s the only reliable survey website I’ve found and I’ve made about $400 within a year for doing short surveys randomly when watching TV.
2:00: I love having background noise on while I work, so I’ve been watching the newest season of Schitt’s Creek. I love this show and I’m so sad it’s the last season, but glad they aren’t dragging it out past it’s prime how some shows do (cough Grey’s Anatomy). I am not hungry, but craving chicken wings HARD. I have the ‘we have food at home’ conversation with myself and try to talk myself out of ordering them for dinner tonight...I tell myself if I don’t buy food out all week, I can buy myself wings on Sunday.
5:00: Wrap up work and plan to have a chill night at home. Usually about half my week is made up of days like this - no spending and not leaving my house. I’m an extroverted introvert though and 2 full days of no contact with anyone is about my max before I get antsy and need to have some social interaction other than my cat.
7:00: I move my car (I have street parking and have to move it daily) and also finish Schitt's Creek. I watch some YouTube and end up turning on a new Netflix show that is pretty good so far. I'm also not super hungry, but I make Lipton Cup of Noodle (honestly my favorite soup). I eat it with tortilla chips and some crushed red pepper. After dinner, I do two 10-minute Chloe Ting videos. I was really consistent with her workout challenges from May to August, but took a few days off which turned into a few months. I’m trying to get back into it, but need to increase my strength a bit before diving back into the full challenges.
8:00: The guy I’m seeing calls me and we talk for about an hour. We just recently started talking but we have already made it exclusive (not talking to anyone else). I’m not ready to call him my boyfriend...yet. I’ll refer to him as ‘N’ through the rest of the diary. We talk about our days, random stuff, and discuss when we will hang out next.
Total Daily Spend: $0.
Day Two, Wednesday:
7:00: Le chat wakes me up for breakfast. I always thought cats had a great internal clock, but my cat wakes me up at different times everyday. Sometimes 4 am, sometimes not until I wake up around 8:15. I feed him and go back to bed.
9:00: It’s a productive day already - getting shit done! I text some friends about our plans for the upcoming weekend and listen to the new Call her Daddy podcast episode. I still like the podcast, but do feel that it’s marketed towards college students and I might be a bit too ‘old’ to listen.
12:30: After I eat my beef and broccoli leftovers, I pack up my work stuff and my laundry and head to my parents house about 15 minutes away. I usually do this once a week to break up the monotony of working from home. My parents have an office that doesn't get used often, so I set up in there and work the rest of the afternoon. I also do my laundry because it’s free as opposed to paying for it where I live.
5:00: My dad gets home from work and I talk to him and my mom for a while. I actually brought dinner for us (a frozen TJ’s corn pie I bought last week and green beans). 9/10 would recommend this corn pie - I do wish it had a crust though, as it was a little soggy. Still delicious though. After dinner, I go to the post office to ship a sale I had on Poshmark.
7:00: I head back to my apartment, drop off my clean laundry, feed kitty, and then go to N’s house. He lives with his parents about 20 minutes away in the opposite direction of where my parents live. He also can’t drive currently because of a DWI (I know, I’m still dealing with how I feel about this). For now, I don’t mind driving to see him because he makes me laugh and we always have fun. We play a game of pool, watch a horror movie, and I end up spending the night.
Total Daily Spend: $0.
Day Three, Thursday:
7:00: My alarm goes off and I continue to snooze for the next hour or so while cuddling with N. I actually feel pretty well rested and it doesn’t hurt knowing that I don’t have a big workload today. The week has flown by, I can’t believe it’s already Thursday.
8:15: I leave his place and stop at a drive-through Starbucks on my way home. I usually get Starbucks once every two weeks or so and make my coffee at home the rest of the time. I can’t resist getting a slice of pumpkin bread with my iced caramel macchiato (with skim milk because #health). I don’t have enough funds on my account, so I add $15. $15.
8:45: My gas tank is about to hit empty, but I will deal with that later. Arrive home and feed kitty and apologize profusely for leaving him overnight. I know he is self-sufficient and I do spend pretty much all day everyday with him but still, I feel bad. I power on my work laptop and schedule a meeting with my manager to go over some questions I have this morning, then get into emails and other work things.
11:00: Like I said, my work is really light today. I end up doing some required trainings to get ahead and so that I feel like I’m doing something. I take full advantage during light weeks like this because during busy season(s), I am usually working upwards of 60 hours a week. My cat is in a feisty mood today, running around the apartment, meowing at the top of his lungs, and playing with his new cat tree I got on a Facebook Buy Nothing group page. I turn on his electronic cat toy (a little device that has a fake fox tail that moves around) and he goes nuts, he loves this toy. Sometimes I wonder if my cat wants another cat friend in the house...probably not.
12:00: I am actually a bit tired from sleeping at N’s place last night, so I decide to take a nap during my lunch hour. This is definitely a perk of WFH. I panic when I wake up before my hour-long alarm goes off because I thought I slept through it and it was actually 4 pm or something. Luckily, it was not. I get out of bed, heat up my leftover beef and broccoli (day 3 of this, one more day). I swear it tastes just as good as Chinese takeout. Back to work.
4:00: I meet with my manager and get a few additional tasks to work on today and tomorrow. I also call a local restaurant to make a reservation for our work team lunch next week. We have all been working from home since the middle of March and have no plans to go back until at least 2021. We’ve done one picnic this summer and we are going to have a team lunch next week as well.
5:30: Done with work for the day and I decide to go for a run. I run about 2.5 miles and walk a little in the middle of the run as a break. It’s the first chilly fall day, which is my favorite running weather. I’m trying to increase my mileage slowly, as I used to be a runner but ended up taking a several year hiatus… it’s a little depressing with my current cardio state but my favorite running quote is ‘no matter how slowly you go, you’re still lapping everyone on the couch’.
6:15: Home and I feed kitty dinner. I decide to go to Wegmans and get ingredients for the snacks I’m making to bring to my friend’s get-together tomorrow night (Oreo balls, spinach artichoke dip). I also get gas on the way there because like I said, I’m at E ($23.40). When at Wegmans (best place on Earth), I get Oreos, cream cheese, fancy sprinkles and melting chocolate, grenadine for drinks, pico de gallo, and a few other things. I also get toilet paper and razors for myself. Thank goodness they have toilet paper in stock because I have one roll left…($62.10).
7:30: Home and I take a hot shower, put away my groceries, play with kitty, and watch some Youtube before going to bed around 10:30.
Total Daily Spend: $85.50
Day Four, Friday:
8:30: I get out of bed, feed kitty (who slept in today), and turn on my Spotify Release Radar (one of my weekly pleasures). I end up jamming all morning to Machine Gun Kelly’s newest album. He’s the pop punk artist we didn’t know we needed in 2020. I start work and make myself a daily to-do list, which is arguably the only way I get things done.
10:00: Fridays are nice because I usually have no meetings. I end up taking a mid-morning break to make Oreo balls for my friends’ get-together tonight. I bought fancy sprinkles and I want these to look good. They’re one of the easiest desserts to make, but always a fan favorite.
12:00: During lunch, I make another snack to bring to my friend’s place tonight - spinach artichoke dip. This is another well-loved, easy recipe! I also eat the last of the TJ’s beef and broccoli. Cooking for one person is tough because I have leftovers for daysss.
4:00: My motivation for actually working right now is at an all-time low. I wash my dishes from the two recipes earlier.
6:15: I put on a full face of make-up (Bareminerals foundation, glossier cream blush, glossier concealer, Anastasia BH eyeshadow, Stila eyeliner, Too Faced mascara, and Clinique lipstick). Honestly sometimes I think I look better without makeup because I feel clown-like with a full face on. But maybe that’s because I’m so used to myself without makeup on.
6:45: I head out to pick up N. I’m so excited for him to meet my friends! We stop at a gas station on the way and he buys a case of beer.
7:30: N and I arrive at my friend’s house. There are about 8 of us hanging out tonight and we have the dip I made, Oreo balls, cheesecake, puff pasty with brie, and pizza bagels. One of the biggest perks of being an ‘adult’ is having snacks at parties! I made the decision prior to coming that I wouldn’t be drinking much (2 drinks max). I have anxiety, which at its worst manifests as agoraphobia, and it is heavily impacted by alcohol. I was never to the point of being unable to leave my home, but even tasks like going to the grocery store alone could trigger panic attacks. If I get really drunk, my mental health can be negatively impacted for over a week. I take a daily SNRI and am luckily in a good mental state right now, thanks to years of therapy and knowing my mental health strategies (exercising, not drinking excessively, keeping my apartment clean, having enough time alone to recharge).
9:30: We are all having a great time and my friends love N! Despite his history with the DWI and other ‘bad boy’ tendencies, he is fun to be around, genuine, and easy to talk to - and makes me happy. We play beer pong (with water), mingle, and eat all the snacks. One of my friends has a few too many dirty martinis and gets sick, which reinforces my decision to not get drunk.
11:30: Our friends start to head home and N and I stay to clean up and pack up my leftovers. I drive us back to my apartment and we attempt to stay awake to watch a movie, but both fall asleep on the couch. We relocate to my bed once we wake up at some point in the middle of the night.
Total Daily Spend: $0.
Day Five, Saturday:
7:00: N wakes up early to a call from his relatives about an issue at one of their businesses (I won’t go into this, as it could be revealing as to his identity). He Ubers home early to get back to his family and get ready for a family event he has later today.
11:00: Wow, I guess I really needed the sleep. I haven’t slept in for two weeks because I was on a hiking trip last week, so this was much needed and incredible. I get up, make coffee, and retreat to the couch. Even though I didn’t drink much last night, I feel exhausted. I probably got too much sleep.
2:00: I am enjoying having this relaxing day to myself. I heat up leftover spinach artichoke dip and have that for lunch with some chips. I also eat a piece of cheesecake that I took home with me last night. It’s so delicious.
5:00: I’ve been watching hours of 90-day fiance and Youtube. I put some simple make-up on though because I’m about to meet a girl from BumbleBFF. She’s not from the area, but seems really interesting and fun. I leave my apartment around 5:50 to meet her at a local brewery.
6:00: BumbleBFF arrives and we each get a drink (hard seltzer for her, beer for me). I also get a pizza because I didn’t have dinner before this ($21.06 for the pizza and one beer).. We end up having a good time talking about dating in this city, our families, future goals, and our college experiences. On the way out, I buy a t-shirt from the brewery with my favorite beer on it because I’ve been wanting this shirt for a long time ($15.60). I drive BumbleBFF home because she doesn’t have a car and lives super close to me, then I go back to my apartment. $36.66
9:00: Like I said, I think I got too much sleep last night, which is making me super tired. Don’t you hate how that happens? I snuggle and play with my cat and watch more TV. I should probably get more hobbies to do at home instead of spending all the time on my computer…
Total Daily Spend: $36.66
Day Six, Sunday:
7:00: Kitty wakes me up, I feed him and go back to bed.
10:00: Ah, a much more reasonable hour to get up on the weekends. I get out of bed and make my coffee. I should clean my apartment right now, but instead I lay on the couch and watch 90-day fiance. Why is this show so addicting?? I also heat up more spinach artichoke dip and eat that followed by another slice of cheesecake I took home from my friend’s place. Wow, I need more vegetables in my life...
12:00: I head to my parents house for a little while. I sold something else on Poshmark and need to print the shipping label, but I don’t have my own printer. On the way over, I stop at Walgreens to pick up my birth control (I get 3 months at a time, but it is fully covered by insurance) and I get a flu shot as well (also covered by insurance). Once I get to my parents house, my dad and I discuss our upcoming hiking trip next weekend and my mom shows me some new furniture she got for the house.
2:15: I leave my parents and head to the post office to drop off my sale. Then, I drive back to my apartment where three of my friends meet me. We go to a park in the city with plans to hike and explore an abandoned cave. My friend suggests we wear gloves and bring trash bags to collect bottles and other trash in the park. This is a great idea, as we end up filling up four bags on our hike. The park is also not in the best area and is a known location for druggies - we find two opened packages of Narcan, a few needles, and a ton of empty alcohol containers. Yikes. We did end up getting some great photos of the cave and waterfall.
4:00: Back to my apartment and two of the friends leave to go home. One of them stays and we end up grabbing sushi and a beer at an outdoor bar near my apartment. I pay for my own sushi and our beers. ($17.71 for the sushi and $10.33 for the two beers).
6:30: Home and I’m freezing...Realize my apartment is only 62 degrees. I turn on the heat up to 68 for the first time since spring! I’m interested to see what my electricity bill will be this coming winter. I moved in during April, so I haven’t experienced a winter here yet but it is an old apartment and I can definitely feel cold air coming through the windows a bit.
10:00: I get in bed with kitty, resolving to clean my apartment tomorrow after work.
Total Daily Spend: $28.04
Day Seven, Monday:
8:00: I wake up with my alarm and get up to feed kitty - he slept in today. I reluctantly get out of bed and make coffee.
9:00: I turn on my laptop a bit late today and also turn on the newest crime junkie episode to start the day. This is my all-time favorite podcast, I really should subscribe to their Patreon.
10:30: Just wrapped up one call and I have a few hours until my next. I revisit my to-do list for the day and assign things to be ‘before lunch’ or ‘after lunch’. I’m also pretty hungry but decide to follow through with my IF today and wait until lunchtime.
11:00: Screw it, I’m hungry. I heat up the last of my spinach artichoke dip and re-heat one slice of pizza from Saturday night. I swear I don’t usually eat as terribly as I have this week…
12:00: I have a $20-off voucher for REI, the outdoors store, for joining their member program a few weeks ago. It expires in a few days and it is ‘free money’, so I head there on my lunch break. $20 doesn’t go very far in a store like this, but I get a new pair of hiking socks and some protein and electrolyte snacks for my upcoming hike this weekend. Total cost is $33.54, but I get $20 off. $13.54.
4:00: I am really getting the afternoon sleepies. I would go for another cup of coffee, but I don’t want to be awake all night. I decide to go for a quick run because work is pretty light and I plan to make up the hours tonight while watching TV. I grab my headphones, turn on my ‘pop punk angst’ playlist, and head out. I end up just running a little over a mile because my body does not feel like moving and I don’t want to push it. I guess this could be attributable to how awful my diet has been this week. I walk another mile back home and get back to work.
5:30: One of my best friends comes over for a walk. This is something we do fairly often because we both love to walk and talk with each other. We end up stopping at a local coffee shop and I get hot chocolate and a brownie (might as well round out this poor eating week). I also buy my friend’s iced tea because she’s had a really rough week. I add a tip as well. We walk for a few miles and come back to my apartment. $9.99.
7:15: Once at my apartment, we purchase tickets to a haunted house we plan to go to in a few weeks. I was surprised the haunted house is happening with COVID, but they do seem to have many precautions in place (masks on everyone, temperature checks, limited number of tickets sold for each time slot). Each ticket costs $34.79 and I pay my friend with funds I have on my Venmo account. Once we buy the tickets, my friend heads home and I re-heat the leftover pizza from Saturday for dinner. $34.79.
10:00: Typical night doing work on my laptop while watching 90-day fiance on my other screen.
Total Daily Spend: $58.32
Total Spend:
Food & Drink: $144.59
Fun & Entertainment: $34.79 (haunted house ticket)
Home/Health: $0
Clothes & Beauty: $15.60 (for the brewery t-shirt).
Transport: $23.40.
Other: $9.99 (hiking snacks/socks)
Grand Total: $228.37
Reflection: I wish I could say this week of spending was unusual, but sadly it is pretty typical. My largest expenses are always food/drink and I'm trying to spend less (obviously not trying that hard though). My first goal, which I've been achieving, was to be honest with myself and track all my spending, even if it's over budget. Now that I've been tracking regularly, I need to be more aware of spending (mostly at Wegmans honestly...the prepared food/bakery gets me every time and that stuff adds up $$). I never spend more than what I earn, but I do want to start saving more. Anyways, I hope you enjoy and definitely let me know any thoughts you have :)

First off, this game was an aesthetic treat and compared to GTAV, it is indeed much more "dense" with the core areas so much more beautiful in that regard... But no game is perfect, nor is it realistic in this decade to expect a full "city simulator" for any dev or in any game, so that's not what I'm expecting out of Night City not even under the most ideal of circumstances... That said, there are plenty of room for improvement, bug fixes sure, but also beyond that I'd like to see more in the upcoming DLC's that make NightCity more alive, not even necessarily newer and larger maps, but just practical added-elements and additional functional components that would go a long way towards making the city appear more 'alive', and immersive and dynamic and all that was illuded to but never fully manifested...
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So in terms of most bang for buck and the low-hanging fruit (80/20 principle):
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In real life there is a sense of interconnecitivity and permanance... NightCity doesn't have this and is just a disconnected Hodgepodge of static elements that have no effect on one another... for example I should be able to balance the transportation cost of getting to work versus the career path that I want and the amount of money I'm making and taking into account my net worth... it wouldn't make sense for me to accept an entry level position that requires hours of commute every morning when I'm living on the other end of town... and on the otherhand if I'm processed to a VP making bigly bucks I can afford to take the automated air taxi every morning to work in central business district and still live outside by the beautiful beachfront property etc... likewise a downturn in the economy will affect my company and I could get laid off or no bonus for the year, or if I'm working a gig job that is seasonal then come spring I wouldn't need to find a second side gig to make up for the loss of income... and all of that ties into what kind of loft I can afford, what kind of car I can buy/lease/rent and the food I can eat (tv dinner vs fine dining) and the cloths that I can put in my back which affects the sort of women on the street that I can radnomdly hit on and get intro interested into d going on a date with me etc etc etc... its all interconnected and has a continuation that affecst so much more than just mindless NPCs spawning and despawning right in front on my eyes...
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#TRANSPORTATION
1) Bring back (or rather develope for the first time) the promised subway system... this shouldn't be that hard to do... it would add an element of connectivity of the different parts of the city... Leave fast travel as an option, for those that want to ride the train shouldn't be forced to use loading screens
2) Air taxi(s) -- in the age of Telsa self driving cars, hyperloops, drone taxis we should have plenty of automated air taxi options in the world of CP2077, basically like the taxi hailing component in GTAIV (Liberty City) except the player can hail an air taxi that lands close to where he is standing, he gets in, and then chooses any destination and it automatically flys him to the location, while allowing him to look out the windows and enjoy the night city from above / higher perspective... this is simplier than simply giving the player ability to fly hovercars/etc since an air taxi is just from point to point and its trivial to code a system that flys the player from any point in the city to any other point without crashing into any buildings... we've seen NightCity from the ground, now lets see it from the sky!
3) Rented transporation -- user pays to be able to rent jet packs, hoverboards, scooters at different locations in the city so he can use a public transportation but on a personal level... for the jet packs cap a max height so that its still basically hovering at or around slightly above ground level, giving the user the discretion of travel but not allowing him to fly or scale above buildings etc... this requires money to rent and if the equipment is damaged, lost, stolen or not returned properly the users bank account will be deducted for the amount ( see #ECONOMY)
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#JOBS/CAREERS/WORK/EDUCATION/GIGs
Ability to work a day job to earn steady money and climb a career ladder by taking courses or going to school at night... ability to go on the nightcity job boards or online to hunt and interview for other jobs... to change industries and do other jobs... to participate in the Gig economy... like drive around in some version of ubereats delivering food or packages to people... or a corporate desk job thats basically on the computer all day... for corporate day jobs the game should give the user the ability to fastforward just like he can go to bed and fast forward for eight hours etc....
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#INTERIORS
1) Skyscrapers with observation deck -- in every major city there is a theme like this, take Seattle for example you can visit the tallest building in Seattle downtown and go up on the obs deck and see the city view from high above, I would say incorporate some options like this where user can enter some of the taller buildings in NightCity, ride up the elevator to the higher decks and see the city from that view... maybe even add a floor with fine dinning where user can take a friend/date/group to the restuarant and eat while enjoying watching the scenery of the nightcity below etc...
2) All major buildings enter-able (is that a word? lol) with at least a ground lobby.... right now most of the buildings are just fake exteriors, nice to look at from the outside but completely fake and empty with no insides... Due to system restrains its not practical to simulate every room of every floor of every building in nightcity with furnished interiors and real windows and all that... but at least make the first floor /lobby area of every large and major building enter-able so that the character can walk in and out of them... for certain buildings you may want to make a working/functional lobby elevator that leads to an underground garage and/or allows the user to ride the elevator to above ground higher floors of the building... or have the elevator only allow certain floors to be accessed and furnish these floors with realistic settings/environment and this can tie in nicely with the job/work/career paths discussed in #ECONOMY section with gives you the office space to put a number of companies in which the user can find and switch jobs and work in corporate paths etc... for example allow the user to customize and decorate his own "office/desk", and if he has a window office, then that would provide another unique view/scenery of nightcity from above ground perspective, one that can only be gotten from working at that particular company/job, and gives him an incentive to work late to see the city from nighttime while burning the midnight oil:)
3) Multiple apartments, the user should be able to pick and choose from a vast selection and array of living arrangements and this necessities a lot of hotel/condo/apartment options which means these buildings need to have interiors and furnished and environments fully built out...
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#ECONOMY
1) Ability to find and work a job, with multiple career paths and with ability to move up in the corporate world... this provides the user with a steady stream of income for which he can use to buy fancier cars, to move into newer and better apartments /condos etc.. and to buy fancier items like designer cloths and the suches... not to mention to spend on fine dinning in high end restuarants which can tie in nicely with going on datings, impressing women with luxury cars and expensive meals and "date nights out" at elaborate events.... basically there has to be a purpose and meaning to making more money, and the process of making more money has to be derived from a job or work or career of some sort as the main component...
2) Have a real economy with unemployment, inflation, commodity prices, and all of that impact and influence and affect the user in his everyday life... for example if a major terror event or pandemic causes the Nightcity to suffer an economic depression for a few months then its possible the company that the user is working at has to lay off people and he gets canned and has to downsize to a smaller apartment, loses his girlfriend/wife, and then has to find another lower paying job and stuck in the downward cycle for a few years until he is able to win the lottery (#GAMBLING/SPECUTLATION/BETTING) or his luck somehow changes...
3) Everything should cost money, it costs money to rent an apartement and it should also cost money to eat and drink... basically he user has to spend money to eat otherwise he will starve to death... and the user has to keep paying rent every month for whatever apartment he resides otherwise he gets evicted and could even become homeless and have to live in one of those nasty tents in tenty city or under a highway bridge etc etc
4) Grocery stores, restuarants, movie theaters, hotels, and shopping malls... There should be at least a few convinennce stores, shopping malls, restuarants and other retail places spread throughout nightcity, this is a component and element of the economy as well as a means for the user to spend all the hard earned money he worked towards... for example if you give a homeless a few bucks he should be able to use it to spend at a store on the corner to get something to eat and then that makes him happy because he is no longer so hungry... there should be a tie in for economy, money, and the ability to exchange that for goods and services (barber, tatto artists cough cough) and associate these goods and services to emotional feelings of happiness and satisfication for both the user /player and the NPCs...
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#SEASONS
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There should be a distinction between autumn/fall, spring, summer, winter etc... This gives a big cycle sense of passage of time that cannot be simulated with the current day/night cycles along... in the winter the sun should rise and set at different times/angles than the summer...
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In addition, I'd like to see an accurate night sky map/ stars. NightCity takes place in SoCal, its trivial to map the nightsky for the year 2077 in the SoCal area... even in the latest Flight Simulator 2020 the stars are now accurate at night...
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Ability to choose LIVE weather based on current user location (see Flight Simulator) so say its raining in Dallas Texas where a user is playing, then in NightCity it will match that and we raining in the game as well... also ability to customize weather on-the-fly in real-time (see Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020) and have that instantly change in the game without reloading...
Along with seasons I'd like to be able to see holiday celebrations for example Christmas time espeically... I want to hear holiday music and see buildings decorated with Christmas lights and the jolly spirits of it all... Think the ambiance and environment of say Polar Express, bring that alive to Night City for Xmas...
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#MINI GAMES and other Microcosm
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There is a "Go" board in Chinatown... but its fake... and the players aren't even attempting to play Go... See what Google Deepmind did with AlphaGo, Facebook made an OpenGo that they open sourced... there is also LeelaZero and KataGo free AI engines that have already been trained using deeplearning/machineAI to be far better than the Go masters... the same applies to Chess by the way... but I didn't see a Chess board in Night City yet... in any case all these board games the computer AI can now master... make these games playable in NightCity, so the user can watch two NPC's play a round of Go/Chess/etc (Ai vs Ai) or can join and sit down and take a seat and play against an NPC a real game of Go/Chess, (or in the future if CP gets a multiplayer than humans can play against one another etc) basically a microcosms and games-within-a-game....
Spotify/Netflix/youTube integrations... I'd like to see the user have a portable/personal mp3 player or app on his virtual smartphone that allows him to link to his personal -reallife- spotify account to listen to music while in the game... also on the TV screens at home to be able to watch netflix movies while in this virtual apartment chilling with his date/friends... and things like YouTube integration would be nice... maybe even pornhub integration....
Other simple games like darts, bowling and even toys like RC cars or DJI drones... give the use the ability to fly drones (check out DJI Simulator) or operate rc model cars etc... basically toys that he can buy at electronic stores or corner outlets that he can then use these toys in real life for any variety of enjoyments... this also ties into #ECONOMY and why its important to have a good job /career that pays good money!
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#GAMBLING/SPECUTLATION/INVESTMENTS/BETTING
Have some form of virtual casinos in the game, NightCity reminds me of Vegas, yet not one slot machine and not one means to gamble or bet? How about the ability to play the stockmarket, bitcoins, and make bets and well as go gambling, cards, poker, etc this not only provides a form of entertainment but also gives the user a way to quickly win / lose a lot of money and for the risk takers they may wish to invest their money in high risk high reward speculative stocks in the stock market instead of immediately spending it on a new apartment, new car, new tech gadget etc etc... this would also tie back to #ECONOMY since the more the user earns the more income he has to spend on gambling/stocks and the better the economy does the higher his stocks return on investment...
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#ROMANCE/RELATIONSHIPS
Should be able to court any pretty woman on the streets, to walk up to her and say hi and have a path/chance to a dialogue that leads to setting up a first date... and following that if it goes well can progress to more dates and evetnually her moving in with the user and eventually even having a kid, getting married, and the works... each female NPC should have a male preference and a threshold of compatiblity... so that for example if on the first date the guy is cheap and takes her to low end resturant, doesn't have a nice car to pick her up with, and otherwise seems like a low life then she wouldn't process/continue with him... whereas if he is already established with a multimillion apartment, supercar, takes her to most expensive restuarant in NightCity, then I could see her going back to his place on the first date and maybe even getting pregnant right then and there that night etc...