Dumpshock.com

From here in North Carolina comes The story of a woman with cyber eyes well, almost. They’re getting there. As always, someone had something to say about it Here.

Comments from Dumpshock discussers can be found here.

Yes yes, i was the one nominated/selected to run the RL news and other info side of things, arent ya all worried?

Two quick notes:

• The Sixth World Wiki has been upgraded to better handle automatic-spam rejection. A lot of people have done some great work compiling information about the Sixth World on the wiki over the last year — check it out!
• Over at The Shadowrun Supplemental, we’re posting one Seattle location a day for the next couple months or so.

Both Sixth World Wiki and The Shadowrun Supplemental have feeds so you can subscribe to recent changes/new entries there.

Over at ShadowrunRPG.com, those handsome devils at FanPro have posted version 1.3 of the Shadowrun 4th Edition errata.

“Readers looking for warm-and-fuzzy fantasy need not apply — but those who crave dark, dangerous, powerful fiction had better strap in, bite down, and read Scars.”
— Bradley Denton, World Fantasy Award-winning author

Over ten years after its original scheduled publication, Scars — the first novel in Caroline Spector’s “Immortals” trilogy which bridges the popular Earthdawn and Shadowrun roleplaying game worlds — is finally coming into print in a beautiful trade paperback edition by Per Aspera Press. The third book in the trilogy, Worlds Without End, was published as part of the Shadowrun series in 1995, but the first two novels were “lost” when publisher Penguin Roc was forced to cancel the Earthdawn novel line.

In 2003, Per Aspera Press debuted the first of the “Lost Novels of Earthdawn”: Liferock by Jak Koke. Based in Seattle Washington, Per Aspera is an award-winning independent publisher of science fiction and fantasy.
The Earthdawn universe is a traditional high-fantasy world populated by powerful magical adepts and visited by Horrors — wicked creatures which live off the pain of others. Spector’s Scars introduces Aina, a five hundred-year-old elf who is haunted both by the choices of her past and a sadistic Horror which trails her every step. Ruthless and desperate, Aina will use anything — and anyone — to escape her ancient pact with the Horror and his terrible gift.

This first English-language edition of Scars (Trade Paperback, $16.95, ISBN 0974573426) includes a map of Barsaive, an introduction by past FASA president Sam Lewis, and interior illustrations. It is available at www.lostearthdawn.com and by order from bookstores and online retailers.

The first episode of Shadowcast — a new Shadowrun podcast — has been posted. It was recorded on June 12th, so some of the material is a little dated, but future installments should be more timely.

Live and direct from the Dumpshock forums… it’s Shadowcast, the Shadowrun podcast! Hosted by forum regulars Spookymonster and Kagetenshi (a.k.a., Marc Santiago and Jonathan Woodworth), Shadowcast discusses the latest news and events in and around the Shadowrun universe. In this, their premiere episode, the discussion covers the pros and cons of softcopy (PDF) manuals.

Got questions you’d like us to answer? Maybe a suggestion or two for the boys? Feel free to drop by the Podcast Thread and let us know!

• Shadowcast 1: June 28th, 2005 [16MB MP3]

Jürgen Hubert has opened a Shadowrun NPC Wiki, where users can browse a list of Shadowrun 3rd Edition [and soon, SR4] NPCs, and like any good wiki, you can edit and create your own NPCs, instantly adding them to the catalog right over the web. If you want more info, there’s a thread on the forums discussing the SR NPC Wiki and how to use it.

Here’s a BBC article about a new female humanoid robot from Japan.

“Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It’s very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet.”

Professor Ishiguro believes that it may prove possible to build an android that could pass for a human, if only for a brief period.

“An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes,” he said.

“More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman.”

Well, word has leaked that Microsoft appears to be working on a Shadowrun game for the Xbox 360: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/635/635071p1.html.

We present this news without comment. Forum visitors, however, have been commenting already.