DiscoPosting [none/use name]

[Hard: Failure] — My god. It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.

— “According to our survey across various platforms, it was revealed that certain modders are actively developing a means to transform Yasuke, originally depicted as a Black man in the latest Assassin’s Creed installment set in Japan, into an authentic Japanese character.”

[Trivial: Success] — The run-on chaff breezes past you, leaving only the core conceit. “Depicted as”. Changing him “into an authentic Japanese character.”

— Certainly takes far less imagination to view a Black samurai as a Black samurai than the tone of this article would suggest.

[Challenging: Success] — I need you to not listen to what your instincts are about to tell you. Ignore them and walk away from this. Close the tab, close the article. It isn’t worth your time.

— Pull your gun.

— Yes, Ukraine has no serious chance of coming out of this with anything remotely resembling a victory and the immediate brokering of peace has been the only sensible path forward for the past two years.

— “You know…I’m not going to tell a Palestinian voter to vote for Biden. I’m really not. I won’t.”

— But…

— “What I am gonna do is tell a white voter who couldn’t find Gaza on a map 6 months ago to miss me with their work-from-home-slacktivism and choose the lesser evil.”

[Easy: Success] — Of course. Only the white votes matter to her.

— If a DDOS were launched on this website right now — if the feds came crashing down and an emote of a DPRK soldier took the entire server with it — this woman would hurl herself in death’s way to post for you. You are sure of this —but why?

— Hold on, who is she to me?

— She is your half-sister.

— “I love pot. I can’t get enough of the stuff.”

— The Union leader raises an eyebrow. “Oh, do you, Harry? Excellent! Truly wonderful. I’m certain you’ll find many men in the Union who would share your moral position on drugs. Not that they use them, of course! It would be both illegal and extremely unprofessional to be under the influence of drugs at the worksite.”

— He’s lying. He doesn’t know that you’re cool, yet. Everybody lies to uncool people.

— People don’t think I’m cool?

— What? No, everybody thinks you’re cool. But you’re a cop, so he’s expecting you to be a narc. Narcs aren’t cool.

— “So, you wouldn’t mind if I…smoked in here, would you?”

— “Actually, Harry, I would very much prefer if you didn’t smoke anything in my office. It’s my lungs, you see. Can’t handle all of that second-hand stuff. It’s nothing against you personally. You can step outside if you’d like to spark up.” Evrart grins, tapping his fingers on a stack of papers. “Besides, there’s still the matter of your missing gun to attend to.”

[Hard: Success] — Nobody tells you what to do, least of all a civvie. It’s time to show him what happens when someone refuses the request of a uniformed officer. You’ll have to wait until he clocks out before you can strike, but he’ll come back in the morning to the skunk-scent of a message.

New task: Smoke a blunt in Evrart’s office

— The Yemeni maritime border meets Saudi Arabia’s near Al Qunfudhah, splitting the Red Sea across the middle. From there, it stretches all the way South to Aden, and then continues a few hundred kilometers off the coast into the Gulf of Aden.

— Is that why the United States is bombing Yemen?

[Easy: Success] — Partially.

— It’s the Houthis, sire. They’ve warned all of those ships heading down the Suez Canal that they’re going to blow them to bits if they enter their sea-space. The captains haven’t been listening, so they’ve been getting shot at. And the United States! Oh! The United States have started giving the companies military escorts! It’s a dreadful, dreadful situation! Everyone needs to know how you feel about this!

— But…if Yemen says that the ships can’t go through, isn’t it illegal for the ships to go through their borders anyway?

[Medium: Success] — The international rules-based order doesn’t seem to like it when other countries enforce the rules.

-1 MORALE

[Impossible: Failure] — You are submerged deep within the milieu of news cycles and chauvinism, and you are drowning. Air. You need air. It burns at the corners of your eyes and claws at your throat. Everything hurts. If this is the way it’s going to be, you don’t know if you can keep going.

— How could you, when everything is so terrible?

[Challenging: Success] — A world away, further than any place you’ll ever go, a young boy sits outside a crumbling, concrete apartment block. Sea spray and smoke swirl through the air together, salty and acrid, coating the world in a shade grayer than usual. He sits and stares up at the sky, at the planes carrying missiles overhead, and he listens for the sounds of catching powders and marching footsteps. He sits with two million siblings. None of them may make it to tomorrow. The sufficiently old and sufficiently able take to the streets. The shelters and tunnels curling beneath them like veins tremble against the tension.

— Have they given up?

— No. They haven’t. And that means neither can you.

[Hard: Success] — War, and murder, and violence…they’re all just so terrible. So, so many people are suffering, every single day. And worst of all are the ones who pay back violence with violence. You worry that it merely ensures an unending cycle of ever more violence. Just more and more people being hurt. It is a history of abject failure.

— “Haiti, Angola, South Africa, Cuba, Vietnam. I could genuinely go on.”

— Oh-ho, this one knows much, Sire! Good, good! This may prove to be an interesting debate…

[Challenging 12] — Recall everything you know about the history of violent uprisings.

CHECK SUCCESS

— Delving deep within the recesses of your mind, poking around inside all of the grey little folds and corners, you manage to come across a pale, faded memory. Exerting a little concentration frees it from the gummy surface of your liquor-pickled brain, bringing it into focus: it’s the sum total of all of the knowledge you have ever possessed about the history of violent uprisings.

— It’s blank.

— No. Surely there has to be something in there.

— You’re a moralist, detective. Why would you know anything about history?

— Bad news. The wömen are acting up again.

— Oh, no. What have they done this time?

— The same thing they always do: take something from the past that you love and hold dear and shit all over it. Shit all over what was once strong, and proud, and good. Shit all over your ancestry. Instead of King Bowser calling Kammy Koopa an “airhead” like he did in the original release, the new version of the game makes him call her a “lunkhead”, instead. It’s sickening.

— “Kim. The wömen censored Paper Mario.”

— He lifts his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I’m sure they did, Detective. Let’s try to focus on the murder for now.”

— The phrase “business meeting” drips out of his mouth like gutter rain.

— “Who is Soon-Yi?”

— The lieutenant shifts his weight to one side. “Soon-Yi is Mr. Allen’s wife. Their relationship is very…public.”

[Medium: Success] — He means “controversial”. The two of them have been under active investigation for over thirty years now; too many late nights across too many precincts have been spent investigating claims of sexual coercion, child abuse, judicial misconduct. Most of it’s been buried beneath mountains of red-tape and corruption, but even the most crooked cops can’t entirely cover up the Epstein connection.

— The North Korean Famine took place between 1994 and 1998, with the U.S. Census Bureau estimating approximately 500,000 excess deaths over a seven-year period. Four decades prior, during the Korean War, the United States Air Force dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and napalm on North Korea. The indiscriminate bombing campaign destroyed 85% of all buildings in North Korea and killed an estimated 1,500,000 million North Koreans; of those, about 1,200,000 of them were civilians.

— “This is just how it always starts, don’t it? Every inch you give them, they take miles. It’s the same obvious type of bullshit that the people who push these ideas through never think about. Around these parts, we take care of our own — at least, that’s the way it ought to be. Last thing we need is more shitstirrers coming in here to mess with the closest thing we’ve carved out to something decent. Hell, we barely had ourselves sorted out before whoever-on-top opened up their cages on us.” He spits. “Bunch of fucking assholes.”

— “It’s not brigading, Harry! It’s simply inciting a conversation! There’s nothing that says we can’t all engage in a simple little conversation, is there?”

[Hard: Success] — He’s right. There was a rule against it, back in your old haunt; but here is not there.

— “There’s nothing stopping us from banning you for brigading, anyway.”

— “Oh, don’t be an asshole, Harry. You’re a good man, and you’re certainly not an asshole. Besides, while your mod powers are still missing, I don’t believe you’ll be able to ban anybody. Now, if you’d like to take this conversation a little more seriously, I’d be more than happy to assist you in locating that banhammer of yours again.”

— A lot of things can theoretically cause other things. Your insomnia isn’t likely to trigger a seizure — and McConnell’s seizures aren’t likely to be triggered by insomnia.

— Focal seizures can occur for a number of benign reasons, such as lacking dietary sodium, hormone changes, and insomnia. More concerning root causes include transient ischemic attacks, brain tumors, and degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s or frontotemporal dementia.

[Easy: Failure] — Mitch McConnell is in the prime of his life. There’s no way it’s anything other than insomnia.

[Legendary: Success] — THIS IS IT. Λήξη. Everything is finally coming back down on him. Whatever time is left is gone. A sick and frail worm wriggling from lismoniá returns to it.

— What? What’s coming down on him?

— Oblivion.

— TIA stands for “transient ischemic attack”, but they’re more commonly known as “ministrokes”. The difference between a TIA and a stroke is almost entirely in the duration; the blockage of a TIA lasts very briefly and causes no permanent damage, while the blockage of a stroke lasts much longer and is highly likely to result in permanent damage, if not death. The underlying cause of atherosclerosis is the same in both, however, meaning that about a third of all people who experience a single TIA will have a stroke within the year.