Where?

more like amoral...

What we can do in 4th edition is have the commented sections be written by other characters in the world. So while Wordsmyth is not a Jackpoint poster, people can put up something from Ehran the Scribe for commentary by Jackpoint.

What this means is that if you want, for example, your own character in a Shadowrun book, he has to either write something that Jackpoint posters are commenting on or be a character in one of the intro fiction chapters. I had my little fun with this - my personal player character is also in Augmentation - he's the unconscious man at the beginning of Advanced Medtech. A parody of Mary-Sueage as it were.

-Frank

Nobody needs to post to Shadowland or read it. But it can be fun. And, honestly... who does a Great Dragon talk to? He got no friends, literarily. Oh, and the 'care' stuff... 'Aztlan' showed they do. And in the neo-Anarchist setting of former SR, it made quite some sense to steer those in the shadows.
Really, there are bigger gripes in publications than named characters spreading paranoia.

The new ST format is nice, but that does not mean the old one was bad. Personally, I'm a bit bored by Jackpoint - but that's just me.

I'm sure it's not. I miss the busy traffic, and even in many cases "pointless" posts. It may just be a simple matter of missing the old personalities, and resenting their lack that keeps me from enjoying the Jackpoint crew as much. But I still liked Shadowland better.

My understanding is that it was done to make things easier on the writers, both to have a more consistent pool of names, and to avoid contradictory statements with the same 'personality'. Still, I liked the old format better.

Glad it's not just me.

That's just ... perfect!

Yeah, I really liked that creative chaos. The buzz made the book somehow... come alive.
Somehow, reading Jackpoint feels like watching a TV series to me - those have a tendency of turning into soap operas.

As a sidenote: A network of trusted users is something that works well IRL, but given the weak cryptography in SR4, I'm not certain how well it works...

in a very simple way to show that it's up to the GM to decide.

While the "fluff" shadowtalk tend too much to be like this:

with the occasional additional:

I miss some of the good old shadowtalk, such as street samurais commenting their favorite toys SSC style.

By the way:

Looks like something out of a Shadowtalk!

They're infinitely old, eternally youthful, and have had over a century to adjust to the technological age. It would be ridiculous to assume they were grossly incompetent. Even Fastjack is an old man, yet he's still likely one of the best hackers in the Sixth World.

Age has nothing to do with it. A desire to learn does, and immortals like Dunkelzahn and Harlequinn had that desire. Especially since technology is effectively the new magic, and all of them are very involved and fascinated in that particular field.

let's suppose you're a pretty good decker.

dunkelzahn offers you 50,000 to get him into shadowlands. you gonna tell him no?

so sure, he may or may not know the matrix, but he's:

1) incredibly rich... one great dragon is known to have resources at least as impressive as that of a megacorp. we know that because he *owns* the megacorp. and i would be very surprised to hear that lowfyr didn't keep some things separate from that megacorp.

2) incredibly smart. smart enough to know that he doesn't know everything, but also smart enough to know he can delegate.

3) incredibly manipulative. sure, he may not know how to program your VCR, but he makes a social adept look incompetent (granted, the tech may have changed, but people are still largely the same)

4) a powerful mage. the kind that takes tarantula's cheesy ritual group and busts out reflecting metamagic to send it back to them with their ridiculous dice pool. the kind that knows metamagic techniques that you haven't even dreamed existed, and that can summon spirits that would kill the average magician without breaking a sweat.

so sure, maybe dunkelzahn, or harlequin, or other 4th world holdovers don't know much about the tech (although i should think that being there when all the tech was developed would give the immortal elves at least a pretty good handle on it), but they *do* have plenty of skills that are useful in the sixth world, and plenty of resources to back up those skills. more to the point, they've had plenty of time to adapt to that tech. the 6th world began in 2011, right? that means they've had something like 40 years to get a basic understanding of technology since they've awakened by the time shadowrun as a setting is begun, iirc (it is 2050, isn't it?). 60 years by the time you get to SR4.

and sure, your dad may not be so good on a computer (heck, my dad has a hard time with e-mail sometimes). but, on the other hand, i also have a grandfather who understands how to use a CD/DVD burner, and is transferring his entire video library to DVDs. i know people my dad's age who are fully competent with technology of the modern world in general. being old does not automatically mean you fall behind the times. the people who fall behind the times are the ones who don't make an effort to keep up with them, generally speaking.

"I've got a sea urchin."
"I've got a pair of glasses."

-Frank

But they all did that before. For a long time. Just the daily grind.

It has nothing to do with intelligence, just that its unusual for someone to stay up with the times. Its rare for people to keep up with technology now and were talking a human lifespan of tech. For someone to keep up with 10,000 years of tech advances that were somewhat slow, then all of a sudden keep up with the absurdly rapid advance of computers should even be rarer. Heck having the drive to keep up with the slow advances of 10,000 years is unrealistic.

When it was one or two of them in shadowland I didn't have much of a problem, but it eventually seemed like every known immortal was on top of the matrix.

I wouldn't mind them using the matrix. I can accept that level of adaptability. Maybe I just saw shadowland differently, but it seemed to me that to get on shadowland you not only had to know how to use the matrix, you had to be fairly tech savvy about the matrix, and on top of matrix shadow trends. I'd assume you would need both a decent computer skill but also some matrix etiquette skills to find it or heck even to know it exists.

I can accept others getting them there or those posts being done by either proxies or pranksters and in any game I ran they were. But that wasn't my take on how it was portrayed in the books.

He knows computer tech from the very beginning... no record time, on the contrary.

I gotta say, that image does make me smile.

your thinking of the one at the start of VR2.0. its one of my favorites.

AH has it up on the site, with annotations.