well, obviously . . you can't say enemy without saying me . . same as you can't say slaughter without laughter *g*

Just thinking of this subject-hobbies, not DLN's insane husband, who does manage to look completely at ease in a modern super market while wearing a 1770's uniform,

Off roading-sure

surfing- yup, the Hawaii SB has a pic of an ork in jamms with a board

painting-yup

camping-sure, we know there are nasty things out there but there are nasty things today.

clubing- oh yeah

X-treme sports- most likely

sports- of course

what about ham radio? would that be lost in the wave of matrix communication or would it be kept as a 'ancient' art the way DLN's husband can start a fire with flint and steel.

Home brew beer?

I imagine ham radio operation will be an offense punishable by death in SR, even more so if you play SR4. That's spectrum some money-making corporation could be using, after all.

~J

In 2070, WWII is sufficiently distant for them to have Concentration Camp reenactments without invoking the Spectre of Bad Taste.


Why, they could even have a Saeder Krupp Concentration-Land, with actors dressed up as fun cartoon versions Rudolf Höß and Josef Mengele and hundreds of happy Jews, Poles, Homosexuals, and Anarchists led by Anne Frank performing Disney-esq musical dance numbers about how fun it is to be at Camp.

...and for the kids there's Escape from Stalag 13 complete with Col. Wilhelm Klink, Sgt Hans Georg Schultz, and Gen. Albert Burkhalter.

With gormet meals serves at Cafe Renee where his wife(Mrs. Nighthawk) will sing at you. But when the waitress tells you the specials "Listen carefully, I will say this only once."

Home-brewing beer is a good question. You can ferment mushrooms and tofu, but I can't imagine anyone intentionally ingesting it. So automatically, home brew is for upper middle class or above. The process is not especially complex, but if the price of grain rises astronomically (which seems to be the case in SR) it simply won't be cost effective compared to the synthetic stuff.

(For the record, I paid $150 startup costs for my gear, which would be the same or cheaper. I spent about $25 for a batch. Out of that, about half of that is malt, a third is grain, the remainder is for yeast, hops, cleaning supplies and other odds and ends. That $25 makes 6 gallons, more or less, depending on how worried you are about QC. That's round about 64 bottles of beer, more or less. Less for heavier beers or higher quality beers where you forego the gunk at the bottom, more for lighter or lower quality beers. Current market price for a 6 pack is about $8 for the cheap stuff I believe? That means my beers are about $.40, whereas normal beers are about $1.30. If we assume the cost of cheap beer stays about the same, but the price of grain goes up by a factor of 10, I'd be paying about $3 a beer for home-brew, with about $200 upfront.)

I think my point is that if I am a low-level wageslave who drinks beer to get a little drunk and has learned to drink the cheap stuff because the expensive stuff is too expensive, I will learn to drink synthetic beer. If I'm a low-level wageslave who really likes beer well enough to buy the expensive stuff, and can already afford to buy the expensive stuff (and more importantly, can afford to plop down a fat $400 all at once instead of over the course of months), then yes, home brew makes a lot of sense.

But to use me as an example, I can afford quality beers, but I can't afford quality wines. I don't really do wine-making and don't especially care to get into it because I've already cultured a taste for quality beer. If, when I was first getting into beer, quality beer was above my price range, I would have developed a taste for quality cheese or something instead, never would have gotten too interested in beer except to get drunk, probably would have stuck to vodka, and never would have gotten into home-brew at all as a consequence.

(As an aside, on this line of thought, there are a lot of hobbies that produce good food on the cheap, if you have either space, or some minor expenses or both, even without the availability of much more than what we see in Shadowrun. My wife and I are currently looking into raising rabbits for food and fur, which is almost free since you can get waste vegetable matter from your local grocery store. They're going to throw it out anyway, after all. If we assume that we can find a cheap feed for rabbits, which shouldn't be all that hard, it would make sense that anyone with the space for it get into it. For braver individuals, raising beetles can fill a similar niche. Both provide great protein relatively cheap. The problem (well not so much with the beetles, but definitely with beer) is security. If you live in the barrens and people catch word you've got forty gallons of fresh, real beer, your apartment is going to get torn apart.

Cheese making I imagine will be gone and making pricey wine will be gone (cheese requires milk, which is practically unheard of in SR, GOOD wine does best with wooden barrels and the like, also difficult to get, plus grapes, which is pricey compared pound to pound with grain).

As an aside, cider is VERY economical. While it costs me about $25 for 6 gallons of beer, cider is closer to about $8 for the same quantity, higher alcohol content and higher quality. I can't imagine some sort of juice is available. It just needs sugars the yeast can break down. Related, if you have alcohol (including the synthetic stuff), distillation is relatively easy, although a little more risky. I could definitely see there being plenty of stills in the barrens where they take bad stuff and make it into worse stuff. The problem with stills is a lot of times people will make them out of stuff like car radiators. Car radiators are not made to hold stuff for human consumption and are coated with heavy metals. I had a friend who told me how after making a few batches with his still, he realized the inside of his scavenged metal coil had changed color and he was stripping away the metals into the drink. He was pretty stupid beforehand though, so I can't say if it made any change. I can DEFINITELY see this coming up in SR.

When I was in college, my housemates and I were briefly looking into setting up a still in our basement (which, hey, happened to be my room). Their thinking was that I would be there most of the time to keep an eye on it when they weren't around. But I had to be the square that said "no still," because I realized that all this time I spent in my room while everyone was at work was time I needed to spend sleeping so I could go to class in the evening. And none of us had any experience making a still. So basically, their plan was for me to get sprayed with boiling alcohol in my sleep when the still none of us really knew how to make exploded.

Of course now that I'm a bureaucrat that hates his life, setting up a still in my room might not be such a bad idea. I should maybe look into this again.

...had a good friend killed by a still explosion, and he did know how to make them with the right materials. A dangerous hobby even for the experienced.

At $3 a beer I wouldn't do it. I have better things to spend my money on.

And for the record, I DO drink Natty Bo, but that's mostly because I live in Baltimore and feel I should show a little pride in my city. Which reminds me, I should probably pick some up! I need a palate cleanser after my nut brown ale.

Although classic SR 1st Ed talked about how rare 'real' food is that's sort of dropped away. I had a thread a while back, like a year or more, where it occurred to me that there shouldn't be a food shortage. The idea originally was basic cyberpunk but in the SR world, the VITAS plague wiped out a huge swath of population but leaving crop ground in place and no major toxic screw ups in North America there should be plenty of real food.

As for wine, I think we'd have that-you can used metal casks with strips of oak inside them. but also in France it is damn close to religion, the same for country cheeses. and if they do it, then so will the corps-for profit. though the australian wine biz' is probably dead.

I don't think there's any doubt that wine would still be around. It's just that all the small wineries would be gone.

About the food shortage, I don't know if the NAN would still be cultivating more land than they needed to survive, so maybe the huge urban populations like Seattle would still get screwed. Although, you're right--it does still seem like the half of the country that didn't get taken by the NAN would still be full of farms. I guess you still need to look at it in terms of whether or not that can supply the whole world, but there's probably also other areas of the world that can produce and export food, and you'd think that if bioscience can give me more brain and heart tissue to make me some sort of badass genius, they'd be able to make cows that produce twice the meat and rice that feeds everyone.

I think you've already put more thought into it than the original writer, which is why it's been downplayed. It's a very cyberpunk idea, but too hard to consistently back up. I still like telling all my players about how they're not eating real food unless they fork over the big bucks for a High lifestyle, but that's not to say it makes a lot of sense.

I've always thought that the big problem with big agriculture in SR was that there are seriously fire breathing cows/rats/kangaroos/god knows what else out there and that would make your little agricultural operation a bit more risky.

Certainly animal husbandry would just be impossible. 'Oh look a new calf' moments later 'oh look it breaths fire how .. larry get the gun.'

I figure there are very few viable 'little agricultural operations' remaining. Most of that would be large conglomerates and the like that could afford proper security.

The UCAS, CFS, CAS all have serious amounts of RL USA farm land. I would guess that the Sioux would also do well. Unless they really make a mess of land distribution like they have done in zimbabwe they would use that great natural resource.

The same would happen in Japan where today the farm lobby is very powerful. Probably the corps would exploit the profit margin. The question for food delicacy might be fish. There is a risk of some fish being hunted to the brink now. And fish like tuna do not make up a part of the diets of China and India so the population losses there would not affect the hunting.

I would assume there are a few basic factors feeding into it...

1) don't forget exports. While the UCAS has farmland and the NAN has TONS of farmland, places like China may have a far larger population than they have now (even after VITAS), less arable land, and more interest in meat, milk and so on, driving up demand.
2) Severe environmental damage, such as overuse of the aquifers which feed most of the midwest, will have made the environment a good deal less hospitable to farmland. The cost of importing water, fertilizer and so on will have driven costs of growing stuff through the roof. As soon as you can't just drill and bring up millions of gallons of water, most of the midwest becomes largely inappropriate for growing our major grain crops like corn (which take a ridiculous amount of water). While there's land available, there's no water and no fertilizer.
3) Big mean animals and indians like to eatsy farmers. Yum! Well, the indians don't eat them, but I wouldn't be surprised if conflicts between natives still cause problems.
4) The rise of soy, mushroom and krill based food (I know all three of those require lots of water, shush!) has greatly depressed the cost of food, resulting in farmers either having to seriously lower their prices or not being able to cater at all to the price conscious. As the cost of living goes down, strictly speaking (you can still afford food and a house, just like your parents could, it's just a far, far crappier food and house), that may depress wages, meaning there are fewer people in the income bracket able to afford that 'real food'. This doesn't even touch on the mass of SINless.
5) (Seattle specific), Seattle is effectively an island. It does not have enough land to support the people living on it. All food must either be imported from its neighbors, with which it has an uneasy relationship, or shipped in from much farther away, raising the local food prices.

The end result is while there is grain, it's very expensive because it takes so much to grow it and there's overseas demand, and such cheaper alternatives for the average Joe, grain really isn't the staple diet any more.

I imagine there are some sprawling family farmers, making up for lack of water and therefore poor crops with sheer size. There are also going to be large, very expensive 'natural' farms where everything is imported and heavily guarded. In general I imagine the dust bowl of the depression with more guns, though.

...o'l Hellhound. Excellent vintage.

Then how do you explain the recent rise in milk prices domestically?

Yeah but demand for milk has shot up everywhere.

Also something I thought of this morning - ethanol. Everyone should know by now if we turned all of COUSA into a giant cornfield, it still wouldn't provide enough ethanol to power all of our cars. However a huge number of cars in Shadowrun appear to be ethanol powered. Since we're not assuming they figured out that neat bacteria they're trying to make which would produce more sugar than sugar cane, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume the drive for ethanol has driven up the cost of any product which requires corn land to grow.

Funny, but Google doesn't seem to think 'Knick Pick' is all that common a saying, let alone an up-and-coming catch-phrase for anything other than a basketball draft choice.

I'll admit that I found a few instances where people have erroneously used 'knick pick' when they do in fact mean nit pick (since that is the proper catch-phrase), but rarely without correction.

Since I love to cook I'll lean in on this. Remember that with the population being decimated world wide, there would be fewer drivers too. Also while Africa or Asia may , or may not, be over populated there might be little desire to sell grain there to feed the masses than to provide for the market here. Besides pinkskin farmers I imagine NAN farmers might get a kick out of selling their grain to the UCAS and CAS, sort of getting more pay back from the white man.

I don't think there's a market for a Shadows of Africa SB it might be interesting to see what happens in areas that currently have good soil but poor organization. Zimbabwe strings to mind. Once the bread basket of southern Africa mismanagment by Mugabe has destroyed the nation BUT the soil is still viable. I'm sure either an open corp take over or just a show of 'native ownership' in a well bribing shell company could exploit this terrain for more crops.

The old bestiaries do raise ideas. Are seafood too contaminated to eat or are the a bounty? A 100 kg lobster? Think of the King Crab legs! Talk about The Most Dangeorus Catch.

They're even worse news when you're in your bathtub!!!

The Most Dangerous catch is a reference, maybe a misnamed one, to a reality show on the discovery channel that puts camera crews on ships of the Alaska fishing fleet. For a reality show it's refreshing in that it is not blandly beautiful people trying to become famous/find love/get a job/out think etc competition.

This job is dangerous enough when you are just hauling up modern Alaska King Crab.

...had a couple friends work the fishing fleets in summer (if that is what you call it up in the gulf of Alaska and Aleutians). While I haven't seen this programme, I have seen others about Alaskan fishing on the Discovery and Learning Channels and they are pretty dead on. It was great for my friends as this was the way they put themselves through school without the need of grants or loans (rare in this day & age). When you're up there you're on the boat almost all the time so there's little to spend your hard (and I do mean hard) earned wages on.

They also came back in pretty good physical shape as well. One thing though, I wouldn't think of taking them to a seafood house for dinner nor invite them over for fish after they got back.