Artist: Run The Jewels
Album: RTJ4
Date Released: June 3rd, 2020
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Artist Background
The duo consisting of Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, and legendary underground produceMC El-P, known together as Run The Jewels, originally came together as a result of Adult Swim executive Jason DeMarco who introduced the two in 2011. After his 2011 album PL3DGE peaked at #115 on the US charts, Killer Mike told Jason that he wanted to make his own AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Jason informed Mike, “If you want AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted modernized, the only producer I know who comes close to the Bomb Squad-level of production is El-P”. The duo’s chemistry was immediate, as El-P went on to produce all of Killer Mike’s 2012 last solo album R.A.P. Music, and Mike featured on El-P’s final solo album Cancer 4 Cure. Mike and El’s respective albums released within a week of each other in May 2012, and the two embarked on a twenty-city US tour in the following months. After returning from tour, the pair had found a friendship growing between themselves, and made the decision to put other projects on hold and focus on the chemistry that had been sparked. Recording at an upstate NY studio beginning in April 2013, the duo re-appropriated the phrase “Run The Jewels” from the LL Cool J track “Cheesy Rat Blues", and released their self-titled collaborative album, for free via digital download, only a mere 2 months later in June 2013.
36” Chain vs. Pistol & Fist
Run The Jewels discography currently exists in a distinct pairing. With Run The Jewels as their debut, this record set the group's tone as a light-hearted, braggadocious duo with as much confidence in their abilities as swag in their punchlines. Just over a year later, the sequel Run The Jewels 2 took the foundation set from their freshman effort and dialed the insanity up to 11. RTJ2 pushed the boundaries of their aggression and flows to new heights; with incredible energy in their verses, and absolutely impeccable beats, blending El-P’s signature industrial sound with sharp synth arpeggios, chopped Zach De La Rocha vocals, and absolutely bonkers Travis Barker drums.
It was then nearly 3 years before Jamie and Mike followed up their breakout RTJ2, with Run The Jewels 3 being released again ahead of its scheduled release date via free digital download, this time on Christmas Eve 2016. Instead of these two attempting to outdo the pure insanity and in-your-face attitude found in their predecessor, Mike and El decide to evolve themselves as a group. The duo had noticeably pulled back on the swag and dick jokes which made such a splash on RTJ2, instead choosing a more subdued, electronic approach to their beats, as well as a clearly stronger political approach in their lyrics. This change in sound and style is demonstrated in the album cover’s artwork. The first two records featured the distinctive RTJ “Pistol and Fist”, with the fist tightly gripping a chain. The chain, in my opinion, represents the swag and braggadocio that drove the aggressive nature of their first two albums. In RTJ3 the chain is removed, leaving only hands that have transformed from bleeding and bandaged, to a pristine gold.
This brings us to early 2020. It’s been nearly 4 years of living in a post-Trump America, and El-P announces that Run The Jewels fourth record has been completed. Mike and El live-stream the first single “yankee and the brave” on Instagram on March 22nd, 2020. Lyrically and sonically, RTJ4 exists as the successor to Run The Jewels 3, with Mike and El again taking the good from their previous effort and launching it into the creative stratosphere. El-P’s beats are again leaning towards the synthetic, electronic side, this time with the intensity dialed all the way up to 11. From a lyrical perspective, RTJ takes the politically-charged lyrics from their predecessor, and again, up the ante, laying down some of the hardest hitting and politically poignant bars either of these two have ever spit.
Album Review
2020 was a year that none of us will soon forget. An unprecedented global health crisis kept the majority of us inside for months at a time. RTJ4 was announced on May 12th, 2020, with a release date slated for June 5th, 2020. However, with 2020 as the gift that won’t stop giving, the end of May was highlighted by the unjust killing of George Floyd. The phrase heard around the world, “I can’t breathe” instantly became a rally-cry for the oppressed to finally take to the streets to demand systemic police reform, as Floyd’s death was not the first time this phrase was uttered in an unjust police killing. In fact, a 2020 study by the New York Times showed that at least 70 people have died in police custody after using the same phrase over the past decade. As millions of American’s began organizing protests and demonstrations in the wake of Floyd’s death, Run The Jewels made the decision to release their latest chapter two days ahead of the scheduled release. El-P tweeted, just minutes ahead of the drop, “Fuck it, why wait. The world is infested with bullshit, so here’s something raw to listen to while you deal with it all. We hope it brings you some joy. Stay safe and hopeful out there and thank you for giving 2 friends the chance to be heard and do what they love”. In line with all past Run The Jewels releases, the album was made available for free digital download, two days ahead of its scheduled release date, on June 3rd, 2020.
THE RETURN (we don’t mean no harm but we truly mean all the disrespect)
RTJ4 opens with the first single, “yankee and the brave (ep. 4)”. Using the team names from their respective hometown baseball teams, Mike and El use the opening track to prove that they’re not just a hip-hop duo, they’re brothers, for better or worse. El-P kicks this installment off with rapid-fire, machine-gun esque snares, matching Killer Mike’s aggressive flow and tightly packed rhymes, before El jumps in to trade some dense rhymes as well. Mike and El depict themselves as outlaws, with Mike surrounded by cops with only one bullet remaining. He contemplates suicide instead of allowing the police to take him alive, until El-P jumps back in, offering Mike a way out, with a getaway car waiting outside. This tense situation is depicted lightheartedly in this song’s music video, which was released via Adult Swim and features the duo animated.
The trade-off between Mike and El’s short verses are reminiscent of late-80’s EPMD flows, while the production sounds like boom-bap that’s been sent to us from the future. This distinctive blend of old-school rap roots and forward thinking production is what continues to separate Run The Jewels from absolutely all of their contemporaries. While so many artists are continually playing catch-up with the latest trends, RTJ are side-stepping the trendy and moving forward with the mind-bending.
FLEXIN’ (ayo one for mayhem, two for mischief)
The second single “ooh la la” samples a Gang Star track "DWYCK (feat. Nice & Smooth)" as the basis for the chorus. I say “samples” as that’s how it is credited in the album’s liner notes, however it’s truly an interpolation of Greg Nice’s bar, slowed down slightly, and sung by El-P and Greg Nice himself. El-P is a true old-head at heart, and it’s abundantly obvious in his work, even going as far as to recruit legendary producer DJ Premiere to handle the scratching on the back end of this banger.
Out of key piano chords are looped to quickly create an unsettling aura surrounding the track, before El-P’s voice cuts through the infectious piano like a whip. Pounding, up-tempo drums are introduced after the chorus’ first iteration, creating what is possibly El-P’s first danceable beat. Lyrically, Mike and El-P initially seem scattered on this track, however the music video quickly makes their point very obvious.

”we imagined the world on the day that the age old struggle of class was finally over. a day that humanity, empathy and community were victorious over the forces that would separate us based on arbitrary systems created by man.
this video is a fantasy of waking up on a day that there is no monetary system, no dividing line, no false construct to tell our fellow man that they are less or more than anyone else. not that people are without but that the whole meaning of money has vanished. that we have somehow solved our self created caste system and can now start fresh with love, hope and celebration. its a dream of humanity’s V-DAY… and the party we know would pop off.”

The video envisions a society celebrating the fact that the class system we currently exist within has finally imploded. Money is worthless, and we have rejected the desire to bind ourselves to the constraints of capitalism. All creeds and colors unite to burn the system that has so effectively controlled us for over a century. It’s a party, and if there was a song to celebrate the end of the world as it is currently known, “ooh la la” is that song.
Mike’s last verse features a few metaphors and comparisons celebrating the destruction of capitalism, saving the most poignant for last:

I used to love Bruce, but livin' my vida loca
Helped me understand I'm probably more of a Joker
When we usher in chaos, just know that we did it smiling
Cannibals on this island, inmates run the asylum

Premo’s expertly cut scratches lead us into the equally hard hitting sample flip of “Misdemeanor”, by Foster Stevens as the basis for the beat to “out of sight”. Lending yet another nod to the old-school greats that laid the foundation for RTJ, “out of sight” samples the same track as The D.O.C.’s “It’s Funky Enough”, only adding a bouncy, electronic synth atop the inverted chord hits, and uptempo, industrial drums, to create an absolutely infectious groove for Mike and El’s dynamic chemistry to shine, rapidly jumping between each other’s two line flows in the first verse.
“out of sight” shows each MC providing insight into how each of them earned a living and achieved their current status. Mike and El’s opening verse each details themselves robbing people in order to eat. El alludes to the fact that he crossed his accomplices in crime for the whole bag, while Mike details the fact his assailant tells him it’s an “honor” to be robbed by his mother’s only son.
While El-P’s production is the obvious stand out on first listen, Killer Mike comes through with one of the most sonically pleasing and technically proficient verses of 2020.

We the motivating, devastating, captivating
Ghost and Rae relating product of the fuckin' '80s
Coke dealin' babies, never regulating, bag accumulating
It would not be overstating to say they are underrating
The pride of Brooklyn and the Grady, baby
We don't need no compliments or confidence
Our attitude and latitude is "fuck you, pay me"

The dense, intricate rhyme schemes smack you in the face, almost distracting you from Mike’s delivery and blistering flow on the verse; flexing his legendary status while paying homage to his drug-dealing past. This absolutely stunning display of technical skill, story telling, and complex rhyming illustrates how RTJ seamlessly integrates the best of both old school and new school hip-hop.
“out of sight” also features a guest verse from 2 Chainz, and he continues to lay the braggadocio on thick. Considering Tity Boi’s dedication to trap stylings, his verse feels right at home on the flex track, despite it’s late 80’s tribute sample, a considerable departure from his usual sound palette.
Up until this point, I haven’t mentioned any of the El-P’s lyrics specifically. El-P is a great rapper, but Killer Mike… Well, Killer Mike is an incredible rapper. He’s the guy who draws you in. El-P is the one who lays the foundation for greatness and Mike is the show stopper, and that’s generally the case for most RTJ tracks. But on “holy calamafuck”, El-P seems determined to make people stop and ask, “Who the fuck is this?!”.
A sharp, yet nearly minimalistic drum kit backing a heavily distorted synthesizer melody lays beneath rhymically knocking cow-bells. This aggressively set stage allows Mike and El to flex as the dynamic duo they are, until the beat suddenly takes a turn for the chaotic. A gnarled, ultra-menacing synth overtakes everything while Mike screams into the abyss, until a distorted snare, enormous 808s, and skeletal hi-hats cut through and launch the beat switch into another dimension. The minimal, yet incredibly dark soundscape allows El-P to snap in a way I have never heard from him previously. His rhymes schemes are reminiscent of an old MF DOOM lyric notebook, while his topics flawlessly combine flexing, psychedelic use, and his well-cemented legacy in the hip-hop community. Cutting and pasting a few of his bars into this review could not convey a fraction of how stunning El-P’s performance on “holy calamafuck” is.
Slightly later in the track list, making liberal use of the Ether song “Gang of Four”, “the ground below” samples and loops the sharp guitar riff and adds aggressive, pounding drums as the basis for the beat; this is finally reminiscent of the forward-thinking, stridulous production El-P has built his reputation on. Capitalising on the classic RTJ moment, Mike and El both flex in their own unique ways. Mike compares himself to Godzilla taking on Tokyo, and El-P demands respect for his name as the legend he is, threatening to smack dying children for mispronouncing his name with his middle finger to the world; his complete disregard for human life and confidence in his abilities are summed up at the end of his verse.

You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit
Cancel my Hitler-killing trip
Turn the time machine back around a century

SO¢IAL JU$T-ICE (until my voice go from a shriek to whisper...)
While the first few tracks aren’t without their social and political themes, the back-end of RTJ4 is where Mike and El start to bust out the heavy topics. “goonies vs. E.T.”. starts off light, with El-P pointing to the irony of how once he finally started to make it “big” in the industry, the world began to descend into chaos due to climate changes, increasingly obvious social injustice, and political madness. He culminates his frustration with our disregard for the Earth with a fantastic quotable.

Fuck y’all got, another planet on stash?
Far from the fact of the flames and our trash
That is not snow, it is ash, and you gotta know
The past got a wrath, it’s a lover gone mad

Mike’s verse takes the light-hearted frustration expressed by El-P, and turns the aggression to the next level. Aiming his sights against the ruling class and their society that’s been designed to oppress people for profit, who have very meticulously painted themselves as celebrities and idols to the American public. Mike accepts that he will be villainized by these people for speaking against them, but he welcomes the nefarious role, knowing that the working class will eventually eat the rich, no matter how much they are stomped into the dirt.
And this is just the warmup.
If it’s possible for a song to represent a moment in time that captures the absolute shit storm that has been 2020, “walking in the snow” is that song. It’s release coincided perfectly with the protests for George Floyd which were sweeping the nation. Killer Mike’s verse directly references the phrase “I can’t breathe”, the last words of Eric Garner, which also happened to be the last words of Floyd as well. The fact that this verse was reportedly written in November 2019 perpetually underscores the importance of the content and perfectly represents how persistent this problem is. “walking in the snow” is a true encapsulation of both a defining moment in time and an ever-persisting issue.
But he doesn’t just stop at the racial injustice. Mike goes on an absolute rant about the American education system; how it’s not designed to teach people, but to discriminate against poor populations, limiting their legitimate opportunities, and therefore disproportionately leading them into a criminal lifestyle. He calls out the media as fear-mongers, and the apathy of the American public in the face of indecency. Fortunately for Mike, by the time we finally had the chance to hear this masterpiece, we were already on our feet, using this album as a war cry to mobilize against a tyrannical government that militarized against its own citizens simply for asking that we recognize systemic racism and demanding change. Killer Mike has the best verse of the year, no doubt in my mind.
The only drawback is that Mike’s verse is so fucking good that it completely overshadows El-P’s, which is also amazing. A menacing guitar riff and haunting synths kick the track off into a bouncy groove, where El-P unleashes a flurry of internal rhymes that does not relent for about half his verse. Even adding layers of social commentary within the densely packed bars, El refuses to quit and continues on his political tirade; criticizing ICE’s detainment center practices and the “pseudo-Christians” who support them, with a bar that now lives in my head:

Pseudo-Christians, y’all indifferent, kids in prison ain’t a sin? Shit
if even one scrap of what Jesus taught connected you’d feel different
what a disingenuous way to piss away existence, I don’t get it
I’d say you lost your goddamn minds if y’all possessed one to begin with

The combination of two of the best verses spit by any rapper(s) this year and production help from El-P and long time RTJ collaborator Little Shalimar, create a bouncy, aggressive, deeply truthful banger. “walking in the snow” not only encapsulates the crux of 2020 with lyrics that will become more powerful as they age, but will also forever be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and the determination to expose continuing racial and societal injustices.
The sonic palette of RTJ4 holds an extremely unique place in El-P’s discography. Jamie is the definition of a self-made 90’s hip-hop legend. This is the dude who put New York underground hip-hop on the map with Company Flow, and he did it with his unique flavor of dark, noisy, dense, boom-bap. Whether he was doing it with the help of Rawkus, or completely independently during his Definitive Jux run, El-P has never made music with the intention of becoming famous. Funcrusher Plus, Fantastic Damage,I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, and Cancer 4 Cure are all highly revered as industrial, technical, abrasive, and completely unsuitable for the radio or a party. The fact that three songs on RTJ4 could easily be heard on the radio, at a party, or in a TV series credits scene is frankly, astounding. In a 2002 interview/documentary on El-P’s budding record label Def Jux, he stated that his friend bet him $500 that he could not make a beat that was “happy”. At the time of the interview, El-P said that he had not won that bet yet. While I might not qualify the beats on RTJ4 as “happy”, if you showed El-P the beat for “JU$T” in 2002, I believe he might have won that bet.
Pharell opens “JU$T” with the pre-chorus, spitting varied examples of how we’re all slaves to our current system throughout the track, over echoing snares and bouncy 808s before bright synth chords and up-tempo hi-hats burst in while Killer Mike delivers the chorus, pointing to the fact that the majority of the people featured on American currency owned slaves at one point in their lives. Mike’s verse touches on the fact that he has committed crimes to get where they are today. Mike is publicly open about his past as a drug dealer. So why is he a criminal, but Benjamin Franklin isn’t? These are the people who built our country, and they built it on the backs of slaves. He illustrates this theme with a more recent examples:

You believe corporations runnin marijuana? Ooh (how that happen?)
and your country gettin ran by a casino owner (ooh)
pedophiles sponsor all these fuckin’ racist bastards (they do)

When corporations are able to sell cannabis legally, but the government continually incarcerates people who trap, our president is a notoriously fraudulent businessman, and the people who helped put him in power run a pedophile ring, yet none of them face consequences and are allowed to continue to profit and remain in power while people suffer; well, we might be closer to slaves than previously imagined.
Rage Against The Machine frontman Zach de la Rocha also makes his mandatory feature appearance at the end of “JU$T”. As the only artist to feature on three Run The Jewels albums, Zach is essentially an unofficial member of the group at this point. His fiery verse is spit with the same “Rage” energy that set him apart in the mid-90’s, ending the track questioning his place in a capitalist society as a recipe for his inevitable demise, since his “breath”, or art, as his weapon to express himself is still being exploited for other’s profit.
Continuing with RTJ4’s heavily synthetic sonic palette, “never look back” features wavering synth leads resting above the slow-jams snappy snares and thumping bass, while a haunting voice echoes in the background. This unsettling aura provides additional gravity for Jamie and Mike to continue self-reflecting on defining moments in their childhood, and as well as how far they’ve come from those moments. Mike and El are both self-made men, and while they have a certain fondness for those gritty moments that defined them, moving forward in life is undoubtedly more important.
Skeletal drums reminiscent of a slowly pounding heart opens “pulling the pin”, before rhythmic hi-hats and textured, watery synths fluttering in the upper register resting above a bouncy synth lead, and punchy 808s, burst in. The track digs itself into a slower, marching groove and shows the duo figuratively doing exactly what the title implies. Painting a portrait of a society that has turned on itself, Mike and El are ready to pull the pin and start over.
The duo both detail their despise for the ruling class, pointing out multiple examples of how the elite have designed our society to keep poor people in their class. Simultaneously recognizing their own hypocrisy for profiting in a system that inherently discriminates; Mike reflects on his own success, knowing that living the lifestyle he enjoys is one built on oppression, and expresses the guilt that has caused him. El-P opens with a brutal metaphor for police, implying that they’re the root cause of the “wretched state of danger” our society exists within, and that the only effective corrective action is to numb yourself with drugs. Despite his advice, Jamie knows this is not a permanent solution, but one that causes more self-inflicted wounds.
The final piece of the puzzle that is RTJ4, “a few words for the firing squad” begins to close the album with ever crescending strings, and loud, thunderous drums which never seem to resolve, continuing throughout their verses. While the drums that lead to nowhere can be sonically unpleasant, the unresolved melodies are intentionally representative of their current mindsets. Their verses are reflective and grim, but simultaneously optimistic and envisions a world where tragedy is a less common occurrence.
El is grateful for what he has now but recognizes his entire life has been skewed by traumas, so out of place feels normal for him. He reflects on his current success, noting that the worst people tend to end up with the most, which makes becoming “rich” something not as desirable as it once was.
Mike opens up about the death of his mother who died while he was on an airplane, admitting his struggles to not cope with his trauma with opioids. However, his wife provides him the most important reason to stay clean “but my queen/say she need a king/not another junkie rapper fiend” while a heartbreaking saxophone solo highlights the gravity of his lyrics.
The track ends with what sounds the like wrap-up voiceover to a TV show, a conceptually satisfying ending, as the opening track “yankee and brave (ep.4)” began with El-P stating:

”This week, on Yankee and The Brave”

This voiceover paints the duo as brothers on the run from the law and crooked cops, and while this does close this “episode” out as intended, the critic in me is bothered by the slightly kitschy outro to such a spectacular album. The voices singing over and over, “Brave, brave, braaaaaave, Yankee and the Brave” would be, simply put, better left on the cutting room floor. The ending of this track alone is what knocks my score of this album down a few points. Despite its stellar lyrical content, with drums that never seem to reach that “holy shit!” moment, and the easily skippable outro, it’s upsetting to me that an album this great ends on such a low note.
Overview
RTJ4 is by far my favorite album of the year. El-P’s cutting edge approach to their sound, blended with lyrical content that continues to be more relevant by the day, the duo have come together with what is objectively their most accessible album to date. RTJ4 is the natural evolution of sound and subject matter for the duo; taking the foundation set by Run The Jewels 3 and evolving it into a more concise, more accessible, and more conceptual album. While I still personally prefer the “fuck the world” intensity and experimental nature of Run The Jewels 2, RTJ4 opens themselves up to a whole new world of exposure, and when you’re as talented as these two, you know they’re going to capitalize on it. RTJ is currently at their apex, and they’ve created an album that will make many new life-long fans going forward.
9.2/10
Discussion Points

• How does this compare to other RTJ releases? How about in comparison to the member’s solo works?
  
• Does the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of this album surprise you?
  
• How will this be looked back on in 5 years?
  
• What are your favorite lyrics?
  

My take on Cyberpunk 2077.
I’m playing on a decently powerful PC ( i7 7700, GTX 1070 Ti, 1TB SSD, 32GB DDR4 RAM), and I only started after the game was patched to v1.04. Female V, Street Kid background, on Hard difficulty. I'm not particularly far into the game, as I've been busy with work and also just exploring. Maybe 25% or so done.
I’ve patched the PC version to 1.05. Glitches have been minor, non-gamebreaking graphical issues, mostly things just looking weird. Not common, and more amusing than distracting / infuriating. No crashes, one T-pose, some dumb A.I. stuf. I had one issue where Johnny kept repeating some line about a casino, but I found fast-traveling back to the casino lets the game flag the dialogue as complete and it goes away.
I also used to play the tabletop Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG, so I’m quite familiar with the setting and the changes.
Things to know:
* Despite being based on a popular RPG, it’s more like Mass Effect or the Witcher III vs. Fallout or Skyrim. Your path is just more about if you’re going to respond as a noble anti-hero or an obnoxious dickhead. It’s more Paragon / Renegade responses to the same choice vs. making massive, world-changing decisions. Also, unless this happens later in the game, your background doesn't make a massive difference in the game. Going Nomad or Corpo or Streetkid just seems to change the prologue, give you a few unique dialogue options, and probably a few sidequests. Sort of like the FemShep background in Mass Effect. I was hoping it would be more like the original RPG, where a Corpo could request corporate assets, the Nomad could call in their family convoy, etc.
* The game earns its M-rating. Profanity, violence, gore, and heavily sexualized in-world advertisements that are HEAVILY focused on conventional heterosexual male gaze (Although someone pointed out to me that the Watson Whore ads actually feature a feminine male individual in thigh-high boots, and not a woman as I originally thought). I get it. It’s a dystopia where corporations exploit anything and everyone for profit, but sheesh. It’s 2077. Let’s extrapolate out how 57 years of progress would affect gender and sexuality and really blur the lines. I doubt a transwoman model would be shocking in 2077, even one that is visibly well hung.
You’d think 2077 would have cyborg models that resemble something out of the grotesque Maelstrom transhumanist gangers. I mean, I like porn, and seeing tits and dicks isn’t going to offend me. It’s just so widespread that it loses any shock or titillation value, and it’s too close to actual “sexy” ads that it isn’t an effective satire or parody of hyper-sexualized marketing. I did smirk at going into a Night City sex shop and seeing a display of a female mannequin pegging a male mannequin, so it’s not like I’m completely above cheap titillation.
Pros:
· Graphics are absolutely gorgeous
· Sound is great, as well as voice-acting. A certain mainstream actor sounds a bit flat, which isn’t uncommon for traditional actors doing voicework.
· World-building and storyline is engrossing.
· Some of the in-game humor is genuinely funny. Some of the relationships with your NPCs is genuinely touching.
· When the game’s missions really embrace the source material, it’s really cool. Like rescuing a rich woman from bio-scavengers stripping her for her high-end cybernetic parts like a Ferrari in a chop shop, and having to un-jam the interference chip that is keeping her internal alarm system from alerting a heavily armed Trauma Team, or corralling rogue A.I. taxi cabs.
· Music is nice and setting appropriate. The licensed music on the radios is great.
· Weapons are neat and have some cool sci-fi features not found in modern shooters. Armor is available in everything from bulky military vests to clubkid wear.
· Braindancing is genuinely cool.
- Some fanservice for Cyberpunk 2020 players, such as Jack Entropy, Morgan Blackhand, Rogue and Johnny Silverhand. There's even a flashback to the distant past of 2023.
- Once you get the rhythm down with weapons, mods, cybernetics, and combining hacking, tech, and firepower and you start ripping through entire gangs like a true street samurai, it is a fucking rush. Scouting, marking targets, disabling security cameras, then stunning the Alpha Dawg with a hack of his cyberware or nervous system, wounding them all with a frag grenade, charging in with a poly-diamond-carbide katana, then retreating to patch yourself up and popping a few guys through cover with a Tech Rifle before finishing off the last guys with a Smart Shotgun feels AMAZING.
Cons:
· Driving is a bit wonky at first, due to the fact you’re using the A/D keys for left/right, vs. an analog control stick. Seems easier on a motorcycle.
· Combat is a bit annoying at the beginning, as enemies are Borderlands-style bullet-sponges. The original RPG’s Friday Night Firefight combat system emphasized that people don’t magically become more resistant to bullets with experience (outside of armor or implants), and a single, well-placed bullet can drop a rookie Netrunner just as easily as a veteran Solo.
· The breaching mini-game is rather repetitive. I finally figured out the Vertical-Horizontal-Vertical pattern.
· Some of the in-game tutorials or level requirements are unclear or misleading. Like how to disrupt an enemy Netrunner trying to overheat your cybernetics, or what the actual patterns are for the hacking mini-game, although you should have enough time to trial & error a solution. It’s far too easy to stumble into a random encounter or sidequest that you are massively underpowered for (such as the bare-knuckle brawling). It’s even weirder since Witcher 3 did an excellent job of preventing this.
TIPS:
· Upgrade your Cyberdeck as soon as possible, preferably with a Blue or Purple Grade one. This really ups your hacking prowess.
· Sell anything white, and break down anything Green or above.
- There's an Intelligence perk that highlights hostile Netrunners in Amber instead of Red like every other enemy mook. Very, very handy.
- Some of the Power sniper rifles will still penetrate cover, even if they're not a Tech rifle. The slow rate-of-fire, but heavy single shot SPT32 will punch through cover. Very handy for taking out mooks you've marked. There's a Blue crafting recipe, and it's still pretty devastating.
· Mix up your skills. You can’t raise a sub-skill above an attribute, so if you have Reflexes at 7, and Handguns at 7, using a pistol won’t raise your handgun skill to 8 until you boost Reflexes to 8. So switch to a shotgun or melee weapon.
· It doesn’t seem like your character is affected by Cyberpsychosis. In the original RPG, to prevent everyone from going to a full Robocop / Adam Smasher total body conversion, the more hardware you added, the more humanity you lost. Go nuts at the Ripperdoc!
· Melee weapons are surprisingly effective in the 2070s. I avoided them, then tried them out of curiosity when I got an Iconic katana. I didn’t expect to run through a squad of Maelstrom creeps like a Cuisinart with severed limbs flying. MILD SPOILER: There’s a Maelstrom cyborg who is one of the Cyber-Psychos. She’ll close in and slice you to ribbons if you try to shoot her. Duel her, and parry her Mantis blades.
· Don’t forget your grenades! Using grenades helps boost your Engineering skils.
· If you get too many health kits or grenades, you can break them down.
· After hacking a security camera, you can manually reach up to it and permanently switch it off. This prevents it from being turned back on, AND boosts your Engineering skills.
· Hiding bodies in dumpsters, crates, car trunks gives you Stealth XP.
· I’m still searching for a good way to boost Athletics besides running and climbing everywhere. I believe parrying melee attacks with a katana boosts this.
· You can drag someone to a body dump site with your initial chokehold, then kill them and stash their body with one button press once you’ve dragged them to a body dump site.

7 Days to Die Alpha 19 Newbie Guide (PC Version)
I've seen a number of posts looking for a "how to play," or "introduction," to the game. This is my attempt to write one.
At the beginning of the game, you wake up video-game naked (i.e., in your underwear) and completely ignorant. Your goal is to survive, which is made harder by a) your nude ignorance, and b) the fact that you're living in the aftermath of a combined zombie/nuclear apocalypse.
Your character has four on-screen meters showing your status: food, water, health, and stamina (or call it whatever you like -- fatigue, energy, etc.).
Food and water levels go down unless you eat or drink something. They go down faster if you're doing something that burns stamina (like running). They go down faster if you're too hot or too cold (which is usually only an issue in biomes like desert or snow when you're not properly dressed). They can also go down faster with certain health effects (like getting dysentery -- I'll talk about these effects in a second). Run out of food or water and you will die. (Pay attention to the status bars; in real-life survival situations, regularly getting water is more important than food, but in-game, they both matter.) (Pro tip: Food and drinks you can make yourself are better in many ways than canned goods or basic crops.)
Health is just like in any other video game. It goes down when you get hit, or fall, or step on pointy things like spikes or cacti. Run out of health and you die. Eating food, using certain medical supplies, or just waiting will cause health to go back up. Again, certain health effects may nerf your health bar.
Stamina shows when you're tired. If you run out of stamina, then you can't swing weapons or tools, run, jump, or do other elements of an active post-apocalyptic lifestyle. The good news is that your stamina comes back faster than health while waiting. Drinking improves stamina recovery, and eating gives a temporary boost to maximum stamina. The bad news is that you will be using stamina constantly as you go about your day. (Pro tip: Check out the various beverages in the game to find stamina benefits -- particularly red tea and coffee, also known as the mining combo.)
Alpha 19 has a variety of different health effects that can hamper your food and water consumption, your health/stamina recovery, your maximum health/stamina, your speed, or your ability to use tools. Dysentry comes from eating rotting flesh or drinking unboiled water. Don't do that if at all possible. (Pro tip: You can eat animal fat and snowberries -- or yucca fruit in the desert biome -- if you run out of food in the first couple of days.) Other de-buffs come from injuries. The good news is that if you click on the icon showing the effect, it will bring up your character with info on exactly what you need to mitigate the effect, e.g., put on a splint or a cast to speed healing from a broken leg. Two particular health effects worth calling out are bleeding and infection. If you're bleeding, your screen will flash and your health will keep dropping. Use a bandage, medicated bandage, or medkit to stop it. ANYBODY can make bandages from cloth, so keep some with you. Infection refers not to gangrene, but to the dreaded zombie infection...a disease so horrifying that it helped usher in the fall of civilization. The ONLY way to cure this dangerous disease is...to eat some honey or take an over-the-counter antibiotic. Really, infection should only ever be a serious issue in the first week. (Pro tip: using an ax on tree stumps has a random chance to drop honey.)
Encumbrance: You have a fixed number of inventory slots. You will note that three rows are clear at the start of the game, while the final two rows are not. Those extra rows represent encumbrance, and filling them up will significantly slow you down and increase your stamina usage. Try to avoid that outside of cleared or safe areas. You can increase the number of non-encumbered slots with clothing and armor mods, or through the Pack Mule perk. I recommend finding or making pocket mods ASAP and skipping the perk, though a single level in the early game can make things easier for newbies. (Pro tip: Some items, like most raw materials, food, drinks, medicines, etc., stack in inventory; some items like clothing, mods, and weapons do not. Smart inventory management when looting and salvaging will keep that in mind: do I really want to pick up that pair of shoes, or hold onto that dirty water that will stack if I find more?)
All right, now that the basics are out of the way, how do I get better at surviving? The answer to that is two-fold. 1) Learn how to do more things. 2) Get better stuff.
How do you learn more things? You get experience points (xp) from almost everything in this game. Eventually, when your xp bar fills, you will gain a level and get a perk point. You can use that to select perks, which all have various benefits. At the start, you will get a series of basic quests that serve as a mini-tutorial, and you will gain 4 perk points from finishing them (make sure you complete them!). (Pro tip: Upgrading blocks, e.g., turning flagstone walls into brick walls, is an exceedingly generous way of earning xp in Alpha 19; using a hammer on a block will tell you what material is needed to upgrade it.)
Which perks should I pick first? Well...as a newbie, I recommend Lucky Looter (which improves your chance of finding good stuff), either Pummel Pete or Skull Crusher (depending on whether you want to use clubs or sledges), Sexual Tyrannosaurus (which improves your stamina usage), and something from the Fortitude recovery perks. Healing faster, using less food, or running away are all useful. Ask a different player and you will get wildly different suggestions. Eventually, you will figure out your preferred style of play and pick things accordingly. Note that perks tend to be useful to different degrees based on whether you are in early, mid, or late game.
The other way to learn stuff is to find skill books and schematics. Schematics let you craft new things. Skill books give you a free perk, basically. Collect all seven of a type to get a bonus perk. Some of those are quite useful. Some of them are very circumstance-specific. Regardless, reading an unread book or schematic at least nets you bonus xp. You can tell that you've read a book by the tiny book icon (it will be open if read already). Even if you've read it, you can keep it and sell it for some cash. (Pro tip: Technically, schematics and books stack in inventory; in practice, finding multiple copies of the same one in a single POI is relatively rare.)
How do I get better stuff? There are three ways to do that: 1) Loot it; 2) Make it; 3) Buy it.
Looting: There are many objects that serve as containers in the game. Some objects, like cars, may or may not be a container. Just get close. If you get the option to search it, then it is a container. Not every container will have stuff. Searching containers takes time and makes noise. Locked containers need to be disassembled or have the lock picked in order to open them. Alpha 19 changed looting to be highly level- and time-dependent. You will not get top-tier loot in the early game. Even if you somehow fight your way to the roof of the Shotgun Messiah weapons plant on Day 1, you are likely to find stone spears and maybe a blunderbuss. (Pro tip: a pair of lucky goggles will increase your chance of finding better loot when opening a container for the first time.)
Crafting: If you know how to build something, and you have the necessary ingredients, and you have access to the correct work area, then you can create something from scratch. Perks and schematics will tell you how to build stuff, though there are a handful of things you can build right at the start (like you saw in your tutorial quests). Ingredients can be looted, or you can salvage them by destroying items. See the next paragraph for more on this. Lastly, some items require you to be at a workbench, chemistry station, campfire, or forge to create (there will be an icon next to the item in the build list telling you which). You can build all of these work areas if you know how, buy them from traders, or use ones you find scattered around the world. Traders have one of each, though they probably won't all be functional (but the broken ones can be looted, at least). Caveat: In Alpha 19, you can build up to level 5 gear (higher level gear is usually better and has more slots for mods), but level 6 gear can be found or purchased. Level 6 gear is typically better than anything you can build of the same type.
Salvage: Getting raw materials can be done in a number of ways. Use tools (axes, picks, wrenches, shovels) to extract things from blocks in the world. This is mostly fairly intuitive -- shovels work best on dirt, cement, etc., while axes are good on wooden items like tables and trees. Tools have different levels and can be modded to improve their abilities. Pay attention to the "block damage" stat of the tool to compare them. Some blocks are better sources than others. You can find mineral nodes scattered around that provide you with coal, iron, nitrate, oil shale, or lead, and those are excellent sources (Pro tip: the nodes are just the tip of the mineral iceberg; you can dig down to extract more ore.)
Another way to get raw materials is to use the scrap command in inventory (personally, I found the hotkey for this a little too easy to hit accidentally, so I remapped it). This includes most useful items of gear, as well as certain decorative items like faucets and chairs that you can pick up. Note that many metal items can be put in the forge to smelt them down for more resources than you get using the scrap command, including iron tools. (Pro-tip: Smelting radiators that you get from disassembling cars, heating radiators, and AC units is a great source of brass for crafting ammo; you can also smelt Dukes...but you're usually better off using them to buy ammo from a merchant.)
Buying: Merchants are scattered over the map. Setting up a base near one is a good idea. The post-apocalyptic currency in this game is the Duke, a brass coin that looks like a casino chip. (There are no bottle caps in this game!) If you don't have any money, then you can instead trade your labor for payment. Complete a quest and you'll get cash, xp, and a free prize of some kind (you get a choice -- ammo, meds, gear, etc.). Quests boil down to: retrieve a package, kill some zombies, kill some zombies AND retrieve a package, or dig up and retrieve a package. In the early game, in particular, quests can be very lucrative. (Pro tip: The Daring Adventurer perk can improve the rewards you get from quests if you decide you want to focus on that aspect of the game.) Merchants sell all sorts of things: food, raw materials, weapons, armor, vehicles, skill books, schematics. Their inventory resets daily-ish, so pop back on a regular basis.
Cheesy pro-tip: When you trigger a quest location, the POI will refresh to an "unexplored" state. This automatically refills all of the loot, etc., as well as repopulating the zombies. You can clear the location, then trigger the quest and clear it again for double the rewards. Just don't leave any loot inside a container that will refresh.
What about combat? Why haven't you really mentioned the z-word yet? Well, honestly, you'll probably spend a lot more time salvaging and looting than fighting (with the exception of Blood Moon horde nights, which I'll talk about below). Most zombies in the early game are slow and fairly easy to avoid. If you can avoid getting mobbed, then you will probably be all right.
Animals, however, will mess you up. You will quickly start yawning when you see a single stumbling housewife zombie, but a wolf will continue to be a threat well into the mid-game. Zombie animals are also a threat. Zombie dogs are fairly easy to kill but come in packs of 3-7. Zombie bears will soak up more damage than you can easily dish out in the early game. Zombie vultures are hard to hit and are really good and causing lacerations and bleeding. I've gotten infected by zombie animals far more commonly than I have from human zombies.
Zombie dogs, coyotes, wild cats, and wolves: running works until you run out of stamina, and then you're dead. The best bet in the early game is to find someplace high they can't reach and snipe them if you have enough arrows or ammo. These animals can and will sneak up on you. The good news is that they will make random noises that will let you know they're in the area.
Snakes: I've seen these in the desert and wasteland biomes. Good eatin', but they are quiet and can attack without warning. Luckily, they die easily.
Wild pigs: Don't bother them. Seriously, just leave them alone until you have good guns.
Bears and zombie bears: The good news is that they won't chase you as easily as some other animals. They are also not as fast and you can outrun them. The bad news is that if you get cornered, they can take and dish out huge amounts of damage.
Zombie vultures: These will attack you if you're injured, or are riding a vehicle. Shotguns are the easiest way to deal with them. Hitting them with melee weapons is an irritating chore that often ends with negative health effects. Possibly the most annoying creature in the game.
Deer, rabbits, and chickens: They don't attack, but run if attacked. They can be a good source of meat. (Pro tip: you can get quests from slips of paper you find in loot; the ones asking you to do things like, "kill a bunch of rabbits by throwing cans of Sham at them," are never worth it unless you're desperate to try something new.)
As the game advances, and as you explore some of the larger points of interest (POI), you will run across more dangerous zombies. Feral zombies have glowing eyes and always move at a full run. Crawlers will jump around like demented jackrabbits. Glowing versions of zombies regenerate health. A good rule of thumb is that if something is different about a zombie, it probably is more dangerous. (Pro tip: Quite a few POI's have alert triggers that will cause a bunch of nearby zombies to wake up at once, and stealth doesn't avoid tripping them; best to always have a clear avenue of retreat when entering a new location.)
Weapon selection: As said earlier, clubs and sledgehammers are your basic melee option. Either works well for the early game or to save ammo or hit quietly in the later game. Spears, axes, and knives/machetes can also be used, but they require more practice and really NEED perks to be fully optimized. Note that knives and axes are mostly meant to be tools. Stun batons require another source of damage, either turrets or other players, to be effective, and are also perk/mod-dependent.
Bows can easily kill basic zombies quietly with a headshot. Use the best bow or crossbow and the best ammunition that you can. Do away with stone arrows/bolts as soon as you can find or build the iron versions. You'll need to decide for yourself if you want to keep using bows once guns are available. I like them, but your mileage may vary. (Pro tip: There is a skill book that allows you to craft flaming and explosive arrows; sadly, there is no way to ride around in a Dodge Charger, shooting exploding arrows out the window while Dixie plays from the car horn.)
Guns are easily the best option in the game...and while perks can make them more effective, they aren't necessary. Don't hesitate to pull out a shotgun just because you put all your perk points into pistols if you run out of 9mm ammo. There is a fair amount of ammo in this game, and you can make more...but I always keep a club or sledge with me just in case. Having a gun makes exploring the harsher biomes a lot easier. The trade-offs for gun selection are pretty in line with any other game that has guns. Some burn ammo quickly. Some have low ammunition capacity. Some are better at long range. (Pro tip: having several loaded blunderbusses or double-barreled shotguns in your tool belt can provide an early-game rapid-fire option for dealing with tougher opponents.)
Weapon perks and skill books: Each type of weapon has an associated perk, and an associated skill book set. Maxing out both can make a fairly sizeable difference, and can have some unexpected other benefits. For example, one of the skill books gives you a 10% barter bonus if you happen to be holding a .357 while trading.
Blood Moon Horde Nights: Every 7 days (by default), the sky will turn red. When night falls (hour 22 by default), a horde will spawn near the player. Every zombie in that horde will magically know exactly where you are and will rush at you to eat your delicious flesh.
The devs of the game have made it clear that they want you to FIGHT the zombies, and have gone well out of their way to make turtling behind defenses less viable. Zombies will break down walls -- even ones made of brick and concrete. They will dig to reach you. They jump on top of each other to climb to get you (like in the Brad Pitt zombie flick). As the game progresses, zombies will appear that are capable of spitting acid, or that act as suicide bombers (can you call it suicide bombing if they're already dead?). (Pro tip: Bomb zombies, also known as Demolishers, can be taken down by head or leg shots; shooting them in the chest is a bad idea, despite the fact that shooting the glowing spot is normally the best move in a video game.)
Having said that, building defenses and traps can be very effective at delaying or channeling zombies, and can effectively thin the horde. There are pretty much two approaches people use to deal with a horde night.

1. Find a POI that prevents the zombies from reaching you and then wait out the attack. Anyplace high with enough metal or stone to last for a while will work. Large stores, fire departments, skyscrapers, water towers, etc., can all work, though the smaller the location, the more quickly it will fall to the zombies eventually.
2. Build a fortress. This is usually a setup that includes auto-turrets, traps, spikes, and walls made of brick or concrete. Often, they're set up to lead zombies into a killing zone where you can shoot or bomb them into bits. There are many YouTube videos on different approaches, and they range from lore-friendly to extremely cheesy exploitations of the AI or physics engine.

Note that these two are not mutually exclusive. It's pretty common to use POI's at first and then try building your own, or to move back to POI's if your attempt at a custom fortress is less effective than you had hoped. (Pro-tip: Don't use your home base for horde nights...at least until you've got a LOT of experience fortifying against horde nights.)
Creating a home base: Every survivor needs a place to keep their stuff. Just like with a horde base, you can either re-purpose a POI or build your own from scratch.
If you use a POI, then make sure you put down your bedroll. That will keep sleeping zombies from respawning in the area. If you want to use a bedroll as a way of regularly resetting your spawn point, then you're probably better off building your own base. That said, a good POI to use as a base has height. Using a forge on the first floor is a good way to attract random zombies. It's also good to find someplace with brick or concrete walls, as they'll last longer against wandering foes. Also, keep in mind that you'll be going in and out a lot, so you don't want it to be too hard to get in and out. (Pro tip: lone zombies can't jump to ladders that are two blocks off the ground, but you can; this doesn't work so well with hordes, as they climb over each other.)
By default, zombies are faster at night, so early game nights are a good time to huddle up in a base and craft things. When you run out of things to craft, READ the descriptions of your perks, skill books, and the built-in journal entries. You'll be surprised how much information is buried in there. You can also take the time to look at the map and plan out the next day's activity. (Pro tip: Find a cluster of close-together POI's on the map, and put a chest or storage box in the middle to serve as a temporary loot repository; inventory item stacking means that having a collection point can mean many fewer trips back to your base with the fruits of your effort.)
Vehicles: Maps in this game are fairly large. The solution to moving about to different biomes (which have different resources and different POI's) is to make or buy a vehicle. Anybody can assemble vehicles if they have the right parts, but some of the parts are locked behind perks/schematics. Taking the first-level vehicle perk can be useful, as the bicycle isn't a bad starting vehicle and the perk unlocks wheels, which every other vehicle needs. (Pro-tip: the easiest way to get gas when out-and-about is to salvage the many derelict cars.) Zombies and wildlife are pretty harmless if you can speed past them...with the exception of vultures, which can be annoying enough to make you stop your motorcycle just to shotgun them out of the sky.
Mods: There are tons of clothing, weapon, and armor mods in the game. Read the descriptions, as they can have a huge impact on effectiveness. (Alpha 19 has no vehicle mods, despite the fact that vehicles have mod slots.) If you open an item for modding, then any mods in your inventory that can be used for that item will start flashing, making it easy to see which mods go with that item. (Pro tip: There is a boot mod that reduces falling damage that is worth its weight in gold. Not only is it really easy to fall in some POI's, but the de-buff from spraining or breaking a leg when zombies are about can be utterly lethal.)
Power tools: Power tools are very powerful. Augers and chainsaws harvest materials very rapidly. They also use gas and make a ton of noise. They tend to quickly attract screamers, which are zombies that scream until other zombies show up to find out what all the fuss is about. Kill them quickly to avoid hordes interrupting your mining. (Pro tip: The physics engine of the game means that mine collapses are a thing, and they can be deadly; shoring up the ceiling with wood blocks can help prevent this, but augers can mine so quickly that you can lose track of how deeply you've gone beyond your supports.) The annoying pinging noise made by augers is an Alpha 19 addition that was generally disliked by everyone.
Repairing items: Many items like tools, weapons, and armor will degrade over time. Weapons and tools will let you know they need repair...typically when you need them the most. Armor never notifies you. It just stops working. Check your item status bars to figure out when to repair them. Simple tools and weapons can be fixed with wood and stone. More sophisticated items require repair kits. In Alpha 19, repair kits are a generic fix-all for any advanced item, which greatly simplifies things. They can be crafted with forged iron and duct tape. (Pro tip: forged iron can be made in any forge, but you can also salvage them from disassembling weight sets, desk and gun safes, and NON-FUNCTIONAL vending machines; salvaging them can be tedious in the early game but can be worth it to keep your precious firearms and armor functioning.)
Farming: You will find seeds, or you can take a perk or find a schematic to craft seeds. It takes five cobs of corn to create one corn seed, which is odd given that the whole grain is basically made of seeds...but chalk it up to game-play balancing. To plant a seed, you need a farm plot (except for mushrooms, which can grow on any surface), which you can craft with wood, rotting flesh, clay, and nitrate. Once planted, it will grow in three stages. Harvest it at stage 3 by punching the plant, and it will revert to stage 1 and deposit the appropriate food item into your inventory. If you accidentally harvest the seed, just replant it. If you want to get physically fit, do a push up in the real world every time you accidentally punch the ground or the air instead of your crop. (Pro tip: Don't harvest with a mostly full inventory, as if your tool belt slot is the last open spot, the crop will go there, and your next attempted punch will instead eat the last one you harvested.)
Electricity: Fire attracts zombies like moths. Using electric lights is a convenient way to avoid that, as zombies are Luddites and don't care for the products of industry. The most convenient way to light up your home base is with lanterns, but you need to find a certain skill book to make them. The good news is that their batteries never need recharging. You can also get flashlights, or mods that attach lights to your helmet or your weapon (press F to pay your respects...er, sorry, to turn on your light). You can also craft a variety of stand-alone electric lights, but that requires a separate energy source.
Energy sources come in three varieties. Battery packs hold up to six car batteries and drain the batteries over time. You can recharge the pack by connecting it to a different energy source. Generator banks hold up to six engines (recoverable from many derelict vehicles, among other sources) that burn gasoline to provide power. Solar banks contain solar cells and generate power as long as they are in sunlight. They also cannot be crafted and are as expensive as hell. (Pro-tip: Higher-level batteries last longer; use level 1 and 2 batteries to craft vehicles, sell, or smelt for lead, and keep the better ones for the battery banks.)
Use wiring tools to connect energy sources to energy consumers. There are some slightly wonky rules to how you can connect, but it isn't hard to learn with a little trial and error. Wiring doesn't cost you anything, so experiment freely. You can put various switches between the consumer and the source: toggle switches, pressure plates, and motion sensors being the most common, though there are other options. Switches require power, but less power than an active consumer. This allows you to, for example, conserve power in the daytime by turning off active defenses and lights so you don't waste battery charge or gasoline. (Pro tip: a solar bank charging a full battery bank will provide quiet, continuous power, at which point you can feel free to light up your place like a Vegas casino 24/7.)
Stealth: Some players will tell you stealth is impossible in this game. That is not true. What is true is that some situations negate stealth, most particularly Blood Moon hordes. Just tell yourself that the red moon makes their senses so acute that they can smell a living human from a mile away -- if you can't rationalize it away as a game balance issue. Some POI's also have event triggers that are based on your location rather than how stealthy you are being. Chalk that up to dramatic license. This is a game where zombies are real and I can carry a motorcycle in my boot. Get over it.
There are some things you need to know about stealth, though, to do it effectively. Your stealth rating is a combination of noise and visibility. Clomping around in heavy armor, waving a torch or flaming club around, or using a flashlight will make you easy to notice. Firing a gun, whacking a wrench against a metal appliance, or jumping up and down on a pile of trash will also make you easy to notice. That means using light armor, using a bow or melee weapon, and crouching are all ways to avoid being seen.
There are a number of skill books, perks, armor and weapon mods, and craftable gear that can all make you more stealthy. With diligence, you can walk up behind a sleeping zombie, smack him in the head with a sledgehammer, and not disturb the other one right next to him. Will this make the game much easier? I would argue no. It certainly makes some specific situations much easier. Clearing out a mini-horde in a POI with a bow before they wake up can be much less stressful, certainly. The lack of universal effectiveness definitely makes it a playstyle choice, however, rather than an over-powered build to avoid if you want a challenge. (Pro-tip: Stealth is never a 100% guarantee, which is why you always carry stacks of wood; wood is incredibly flexible, as it lets you drop cheap spike traps in narrow passages, climb up easily to places zombies cannot reach, make bridges across open gaps, craft doors to seal off openings that foes have to make noise to get through but that you can open easily, etc.)
That's about it. The most important pro tip is this: this is an open-world game where the only thing that matters is that you have fun playing it. It doesn't matter if you want to do single-player, or multi-player, or if you like crafting more than combat, or prefer spears over guns. You bought the game. Do what you like, as that is really the only goal.

Update Notes: Sept 10, 2020

New Dungeons

The main feature of this update doesn't need a lot of patch notes: there's two new dungeons to explore! One is a group dungeon that can be reached from the Fae Realm. The other is a solo experience inside Hogan's Keep (which will require you to be on good terms with Hogan to get in). There's also a new skill that can be learned in one of them.
We plan to do a little bit more with each dungeon (decorations, a few lore notes, side quests, etc.), but these are ready for you to test! We're particularly interested in feedback regarding problems with dungeon flow or monster difficulty (too easy/too hard).

Aurest Missions

The Autumn Resistance is looking for mighty heroes who are willing to work for Councils. Each day there's a different high-level group dungeon available from the local Aurest leader, who can be found in the casino (usually near the bar).
To speak with Lady Alethina, you'll need to be famous enough for her to have heard of you (Notoriety 25), and have two combat skills level 50+. And on some days, the daily mission has a higher level requirement than 50.
There are 7 different Aurest missions (so far). Each day a new mission is chosen randomly, leaving out the ones that ran the past four days. So you won't see the same quest too quickly in a row.

Goblin Dungeon Revamp

We've remade the "Goblin Dungeon" (under Castle Eltibule) with a new art set. The original dungeon was just too ugly: it was made during pre-alpha with placeholder art, and the textures were too low-res to be saved.
But we didn't want to make a NEW dungeon, we wanted to keep the old dungeon! So this is actually a replica of the old dungeon's layout. It uses approximately the same spawns, loot, monsters, etc. just with different dungeon art.
The old dungeon was unfurnished, so this replica is too. We'll definitely be fixing that, but first we want to make sure everything still works, more or less as it did before. If it doesn't, please let us know.

Combat Balance Changes

• Animal Handling pets have reduced health and armor (not very noticeable at low level, but reduced by 20-40% at level 80, depending on the specific pet)
• Significantly nerfed the damage of Elite and Boss monsters (by about 70-120 damage per attack, for level 80s).
• (But note that their Rage attacks weren't nerfed! They deal approximately the same damage as before.)

Manticore Changes

Manticores are involved in one of the new Aurest missions, and have been refactored for that purpose.

• Nerfed the hell out of manticores' stats
• Nerfed loot also
• Changed respawn rate to be more typical (to make it plausible for a group of level 55s, say, to farm them)
• Hegemonic Storage Keys drop much more often, although the amount of loot from the hegemonic chests is reduced a bit

Other Changes

• Fixed animation issue with golems that made them seem to blip around as they walked
• Fixed animation issue with trolls that made them keep running when they should have stopped
• Frost Hippogriffs, which were previously just blue versions of regular Hippogriffs, now have more distinctive attacks
• Solving the vault puzzle in a War Cache now also gives out 1-4 sacks of Councils, as well as a random piece of gear as before
• Emotes like /wave and /cry now have a different message when you have something selected, versus when you have nothing selected
• Added "/thank" and "/cheer" emotes (which just perform a waving animation for now)
• You can no longer butcher Striga for meat (because they are sentient)
• Fixed display issue that caused all Elite/Boss monsters to have the Thick Armor descriptor. (This wasn't technically a bug, because all Elites do get some thick armor automatically. But this made it impossible to differentiate typical elites from elites that have a LOT of thick armor. Now only the thickest elites are so labeled.)
• Recipe for Forensic Analysis Kit now requires a higher-quality first aid kit
• Tweaked Qatik's Casino Excursion quests to actually require you to pick up the items requested
• "Labyrinth" dungeon tweaks: entrance is easier, Asterion is nerfed a bit, final maze has a somewhat more reasonable monster distribution, added a map
• Laura Neth now accepts work orders from animals
• Fixed bug with treasure generation on Fairy Dirks
• The emergency-exit portal at the bottom of the Wolf Den dungeon could not be selected (except at a very odd angle)
• Fixed a bunch of ability buffs that could persist even after the caster switched combat skills. In some cases this could be exploited by rapidly switching loadouts to gain the benefits from more than two combat skills at once. We've fixed many of these type of bugs, although we're still rooting them out of nooks and crannies of the game and some probably still remain. Please report them! It is never intentional for you to keep the benefits from a combat skill that's no longer active.
• Fixed a few abilities and treasure effects that boosted Movement Speed when they were supposed to boost Sprint Speed. (The difference is that Movement Speed also boosts fly/swim speed, and prevents roots/slows from being as effective.)
• Moderately increased the cash value of higher-level magic items. (Only applies to newly-generated weapons.)
• Fox Outpost defense crystals no longer shoot foxes on sight (other fox tweaks to come, just didn't fit in this update!)

Have y’all heard of the exploit where if you drop 32769 casino chips they become negative and you can redeem them for infinite caps? Well as it turns out, that works with sierra madre chips too. And you can use the negative chips in the vending machine at the abandoned bunker... i now have an infinite source of stimpacks, .308 ammo, chems, and weapon repair kits. Plus I could easily sell the stuff from the machines for infinite caps as well. Just thought I’d let y’all in on the best way to never let go :)

Skyfall's villains can blow this one up too
The Clarkson Review: Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante (Sunday Times, Oct. 13)
Of course I will go and see the new James Bond film, but I almost certainly won't enjoy it. I haven't really enjoyed any of them since Daniel Craig took over.
I know he wants his Bond to be fallible and weak, like the character in the books, but I don't want to see 007 swigging Heineken from a bottle that just happens to be label-side out, and I don't want to see him bleed, or fire his gun at something and miss. I want him to be Roger Moore, the cheeky chappie who could speak Latin, fly a space shuttle and lay anyone low with one of his signature karate chops.
Craig's Bond can't do that. In fact, if you actually stop and think what he's done in the past, you'd have to conclude he's completely useless. In Casino Royale, he didn't notice that the woman he'd fallen in love with was spying for the other side, and then, despite his best efforts, he let her drown in a lift. The next woman he lurved, in Skyfall, got shot in the head by a former colleague. Oh, and then he took an old woman who needed to go into hiding to his own bloody house. Where she and 007's gamekeeper wandered about on a darkened moor, with a torch, just in case the baddies needed even more help locating her.
Before that happened, though, Bond went to interview someone in Shanghai and ended up throwing him off a skyscraper. And in an earlier scene, he was shot by Miss Moneypenny. I'm telling you, Johnny English is better at espionage than this guy. So's Inspector Clouseau.
But the worst bit in Skyfall came when the director Sam Mendes decided to blow up Bond's Aston Martin. So he pumped it full of bullets until it exploded.
I'm sure, to the luvvie-in-chief, this was fine, because a car is just a collection of plastic and metal and glass. But a car is not just a collection of plastic and metal and glass. And Bond's Aston is more of a car than most. It has been a part of my life since I was four. I have owned many models, including one that would fire a small man under the sofa. And Mendes blew it up so he could get Craig to do some acting. I considered at the time filling Sam's dog with bullets until it exploded, just to show him how it felt.
The car was put back together in the next Bond film, Spectre — and it appears in the new movie as well — but it was like making Ring of Bright Water 2 and trying to argue that someone had sewn the otter's head back on.
I bet Aston Martin had a duck fit when it saw the DB5 reduced to a smouldering ruin, because Bond is its marketing department. He is its PR machine and its ad agency and its ambassador all rolled into one. So I bet it really did try to sew the DB5's head back on, because without 007, the company would have to maintain a public profile on its own. And it doesn't have the cash for that.
I'm not sure it even had enough cash to develop the car you see before you today. It's called — deep breath — the Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante, and sometimes you get the impression that you're tootling about in almost two tons of make-do and mend. With a bit of cast-off Mercedes tech to maintain a veneer of modernity.
To create it, Aston had to chop the roof off a normal DBS, but this meant finding somewhere to put the electric roof mechanism. That meant rerouting the massive exhaust system and that meant turning the fuel tank round and redesigning every body panel aft of the doors.
The company managed it, but sometimes the roof doesn't go down when you operate the switch, the boot is laughably tiny, and it gets so hot in there, owing to the exhaust system, you could roast a chicken. There's also a problem with the interior. Astonishingly, we got four adults in it, and that's impressive, but it is almost identical to the interior you get in a far cheaper DB11 Volante. And that's not good enough.
The basic starting price of the DBS Superleggera Volante is £247,500 and, I'm sorry, but if I'm going to blow a quarter of a million on a car, I don't want it to have the same innards as a car that costs almost £90,000 less. The trouble is, of course, that when you've spent all that money turning the fuel tank round, there simply won't be enough left to do the air vents as well. Or fit a glovebox.
It sounds like I have a real downer on this car, and I haven't finished yet, I'm afraid. Because superleggera is Italian for "superlight", and it just isn't. With a couple of people on board, it weighs more than two tons. Perhaps that's why it endlessly catches its chin-mounted skid plates on speed humps. And why its tyres are so thin you need to be very careful when you're parking, even against a dropped pavement, or you'll kerb the wheels. Perhaps Aston should have called it Supergrasso.
You can feel this weight when you're driving, too. It doesn't come across as a feisty little whizz-bang; it's no water boatman. But that said, it's fast. Rocket-ship fast. It's almost too fast, because on wet roads you would be well advised to treat the throttle with extreme caution or you will have a crash. You even need to be careful sometimes on dry roads.
And that raises a question. If you can't unleash all the volcanic fury without the back end having a few moments of panic, then why not save yourself the best part of £90,000 and get the DB11 Volante instead? Because you can exploit all the power in one of those, all of the time.And it has the same interior. And it's a little bit more civilised and comfortable.
It's almost as though Aston bit off more than it could chew with the DBS. Think of its engineers as pianists. They're accomplished enough to impress their friends and colleagues, but they're not really able to put on a penguin suit, walk onto the stage at the Royal Albert Hall and attempt Liszt's La Campanella.
If you attempt to build a 211mph car that costs £247,000, you need to make sure that you have the money to pull it off. Yes, the DBS Superleggera Volante is one of the best-looking cars ever made, and it's blisteringly fast and it makes some laugh-out-loud noises from the tailpipes, but as a package, it's flawed.
Hopefully, the new Bond film will be a gem and will keep alive the aura that surrounds the man and the car he drives. But I wouldn't count on it. The way things are going, they'll replace Craig with Anthea Turner and give her a Nissan Leaf. And that, I fear, would bring the curtain down on Britain's best-loved car-maker.
In the meantime, if you want an Aston because you, like me, grew up worshipping them, then don't despair because the DB11 Volante is brilliant. That sort of car at that sort of price? Nobody does it better ?
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He's not around to beat me, so I'll say it: Ginger was only the world's second-best drummer (Sunday Times, Oct. 13)
The drummer Ginger Baker died last week and everyone was very surprised because we all assumed the drug-addled wild man from Cream and Blind Faith had shuffled off this mortal coil years ago. It's customary, of course, when someone dies to gloss over their shortcomings and concentrate instead on their work for charity and their heroics in the war. But this is nigh-on impossible with Baker, who was almost certainly the most unpleasant man ever to grace a stage. He pulled a knife on Cream's bass player, Jack Bruce. He used his fists to settle almost every dispute. He broke the nose of the director who made a documentary about him with his walking stick.
Then, of course, there was the naked 11-year-old girl featured on the cover of Blind Faith's only album. That's such a difficult issue these days, none of the obituaries even mentioned it.
Instead, everyone concentrated on Baker's skills as a musician — but even here people missed the point, because despite what he claimed, he wasn't the best drummer the world has ever seen. Thanks to Mitch Mitchell, who played with Jimi Hendrix, he was the second best. I'm on Twitter if you want to argue.
Baker, however, could keep perfect time, even when he was full of heroin, which is quite an achievement. And he could maintain four different cross rhythms with each of his limbs. This is like rubbing your tummy, patting your head, pumping up a lilo and playing hopscotch all at the same time.
I have a drum kit. It's an enormous Pictures of Lily limited edition replica.
And after several years of weekly lessons, I developed a profound admiration for drummers, because they're doing something I can't do.
We can't admire people who can do what we can do. I don't admire anyone who can drive fast while shouting, but when I watch a dry-stone-waller creating a natural barrier using nothing but experience and big, warty hands, I become a statue of wonderment held upright by nothing but the tingling in my hair. That's what happens when I hear a drum solo.
A columnist last week said that words cannot begin to describe the "unstoppable misery" of the "nightmarish" drum solo. Plainly, he is the sort of man who thinks drummers are like houseflies. That they come, they make an annoying noise and then they die. And I literally could not agree less.
A drum solo allows the audience to marvel at the technical wizardry of the drummer. It allows us to concentrate on his incredible ability to get a whole arm from one side of the kit to the other faster than it takes a Formula One car to change gear. And to do it in perfect time.
It's been suggested that Ginger Baker invented the drum solo so his bandmates could have a moment to go backstage and top up whatever was missing at that moment from their lives. I doubt this, though. He didn't really like other musicians that much.
It's been reported that he called Mick Jagger a "musical moron". But that's not true. What he actually said was that the Stones were like "a load of little kids trying to play black blues music and playing it very badly". It was George Harrison he called a musical moron. And he dismissed Paul McCartney too, because, unlike him, McCartney could not sight-read music. Led Zeppelin? If you even mentioned them in his presence, you'd get a thick lip. He only really liked people we've never heard of. Phil Seamen was a hero of his, for example. And Art Blakey.
So no. Baker was on the stage doing his solos simply so we could hear how he'd fused the jazz music of his heroes with an altogether new and busy way of playing. He despised the 4/4 beat of rock and pop music, but it's possible that, because of what he did with Cream, he's partly responsible for it.
His solos were often more than 10 minutes long and were mesmerising. And soon drummers everywhere were trying to outdo him. Led Zeppelin's John Bonham did a 17-minute epic on the track "Moby Dick", and then you got — whisper this, because I'm friendly with Nick Mason and Roger Taylor — my favourite drummer, Phil Collins, duetting with Chester Thompson. They started out hitting bar stools and then moved to their kits for a drumming shootout. It's the best thing on YouTube.
And now? Well, there was the movie Whiplash, which everyone, apart from me, thought was weird — but on stage? In real life? There's nothing. The drum solo is dead.
I find that odd. There are still bands and some still have drummers, so why don't these people want the audience to see and hear them doing their thing? Isn't that like being a goalkeeper who never wants to make a save? The only explanation is that they actively hide at the back behind the bass and the guitar and the flashy vocals because they're not that good.
This sort of thing has happened before. Between 1750 and 1820, the world heard from Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, but since then, apart from a couple of little spurts, there's been nothing of any great consequence. And today? There's a woman in Iceland who turns drawings of turnips into classical music and there's Ludovico Einaudi, who provided the soundtrack for many of the Top Gear films I made. But that's about it.
Could it be that the same thing has happened with drumming? That we as a species were only ever any good at it between 1958 and 1978, and now we have lost the ability, in the same way that penguins have lost the ability to fly? Luckily, however, we still have the recordings from the days when drumming wasn't just an electronic nn tss nn tss nn tss nn tss and I've been listening to a lot of it all week. That's why I ended up revisiting "Can't Find My Way Home." You played on that one, Ginger. And now you have.
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And here's the Sun column: "Extinction Rebellion forget dole money, tents and yoga mats all come from… oil"
Clarkson is wrong by the way: Ginger Baker is only the world's fourth best drummer. The best and second best are Hal Blaine and Levon Helm.
Anyway, I have now caught up on posting all the Clarkson columns that ran while I was on vacation. Normal weekly posting will resume on Monday.

This is a compilation of all the posts by user ar_david_hh who summarises anti-Corruption news of the day along with other interesting news in one comment. It is linked from the sidebar->Interesting Threads->Anti-corruption. The list is ordered by date, newest first. Date format: D/M/YYYY. All credit goes to the sub's hero ar_david_hh
Previous compilation threads: Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
UPDATED DAILY

• NEWER ENTRIES
  
• 19/6/2020 News: (1) Russia responds to "cigarette smuggling". Mishik's hoax. (2) Govt rejects Gazprom's price-hike for public (3) Parliament vs Un-Constitutional Court (4) Ex-police chiefs charged (5) Serj's nephew facing 7yrs (6) Robik's dilemma (7) Gago's sectarian sheep (8) Fewer refugees (9)..
  
• 18/6/2020 News: (1) Big bills passed: public TV, elections, pensions, child trafficking (2) Court strikes down anti-corruption laws (3) Kocharyan's $4.1mln bail (4) Child care doubled (5) Serj, EPP & Nikol (6) COVID aid, microchip story, polls (7) Army audit (8) Sevan fishing (9) Fake news stories
  
• 17/6/2020 News: (1) Election fraud story. MPs held hostage. Death threats (2) Pashinyan criticizes NSS leaks (3) Tsarukyan's mother (4) BHK strikes back (5) Woman dies after falling victim to COVID micro-chip theory (6) Public TV. Fake news. Magic Wand. Foreign TV (7) Elder attend university (8)..
  
• 16/6/2020 News: (1) How a 2019 construction bribery bust led to a chain-investigation that uncovered documents about opposition leader's election fraud (2) BHK chief Tsarukyan loses immunity (3) Busing in non-Yerevan residents to vote in Yerevan (4) Tsarukyan's folks return 259mln (5) ID and glove
  
• 15/6/2020 News: (1) Yerevan's forest restoration (2) Constitutional reform (3) Tsarukyan's immunity (4) "Deal Leader" documents (5) MPs throw blows (6) Free masks. COVID research. Joggers (7) Artsakh's border tests (8) Hospital visits decline (9) Zoo residents (10) Wildfire (11) Lydian's wallet
  
• 14/6/2020 News: (1) BHK leader Gagik Tsarukyan accused of casino fraud, land fraud, voter buying. Dozens of raids and confiscations. (2) Workers claim they're pressured to attend a protest to support Tsarukyan (3) Allegations and counter-arguments about "persecution" (4) Tsarukyan's immunity as MP
  
• 12/6/2020 News: (1) North-South fraud. 29 charged (2) Azeri defector (3) ARM responds to EP (4) Shahumyan region (5) COVID & employment, tests, lung vents, beds, donations (6) Protesters arrested (7) Komitas performance (8) Emergency Order (9) Fake news (10) Remote work (11) Armenian bestsellers
  
• 11/6/2020 News: (1) Mining reforms (2) Kocharyan aide's $1mln (3) EP's rapporteurs (4) Edu. official's case (5) Nuclear loan. Russia comments (6) Firdusi (7) Fake news (8) COVID news (9) Criminal subculture (10) Amulsar mining (11) Yerevan's trees & buildings (12) Gas price (13) Cattle (14) To...
  
• 10/6/2020 News: (1) Գյուլնազ տատի (2) $22mln bribery (3) Deadly mining incident (4) Nikol fake anti-Russian? (5) World record set (6) Yerevan budget could spike (7) New cancer tech (8) COVID (9) Draper Uni. (10) Global Peace Index (11) IRS meets Tech Giants (12) Frunzik (13) Sports (14) Lake Sevan
  
• 9/6/2020 News: (1) Job for prisoners (2) Lake gets clean (3) Nuclear loan (4) QP & BHK deal blows. Civil society responds (5) How overloaded are courts? (6) Public is listening. Fewer COVID violations (7) Bed shortage gone (8) Conspiracist defunded (9) Cop's scheme busted (10) Seismic retrofit (11
  
• 8/6/2020 News: (1) Minasyan charged again; Offshore firm & SPAYKA; Laptop with 9000 deleted files; List of deals (2) New NSS chief not a career KGB-shnik (3) UCOM founder to buy Beeline (4) Judge acquitted (5) High tech (6) ex-police chief Vlad (7) COVID news (8) High tech (9) Soccer league (10)..
  
• 7/6/2020 News: (1) Dodi Gago comes out swinging (2) Armenian cards game (3) Good guy Colorado (4) Fake news for your entertainment (5) COVID unleashes hell (6) Crime plummets because of COVID (7) Internal tourism (8) Export stats (9) COVID donations (10) Major roads connecting Armenia-Artsakh
  
• 5/6/2020 News: (1) Points-based traffic rules show results (2) Tushonka's wife charged (3) ex-IRS chief's son charged (4) Cops charged (5) COVID stats, rules, enforcement, patients at home, anti-body tests (6) Govt agencies return savings (7) Banking stability (8) Canada won't arm AZ (9) Lanzarote
  
• 4/6/2020 News: (1) Army's weapon imports through offshore (2) Where does the gas money go? (3) COVID stats, measures, enforcement, aid, latest update (4) Vending machines sell masks (5) Armenian movie in Cannes (6) Your favorite cartoon (7) other stories...
  
• 3/6/2020 News: (1) Masks required everywhere (2) Shareholder transparency (3) Police reform (4) COVID vs employment (5) Protesters flip a car (6) Gloria factory bolola (7) Oghakadzev Park (8) Rocket found (9) Video in courts (10) Child interrogation reform (11) Fuel $ -31% (12) kalashnikov factory
  
• 2/6/2020 News: (1) Fugitive Prince's assets frozen; Sale of media outlets, hotels (2) Pashinyan promises curfew if... (3) Armenian airlines sanctioned (4) Gago's director charged (5) COVID update (6) Agricultural loot crates (7) Lake Sevan algae & fish (8) Ethnic minorities (9) Garabed Gospel
  
• 1/6/2020 News: (1) Parliament bans antibiotics in food; Other drug reforms (2) More gas from Iran (3) Armavir ex-mayor busted (4) Army retaliates in Nakhijevan (5) Crime stats (6) COVID update (7) Missing weapons (8) Parks (9) Prison food (10) Foreign affairs (11) Cash registers required (12)...
  
• 29/5/2020 News: (1) HHK MP is charged with embezzlement (2) MP's son charged with land theft (3) ECHR's Kocharyan verdict (4) COVID intensifies; Enforcement gets stricter (5) Kocharyan's vacation (6) Artsakh's new president aims unity (7) Gandhi (8) Renovations (9) Doing Business (10) Prprty Taxes
  
• 28/5/2020 News: (1) Armenia commemorates the independence struggle (2) COVID update; Raids, Restrictions, Conspiracy theories (3) High profile fight in Education Ministry (4) Mobile mammogram (5) Kocharyan's full verdict (6) Nemets Rubo in Russia (7) Property taxes (8) Meteorite light up the skies
  
• 27/5/2020 News: (1) Soviet army opens fire (2) 19th aid package (3) New human rights group (4) Environmental taxes (5) Luxury property tax (6) ECHR verdict on Kocharyan (7) Officials charged (8) Pashinyan comments cigarette smuggling story (9) COVID restrictions (10) Healthcare news (11) Press F
  
• 26/5/2020 News: (1) Digital overtakes Cash (2) Free healthcare expands (3) Neighborhood news (4) Stats on business layoffs, cuts, turnover (5) Electoral system reforms in provinces (6) Govt raises an alarm, stricter rules (7) Yerevan lands; Worker drama (8) Artsakh govt (9) Armenian nature (10)...
  
• 25/5/2020 News: (1) Qajaran mayor implicated in kidnapping and torture (2) Part 2: How Azeri officials collaborated with Nazis (3) Institutional police reform; Big salary & quality jump (4) Arthur Vanetsyan (5) COVID restriction & Latest (6) Competition (7) Wages & Economy (8) NBA in Armenia (9)..
  
• 24/5/2020 News: (1) Protests after raid ends with 4 arrests in Syunik (2) Story of how Azeri politicians collaborated with Adolf Hitler (3) No felony in Parliament (4) You're a farmer, Harry (5) Army says you shall not pass (6) Salty neighbors attack a lawyer (7) Price gauging busted (8) More...
  
• 22/5/2020 News: () Doctor's note magically disappears to help HHK official avoid jail () New law in action () Constitutional Court crisis () Armenian battalion () COVID stats. Hotel costs. () The GDP () President about population spread () Road repairs () Poultry industry () Climate change () ...
  
• 21/5/2020 News: (1) HHK MP charged with abduction & torture (2) Giant solar farm (3) Only 1 exam (4) Forest embezzlement (5) Yerevan district chief busted (6) COVID. Anti-body tests. Doctors needed (7) Soccer rules (8) Sauna found in university (9) Artsakh president's electric car (10) Inflation
  
• 20/5/2020 News: (1) Programming classes for COVID victims (2) HayPost deliveries (3) Test production (4) Bribery uncovers wider scheme (5) "Cigarette smuggling" update (6) Ex-oligarch cases more charges (7) Sales receipts plummet (8) Vroooom (9) Dod Exotic (10) Gold plates for $ (11) Stolen statue
  
• 19/5/2020 News: (1) Audit uncovers billions (2) High ranking NSS official quits (3) Fuel machinations uncovered (4) Foreign affairs (5) HHK activist is charged over Facebook post (6) COVID penalties & masks (7) COVID vs Real Estate (8) Conspiracies (9) Economy 2020 vs 2019 (10) Genocide archives
  
• 18/5/2020 News: (1) Armenia will produce buses (2) ex-SOC chief's court trial (3) Pashinyan's Q&A with media: Courts, Cigarette smuggling, $105mln recovered, Amulsar, WW2 & Nazis (4) Cassations Court boost anti-money laundering (5) "Pashinyan lied to you all" (6) USAID++ (7) PCs for kids (8) ...
  
• 17/5/2020 News: 100 facts about new Armenia. What has changed since 2019?
  
• 15/5/2020 News: (1) SIS charges NSS agents & Cops for letting a suspect flee (2) Judge charged with forgery (3) Fugitive ex-official faces 2bln abuse charges (4) HHK scorches EU for praising Armenia's achievements (5) Here are the rules (6) National Archive (7) Yerevan news (8) New ISP created
  
• 14/5/2020 News: (1) Housing subsidies to boost birthrate (2) 18th aid package (3) Church about child abuse convention (4) Hay Park (5) Judge's private info leaked (6) Military audit stats (7) COVID vs Marriages & Tourism (8) Masks required; Transport & preschools; Max 5 people (9) Visitors' fate..
  
• 13/5/2020 News: (1) The final days of Artsakh war (2) Drama over Parliament fight (3) MP attacked over voting record (4) Kocharyan's 3 petitions get rejected (5) Where do strawberries come from? (6) Ex-police official charged (7) Gloves & smoking (8) COVID reaches PM's office (9) PM roams around
  
• 12/5/2020 News: (1) Ejmiatsin mayor accuses "mafiosi" of fabricating stories after raids (2) Cigarettes story (3) Biggest Freedom House jump (4) Parliament drama (5) Robert Kocharyan (6) Judges approve 91% of arrest warrants (7) Remittances from abroad (8) Central Bank protest (9) More inside...
  
• 11/5/2020 News: (1) Massive campaign to make Yerevan greener (2) Offers made for several MPs to resign (3) Businessmen fight after river overflows (4) Child exploitation convention (5) Story of "Mother Armenia" statue (6) Artsakh bridge gets Aliyev in trouble (7) Judicial reforms (8) Men's rights?
  
• 8/5/2020 news: (0) COVID's impact on Real Estate & Industry (1) Kocharyan trial; former PMs ask judge to free him (2) Anti-corruption bill discussion turns into a fight in Parliament; context; response (3) Magic wand in action (4) File & pay taxes online (5) COVID in army (6) Liberating Shushi (7)
  
• 7/5/2020 News: (1) New solar farm (2) Big preschool reforms (3) Free cash for doctors (4) ECHR vs Armenia (5) Saryan's painting found (6) U.S. Department about Artsakh (7) Infrastructure upgrades, new roads & facilities (8) Aid for tech industry (9) Faster court trials (10) 1988 quake survivors...
  
• 6/5/2020: (1) Pashinyan "hijacks" NSS (2) ֏1k fees to army (3) Donation transparency (4) Everyone to file taxes? (5) Mass construction (6) Gago's casino (7) Science news (8) Alcoholic Pashinyan (9) Modern architecture (10) Yerevan floods (11) What happened in 2019? (12) Artsakh negotiations (13)..
  
• 5/5/2020 News: (1) "Gun laws" to get stricter (2) Govt wants to ban antibiotics in meat (3) Yerevan wastewater cleanup corruption (4) Family annihilator in Yerevan (5) PM makes staff changes (6) Eight students' bribery (7) Cursing lawyers = felony? (8) Fewer deaths, tourists, cargo (9) More inside
  
• 4/5/2020 -- Monday News, How UCOM got involved in money laundering story \ Aid for businesses that hire during COVID \ Voter lists inflated? \ Defamation lawsuits \ Economy & Unemployment \ Mask and testkit production \ "Repeated" infections \ EU tariffs & Armenia \ Road repairs \ more... How UCOM got involved in money laundering story \ Aid for businesses that hire during COVID \ Voter lists inflated? \ Defamation lawsuits \ Economy & Unemployment \ Mask and testkit production \ "Repeated" infections \ EU tariffs & Armenia \ Road repairs \ more...
  
• 3/5/2020: Today's News Stories --- Armenian airlines blacklisted by U.S. \ 3-way clash between Pashinyan-Vanetsyan-Minasyan \ New raids related to ex-IRS boss \ Bill to require balanced news on TV \ Healthcare system capacity & Future of COVID \ Diasporans \ Yerevan news \ more stories...
  
• 1/5/2020: Friday News --- Manvel needs the tushonka \ Pashinyan in legal trouble \ Plot twist in fake cigarette story \ ADHD kids \ Mayors charged with embezzlement \ Kocharyan in hospital \ Hydro in Artsakh \ Party animals \ Economy is re-opening \ COVID situation & aid \ George Soros
  
• 30/4/2020: Thursday News -- Offshore firm makes your money disappear \ ex-NSS boss accused of being Russian agent \ Fired over Facebook Like \ UCOM's shareholder raided \ Utility subsidies \ 1k Nature jobs \ Smelly tomato \ Education reforms \ MP vs Activist \ Cigarette fake news \ ++
  
• 29/4/2020: Wednesday News -- Armenia being sued for $160mln after Serj's railway deal w/offshore firm \ Lake Sevan building destruction \ Freedom of press \ Armenians in WW2 \ Fight between MP & activist \ Pashinyan office vs ex-NSS Vanetsyan \ Hospital trashed after a shooting vendetta
  
• 28/4/2020: Today's News --- Massive $22mln bribery story involving ISP giant UCOM, offshore laundering, Dodi Gago's right-hand man, and former IRS boss // Business restrictions are relaxed // Armenian Genocide material damage // Yerevan news // Banks // more inside...
  
• 27/4/2020 -- News Summary -- Armenian mafia in US / App to find street parking, CCTVs / Aid for startups / Officials busted with bribery / Foreign aid to ARM and Artsakh / Neighborhood news / Wages up / Trade & Services down / Prosecutors investigate report against Yerevan mayor / 15% had COVID
  
• 24/4/2020 -- Summary of today's news stories about Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 23/4/2020 -- Anti-Corruption & News -- Early cancer detection in Armenia / Institutional police reforms / Salaries raised / Soldier families get free healthcare / Economy to shrink / Tuition subsidy / Garni mayor charged / Cop is arrested (lol?) / Cultural events / Chatbot Tiko reporting for duty
  
• 22/4/2020 -- Daily News Briefing -- The gas wars, Serj's son-in-law wanted, US/UN/EU send aid, Armenian Genocide, Tax code reforms, Nature Ministry and Lake Sevan, Giant cross near Turkish border, Trees or no trees,
  
• 21/4/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Stay up to date on Armenian Foreign Policy, Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 20/4/2020: Daily News Digest -- Student loan subsidies // New giant park idea // Pashinyan blasts "haters", pro-Western, and pro-Russian factions // Dilijan mayor charged // Nature Ministry officials busted // UCOM co-founder to launch new ISP // COVID status // many more stories...
  
• 17/4/2020 -- Today's News -- Tourist avenue near Lake Sevan -- Many bills passed (nature, anti-corruption, transparency, childbirth) -- Yerevan buildings -- Church scandal -- Deportation of Armenian suspect -- COVID update -- Moody's -- How is Heno doing?
  
• 16/4/2020 -- Today's News -- Stay up to date on Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• News & Anti-Corruption -- 15/4/2020 -- Judicial Vetting / NSS's Money Laundering Charges Against Churchman (former PM as shareholder) / Asset Forfeiture Law Amended / Civil Aviation Bombshell / Catholicos in Hot Water / Hate Speech Law Expands / Future Artsakh President / COVID and Consequences /
  
• 14/4/2020 -- Today's News -- Stay up to date on Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, Changes, and more...
  
• 13/4/2020: News from Armenia // Utility bill subsidy // Government removes media gag // UCOM founder gives details // Tushonka's merch // $3,000,000 house // COVID tests increase, Stats, Curve // Emergency extended // Mobile tracking results // 13 days at 0.9 // Burglary // more stories...
  
• 10/4/2020 -- Today's News & Anti-Corruption // Telecom operator merger // Several high profile corruption busts // Former NSS chief Vanetsyan makes alliance // a lot more...
  
• 9/4/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Biological labs in Armenia & Russian media / Government aid / Artsakh election & George Soros / Arrest in-absentia for HHK MP / Botanical garden embezzled / Kocharyan sues Armenia / How does Armenia fare against world in COVID graph? / Mass tests incoming /
  
• 8/4/2020 -- Your daily summary of Armenian news -- Stay up to date on Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 7/4/2020 -- Today's News Summarized -- Incarceration drops (=Denmark). Mysterious pneumonia. Pashinyan gets sued. Foreign investment stats. Black market for masks. Real estate transactions. New healed > infected. Artsakh elections. $500mln gas investment. Domestic kits. Pashinyan vs Gago. +++
  
• 6/4/2020 -- Today's news stories TLDR -- Pashinyan's Q&A - Many topics - Weapon smuggling in Africa, Artsakh election fraud, Police contract abuse, Which officials are charged?, Prosecutors less likely to arrest, Road repair fraud, COVID - domestic tests - tunnel light, ... a lot more
  
• 5/4/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Civil Aviation details -- Lord Voldemort stats -- Stay up to date on Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 3/4/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Stay up to date on Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, Post-Revolution Changes, and more...
  
• 2/4/2020 -- Today's News Wrap-Up // What's happening in Armenia? // Coronavirus situation & Important message // Ministry goes after a judge // HHK MP under investigation // and a lot more...
  
• 1/4/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Election results, who are the candidates? /// Prosecutors bust former officials /// Gas prices /// Coronavirus stats /// CSTO's response /// Stay up to date on Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 31/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Artsakh elections /// South Korea style COVID19 tracking, Parliament discusses details /// 60,000 test kits /// Lockdown extended /// Satanist chicks /// Stay up to date on Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 30/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- TLDR of Today's Major Stories.
  
• 27/3/2020 -- What's going on in Armenia? -- Today's major news on COVID, Anti-Corruption, Post-Revolution Armenia, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 26/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary // Government aid for family, farmer, business // How wealthy are MPs? // Stay up to date on Post-Revolution Anti-Corruption, COVID, Economy, Politics, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 25/3/2020 -- Today's News TLDR -- Stay up to date on COVID, Anti-Corruption, Post-Revolution Armenia, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 24/3/2020 -- What's happening in Armenia? -- Papers, Please -- Today's major stories on COVID, Anti-Corruption, Post-Revolution Armenia, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 23/3/2020 -- What's going on in Armenia? -- Today's major stories on COVID, Anti-Corruption, Post-Revolution Armenia, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 22/3/2020 -- What's happening in Armenia? -- Today's major stories on COVID, Anti-Corruption, Post-Revolution Armenia, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 20/03/2020 -- Your Daily News Summarized -- Today's major stories on COVID, Anti-Corruption, Post-Revolution Armenia, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 19/3/2020: Daily News Summary / Yerevan mayor cleared / Artsakh presidential polls / Sports pensions / IRS stats, COVID impact / 122 infections / No shortage of food / Export of med-stuff banned / Donations surge / Techies drafted vs COVID / Aid package, salaries, utility bills, loans, imports
  
• 18/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary / Property embezzlement busts skyrocket / 110 COVID cases / 150bln economic stimulus being drafted, loans, aid / Police monitoring the quarantined, crowded buses / fake news gag / Remote education / and more...
  
• 17/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary / Mass COVID19 testing results in high detection rate / Emergency gag on COVID fake news / 78 cases / Online schooling / IRS worker busted, Former Minister / Tushonka's nephew charged / Defamation lawsuits / and more...
  
• 16/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Chronological COVID timeline -- State of Emergency -- Healthcare Ministry takes over private sector -- Gatherings banned -- Non-citizens banned -- Referendum postponed -- and more...
  
• 15/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Pashinyan unknowingly socialized with COVID patient; tests negative -- Ejmiatsin city entry & exits closed -- Russia arrests March 1st suspect -- Other major stories on Post-Revolution Changes, Anti-Corruption, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 14/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Levon Aronyan's wife had car crash -- Latest COVID news -- High ranking Nature official investigated -- Other major stories on Post-Revolution Changes, Anti-Corruption, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 13/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Pashinyan & Wife isolated after contact; COVID test -- 13 cases -- Italian COVID brought before main outbreak, shutting flights wouldn't help -- Other major stories on Post-Revolution Changes, Anti-Corruption, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 12/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Your COVID briefing minus fake news -- Tech sector expands -- Other major stories on Post-Revolution Changes, Anti-Corruption, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 11/3/2020 --- Daily News Collection --- Pashinyan about Serj's "$42mln weapon waste" -- Rob's judge releases Rob's media friend -- Embezzlement during 2016 Pope visit --- Other major stories on Anti-Corruption, Post-Revolution Changes, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 10/3/2020 -- Daily News Summary -- Pashinyan blasts Constitutional Court chief for secret meetings with Kocharyan's lawyer -- Other major stories on Post-Revolution Changes, Anti-Corruption, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 9/3/2020 -- Your daily news summarized -- Today's major stories on Post-Revolution Changes, Anti-Corruption, Economy, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 6/3/2020 --- Your daily news summarized --- Don't miss today's major stories on Anti-Corruption, Economy, Post-Revolution Changes, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 5/3/2020 --- Your daily news summarized --- Don't miss today's major stories on Anti-Corruption, Economy, Post-Revolution Changes, Politics, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 4/3/2020 -- Today's news summarized. Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption, Economy, Major Changes, Politics, Constitutional Court Crisis, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 2/3/2020 -- News collection from Armenia // Major busts today // Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption, Economy, Major Changes, Politics, Constitutional Court Crisis, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 1/3/2020 -- News collection from Armenia. Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption, Economy, Major Changes, Politics, Constitutional Court Crisis, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 28/2/2020 -- Daily News & Anti-Corruption from Armenia / Lydian miner wins lawsuit / Offshore embezzlement revealed / Mayor's theft / Sumgayit massacres / SOC audits a Uni / Armenian army / Coronavirus update / Azeri spy rumor / Rob ally's bribery / Cabbies vs gig economy / Sports / ... and more
  
• 27/2/2020 -- Collection of news from Armenia / Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption / Economy / Major changes / Politics / Constitutional Court crisis / Diaspora / Daily Life / and more...
  
• 26/2/2020 --- Daily News & Anti-Corruption summary from Armenia / March 1st witnesses, borders, murder, bribe / Disability protection bill / Foreign Affairs & Trade / Lots of trolling / Coronavirus / Women in army / Sports victories / Education reform complaint / Nature / Wages++ / & much more...
  
• 25/2/2020 --- Daily News & Anti-Corruption summary from Armenia --- Economy / Wages & Inflation / Tech & Manufacturing up / Judicial Reforms / Kocharyan & Serj's trial / High ranking bust / A school fight / Coronavirus / Aid for low-income families / Business survey / Gift for women / and more...
  
• 24/2/2020 --- Daily News & Anti-Corruption summary from Armenia --- March 1st, testimony, sniper, murder / Education Reforms / TV networks / Yerevan's sewers / State property embezzlement / Coronavirus at borders / Fish farms and nature / Nominal wages in 2019 / High tech / and more...
  
• 21/2/2020 -- Daily News summary from Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption Busts / Constitutional Court crisis / Politics / Economy / Diaspora / Daily Life / and more...
  
• 20/2/2020 -- Daily News summary from Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption Busts, Constitutional Court crisis, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 19/2/2020 -- Daily News summary from Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption Busts, Constitutional Court crisis, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 18/2/2020 -- Daily News summary from Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption Busts, Constitutional Court crisis, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 17/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection From Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Constitutional Court crisis, Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 14/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection From Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Constitutional Court crisis, Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 13/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection From Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Constitutional Court crisis, Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 12/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection From Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Constitutional Court crisis, Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 11/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection & Anti-Corruption from Armenia --- Massive police reforms, new academy, new ministry, duty reshuffling --- Landmark court decision to fight army bullying --- Constitutional referendum update --- Mayor & son charged --- many more stories inside...
  
• 10/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection From Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Constitutional Court crisis, Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 9/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection From Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Constitutional Court crisis, Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 7/2/2020 -- Daily News Collection From Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Constitutional Court crisis, Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
• 6/2/2020 -- Daily news collection from Armenia -- Stay informed about the ongoing Anti-Corruption Busts, Politics, Economy, Diaspora, Daily Life, and more...
  
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