If you enjoy action roguelikes at all, Hades is, oh my Greek gods, a work of art. Beautiful, well-acted and voiced, with intriguing progression mechanics, and a satisfying just-one-more-run core game loop.
Also its fascinating that we're still telling new stories about the Greek gods, isn't it? And that they can be really good stories.
Trust me, you might never have had a hole in your life for millennial ironic California dude surfer Poseidon but he's amazing.
This has thoroughly eaten a weekend and the *sheer depth* of the game is so amazing. The self-referential in game nods to the power increase happening both via stats and skill. How some powers essentially transform it into a different game instantly. The tradeoffs in builds.
I got to the end (?) boss, got him to 2% health then died, and on a later undistinguished run found an artifact which makes health, the scarcest resource in the game, unscarce.
A plot immediately developed in my mind and I executed on it, and I’m saved before boss.
Waiting to put the kids to bed. “Daddy is about to face tank a laser while laughing maniacally because the boons of Ares mean that it will hurt the other guy more than it will me, while I heal rapidly through basic autoattack. Sweet dreams!”
Many games cater to power fantasies but few of them go with “I mean, you’re literally an immortal demigod. Of course your power scaling curve is ridiculous on every play through.”
Report: face tanking a Greek god not advisable.
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Listening to a podcast (Trillions) a guest made an interesting claim:
Guest: You know when you swipe a card at [coffee shop] part of the fee pays for your ability to reverse the transaction with the coffee shop. But come on, no one reverses transactions with [coffee shops].
I have removed the name of the coffee shop so that no one believes I am commenting on private financial details when I say: oh you sweet summer child.
You and I will likely go through life having very few arguments with baristas. Baristas do not experience their lives as including very few arguments with customers.
The existence of YouTube does not make reading and writing less valuable. It gives children a constant companion who is responsive, preternaturally so, to their desires and curiosity.
(I devote a bit of brain space—not too much but I pray not to little—to making sure that constant companion does not make the entire world look like a pale imitation of itself, which would be wrong but could easily look accurate to the subjective experience of a child.)
“Any parenting tips?”
I do not have the constant fights about screen time some parents report, do not know how much of that is due to decisions I’ve made, and have one regret: we went two years without a TV due to moving and I should have made that permanent versus “completing.”
(In particular note the cap on cash back and the carveout for particular transaction types which some users are able to generate arbitrarily high amounts of or would naturally have arbitrarily high amounts relative to “normal” CC use.)
“How does this happen?”
Credit card PMs are extremely aware that there are multiple different personas for credit card use out there. One of them has a name in various banks, but you can think of them as Mercenary Financial Enthusiast.
If I can give a slightly more optimistic take on this: much of how commercial software development is done trades some resources for others, in ways that might not be rational for people with very different strengths than e.g. AppAmaGooFaceSoft or BigCo customers.
A lot of AWS services exist so that two teams don't need to have a meeting.
That *is not a criticism of either AWS or those two teams.* That is a preference one can have about time allocation and corporate structure, and capitalism will help you satisfy it.
If you are not constrained on organizational complexity, if meetings with yourself are free, then a lot of the standard stack that BigCo uses is both overkill and underkill at the same time.
So strange that card program managers make such a show of doing this careful balancing act when everyone who reads the Atlantic knows that the real source of rewards is cross-subsidization of elite cardholders by poor people. </sarcasm>
Less sarcastically: it’s a math problem conducted by people who are pretty good at math, and the marching orders they get are “In general and in steady state, all of our card programs should be margin accretive. Make it happen. If you can’t you’ll need a senior signoff.”
(The above is not private information from any particular issuer but rather is a pastiche representing industry standard practice.)
I think the so-called Bitcoin treasury companies have just reinvented exchange tokens: there is an asset with X real world utility but not naturally leverageable. It should flow to place in world where most leverage is bolted onto it; immediately incentive compatible. Repeat 100x
And then “Holy %}*]^ how did so much of it end up in a place with grossly deficient risk management?!”
(I understand that MicroStrategy is the opposite of leveraged exposure from the common shareholder’s perspective but if someone with hands on keyboard believes they are allowed leverage if they hold more exchange tokens then the model happens regardless of whether that is true.)