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.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
1) There are other examples of business models which are essentially status arbs.
2) Plausibly there should be more businesses which say “This biz is an extended argument that X should be higher status and will win if we win that argument.”
See that is one of the weird rules of the status game: by convention you lose points if you make it obvious you’re playing it, and someone who says “You’re playing it” makes themselves an enemy.
Thus you must use the traditional rule to absolve a salaryman of responsibility for violating the status ladder: put an intoxicating beverage in my hand. Actual intoxication is not a pre-requisite; just the fact of it by convention absolves me from telling you my true thought.
This week on Complex Systems I was joined by @David_Kasten.
We talked mostly about our experiences together at VaccinateCA, in creating essentially public infrastructure while being nominally outside the usual trust graph.
That "nominally" thing is important, and we discuss the importance of policy engagement, PR strategy to court favor with (and cooperation of) more formal actors, laundering blog posts into the policy apparatus by being crafty about it, etc.
But mostly we talked about the operational realities of making tens of thousands of phone calls from a standing start to conduct an ongoing census of Californian (and then American) medical providers,
Which was hard, but crucially it was not *impossible.*
(If one diagrams out what one has to do to actually exploit this, one can predict with pretty high confidence where secondary aut/auth happens and why the bank didn’t rescind the policy after massive losses they were trivially liable for.)
Like there are way to turn a compromised securities account into value extracted elsewhere but they will often stick out like a sore thumb and require pre-work that many popped accounts will not have done for you.
For example if the popped account has options permissions you could theoretically transfer a confederate money by being the literal only party willing to trade a particular strike on a particular product but a) chumming water with free money brings much more evolved sharks than u
a) Kinda genius.
b) On those rare occasions when I use terminal these days I continue to surprise myself with how many wildly different things I can get the LLM command to do for me.
(If you haven’t seen this it is on homebrew or and you’ll need an API key from your provider of choice, though there is a run locally option.)github.com/simonw/llm
Worth noting, apropos of the occasional discourses about getting customer service via Twitter, that the entire U.S. government has a blessed side channel.
It is calling your Congressman’s office.
Can’t get a passport? Call and talk to Constituent Services. They do this all the time.
Immigration issue? Half their caseload.
Tax issue? They will happily bug the IRS on your behalf.
It’s also typically staffed by people who are far better educated and higher agency than frontline workers in most frequent flier agencies.
It is lower friction than the previous ways to achieve escalation, works fairly deterministically, and while sometimes annoying for the organization that is assisted in dealing with the issue does give them agency for improving blessed path (versus escalation through Legal).
Most of the downside is perception management, and that is fundamentally a comms problem.
“This happens all the time.” It doesn’t, actually. You’ve got the stats and can publish any time you want.
“This is the only way to get support.” Untrue. You’ve got the stats and…