The West Wing deserves better than this tbh

And even long rests are basically free, so unless you are in one of the rare time sensitive moments use them a lot.

Wait, is this true? I’ve been avoiding even short rests since the game tells you so explicitly that time sensitive things can get messed up by too many long rests, and the early plot is super clear that having a tadpole usually means death/mind-flayer-dom within a week. So I’ve been SUFFERING through every single fight since I need to conserve short rests. Can I actually long rest without dooming myself?

I will always, always, always go to bat for Parade Killer. I think half my comments on Lemmy have been shilling for it. I desperately want more mystery games like it. Not just for the reasons you described, but because it so, so, SO completely nails the relationship between its aesthetic and its plot question about what it means to have institutional power in a institution that’s downright malicious. The player character is explicitly a tool of the evil Syndicate. Is she even interested in effecting change? Could she if she was? Is Paradise worth saving?

They’ve also significantly muddied the waters on what economics actually means and does. The stock market is not the economy, and being better at predicting what it does than someone else has absolutely no bearing on your ability to speak to broader economic concepts like unemployment, inflation, wage disparity, etc.

It doesn’t help that in the business schools I’ve seen, if they require economics courses at all, only require very basic microeconomics lessons-- conceptual models of very basic principles that, when overgeneralized, can be disastrously wrong. As an example, most introductory economics classes cover supply and demand curves. These are basic and reassuring graphs that I have seen used to argue against minimum wages, under the idea that an artificially high hourly price for labor would reduce the amount of jobs available so much that it would offset gains that employees would make with the higher wage. This clashes with the empirical data we have showing that areas with high minimum wages routinely outperform those with lower minimum wages in job growth. Economics, as a study, is about developing the models and the mindset needed to think critically about the economy. There simply isn’t the buy-in needed to teach that for most students who aren’t explicitly there to learn about economics, so we get a million bad supply-and-demand takes every time something comes up. At the same time, there’s a cultural understanding that successful businesspeople are inherently good at understanding economics, when at best they are specialists in an extremely narrow subset of the market that they work in.

I’ve played a little. It’s okay. The one I was playing didn’t do anything approximating the Mind Palace and was very, very linear-- which I think is better than the Sherlock Holmes style games. It was the everything else about it that annoyed me into turning it off!

I love mystery games, so–

Love: When mystery games actively draw attention to the idea that you need to draw your own conclusions about what you find in the game, and make your own truth, instead of just following a track

Hate: when the above is expressed as a formalized “Mind Palace” mechanic à la the more recent Sherlock Holmes games. That’s just covering the track with a tarp instead of letting you build your own theories. Either let people accuse who they want with the evidence they have (once again I plug Paradise Killer) or acknowledge that there’s only one acceptable answer

Thank you, I didn’t make it but I don’t remember where I saved it from rip

That’s why I got Nebula. It’s not everyone I watch on YouTube, but it’s a lot of the best people, and they get a much, much larger amount of revenue from me specifically than they do from even YouTube Premium at a better price since you’re not also paying for YouTube Music on top of it. I was a devoted Google Play Music All Access listener, but true to form Google forgot about it and then replaced it with a worse service that costs more money. Spotify and Nebula as separate subs is as close as I’m going to get to the old school GPMAA/YouTube Red bundle and I don’t have to give a penny to Google for it

I’ll give them all a look. Thank you!

I think the special feature about the Das keyboard is probably the media controls, so finding a replacement/similar build should be easy :)

Ah, that’s just it: mine doesn’t have those! Back when I got this, just having mechanical keyswitches was the special feature. I’ve watched in absolute awe as the scene has exploded, but I’m very much behind on what the state of the art is. The biggest tech-y enhancement this one has over the switches is a two-port USB hub that I plug my mouse, and occasionally a thumb drive or other USB controller into.

I’ll look into those switch recommendations but honestly the pre-built boards are going to end up being where I go. Given how long I’ve used the Das, do you know if there’s a standout for solid build quality in the sub-200 range? That’s where the Das would be anyway

I used to use Boost all the time, and browsed the site when I was on my computer. Now that I can’t access it from my phone (the first party app isn’t happening lmao) I don’t feel much like using it on desktop either. Tumblr, of all things, has absorbed much of my traffic, and I’ve paid to remove ads on it because I’ve used it so much over the last ten years that I know it’ll be worth it, plus I’m hoping that if enough people pay for it they won’t go down the monetization rabbit hole as much as other sites have recently.

Lemmy is okay, but the hot/active post sorting is far worse than Reddit was (I’m still seeing days- old posts even when set to All) and the user base just isn’t large enough yet to have a consistent feed of stuff I find interesting. Both of those can easily change over the coming days/weeks of course.

All social media platforms’ viability come down to userbase and how fun they are to hang out on, and reddit has absolutely damaged both. It’s unclear to me what impact that will have for it long-term, but its time as the problematic but scrappy underdog in the space is over.

Detective/mystery games tend to be a good fit for not having great dexterity while still being really engaging. I don’t have a Steam Deck so you’ll probably want to check on compatability for these:

Paradise Killer: Open-ended and extremely a e s t h e t i c murder mystery game. Most online commenters end there, and it’s true that it is that, but it’s a massive oversimplification of what is, in my experience, one of the best and most special games of the last couple years. Everyone is hot, everyone is terrible. The sky is sunny and the ground is drenched with blood-- blood of thousands of innocent people whose deaths you are explicitly NOT investigating. It’s a locked room murder mystery and also a dating simulator. You are the sole investigator for an evil, murderous cult whose leadership has just been killed off, and you have impeccable taste in music. If this game has one person plugging it, it is me. If it has no one plugging it, I am dead.

IMMORTALITY: FMV mystery game with very light horror/thriller elements. You are given access to an archive of work from a 70s-90s starlet who filmed three feature films, none of which released, and then disappeared. Jump from clip to clip, fast forward and rewind through them to uncover not just the plots of the movies themselves, but the behind-the-scenes details leading to her disappearance. Most of us remember FMV games as being cheesy or poorly directed, but everyone here is turning in the performance of their lives. If you’re familiar with Sam Barlow (of Her Story and Telling Lies), you’ll like this for sure-- this is him fully realizing what he does well. Even if you tried those and bounced off them like I did, this one is worth a look.

Nancy Drew games: Yes, these games are mostly for young girls. Almost every single one of the over two dozen is a banger. These are point-and-click mystery puzzle games with very little eye-hand coordination or reaction time needed. These games are what made me fall in love with mystery games and they largely hold up today. Pick a setting that looks interesting to you. Standout favorites are Danger on Deception Island, Shadow At The Eater’s Edge, and Sea of Darkness.

He never claimed to be an absolutist.

Here he is making that exact claim in 2022 before deleting it once it became inconvenient

Nebula is great in comparison, and apparently video creators make even more money from Nebula views than YouTube Premium views, which is already a lot more than ad-supported views.

Nebula’s content base is small in comparison but very quickly growing and already includes most of the longer-form video creators I would want anyway (Jenny Nicholson is one notable exception, but her Patreon channel is wildly successful so I sort of doubt she feels like torpedoing that to do a whole new platform).

But frankly, if I paid what I pay for Nebula and only got Jet Lag, it would still be worth it to me.

When I stop plugging Paradise Killer it will be because I am dead and in the ground. Absolute masterpiece of theming and plot. It’s a mystery game without the clunky logic puzzles-- just your patience and intuition. And my God, the music. I’ve been obsessed for over a year now.

Jerboa is crashing for me on start, which isn’t a great sign. I just want Boost already!

Looks like this will be my last comment on .17.4. Thank you all so much for working on this!! This is exciting!!!

Note that a lot of tech companies, particularly startups, operate at a massive loss while they increase their market share and outcompete established competitors. The idea is that once they’re entrenched they can start raising prices and cutting back on expenses to start making massive profits-- see how great it was to use Uber 10 years ago and Amazon 15 years ago versus now. This heel turn was always coming for a lot of these companies. Interest rates rising and investors being less willing to hand over cash after high-profile failures like crypto just hastened the shift.

Be not afwaid uwu

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