From "Why Texas Republicans are Souring on Crypto" from The Economist https://archive.ph/eIXGc

Recently picked up Slay the Spire on my phone so I could play it on a long car ride and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Will probably pick this one up as well.

Been thinking about this since I've been playing Rain World. I feel that Rain World is solidly within the genre. There are definitely video essays out there about it being about existing in an ecosystem or whatever. Pathologic is another obvious one. The original Dark Souls is probably paradigmatic of this category.

What traits define this category? I think:

• Difficult, you struggle to make progress
• Inscrutable narrative motivation
• Hidden depth to the world that can be teased out through intensive study
• Possible to find it fun, but much likelier to just bounce off (and watch the video essay instead!)

Is this a valid category?

Bounced off this game at least twice over the years but am finally gelling with it. It works well with the steam deck since each run between storms isn't very long so it's easy to pick up and put down. I think when the game finally clicked for me is when I realized it was less about progression to the next area and more about learning to live in and occupy each space, integrating into the ebb & flow of the local flora & fauna. Like:

There's some corn I can get if I go over here. And some bubble fruit over there, as long as I take care to evade the lizard who hangs out near it. Sometimes the scavenger tribe comes through here - what can I give them as a gift so they won't attack me? Time to venture out to this area so I can collect some bats. I bet that corn I ate a while ago has regrown by now. I get a bonus if I go six days in a row without eating meat, can I do that? Gotta take care in this section and watch for the shadows cast as vultures come down. Time to start heading back to the den for the day.

My enjoyment increased quite a bit after I stopped turning my arrival in each area into a quick springboard to get to the next area, and instead sunk into it for a while & mastered the art of existing in that ecosystem. Only after perfecting a routine would I start venturing further out to see what's next. Very unique game.

"Yes I want to be part of a proletarian mass movement but liking sports is normie boring low-IQ primate brain behavior" -statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged

but when they finally abandon newspapers in favor of newer technologies like radio transmissions it will be over for you all

"But Middle Eastern money has become the most powerful geopolitical force in the tech industry virtually overnight. “The Khashoggi era is over,” said a prominent venture capitalist.

“Everyone I talk to is either going to or coming back from the UAE — the same way we used to swing by Sand Hill Road,” said Feldman, referring to the street that’s home to Silicon Valley’s storied venture capital firms. Feldman will visit Saudi Arabia later this year."

"Some Silicon Valley companies have personal backchannels with U.S. officials: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has taken at least four fundraising trips to the UAE to raise hundreds of billions for a massive new infrastructure company, internally dubbed InfraCo, is on a text message thread with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, according to four of the people."

and people say the government doesn't respond to peoples' needs, that's top tier service

When trying to explain the us/israel relationship I always get hung up on this part, which is the most immediate experience people in western countries have with the conflict. Were people getting fired for voicing mild criticism of apartheid south africa at work?

None of the antisemitism commissioners for either the German Federal Government or its Bundesländer, or states, is ethnically Jewish—which, according to Klein, is by design. “The fight against antisemitism is a problem for the whole of society. It isn’t a problem for the Jewish community to face by itself,” he told me. “I mean, it’s not as though the most pressing problem with antisemitism in Germany is among Jews.”

Went to a small regional socialist political conference recently and there was a lot of discussion about this. It has really advanced my worldview, especially having recently read Settlers.

The doctrinaire Marxist analysis of society is that there is a proletariat working class, and there is a capitalist class. The capitalists exploit the proles, and the proles are revolutionary. We are all familiar with this.

However, communists in every country must adapt this analysis to their own actual existing society. This requires answering three questions:

1. The history of this region is characterized by ________
2. The contradictions of the current moment are primarily ________
3. The revolutionary class is _________

In Russia the revolutionary class was the industrial proletariat, and in China the revolutionary class were the peasants. We can't pretend the US has any similarity to Tsarist Russia. So what are the answers to these questions in our context? I'll give my own thoughts as a comment.