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Showing posts from 2021

When the Shoe Is On the Other Foot

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  So a mob invaded the capitol building last week. That was interesting. Here’s what I find more interesting: the accusations of hypocrisy flying in every direction right now.  I find them interesting because I have a heuristic that I try to employ whenever something drastic happens to someone on one side of an issue. Especially if it’s not a side I agree with.  That is, I try to imagine how I would feel if myself or someone I agreed with had the same thing happen to them.  With that in mind, let’s look at some of these accusations of hypocrisy. Here we see a liberal ‘take down’ of concerns about Trump’s Twitter ban. The question this begs is: Are liberals now ok with private companies refusing service to those they disagree with?  Because last I checked, most were not.  In this particular instance, we who find Trump revolting and dangerous are very happy that a private company gave him the boot.  But my heuristic tells me to ask what would happen if O...

Hades as Allegory for Gen Z's Desire To Escape

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  The first thing I did in 2021, even before getting out of bed, was to finish Hades.  I deliberately took my time with this game, having spent 109.4 hours and 96 attempts. I tried to figure it out all on my own without guides or walkthroughs.  Rogue-lites have been my favorite genre of videogame since I discovered Spelunky a decade ago, and it's cool to see how this little subgenre has developed. Many have said it, but I'll repeat it; Hades does everything right. It is >very< hard for a game to get me to care at all about its story/characters.  Especially cartoon characters.  But somehow they pulled it off.  The pacing of the various systems’ introductions and expansions and combinations is truly a masterful work of design art.  But I want to talk about one thing that struck me from a thematic perspective. And that is how the plot is speaking to a generation.  Not my generation; but my kids.  I read somewhere that something like half ...