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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 Obama had been banned from Twitter?

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 of young adults under 30 are living