12. Hades II

Objectively superior to the original in almost every way which is not bad going when your predecessor is one of the best games ever. The only sliver of criticism I can manage is it being that bit more familiar inevitably means it doesn't quite have the same magic as the first time.

Oh yeah there's no doubt that it's thoroughly idiotic from any point of view. But it might seem marginally less insane to the American mind.

The whole thing comes down to America-brain. Taking connecting flights, rechecking your bags, and making last-minute flight changes (the only thing that I can imagine would have pushed him onto this route) are all way more common in the US.

Yeah and it was still worth doing but the unnecessary cost and effort crowded out other infrastructure at the time and made future investment less likely so there's quite a lot of implied crapness there in the overall amount of infrastructure that gets built.

Well in some ways it was a bit crap. Not the quality of the engineering but it cost a lot more a took a lot longer than comparable projects elsewhere so still certainly a degree of crapness in the overall delivery.

"Alpha" here is investment jargon for rate of return rather than the alpha male sense. Or at least that's what Andreesen means, it's possible Musk has misunderstood adding yet another layer of idiocy.

I recently read Nathaniel's Nutmeg by Giles Milton which was enjoyable enough but I was constantly baffled that Milton was so clearly immensely proud of Nathaniel Courthope for no particular reason other than that he was English.

Can't help but think that the Catholic Church might have adopted this approach of gently chiding heretics rather than jumping straight to genocide a bit earlier and spared everyone a lot of grief

Inshallah

Surprised but glad to hear you somehow survived this

To be fair it's not unique to Paradox, most strategy games are bad at this. But their games are especially complex and getting even more so with every iteration. They really need to be leading the way on designing tutorials that don't trigger cognitive overload with 90 seconds.

There's a reason why Assassin's Creed games don't start by getting you to read a hundred tooltips. Even much (much!) mechanically simpler games understand the need to gradually introduce concepts and mechanics in digestible chunks, but Paradox games refuse to do this in any meaningful way.

So much good stuff in there. Best bit for me was a toss up between having to upload my passport photo as a PDF and the extra question where in addition to having already stated your nationality you promise again that you're *definitely* not from Pakistan.

When I started building PCs I really was a strict penny-pincher because I was a teenager and had no money. But for grown-ups with jobs this has always been the best approach.

Sounds like they only counted manufacturing and not distribution for one, which feels a bit unfair considering that 100% of the emissions from digital games are due to distribution.

So much so that I actually don't believe it!

Probably the only time I've been sort of impressed by Wilders is when he gracefully conceded the 2021 election immediately after the results came in. Now he can't even clear the low bar of "accepts the results of democratic elections".