domain:city-journal.org
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
I guess Lucas should have listened to the suits instead of his nerd buddies and ditched his pulp space opera idea. Audiences won't connect with it. And even if it was produced they would only give him the toy rights.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Kind of?
Until you're both way worse off at the end of it all. Although I guess you're both worse off together.
Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war and a commitment towards shared prosperity (as that's worked quite well for the last 10,000 years) but that brings us back to "the current crop of western political leaders are myopic morons"
roystgnr
1d ago
once it's established that the symbolism of magic = family love is all that matters, the backstory revelations undermine it: Was it grandpa's death that brought about family love?
... Yes?
He's leading refugees away from their burning village, he sees soldiers catching up to them on horseback, and he kisses his wife and babies goodbye to turn back and (checks video) wave down the soldiers. Rather than using the opportunity to run or hide, his wife stops in her tracks to watch him die. The natural interpretation here is "he loved them so much that he would run to his own death just to buy them another minute to run and hide, and she loved him so much that even in those circumstances she couldn't bear to leave him, and The Magic rewarded such powerful love." (The other interpretation, "neither of them had the common sense or tactical acumen of a mouse, and The Magic took pity on such powerful stupidity", doesn't really fit the movie's tone.)
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
You may like Starsector.
It's basically "mount and blade in space" but with an incredibly well designed and tight gameplay loop for the 2D ship to ship combat.
The mod scene is also exceptional (Nexerilin is basically a DLC that massively improves the game by making it a 4x-lite). Although filled with unbelievable amounts of discord drama (totally ignorable, but hilarious).
Your allied ship AI is quite stupid, but my god it's so fun to space battle.
You can also get a free CD key from the Sseth review video (meme-y video game review channel) if you want to try it, developer approved as he's a very chill guy.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Factorio is really fun but you basically are forced to restart a few times because it's easier to start from scratch than it is to totally refactor your mineral bus once you've spaghetti-maxxed
It'll probably click for you and delete a few weeks though, it's incredibly compelling, the factory must grow.
I usually start getting burnt out from the complexity around oil, and I tried playing a while ago with a new update, played for a while (got to oil), and then saw the tech/production tree for nuclear and promptly quit and uninstalled the game. Started to feel like I was studying or working to play the game.
A brief tangent on medical billing that US-based Mottizens may find useful.
So back in college I worked for an insurance company for a short amount of time. While there I received a crash course in medical billing, and what I learned ended up being pretty helpful in disputing a bill I received a few years later. All doctor's offices, hospitals, and clinics across the country (the US) use a standardized billing method. While the actual paper bill may look different, each and every one will provide you with a list of common codes for the services you received. These are called Current Procedural Terminology Codes, or CPT Codes. These codes are published by the American Medical Association (AMA) and get very, very, granular. When you receive a bill, it is to your benefit to look up these five-digit codes to make sure that they match the treatment you received. Hospitals have a perverse incentive to "upcode" your bill, that is to put down a code for a higher tier/cost, of treatment that you received. This is illegal, but it happens with shocking regularity.
Consider code 97161, "pt eval low complex 20 min." That is, a healthcare provider spent between 0 and 20 minutes in the room with the patient, providing an evaluation of a low complexity issue. An unethical hospital might "upcode" this to 97163, "pt eval high complex 45 min." Or you might have gone in for a G2251, "brief chkin, 5-10, non-e/m." That is a brief check-in for 5-10 minutes for a non-emergency issue, which might get up-coded to a 97161.
You will rarely, if ever, know the exact proper code for what you went in for. You're not supposed to. This is arcane back-end stuff the patient is not supposed to ever really understand. But the list is public information, and you can very easily check the codes you were billed against the list of treatments. Being able to respond to a bill with specific questions, such as "why was I billed for an hour-long patient interaction when the doctor was only in the room for 20 minutes?" is a very effective way of disputing a medical bill.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I've definitely been alpha-widowed by my favorite games, lol
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
We have pretty similar taste in games, although I find ARMA way too boring and love battlefield (as much as they keep insisting on fucking it up).
I too bounce off games really hard, and I basically only enjoy gaming now if I also take cannabis, otherwise it's kind of boring and I stop after 45 mins.
I had the exact same experience with BG3, I feel like I should love it, but I just kinda... stopped.
I tried getting back into modded Skyrim after learning Wabbajack existed (I don't have the patience to manage massive mod lists) and it was INCREDIBLE but again after getting not that far into a run, I just... drifted away
I really want to get into Rimworld and Total war (played Shogun a bit, then stopped) but haven't gotten around to it (lol)
I basically just play heavily modded civ5 (seriously vox populi is insanely good) and Victoria 3, I don't even find either of those games super duper fun anymore as I've played them a lot, but I always end up back on them instead of diving into something new.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
This is one of those issues that are prone to a gish gallop. There are a bunch of different argument variants, and folks often slip back and forth between them, often not letting a response to one form become the actual topic of discussion, deflecting to a different form, and then swinging back later, as if the initial response was never made. I will try to cover a few variants, of course trying to steelman some where I can.
There is some historical sense of medicine as charity. Historically, many hospitals were, indeed, primarily charities. Medicine is often considered an unalloyed good, and of course, when it's being provided as a charity, doctors and patients should only be thinking about the medical decision, itself.
Robin Hanson talks about how this historical sense has lingered, even as it has transformed significantly into one of the largest industries in modern society. He thinks that medicine is 'sacred' in his terminology. He believes that money is 'profane', and one of the primary rules of the sacred is that is shall not be mixed with the profane.
This makes a bit of sense, and we can sort of steelman it. Medical decisions can, indeed, be life/death sorts of things. (Not all of them, of course.) Plenty of folks have a generic sense that when it comes to such life/death decisions, money shouldn't come into it. They may think so from a personal perspective ("It could save your life; you have to do it; you can figure out the financial stuff later; if you're dead, the financial stuff won't matter anyway") or from a societal perspective ("Society shouldn't allow anyone to have to decide to not get a life-saving treatment just because of the price"). There are pieces of this in @quiet_NaN's comment:
In a borderline sane medical system (e.g. what we have in Germany), that should be wholly between the health insurer and the clinic. The doctors use whatever procedures they see medically indicated, and then their billing department will settle with the health insurer.
Or, as I quoted above, the way the NYT journalist's surgery provider put it:
“MSK is committed to ensuring we are only communicating clinically necessary information to a patient prior to their procedure.”
Or, part of the quote I had above from the old doctor-written NYT Op-Ed:
I saw my colleagues prescribing suboptimal drugs and thought they weren’t practicing evidence-based medicine. In reality, they were doing something better — practicing patient-based medicine. When people said they couldn’t afford a medication that their insurance didn’t cover, they would prescribe an alternative, even if it wasn’t the best available option.
As a young doctor, I struggled with this. Studies show this drug is the most effective treatment, I would say.
There really is a sense for a variety of people that prices are simply conceptually divorced from what the Objective Right Medical Choice is. That there is a simple and sharp divide between the one true optimal thing, which is the Platonic Ideal of Evidence-Based Medicine, and every other possible consideration, which is pure bollocks. That anything else is, or should be, someone else's problem. That patients and doctors should only talk about direct medical costs/benefits. That price 'costs' just aren't even costs, and some other magic either will or should take care of it. And of course, if some other magic doesn't, well, then, you'll be fine figuring out how to manage your gigantic bill; you should just be happy that you got the best care.
Of course, while I get where this is coming from, I don't really buy it. There are plenty of situations where there isn't necessarily an Objectively Right Medical Choice that is conceptually divorced from price. The silly example I use to illustrate this is to imagine having some minor pain in your wrist. For a lot of people, it's probably just fine to take some painkiller and just wait to see if it goes away in a few weeks. The chance of it going away is decently high, and the cost of doing a whole lot more often isn't worth it. However, suppose that same minor wrist pain presents in a superstar NFL quarterback. Say it's in their throwing arm. There may be a ton of value in doing a whole lot more, gathering information, possibly trying an intervention, deciding whether they should sit out for a week or two before the playoffs to have a better chance then, etc. In this situation, the price is much much more worth it.
Obviously, this is an extreme example to make a point, but again, many many people don't think this way. They want prices to not matter. It's probably part of the impetus for many people to support government-run healthcare, because then no patient has to directly make decisions based on price. For many people, just the idea that a patient might "have to" consider price in their medical decisions is an affront to their sense of what medicine "should" be about.
Equally obviously, the medical industry would prefer if no patients ever thought about prices. You don't even need to jump to a nefarious provider who is sneakily deciding to perform procedures for the purpose of making more money rather than the patient's best interest. For one, it contributes to their status image. Their expertise is so valuable that you can't even put a number on it. Obviously, they know best, way way better than you do, and you really ought to mostly defer to them. Dovetailing with this, their expertise is in the medicine; that's what they want to focus on; there's a half-decent chance they don't know anything about the prices anyway. So you should really just acknowledge their status and expertise and view things the way they do, leaving any petty concerns about money out of it.
Second, very related, they don't want to bother. The other thing that the doctor who kept trying to argue here that prices don't matter would slip to is, "Why should that be the doctor's job?" I get it. I do. They're very busy. They have many, many things that they need to know. Prices are complicated. This isn't really along the lines of "customers don't want to see prices in healthcare", but trust me, when doctors get going on this topic, they will slip into this one.
On this front, I just say that I don't care who actually does it, so long as it gets done. Most healthcare providers have plenty of non-doctor staff. Insurance companies likely deserve blame, too. Neither the providers or insurance really cares to inform patients much, and they're more than happy to point the finger and say it should be someone else's job.
This is why I have mostly defaulted into just saying that it should be a requirement. That a patient cannot consent to a procedure (or the corresponding billing) unless they've been provided a price. Legislation can mayyybe even be a bit coy as to who actually hands it over; so long as the outcome is required to happen, let them figure out how to do it.
I suppose, since @ArjinFerman mentioned another variant, I should give a sentence to it. The "all the numbers are fake, so nothing matters" argument. Sigh? Get your shit together and make not fake numbers? When the patient actually gets a bill, it's not going to be a 'fake' number. It's going to be a number that they're expected to pay. With potential threats of collections/bankruptcy, etc. Sure, some providers may make some allowances sometimes, but that's hardly here nor there. If you can provide actual bills with actual numbers that patients are expected to pay (and you do), then you can do a lot better to inform your patient. At least a lot better than the current default, which is 'not at all'.
Throwaway05
1d ago
So uhhh that's me. Intent here is to provide context not inflame drama so mods tell me if you think I should just delete that portion or just the whole comment.
Background - got in a loooooong argument with this guy which to my recollection involved neither of us covering ourselves in glory and involved me feeling my interlocutor was being deliberately obtuse and getting highly annoyed so I doubt the essential thrust of my point comes across well. Also not sure if it's appropriate for me to participate in this discussion since I blocked the guy for what I perceived to be him following me around complaining after the discussion stopped becoming productive.
That said, here's a summary of the argument: "the number is fake anyway, so you don't need to see it," (as you say!).
But yeah healthcare demand is typically excruciatingly inelastic which is a large part of it. Supply is also often inelastic in the short term. Add in all the usual complexities of the U.S. healthcare system and shit is a mess. It doesn't need to be, but it is.
The problem is that the cost to provide the healthcare, the price the hospital wants to charge the insurance company (and therefore you), the price the hospital actually charges the insurance company, the price the insurance company actually pays, and how much you are on the hook for are all totally different, often completely unrelated to each other, and involve information that other parties don't have. Your health system can usually functionally guess how much your insurance will want you to pay for something but it's a guess and insurance companies deviate frequently and quite substantially. If the insurance company knows exactly how much something costs they'll low ball the hospital and the hospital will go out of business (we have a huge issue with hospitals going out of business right now).
Even if the hospital knew with perfect information how much the average procedure "costs" the hospital, and could predict how much the procedure will "cost" you (they can't) it still has no relationship to how much the patient actually pays because their insurance company decides that and they do whatever the hell they want.
You can choose to socialize things and make everyone pay an average for a given thing but Americans typically don't like that so it usually only happens with "safe" stuff.
Smuggled into here is the expectation that the doctor specifically and the healthcare system in general provide information about what another actor (the insurance company) will do. Hospitals already spend a ton of time and salary costs on trying not to lose a war with insurance. Adding more expectations to this will not help anyone and have a low degree of accuracy because fundamentally insurance companies will do the shit they usually do like randomly change which inhaler they'll cover with no warning.
Physicians themselves having awareness of some of the specific numbers is possible in an environment like one guy only doing total knees with a few major insurance companies but that doesn't usually happen. Asking us to know quickly balloons into a time consuming, pointless, inaccurate mess. We'll usually try and keep track of some things that can be leveraged into value for a patient (like which beta blocker is cheapest for your insurance) but this has the risk of becoming rapidly inaccurate and is questionable when you are considering giving someone something less effective to save them money. Is the patient equipped to truly understand the tradeoff? Do you have time to consent and document this in a way that doesn't create risk of later lawsuit?
Messy.
As a practical matter I assume most people want this so they can say spend less money on their colonoscopy, but again their is a lot of inaccuracy and false sense of security that can be driven by this.
Let's say you try three GIs and you get a quote of 5k, 10k, 15k being charged to your insurance or you. The 15k guy says he knows your insurance and they are in network and will for sure only charge you a 20 dollar copay.
What are some possible outcomes?
Maybe you take up 15k guy, go in for your procedure and he has to do a stat case and he offers his partner. You are exhausted from the bowel prep and don't want to spend another day shitting yourself so you say sure. Wait this guy isn't in network! Full bill. If you are lucky they'll notice this in advance and tell you but you might not notice because at this point you are sick, but realistically some random intraop nurse saying "hey do you want this done today or nah" isn't going to catch that problem.
Maybe you want to self-insure and pay the 5k guy. It's a colonscopy the pricing std is going to be pretty favorable. Okay but you have a cardiac event during the procedure and are now on the hook for millions of dollars (wouldn't quite work this way but I'm trying to keep the examples constrained). Maybe your insurance covers 5k guy and you go with that but it doesn't cover the replacement anesthesia because they aren't in network or the cost of your adverse event.
Ultimately the problem is that it's hard to give numbers in general, it's harder to make them accurate, nothing the hospital can do can guarantee the numbers are accurate, they are therefore not very useful in the vast majority of situations and also have a very real cost to deliver to a patient (in the form of literal costs in staffing to generate the numbers and in negotiating costs with other actors).
BahRamYou
1d ago
hmm, are you suggesting that Britain could ship away all of its undesirable white males to Antarctica...? (just a joke)
Jiro
1d ago
Smashing the defect button in response to someone who always defects is the correct move.
Jiro
1d ago
You just help to normalize and move the overton window on counterproductive self-face hitting among normies.
Just like you can't get back to the state of "nobody does it", you also can't get back to the state of "it isn't in the Overton window". Either it's acceptable for only the left to do it, or it's acceptable for both sides. You can't move the Overton window to "it's acceptable for nobody".
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
You ever play with the vox populi mod?
It actually makes it the 4x GOAT imo, civ5 with VP may never be topped
Easily the highest quality mod overhaul I've ever had the privilege of playing
Soteriologian
1d ago
I got back into Elden Ring a few months ago, fairly hardcore (lvl 1 challenge runs, etc.). The addiction didn't last too long, but it was pretty strong for a solid two months.
People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."
Mechanically, the game is challenging for casuals, but it's fulfilling to play well. The defining design principle is that actions should be deliberate and if you get hit, it is your fault, and there is something you as a mortal human (ie., not Serral) could reasonably have been expected to do to prevent it.
The challenge that baited me into learning the game seriously was "Can you beat the Tree Sentinel as a lvl 1 wretch?" It's available right from the start of the game, and at first it seems impossibly hard, but it actually isn't once you learn the fight. At first, you'll die over and over again in the first ten seconds, and the challenge seems like something only a demigod could do; but with a bit of practice, you start to notice that all the attacks have predictable behavior, and eventually, not only does it seem doable, it feels downright easy.
The story is not told in a traditional fashion, and if you wait for the game to tell you the story, you'll miss it entirely, because the game never does. Rather, you're expected to pay attention to the detail of the world by piecing together snippets of information you retrieve from item descriptions. This sounds annoying, and it is until you get used to it. But once you get used to it, you'll be like "huh, I wonder what that Shaded Castle is all about. I never paid any attention to the items or people there, I wonder if there's anything interesting?" And there is! (If you want to know, the guy who's supposed to be ruling the castle is a weak simp who's been booted out of his own palace, which is now ruled by a foreigner who threw all the beautiful artwork in the trash, and the entire place is now flooded in poison and overrun by screeching subhumans. Gee, what could the game have been trying to tell us? Everything in Elden Ring is like this, and you can absolutely waltz through the game without noticing any of it if you don't pay attention.)
Finally, Elden Ring is one of the only games I've ever played where I genuinely believe the team's visual designers are more cognitively gifted than its programmers. I don't mean the game is has Realistic Graphics, which I don't care about (I usually prefer stylized graphics to realism, e.g., the Persona series). I mean the visual design itself is absolutely stunning. For example, the Church of Vows is aligned such that when you look through the front, you see Rya Lucaria Academy, and when you look through the rear, you see the Erdtree, because at this church were married the leaders of these two factions to resolve a great war. Once again, you can play the game and be totally oblivious to this sort of thing; but the game is saturated with this sort of high-IQ, intentional design. It is beautiful, and I have the highest respect for it.
My biggest criticism is that the game is bad at explaining how to play. This was my first souls game, and at the start I found the mechanics frustrating and counterintuitive, and the game's hints are worthless ("Did you know you cannot ride your horse indoors?" Yes, thank you for that profound insight, now how do I use the skill in my right-hand weapon?). And even aside from that, there are a zillion small design issues and bugs. But these problems fade into irrelevance in the light of the glory the game achieves. Its heights are so high. It is the only game I've ever played that feels like it successfully transcends the middle class nature of video games and ascends to the same tier of artistic achievement as good literature.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I would posit the GM share ownership was as a result of a huge exigent circumstances, which Intel is not facing.
They were already facing it; this is a follow on from their taking of CHIPS Act money. Intel is in trouble; x86-based architectures have lost to ARM at the high end, they don't have a GPU design, and their foundries aren't state-of-the-art. They can either try to build down and compete only in markets which don't want the cutting edge (defense, aerospace, automotive), or build up and try to get themselves out of the hole they are in. They probably are simply too big and have too much debt to do the first without bankruptcy, and it's simply not clear how they can do the second.
How would you feel if the Dems started buying equity shares in solar panel manufacturers because "the climate is an urgent crisis we must address"?
About the same way I felt about Solyndra. My point isn't that this isn't bad, it's that it's not some new sort of badness.
JTarrou
1d ago
Of course it is. And with competing nationalisms and versions of the religion. Point is, they all happen within Islam. When Europe was "Christendom", they had thousands of heretical sects, competing secular governments, nobles, clerics, etc. They still had some more powerful ideology serving as the tent under which all that was "united". Neither Islam nor globohomo is any different. We're all in globohomo, whether we like it or not in the same way Iran is part of Islam, even though they are hated heretics by the rest of Islam.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
"What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong."
Talk about brand dilution, this is fucking embarrassing lmao
I adore the concept of the "shining city on the hill" and I admire America's national mythos.
I actually like the concept of this initative.
But mortgaging America's brand to leverage your own? Cringe
roystgnr
1d ago
China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on.
In space, China's performance these days (whether measured by launches or satellites put in orbit or upmass) beats out the entire rest of the world (excepting SpaceX) combined. SpaceX outdoes them by somewhere between 200% and 900% depending on how you measure, though whether that means "the West is fine" or just "the West got really lucky" is less quantifiable. China's shooting for their first manned lunar landing around 2030, which doesn't seem likely but does seem possible; if Blue Origin continues to move glacially (though they've reached orbit now, good for them) and if Starship continues to have teething problems (the v2 ships have been tragedies so far, though catching two boosters and reusing one already was impressive) then China might beat Artemis 3 (still supposedly 2027? that is not going to happen).
China's current lunar plans are basically Apollo-style "flag and footprints" missions, vs US designs that ought to be more sustainably affordable and carry more cargo (or "much more", if Starship gets working smoothly), but China has 3 companies with Falcon-9-scale partially reusable launch vehicles currently in testing, which puts them way ahead of most of the competition. China's Starship-scale fully reusable plans are currently at the "Powerpoint slides of what we say we'll do in the 2030s" stage, so may never happen, but even that feels like a step up from e.g. the UK (current motto: "The sun will never stop setting on the British Empire") or continental Europe (also armed with 2030s-target Powerpoint slides, but for a mere Falcon 9 competitor).
I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.
Starlink is up to 6 million subscribers now, so even if Elon's irrevocably pissed off both parties at this point they've still got enough non-federal revenue to keep going. If he goes full Howard Hughes and starts trying to redesign Starship from birch or something then all bets are off, of course.
Their next Starship flight test (scrubbed yesterday with a ground systems issue) is going to be attempted this evening. No exciting booster catch attempt this time (this flight and the last are trying different angle-of-attack flyback trajectories, to get data and push out the envelope on that, and they don't want to come back near the tower in case they push too far), but it should still be tense. Everybody's waiting on pins and needles to see whether they've fixed the last of the new v2 ship problems or whether Turks and Caicos are about to get another unintended fireworks show.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
For what it is worth, the government taking direct control of key industries is not a leftist-only thing. Historically, fascists were also big on dirigism. If the Fuehrer wanted German car manufacturers to build tanks, he will tell them to focus on building tanks, and they will comply, or else.
From what I can tell, Intel foundries are basically in the third place after TSMC and Samsung for 3nm processes. Also, it seems that the foundries -- the only part of any strategic importance -- are perhaps 10% of their business.
Personally, however little I trust CEOs to be aligned to the long term interests of their companies, I trust the USG a lot less. I can totally see Trump wanting the ability to fire CEOs when they report weak quarterlies for making him look bad, I just don't think that this is going to make companies more competitive or serve urgent national security needs.
georgioz
1d ago
Britain already has history of shipping various prisoners and undesirables to inhospitable places in name of expansion. Who knows, history could repeat itself.
I got into Anno 1800 (pro tip: you can get the base game cheap and cream API the DLC for free) about a year ago and Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I haven't had a game touch my dopamine receptors like that since I was a teenager first getting into gaming.
It was un-ironically as close as I've ever gotten to wire-heading. The temptation to play at the expense of food, sleep, work performance, sex, socialization was intense.
What made it so addicting:
The production chains being complex enough to be challenging while not so complex as to shut down from overwhelm.
Ship logistics was a ton of fun, getting better at that and seeing it pay off was sweet.
The Victorian aesthetic I find really compelling, and the tense action against the other AI (who you later realize are absolutely useless at the game) makes for a really fun juggling balance and tension.
The different areas provide variety and a steady march of new challenges to wrap your brain around.
Each phase of the game has a distinct feel, and is fun on its own merits. Desperate economic balancing when you're on an island or two. Balancing wide/tall expansion with conflict in mid game. And finally hyper-optimizing and paper-clipping in end game once you've wiped out everything else.
I finally stopped playing incredibly suddenly once I was at about 150,000 investors and had just started the final production chains for the higher level skyscraper goods. The level of optimization required at that point (my goal was 1,000,000 investors) meant I was largely following templates I found on the German (lol) template sites, including their researched specialist stacks. At that point I wasn't really playing anymore, I was just following digital Lego instructions. I was also getting mildly tired of having to raze and re-design suboptimal islands repeatedly as I got better/learned how the game worked. I guess I could have continued to play blind and try to get to 1mil myself, but that would have taken so long, and required even more "raze and re-design" moments, so I got bored and stopped. Sucked a good couple hundred hours of me before I did though.
How do you feel in the midst of that mechanic:
Fucking incredible, it was the perfect level of challenge and the challenge level contributed to increase at a pace that allowed you to skill up perfectly in sync with it.
It was seriously so compelling and so fucking fun.
It was basically an instant drop into flow state on command, it was magical.
The sudden end was kind of surprising to me. I went from being so compelled to play it to basically 0 interest over night. Other games I adore (civilization, paradox games, battlefield) I have played for decades and will continue to play for decades. Anno was a whirlwind romance in comparison.
Highly recommend.
The book is way more enjoyable if you ignore Kuang's seething and take the satire at -- pardon the pun -- face value.
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