One of the great parts of this game is even if your not going to win, you can still have a huge influence on the outcome so you are still involved in all the politicking.

That's one of the things I liked, yes. If you couldn't be King you could be a Kingmaker.

Never tried Battle for Julu - I’ll add it to my list of future game ideas!

Battle for Julu is, to my knowledge, only published in Chinese, so you might have a hard time playing it:

I Internet-know the designer. She's made quite a few games, but this one she specifically made for people like me: simple enough that we don't get bored to tears, intending it to be basically a gateway drug.

100% is a bit much for me, but I do like it best hovering around at about 80%.

It was one of those strange games for me. Usually I'm not a fan of wargames, except the simpler ones (like Battle for Julu B.C. 207) every once in a while (my SO is an avid wargamer), but this game, despite being the kind of game I should hate just had me enjoying myself when I got the time to play it.

Enjoying myself, and hating all my fellow players, mind. 😉

Another good one for this, if you can find it, is Republic of Rome.

In it you have to cooperate or everybody loses as the republic falls. But you also have to backstab your enemies to get ahead to win. Cultivating a good sense of rhythm so that you can backstab someone at just the right moment to prevent them from being able to retaliate is the fine art that wins that game.

When marketing staff with no knowledge apply buzzwords to things.

OK, definitely it's a lot funnier.

It's hard, however, to deal with people acting as individuals who just happen to be paid by Apartheid Manchild to write or edit articles slanted to his fucked-up worldview.

Harder to aim than a cargo drone filled with 500 lazy dogs.

It would be more suitable for Mr. "I AM High Tech Personified" to be taken out in a decidedly low tech way.

Maybe we can combine high and low tech: a drone that drops lazy dogs on him. Those things are REALLY nasty and very hard to defend against.

I was at work on Christmas (it's Boxing Day right now for me). Christmas isn't a thing here (no matter how hard the merchants try to make it one) so I'm mercifully unimpacted by the high stress winter season.

(High stress here comes in early spring.)

Side note:

With lessons learnt, "the construction of future lines will be increasingly easier, faster, and more cost-efficient", Hoang told AFP.

Hell, yes! Line 2 took ages and was embarrassingly late. (Slated for 2010 opening, it finally limped across the finish line in late 2012, IIRC, and had major teething problems, including one train catching fire, thankfully at a terminal station with almost nobody on it. The next five lines were up in a couple of years, and the remaining half dozen seemed to spring up out of nowhere, not to mention the constant extensions of existing lines. Twelve years, eleven new lines, plus countless extensions. It unfurls like magic once you have the techniques and challenges down.

Cool! It's a life-changing thing to start getting good public transit in a city!

When Wuhan got its first metro (line 2: line 1 is a then-useless elevated light rail) it was actually possible to cross the Yangtze river in reasonable amounts of time, meaning that the two major halves of the city could finally interact properly without hours-long (note the plural) traffic jams.

Now with twelve lines built:

And with a bunch of extensions and new lines in the works, I haven't had to use a private vehicle in ages to go almost anywhere in the city with only a short bus ride and/or short walk on each end.

Ho Chi Minh City: congratulations and enjoy your new life as it unfolds before you.

That's what I was about to say, but quickly checked if someone else had already said it first.

P.S.

...there is a light at the end of the tunnelgangplank.

Fixed that for you.

(As a joke, not seriously.)

Albeit in many countries, Twitter never really had the same impact as in the US. Where I live, Telegram is the source for notifications, updates and news.

Twitter has always been an also-ran in social media circles.

Twitter purports to be a world-scope social media site. These are the numbers for October of 2023 (the most recent I have info for):

Twitter is behind three local-scope social media sites (WeChat, Douyin, and Kuaishou) and running neck-in-neck with a fourth (that is locally largely considered a failure).

Note that: a "global" site is not just behind, but FAR behind in one case, several locally-scoped sites. And it barely registers against other world-scoped sites.

And this is in late 2023 before Apartheid Manchild opened the doors to reveal his batshit insanity and stupidity even more.

Just like the Spinning Jenny back then, AI is as bad as it’s ever going to be today. It’s only going to get better and jobs will be made redundant, I’ll put my money on that. It’s a real fear that many people have, whether they’ll admit it or not.

It's also as good as its ever going to be today (or the near future).

Degenerative AI has already dropped off in usage to the point that major stakeholders in it are terrified. It's going to go into the same winter that every previous "no really this time we've got it right" AI crazes went.

I'm assessing whether your "guess" is wild SF-inspired imagination or grounded in anything, you know, actually factual.

You've answered.

Sportsmanlike behaviour in the modern age?

That IS weird! 🤣