Pretty interesting review for anyone interested. There are spoilers about 2/3 through: https://youtu.be/HMUugZ3DxH8?feature=shared

I listened to the soundtrack for about 4 years before getting around to watching the movie. Very fun. For how slow the build-up is, Playtime is Over is one of my favorite workout songs, always gets the endorphins running.

Caffeine has a metabolic half life of 6-12 hours. This means that after a 24 hour period, there could be 1/4 of the original caffeine amount you drank in your system. If you drink the same amount of caffeine again at that point, now after a 24 hour period you ‘ll have up to 1/4 of that 1.25 amount in your system. If you consume caffeine daily, this can lead to an accumulation of caffeine that your body adjusts to always being there, becoming the new baseline normal. This would feel fine until you stop, at which point the caffeine your body expects to be there is gone, and it needs to take time readjusting to that absence. That leads to withdrawal symptoms.

Oh nice, I just replayed The Last Autumn since the trees are changing color, just waiting on the first snowfall to play the main game. Let me know if there’s anything especially challenging you want advice on!

I’d like to point out that you have only talked about hope without personal action to support a statement about hope as a whole. A better term for that would be wishful thinking. While I agree that not acting while hoping for change is foolish, I believe acting on hope can drive a person to perform beyond what would normally be achievable.

If the world is truly hopeless, then why would anybody put any effort into saving it? It seems to me that at least some level of hope for a better world or life would be a prerequisite toward making that world or life a reality.

I couldn’t figure out the spoiler tags or I’d have left it up. I played it out on my DS so I got the full experience. If I remember correctly even if there wasn’t dialogue you’d still get a short cutscene of the gang eating ice cream after a long day of fighting stuff, which (for a middle schooler at least) really built up a connection by the end of the game.

I never thought a game could give such an emotional gut punch by asking ::: who am I going to eat ice cream with?! :::

I never thought a game could give such an emotional gut punch by asking :::who am I going to eat ice cream with?!:::

It’s probably the format they watched when they were younger, which would be a major contributor to nostalgia. I still keep a VHS player and my parents’ old copies of the pre-special edition Star Wars movies along with Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

Not just the customers, but the “business partners” too! If you want your search results at the top of the list, pay up! Sometimes you even get to pay for your ad to be shown in a context that’s not relevant at all, despite all the data collected to personalize ads!

Don’t go bringing that crackpot Edward Gettier into this. Caesar would know the Germans (those who hail from Germania) as a disorganized, unorganized group of tribes with a common heritage. That’s a justified true belief, or at least as justified and true as one could expect of him. His beliefs would not cover a unified German nation, at which point there can’t be a belief part of a JTB.

Counterpoint: a welcome mat that says “welcome” or “come on in” can be used to circumvent such requirements.

I think it comes down to whether the limitation of entry comes from a restraint external or internal to the vampire. If there is some force that comes from people/houses that prevents the vampire from entering until consent is given, then I think you may be correct in that the permission goes as interpreted by the permission-giver. If it is a compulsion that comes from the vampire themself that they need to receive permission, then it comes down to the interpretation of permission as received by the vampire, and they would have more leeway to twist meanings to allow themselves entry.

Personally I lean toward the latter understanding as it is a simpler explanation of supernatural phenomena for such compulsions to come from the vampire’s psychology than explain some magical force acting on the vampire from the dwelling. It also makes vampires more sinister and therefore scary, which for a horror entity is good.

No, independent would mean you could cease that source of income and maintain your lifestyle. If you save 50% of your first paycheck and then quit I doubt that would be the case.

Being able to set that much aside would definitely make one wealthy (or live a very austere lifestyle) and fast track them toward independence, but it’s not an automatic qualifier.

Man, I loathe this guy. There’s a sign of him at my work lunch area with some rhyme about “something something, avoid a slip up” and I’m just thinking “yeah yeah, whatever Glasses Office Man! Why are you targeting my demographic specifically?”

It’s a myth so widely pushed and accepted over the decades that just calling it a myth won’t be accepted as an argument against it at this point.

What I think is interesting is that this sense of fiduciary duty can be used by a company to do whatever they want. Mass layoffs are part of a fiduciary duty to cut costs. Mass hirings are part of a fiduciary duty to expand operations for growth. At this point it’s less a myth and more an excuse for doing whatever.

Maybe some mental mixup with Snowpiercer, which does take place on a train surrounded by snow?

I think it’s worth playing the first because it’s a much smaller scale and sets up the world. This one is set 30 years later so the society from the first game has significantly grown and expanded, with a lot of the evolutions in gameplay stemming from that. You probably could jump right into the second, but you may feel like you’re missing something at the start.

One of the few series that I love for making me want to be a better person, then hate it because that’s hard, then love it all over again because it’s worth it.

Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.

There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.

And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”

I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU, but by the end of my last game building one mega metropolis even the music was skipping repeatedly as the game tried to keep up. I do really hope they make it run better going forward.

It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.

I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.

I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.