It really depends on what you’re dying to. Even top level players will die to Gremlin Nob and Lagavulin in STS1 if they don’t get enough damage early on and Skulking Colony or Effigy in STS2 if they don’t get enough block consistency. And the higher you climb, the more RNG will start to affect your early game.

It sounds like you have a good general plan already. In general, in Act 1 you want to prioritize getting a damage plan in place, especially for Ironclad and Watcher in STS1 and Ironclad and Regent in STS2. If you can kill enemies on turn one or two, you don’t have to worry about block as much. Combats are more valuable if you can end them quickly because you get to see three cards, get some money, and possibly get a potion. If you see one or two good block cards, grab them for act 2.

Act 2 is generally a mixture of AOE fights, damage checks, and block checks. Slavers and Gremlin Leader in STS1, Decimillipede and Entomancer in STS2. Try to look for solutions to these in your card rewards. Draw is almost always valuable and can mitigate card draw RNG.

Act 3 is usually a scaling check. Can your deck scale fast enough to kill the boss before it kills you? In STS1, you usually want to aim for a 20-25 card deck that has consistency, in STS2, it’s not unusual to end with a 30-35 card deck that’s more versatile. These are just suggestions, not hard rules, if you can make a consistent fifty card deck or a versatile five card deck, go for it.

On the turn to turn level, always take a moment to check your draw pile before doing anything else. Turn off fast mode if you’re playing too fast. Check for lethal before you play cards (I lost a Regent run recently because I could have killed but missed it). Check your relics for slow plays before you end combat (like setting up Pen Nib or Nunchaku). After that it’s just making choices. Do you want to get weak or vuln in place or do a bunch of damage? Do you want to play a strike over a defend to trade health or try to greed out a few HP?

Baalorlord, FrostPrime, and jorbs are my go-to YouTube channels. I’ve heard good things about Xecnar and Japanese Exports as well.

I know this is a shitpost, but I honestly think that was better. In the past couple years I’ve bought an mp3 player, and dslr camera, and a pocket sized e-reader, and a retro gaming handheld, and it feels so much better swapping between them when I’m doing something than just staring at the little hell rectangle for 12 hours a day.

Asking the solution to doomerism is asking the question backward. Doomerism is a rational response to the rich and powerful steering civilization directly into climate catastrophe. Oil companies have known for at least 60 years that they were negatively affecting the climate, but there’s been a bipartisan project to not only shield them from accountability, but to actively empower them to continue the destruction. All of the most powerful state apparatuses in the world serve the same death cult.

If you want to stop doomerism, you should become a green socialist. Tear down the power structures that suppress green alternatives. Oppose oil lines, oppose AI data centers, shut down the corporations, the governments, the shills. Stop letting them steer the ship toward destruction.

The solution to that “can’t find love” feeling is more complex, but it’s equally as tied up in the current state of global capitalism. Basically every major government has spent the last fifty years trying to squeeze people as much as possible to the point that everything’s expensive and nothing works. We’re all alienated, we all have various traumas handed down to us by our boomer parents and no real way to heal from them that’s not reliant on others. Our communities have been destroyed over and over again because community stands in the way of capital.

Destroying capitalism probably won’t fix the entrenched ideologies that keep us miserable, but we can’t start trying to fix the entrenched ideologies until we destroy capitalism.

Can we stop with these profiles of people who were holding “Mass Deportation Now” signs two years ago and maybe interview some annoying leftists who opposed the genocide in Gaza and war with Iran before gas was six dollars?

1. The business class has been promised they can cut workers and use AI instead, which has been their dream since forever.

2. AI has been shown to deskill workers. Experts lose their skills, new workers don’t gain new skills. Then the owners of AI can rent skills back to people at a profit.

3. If businesses can deskill and fire enough workers, they can take advantage to reinstate things like scrip and slavery.

You rightfully notice that AI isn’t useful enough for businesses to throw an entire civilization worth of money at because you’re thinking about it as a tool, but it’s not a tool, it’s a weapon. A weapon pointed at you and me.

Hey, an actual shower thought

Currently in the US, my full time job pays me every two weeks (May is a three paycheck month for us). It’s a professional level job, but we’re not overtime exempt, so I only work 40 hours a week or I need to take flex time to balance it out the next week. I sometimes work 9 or 10 hour days, but that just means I get to leave early on Friday.

My part time tutoring job pays once a month, I turn in teaching reports at the end of the week and they use that to calculate hours.

When I was teaching in China I’d get paid on the first of the month, never had any problems with delays, but that might be owed to being a foreign teacher.

When I was in Korea they’d pay twice a month, with the only delay being the first paycheck where they forgot to take down my banking information and the last paycheck that I had to fight HR for.

The current connotation is a marketing term for a series of computer models that generate text, images, and video, none of which is actually artificially intelligent, but which many people have been swept up in with various promises of a future that’s almost certain to never materialize.

If you’re a Palantir employee reading this wondering if you’re the bad guy: You are. You are the bad guy.

Liam (The Plant Slant) does short form video that’s aimed at combating misinformation and giving simple advice for forming nutrition habits

Feel better, speedy

I filmed a lake with dark clouds over it a couple weeks ago for a video outro, set my phone up at the edge of a dock, held onto it the entire time. Could not stop thinking about how screwed I’d be if I had a hand spasm, or if there was a gust of heavy wind, or if the dock suddenly shook and my phone dropped into the lake.

The person who wrote that fancies themselves someone who can manipulate circumstances to their favor through means other than action, such as through social manipulation or persuasion, not realizing that sometimes conditions require changing hearts and minds and sometimes conditions require putting your body on the line.

I know, you should stop using Google

AI doesn’t understand anything, it’s just producing a linguistically coherent answer that may or may not be right. Stop looking to LLMs for answers if you care about whether those answers are correct or not

Reading anything without the help of AI will help you become a better writer because you’ll learn new ways of using words and sentences and syntax in a way that people write naturally. It seems weird to focus on Marxism, but if that’s what gets you reading, go for it.

Libertarian used to be a polite word for anarchist, it was a contrast to authoritarian. Libertarian socialists still see themselves as part of a historical tradition as an alternative to authoritarian socialists, though that’s more European than American. Then there was a political project of European and American conservatives to redefine libertarians to mean conservatives who believed in strong property rights and a weak state.

Anarchism is a broad ideology against authority. Anarchists are against private property rights because if there is private property, there must be an authority to enforce those rights. Instead, anarchists point to pre-civilization methods of carving out individual spaces from the commons so that people can live without having to “make a living.”

There’s been a massive propaganda push by governments and state powers to define anarchist as “bomb-thrower,” or to try and make anarchist ideas seem ridiculous, but anarchists are extremely invested in people recognizing themselves as moral agents invested in communal good while maintaining individuality. if you’re interested in anarchist ideas, try reading non-fiction like David Graeber, or fiction like Ursula K LeGuin, or speeches by Emma Goldman. Don’t let people on social media’s knee-jerk reaction against anarchism turn you off. Even if you end up not being an anarchist, you can at least engage with the ideas and maybe find some stuff that resonates with you.

If they’re still alive and still benefitting from said art and still harming people, no. Any time, money, or attention you give to them enables them to hurt other people.

A couple years ago I saw a band I really liked live. They were really important to me because their music helped me get through the collapse of one of my past relationships. Then it came out that the singer had hurt multiple people in multiple cities on their tour. So now if I stream their music, or buy their merch, or even just listen to their music alone, it’ll be materially supporting a person’s ability to hurt other people.

It’s much easier to separate art from people who are no longer around to hurt other people. I don’t feel bad for appreciating Guernica or reading Infinite Jest because doing so doesn’t support the artists behind them causing harm.

Ocarina of Time is my GOAT. Finishing it as a kid and realizing that games could be more than just killing time, that they could be epic journeys with satisfying endings, that they could be a whole art form was really transformative.

I saw someone in advertising a few days ago saying that using AI generated images in their ads kills their sales with gen Z. Gen Z can spot errors in shadows, inconsistencies in textures, small tells that boomers and gen X largely can’t. As a millennial, I can spot a lot of AI, though every so often something slips through. But when I see a youtube channel with an AI generated image, or a business with an AI generated advertisement, or a game on steam with AI generated thumbnails, I click the three dots and ignore.

I think most advertising companies are going to find that the more Gen Z and millennial customers they have, the less they’re going to want to use generated images.