Juice

HBLB took me a while but once I got good at him its an exciting fight.

There are still pockets that play it. Reddit (yuck) has the huntersbell community which last I checked still had bloodstarvedbree helping people through the game. There's also the tomb prospectors discord, which is the best community around bb IMO they explored and mapped all 1600 chalice dungeons, and the creators of the hacked FD chalices including the cummm dungeon still hang out there too.

The story dungeons are a little bland, but some of the root chalices are insane. People used to think they were all randomly generated, but some are so well designed, too well designed to be random. I found a section inside one of the hacked FRC chalices, where there is a giant oil swamp and 3 big troll pthumerians; two that shoot cannonballs which explode in the oil, and one regular hooky boy. But there is a beast possessed soul (the tall black wolf beasts that you sometimes fight as a boss in CDs) chilling in a tunnel that you can lure into the oil swamp. And remember these dudes throw fireballs too, and can attack other enemies, so he can be lured into the oil swamp and set on the giants. All of the sudden there's explosions everywhere that can one shot you, but if you get away you can watch them fight and then come behind to clean up the trolls by getting the cannon guys to shoot the other ones and then run in to go finish the last one off. Like you can imagine the devs coming up with these little scenarios, maybe dozens of different ones, as they make like 1600 discrete dungeons. So cool. Like the devs didn't have to add the CDs, but they still give a ton of content and new challenges.

Care to elaborate?

Headless Bloodletting Beast. Learning to solo the watchdog and Amygdala in cursed pthum, and then helping people in coop with those bosses after they got killed over and over and over is my favorite part of coop probably.

But fr my favorite part of the CDs is all the weird little set ups in the level 5 root dungeons. There are like puzzles in them, there aremore than a few really cool encounters that aren't bossfights at all

Exactly! the two things are the same phenomenon expressing in two different ways! This is exactly why this is such a mindfuck.

Follow my logic: in the usa by 2022, covid19 had killed over a million people. When you compare this to the total unemployed in the US, that's not just the governments padded numbers but adding together all the people in prisons, people who stopped looking for work, etc., those covid deaths were about 12% of that unemployed "surplus" population. Again, the system needs a certain number of people to be unemployed, over a million people died, which means over a million "jobs" (this includes employed and unemployed positions within the entire workforce.) At the time the media was calling it "the great resignation," where employees were just going out and getting better jobs. But where did these jobs come from? Can you really just go out and get a better job any time you want? Of course not. Try searching for a job now, good fucking luck.

Seriously, google "reserve army of labor" if you haven't already, it explains everything. So as the labor market tightens, consumption increases. People got a better job and can fix their credit up in a few months and get a loan on a car maybe for the first time. People are walking out of the grocery store with more food, or going out to eat more. Retailers notice this and raise prices in response to increased spending. this is a phenomena that Marx wrote about in value price and profit, which I might mention again.

So why were prices going up? Larry Summers gets in front of Jon Stewart and says that increase in spending equals increase in demand, when demand challenges supply then prices go up! Which is what we are generally taught. Except Marx proved that this was not the case, that inflation really was just retailers raising prices due to increase in consumer spending. Its a bit of economic slight of hand that I could explain if you want but for now I'm already long.

The federal reserve says that inflation (which is like you said, mostly driven by companies raising prices to squeeze consumers, and this is proven by the way the fed responds) is out of control, so therefore they are raising interest rates. The way this will control inflation is by making it harder and more expensive for companies to get money for large capital investments. This is all to squeeze the companies to stop hiring (since their p&l is negatively affected) and eliminate excess staff. But the companies are reluctant to let people go/stop hiring because of what they just experienced with a "tight" labor market. They have the incentives or pressures, but they need an excuse, they need a justification. Enter automation with ai. Finally the automation revolution that the media has been threatening workers with for decades is here and sorry can't halt progress you see (Ned Ludd did nothing wrong.)

Except it isnt all that. In the mean time the economy has adjusted to the depleted reserve population, the corpos were given everything they wanted or needed in order to continue to profit after the death of millions, and a new grift industry has grown up and attracted all this funding and following and clout. Didn't even have to lose that many jobs, just a bunch of high paid ones. Except interest rates are still elevated so the fed is continuing to keep that pressure on the labor market. Anyway, there's all of these cascading effects, from systems interacting with each other; therefore its more useful to understand the relation between phenomenon than it often is to try and understand that phenomena on its own.

So you're right, it was corporate policy, but it isn't greed necessarily. Definitely greed adjacent though, its like systematic greed. There are incentives and disincentives present within the system. Karl Marx was able to write about the causes of inflation 150 years ago, and they were using the same faulty excuses then. That's also why the fed decided to raise interest rates, they understood what the problem was, and the fix is and always has been to throw people into unemployment. The system is predictable, but it isn't rational.

Again, I am highly skeptical that this technology (or any other) can be deployed for such a worthy social mission. I have a cousin who works for a company that produces educational materials for people who need a lot of accommodation, so I know that there are definitely good people in those fields who have the ability, and probably desire, to deploy this tech responsibly and progressively in a manner that helps fulfill that and similar missions, but when I look at things systemically I just don't see the incentive structures to do so. I won't deny being a skeptic of AI, especially since my personal and professional experience with it has been like dramatically underwhelming. I'd love to believe things work better than they do, that they even could but with ai I see a lot of promises and nothing in the way of results, outside of modestly entertaining tricks. Although I gotta admit, stable diffusion is really cool. Commercially I think its dogshit but the way it creates the images is fascinating.

No actually I'm mostly self educated. I'm just a tech worker who studies history, social theory and economics, but also does some political organizing. So take it with a grain of salt if you must.

Glad you got something from it, I appreciate the compliment!

Excuse me? Are you calling me a bot?

I remember learning about Turing tests to determine whether speech was coming from a machine. Its ironic that in practice its much more common for people to not be able to recognize even a real person.

"Pessimistic and casual"? You're gonna make me self conscious.

I'm an AI skeptic. Its too energy hungry and its not doing anything except scraping massive amounts of consumer data. No its not going to replace workers (because it doesn't work), but then again countless workers were already laid off so it already served its purpose there. Doesn't have to replace them, just has to purge them but in a systematic way, such that the Fed called for when they started raising interest rates.

Are you an AI Scientist/engineer? If so I'd love to hear more about your work. I'm in tech myself but def not on the bleeding edge of AI.

Well remember that the shifts that can happen in material conditions and consciousness can happen very quickly. We can't decide when that is, but we can prepare and build trust until it does occur. Hard to imagine what it would take in the west to see an overthrow of capitalism, all we can do is throw our weight behind where it will have the most effect, hopefully where our talents reside also! Stay optimistic, despite even evidence to the contrary. For the capitalists, its better to believe that the end of the world is coming than to believe a new world is possible. So if nothing else lets give em hell

It is frustrating in almost every way! I can summon a lot of optimism for the project of socialism and the historic role of the working class; but when it comes to the day to day its too easy to get disillusioned. Its supposed to be disillusioning! The tragic reality in the west is that in our alienation, our exploitation appears to us as comfort. Hang in there and take care of yourself!

You have to learn to distinguish cool liberals, who are for individual freedom, democracy, progressive society; from the bad liberals who always side with private property against those things. The people in the first category are just confused; the people in the second category are actual class enemies. I acknowledge that these aren't discreet categories and there will be some overlap, but winning people to your ideas slowly, over time -- because these ideas are based in their material reality, which they need to test against their existing views -- is the only way to get through to people. Sometimes the process is quicker, sometimes its slow, but its the only way to help people see the world for what it really is, and that together we can actually bring the fight to the ruling class.

Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, colorized