The sweet release of d… Ah, no. Too morbid.

The collapse of the U… No. Too political.

I’ve got some very nice tea (an Anhui “golden flower” black tea) coming in a couple of days. I’m looking forward to that because golden flower tea is almost unbearably tasty.

Jade is quite a bit harder than even a hardcover book. ;)

It’s not all that posh, though. That example there costs the equivalent of about $35.

There are a few stories about it, but the most plausible one is that an alkaline lake dried up and someone found an egg (or maybe a batch of eggs) in it and decided to eat it.

I agree with you. I use pillows of that shape almost exclusively these days.

You consider that a difficult pillow?

Try these on for size. The first turns your WiFi into 5G. The second into 6G, and the final one turns it into an ansible.

Yes, this last one is, in fact, a solid piece of jade. Why do you ask?

Whatever you do, do not look up terms like “TESCREAL” or “Less Wrong” or “Roko’s Basilisk” or “Effective Altruism” or “Longtermism” or …

Well, basically, don’t look up anything related to Silly Con Valley techbrodude CEOs. It is literally insane.

Take something perfectly edible, like say an egg, and cover it in a coating made of mixed clay, wood ash, salt, and quicklime, rolling it in rice hulls and then letting it sit for weeks to months before, you know, eating it.

Oh. I see we have a Canuckistani in our midst here.

Yeah, the “freedom convoy” was one of those more bizarre things in recent Canadian history. (Funded by Americans, of course, because every right wing grift in Canada is funded by Americans.)

And here you come SO FUCKING CLOSE … and still fumble the ball. Tsk. Tsk.

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Aside from him having always been an asshole (that story he tells of being bullied to the point of hospitalization neatly overlooks that he incited that attack…), I genuinely believe that Musk was “red-pilled” to the lunatic extent he is today because of his daughter’s transition and subsequent permanent rejection of him and everything he stands for. Kaptain Ketamine Kidd, the father of the year who refers to his living child as “killed by the woke mind virus”, went hard alt-right after she did the very public name change rejection.

(Hint: Check your assumptions. And while you’re at it check the thread history.)

If you think thousand dollar games are a necessity for modern publishing, I’m sorry there’s absolutely no common ground your or i have. Buh-bye.

After many years of working marketing for high tech firms, with an ever-increasing salary until it hit mid six-figures, I had a complete meltdown and dropped that work entirely, with no employment prospects and no idea of what to do for money, living off my savings for a year.

This enabled me to finally take the plunge and move half a world away (teaching English at first) to reconnect with my roots. I’ve been here now for almost 24 years and haven’t been happier. I even returned to marketing (well, market consultation) in 2016 and managed to somehow not have a second meltdown.

The smell of fresh tea when the package is opened.

“Stinky tofu” when passing the street carts selling it.

Freshly-made lard-cooked french fries.

A “strong-scented” baijiu.

A good Indian restaurant, that moment you walk inside and breath.

The point is these are games MADE FOR RICH PEOPLE. You know, like I said at the beginning of your blank incomprehension:

If you’re “appealing to a larger market” by making the game so expensive that only a few can afford it, are you really getting a larger market? Or are you just deciding you want to cater to rich folk?

$150 for an all cardboard game. Now let’s talk Star Wars: Imperial assault:

• core game: about $110
• dice for everybody? That’s an extra $12 per.
• want expansions? That’s $50 to $75 each. If you want all of them, that’s about $375
• want the “ally and villain packs”? That’s $15-$22 each. If we just count the ones still in print: That’s about $598

Fortunately all of the skirmish maps (at $25 each) are out of print so we’ve saved ourselves a further $325.

So the complete game, with all published parts currently available, is over a thousand bucks, which is utterly ludicrous for a mass market game that won’t even be remembered in a couple of decades (and whose components will have long rotted away before a century is out.

How ludicrous am I talking? For the price of this game that won’t survive a century as any kind of cultural icon (and whose components likely won’t last more than 30 years) I can buy a bespoke Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) set made of knotty red sandalwood with ornate, handmade mother-of-pearl inlay.

But this isn’t the entry price to play the game. If I just want to see if the game is even something I’m interested in, I can get a perfectly functional set for a little bit over fifty cents:

And even this el-cheapo set will outlast, probably, the thousand dollar Star Wars game aside from the thin board (which you can replicate easily with a piece of scrap wood, a pencil, and a ruler). And I also know the actual game will have legs considering the first known set of components was found in the archaeological record at 900 years ago or so, while mentions of it in literature go back almost 2500 years.

So here we have a game accessible to literally anybody ranging from the budget-conscious to the æsthetic fetishist, and that has proved popular across wildly different social classes for well over a thousand years. THIS is the kind of thing I wish the game industry would return to instead of ludicrous stuff like Star Wars: Imperial Assault, or Kingdom Death: Monsters, or Cthulhu Wars, or even the humble old Ogre. (In defence of Ogre, though, I have to say that at least it once had a cheap edition, and may still have.)

TL;DR summary: Stop making games for just rich folk if you want, you know, to expand the hobby, especially now that Trump’s tariffs are killing everything.

I’m pretty sure that any murder is a death sentence.

(Hint: check your assumptions.)

$150 for a game consisting entirely of cardboard, essentially.

How much did the deluxe version of Ogre cost again?