So, what, a month-and-a-half since my last post? Sure feels longer than that. The world at large is fairly quiet, maybe in part thanks to the Winter Olympics going on. The AI bubble may not have popped quite yet, but it sure is looking wobbly. Best of all, the U.S. hasn't started any new shit in the world at large as of yet, although we're definitely making moves that say beating on Iran a bit is a matter of when, not if.
Why might that be? Well, it's because things inside the country have taken enough turns to keep the baddies occupied. ICE did their best "occupying power" imitation in their Minnesota surge, up to and including executing citizens, but, amazingly, the citizenry neither cowered nor exploded into the violence needed to act as an excuse to impose martial law. Things got bad enough on that front (for the baddies) that they had to replace the guy in charge on the ground, who eventually announced that they're going to pull back. Of course, given the track record of truth in announcements from this group, that's a definite wait and see.
Meanwhile, Epsteinapalooza continues apace. Having released about half of the total documents, with significant mis-redactions, the Department of Justice (hah!) wanted to declare everything required by law to be released as released and move on. Funny enough, Congress didn't see it that way. The most recent visual stuck in my head on that is the head of the DoJ in a Congressional hearing doing three things: contemptuously attacking congresscritters from a cheat-sheet, refusing to look at the victims seated behind her, and ranting about the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting an all-time high (as if that had any bearing on her performance of her job).
Of course, those are just the headline items. There's plenty of other smaller-but-not-less-important items, like the baddies trying to find a way to nationalize the next elections, because they're projected to do so poorly in them that they're willing to try and strip that Constitutionally-protected function from the states to protect themselves. The clock is ticking, and I think it's sinking in that their New Reich plan is coming apart at the seams.
On the topic of waiting for things to come apart, can that AI bubble finally pop, or at least significantly deflate? It's interfering (in a definitely first-world-problem sort of way) with me getting a Steam Machine and revamped Steam Controller! The controller's the most important part of that batch, since it would let me play a few games I've been itching to play from my couch (I could make something work for the rest of the gear). But Steam is apparently waiting on some clarity or stability on things like memory prices before they launch their latest batch of hardware, something I honestly don't expect to see this year. But I wants them!
While I wait, I'll mention that I've gotten some good mileage lately out of Reus 2. It's really more of a re-imagining of the original game (which I wrote about back in 2013) than a sequel, but whether that's an improvement or not will be mainly a matter of personal preference. I do like that it's no longer a timer-driven affair and a fair bit less fiddly, but you lose things I liked from the original like biomes interacting with each other. All in all, I think I like it better myself, although there is a fair bit of "min-max your way to victory", as I put it in my original writeup.
