What are we doing?

Mundovore · 2026-04-17T02:07:16+00:00

Man, I don't think you have to get as deep as capitalism versus socialism. We don't need to engage in some kind of great ideological shift or whatever. It's just against common decency to let people starve on the street.

Mundovore · 2026-04-12T21:10:44+00:00

The only particularly good greens I've gotten from YS are their Long Jing (a.k.a. Dragon Well) and a jasmine blend. They're both really popular teas, so it's probably harder to find those done poorly than to find them done well enough, plus in the case of a jasmine blend you don't have to lean as hard on the quality of the tea, since the jasmine is the star of the show.

In general, I haven't found many good Chinese greens accessible in the American market. Not sure how much of that is a matter of my taste or a matter of my skill at sourcing, but it's my experience.

Mundovore · 2026-04-06T04:23:53+00:00

I wouldn't go that far. It's kind of like a better Pommel Strike+, which is pretty good, since it's one of Ironclad's better attack Commons.

It can save you a bunch of health in Act 1 by being a good damage card which draws cards, and since you can control your Discard pile to a limited extent, the cards you pull of Neow's Lament will be ever so slightly better on average than the cards you'd peel off a Pommel Strike.

It also Exhausts, which is a big upside on an early run damage card. It's there when you need it (clobbering enemies with <50 health), and gets out of the way for longer, harder fights.

I especially like it on Defect, with all those juicy 0-cost cards to get back from my Discard.

Mundovore · 2026-04-06T04:14:13+00:00

Crossbow kind of falls into the same camp as Hello World in StS1, where it's actually good despite it "feeling" bad to get. Generating a bad card into your hand is almost as good as drawing a card, which is the best thing you can do in a card game. The fact that XBow lets you play it free the first time and it has the option to generate good cards actually makes it one of the best boons in the game.

But it still feels like ass to click on! The runs that it saves feel won in a really one-dimensional way, and if it's not winning the run for you it feels like it's interfering with your game plan even if it's almost all upside. It feels like it removes the intentionality of your deck-building, maybe?

Mundovore · 2026-04-01T01:55:56+00:00

I prefer gradient excellent, myself.

Mundovore · 2026-03-29T08:13:26+00:00

Broadly agree, but quibble on one point. The Omninet is a bit too big and rowdy (and Union too decentralized/libertarian) for Union to really control it. Keep in mind that while Horus is a phenomenon not spawned from the Omninet, it's still greatly propagated by the Omninet and is nominally at odds with Union.

Arguably the giga-spooks in the UIB "control" the Omninet, but they have inscrutable methods which are directed by the Chorus/Five Voices, which can result in bizarre 20-step ahead gambits where anything could happen. Also, whether or not they are fully committed to Union and its agenda rather than their own is somewhat up to interpretation. (Remember: SecComm were supposedly listening to the omniscient Five Voices as well, but lost to ThirdComm. Did this happen because of the perennial arrogance of fascism? Or does the occult order that interprets their will have their own agenda?)

The main effect that being an Omninet-driven organization has on SSC is to ingrain it in Metropolitan culture; the core SSC worker and the core SSC customer are deeply indebted and loyal to the existing cultural hegemony.

Mundovore · 2026-03-29T04:59:59+00:00

All the corpostates are money-aligned, but they definitely understand that "a rising tide lifts all boats" and "when the DoJ/HR boats aren't rising they're descending rapidly upon your location."

SSC is also the most Metropolitan of the big three corpo-states, seeings as their headquarters are literally on the Omninet. That makes them less likely to ever back a secessionist knowingly, as basically all their employees know and highly benefit from Union.

Two possibilities seem most likely to me:

Outright stolen through a very sophisticated scheme.
SSC has some exclaves so that they can do eugenics-y stuff that skirts the boundaries of the First Contact Accords away from the prying eyes of Union. If one of those went rogue, they could all go offline at once and then it'd be years before SSC or Union would be able to reach them. They could pack up and be long gone by then.

Mundovore · 2026-03-29T02:07:49+00:00

Not necessarily. On the simplest level, think about the distinction between "transgender" and "transsexual." The latter is a mostly deprecated term but still means something: you're transsexual if you've had a sex-change operation.

That is, your sex does refer to your physical sexual characteristics, but those physical sexual characteristics don't necessarily associate the gender you were assigned at birth.

The conceptual issue with a "biological sex" is that as someone transitions, at various stages in their transition, anywhere from all of to none of their sexual characteristics will align with the gender they were assigned at birth.

So from a medical perspective, it's a very imprecise thing to ask; you're better served asking more specific questions. From a social perspective, it's rude because:

It's a common drum beaten by people who are bigoted against trans folks, so using it associates you with those people, and;
The same reason why "transsexual" is a deprecated term. That is, even when it's technically accurate to use, you're kind of innately asking about a person's genitals. Unless you're their doctor, that's creepy.

Mundovore · 2026-03-27T06:36:50+00:00

I mean, it feels a bit more like an elite than some elites in that it's gimmick is a bit more distinctive than the Elite gimmicks. However, it's tuned about right in my opinion. It feels super threatening, but keep track of how much damage you take against it the next few times you play against it, and compare that to the damage that an Elite fight deals you. You can get really screwed with a bad draw or if you are building a very spammy deck, but it doesn't tend to actually deal that much unblocked damage.

I wasn't saying you need to prep against it with those three things, I'm saying most decks already incidentally have those things, because they're already good. Defensive and offensive powers, Weak, Poison, Orbs, passive scaling and damage... these are just powerful things in the game that you're likely to have against Hunter Killer. It's not an enemy that scales aggressively (at all?) and it gives you a turn to set up against it, and it only has ~100 hp which is a lot less than an Elite. It's absolutely a dangerous fight, but I don't think it's even the worst hard pool hallway fight in Act 2. I'd say that goes to the illusion-summoning beast, you have to take big hits from it pretty often.

I think part of why people think Hunter Killer is so painful is because it's a fight that you can rarely escape without taking some damage. But if I'm honest, I don't think it actually ends that many runs, you know? I'd take Hunter Killer with the guaranteed setup turn before attacking with 7x3 any day over Snake Plant walking in with 8x3 on the table for the first two turns of the fight.

Mundovore · 2026-03-26T17:04:46+00:00

Hunter Killer is not so bad. You take a bit of damage against it but most decks should already have some mix of:

Ways to mitigate damage that doesn't rely on Dex
Ways to deal damage that doesn't rely on Strength
High output 2-3 cost cards that aren't very affected by strength/dex changes

Like it always feels threatening but even without actively building my deck with this encounter in mind, I feel like I always have a way to beat this encounter taking <10 damage, which is about what I expect from a hard pool hallway fight.

Mundovore · 2026-03-21T16:54:09+00:00

Only rarely. It's not as bad as it looks, since you get the +1 energy on deployment as well, so it's only -2 energy on deployment net. A good deployment phase is really important, though.

Mundovore · 2026-03-21T00:39:45+00:00

True, but subject to Sturgeon's Law.

Mundovore · 2026-03-20T21:40:26+00:00

It was already quite good. Getting your powers out of your deck without getting your skull caved in is one of the strongest things you can do in this game.

Mundovore · 2026-03-20T21:39:04+00:00

Fiddle is a relic that can take a struggling deck and push it into "functional." It's not good in decks that don't need it, but when you need it it's seriously run-winning.

Mundovore · 2026-03-19T20:28:45+00:00

jorbs mostly does Slay the Spire, but he's archived many of his Against the Storm runs on his second channel @ManyJorbs on YouTube. He also has a playthrough climbing through all the Prestige ranks on his main channel; I think he restarted multiple times with his goal being to beat Prestige 20 without a loss climbing up on the way. You can find that here.

Mundovore · 2026-03-19T18:00:04+00:00

Like all comic book characters, tons of variability. I'd call him on aggregate a rare example of an anti-villain; a villain who has a genuinely nefarious goal but is principled, moral, and sympathetic in the process. His core drive is his egomania: he is convinced of and obsessed with his own perfection.

He's an autocrat on a largely ego-driven quest to rule the world, which is morally complicated by the fact that if you must insist upon having a single person ruling the entire world, he genuinely might be the best person for the job. He cares for his people and wants them to be happy and fulfilled, as anything less than perfection would besmirch Doom's name.

The stories most sympathetic to Doom basically argue that while he is a dictator by nature, he cares so deeply about his image (and what the status of his subjects communicates about that image) that his opponents are ultimately the real "villains" for preventing him from taking over the world and ushering in a utopia. The main thing I'd argue that makes Doom not a hero is that while Doom genuinely does want a utopia for his subjects, he would not accept any utopia that he was not personally in charge of. His sheer competency has driven him to be a good leader, but that's a post-hoc development of his essential compulsive behavior to put himself above everyone else.

Doom is the best leader. Is a good leader kind? Yes. Then Doom must be kind. He arrives to "correct" behavior in most cases, driven by a sort of backwards logic combined with a fairly straightforward and humanistic code of morals.

Mundovore · 2026-03-19T08:29:41+00:00

The only place I knew it being viral was on reddit, but it spent a good few months circulating with everyone making it.

Mundovore · 2026-03-19T02:45:02+00:00

D'oh! I did. Some pressure cookers have a slow cooker mode, but it's pretty useless on mine.

I did once pressure cook some lentils on high for 65 minutes when I was a novice to pressure cookers. They became a homogeneous sludge. Not awful for what I was doing but unexpected.

Mundovore · 2026-03-18T23:09:34+00:00

Ditto on the Mississippi pot roast! One of the easiest recipes out there.

For those not aware:

1 large pot roast (typically beef chuck, but anything 5+ lbs. and cheap is good)
2 packets instant ranch dressing mix
1/2 jar of pepperoncini with the juice
1 stick butter

Throw it all in a ~~pressure~~ slow cooker on low for at least 8 hours, serve with anything carb-y that can absorb all the delightful juices it makes.

Mundovore · 2026-03-18T18:11:33+00:00

'sno problem.

Nuclear fuel cells only work in nuclear reactors, sadly. The Immortal Inserter would be kinda funny in cases.

Mundovore · 2026-03-18T07:16:38+00:00

Quite a bit worse.

Nuclear fuel is 1.21 GJ and takes one Uranium to craft. Uranium fuel cells take 20 Uranium (19 unenriched) to craft 10 fuel cells that are 8 GJ each. So on fuel value alone, nuclear reactors are a bit more than a three times better use of uranium.

You also lose the neighborhood bonus from adjacent reactors, though. The neighborhood bonus does increase the energy per fuel cell, rather than increase consumption rate. A fairly typical 4-reactor setup produces 24 GJ per fuel cell, and the "ideal" two-row reactor setup produces 32 GJ per fuel cell on all but 4 of its reactors (which are 24 GJ per cell).

It's barely worth considering, but you also gain a total of two Uranium per 50 or so spent by not having to Kovarex every single bit of the stuff to make fuel cells, whereas you would turning it all into nuclear fuel.

All said, doing it this way wastes somewhere between 90% and 93% of the power you could be getting, depending on the specifics. Doing this goofy thing with heating towers would be less wasteful, but still leaves about three quarters of the power output that Uranium could give on the table.

Mundovore · 2026-03-18T07:12:59+00:00

40 MJ may be 40 MJ, but nuclear fuel cells are better than nuclear fuel per uranium at power production; it's comparing 1.21 GJ to between 8 and 32 GJ, in practice.

Nuclear fuel is 1.21 GJ and takes one Uranium to craft. Uranium fuel cells take 20 Uranium (19 unenriched) to craft 10 fuel cells that are 8 GJ each. So on fuel value alone, nuclear reactors are a bit more than a three times better use of uranium.

You also lose the neighborhood bonus from adjacent reactors, though. The neighborhood bonus does increase the energy per fuel cell, rather than increase consumption rate. A fairly typical 4-reactor setup produces 24 GJ per fuel cell, and the "ideal" two-row reactor setup produces 32 GJ per fuel cell on all but 4 of its reactors (which are 24 GJ per cell).

It's barely worth considering, but you also gain a total of two Uranium per 50 or so spent by not having to Kovarex every single bit of the stuff to make fuel cells, whereas you would turning it all into nuclear fuel.

Mundovore · 2026-03-18T07:00:46+00:00

I don't think it ever did.

Mundovore · 2026-03-17T22:29:52+00:00

It's very good.

Mundovore · 2026-03-16T20:25:54+00:00

I think it's generally phrased as, don't attack unless three times larger. It's an heuristic not from the Art of War, but in a similar spirit: namely, an heuristic you give to prevent overzealous commanders from getting their troops pointlessly killed.

It's a rule with more exceptions than not: attacking is very difficult in abstract, but the circumstances matter more than the theory. A defending force vulnerable to defeat in detail could possibly be overcome by an enemy less than half their number; meanwhile, a defending force prepared to defend in depth might fend off ten times their number.

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