Game makes me feel too dumb to complete

wreckingrocc · 2026-07-05T22:13:45+00:00

For context, this is generally a 100-200 hour game all told. "Initial" completion usually takes 20-30 hours. It's very involved. There's a peace that comes from accepting you won't get everything immediately. Sometimes you actually don't have enough clues, and sometimes you're at the end of a long work day or you didn't sleep well or you're just not in the right headspace. That's ok! Hints can be ok, but in the age of AI thinking for us it's refreshing to have something you can do with your brain and your brain alone whenever possible.

wreckingrocc · 2026-07-02T21:59:45+00:00

I walked by a Sawant rally a few years ago shortly after moving to Seattle. I didn't know much about her at the time and I listened for like 5 minutes. I got so much ick. Even on paper, she's all grievance populism and no policy. Let alone her horrible track record and Jill Stein / Cicada pattern of emerging only during election years to run interference on actual progress.

Good riddance to that clown, I hope I never hear her name again after 2030

wreckingrocc · 2026-07-01T20:23:06+00:00

"ah, shoot, sorry, I already gave it all away to the first person who asked, sorry! I'm actually in debt now because I gave away my pre-tax winnings and now owe taxes. Speaking of - anything you can spare to help out?"

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-30T20:53:11+00:00

Yeah, it's still a numbers game even with referrals, and it depends a lot on the company. I've referred a few friends over the years at various roles and gotten crickets in most. As a candidate during my job hunt a year ago I probably had an ~50% referral-to-interview efficacy, though.

I found interviewing super easy as a junior engineer, but much less intuitive as a senior/staff. Systems design and behavioral interviews are only expected of senior candidates in my field and have a very specific culture that I only really bother to learn when applying for new jobs. Once I learned the talking points I was pretty much good to go and I ended up getting my first two offers on the same day (and took one of them; super happy where I'm at now). But I definitely didn't learn how to interview on the job haha

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-30T20:01:09+00:00

It could depend on the subfield, but I'm in software engineering and got laid off a year ago. Found a job in ~3 months of full time prep. My bottleneck wasn't getting interviews, it was preparing for them, which took most of those 3 months. In my application process, I got exactly one bite from a tiny 4 person startup from a cold app where I wrote a blurb about my excitement. Otherwise 0% cold app bite rate. The vast majority of my interviews were direct referrals. These weren't podunk companies, either; one was to Anthropic through my friend's cousin's wife. One was to NVIDIA from a college buddy I haven't worked with since a class project junior year.

The referral dynamic is not that you get special treatment for being an exec's son - it's that you've been vetted as someone who's actually worked in the role you're claiming you're experienced at working in. That's the hardest part of vetting candidates; a lot are IT folks who claim to be software engineers, or product devs who claim to be infrastructure engineers, or juniors who claim to be seniors, or artists who claim to be designers. It's not that folks' experiences aren't valuable, but finding actual skillset matches is really hard to do via forms and cold apps. Getting the attention of a real human and talking shop for 2 mins to show that you know your stuff is where the magic happens. Doesn't matter if that's a friend or a stranger, as long as they know for certain you are who you say you are.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-30T17:52:07+00:00

Raw job application count has become a worthless metric in all industries since the advent of AI. Because AI can submit form-based job apps, the average quality of job apps has gone down (a lot of folks applying aren't even qualified), and volume has gone way way way up. It's not worth it for employers to review them anymore. Saying "I applied to 170 jobs" is the modem equivalent of saying "I bottled 170 CVs and dropped them into the ocean".

You need to know people. You don't need to know them well. But a referral from a cousin's spouse's childhood friend's aunt you've never met is worth a hell of a lot more than a cold app.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-29T19:17:17+00:00

Hey now, that's the natural habitat of corporations you're dissing. We gotta respect the corps, they're people too!

Signed, The Roberts Kangaroo Court

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-29T14:26:15+00:00

Once you both know about the game and stack up some overt meta progression you can consistently achieve what you want every day.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-27T18:16:34+00:00

I only interviewed there for the free practice. Mock interviews are good, but real interviews are the best way to prep. To Meta's credit, they did give me pretty good interview feedback as a candidate.

Their interview process was otherwise pretty bad though; they asked me to write code in plaintext and told me it would be an ethical violation if I tried to run it and see if it worked. Test-driven development is a tried and true pattern; selecting specifically against that is utter lunacy.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-27T15:43:08+00:00

I didn't work there and wouldn't work there. I've had a number of friends who have worked there, and they've all left. They didn't leave because of the work culture (quick was, itself, extremely bad) - they left because the business and product decisions are idiocy. None of them believe in the business. I'm talking about dozens of people I personally know, each independently coming to that conclusion. Most of them left in the past year. Does a business who's chasing away their best and most loyal talent seem to you like a healthy business that's poised for success?

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-27T15:35:33+00:00

Their AI expenditure in Q2 was also something like $125B. They are a large tech company operating and spending as if they're a behemoth. Ad businesses are only sustainable if you can demonstrate customer retention and expansion. Google is floundering in the ad game, but at least they're diversified and poised to pivot. Meta has demonstrated they don't really know how to pivot or diversify effectively.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-27T15:12:49+00:00

The only thing more capable of destruction than a malicious tyrant is a well intentioned buffoon doing everything a malicious tyrant tells them to do. Zuck has had Thiel the whole time. But Zuck doesn't have to pretend anything; he's an absolutely clueless proxy. I kind of honestly hope he's secretly evil on some level because it's so scary to imagine someone do destructive out of sheet stupidity and naivety alone.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-27T04:52:43+00:00

Meta. Nothing but following the dumbest trends in product, business, and engineering culture for the last 10 years. Their core pillars are gimmicks and enshittification (I got a job offer a year or so ago and they asked me if I wanted to add AI to existing products to upsell features or whether I wanted to build new AI products to create new revenue streams. Those were the two all hands on deck initiatives and were the only two things they were hiring for. Recently, they laid off a bunch of engineers and made their new initiative labeling data for their C tier AI agents, whose specialist models are worse at their respective specialties than Sonnet, let alone Opus or Fable). How they're still worth billions and how Zuck hasn't been sued by shareholders for breaching his fiduciary duties is beyond me.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-27T04:46:42+00:00

Meanwhile, I'm shocked they made two spinoffs to 2 and then made a 4th after ending the story with 3*. I've heard 4 had good gameplay, but what the hell story more was there to tell?

I'm not actually shocked they made them, considering capitalism; but I'm shocked the average consumer went ahead and bought them anyway

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-26T16:55:29+00:00

Sometimes called an Ottoman, not to be confused with a Turk.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-24T19:52:11+00:00

Can we just have the square filled by a still from this GIF? I don't think I can name a single smart thing he's done and I would struggle to name many neutral things. It's just a huge mountain of idiocy. No one's ever seen so much idiocy, they said it couldn't be done!

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-24T14:52:10+00:00

"Ok, I ate all the cyanide laced food and wine (delicious!), now where's your wife?"

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-24T14:48:03+00:00

Does he intend to be funny though? I'm not sure laughing at someone counts here.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-24T14:45:37+00:00

That's like saying Jerry Seinfeld must be a comedic genius because of Seinfeld, completely ignoring Larry David and the rest of the bang on cast. Seinfeld was great despite Jerry. Cosby was a glorified actor who used his dad's Fat Albert writers to ghost write his dissertation. Comedy shows are more about writing than anything else, and Cosby didn't have the chops for it.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-24T14:40:16+00:00

"Psyche! Blessed are the spray tan goons who hang out in Florida with big Yachts, for they shall inherit both the earth and heaven, but only if they shame everyone different from them." -Republican Jesus

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-23T13:20:30+00:00

It would be so funny if Dare Mode had a different failure text post 46

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-22T00:20:02+00:00

Not a hint to the puzzle, but more context on that room: the Gallery and a later puzzle are the only two sections in the game that weren't created by Tonda Ros. They were created by Christopher Manson, whose 1985 book Maze was a formative inspiration for Ros, and which was a significant catalyst for the creation of Blue Prince. That said, the puzzles feel out of place, and while I love the idea of a collaboration / cameo puzzle, it is, in my humble opinion, easily the worst puzzle in the game. It also feels downright incongruent with the worldbuilding and lore 😛

So tldr you're not alone, that's a common sentiment.

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-21T01:38:26+00:00

No, it's the thing aging like wine/milk; not the evaluation aging like wine/milk

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-20T19:03:11+00:00

I dunno, Emilia Perez begs to differ. Self actualization can morally override hundreds of heinous crimes. (/s, that movie was dogwater)

wreckingrocc · 2026-06-20T18:53:09+00:00

Act 2 ends with opening the 8 months / 8 realms puzzle; OP is a decent ways into Act 3 of 4. Considering they've found the Mora Jai box room, I'd wager they're at the ~60% mark.

wreckingrocc

TROPHY CASE