I've been playing Persona 3 Reload on PS5. Thanks, Jeff.

The TLDR: I'm enjoying Persona 3 Reload, having enjoyed Persona 5. It's very much the same game but enough time has passed between playthroughs that I'm good for it. With that out of the way, I'll talk about some game mechanics and how much I love them or hate them.

The game has two oscillating phases:

1. Dungeon crawler with turn-based combat common to JRPGs
2. Social sim

Both formats are quite repetitive from moment to moment but change over the course of the game, enough to keep me into it.

Personas and the dark hour

The premise of the game is more or less covered in the image above - at night almost everyone turns into a coffin and only certain people are empowered to roam the streets and fight shadow demons using their supernatural alter ego (persona).


So how does one call up their persona? If you look closely at the above screenshot you might notice- hold on...


Whew, now that we have that out of the way, the mechanism by which a character summons their persona is by using an 'evoker' to prove their resolve:


I'm not sure this game could get made in the US in 2025.

'Gotta catch em all' and arcanas

The unique thing about the main character's is that while everyone else can use 0-1 personas, he can use a dozen or so. Player character personas are unlocked throughout the game as combat reward drops and a mechanism described later. Finally, personas are divided into tarot arcanas that determine their powers and align with their associated NPC.


As mentioned above, half of P3R's gameplay consists of a friendly overworld wherein the protagonist attends school and goes to the movies and such.

Things to do

Daytime activities consist of grinding social stats and friendship points by doing activities such as working at a coffee shop, singing karaoke, and going to the movies. The social stats (Charm, Courage, Academics) serve as gating critera for activities and friendships. Friendship points unlock scenes with that character and levels the protagonist's rank in his acquaintance's associated arcana.

Outlook Simulator

There are a variety of optimal paths for overworld choices and, afaict ͥ , many available activities don't/rarely figure in to any of these paths. This means most of the overworld sequences consist of repetitive clicking where most of the map and activity options can be ignored. And yet there is semi-unique dialogue everywhere, from allies to random NPCs who comment on whatever the main thing going on is (summer, tests, strange disappearances, etc.).

I don't need to 100% this game but I'd like to do a pretty good job with my playthrough. So it's mildly frustrating to not have a clear picture of, say, what social stats to focus on in order to access an important area that's gated by a skill check.

Dialogue

There's a lot of dialogue in P3R and it quickly becomes easy to determine which discussions are skippable boilerplate. But there's no shortage of entertaining dialogue, primarily in the relationship- and plot-advancement convos.

That said, one flavor of dialogue is basically a test to increase friendship status. If you choose the right things to say in these conversations you can level your friendship quickly. If you don't, you have to burn calendar time doing generic stuff with that acquaintance. Theoretically, choosing the right dialogue option comes from knowing the character's personality and, ugh, choosing the thing they would want to hear the most. In practice, the options are sometimes:


For this reason, I have no qualms about using one of the many conversation guides available on the interwebs.


The combat portion of the game is built around two flavors of hostile territory:

• Tartarus, a 200-story dungeon you visit one or more times per month.
• Full moon (boss battle) missions that occur every month and progress the story.

Tartarus

Tartarus exploration amounts to traversing a dozen-ish floors that constitute a block of the dungeon. You can also hit any of the lower floors cleared in previous visits but there isn't much reason to. Each floor is randomly arranged from a few tile options that change style from block to block. Due to the randomness and repetitiveness, the Tartarus crawl is fundamentally either running past enemies or grinding them for experience/items/money. The way it plays out is more like a casual ascent to the block's top floor, the boss battle, and then a return to earlier floors for light farming.

Each block of Tartarus has a few fixed warp points back to the lobby where you can heal, switch party members, or fuse personas (explained later). If you're really in a bad way you can look for a one-way warp point but then continue from the last two-way portal.

Upper floors add some mild twists - darkness mod, special doors with optional minibosses, etc. It's not much but it adds some variety where the game might otherwise just change graphic style and difficulty from floor 1-200.

Tartarus has a few flavors of lootables that contain items that can be equipped, used for crafting, or exchanged for money. But mostly it's full of enemies. Slashing an enemy with your sword (or being surprised by them if you're careless) initiates the transition to turn-based combat.

Combat

The battle screen with hud callouts.

90% of combat requires just a few button presses:

1. Smack the baddie in the dungeon view.
2. Knock down each enemy by hitting it with the element or physical attack type it is weak to (unless you miss the knock down always procs).
3. Perform an "All Out Attack"; basically a finishing move available when all enemies are knocked down.

Press 'X' to win.

If this sounds somewhat mindless, that's because it is. But the visuals and music are cool, it's kind of like fighting squishies in Slay the Spire or endgame Elden Ring.

Combat yields xp, items, and randomized rewards such as overworld money and personas.

Damage types and weaknesses

#2 from above comes with a caveat - to get the knockdowns you need to know each enemy's weaknesses and be able to deliver that type of attack. Helpfully, the game keeps track of what weaknesses you know and don't know, though any new enemy type starts with a '?' in each category. Once you deliver that kind of attack, the '?' changes to an icon corresponding to 'weak', 'strong', 'null', 'heal', or 'repel'. Since each new block of floors contains a new set of enemies, it means each new Tartarus run involves learning the weaknesses of the enemy set (or cheating and using a guide). It's sometimes possible to make an educated guess about unknown weaknesses based on the enemy's arcana and/or appearance - "It's an ice creature, what could it possibly be weak to?"


Elemental damage requires invocation of a character's persona which consumes stamina points. In the early game, SP puts a cap on how much of Tartarus you can explore - or really, how much leveling you can do before taking on the area boss. Later on you have more characters and ways to replenish SP.

Ailments

It's not a big part of combat but certain weapons and persona attacks can inflict ailment conditions. Ailments do things like make combatants skip turns, attack allies, or lose health over time. Since most squishies can be quickly dispatched with damage matching their weakness, ailments don't really come in to play in normal battles. Tougher enemies are almost always impossible to deliver status effects to, so it's not a big part of the offensive game.

Strong enemies love to inflict ailments on our heroes so for boss battles it's important to have resistances and remedies ready.

Similar to ailments are stat debuff actions that reduce an opponent's attack, defense, evasion, etc. These proc 100% of the time and are pretty important for bosses.

Ults

Each character has an ult attack that charges through normal combat. There's nothing remarkable here - it's just a big attack - except that they bypass resistance so timing them for boss fights is pretty helpful.

Player personas

I mentioned that the player character is unique in that he can equip multiple personas. Since he can only explore with three teammates at a time, having an inventory of personas means you can cover the attack types not in your squadmates' repertoire.

Minibosses, bosses, and full moon missions

Bosses are rarely weak to anything so the damage type mechanic is really only relevant to the flat track. Boss strategy amounts to wasting a few actions as possible on healing so that you can slowly grind down the its health. This means it's helpful to learn the boss's often-cyclical attack patterns and use guard actions when a character might get statused or knocked down.

Boss battles aren't particularly hard or frustrating but it'd be nice if personas had more offensive impact. On the other hand, bosses don't cheat and simply bypass defensive strengths - if you nullify fire damage, even a boss fire attack won't hurt. This is both nice from an equity perspective and because if the boss drops a nuke, having one character standing is infinitely better than game over.

Wtf enemies

The final stage of Persona 5 had, well, dong enemies. P3R also has some creative ones like Lustful Snake and Random BDSM Dude Chained to a Wheel. Lol.

Persona fusion

Left column: current personas (arcana, level, name) with one selected. Right column: the fusion outcome for the selected persona with another from the left-hand list. '!' indicates it's a persona I have not yet created.

Most RPGs let you choose a class and level your character(s). Persona has overworld social stats, but for the combat phase of the game personas are what determine your level and abilities. It means your main character can seamlessly switch between classes of sorts - each persona has different abilities.

The one exception to my statement about the characters not having combat stats - the main character does have a level but this is used to limit the level of personas available through fusion. The cap is only applied for fusion though, leveling a persona through combat ignores it. Additionally, when you do persona fusion it immediately gets xp based on your character's overworld relationship strength with its arcana.


Persona fusion amounts to tossing 2-3 existing personas into the proverbial cauldron and getting another (most often) higher-level persona from a different aracana. When the new persona is created, you can choose skills from the source personas to inherit - as long as the skills don't conflict with the new persona's arcana.

As personas level, they learn skills a fixed set of skills and you must decide which ones to keep and forget.

A pre-endgame Siegfried build - lots of resistances and built for physical attacks/criticals. The Auto _______ skills provide automatic stat buffs for the character or team at the start of battle.

Fit and finish

Like P5, the Reload graphic design and soundtrack are awesome. The anime models only look dated when they walk so it generally doesn't feel like a game designed two decades ago.

Story

P3R has an adult, cohesive story that somewhat dulls the edge of repetitive gameplay. I like it so far but will provide an update when I complete the game.

	There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension.	�
	From Sovereign in Mass Effect (pic unrelated)

I think there's a broad consensus that, more than anything else, in 2024 Donald Trump was re-elected because moderates were unhappy with the price of groceries. The toll of inflation was somehow attributed to the CHIPS act and student loan forgiveness rather than the great money printing of 2020. Just today, the guy who made that printer go 'brrr ͥ ' said, "We're well aware of what happened with the pandemic inflation". There's a story to be told about Election 2024, but that's a story for another time. This post is about what's happening in the markets and in DC that might impact the retail investor.

BTW title ref.


For the last four years, the Fed's path to a soft landing (fixing inflation with no recession) was clear: raise interest rates quickly and go slow with QT ͥ . It's certainly worth remembering how many pundits predicted economic disaster when rates were raised to 5%+ in a very short period. Those people were proven wrong by the ensuing three years, with inflation reduced to near-target levels while markets and GDP still reached all-time highs. The slow path down from peak interest rates was unexciting, with the Fed telegraphing every move and assuring the public they were taking no chances. Fiscal policy was similarly mundane - Biden pushed through some big infrastructure projects and otherwise bought spending down from the covid spendfest. Except for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it was an easy market to make money off of.

President Trump is, if nothing else, the embodiment of volatility. This can be a good thing for theta gang ͥ -inclined individuals such as myself, but both bulls and wheel traders lose if the market tanks. So what are the risks?

• Tariffs and retaliatory tariffs
• Trump's penchant for borrowing i.e. cutting taxes and printing money to juice GDP
• Any possible attempt to replace Jerome Powell with a yes man like Sam Bankman-Fried or Hulk Hogan
• Other macro events such as conflicts involving Russia, Taiwan, Iran or any of the territories the administration has claimed they will annex (Canada, Greenland, Panama, Gaza). I should say, I don't expect the US military to be asked to do anything other than airstrikes and special operations over the next four years, but with the guardrails gone and plentiful annexation rhetoric, I'm not ruling them out.

Runoff room

In March of 2020 we got a peek at how our economy can absorb a crisis. With interest rates near zero, the government and Fed relied on a lot of QE ͥ and fiscal stimulus to keep things going. Interest rates are upwards of 4% right now, so if you don't mind surrendering to inflation in its final throes, rate cutes are available as stimulus. The Fed balance sheet is still quite hefty and if any of the rhetoric about a budget crisis are honest, we might not be able to rely on deficit spending.


Tariffs (or 'tarrifs', to many) have been a significant issue since Trump promised to use them to fix the budget deficit and 'fix' various 'trade deficits'. Unfortunately, since discussions can only be bipolar, in common discussion tariffs can only be one of two things:

1. A cost incurred soley by other countries
2. A cost incurred solely by US businesses/consumers

Seems like both are lies; an efficient market will distribute the added costs to all parties involved find its equilibrium. Foreign producers will attempt to meet US consumers somewhere in the middle unless margins are too low to be worthwhile. But the net effect is that things will get more expensive.

I'm not outright for or against tariffs. To its credit, the administration (I'm told) closed the 'Temu loophole' whereby extremely cheap merchandise bypassed certain duties. I should caveat: this loophole could be back next month if the administration was simply using it to extort concessions from a foreign power.

The use of tariffs to resurrect certain industries seems unwise in the same way that there's little to gain from investing in coal mining or punching a wave. There are profitable industries where the US is competitive and could benefit from measured protectionism. Legacy auto companies fought tooth and nail to avoid a transition to EVs and so Tesla became the premier electric car. We are competitive there, so promoting domestic EV sales makes sense unless, say, the brand suffers a meltdown at the hands of its 4chin CEO. There's also retaliatory tariffs to consider. With Japanese and German EVs finally getting mass produced, the international market share strangehold Tesla fought to establish could be ripped away with tariff-caused price hikes. It's the kind of thing that requires calculus and nuance, and I wonder how much of that is happening behind the veneer of all-caps tweets about retaliation-for-retaliation.

On the subject of EVs and unnuanced moves, as I recall Biden tariffed Chinese EVs in a huge way (notably without social media cat fights). These may have been protectionist or simply "due to regulatory and/or national security reasons these cars will never be sold here". In some ways it was a bro move to Xpeng and BYD as they could simply rule out the US market. The alternative might resemble the way American tech companies tripped over themselves to get access to the rapidly growing Chinese middle class market, only to find themselves slowly phased out and subjected to mandatory IP sharing.

Tariff whiplash

Source.

Trump is a negotiator and as any good negotiator will tell you, it's not a deal unless you've stormed away from the table a half-dozen times. The White House spent much of February and March announcing tariffs against Canada and Mexico, then delaying them in the eleventh- or sometimes thirteenth hour. It made for some bigly headlines and market swings.

4theFrontPage

Speak loudly and carry a small stick... Or something like that

For most of us, the tariff announcments and market response were unpredictable and/or after hours. For a select few, frontrunning the announcements may have been good money:

An ambitious crypto trade made and closed in the hours surrounding a Trump tweet about creating a federal crypto reserve.

The current paradigm of - as a reporter at the Fed presser today phrased it - "government-by-tweet" certainly creates an opportunity for people connected to the president to profit from the news, like in the crypto trade above. And like Congress trading off of confidential information, this is almost certainly completely legal and otherwise pardonable.

Revelati123

OMG Donald Trump committed the crime of failing to disclose stock sales! THATS IT GUYS WE GOT EM!" Thomas: "Ehh... I dunno... Seems cool to me!" Alito: "Stocks, and socks, only one letter different, so pretty much the same thing, are you trying to tell me I CANT SELL MY OWN SOCKS!?!" Kavanaugh: I... LOVE... BEER... AND I HATE SEC DISCLOSURE FORMS! Barrett: "Bible says you are GTG!" Gorsuch: "The founders are silent on the issue of meme stocks..." Roberts: "I lobotomized myself with a power drill when I realized this was going to be my legacy. So why not... I think there are some more judges or something but their opinions really dont matter. so... Yeah I dont think Dons going to jail for this.

Escalatory tariffs

The on-again-off-again tariff war phase was followed by escalating tariffs as each side responded with matching or increased severity.

ajmeko

I'm hoping there's an "out" somehow that allows him to save face while dropping this bullshit.

Certainly, we wouldn't want a politician to have to bear the brunt of their decisions. Anyway, the clamor about tariffs has died down for the moment, they're supposed to actually take effect in early April.

Mel Gibson moment

I'm not sure the cause of the following CNBC article but I'll construct a plausible story:

1. The president was displeased that Canada did not roll over and all the bad press
2. He talked to Stephen Miller
3. He did a press conference

CNBC

Major stock indexes dropped sharply this week, as rattled investors struggled to get a handle on President Donald Trump's sweeping and shifting tariff policies. But when asked in the Oval Office on Thursday whether he thought it was his tariffs that were scaring the markets, Trump pinned the blame elsewhere. "Well, a lot of them are globalist countries and companies that won't be doing as well," Trump replied, "Because we're taking back things that have been taken from us many years ago." Trump did not elaborate on what those things were. "We've been treated very unfairly as a country," he continued. "We protect everybody. We do everything for all these countries, and a lot of these are globalist in nature." It was not clear what was globalist in nature, but NBC reported Thursday that the Trump administration is considering an overhaul of how it interacts with NATO allies. Later in the same press event, Trump again blamed globalists for the market downturn. "I think it's globalists that see how rich our country's going to be, and they don't like it." Over the course of an hour, Trump used "globalist" to describe people, companies and countries, making it difficult to pin down specifically what he was talking about. But during his first term, Trump repeatedly denounced a set of ideas he called "globalism," and labeled some of his political opponents globalists, as he pushed his nationalist, isolationist worldview. The word has drawn condemnation from critics who say it is linked to antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people. According to the American Jewish Committee, the term globalist is used today as "a coded word for Jews who are seen as international elites conspiring to weaken or dismantle 'Western' society using their international connections and control over big corporations." It was unusual for Trump to use the term globalist as a catchall for what he claimed was driving day-to-day movements of the stock market. The White House did not immediately reply when asked for additional context about Trump's invocation of the term. The Oval Office remarks came as Trump, just two days after imposing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, issued temporary exemptions for many goods coming into the U.S. from the two neighboring countries. He denied that those pauses came in response to the market rout.

For a front page, mainstream news article, this had an impressive amount of veiled condemnation.


Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is in a tough spot. He's trying to finish his campaign against inflation while adjusting to a new fiscal reality while also avoiding a visit by Elon Musk's goons. I talked about the first two things above, the third would be more at home in another post about the "constitutional crisis" headlines that have been flying around. To put it as succinctly as possible:

• In its majority rulings, dissents, and concurring opinions, elements of the Supreme Court have been waging a war against independent government agencies. This has included advocacy for the unitary executive as well as indignation that there be Article II entities not funded by Congress (Fed, CFPB, Social Security Administration, FDIC, ...).
• The administration has pressed the issue to an eventual SCOTUS showdown by firing the heads of independent agencies, most notably the head of the Office of Special Counsel. The outcome of this decision may directly impact Powell's job security.

So today's pre-FOMC banter didn't downplay the situation:

/u/watcherofworld JP is gonna raise a personal army. That's the actual announcement. Nothing economical, just the warlord plans.

/u/boredpandaguy Immortan Jerome

/u/joelbealesubc WITNESS !! The rates ascend !!

/u/PotatoWriter Into WallStreeta, Shiny and regarded!

/u/Eye_am_Eye Ahhhhh mediocre!!!!!

/u/FlatOutUseless JP shaves his head and becomes Prigozhin

/u/Track_Boss_302 NCD found its way into WSB

/u/Specialist_Fig9458 SHOIGU! GERASIMOV! WHERE IS MY FUCKING RATE CUT!

The Fed's statement is typically a copypaste of the prior one with certain terms added or replaced. In this case, they replaced "the economic outlook is uncertain" with "uncertainty around the economic outlook has increased". I believe that's the FOMC's version of an all-caps tweet demanding the White House chill out.

And so they've decided to hold interest rates at 4.25-4.50 for now but slow QT ͥ .

JPow didn't have a whole lot to say at the press conference, it was variations on "what we're doing is working". Journalists asked things like, "have you considered doing something else" to which Powell replied "yeah but this is what we think is the right choice". They also tried to bait him into condemning the White House's tariff regime. Powell stayed diplomatic, replying that tariffs are inflationary but won't impact their long term strategy.

As I mentioned, Trump likes interest rates to be at zero and so he took to his Twitter clone and condemned the FOMC decision.


Elon's been spending a lot of time in DC. His absence from his normal duties combined with his controversial PR metamorphosis have not been great for Tesla's sales figures or share price. When asked on Fox Business if there was any turning back on yoloing into DOGE, he heaved a huge sigh and reverted to a mindless talking point, "I'm just trying to save the country."

Musk probably vented to his buddy in the Oval Office and so not long after, Trump announced that he was buying a Tesla...

I had no idea 'car salesman' would be so literal.

... and then did his Goya beans routine with a cykatruck while dropping some new meme formats.

"I love Tesler ͥ !"

"Everything's computer ͥ !"

Pure gold.

"This is the Secretary of State, brought to you by Carl's Jr."

/u/NematoadWhiskey August 5th 2021 President Joe Biden did the same thing promoting Hummer Ev and Jeep Rubicon Ev on the south lawn of the White House and announcing an executive order to have 50% electric vehicle sales by 2030 to be exact. This just proves Reddit is brainwashing all of you.

/u/Own-Solution60 Biden was publicizing a policy promoting EV's with three different EV manufacturers present. He wasn't shilling 1 vehicle with the CEO standing next to him while reading from a script like a used car salesman. Come on man!

It's not supposed to make sense.

Here's what I'm optimistic about for the near future:

• TLT/TLTW - we're winning against inflation and there's a chance SCOTUS rolls the Fed into the unitary executive.
• BRK-B - went heavily into cash before the current pullback, could be a stable wheel trade.
• NVDA, my beloved - LLMs are integrating into everything, agentic AI is coming. It all runs on CUDA.
• Energy - somewhat surprised energy ETFs haven't mooned due to the administration's energy/regulation/environment posture.
• Speculative stuff like ACHR and JOBY.

I think it was a good idea that J and I avoided game guides for our first playthrough of Elden Ring. It probably made for a better/soulsier experience and if you want to play with all the cards face up, the game offers like a dozen NG+ rounds. I should caveat the above statement - we absolutely checked out boss vulnerabilities after dying to them a few times if for no other reason than to save ourselves more Erdleaf laps (farming multiplayer consumables). There's also my little flaming finger adventure that I barely managed to complete even with the benefit of a wiki instructional and the cadre of Malenia co-opers.

In any event, playing the main game with fog of war meant the Lands Between still held a lot of unkilled bosses and undiscovered treasures. I should say that we discovered 95% of the sites of grace and dungeons but lacked completion on tough, optional bosses and ones that spawn in the overworld.


We've done alright in our first few hours of SOTE but being repeatedly murdered by a giant hippopotamous who is only weak to lightning damage made me re-realize that I needed to have all elements at my disposal. This meant bouncing through the spawn points in the main game with a shopping list of armaments that were not quest-locked.

Rampage

Elden Ring is like Fallout in that enemies are a fixed level in their respective geographic domains. Other games scale the baddies with the player, either smoothly or at fixed points. So teleporting back from the SOTE zone to the Lands Between at level ~170 meant that I could 1-shot half of the map and 3-shot larger enemies. Considering I've mostly been hiding behind J for our DLC playthrough, slicing through squishy enemies was a relaxing way to remember the combat system.

Smithing stones

From /u/ded_lord

Acquiring Elden Ring's most coveted weapons isn't particularly useful if you can't max level them via the handful of dragon smithing stones available in each playthrough. That's actually not true at all, the max-1 -> max stat change is the same as every other level. But tarnisheds don't leave damage on the table.

Still, the hardest part of gathering the unclaimed stones was remembering which ones I'd already picked up. But since there aren't many and they're thankfully close to sites of grace, this was quick work.

Alecto, Black Knife Ringleader

After collecting rocks, I rode around between the few evergaols I hadn't cleared and administered capital punishment to the bosses therein. I hit an abrupt snag with Alecto. Her endless combo attacks and ults were sufficient to take my overleveled character from half health to You Died in seconds. I considered skipping this one but had vague ambitions of taking another run at Placidusax and her (spirit ash) reward is supposedly ideal for that fight.

The wiki said that the best tactic for Alecto was the five D's of dodgeball (really). After some experimentation I found I could keep a gap to her and this was sufficient to reliably avoid her combos. That is, she could cover the gap with a single combo attack, but it wasn't fast enough to prevent me from stepping a direction that would probably not be in her knife arc. It also helped that Alecto's ranged attack is as easy to avoid as any in the game.

Most importantly, Alecto's ult is an omnidirectional near-instakill and afaict ͥ it can't be avoided or rolled through unless you're already out of range.

So avoiding hits is nice but I couldn't just sit back and throw darts (she dodges everything ranged). But I did find that when Alecto moved to close the safety gap I could easily time an attack to hit her - she wouldn't change intents midstream like some bosses appear to do. For about half of these attacks, Alecto would simultaneously get a weak hit in. This was fine by me since she has no heals. Fine unless she followed the strike up with a flurry attack or ult. The other way to get a hit in was to watch her start a really long combo from distance and dodge far enough to avoid each hit but close enough to get a swing in at the end.

This was all well and good except that it wasn't perfect, I needed to get a bunch of hits in before my focus/luck ran out.

With my normal loadout I came frustratingly close to killing Alecto a few times and not close at all many others. But I learned her timing and switched to my one colossal weapon (a dex axe). The hefty blade my timing and distance needed adjustment, but the axe was fully viable for the float/sting approach. Crucially, with the axe I only needed to string together eight or ten hits to win. And that eventually happened.

Borealis the Freezing Fog

I'd previously taken down most of the main game's dragons but Borealis still roamed the Consecrated Snowfield. He wasn't too tough with a spirit ash and Torrent at my disposal. The key was getting behind his blizzard breath that could quickly frostbite my character.

Death/Rite Birds

Elden Ring has a bunch of overworld bosses called Deathbirds and Death Rite Birds. They're easy to miss because they only spawn at night and in unassuming locations on the map (as opposed to, say, the end of a dungeon).

Most of these birds were not challenging due to my level and having the holy damage of the Sacred Relic Sword. One of the harder birds drops the Death's Poker which is supposedly a great dex weapon. Returning to my shopping list, Death's Poker filled my need for magic damage and frostbite buildup.

The last Death Rite Bird gave me trouble. He sits at the north end of Consecrated Snowfield and has the best stats of the flock as well as an AOE that is instadeath.

Source. Example of an Elden Ring message.

The messages and guides said to hit the bird from range - there are cliffs above his spawn that he "doesn't go up". The downsides were threefold:

1. "He doesn't go up the cliffs" is more like a guideline ͥ than an actual rule. Despite being a bird in a frozen land, this DRB could fly and did so a couple times in my dozen or so attempts.
2. When standing above the DRB, he mostly hung out at the foot of the cliff, beyond the arc of my bow. Thankfully, he would occasionally retreat to an open area and sit still enough to get a couple headshots in.
3. Non-magic ranged weapons suck in Elden Ring; they do low damage, expend ammo, and can't hit moving enemies.*

*Okay so I did fully level a Lion Greatbow and dusted it of for this fight. With my dex/70, str/50 build, I was getting 640 per headshot in DRB's stationary phases. That's not amazing but like 30 arrows was enough for vengeance and a 200k-rune payday.

The game guide said the Lion Greatbow could do ~3k per shot against Placidusax so I kept this engagement in the back of my mind since most Placi easy-win builds involve magic.

Night's Cavalry

Glitched at zero health.

Like the Death/Rite Birds, nighttime brings out a Night's Cavalry bosses in a few out-of-the-way places on the map. The final NC foe happened to be first one I fought (in endgame times, I killed a couple during the main quest). This encounter involves a pair of knights working the grave shift guarding the Consecrated Snowfield caravan.


Unless you go in blasting ͥ , the duo can be handled one at a time. Even so, a couple of weird things happened:

• In all but one of my attempts, the second knight and I were joined by a huge ghost troll whose swipes were hard to avoid, even on horseback. I'm not sure if knighty and ghosty are buddies or if our battle just spilled into the domain of another enemy like that Pulp Fiction scene.
• When I knocked the second knight off his horse in our final battle, he disappeared and the music went mellow. No 'enemy felled' text, no rewards. I eventually gave up and rode away. Then he reappeared. When I rode back to hit him, I had a few seconds before he'd disappear and the cycle would repeat.

While some of the mop up effort has yielded gear not relevant to my build, the Night's Cavalry provided some neat ashes of war that are great for str/dex characters.

Dragonlord Placidusax

The Lands Between were starting to look pretty empty of non-respawning baddies. Last on the list was an epic battle with the creme de la dragon, Pacidusax. I had to drop by his arena for my Three Fingers adventure but still took a few unsuccessful runs at him.

After light research I rolled in with my Death's Poker, Lion Greatbow, and Black Tiche ashes. To my surprise, the first hit from Tiche burned a big chunk of Placi's health and nulled the top tenth of his hp bar (shown in the screencap above). Unfortunately, the rest of her attacks weren't nearly as effective, nor was the greatbow. Still, my first run ended with Placi down to ~20% health. Tiche had long been dead at that point and the Dragonlord was in his aggressive second phase.

For run #2 I used a mimic summon, hoping the game could play my character better than me. Alas, while my doppelganger drew plenty of aggro, it didn't do as much damage or last as long as Tiche.

I went back to Tiche for my third attempt and spent Placi's docile first phase slashing him with my poison katana. This did more DPS than the bow and took some of the heat off Tiche. My Spirit Ash assassin again didn't last the whole battle, but long enough that I could fire off Radahn Spears and dodge/heal my way through the final stages of the fight.

Shadow of the Erdtree

Placi dropped a dex-friendly sword that does lightning damage and bonus damage to dragons. I'm only lacking fire damage which I intend to solve with weapon coatings on my hookclaws and swift spear.

From /u/EduUszh

The internet has a lot of terrible, algorithmically-generated "articles" that summarize popular Reddit posts. That's not great but neither is the idea of user submissions remaining solely on an enshittifying, pre-paywalled platform. With that acknowledgement, here are some neat pics from a couple of posts soliciting users' favorite screenshots.

Vindold

Azure_N1ght

empress-_-raven

btha10

KindofBroke

BigfootIssReal

aureolins

blk_roxas

Certain-Service661

tooncake

thorwyn-eu

ApprehensiveWay3843

beyblading

SSJ_Iceman

DaanA_147

javvykino

Educational_Exit_228

Nostalgioneer

MrRoundtree17

babytigertooth005

DrizzyDro94

Weeb-Hunter_

Dull-Fix-6361

DragonMaster1_2

eoghan_perra

hyperrot

yian01

Illinois_Yooper

daemonicotter17

Dual-Blades_Forever

Necessary_Wave_6760

	Man, all this mud remind me of my friend Keith. Yeah, he was goin' to build a shack once, to live in and all, and I know most people here, they build houses and they become shacks, but Keith, he was about jumpin' right to the shack stage. But he had no wood. So he got some mud and was makin' what we were all thinkin' was gonna be this adobe bricks, you know, like when them people out west made bricks and shit? Well, he had mud and--	�
	From Ellis in Left 4 Dead 2 (pic unrelated)

1. I watch another finance film
2. Some contemporary scam companies meet the fate
3. A totally opaque web 1.1 change
4. Some quick house projects
5. PUBG vids cause what else are you going to do on server maintenance days
6. Thunder Road: Vendetta
7. Obligatory cuteness

I finally got around to ticking another film off my finance watchlist. Since Rogue Trader is freely available, I put it on while I slogged through the refactoring discussed below.


Turns out the refactoring was more interesting than the movie. The premise of Rogue Trader is solid - the true story of a guy who made a bank insolvent through ill-advised futures ͥ trades. But there isn't much more to it than that. The film spends most of its time beating the viewer over the head with Nick Leeson's (Ewan McGregor) gnawing guilt, unconvincing lies to his coworkers, and problems at home.

It secures the bottom spot on my running ranking of Wall Street/finance/scam films:

1. The Big Short (2015) A smart/funny drama that follows the handful of people that saw the 2008 Global Financial Crisis coming. This film excels in its explanation of the GFC both at a high level and through its ground-level stories. It also takes a refreshingly honest approach to the 'based on a true story' genre.

2. Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) Enron's rise and fall told in a documentary that will make your blood boil. E:TSGitR covers Enron's scammy accounting methods, Apple-like cultishness, and (with audio transcripts) Texan schadenfreude toward California.

3. Margin Call (2011) An unofficial counterpart to The Big Short, Margin Call tells the story of a Wall Street firm the night it realizes the bubble is popping. It isn't as heavy-handed in its condemnation of investment banks/bankers as you might expect; the characters are complex and personable.

4. The China Hustle (2017) Investment movie night finally goes abroad with this documentary about the RTO ͥ /Muddy Waters saga of the early 20-teens. The China Hustle describes short sellers' investigations into the hazards of speculating across sovereign borders.

5. Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis (2018) An unofficial counterpart to The Big Short and Margin Call, Panic is a documentary that focuses less on the causation of the GFC and more on the response. This might be dry to some, but it drips with intrigue if you're into macroeconomics and/or government.

6. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) Elizabeth Holmes once asked the question, "What if we did a Fyre Festival but instead of music and tents it was blood testing?" The answer was Theranos and it became an HBO documentary in 2019. She was convicted in 2022.

7. MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street (2023) Ponzis are the vanilla ice cream of scams but Bernie's had more scoops than anyone else. The Netflix docuseries isn't bad, but not as compelling as some of the competition.

Rogue Trader (1999) Dramatization of the Nick Leeson derivatives market blowup. More about guilt and lying than causing the collapse of a large financial institution.

In other news:

• I enjoyed reading "autonomous trucking company... has rebranded to CreateAI, focusing on [gen ai for] video games and animation." Lots of synergy there.
• Another truck company, meanwhile, rebranded from 'Nikola' to 'bankruptcy'. These dudes were famous for their "HTML 5 supercomputer" and gravity-powered vehicle ͥ .
  
• And the saga of that weird NJ deli scam finally concluded.
  

Looking at my Outer Web memory footprint, I decided it'd be a manageably-bad idea to try to cut my RAM needs in half by replacing instances of String with new types that aren't 16 bits per character. My code already does a UTF8 conversion on page data and things like URLs have to be ASCII, these can be represented as byte buffers.

I had a few concerns.

1. Strings are used a lot. Even if it's find and replace, it's a lot of find and replace.
2. I had no intention of implementing things like regexes in the new types. Converting an 8-bit string to a Java native string to use these operations would have a performance impact that would blunt the memory benefit to some unknown extent.

So I backed everything up, cracked a two liter of Shasta, fired up my all-Rush mixtape, and went to town.

It took a while, wasn't awesome, but ultimately worked out. The biggest pain was maximally reusing code up and down the class hierarchy...


... while avoiding downcasting and factory types.


Dani and I had a full day to ourselves so we went rogue and conquered some kitchen projects. The vent hood needed replacement and rewiring. The work was disproportionately not kid-friendly, so there was a lot of "dad, give me a job".


We've pretty much never used the light above the sink. The switch is well out of reach and it doesn't provide all that much light. But when I did the sink it occurred to me that a motion sensor would be good here. The light is recessed so it's unintrusive but helpful when doing dishes or wandering into the kitchen at night.


The fixture is not particularly common (see above). The cover - which was R.I.P. - attaches to the recess the same way bathroom fan grilles do. I browsed the Home Depot site a bit and found they added an AI assistant that reads product documentation.

It seems to know its own limitations.

The non-AI assistants in the store told me I'd have to go to a specialty shop. So for the moment it remains open and untrimmed.











The board game crew lost our Arkham Horror campaign and moved on to Thunder Road: Vendetta. The game reminds me of X-Wing Miniatures in that the movement and combat rules are well-designed, tactical, and balanced.



Because of the solid mechanics, the game lends itself well to expansions and is kind of dull without them. Drivers and upgrades make for a deeper, asymmetrical experience. We're currently duking it out in a vehicular thunderdome.


I'm going to claim there's some rogueishness here because Dani made Uncle Ted an Octonauts birthday card and Kwazii is pretty rogue.

	Secret final boss this way.	�
	From a large billboard in Borderlands (pic unrelated)

Elon tweets a lot, but after Friday's shitshow, he posted something dumb enough to preserve. He, of course, doesn't mean a word of it but is just doing PR for the president of at least one country. Still, it's remarkable how little he thinks of his own Twitter followers.


Some guy called Alfonso was quick to point out Musk failed to mention the other person who can stop the trolley. With full control of his military, Putin's path to the peace the White House says it seeks is considerably more direct than Zelensky's. Considering the administration has strongly condemned the loss of life and treasure as well as its relationship with the Kremlin, their "pursuit of peace" has been rather one-sided.

Elon's meme was entirely too wordy, a simple rail switch would do.

More than anything else, this was dumb. The president met Zelensky at the White House with the forgone decision to sabotage the mineral deal SecState had negotiated. And they didn't even really try to hide it.

• Trump proxies and nominees were unwilling to state one way or another about whether Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The democrats seem to have gotten wind of this and asked them directly. They weren't even allowed to claim it was provoked attack.
  
• The president called Zelensky a dictator (and not flatteringly like when he refers to Kim or Xi) and was somehow mum about the other guy.
• VP Vance was quite clearly given the role of escalating anything that could be perceived as a confontation.

The administration could have informed Zelensky of their decision behind closed doors but, probably, knowing that McConnell and others support Ukraine (and the American M-IC ͥ ) they needed to make it seem like Zelensky provoked them. Unfortunately for everyone, Trump and Vance simply did a terrible job of making it appear authentic.

While plenty of media commentary has hinted at this, far too much of the discussion is about Zelensky wearing the same thing he's worn since (smirk) his country's borders invaded Russia's peaceful westbound tanks and infantry. The headlines have also fixated on "the controversy" where Zelensky described the global impact of a continental war as "feeling the effects", something Trump grotesquely spun into an assertion about the country's emotional state.

It was sad, it was a national embarrassment, but it's exactly what a electoral and popular majority asked for. The president's preference for Russia is as core to his persona as his occasionally charming, frequently tragic struggle with words.

I dipped into /r/conservative because, in the words of two contributors from the lesser of the drama subs:

/u/TwasAnChild Haven't gotten their marching orders from fox news yet, check in a couple of days and they'd have changed their tune on this

/u/skishface 1000%. They will have 24 hours of authentic reaction then they all fall in line behind a unified right-wing talking point. It's wild they call us the sheep.

This exchange was addressing the /r/conservative response to Trump Gaza #1 video, but I've found their observation to be generally applicable.


It's somewhat convenient to go to that sub to get an idea of the conservative mindset as well as a tldr of the GOP's official messaging - it has both. In response to Friday's theatre, there was understandably no shortage of "this is what I voted for" because, as I said, this is what they voted for. A few comments critical of the administration bubbled to the top (in both the Gaza video and the simulated negotiation). This cause of this is twofold:

1. Plenty of conservatives were raised before the GOP turned isolationist and doing the Neville Chamberlain routine offends them. Still others inexplicably expected diplomatic poise from Trump, perhaps thinking he might negotiate the deal back up to a $500B value. Instead they watched their leaders yell at a wartime president about integrity of an oval-shaped room.
2. Unless things have changed since I participated in Reddit many years ago, anyone can vote on any sub, moderators can only limit comments. And so non-conservatives follow or happen upon /r/conservative (e.g. when it hits the front page) and through upvoting/downvoting can impact the popularity and visibility of a comments.

And so these conservative-but-not-MAGA opinions are amplified by left-leaning passersby, much to the ire of the platform adherents. Some find this funny, others find it disgraceful, SCOTUS is due for a decision on the matter once it returns to them. For me, it just means my search for raw opinions and official taking points has to slog through indignant complaints about downvotes, the 'hivemind', and brigaders (brigadiers for autocorrect people).


Friday's incident was no exception:

UltraAirWolf

People are confused about downvotes. We need to understand this is the most brigaded sub.

It's gotten bad enough that there's now a sticky post in which the /r/conservative mods ͥ admit they are at a loss.

Jibrush

Addressing Brigading Hello verified conservatives! We are fully aware of the absolute state of the sub. We're taking some measures to deal this while we recruit and train new moderators...

Let me take a quick break from solving the internet to offer a solution to the mods of /r/conservative. First, yes, Reddit is predominantly left-leaning, they absolutely brigade /r/conservative, and there's no technical solution without a change to the platform. But pursuing a technical solution is both difficult and - let's be honest - what a liberal would do. 2025 is all about making a deal. Having a compromise mindset works in every context - business, geopolitics, even social media.


There's some bad news though, compared to the woke hivemind of Reddit, /r/conservative is very small and unable to independently combat the brigade, even with allies from the UFC and conspiracy subs. In transactional terms, /r/conservative don't have a lot of cards to play.

Luckily, Reddit is now an amoral corporation and beholden to shareholders and not than their purple-haired, keyboard warrior users. And Reddit understands brigading is bad for everyone, they even say so! It's just not enough of a problem to really matter. They shuttered popular subs like the_donald, so it's unlikely that /r/conservative's struggle will move the needle. There's an ocean of space between the /r/conservative downvote problems and anything that will hurt Reddit's engagement metrics and AI training copus profits.

So while it's admirable that the /r/conservative mods wish to have an independent place for conservative discussion, they're in an unwinnable position*. *Unless, say, the brigaders were oozing desperation, e.g. hiring North Korean downvote bots and taking out 20% APR loans.

Anyway, here's the deal. First, everyone in the sub should buy 100 RDDT shares - keeping in mind that simply using the service has historically cost Reddit precious server resources so they owe it. Once that is in place, it'd be best that every fifth post on the sub be a crosspost to some liberal subreddit. Sure, that'll mean /r/conservative will feature dogwalker manifestos and people criticizing Wayne Gretzky, but it's in everyone's best interest to seek peace. In exchange, the rest of Reddit will probably stop brigading the 'Flaired users only' posts.


Also I should say, it's very disrespectful that /r/conservative haven't thanked Reddit in recent memory. Moreover, I imagine many users have posted on Truth Social and Rumble and TikTok, almost like they don't even want Reddit's help. Very Disrespectful.

I recommend the mods submit this peace plan to spez when they are ready.