So . . . if this is Last Epoch, but it's season 3, does that mean the original was actually the Antepenultimate Epoch?

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That looks pretty cool.

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Used to be when we talked about "The way the future was" we were talking about the 50s version of the future, with flying cars everywhere and transparent weather domes over cities and huge talking mainframe computers but also intelligent robots.
Now we can also have the way the future was in the 80s.

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There was a REALLY old Civilization board game that was not actually derived from the computer game, and it's awesome. Just elegant, innovative, full of emergent properties. It's like multi-tier in what you're trying to accomplish. The end game is all about Civilization cards, which are like technologies. Most of them do something useful in the short term, although the arts less so. But at the end of the game, you don't win based on conquest or anything, you win based mainly on having the most points' worth of civilization cards. Philosophy isn't much use but it's worth more points than anything else; not gonna win without it. To get the civilization cards, you have to do trade. To do trade, you have to build cities--on a turn you draw one trade card per city, and they're in 9 tiers of value, so if you have just a couple you only get the crappy stuff. Every turn there's a trade round as everyone tries to swap cards to build valuable sets. To build cities, you have to have a decent amount of territory and population. If you start a war, you might get more territory but you risk nuking too much population and not having enough to support some cities. And, hidden among the trade cards there are disasters, ranging from earthquakes to civil war, that shake things up.
But it's an all-day game that's best with a bunch of players, so I haven't had that many chances to play.

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I'm sure we will be able to solve the pronunciation issue in a giffy.

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Looks really cool.
See, this is what that one about frogs needed--some base in just what the creature is who's doing the building.

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Thinking about this game made me wonder about the possibility of a new kind of automation mechanic. So like, a lot of industrial thingies like ports, factories and stuff have a number of processes going on. And we have two ends of how to do them . . . one is, you sort of abstract them, you place a widget that does the thing and passes its results to another widget which you also place and you try to get good positioning and flow and that's the game. And the other end is just actually doing the processes all the time manually, which seems to be what this game is mostly based on.

So what if you had a game where overall, you're placing the widgets. But, the efficiency they work at is based on you doing the process manually in a minigame--they operate at speed and efficiency based on your best run of handling the job personally. So at first, you'd need to do quite a bit of manual operation, but around the time you get tired of that is hopefully also around the time your efficiency plateaus a bit and you can just leave the widgets working as well as you managed and spend more time expanding the operation and working on streamlining your production setups and stuff. And then maybe later you notice a bottleneck where you think you could get some advantage by improving your performance on some process and you go back to handling the heavy machinery personally for a little while. Kind of a niche idea, but I dunno, maybe it could be fun?

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Thinking of Finals, I am starting to think the developers didn't study hard enough for theirs.

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One thing about modern crypto is that in practice, nobody is really using the blockchain for direct peer-to-peer transactions. I don't quite understand why, but I get the impression it sucks. Everyone uses these "exchange" things instead, which are kind of like an unregulated bank with no deposit insurance that is probably run by fraudsters, to keep their crypto "money" in and do transactions. And those are totally unprotected; people's investments can be and have been totally stolen, both when an exchange goes bust and the owners skip with everyone's dough, and just when hackers break the exchange's crappy security and steal it. Governments would have exactly zero difficulty doing anything they wanted with crypto "money" that's in a crypto exchange. So for most holders of crypto, the few theoretical advantages of crypto are completely negated by the actual way it's now used.

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I saw the Waterworld movie back in the day. It was kind of a crap movie, but the sailing ship the hero used was awesome.

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