Early video game designer: Okay, we’re just about done with this level
Video game designer’s manager: Great! Did you figure out what to put at the end?
designer: Yeah, we put this tough, nasty, mean, ugly monster that the player has to beat. We made sure killing the monster feels as rewarding as possible.
Memes have become so heavily context-dependent that they briefly spawned a side-phenomenon of corporations mistakenly assuming that the image combinations are simply random, and that “randomness” is what the new generation finds humorous, and then deliberately creating nonsense ads in a desperate attempt to appeal to the youth, which went on for several years before they finally started hiring younger social media managers.
High Roller Club Marvey, rated E (overall, not this chapter) Chapter ¼
Summary: Harvey wants to play poker, but some punk kid at his poker table cheats his way to winning. Or, an alternate first meeting where Harvey and Mike both think they’re the ace in the hole. Mike counts cards. Harvey plays people.
Excerpt: “Do you have collateral to put up against this?” Mike asks, reaching into his pocket and waving the money stack.
“I’m good for it,” Harvey answers. “Isn’t the suite and the room service and the amount I exchanged for chips enough to give that away?”
“What if I don’t believe you?” Mike twists the hoodie strings around his finger, unwinds, then repeats it again.
Sighing, Harvey fishes his cell phone from his jacket pocket and dials his bank. He goes through the prompts to get to his balance and puts the call on speakerphone so Mike can hear the readout. Mike’s expression melts from challenging to wide-eyed shock.
“I’m good for it,” Harvey repeats. “Shall we play?”
“I’ll deal first, then you,” Mike agrees. “Best out of three games.” He belts out in song, “Signed, sealed, delivered—I’m yours.”
A bubble of laughter spills out of Mike, clearly amused with himself. Harvey’s lips twitch. Mike better watch it, or he’ll get the kid to agree to that, too.
The bad boy trope is only really entertaining if the bad boy is actually bad. And not “rebellious” or “mean”, but real bad. Terrorists, gang members, mafia, dictators, car dealers, that level of bad.
The historian hatred of counterfactuals (“alternate history”) would be one thing if they refused to use causal language or affirm causation, but they often do. Counterfactuals are, in fact, a perfectly reasonable question to consider when doing causal inference.
Prices are a signal of resource scarcity. Supply side inflation is useful in that it’s a signal of a real lack of resources relative to demand. Demand side inflation is noise, a money illusion so to say.
Seeing the way Marc Andreessen, a billionaire Gen X poaster, use Zoomer slang and terminology, incorporating it naturally into his own lexicon, demonstrates to me one of the underrated powers of the internet. It disseminates youth culture and ideas upwards in a natural way. Right now it isn’t happening as much as it will in the future since older people in general didn’t grow up with the internet, but when Zoomers grow it will. Andreessen, being essentially one of the pivotal figures in the creation of the web, is uncommon in how online he is, but we should expect more like him in the future.
