Hitman-inspired FPS where you're in a crowded party, awesome music is bumping, and you've got to find the girl wearing your same outfit, then take her out via carefully coordinated gossip and slander.

Can confirm. The professor in my Master's program called it "story sense." And the more you've read (especially in the market you write to), the better your sense of what to write and when.

I was still doing green in 2010, but I'll always be a '90s boy.

have you tried being a sweetheart about the problem

This is probably true, but only because AI will have revealed that so much of the science we were doing was just board games. That is, we won't necessarily get magic; we might just all become skeptics.

I've bound eldritch magics into all my organs to channel my undying will and grant me subtle control over the oblivious hosts, but I won't know if it works until I wake up as somebody's spleen...

If you enjoy this kind of analysis and you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma," I recommend that you read "The Innovator's Dilemma."

I like hanging out with people who think about Bible characters like they were actually people living through those events. I've found the best wisdom that way.

as a neutral party in this fight my only option is to sell weapons to both of you

Worth thinking about for a good long time:

The other issue is that our world-changing geniuses are currently mixed in with a bunch of mediocrities, grifters, and morons, and all of them are trying as hard as possible to seem like geniuses. In time, it'll become clear which was which, so we look back and see only geniuses.

This is an excellent reminder! Jesus wrote it into the Lord's Prayer with "Forgive us our debts in the same way we forgive our debtors...because the actual decision-making and power belong to you, God."

"Remember the Sabbath, and keep it sacred."

May God convince you his love is real today.

We did print a lot of money, but I suspect this effect is mostly a sudden, rapid injection of NY/CA dollars into states with much, much cheaper houses.

A huge amount of parenting is just teaching your children how to navigate the weird social environments of your family, your church, your local school system... All the things you learned. All the things you know. That makes it easier than you'd think.

These are my people. Let us all be Gideons, and let other people be Samsons.

It would be sort of funny if Democrats lost the Electoral College in 2032 because they didn't build enough affordable housing in blue states.