Beyond the field of hard sciences, I have serious doubts whether absolute truths can even exist. As soon as you believe in more than one value, situations can arise where two values clash with each other. I used to live in a big city, near a quarter with a large Muslim population. And while I believe in religious freedom, it was hard for that not to clash with my feminists belief when seeing a woman in a burqa walking 3 steps behind her husband wearing jeans and T-shirt. Certain religious beliefs are simply not compatible with certain modern social beliefs.

On this blog I am constantly getting into trouble because I do not believe that it is possible for one political side to be 100% right, and the other side to be 100% wrong. One doesn't have to be a Trump supporter or be in favor of the bunch of bozos he is currently appointing to his cabinet to admit that left-wing governments have a tendency towards regulatory overreach, and that pruning some aspects of certain federal agencies is probably helpful (not that I think that the bozos will do a good job of it). Sometimes to a certain degree a part of the conflicting statements of both sides happen to be both true. For example the left claims that Trump committed a range of felonies and that the lawsuits against him are a consequence of that, while the right claims that the lawsuits are politically motivated. I think it is both, with the substance of the lawsuits being judicial, but much of the timing (from all the lawsuits starting in 2023 to the recent abandonments after the election) being political. That is not some strained attempt at balance through bothsideism, but the admission that the people on both sides are human, and thus fallible. If I had been able to vote, I would have voted Democrat, but that doesn't mean it is helpful to gloss over the failings of the left. I think the Democrats would have a much improved chance of winning elections if they would be more open to listening to criticism, and would be less certain of how specific demographics "must" vote for them.

There is a well-known cognitive bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which leads to people being most confident in knowing something when they only have very little knowledge of the subject matter. Knowing more leads to the insight that things are complicated and not so black & white. One needs to be a real professional expert in a subject matter to reach the same level of confidence of somebody who knows very little. I get the impression that the high degree of certitude that people express their opinions with online is more likely to be due to the lower end of the spectrum, rather than them being world-class experts. And when discussing issues that are in the cultural, social, or political domain, many beliefs are based more on emotions rather than knowledge. Online there is a good amount of virtue signaling going on, which makes it even more difficult for people to admit that they aren't 100% certain of something. But without that admission, sensible discussion is impossible. Moral superiority posturing leads to discussions drifting ever further towards the extremes, rather than to compromises that could be actual solutions to a problem.

In a way I envy Americans for having only two political choices. I will have to vote in Germany in three months, and there are 6 political parties big enough to possibly reach the 5% minimum vote requirement to enter parliament. Just like in the USA, people vote based on a mix of what a party program actually says, how much sympathy they have for a candidate, and as how efficient a party was perceived when last in power. And these criteria can contradict each other, for example I do agree with many of the positions of the Green party program on the environment, but don't like the Green's candidate having launched 800 defamation lawsuits against people who called him an idiot on X, nor do I think the party was especially efficient at tackling climate change in a socially acceptable way when in government. Knowing that there probably won't be any party with an absolute majority, and having to consider how to vote strategically for a coalition that works doesn't make this vote any easier. The previous coalition was mostly famous for internal strife, and one of the parties just scored a huge own goal by basically confirming through a leaked internal document that this was mostly their doing. On the positive side, maybe there are now only 5 parties left that could get into parliament. Nils Bohr is quoted saying "prediction is difficult, especially about the future". Admitting that I don't know which of my voting options will result in the best outcome for me and my country unfortunately isn't helpful in making that choice.

In cooperative mode in Endeavor you have 7 goals, and need to fulfill at least 4 of them for the most minor of victories. We barely just managed that. That made the game a lot more interesting. In cooperative mode there are goal cards and crisis cards that aren't even used in competitive play. The cooperative mode also leads to more player interaction, trying to coordinate to reach goals, which is absent in the competitive mode.

How does that happen? Well, companies can pay Amazon for specific search terms. If you are a company selling PC monitors, and you know that a lot of websites recommend a competitor's product, you can pay Amazon to redirect searches for that product towards your product. Amazon doesn't care whether the search term you paid them for actually describes your product, they only care how much money you give them. Theoretically Pepsi could pay Amazon so much money, that if somebody searches for Coca Cola, he would be shown Pepsi instead.

Paying companies like Amazon or Google for search terms makes them a lot of money, but of course destroys the quality of the search results even more than traditional search engine optimization does. People add "Reddit" to their Google searches, because without that, they'll only see paid-for results which don't actually correspond to what they were searching for.

The interesting question now is whether AI will make the situation even worse, or whether it will improve internet searches. The general trend of enshittification and need to recoup billions of investment in AI suggests that things could get even worse. But anybody who has ever used ChatGPT knows that an AI chatbot has a secret weapon that regular searches on Google or elsewhere don't have: Refining, which is asking a follow-up question that builds on the previous one. You ask a question, get an answer, and if there is something you don't like about the answer, you can add further specification. Like asking ChatGPT to write you a paragraph, and then telling it to rewrite it in a simpler style.

I would love something like this on Amazon. Amazon has a range of filters you can apply to search results, but those are far from covering everything. If you search Amazon for a "box", you can't for example limit the results by the size of the box. It is easy to see how AI could solve this problem. The question is whether Amazon or anybody else *wants* to solve the problem and provide you with better search results. On the one side, you could imagine an AI company that provides better searches than Google, or makes it easier to find a product than Amazon, to be able to compete with Google or Amazon. But if you give the customer what they want, instead of stuffing the option that is most profitable for you down their throat, how do you make money?

The quality of search results on Amazon is bad because of Amazon FBA, "fulfillment by Amazon", which enables anyone to use Amazon for dropshipping. You buy some cheap product in China, then sell it for some markup on Amazon, having slapped some added invented "brand name" onto it. Because this has been widely touted on the internet as a get rich quick scheme, for any given product there can be dozens of those invented brands, all selling exactly the same item. And you can get the exact same item even cheaper if you leave Amazon, and buy it directly from China via Temu. This is all very bad for the customer, but also bad for the competing dropshippers, who have to lower their prices constantly, and pay Amazon for search terms in order to be the one of many identical products that finally gets bought. Amazon makes more money by selling the search terms than they would make by cleaning up their store, removing all the dropshippers, and selling the item themselves. Amazon sometimes even uses a commingled inventory system, where all the identical items sold by different dropship "brands" are piled up together, and the customer gets a random one from the pile, regardless from which dropshipper he ordered. Which gets very weird if somebody adds a fake scam product to the commingled inventory, and somebody else's dropship operation gets bad ratings for the scam, because even Amazon can't tell anymore whose product they shipped. The quality degradation of a search on Amazon isn't intended, but clearly Amazon is willing to accept this disadvantage in order to keep selling search terms to the dropshippers.

Thus it could be said that the monetary value of a search is in the price difference between the actually cheapest option for a product and the inflated price of the product that the search result shows. While search *could* be better, regardless of whether that is by use of AI or by other improvements, it is not in the interest of the people that offer the search engines to make it better, as their profit increases the worse the search result is for the customer.

For example a developer of the failed first-person shooter Concord called his customers "a bunch of talentless freaks hating on it". It has become increasingly common for triple A games to have an embargo on content creators, and even on user reviews, so that on launch day only glowing reviews from friendly press is available. Compare the following two recent role-playing games: Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an 82 critics score on Metacritic, but only a 38 on customer reviews; Drova - Forsaken Kin has as 79 critics score, but a 89 on customer reviews. Developers always claim bad customer reviews are from "trolls" or "haters", but the big gaps between critics reviews and customer reviews happen exclusively for games with huge marketing budgets. On Veilguard, IGN bridged the gap by first releasing a glowing 9 out of 10 review, and then posting a second article, not marked as a review and with no review score, that listed everything they thought was wrong with the game and wasn't mentioned in the "review". Sales numbers tend to reflect customer review scores, not because the "trolls and haters" have an outsized influence, but because that is how good a game really is.

I think what we are seeing here, both in politics and gaming, is an elite that created their own echo chamber bubble with the help of the internet. When an election or game release forces the issue out of the bubble and into the general population, the reception comes as a surprise, as the bubble previously protected the elite from any real feedback. The current trend on left-leaning social media communities is cancelling the part of their families who voted Republican for Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday celebrations. People want back into their comfortable bubble, where everybody agrees with them. Why would Democrats want to engage with the wider population, listen to what people really thought about the previous administration, and spend the next 4 years improving their program to be more attractive next time, when instead they could just retreat for 4 years into their echo chambers and mutually stroke their moral superiority? Why would game developers want to go through the hassle of open beta testing and listening to actual player feedback, when it is so much more comfortable to listen only to the handful of "games journalists" that they paid to tell them how great they are?

The electorate is never wrong. The customer is never wrong. Dear Elite: If your intimate conviction that your political program is superior, that your game is superior, doesn't survive the contact with reality when stepping out of the bubble, you can't change reality. You don't get to dissolve the electorate or customer base. You should have stepped out of your bubble earlier, and seeked honest feedback, to change your product before it was too late.

And then the content creator said a single phrase that changed my mind: Avowed will be on Game Pass on day one. Suddenly I was thinking, "Oh, I am going to play this!". While Game Pass isn't free, and has increased in price this year, I still consider it very good value for money in general, and have an ongoing subscription to it; so it kind of feels like playing Avowed for free, "no added cost", as opposed to buying the game for $70 on Steam.

I am not poor, and can afford buying $70 games. But this event still shows that I am somewhat price sensitive. Paying $70 for a game and then not liking it just feels bad, even if that $70 is not missing for rent money. On Game Pass, I can try out a game for free, and if I don't like it, it doesn't feel as bad as if I had bought it. It just feels a lot safer. That makes games that I am only borderline interested in a lot more attractive. I felt the same thing about Ara: History Untold, nice enough to play for free, but would have hated to have paid $60 for it.

Of course there is something like circular logic operating here. It feels as if I am playing the Game Pass games for free, while simultaneously me playing a lot of games that would cost $60-$70 on Game Pass justifies me paying €144 per year for the subscription. In the end, I am still paying $10 to $20 per game, depending on how many I try in a year. But the one thing it does for certain is removing that "should I buy this game?" decision process, and the possible regret connected to it.

Since the industrial revolution started in the early 19th century, most countries have a large population of people who make their living mostly from working for an employer. Whether you call them proletariat, working class, or middle class varies with time, country, and the person speaking. But there are some observations we can make about this class of people that mostly hold true both globally and over two centuries: There are a lot of them, they are leaning to the left in economic issues, but they are mostly conservative in social issues.

The US left strongly believes in identity politics, which pretty much completely replaced the older ideas of class politics. Thus Democrats believed that for example Latinos, or as they like to call them LatinX, would vote for them, based on their identity. That turned out to be not the case. In reality, working class hispanics acted more like any other working class population, rather than basing their vote on their hispanic identity. Especially Latino men flocked to Trump in large numbers. They didn't particularly like being called LatinX, and they didn't like illegal immigration, even if many of those new arrivals are also from Latin America. But even more importantly, they were more upset about the price of groceries than they were moved by the social arguments of the Democratic Party. Economic policies of the Biden administration, like student loan forgiveness, weren't very popular to people who didn't have a college degree in the first place, many of them from minorities.

While Democrats strongly appealed to women in their defence of abortion rights, they haven't been particularly nice or welcoming to men. Commenters from the left frequently use "cis hetero male" as a term of insult, and imply that all men are rapists and violent against women. It turns out that men generally don't like being insulted, and that a large majority of men is cis hetero. And that this holds true even for men who are Black, Latino, or from any other minority. The left-wing anti-men bias thus resulted in an estimated 10% gender gap, and 54% of men voting for Trump. I consider it possible that the Democrats got close to 100% of the transgender vote, but of course that doesn't amount to much, and several politicians of the Democratic Party are now back pedalling on transgender rights, realizing that it might have lost them more votes than won them.

All this to say that the US political left, and the Democrats, are increasingly a highly educated elite, detached from the working class population. They believed that because of their identity politics, minorities were somehow forced to vote for them. And now they frequently perceive the fact that the working class voted for Trump as a sort of betrayal. The disdain that many of these left-leaning media types feel towards the common man as a result of that "betrayal" is rather visible in the news commentaries. And I find that rather hard to watch. Some of the comments that left-leaning media made about minority groups that voted for Trump are actually racist, which is strange from the political side that says it wants to fight racism. And even more comments are anti-democratic, which is even stranger for the party that wanted to save democracy with this election. Note that the Republicans mostly fell for the same wrong assumptions of who would vote Democrat, and ended up making it harder for working class people to vote, which then ended up voting for them.

2024 was an election year in many countries, and it turns out that it was a terrible year for incumbents. Many working class people in rich countries were feeling that their government was handling immigration badly, with too many immigrants exerting economic pressure on the cost of affordable housing. It also turned out that regular people perceive the economy differently than economic indicators would suggest: Official core inflation numbers exclude volatile food and energy prices, as well as the cost of investment assets like housing; real people feel volatile food and energy prices more strongly, and also feel their increasing inability to buy a house very strongly. On the other hand, people have a tendency to believe that if they get a raise, it is due to having worked well, rather than just inflation. An economist would say that if you have 20% core inflation accumulated over the last few years, but your salary went up by 25%, you are better off than you were. Only, it doesn't feel like that to most people, which is why they often voted against the incumbents in elections this year.

There is of course a valid argument to be made that people who voted for Trump due to the inflation made a mistake. It is hard to predict how the coming years will play out, but at the very least it is obvious that an economic policy based on higher tariffs is more likely to push inflation up, rather than down. It remains to be seen in how far such a policy might increase working class jobs in America, rather than just shifting them away from China to other countries. But even this "error" of the electorate doesn't justify a left-leaning elite to treat working class voters like idiots. The Democrats could have explained the likely consequences of Trump's announced economic policies better.

Besides the disdain for voters who didn't vote as they "should have", I also find the general panic and doom mongering from the left difficult to watch. Weren't the crazies supposed to be on the right-wing channels? Now they are everywhere. Realistically speaking, people overestimate the power of government and the president, and they underestimate the power of the system, or what the right calls "the deep state". The deep state isn't a nefarious organization, directed by shadowy figures from the background. Rather it is a huge machine of administration that touches a large number of issues in people's lives. While in Scandinavian countries around 30% of the total workforce are public sector employees, in the USA the number is estimated to be around 15%, which is lower, but still around 24 million people. Running an organization of 25 million people is very difficult. Installing a layer of upper management for that organization which mostly consists of ideologically pure and loyal, but incompetent, clowns isn't going to help. The most likely prediction for the next 4 years is that the Trump administration will be shouting very loudly and not achieve very much at all. Bureaucrats everywhere have a fantastic super power to resist change, by simply not working or not prioritizing the change their superiors told them to implement.

Part of that is of course that Trump and other right-wing figures promised some stuff which is simply impossible. I had to laugh very hard when I saw that the one of the government agencies they propose to close down is the IRS. That could never happen. Since Reagan's "government is the problem" speech, many Republican administrations have claimed to want to diminish the state, while often engaging in policies that can only be described as "tax and spend". The US government has grown pretty much steadily over the last 4 decades, regardless of which party was in power, and even Reagan couldn't manage more than slow down that growth without reversing it. While it is possible that Trump manages to shut down the Department of Education, that would only result in the influence of the various states on education growing, resulting in more visibly "blue state schools" and "red state schools". The USA has 3.8 million teachers at elementary and secondary school level; most of them are progressive by nature, as you need to believe in community in order to accept a stressful and badly paid job like that. Firing every progressive teacher, replacing them by MAGA loyalists, and turning the whole US education system into a right-wing indoctrination machine is simply impossible. At most they can slightly diminish the left-wing indoctrination machine. Not that this machine was working all that well, 56% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump, as well as 40% of women of that age. Which then resulted in Millennial Democrats insulting Gen Z on social media: “Gen Z gotta be the worst generation of all time. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t add, can’t fuck, can’t joke, can’t dance, can’t dress, can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t not elect a fascist conman.”. The left never realized how the viciousness resulting from their virtue signalling wasn't any better than the hate speech they accused the right of.

I don't want to give the impression that everything is fine. The incompetent flunkies of Trump will result in some damage to various institutions, and possibly trigger a global recession via a trade war. But both the hopes of the right wing and the fears of the left wing of change in America are mostly overblown. I wouldn't be surprised if even key policies, like Trump's "largest mass deportation plan" end up being fairly inefficient and small compared to the size of the illegal immigrant population. Just look at his previous term, where the "Trump wall" turned out to be mostly inefficient, and the Mexicans never paid for it. The biggest danger I see right now is that I will have to stop watching US news media, because half of them will spout lies about how efficient the administration is, while the other half will spout lies about how much of a danger the measures are.

In the end, a frequent release of new content by DLC or major patch for a 4X or grand strategy game is the same tactic as live service games or MMORPGs: Game companies want you to adopt their games as a lifestyle choice, because they want you to give them money over and over. But I am far from sure that I want that. Not again. I played World of Warcraft for 10,000+ hours, and other MMORPGs for thousands of hours, so I have lived this "game as a lifestyle choice" already. I don't necessarily regret that choice, but do I want to do that again?

The fundamental problem of playing the same game (well, same plus added content) over and over is the opportunity cost. The kid who received Super Mario Bros. in 1985 for his Nintendo Entertainment System probably only had a handful of cartridges for his NES, no other console, and no access to dad's PC. He played the game for months, simply because he wouldn't get a new game before his next birthday or Christmas. But we don't live in that world anymore. Even kids have a huge number of choices for games to play, and several devices to play them on. As an adult, and thus larger financial means, my choice of games is even more huge. Steam alone added 14,351 games in 2023, and the projection for 2024 is higher than that. Epic wants to give me a free game or two every week, and there are plenty of new releases on the Game Pass for PC. I can play games also on my phone or tablet, and I do own a Nintendo Switch console.

I did buy the second expansion pass for Age of Wonders 4. The AoW4 DLCs tend to be exactly what I want: More options to create a distinctly new leader and race, to play another game with different troops, different spells, and different tactics. But I have already played this game for 400 hours, and I don't want it to become the only thing I play. I enjoy other genres of games as well, for example the RPG Drova that I am currently playing.

As a result, the flood of new DLCs and patches for games I already played caused me more negative feelings than positive excitement this month. There are too many games to play, and not enough time. Turning games into a lifestyle and playing them over and over is just aggravating that situation.

While researching SETI, I noticed that about 70% of the BGG community thinks the game is best with 3 players, while only 30% think it is best with 4 players. The poll, as always, doesn't say why people think so. But I would guess that it is a very typical reason: With more players, the game takes longer. That affects both the overall length of the game, and the time a player has to wait between turns. SETI is not a very fast game, it is estimated to take about 40 minutes per player, and for a first game with 4 players we might well need 4 hours, including rules explanation. I can see why some people would prefer a 3-hour game for 3 people to a 4-hour game for 4 people.

I do prefer board games with at least some interaction between players, and SETI has that. But even by just studying the rules, I can see that there are two major ways of player interaction: Moon landings and scanning. Moon landings bring a lot of points, but every moon can be landed on only once. The more players are in the game, the more likely it becomes that somebody else lands on a moon you wanted to go to. The number of moons is the same regardless of player count, so competition is obviously greater the higher the player count is. On the other side, scanning has a small effect when you do it, but then gives additional points once a system has been scanned a certain number of times (usually 4 to 5). Once the system is fully scanned, the person who contributed the most scans gets additional effects and points. Again, the number of systems to scan and the number of times you need to scan them are the same, regardless of player count. But with more players, scanning is more likely to fill up a system, and thus more likely to score points. It is obvious that the relative value of going for a moon landing or going scanning is different with different player counts. And it can't possibly be balanced well for all player counts. From reading between the lines on what strategy is "OP", I think that the game is balanced for 4 players, even if that takes longer to play.

It is thus possible that a game is best balanced at one player count, while the "flow" and time needed is better at another player count. Which makes the game suboptimal at any player count.

How much does a $100 crowdfunding board game cost? Obviously a trick question, and the answer is: It depends; mostly on where you live. The $100 pledge level of a crowdfunded game doesn't include shipping, nor does it include any applicable taxes. In the early days of Kickstarter, there were still board game crowdfunding projects that got away with not paying value added / sales tax. Crowdfunding projects still insist that you aren't actually "buying" anything, you pledge monetary support to the development of a game, and then get a copy of the game as "reward". Tax authorities weren't fooled very long by that charade, and by now it is very clear that sales taxes, like the EU value added tax, apply fully to Kickstarter projects. In a transition period some companies just raised the sticker price, but as sales taxes differ a lot from state to state and country to country, taxes are now usually paid together with shipping cost. So when you pledge $100 for a board game, you might very well pay another $20 for shipping, and if you live in Europe another 20% of VAT. As VAT is applied to both the game and the shipping cost, you end up paying another $44 when the pledge manager opens.

So where does Trump get into this? Trump's main economic policy is based on tariffs, he plans to install a blanket tariff of 10% to 20% on all imports, with additional tariffs of 60% to 100% on goods brought in from China. Now large board game companies producing mostly retail games often have their own production facilities, and those can be in their home country. But the overwhelming majority of small board game companies that produce crowdfunded games don't have any production facilities, but outsource the production of the games to China.

If you back a game on Kickstarter or Gamefound now, it might very well have an estimated delivery date of late 2025. And crowdfunding projects are often late, so it could very well be that the pledge manager only opens in 2026. Now imagine the US customer who pledged $100 for a board game, expecting to pay only $30 for shipping and sales tax, but finds he has to pay another $100 for the China tariff in addition to that. That is going to cause quite an uproar. Very quickly new crowdfunding projects will be required to mention the tariffs in the shipping & delivery section of their project. And once US customers realize that a $100 crowdfunded board game costs them $230, demand will shrink rapidly. The problem for people living elsewhere is that the US accounts for two thirds of pledges on Kickstarter. If tariffs keeps US customers away, the remaining pledges from the rest of the world might not be enough to make the crowdfunding project viable. Some games simply won't be produced at all.

The purpose of tariffs is to encourage manufacturing to the US. The small board game companies that live of crowdfunded projects don't have the capital to build up their own manufacturing capacity. It is possible that US companies will develop which manufacture board games for others. But that sure won't happen very fast. There are other Asian countries that might actually benefit more from the China tariffs, as making a board game in let's say Thailand with a 10% to 20% tariff might still be cheaper than producing it in the USA. Given the length of a typical crowdfunding board game project, it will take years before all of this settles down into a new equilibrium. Until then, there is some pain ahead for small crowdfunding board game companies and their customers.

I already mentioned Dragon Age: The Veilguard here, which by all accounts has great technical quality, graphics and voice acting. But a lot of people aren't happy with the writing and the dialogues, and find the game too linear, with too few actual choices. So I didn't try that game, and went for the exact opposite: Drova - Forsaken Kin. Drova is more of an indie RPG, with pixel art graphics, and no voice acting. It is obvious that making this game only cost a fraction of what is cost to make a Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age. But once you get over that, Drova - Forsaken Kin is a great RPG, with enormous depth. It is very old school, and reminds most people of games like Gothic. There are no features like quest markers, you need to listen to (or rather, read) what the NPCs say to figure out where to go. There are a lot of visible walls, but no invisible ones, and no railroading. If you want to march right into an area that is way too high level for you, good luck, the game isn't going to stop you.

Combat in Drova is action combat, just in 2D pixel art. You can choose between different weapons, which have different speeds, damage, and range. Fighting with a sword and shield feels different from fighting with an axe or a spear. Normally, I don't like action combat, because I am slow. But Drova fortunately has an explorer difficulty, which makes combat easier. I'm playing on the default settings for that mode, but the options would allow me to fine tune damage dished out and received even further. The options also allowed me to turn of the mini-games used to do things like fishing, mining, or lockpicking. You can play Drova on ironman mode, but I'd recommend the opposite: Save early, save often. You *can* get completely lost in this game and end up in the middle of far too many monsters that one-shot you with no way out.

I am still in Act 1, so I can't say how the story is overall. But it sure is a dark one, and gives you plenty of choices on whether you want to be good or evil, up to the option of becoming a drug dealer. The game also has subjects like slavery (and you might end up as a slave for some time), so I really wouldn't recommend this game to snowflake players that get triggered easily. The most important feature of the story is that it isn't too on the nose. After the tutorial you end up in this foreign world, with only a vague sense of purpose. There is a starting area to gain a few first levels and learn things, but you aren't forced to do that. There are two major factions, but it isn't as easy as one of them being good and the other evil. You get a feeling with time what areas are for what "level", but all of that is very open and non-linear. You just adventure and explore, and bit by bit find out more about the world and its lore. The world is both hand-crafted, and an open world.

In Drova, your actions have consequences, and they matter. That part where you are captured as a slave and have to work your way out to freedom? If you kill the people that want to capture you, that will never happen. I was stunned when I discovered that after learning how to extract the claws of animals, I could go back to the corpses of animals that I had killed levels ago and still get their claws. Nothing seems to respawn, not even the inventory of the traders. Which is good, because if you sold some crafting material earlier, but then find you need it later, it will still be there, you just need to buy it back for 5 times the price. There are resources everywhere, and the game lets you use things like healing plants raw, but if you learn how to craft salves and potions, you'll be a lot more efficient. Cooking is also important, as food also heals you, albeit slowly. You can also craft a lot of interesting consumables, like traps. At the start of the game, magic is also available only as consumable scrolls, which are extremely powerful. But apparently you can learn magic much later in the game.

Drova - Forsaken Kin costs €25 on Steam, as is currently rated 96% "overwhelmingly positive". This is not an early access game, but a complete and finished game, although there are patches, and some more content will be added to the game. If you like old school RPGs, I can only recommend this one.

Today I saw (but refuse to honor with a link) a YouTube video using ChatGPT to predict Trump's first 100 day in office "and it is worse than you imagined". No, actually that ChatGPT prediction is exactly as bad as people imagined. Because all that ChatGPT does is take all the fantasies from people who wrote about that subject on the internet and regurgitates them. You get both the horror visions from the left, and the crazy power fantasies from the right, mix them together and get an "AI prediction". Which is complete nonsense.

I was struck by that AI prediction approach, because it is diametrically opposed to my previous post. In that I had looked at various election promises and fears, and subjected them to a reality check. It is exactly that reality check that AI is unable to provide. Large language models repeat language they heard, they can't reason, and thus can't contradict. If I created an Tobold.AI to write my blog posts, it could only tell you what everybody is saying. It couldn't tell you why that might possibly be wrong.

There is no denying that Donald Trump has authoritarian desires and ideas. But realistically, he won't be able to implement many of those. What he will be able to do is to a large extent stop the various lawsuits against him; there is also a good chance of that being accompanied by some smoke and mirror operation in which lawsuits against his political enemies are started. Those won't go anywhere, they would just be designed to make it appear as if all presidential candidates are equally in trouble with the law. But there is no chance that for example Trump would be able to overturn the 22nd amendment and run for a third term, or do any other change that would allow him to stay in office longer than 4 years.

In fact, the probability that Trump's term is shorter than 4 years is significant. You just need to look up actuarial tables for 78 year old men to see that. That is a problem in itself, as the US presidential election system doesn't actually make sure that the vice president is somebody that is suited or popular to become president. Vance doesn't have the same hold over the Republican party that Trump has, and most probably the death of Trump during his term would result is spectacular infighting until 2028. Well, *earlier* spectacular infighting, because that fight for 2028 in the GOP is going to happen in any case.

An estimated 3.3% or 11.7 million people in the US are "undocumented", or as Trump would call them, "illegal". But as most election promises, Trump's "mass deportations" are a lie. That is not to say that there couldn't be more deportations than before, and those will be heavily covered by media on both sides, for different reason. But no country can deport 3% of its population, the practical, legal, and economic challenges of that is simply too great. People also underestimate how significant and effective existing deportation under Biden was. The USA deported 1.1 million people in 2023, which sounds like a lot, but it less than half of the people who immigrated in the same time. Still, Immigration to the US is actually already falling significantly, and no doubt Trump will just claim that as success for himself.

What Trump most certainly also will do, is to claim that the economy miraculously recovered the minute he takes office. If economic data just stay as they are right now, Trump would brag to no end as how great a president he is for the economy. Interestingly that might actually have some effect of dealing with the "vibecession", an economy that is actually strong but perceived as being weak. The most likely economic hardship of the next Trump term is, maybe surprising to people who voted for him, more inflation. His key economic policy, lowering taxes and rising tariffs, is guaranteed to raise consumer prices. It is unclear whether Trump is even aware, or willing to address, the biggest hole in US China tariffs: You pay a tariff if you import a container full of consumer goods from China, but if Shein or Temu first pack those same consumer goods into individual packages addressed to individual customers and then put those packages in the same container, they suddenly don't have to pay tariffs anymore.

Internationally, the next 4+ years will be "America first", which is bad news for anybody who relies on US support, except possibly Israel. That undoubtedly will also result in a much diminished influence of America on the world stage. The overall result of that is unclear, as right now potential rivals, like China or Russia, aren't well placed to increase their global influence either, for different reasons. And of course, a lot of other things could go wrong globally, e.g. a larger war in the Middle East, or a Russian victory in the Ukraine.

Unbeknownst to Trump or to Americans in general, the president of the USA has a lot less influence on the future than most people think, for example they don't directly control gas prices. And even with a majority in both houses and a majority of conservative judges in the Supreme Court, a lot of the predicted doom just won't happen. A federal law prohibiting abortion in the USA is extremely unlikely, for example. And right-wing parties usually stop wanting to shrink government as soon as they control it, which makes most of Project 2025 a pipe dream. One thing you can be sure about for the next 4 years, is that both what Republicans told you what will happen and what Democrats told you what will happen if Trump wins won't happen. That is not to say that America probably missed out on a better alternative with this election, but be assured: The world doesn't end here!