Aron 2 Blue

How long do successful mature games get improvements? Some new features in PoGo: When incubating an egg, now you have the ability to purchase an incubator on the spot. Previously, this element was missing, so you had to back out, navigate to the store, purchase an incubator, then navigate back to your pokemon list and eggs, and incubate. Making purchases like this easier likely increases use of coins, which are the one of the few things you can directly buy for money, and otherwise are limited to 50 coins/day for defending gyms. Incubators cost 150 or 200 coins, so 3-4 days of waiting for someone who doesn't want to pay $. This makes me think the UX team is being encouraged to design for ways to get players to spend $. This is obvious in PoGo's emphasis on paid ticketed activities, up to $15 per event. Free to play still gets some benefit from the event, but early access to new Pokemon is often sold through these tickets. I'm not a game designer, and have mostly played PoGo...

Now on Netflix (sigh). I didn't watch it, I read the English edition. "The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. What a weird thing. The start during the Cultural Revolution in China is really disturbing. A wholesale persecution of scientists and social elites that seems crazy. The zither bothered me. Ultra strong molecular wires - nanomaterials - can be strong under tension but not stand up to shear forces. How fast does it cut?  Unfolding a proton from higher dimensions so that it expands to the size of a planet but still has the mass of a proton - I don't think gravity would matter at all. It sorta hangs together, but is also wildly fantastic. Sci-fi, I guess?  I did enjoy the strangeness of the fairly direct translation. I liked everything enough to keep going and read the full trilogy. Recommended if you can overlook any issues caused by translation. 

SPOILERS I wanted to write down what I thought the major events of the first book because I'm re-reading the series so I can read the 5th book with everything fresh in my mind. Opening: Gavilar assassination by Szeth, truthless, assassin in white. Lashing to change gravity, stick objects together. Kaladin: we get his full back story, training as a surgeon growing up, joining the army to protect his little brother Tien, then having to watch him die. Later, he kills a shardbearer to protect his lighteye lord Amaram, then when he refuses to claim the shardblade because it caused the death of most of his squad, he has to watch the rest of his squad killed and is made a slave, so Amaram can claim the shards. This is told in flashbacks throughout the book. The main timeline follows him as a slave, meeting Syl the spren, then being made a bridgeman in Sadeas's army on the Shattered Plains. He despairs and nearly kills himself, Syl convinces him to try to help. He figures out how to tr...