Month: June 2025

I beat sifu, and more on minimalistic combat

I just beat Sifu. The last boss was hard. I got there with about my actual age, so it was sort of personal that I could still beat Yang. (In Sifu your character ages when you lose, and it’s game over at 70, I hope this is one of the more unrealistic aspects of the game; I enjoyed this mechanism). It took many trials, and I had to carefully study his timings and moves. But in the end, the experience has confirmed my thoughts in the previous post, that we need to rethink combat systems to make them much more fun and engaging. Strong as he was, Yang was stupid. He should have noticed that after a specific combo, I was almost always able to land a few hits. This made the fight quite dull, in the end.

So I am planning to update my scratch game to better illustrate, and the next step would be to put some AI in it, for which I guess I need to port it to C++ or something, I suspect it’s not easy to do that in Scratch.

Liable man

We have witnessed the demise of homo sapiens and the emergence of liable man. The distinctive features of homo sapiens — creativity, adaptivity, empathy, intelligence — have been replaced in liable man with a single function: delivering utterances and performing actions that are in compliance with laws and regulations, to shift any possible blame and avoid liability. This replacement has had a fleeting evolutionary advantage which is ending imminently, with digital expert systems rendering liable man obsolete.

The ancestor of Liable man is the thrifty and servile bureaucrat. But in his current invasive form he has taken over every human profession. Doctors, principals, real-estate agents, contractors, have all but morphed into a slow interface for consulting laws and regulations, providing no added value but significant attrition. Liable man answers the question “What would you do if it was your life” with brief, affected sympathy, then doubles down playing by the playbook. He turns communities into lifeless towns of suspicious zombies, where all services are outsourced.

Be the change, volunteer in your community, add value, or be pointless.