You missed the "for quarter time work". Earning $10k/month working 10 hours a week is pretty close to getting $400k/year for an FT job at Amazon (especially if FT ends up being more than 40 hours a week).
I say "pretty close" because if you're working on a 1099 basis there are a bunch of extra costs (extra SSDI payments, health care premiums, etc.) that you have to cover.
But still, nothing about the article suggests that the pay rates are poor, and the upper end ($250/hour) is quite good, especially when combined with the ability to work less than full time.
Because management should be rigorously defending devs from being needlessly interrupted with whatever some sales guy thinks is important in the moment? Management can filter out the garbage, condense down the really important bits and deliver them during a time it won't knock dev out of the zone?
Something that might bear considering, is what is the office providing you that can't be served some other way? Socializing can be served outside of work (friends, hobbies), Work structure or a dedicated work space can be created without requiring a company office (pay consideration for co-working space or re-allocate commute costs/proximity premiums to a larger living space with a dedicated room for work). For most companies, if they are paying for an office, they are going to require people to come to them. Remote folks lose the main thing they want, the ability to work remote. For the office preference folks, the reasons are varied and can often be solved for sans office.
Americans have increasingly depended on work for connection and meaning as various non-work social institutions have withered. It is probably a bad thing that work is a core social network for a lot of us, and we should all attempt to diversify our networks.
It's tough to have lots of non-work social networks, especially when you work full time and have children/a family.
It's completely understandable that work has taken such a central place in many people's lives. It's probably not ideal, but it is completely understandable.
I actually have a large social life outside of work, far more than the majority of folk I work with. Unfortunately that's all gone atm and unlikely to return until covid is completely over.
As to space, co working isn't the same as an office and having an home office requires moving and spending a lot of money. Many of us don't have expensive commutes that offset that cost
Does Cloudflare still require you to transfer in or can you actually buy domains from them directly now? The buy and then wait 90 days to transfer in thing is a hassle.
Slippery slope / Straw-man fallacy. One is to do with tying the minimum wage to a livable wage. The other is just large numbers for the sake of trying to win an argument. No one is arguing for $150/hr. The argument is simply that you aught not to be able to run a business and extract a profit if the cost to do so is employing people at such a low wage that they require governmental handouts just to pay rent and eat food. Given that, imaginary large numbers like $150/hr or $1500/hr do not come into play and thus do not need to be considered.
Sure, different countries have different living standards. That's the point. "Living wage" is an undefined, ever changing concept. Populist to the core.
That is still better for society than not having the economic activity.
What exactly is the benefit of wholly depriving the putative worker of a job vs. making up the difference with something like food stamps and Medicaid?
Considering that, at least in chicago, the police requested federal assistance, it seems like the pushback is more of a political game played by politicians than the reality on the ground.
The police union requested this. To my knowledge, they don't have any authority whatsoever to call out state national guard or federal troops into a state. Would be as meaningless as me declaring my private property an independent nation state.
> Considering that, at least in chicago, the police requested federal assistance
The police union did, but in any case, for very good reasons of federalism, the normal and proper route for such a request for federal intervention in local civil order other than as a result of open rebellion by the State government against the Union is from the Governor of the State (who will consider the need for such a request in light of and assure coordination with any state response available and in use, such as state-level law enforcement, National Guard, etc.), not from the local police command.
> the mayor requested it, but she delivered a speech yesterday saying she welcomes it as long as the agents aren't militarized.
The mayor is well aware of the practice being employed, and this is a way of saying it is distinctly unwelcome without minimizing the issues being used as a pretext for it.
Nice forward progress on the search for a preventative treatment. Also TIL bad gum health can lead to colon cancer. So counter intuitive. runs off to brush teeth
> The belief, in both colon cancer and pregnancy complications, is that the bacterium migrates from the mouth into the bloodstream (bleeding gums) and from there into other organs.
anecdotally one of the few things I remember about my maternal grandmother was that she implored us to take care of our teeth, and that she died of colon cancer :(
Brushing and flossing does also damage your gums depending on the force and utility. Thats worst then doing nothing because now bacteria can enter your blood stream and hitch a ride to the other parts of the body.
Much better option is to not eat carbs which universally damage teath.
Yeah sure, carbs are the ultimate devil in todays hipster keto obsessed world.
There is just a slight problem that in short they were never a problem during our history when you eat unprocessed whole foods.
Boiled skin-on potatoes are good; complex carbs, Vitamin C and B6, potassium, fibre, water, but maybe lacking in hipster value.
Simple carbs are great for physical activity in proportionate amounts, but fairly terrible otherwise.
When I had a heavy manual job I'd come home, have a cold beer then knock back a litre of orange juice, probably containing 100g/4oz of sugar. Seemed to go to muscle glycogen though occasionally I'd rush :-)
While that is true, its uncertain how dietary fiber would influence this. Since bacteria can only digest it, it might be feeding the pathogen. It also reduces the acid barrier so it makes stomach survivable.
> I'd like to know. Please share whatever you've learned.
Wouldn't we all :) If I share what I learned, we will be here a very long time...
> FWIW I've lowered my LDL thru diet
Its entirely different context that has no relevance to the topic. Eating fiber anywayz is akin to eating fat AFAIK as colon bacteria digest it into short SFA.
We're eating wayyyy more carbs relative to our ancestors. Refined sugar is in everything.
I never thought about it until my wife measured a teaspoon of sugar -- it's 5g. Now when I look at things like protein bars or Starbucks drinks and see 35g sugar I do a spit-take.
Yeah I think most carbs that you’ll eat are pretty OK (grains), but just the volume of sugar in most things unreal.
The daily suggested limit of sugar is ~50g. Which is already a lot if you look at the volume of it all. But then consider a single can of soda is around that much. Bottles are around 75g. There are people who have 3+ sodas a day.
You missed the word "unprocessed" in my post that you replied to. Of course that the processed junk is not good. Nobody is saying that Starbucks "coffee" with ungodly amount of sugar or any similar thing is good for you.
I think things are more complex than "brushing and flossing damages your gums depending on force and utility" because I've got wisdom teeth that I've been forcibly brushing for decades in the interest of making my gumline recede and it just. doesn't. work.
I also eat carbs like they're going out of style. At least one serving every day, minimum. I've also had an insatiable sweet tooth for most of my life, although that tapered off into my mid-30s.
I went fourteen years without seeing a dentist, and when I finally went in, aside from serious plaque buildup, my teeth and gums were in fantastic shape. It may have something to do with the fact that I drink skim milk like a toddler - about two gallons a week.
I will say, one effect that dairy and carbs has on my oral hygiene is that they promote the formation of tonsililoths - but once I was turned on to using a tongue scraper, that problem disappeared completely.
How did I go 14 years without a dentist and end up with great teeth anyway? Avoid sugary carbonated beverages, I floss with Plackers, I brush daily with an electric toothbrush and a baking soda/peroxide toothpaste, I use a tongue scraper, and I rinse with & gargle Listerene.
You are probably one of the rare protected people (my wife is one of them). Genetics may play a role (high number and/or diversity of certain salivary enzymes related to carb digestion) along with some life choices (such as excessive milk).
Thinking back on all the games I've lost, this analysis is depressing confirmation that I might just not be that good at this game lol. Super interesting read though!
Same. I've played the game for 40 hours and made 40 attempts, and 'won' only 4 times. 2 of them were daily challenges (and don't really count, they include very rule-breaking things), 1 was Standard for Ironclad, and another was Standard for Silent. I haven't even attempted Ascension once yet. It took about 25 tries on Standard before I won my first time, too.
I've even watched a few people's playthroughs and going over which cards are better than others and combo well together, and my win rate is still terrible. Just lost again this morning in Act 2 with another Defect run.
Meanwhile this guy is saying the best players are winning 99% of the time on Standard, and nearly the same on Ascension level 15? Wow.
By the way, for anyone thinking this game isn't really for you, you might want to give it a chance anyway (watch a video at least). I don't usually care for Rogue-likes, and I've been pretty tired of Deckbuilders, but I got into this game hard, pretty much immediately, after putting off trying it for forever and finally deciding to give it a chance.
One thing that really makes it awesome for me is that you know basically exactly what the enemies intend to do and how much damage they're going to do to you, so you can puzzle out how to prepare for it, should you kill this person who's going to do 18 damage to you, or reduce their strength, or build up your block to absorb it, or take the hit this round so you can go after something else, etc. If you've ever played Into The Breach, it feels a lot like that, but with RPG battles instead of a Tactical map.
I have no idea if this will help you in particular (depends on how you play right now), but something counter-intuitive about deck-building in general that helped a friend of mine up his win-rate in StS a lot is that you need to consider the cost of taking a card.
StS lets you not take a card when you are offered one, and often this is the best play, particularly as you go later into the game and have a deck that is stacked with powerful cards.
Fundamentally having more cards is bad, because it increases variance in what you can draw. Obviously taking a good card can be worth that cost, but often players fall into the trap of assuming the best card of the options given is worth taking, when really the question should be "does this card beat the average card in my deck, or does it dilute the power of the deck", because you are reducing the chance to draw one of the other cards in your deck.
Obviously there are edge cases: sometimes something may reduce the power of your deck right now, but introduces the chance for later synergy, which may be worth the cost—especially early on, but in general it is worth considering not taking the card.
The ideal deck is always the minimum number of cards that allow you to pull off your win state, everything else is just stopping you getting there (this is also why cards that allow you to draw cheaply are good, and one of the reasons why removing cards from your deck is powerful).
>Fundamentally having more cards is bad, because it increases variance in what you can draw.
StS has a number of enemies that shuffle bad cards into your deck, so this dillution works both ways. On higher difficulties more of these cards get shuffled into your deck. Trying a "thin" strategy with no countermeasures in such a fight (high damage output to end the fight fast?) can get you railroaded. You also start out with 10 starters that you want to dillute because virtually any card is better than them. Cards with "draw" and "exhaust" written on them also let you workaround the problem of drawing starter or negative effect cards. Picking up one or two versatile 2-cost cards early (attack or block card) can give you a good way to use your energy even if you draw mostly starters or negative effect cards while avoiding excessive deck dillution later on.
StS does offer you worse cards at the beginning of the game, and limited ways to remove or upgrade these cards, so picking up too many cards can burden you later on.
Really to be good at StS deckbuilding mostly requires you to know which enemies will come up when and building your deck sufficiently to survive them without shooting yourself in the foot long term too much. Jorbs is usually focused on building his deck to beat the hardest fight in the game while absorbing the minimum deadweight to survive until that point. Watching a stream can give you a rough idea of what a good "pace" for adding new cards into your deck is.
Jorbs's way of thinking about the game is very well considered and I'm sure useful for new players but his skill at taking turns makes it hard to copy him. Try it - take a seed from one of his runs, copy his decisions, and play the fights out yourself. You'll get flattened.
Jorbs can reliably reach the heart with a much more challenging deck than you or I can. He's also playing a game mode that imposes challenges that don't exist for new players. Just shoving a lot of good cards in your deck might be pretty good advice for new players up until about ascension ten.
An important idea is that you're not only drafting to make a generally good deck, you're drafting to defeat the immediate challenges that are coming up.
If you're in Act 2 and headed for an elite, you have to think, "can my deck beat book of stabbing? gremlin leader? taskmaster?".
If right now your deck sucks against the book, and you're offered a disarm or caltrops, it might be worth picking it even if it's doesn't generally make your deck stronger. Cause otherwise you might get stabbed to death.
On the flip side, Demon Form is a very strong card, but it's practically a curse for most of Act 1, because it's too costly and slow. So sometimes you might skip even a strong card if it doesn't help you right now.
That concept is what has helped me get over the A15-20 hump. It's more important to draft cards that shore up immediate weaknesses than it is to draft cards that might pair well with other effects in your deck. Draft for the short-term, not the long term, because stronger short term victories means you can pathfind more aggressively and acquire more gold/rewards.
I'd say that's probably the most important "ah-ha" moment where my winrate really started to significantly improve. That and knowing when to min/max # of combats while pathfinding.
Yeah, I definitely don't mean to imply that the comparison to your current cards is a hard and fast rule, but more that it's a good thing to start thinking about if you never skip cards.
I do skip taking cards, but I probably don't skip it enough. It's difficult to get over the psychology of 'I beat the battle, I get to pick my reward.' It's my reward, I should pick one, and anyway I get a choice of 3, so one of those 3 ought to be good for me, right?
No, not necessarily. But my brain wants to pick one anyway.
It takes a while to get a feel for the strategy and a lot of counterintuitive or seemingly impossible things become straightforward. Considering there's a lengthy stretch just unlocking cards, it doesn't sound like you're in some particularly unusual place, 40 hours in.
What you're saying is true, but I think people with card-game experience tend to over-skip the card rewards in the name of consistency. Low difficulty levels reward this, because the bosses are the only real challenge and holding out for cards good against bosses helps your win-rate.
At high difficulty levels you need to pick a card (and possibly buy cards at shops) through most of Acts 1 and 2 because you won't be able to reach the boss without a bunch of damage commons.
Yeah, my advice was squarely aimed at those who are struggling with the base game difficulty. Your advice is sound for those who get better for sure, the game will definitely punish you for being greedy and trying to keep your deck too clean as you ramp up the difficulty.
I'm aware it's contextual and there are different strategies for winning, and there's a reason for each card being in the game. But I wasn't aware of how some cards combo together, or some situations/battles where they might be stronger than others, etc.
And there are plenty of discussions online for pretty much every card on how strong or weak people think the cards are overall (like is it worth picking it up if it's offered to you late in a run because the payoff might not be worth it, or if you see you're getting a specific boss that act, etc), and most of the cards have been buffed or nerfed multiple times since the game has come out, so clearly the developers have been convinced that some strong may end up stronger than others on average too (and are trying to keep things pretty even as much as possible, I assume).
One thing you may want to try is sticking to a certain class for a while. It'll give you a better feel for how all of their cards work together, and you won't "forget" about certain aspects of the class. I found that I hit a wall around Ascension 8-10 before I started trying this.
Yeah, I agree, good advice. When I decided to win my first standard game, I at first floated around from character to character, but then decided to stick with Ironclad until I won. Took like 20 tries, but I finally made it work. Silent took less tries, currently focusing on Defect.
A really important point with card choice: even ignoring your current deck (and you shouldn't ignore your current deck), the best cards are Act dependent. At the start you want to pick flat high-damage cards that are immediately useful. In act 2 you need cards that scale with the number of enemies, because mobs are common. In the final act it's all about card synergy and things that enable you to manage your deck.
With that said, as the Defect, Defragment and Capacitor are nearly always a no-brainer. Capacitor not so much in Act1, because nothing lasts long enough for it to pay off. And if you've got anything that adds orb slots, Consume becomes really powerful (even without, you can do 10 damage a turn from two orb slots instead of 9 from three, which isn't nothing).
Loop builds are very strong as well, but trickier to get right because you need to pay close attention to your front orb. Finally focus+frost can easily give you so much block most enemies can't cut through. (Watch out for Reptomancer, though, she doesn't respect anyone without DPS.)
I had 1 Loop+, 2 Defragments, and 1 Capacitor that last game I lost this morning :) I got 'All for One' as my random rare card to start with, so I was doing my best to get a bunch of 0 cost cards, and I also ended up with 2 relics that let me pick cards to shuffle in every battle (Nilry's Codex and the Toolbox), along with a Jack of All Trades card, so I got to pick cards to help whatever my situation was each battle and turn.
But I was a little too weak on my defense that go (had some frost generation, but not enough), and I made a dumb mistake attacking the Masked Bandits instead of losing all my gold, who did 50 damage to me before I killed them, bringing me down to 18 health, then I couldn't get to a campfire until I fought 3 more regular enemies, and the next enemy brought me down 6 more, then the second enemy after that got me down the other 12. Oops.
Ouch, that's a nice deck, but I suspect I wouldn't have bothered with the 0 cost cards (Silent's 0 cost cards are amazing, Defect's are meh). Glacier I _highly_ recommend. Autoshield and Stack are great too. (These two are brilliant for surviving early turns before you've got enough frost up.) Use your upgrades on Defragment, then Loop. Upgrading Zap and/or Dualcast from your starter deck is great because they become zero-cost. Creative AI, especially upgraded is amazing. Oh, and don't sleep on Biased Cognition. You can only use it right at the end of a battle, but it can end a battle very quickly. (Unless you've got a source of artifact,
I'm a bit tapped out at A8, but it's amazing how the base game goes from nailbitingly impossible to seeming pretty straightforward. (The mechanics contribute to this: the easier a battle is, the more upgrades you do and the more likely you are to grab an elite relic.)
I finally beat defect using, among other things, darkness plus recursion. It never occurred to me that recursion would retain the power generated by the dark orb you just evoked. All for One to pull upgraded 0 cost recursions to hand.
Nice. Darkness+Recursion is quite nice in the base game, but I've never found it very effective in Ascension. (I'm sure someone with more experience could analyze why, exactly.)
Good luck with Watcher. The biggest advice here is: play it safe until you have multiple cards to get out of wrath. Watcher is super-powerful and _very_ easy to mess up.
Note that this is a general tendency and not a rule. Act 1 benefits from an AOE card for the sentry elite and the slime boss, damage scaling will help against most bosses at any time, and so on through act 2.
For the ironclad, you might take a cleave, or a whirlwind, or a spot weakness, or an inflame in act 1. The first two give you AOE, and the last two will help scale damage if you find a limit later on.
A1 is usually considered easier than A0 because you get more elites but they aren't very punishing yet.
You're possibly bringing baggage from other deck builders, mentioning combos and better cards is an example of this.
Generally you want to judge cards for what they do for you right now (in the next few fights) to maximise rewards and build long term value. Try not to build into "just in case" combos or synergies or you bleed HP before it shows up. The exception is if you are confident your deck can handle the hallway fights then you might take picks for the boss, and if you can handle that then you can start building for the future.
Apart from that, general pickup rules are: Act 1 is front-loaded damage, Act 2 is AOE damage with some damage scaling for the boss, Act 3 is scaling offense and defense (without damaging your other factors too much). You usually want to be plugging holes rather than building on your strengths but there are always exceptions.
One example: A single dark orb can be enough to kill Champ on Act 2 as defect. Any more is excessive.
I was about where you were 40 hours in. Then I bought this game on switch so I can take it everywhere with me and have since dumped about 500 hours into the game. I only recently got all characters to A20. Still working on A20 heart kill and a few other achievements.
It's always intrigued me seeing other people pick up the game and master it much more quickly than I did. There's some people that get their A20 heart kill just 100 hours into the game.
I really enjoy the feeling of slowly but steadily gaining knowledge and intuition about the game - in the 500 hours of play there's been no shortage ah-ha moments throughout. Truly one of the best $/entertainment value games I've ever purchased.
Similar for me - there was a real sense of accomplishment on my first win in Slay the Spire on the easiest difficulty setting. To think that players have >90% win rates on that setting, much less on Ascension 20 is remarkable.
I've learned a lot from Jorbs - a twitch streamer. It's surprising how much statistics and planning can go into any given fight. It's possible to puzzle out how much of the fight will go ahead of time, with knowledge of one's deck and the enemies moves.
You're better than me at the game. I have close to as many hours and attempts and I've only ascended once. Although probably should be at ~3 ascensions and made a couple blatant tactical mistakes fighting bosses with The Silent.
> By the way, for anyone thinking this game isn't really for you, you might want to give it a chance anyway (watch a video at least). I don't usually care for Rogue-likes
...Slay the Spire has nothing in common with roguelikes?
It’s procedurally generated, dungeon crawler, with collectible items and permadeath and resource management. I don’t like arguing over definitions, so call it whatever you want, but those are a number of components that feed into the appeal of roguelikes!
Likewise. I regularly die in act 1, and after finally achieving ascension 10 with all characters I’ve spent weeks trying to kill the heart at ascension 0 with ironclad with little success.
You can kill the heart? I thought that was just kind of like a fun thing you can see at the end of a win where it shows how much damage everyone has done with it, kind of like a communal scoreboard. There's more to it than that? Note: I've only played standard runs and daily challenges so far.
In ascension > 0, there are three keys you can collect through the run by choosing them in lieu of other rewards. If you get them all, there's an abbreviated Act IV to play: a hearth, then a shop, then a special elite, then the Heart. The Heart is much, much more difficult than the Act III bosses.
You don't need Ascension, just to have unlocked Ascension. With that said, I swear it's easier to beat the heart on A1 than A0 because of all the elite rewards.
The heart itself, well it's definitely challenging, but it only works for very specific builds. I went to some effort to beat it once on each character and basically have no intention of doing so again.
There’s an achievement (per character), as well as it being the « true end » of the game (and it increases the challenge as you need to beat a buffed elite, sacrifice a chest and sacrifice a hearth).
The heart was added in an update maybe 2 years ago. If you had the game longer than that, it wasn't unlocked automatically. Call that a bug or bad user experience.
Suggest you google how to unlock the heart and replay whatever needs to be done. It's really not intuitive if you already got all the characters and cards.
It's been a while since I've played, but if my memory is correct you have to collect 3 keys, each obtained by sacrificing an opportunity to improve the run (Pick it instead of a relic/rest/something else)
Blue you get from a chest. Pretty easy in the Act 3 since it's likely the alternative relic is trash by that point. Green is the buffed elite. Again pretty easy in Act 3 because if you can't stomp it you're definitely not beating the heart anyway. Red is forgo a rest stop, which can be done anytime but I usually do it before the boss, especially if the boss is Hexaghost, because why both resting just to buff the boss?
> Technically the green key only calls for an extra challenge in facing a buffed elite instead of sacrificing, at least in the latest version.
I don't know if the latest version changed this, but the green key was definitely also a sacrifice -- if you look at the map, paths that allow you to get the green key have one less fire.
I can recommend watching some twitch streamer, like jorbs or baalorlord, a couple of times. They tend to do it during either ascension 20 or under some other restriction, but the lessons they teach will help a lot. In some cases they will expose combinations of cards that you might not have understood how well they work together, and in other cases they will show and explain cards that is good in the endgame but not very good before that. Very, very helpful.
