It occurred to me a month or so ago that I might want to officially note here that I'm no longer on the major social media platforms. I've personally had the experience in the past where I can't find someone and my mind quickly jumps to "Oh no, did they block me?! What did I do?!" I never announced I was leaving or anything, so I wanted to reassure anyone else whose mind might work in the same way that, no, I definitely didn't block you!
I've had a hate/hate relationship with most social media for quite a few years now. It wasn't always that way. Just now I was looking through my archives for social media references, and stumbled across someposts from many years ago. There was a moment when I was a big fan of Facebook: a way to keep in touch with my friends from college after we all moved to different cities! But I soured on Facebook in particular fairly early on, mostly because I couldn't trust them. They aggressively rolled out new changes and features that didn't give you any options or required you to explicitly opt-out, and always in the direction of less privacy and less personalization. There was a period back in... 2007 or so, I think, where I was doing some early mobile software development with the Facebook API, and I was shocked at how much data I could see from other people on it. This was in advance of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and in retrospect I wish I'd complained loudly about how cavalier Facebook was with user data. For a long time I kept Facebook as a site I'd log into once every couple of months and scroll for a couple of minutes: the saving grace was that their algorithm did a decent job at putting important information at the top of my feed (new births, new careers, new moves), and I would just log off again for a few months once I got past that stuff. But after the last election and the announcement about revising their content moderation policy, I was out and felt compelled to vote with my feet. Zuckerberg's fawning obeisance at the White House reassured me that I made the right choice. I opted to straight-up delete my account, not just suspend. Facebook (and the other networks) do have an option to download your data before deletion, which I did; it's hanging out on my hard drive, I kind of doubt I'll do anything with it but if I ever did want to see my old posts or photos they'd be there. I went ahead and deleted my Instagram too to make a complete break with Meta; I don't think I ever posted on Instagram, and hadn't been viewing it much recently, so that wasn't a big move.
I'd deleted my Twitter even earlier. I was never very active on Twitter; I mostly saw it as a replacement for my beloved Google Reader, as many people and organizations I was interested in deprioritized or removed RSS content. I think I made a handful of posts around 2010 or so, including a couple of Game of Thrones memes, but for the most part just followed people I found funny and/or insightful. I should have removed Twitter shortly after the Musk takeover, instead I stuck around until the actual site performance started tanking. As with Facebook I did a full account delete, but I'm sure nobody ever noticed. I'm really glad that I got out when I did, it sounds like things have gotten even more miserable since, with the addition of paying for viral tweets, Grok, and the increasingly violent and unhinged agitation of the owner.
I guess that's it! I still use a couple of social-y apps but don't really post anywhere. I've been enjoying Bluesky as a straight-up Twitter replacement; it feels a lot like Twitter did back in 2010, which is nice. I'm sure at some point it will stop being fun and I'll get rid of that too. I've had a Reddit account for ages, but Reddit doesn't really feel like social media: nobody follows anyone, it's all about community discussions. I rarely post there, when I do it's in very niche subreddits about obscure video games and podcasts. And I still have LinkedIn, which feels a lot like Facebook used to, in that I'll log in once every couple of months to see what people have been up to.
This blog is kind of a social presence for me, I suppose, though I very rarely post personal things on here. If you'd ever like to catch up, please shoot me an email or text! I feel like our species' experiment with social media has largely ended in disaster, I'm curious if we will find an improved path going forward (possibly via the fediverse or some other innovation we haven't heard of yet), or if we'll RETURN to more old-fashioned analog ways of relating.
I just reached Act 3 of Expedition 33, so I suspect I'm roughly 2/3 of the way through the game. I'm still loving it. The storyline continues to intrigue: it's answering a few questions but raising even more. I now feel comfortable with the overall combat system and am mostly enjoying it. Overall it's scratching that Final Fantasy itch that I hadn't realized I'd had.
I'm mostly enjoying the game, but I wanted to open up this post by rattling off the things that annoy me about the game, mostly to get them out of the way.
I wish you could mark up the map. From the start of the game you find high-level areas that you aren't yet ready to visit, but 30 hours later it's hard to remember whether you already did The Cliffside Caves or not. I loved the Elden Ring map, where you could drop a few types of icons yourself at any point; I would use one to indicate "There's a boss here that I'm not powerful enough yet to beat", another for "There's a new area here that I haven't explored yet", etc. As another example, when I went through Esquie's Nest the first time I wasn't able to beat two optional mini-bosses, a Mime and a Petank. I knew I wanted to come back, as these often have particularly valuable rewards, but I had to just keep that outstanding task in memory, there's no way in-game to remind myself.
I wish there was a journal or quest log. You get a few random quests, which often are very vague. I know that I've started multiple side-missions, and I know that I've finished very few, and I can't remember where the remaining ones are, who gave me the quest or what they (vaguely) asked for. I think one or two are in the Gestral Village, but there are like a hundred NPCs there spread over a huge and sprawling area. I do kind of like not having the Big Flashing Arrow Telling You Where To Go, but it's annoying to just have a vague idea that someone somewhere needs something. In retrospect I should probably be keeping notes with a pen and paper, but I can't think of the last time I had to do that in an RPG. Elden Ring also didn't have an in-game journal, but it also had a lot fewer quests and only a handful of NPCs in the entire game, so there wasn't the needle-in-a-haystack feeling I'm getting here.
I like the overworld, but map traversal gets a little annoying. Even with the faster movement from your "mount", it takes a long time to move from one side of the map to the other; combined with not being sure about whether I've already visited a place or need anything from there, I feel like I'm burning time in transit. Sometimes I do stumble across a lost Gestral or find a beach I haven't explored yet, but I do wish there was a true fast travel / waypoint system. (Maybe one will come later!)
Zone traversal can also be a bit annoying. Once again, I'm comparing it to Elden Ring, which is unfair since Elden Ring has the best movement of any RPG (or probably any game) I've played. But, for example, sometimes you'll be able to scooch along a narrow ledge around a pillar and find something interesting on the other side, and other times you won't be able to move onto the ledge. You won't know until you try. Sometimes you can climb over chunks of rubble to find a path forward, other times an invisible wall will block you. Again, you won't know until you try. This isn't the end of the world, but it's mildly annoying. I also really wish there was a map for zones like there is in the overworld. Some are fine to navigate, but others get really confusing. Even if you do the whole zone in one play session it can be a bit disorienting and hard to remember whether you've already explored a particular path or not. As the game goes on I'm getting a better sense of the map design philosophy so I have more of a spidey-sense for the best way to traverse, so it's less painful than it was, but still not great.
Pictos are really overwhelming. I do like the "use to unlock" mechanic, that's a neat idea that gets you used to their mechanics, but the sheer number of them are a lot. It also doesn't help that I'm regularly swapping around party members to keep XP gain evenly distributed. I think that if I had a consistent loadout (like Maelle, Lune and Sciel) I could be a bit more tactical, like having one focus on buffing, one on breaking, etc. But over time I've shifted towards having almost the exact same Luminas on everyone: ones that gain AP like Energizing Start, Dodger, Energizing Pain, etc., as well as a few like SOS Shell for survivability. I'm curious if the pace of new Pictos will ever let up, so far it's been relentless.
There are also many skills and too few slots. The limitations make sense mechanically with the gamepad, but kind of kills the joy of leveling up since you're unlocking things that don't fit into your loadout. Some things could be useful with micro-management, like Maelle's shield-breaking attack, which is really useful in a few fights and completely useless in all others. Maybe replaying the game at a higher difficulty level would justify the time to micro-manage skill assignments. But with my playstyle, I've just stopped buying new skills once I have a solid rotation and just let my skill points accumulate. (The only minor change so far has been adjusting from low-AP rotations in Act 1 to higher-AP rotations in Act 2.)
MINI SPOILERS
I have mixed feelings on Monocos' feet mechanic. From a game design perspective, it's pretty brilliant. There's a well-documented tendency towards "stickyness", particularly in RPGs: people tend to stick with their initial party members and rarely incorporate later additions. So requiring Monoco to be in your party in order to unlock new abilities for him is a great way to urge you to get to know him and his unique fighting style. But that ends up meaning you only have two people to pick from to travel with him. For a while he was a bit under-leveled compared to everyone else so it didn't really matter, but now he's at parity with everyone else and will probably soon suprass them. I'll occasionally take him out if I see that we're mostly fighting the same Nevrons over and over again, like in Sirene's hideout.
That seems like a lot of annoyances, but they are VERY minor and not really diminishing my enjoyment of the game, only occasionally making me wish I was playing Elden Ring instead. Let's move on to the things I like!
The camp is great. It's almost identical to what we had in Dragon Age: Origins and Baldur's Gate 3, and it works as well here. Narratively it doesn't make a ton of sense to have the same geography no matter where you set up camp, but the mechanics and convenience are huge. It's great to have a safe area to chat with companions and other NPCs, deepen relations, do some crafting-type activities, and advance the storyline.
I'm so glad that there are romances! For whatever reason I wasn't expecting that, and I'm so glad to see them. I was starting to get that vibe a bit in Verso's conversations with Sciel and Lune but wasn't sure if it was real or not. More romances in all of our games please.
I'm loving the plot and storytelling technique. It's very much "show don't tell"; every once in a while you get exposition from a witness like Verso, but even that may be unreliable. The characters are trying to figure things out, and you as the player are trying to figure out even more things since at the start of the game you don't even know what, like, the Gommage is.
Your characters can get really strong. Maelle in particular is a beast. It's very satisfying to start consistently churning out 9,999 damage per hit in a multi-hit combo.
Combat is fun. I didn't like the idea of quick-time events over pure tactical execution, but it's been really enjoyable. Like in Elden Ring, it feels rewarding to learn attack patterns and git gud. Fights can have some fun puzzle aspects too; there's one Petank fight where you need to free-aim shoot a teleporting orb, which sounds annoying but ended up being a blast.
The gradual unfolding of the Manor is fun. I was kind of thinking you could use it as a crossroads to fast-travel between distant areas; it doesn't work like that, but is still fun to open up more areas of it, always get a couple of nice little upgrades and also get to explore some of it, get some environmental storytelling and build out your mental map.
The humor feels great. This is another thing that makes me think of Final Fantasy, where you'll have some intense melodramatic scenes, and then immediately follow it up with some goofy moogles and chocobos. Here, Gestrals look and sound and act and speak so silly, which is great comic relief to the darkness.
Let's talk about plot!
MEGA SPOILERS
In yet another Final Fantasy-esque move, the story so far has felt pretty impressionistic and ambiguous. At the very end of Act 2 we get a bunch of lore dumps. I'm still rearranging my understanding inside my head; here is what I currently think the story is, but I'm almost certainly wrong about at least some (and possibly most) of this:
The game up until now has taken place in a world-within-a-world, where people think that their reality is real but it's actually contingent on outside forces. (In our own world, this idea has recently gained traction in the "We are living in a simulation" meme, but it's been around for a while, including Berkeley's Idealism, and my favorite example of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.) I'll call the "main" universe "prime". In Prime, there are at least two groups/families, the "painters" and the "writers". We don't know much about the writers yet, but they seem adversarial to the painters. The painters we know are all members of one particular family, including Aline, Renoire, Clea, Verso, and Alicia.
The Painters each have a Canvas, which they can paint on to create their own world. The things they paint within there have their own reality: they don't know they live inside a painting. They are born, grow, love, live, have families, and die. A Painter can choose to enter their Canvas or that of another, but doing so has risk, as they become bound to the rules of that world.
There was an incident some years ago where the youngest daughter, Alicia, foolishly made some sort of contact with the Writers. This resulted in a serious fire; Verso was able to save Alicia's life, but she was permanently disfigured in the flames, and Verso himself died.
This produced a lot of strife within the family, with various people blaming or defending others. This either led to or intensified a major rift between the mother Aline and the father Renoire. In their grief, they took two different responses. Both immersed themselves into Verso's Canvas. Aline wanted to undo her loss and so she painted a replica of Verso into existence. The canvas was already filled with things Verso had created and loved, like the silly Gestrals and the buoyant Esquie and the imaginary friend Monoco.
Renoire was aghast at Aline's seeming to slip into delusions and fantasy, favoring a harsh, cold reality. Where Aline (The Paintress) sought to create, Renoire sought to erase. The two of them have been locked in a struggle for decades. The main sufferers have been the (imaginary) people of Lumiere: humans who were exiled from The Continent. Renoire has been trying to erase them; Aline has been holding him back, but her power grows steadily weaker, so every year more of the people perish.
The people of Lumiere haven't understood this situation, though: they believe that the Paintress is responsible for them dying (their "Gommage"), and so they have been undertaking Expeditions to the Continent to try and defeat her, not realizing that doing so would doom themselves.
After several years of this, Alicia talks with her sister Clea and decides to enter Verso's canvas. I'm not clear yet on exactly why this is; I think she might be trying to get her parents to leave the canvas so they can focus on the threat posed by The Writers, but I'm not sure. Alicia loses control while entering, though: she loses her Painting ability and enters the world as a painted being, a baby named Maelle. She thus begins a life incarnate in this fantasy world.
In the game til now, Maelle joins the rest of the doomed Expedition 33 as they set out to the Continent. They are met there by Renoire who annihilates most of the expedition. I think this is because Maelle as a latent Painter poses a threat that no other Expedition has before. I'm not clear on this yet, but I believe that the version of Renoire we've seen in the game is a fiction that was painted by Aline, and not the real Renoire, so she's channeling her own warped impressions of him.
Maelle, Gustave, Luna and Sciel all survive the initial onslaught. Maelle was rescued by the Curator - I think this might actually be Renoire, but I'm not sure. Together they progress through the Continent, finding the evidence of previous expeditions - fictional from the perspective of the Painters, but real to the members of this party. Gustave is killed by Renoire while saving Maelle, and then Verso rescues Maelle. Verso recognized Maelle as Alicia, but shelters her from the knowledge of who she is; the rest of the party gets very suspicious once they learn that Verso is Renoire's son. But Verso isn't really Verso, remember, this is the illusion of her son that Aline painted.
So, where I'm at now is that Verso and Maelle and the rest of the party succeed in killing the Paintress, but this has broken her protection, so everyone in Lumiere dies, seemingly including Maelle. But even though Maelle is gone, Alicia still exists, coming from a higher plane of reality. And Verso continues to exist as well, I think because he was painted by Aline (whereas I believe the Lumierians were originally painted by the original Verso). I'm expecting and hoping that we'll get to reconnect with Sciel, Lune and Monoco; it definitely looked like the first two at least died in the mass Gommage, I'm curious if there will be some time-travel shenanigans or if Maelle will be able to Paint them back into existence or what.
END SPOILERS
So, that's what I think is going on! It's been a cool story so far, with some head-expanding moments, along with a hefty dose of ambiguity and uncertainty. I'm looking forward to seeing where the game ends up. Since this is the first entry from a new studio, I have no idea at this point if they're hoping to usher in a new franchise or making a one-and-done stand-alone universe, I could see this going either direction.
I'll probably be pounding away at this for a while longer. I'm feeling very compelled to play, mostly because it is fun, but also because Hades 2 just came out and I really want to try it!
I don't think I've ever written this about a book before, but I believe that everybody should read "Thinking: Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. It's a book about how we think and why we make the decisions we do, and since everybody needs to think and make decisions, it could improve the life of literally anybody who reads it. I personally found it very eye-opening, immediately recognizing cases and patterns where I have made or continue to make poor decisions, as well as getting a better understanding for how I might recognize those situations and do better in the future.
There are a lot of books on thinking out there, and one unique advantage of TFaS is that it's written by a direct expert in the field: Daniel Kahneman was a psychologist and a founder of Prospect Theory, which revolutionized the models used by psychologists in evaluating decision-making. His work led to the triumph of Behavioral Economics, which has overturned a half-century of largely misguided models and explanations for how people behave in markets. This gives him a huge leg up over popular writers like Malcolm Gladwell who can write engagingly but don't have direct experience with the science behind their books and need to rely on the information provided by professional scientists or untrained enthusiasts. Fortunately, Kahneman is also a great writer. The book is a bit long but very compelling and highly readable, spending enough time on each concept to make it stick without overstaying its welcome, and using lots of vivid and memorable examples to prove his points.
Possibly the most remarkable aspect of this book is that it contains its own proof. I'm used to non-fiction books saying "A study shows that X" or something like that, and I'll just kind of nod and glide over it. TFaS will do something like challenge you to solve a particular multiplication question in your head, then note what you probably experienced while working it, and I'll be like, "That's right! That is what I experienced!" I become the living embodiment of the proof of what he's writing, I can test the assertions on myself in real-time. I know that isn't applicable for every type of book, like WW2 strategy or the history of debt, but it does work for this type of book and works really effectively.
I'm going to jump around a little in capturing a few (probably long) thoughts and responses to the book, so this post will almost certainly feel more disjointed than the actual book. I definitely won't get to everything he writes about, just focusing on the ones that resonate most with me at this time.
The titular "fast and slow" of the title refer to our two main modes of thinking, which he refers to as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is automatic and effortless, our immediate perception and analysis of a situation. Some examples he gives include hearing someone's voice and detecting whether they're angry, driving along a freeway with light traffic, noticing the one black sheep in a flock of white sheep, or answering what two plus two equals. System 2 is effortful thinking, which requires our focus and attention: when engaged in System 2 thinking, our pupils dilate and our pulse quickens. Examples of System 2 thinking include being asked to recall an example of a certain incident from our past, merging onto the freeway in heavy traffic, explaining why a black sheep might be in a flock of white sheep, or answering what thirty-six times twenty-four equals.
We spend the vast majority of our lives following System 1 thinking, and most of the time it works great. Occasionally we encounter a situation where System 1 can't provide a satisfactory answer, and we need to marshal our System 2 to decide what to do. Often times our System 1 will offer up one or more possibilities, and our System 2 will evaluate and analyze them; other times our System 2 will need to do all the work, as in the multiplication example. System 2 is lazy, and thinking slowly is hard, so often times we will stop as soon as we arrive at a plausible answer and get on with our lives. Through the examples he provides to the reader in the book, Kahneman shows how even supposedly bright people like me will often answer a question incorrectly or make a less-optimal choice, whereas if you spent the time to fully think through a problem you would make the opposite choice.
Much of the first part of the book focuses on how System 1 operates, what it can and cannot do. Examples include the importance of framing: we tend to judge things relative to what is "ordinary". We're primed to respond to differences more than to absolute amounts. He also looks at ways our System 2 tends to be reliably lazy. We rely on "anchoring", where we find a number (or value or action or whatever) and then adjust up or down from there, instead of working out the best value from scratch. We're satisfied with answers being merely "plausible" rather than being "correct": if something our System 1 proposes sounds reasonable, or if we arrive at a reasonable-sounding answer quickly, we'll accept that without checking and verifying it.
I'm tempted to say that System 1 is "bad" and System 2 is "good", but that isn't at all the case, they're just different. There's a lot that's amazing about System 1, including its ability to quickly derive meaning from scant information. We need to be cautious about evaluating that meaning, but it's remarkable how much it can collect. Kahneman references an old animated film in the book, which I subsequently looked up on YouTube, and it's pretty amazing. An animation from the 1940s, it just shows two triangles, a circle and a few lines; and yet, over the course of about 90 seconds, you can infer a really powerful and emotionally compelling story from it. There's nothing in the real world that looks like these abstract shapes, and yet our minds are able to immediately supply compelling information about what they're doing.
While our thinking can get us into trouble, there is a very good biological and evolutionary reason for why we think the way we do. For example, we're quick to notice outliers and unusual situations, because in the past that was often a sign of danger: if we notice that there are more lions than usual on the savannah today, we might want to go and hide in the jungle. That doesn't necessarily mean that the lions are planning to attack - there's a natural ebb and flow in the number of lions - but a species that consistently acts on the potential of danger will out-perform a species that is less likely to act. As with so many other things in psychology, our mental tools that were helpful in prehistoric times aren't nearly as useful in the modern world, but we're stuck with the machinery we have.
I think the first part of the book that really wowed me was his discussion on reversion to the mean. RttM has been a big part of my economic reading over the last 20 years or so, but Kahneman's presentation is pretty eye-opening for me, in particular why it's critical to have control groups in scientific studies. The literature I follow most closely these days closely relates to nutrition and health, where an experiment might ask something like, "Does eating almonds help reduce cataracts"? If you run this experiment on a population of people with cataracts, you will see that many peoples' cataracts do diminish or disappear over the time they're eating more almonds. But the thing is, you would expect for some portion of those cataracts to disappear anyways: the population as a whole has some base rate of people with cataracts, and if you have a population of all-cataract-havers, they will tend towards the base rate of getting fewer cataracts; and if you have a population of no-cataract-havers, they will tend towards the base rate of getting more cataracts. We construct causal stories ("The almonds cured cataracts!") when there might not be any causal relationship. In the past I've thought of the "placebo effect" as an almost mystical force, that just believing that things will get better can make things get better. That mental effect is relatively minor, though, the bigger impact is simple mean-reversion. I can't believe I'm finally understanding this so late in life!
Mean-reversion is a great explainer of so many things. One that immediately comes to mind is my business. Over the years, I've noticed that when we have a very successful year, it's usually followed by a less-successful one; and a less-successful year is usually followed by a better one. This has seemed abnormal to me - why do we swing so much from year to year? - but it's very well explained by reversion to the mean. Luck plays a huge part in business, with "luck" defined as "things outside of our control": how the American economy as a whole is doing, how much investment money is available, whether we happen to meet the right person at the right time to kick off a projectand have the right people to make it succeed. Nobody is consistently lucky or consistently unlucky or even consistently middle-lucky: we all fluctuate over time, so of course there are inconsistencies: you should expect them! You can still infer long-term trends; even a less-successful year now will generate more revenue than an above-average year did a decade ago - but the short-term movement is random (as Burton Malkiel predicted). And that randomness is not weird, it is normal.
My experience is also an illustration of the "Law of Small Numbers". We're a small company with relatively few projects, so we'll tend to have more extreme results from year to year compared to a much larger company. Or, to put it another way, we'd expect more variations from the base rate. If the economy as a whole does poorly, we'll have a higher chance of doing well, or of doing disastrously, while a larger company would be more likely to more closely match the overall average.
I like how Kahneman mathematically represents this, with a formula like "Company performance = Overall economic environment + Unique factors". I think we're an especially talented and skillful company (I'm biased!), so I think we have an "edge"; but we don't completely control our own destiny. It's very tempting to attribute our success to causal factors: "We hired a lot more people and we did worse, so hiring was a mistake" or "We focused on large clients and we did better, so we should continue focusing on large clients." We did get some evidence from our actions, but we should approach them with skepticism, compare with the base rates, and not draw too strong of conclusions from circumstantial evidence. Over the long term, we want to continue making good decisions even if they lead to poor outcomes, and not get complacent if we get good outcomes even after making poor decisions.
I found that many of the subjects in TFaS are adjacent to a lot of other reading I've done in recent years. One example is William Bernstein's "The Four Pillars of Investing," with one of the pillars being the psychology of investing. Bernstein writes similarly there that we as a species have evolved to trust stories over data, which was evolutionarily beneficial but mal-adaptive for the modern world generally and for investing in particular. Kahneman's example is a CTO who told him "I went to a Ford auto show and decided to buy stock in Ford - they make great cars!" Whether they make good cars isn't really relevant in an investment decision, what matters is whether Ford's current stock price is over-valued or under-valued.
TFaS also shows how our tendency to focus on anecdotes instead of data drives mass misunderstandings and leads to bad political and social decisions. This paragraph really resonated with me:
An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by "availability entrepreneurs," individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a "heinous cover-up." The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone's mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.
That's a great description of an ever-increasing phenomenon, which I often pair with George Saunder's excellent essay "The Braindead Megaphone": we end up talking about the wrong things because it's what everyone is talking about. The example I think about most often these days has to do with crime rates. In polls, people overwhelmingly believe that crime is worse now than it's ever been before, even though statistics show that crime is lower than it's been in the last 60 years. There's a very simple reason for this: the media (both mass media and social media) loves lurid and grisly crime stories, people love reading them, our brains soak up those anecdotes and come to the conclusion that the world is a dangerous place. Interestingly, Kahneman's examples are about environmental disasters rather than violent crime: supposedly "minor" environmental incidents like the Love Canal became major causes that drove a lot of attention and responses.
I'm definitely personally biased more towards cleaning up environmental issues and punishing polluters, so that was a more challenging example for me than crime. Cleaning up toxic waste is a good thing to do. Kahneman's point is that, in a world with limited resources, we should direct those resources based on some rational metric (like the number of life-years impacted per dollar of remediation) rather than who can most effectively muster public outrage. But Kahneman also notes that in a democracy we need to respond to the reality of people's feelings, even when those feelings do not reflect reality. The alternative is rule by an unaccountable technocratic elite, which will destroy trust in the democratic system. I think that's the tension we've broadly seen in the EU during this century, with populist reactions against Brussels bureaucrats. Still, the problem Kahneman identified has exploded into overdrive in recent years, as outlying incidents are used to whip up widespread hatred among the populace and demonize vulnerable minorities for political gain.
Shifting gears, later in the book he describes "Prospect Theory," which is a basis for behavioral economics. I've encountered behavioral economics a ton in my adult reading, but its findings still feel slightly surprising, and it has been a huge revolution in the field of economics. Kahneman talks about how economists may talk about one of two species of people. The first are what he calls "Econs," who are perfectly rational and absolutely selfish, and will act in the way that maximizes their utility (money and/or happiness). The other species he calls "Humans," who are not always rational, who are capable of altruism, and who can and often do make mistakes. Needless to say, studying "Humans" will probably benefit us more.
Traditional economics (I'm not sure if he uses this term, but I think it's the mode that was dominant after the Red Scare up through 2000 or so, building on earlier work) evaluates based on states, looking at how much utility a person has - for example, how a person with $20k in wealth would or should behave when faced with a profitable but risky gamble. Kahneman's great discovery was that people are influenced by changes more than state. Someone who started with no wealth, and then received $20k in wealth, will tend to be risk-averse: they will want to lock in their gains and stick with the sure thing rather than take a chance. But someone who started with $30k and dropped to $20k in wealth will tend to be risk-seeking. They won't want to lock in their loss, and will be inclined to gamble in hopes of returning to their previous baseline, even if it means losing even more. An Econ would behave the same in both situations since it only cares about the present state and the probability of future outcomes, while a Human is deeply influenced by the past.
We have a baseline and we make evaluations based on changes to that baseline, whether we are measuring salaries, vacation days, food quality, social interactions, or anything else we care about. This is true when evaluating our own situations and decisions, but also when judging the actions of others. For example, we perceive a merchant as greedy if they raise prices to increase their profits; while a traditional economist would say that the merchant should raise prices to what the market will bear, in the real world customers may well be upset and punish the merchant by not shopping with them, even if doing so pains the customer. This also explains why employers almost never reduce salaries, as the change to existing pay is perceived as painful, while hiring a new employee at a lower salary is acceptable to everyone.
We are more sensitive to losses than to gains. I've read that statement a lot, but it's a relatively new discovery in the field. Kahneman and his collaborators have been able to quantify the degree over multiple experiments, and discovered that we feel the pain of losses about twice as strongly as we feel the pleasure of gains. This segues into a great practical primer on the benefits of long-term investing. For any individual gamble we're likely to want to play it safe, but over the long run we are far better off taking (reasonable) gambles, and we should take the long view. (For example, imagine offering to play a game where you flip a coin, and if it comes up Heads you win $120 but if it comes up Tails you lose $100. Many of us would be reluctant to play, because losing $100 is more painful than winning $120. But if you have the opportunity to play that game 100 times in a row, you should absolutely do so, since you are almost guaranteed to earn a fair amount of money at a very low risk. That's essentially what we do in the stock market: in the short term we can gain or lose a large amount of money, and we feel those losses keenly, but over a long period of time we are far better off than if we'd kept the money in our mattress.)
Prospect theory feels pretty applicable to political and economic ideas I've been reading about lately. Reading about income inequality makes me feel outraged, and it's hard for me to understand why everyone isn't up in arms about it. But people are more sensitive to their reference points. If there was a widespread decline in the standard of living, people would get up in arms, but so long as the broad status quo stays similar, it makes sense that people aren't thinking about the big-picture allocation of resources. TFaS also ties in directly by explaining how we have a hard time evaluating extremes, either very large or very small amounts. Mathematically, a billionaire is insanely more wealthy and powerful than a millionaire; but our primitive brains collapse the two into a single "very rich" category.
And on the other hand, I think it also helps get at the much-discussed and often-maligned "white working class" resentments we've been talking about for the last decade. It's tempting to look at the absolute standard of living, or compare that standard of living to other groups, and say that WWC households are far better off than non-American households or non-WWC households. But people aren't comparing their wealth to global standards (as an Econ might), they're comparing to their own reference points, where they were raised or earlier stages of their careers. So declines in things like well-paying union jobs are devastating and cause a great deal of anger and resentment, while at the same time outsiders would judge those people are comparatively secure.
Of course, Kahneman isn't saying that these attitudes are good or bad, right or wrong, he's just describing how our brains work. But that's very useful information. And it can be used for bad! In particular, he has studied how our brains process unlikely occurrences. If you say "There is a 0.0001% chance a parolee will commit a violent crime six months after being released", then people will be inclined to grant parole, but if you say "1 in 10,000 parolees will commit a violent crime six months after being released", people will be inclined to reject parole. The two statements are mathematically identical, but emotionally, the second statement primes your mind to visualize that specific incident of the violent crime, which makes it feel more immediate and likely. Anyways, you see this being used relentlessly in political discourse now - it definitely dates back at least as far as Reagan and the Willie Horton ad, but is omnipresent in 2025. It's bad, but it works!
Back to prospect theory: He illustrates what has been called the Four-Fold Pattern, a two-by-two matrix describing risk tolerance for both high-probability and low-probability events, and gains versus losses. For the most part these make intuitive sense: if you're pretty sure you'll achieve a good outcome, but not 100% sure, then you would feel great disappointment if you fail to achieve that outcome, so you'll want to protect getting a positive outcome even at the cost of a less-positive outcome (as in someone who is likely to win a $1,000,000 lawsuit being willing to settle for $950,000). On the other hand, if you're unlikely to achieve a good outcome, you'll be more inclined to take risk: you aren't expecting a good outcome anyways, so you won't feel too disappointed when you fail.
The scenario that's most surprising is the upper-right. Given a 100% chance to lose $90 or a 90% chance to lose $100, people will pick the 90% chance; even if the choice is a 100% chance to lose $90 or a $90 chance to lose $130, people will still tend to take the gamble. We give disproportionate weight to the sliver of hope of not suffering any loss, which we experience as more than 10% of the difference between the 0% chance and the 100% chance. I think I'm a little less likely than most people to fall into this trap in my investment life; but reading this book I'm struck by how that's absolutely the case for me in personal matters, including relationships and commuting (very different domains!). If a relationship is going poorly, and I can choose between ending the relationship now and suffering certain awkwardness and sadness and pain; or can choose to continue the relationship into the future, knowing that I'm very likely to experience even more awkwardness and sadness and pain, I'm inclined to irrationally continue it, as it keeps alive the (small) possibility of a positive outcome.
Actually, now that I think about it, commuting is probably the opposite for me. In a commute, I'm gambling with losses, which is how much time I spend waiting for my bus or my train to come. I know approximately when the train or bus will get to the stop, and I know approximately how long it will take me to reach it, but there is risk involved; the vehicle could be early, or (more often) delayed, or canceled; my own journey may go a little quicker or slower as well. The worst feeling for me is arriving at a stop and seeing my bus or train pull away, which means I'll need to wait another 10, 15 or 20 minutes for the next one to come. Because of this, I time my arrivals to include a good amount of buffer, often aiming to arrive 5 minutes or so early. Even if I'm running a little late or transit is running a little early, I won't "miss" my trip; of course, if I'm running early or transit is running late (both of which are more likely), I'll wait even longer than usual. I haven't modeled this out, but I'm almost certain that my current approach results in more time spent waiting for vehicles than it would if I aimed to only get there 1 minute before: every once in a while I would miss my ride, but most of the time I would save several minutes , which would more than make up for it. But again, we feel losses more keenly than gains, and the "I missed my train" punishment feels more severe than ten "I saved five minutes" rewards. Anyways, I've thought vaguely in the past about how my commuting strategy probably isn't optimal, but I think this book has given me more precise language and models for thinking about what I'm doing and why.
Returning once more to the four-fold pattern: it also provides an explanation for the phenomenon of people in poverty seeming to behave irrationally. When people are poor, often the only choices they have are losses: they may be trading off between smaller or larger losses, and deciding where to allocate their losses, but their only decisions are often bad ones. So they end up occupying that same upper-right quadrant, of a high probability of losses leading to risk-seeking behavior. An example of my own: suppose someone needs $100 to buy enough food, but only has $75. They can buy that $75 of food, knowing that they will still be hungry; or they could buy $70 of food and $5 in lottery tickets. They will almost certainly end up hungrier than they would be otherwise, but they keep alive a sliver of hope that maybe one ticket will be a winner and they won't need to be hungry at all. It's easy for people like me with enough security to judge and say that people with the least resources need to be the most careful in how they use them; reading this book has helped me understand why that isn't always the case, and connect that to other decisions I might make.
The book ends more strongly on economic topics. The last few chapters would make a great standalone Boglehead book. They build convincingly on the earlier chapters on psychology to come to strong practical and logical investment advice, somewhat in the same way that Malkiel's conclusions derive from mathematics of Bernstein's conclusions derive from history.
There's a really interesting section on optimism. As Kahneman describes them optimists are kind of defective: they are unaware of the risks they face, feel indifferent to the risks, or fail to properly measure the impact of risk. Optimists are strongly drawn to entrepreneurship. It's gutsy to take on risk to start a new business, and their particular foolishness or blindness leads them to do so. The most successful people are optimists, since people who take big risks can earn big rewards. Of course, most optimists and their businesses will fail, but optimists will also tend to bounce back more robustly from hardship than pessimists, largely because an optimist tells themselves a story where the failure wasn't their fault, but the fault of external factors. In most cases people would be better off selling their labor to someone else than they would be working for themselves, but optimists won't stop to think about that. This is bad for them individually, but in aggregate it gives us a dynamic economy with many more businesses started and greater overall growth and wealth.
There are many fine qualities of optimists: they tend to be more cheerful, and as a result are better-liked, which can also lead to more success as others are more drawn towards optimists. They're likely to live longer and be in better health. In my own life, I think my natural temperament runs more towards cautious conservatism than optimism, but in my adult life I've kind of become a "learned optimist", in large part as a side-effect of my career. I've definitely observed that projecting optimism can lead to more successful business outcomes, plus life is just more fun if you go through it with an optimistic mindset: looking for good opportunities, and appreciating the best parts of mixed experiences. I think optimism is a mode I can push myself to inhabit, and I find it's usually a good mode for me to be in.
This is a side-note, but on a recent rewatch of the Lord of the Rings movies, I was struck by the contrast between Theoden and Denethor. Both of them are leaving a group that needs to defend against a much larger and more dangerous foe. Theoden's dialogue seems unduly optimistic: he talks about how the fortress of Helm's Deep has never fallen, how Rohan has survived every invasion in the past, and so on. Rohan has also never faced so dangerous a threat before or been so poorly prepared, so his words seem a bit delusional. But when Aragorn questions him, Theoden snaps for a moment, and you can see that he's deliberately projecting this optimism for the benefit of his people: if they give up they're doomed, but if he can inspire them and instill hope then they'll fight harder and have a chance at survival. In contrast, Denethor has completely given up hope. He doesn't think there's any chance of Gondor surviving, and as a result he fails to take even basic defensive actions. This culminates (in the movie, not the book) of him telling his men to throw down their swords and flee. That's terrible! Between Theoden's optimism and Denethor's pessimism, Theoden is clearly superior.
That in turn reminds me of China Mieville's "A Spectre, Haunting", in which he writes about the "manifesto" as a particular mode of writing. An impartial journalist should just report facts, an impartial analyst should just present probabilities, but someone who wants to achieve a specific outcome should use rhetoric to inspire their audience. "We will fight them, and we will win!" may not be justified by the cold-blooded statistics of the situation, but those words are deployed to change reality, which I think is what Theoden is trying to do. Ultimately Aragorn steers more of a middle ground but much closer to Theoden, saying that he does not know if they prevail, but exhorting his men to battle nonetheless.
As a side-side note, I've been meaning for well over a year now to write a blog post on Denethor and the palantir. I still hope to write it one day!
Back to TFaS: near the end of the book he writes about our experiencing selves versus our remembering selves. Our experiencing selves are what we actually experience from second to second, minute to minute and month to month: how happy or sad we feel in a given moment, how much pleasure or pain we experience over the duration of an episode. Our remembering selves are how we evaluate previous incidents and judge them as positive or negative, painful or pleasurable. These are two very different selves!
The big illustrative example he gives is the "cold hand" experiment, where participants placed their hand in a bowl of extremely cold water, cold enough to cause pain without physical damage. Each participant was told there would be three trials. In one trial (which half took first and half took second), they endured the pain for 60 seconds before being allowed to remove their hand. In another trial, they had the same temperature for 60 seconds, then a small amount of warm water was added to the bowl to raise the temperature by 1 degree: still painful, but not quite as painful. They waited an additional 30 seconds before removing their hand. Then the participants were asked which of the experiences they would like to repeat for the third trial. Regardless of the order they took them in, almost everyone preferred the 90-second experience to the 60-second one. But from the perspective of the experiencing self, that's absurd: every moment of pain in the 60-second one was repeated in the 90-second one, and the overall experience was 90 seconds of pain instead of 60 seconds. And yet, because the end of the longer trial had less intense pain, the subjects' remembering selves preferred that one.
Kahneman has further studied this phenomenon and drawn a few conclusions from it. One is what he calls the Peak-End effect: when we remember an experience, we tend to remember the most intense moment during that experience, as well as how we felt at the end of it, and essentially average those two. So during a surgery, peoples' impressions are mostly derived from how painful the worst part of it was and how painful it felt at the end; a much longer surgery with a less intense middle or an easier end will get a better review than a quicker surgery with less total suffering but a moment of intense pain or more pain near the end. Kahneman mostly focuses on suffering in this section, but it applies to pleasure as well: if we're listening to a beautiful symphony performance, but there's a harsh note near the end, that will diminish our remembering selves' impression of the symphony, even though that note can't possibly undo the hour of pleasure we got from listening to the rest of it.
Another aspect is that our remembering selves are indifferent to duration. We feel about as positively about a three-week vacation as we do about a two-week vacation, even though we experience 50% more total pleasure over the course of the three-week vacation. Going back to the cold-hand experiment, people didn't seem to mind suffering the same amount of pain over a longer period of time.
Overall this seems like a mistake on our part, that we should prioritize our actual experiences over our memories, our life-as-lived over our life-as-recalled. But the remembering self is what's responsible for making decisions: when we draw on our past to decide on a future course of action, it's our memories we marshal, not an integral function of total pleasure and pain over a period of time. We need a balance, mostly for our own lives but also when thinking how our actions impact others (such as doctors picking a course of treatment for their patient, or a musician arranging their set list).
Near the end of the book, Kahneman aligns rational Econ thinking with the Chicago School of libertarian-style economics. Under this worldview, you don't need to worry about people (Econs) making mistakes, because they're making the right decisions for them. Maybe they aren't saving for retirement because they plan to die before retirement age, or because they have decided that pleasure in their 30s outweighs pleasure in their 70s. But in the real world, people often don't think at all about the choices they make, or don't think them through thoroughly. Sometimes that's OK, but often it results in regret and suffering. Retirement savings is again an example, where people made impulsive decisions (cashing out a 401k) or no decision at all (not contributing), and feel profound regret later in life. Kahneman likes what sometimes is called "Paternalistic libertarianism," where individuals are still free to make their own decisions (so long as they don't harm others), but society frames those decisions such that the easiest decisions to make are the ones most likely to lead to a good outcome for that individual.
TFaS was published in 2011, and I think it captures a lot of the optimism of the first Obama term, with competent managers viewing the government as a force for strategic good. Near the end of the book Kahneman lists the successful applications of his research, including allowing employers to default to opting-in to 401k contributions and auto-increasing contribution amounts, which build on what we now know about the importance of framing, reference points, and how we respond to foregone gains very differently from losses. I don't have nearly the same optimism today about this research leading to improvement in peoples' lives. I think that government and business leaders still are aware of the research, but are using it to grow power instead of to benefit people, whether addicting people to social networks or dismantling civil society or normalizing corruption.
Anyways, for all sorts of reasons I think this is a great book and people should read it. As Kahneman notes early on, we can perceive flaws in others' reasoning much more than our own. I'm sure that I'm guilty of taht even while I'm writing this - "Yes, other people have a much harder time seeing the flaws in their own reasoning!" But I did walk away from this book with a lot to chew over on my own thinking and decision-making, past and future. And even if all you take away from this book is recognizing how others process information about the world, that's valuable too. It helps us predict how people will respond to given situations, how we might influence others, and so on.
The writing style is fantastic. I'd noted earlier that it contains its own proof, and in addition to that it's very anecdotal and story-driven, even though the book as a while is saying that we rely too much on anecdote and story. He's acknowledging what's effective, and saying that's what he's doing, showing his work while also making it clear that, say, System 1 and System 2 are just shorthands and not empirically-existing entities.
I think that's all I have to say! If I could buy everyone I know one book, I would probably get them this one.
I sometimes feel like my entire life is playing RPGs: by the time I finish one up, there's another one I want to play lined up and waiting for me. I'll sometimes force myself to take a break, to play another genre or stop playing games altogether for a bit. But I almost always enjoy whatever massive RPG I pick up next.
The latest entry for me is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I received courtesy of my brother for my birthday (thanks, Andrew!). I've been hearing about this game for a while, including from a co-worker who said it's her favorite RPG of the last several years, and I've been looking forward to experiencing it for myself.
MINI SPOILERS
The one-sentence summary of Expedition 33 is basically "A French JRPG". It has a lot of the game structure and feel of a Final Fantasy game. Your main character and party members are all predefined characters. At least thus far in the game, there aren't any dialogue choices or branching plot points. You assemble your team into an active party of 3 combatants, and face off in turn-based battles against 1-3 opponents. You fight enemies to gain XP and money ("chroma"), level up your characters, pick abilities, get weapons and equipment.
But, everything about the game's style oozes French: the haircuts, the clothes, the art style. Accordion music everywhere you turn. You fight mimes, for crying out loud! The characters aren't accented, but most of the proper words are French: Gommage, Petank, Lumiere. About the only thing missing is characters taking long drags on cigarettes.
After playing the game for a while, though, I've been surprised to learn that a lot of it actually feels more like Elden Ring than anything else. (Though this may be more about Dark Souls influencing the RPG landscape in general.) Some examples:
"Bonfire"-style save mechanics. You can discover Expedition Flagpoles, which work similarly to Sites of Grace in Elden Ring. If you choose to rest at one, it completely heals you and refills your consumables, but also respawns non-boss enemies. After you've unlocked one it becomes available for fast-travel, although in Expedition 33 you can only fast-travel from a Flagpole to another one in the same zone (there isn't an Open World or the ability to fast-travel from anywhere).
Consumables regenerate, which is great - no more saving 99 mana potions in your inventory because you might need them one day! Like Elden Ring there is a healing potion ("Tint"), as well as one to generate AP and another to revive a fallen party member (revive was not relevant in the single-character Elden Ring). You also upgrade them similarly, discovering materials that you can use at the Flagpole to increase the potency or quantity of your potions.
Petanks are like Teardrop Scarabs: they aren't necessarily tough, but you have to take them down quickly to acquire their treasure.
Finally, but most importantly and most surprisingly, combat is like Elden Ring, despite being squad-based and turn-based. In particular, both games have combat that heavily relies on Dodge and Parry ability. The actual flow of combat is turn-based, with you issuing commands to attack, use an item or use a skill; but during the animation, you can intervene to change the outcome. For your party's abilities, you can press A at a certain point to increase the strength of the attack (or heal or whatever). More importantly, when an enemy attacks, you can press Dodge or Parry at the right instant to evade the attack and completely avoid any damage. So there's the same sort of "git gud" philosophy as in Soulslikes: you're learning enemy attack patterns and timings and animations, and if you can reliably dodge or parry at the right times, you can whittle away any enemy or even boss, regardless of your level. And, like in Elden Ring, if you're having trouble with a particular boss you do have the option of going elsewhere, grinding XP and resources, getting more HP and attack power, and then coming back with more of a buffer to soak damage during the battle.
I should hasten to note that this game isn't as hard as Elden Ring, though one of my few complaints is that difficulty varies wildly during the game: you'll be in a zone where you can just brain-dead take down all opponents and shrug off any damage, and then face an optional enemy who can one-shot your entire party and who takes fifteen minutes of flawless execution to defeat. I haven't yet resorted to looking up mechanics online (except for one "Tricky Shot" attack that was giving me conniptions), so if I fail a fight a few times in a row I'll just make a mental note of where it was and move on.
Oh, and back to dodge and parry: early on I was focusing on parries, which are strictly superior to dodges: in addition to avoiding damage, you also execute a free counter-attack, which is incredibly helpful. However, the timing required for parries is significantly harder, so I've given up and just focused on dodges. I'm decent, not great, at them. Each enemy has their own distinct timing to learn, so there isn't one universal cue to look for. Usually after a few attack rounds I get to the point where I can reliably dodge, and probably a bit more than half of the time get a "perfect" dodge; with the 1-point "Dodger" Lumina equipped, you gain an AP on a perfect dodge, which is a nice advantage. My understanding is that the window for a Perfect Dodge is the same as the window for a successful Parry (with a Perfect Parry being a further subset), so if I ever get to the point where I'm reliably hitting that Perfect Dodge I may switch back to parrying.
For my team: it's been a pretty slow process of gathering my party, with just Gustave for a while, then adding Lune, then some time later Maelle, and more recently Sciel, so there hasn't been a whole lot of choice in party composition thus far. I've been equipping new Pictos on whoever seems like they might synergize with it or who has open slots; at some point I'll buckle down and do a proper optimization pass with all the Lumina I've learnt, but for now I just periodically revisit that when I reassign Pictos.
I've been loading up Gustave with Free Aim-related Pictos and Luminas; I don't know if he has any particular advantage with them, it's more that I wanted to focus those abilities on one character and he happened to be it. Early in the game I would often do a combo to open battles where he would Mark enemies and then Lune would unleash a fire attack on them for some extra stacks of Burn. For most trash mob fights he plinks away at enemies and we win before he can charge up his arm. For boss fights, I can usually charge it, then need to do basic attacks for a round or two to get enough AP for the lightning attack; this usually finishes off the boss (probably with a good amount of overkill, though I'm not sure if there's a way to track that.)
Lune feels like a caster/mage type, with a much bigger collection of abilities than Gustave. Her abilities revolve around environmental damage: Earth, Electricity, Fire, Ice. These are all pretty different. Earth tends to be more for AOE attacks and healing. Fire inflicts DOT Burn status effects. One consistent aspect of Expedition 33 is that you are strongly encouraged to rotate between attacks instead of just spamming a particular ability. For Lune, the incentive is to essentially create "combos" from multiple abilities; in a departure from how much games work, though, combos aren't triggered by status effects on the target, but rather on the caster. If you cast a Fire spell, you'll gain a Fire "stain"; some other (non-Fire) abilities will then consume that "stain" for an additional bonus, which might be more damage, a free attack, a free turn, some healing, etc. I really like Lune's abilities, but she is chronically short on AP, so I end up needing to do Basic Attacks with her a lot of the time. I should do some theory-crafting research and see if there's a better way to use her.
Maelle is probably my favorite combatant so far. Her fighting style revolves around "stances", like Gaichu in Shadowrun Hong Kong. Whenever she finishes a skill, she will end in a particular stance, which will give some bonuses (and possibly penalties) in the following round: Offensive deals more damage but also receives more damage, Defensive increases resistance and AP regeneration, Virtuoso gives high damage. Like Lune, you are strongly encouraged to switch abilities since you can't remain in the same stance for more than one turn. Unlike Lune or Gustave, I never seem to need to worry about AP with Maelle. She has some really nice sequences that alternate between stances, do a good amount of direct and DOT damage, and keep her AP high. Most of her attacks inflict Fire damage, so she can be weak against enemies who are resistant to Fire; occasionally I'll swap her out during a fight like that, but she also has a few abilities that deal Physical damage, as well as a useful one that converts Burn stacks into straight Physical damage.
Finally, Sciel is the most recent person I've picked up. Once again you're encouraged to alternate between skills. In her case, some of her abilities give "Sun Charge" and others give "Moon Charge"; somewhat like Maelle's Stances, each charge gives a passive buff for the following turn. If you get both Sun and Moon, you then unlock Twilight for two turns which gives even larger bonuses. Sciel's straight damage feels a little lacking, but she excels in multi-turn setups. Some of her abilities apply stacks of "Foretell" on an enemy. By itself these do nothing, but subsequent abilities will consume "Foretell". The most straightforward will convert it to damage, which is very powerful; other abilities will convert to AP for your teammates or healing for yourself. Sciel's AP situation is even better than Maelle's, and I'll often start her turns with 9 AP. I'm thinking of turning Sciel into my gun bunny, since she has AP to burn.
Moving on to the story:
One thing I love about Expedition 33 is the almost complete lack of exposition. Nobody ever explains what's going on. You can gradually piece it together from dialogue, which as in all speculative fiction is more rewarding that being spoon-fed the backstory. Here is my current understanding of the situation, though I could definitely be wrong about many things:
I believe this is set in a separate world, not Earth. About 67 years ago, a godlike being called The Paintress removed humanity from The Continent and exiled them to the island of Lumiere. She also created a large clock tower with a number on it, originally 100 and counting down by 1 each year. Each year, everyone that age or older undergoes the "gommage", basically immediately winking out of existence / dying. So the first year everyone 100 or older died, the second year everyone 99 or older, and so on. At the start of this game, the 34-year-olds all died, so everyone left alive on Lumiere is 33 or younger.
Every year, Lumiere mounts an "expedition" to the Continent to try and stop the Paintress from doing this. The expedition is often largely filled by people who are facing the year of their gommage: if they fail in the quest, they will die anyways, so they might as well try. It's up to the individual, though, and lots of people will spend their last year with friends and family.
MEGA SPOILERS
I think that's the main stuff so far. Your particular expedition starts off very badly, with an ambush on the beach that results in mass slaughter. I am a little suspicious about exactly what's going on: characters seem to die, then wake up, which makes me wonder if they might actually be dead / in some sort of afterlife or something.
Life on the Continent is very strange, which I think is largely due to the influence of the Paintress but may predate her. The main life forms you encounter are "nevrons", who are mostly enemies although you run across a couple for side-quests who seem friendly or at least passive. Nevrons all look very different and very strange, sometimes made from geometric shapes and other times more monstrous-looking.
There are also the Gestrals, who are probably my favorite thing in Expedition 33 so far. They're basically anthropomorphic paint brushes, usually about knee-high although some are much bigger. They talk in a weird language that the human characters in the game can understand but I can't; fortunately subtitles are provided. They are pretty childlike: enthusiastic, excitable, kinda dumb. Oh, and they love fighting, and will eagerly engage in a friendly duel at any opportunity. They're also really bad at fighting! I think those are the easiest fights I've had all game, even though you're usually facing them 1-on-1 and not in a party.
END SPOILERS
I just reached the end of Act 1, hence this blog post. I'll likely check in twice more as I proceed through the game. I feel like there's a lot more story to uncover and I'm looking forward to seeing what else is in store.
