✾ Aura, a Lady.

Continuing to document as much of the journey of making Princéton: Bluff Version as I can, let's look at the Hellman Sister's Boating Emporium. (see previous entries here.)

The shop itself is made using the Pokémart font which is pretty obvious to see. After a lot of trial and error, it ended up being easiest to have the two hellman sisters actually be one object with multiple different states depending on which switches are on. So, when you first load the room, neither switch is on; when you first speak to a sister, she panics and leaves, switch A on. She then comes back, and if/when you speak to her again, has a shop menu available, featuring the mayonnaise potion, lemonade (some citrus!) and Escape Rope, a necessary item for the heist (because you need to escape with the watches somehow!). Then, she leaves, switching A off and B on, which causes the other sisterself to walk back down to the counter. The second sister sells Dive Balls, but keeps the mayonnaise hidden away; then she leaves, swapping B off and A on, and the cycle repeats.

The way this works is by having the "default move route" (you can think of this as an automatic moveset, a looping or non-looping path like "look up and down" or "walk three left and then three right") for each of the B-on and A-on sisters be to move straight down, and then having the counter be opaque to them so they'll stop trying to walk there. So the moving up spaces spelled out is temporary, then the route flops and the next script to move up doesn't activate until after Pomp talks to them again. This hopefully captured the "flightiness" of the two sauce-y sisters.

Fun trivia: because I did my best to use existing sprites as much as possible, I didn't have a "curtain to the backroom" tile available in the Poké Mart font, for the sisters to go up through when it looks like they're leaving the map. When you leave the boat shop, you actually go one tile further than normal; this is because the tile in the center bottom of the red enter/exit map is actually also used for the backroom exit in the upper left. In order for the sisters to go through, it has to be "transparent" to figures, and so instead of stopping on the mat, Pomp also goes through an identical tile on exiting as well!

still managed to lose the demographic of “extremely online trans girls” indicates they really fucked up. if the it/its girlthing with a name like 0872, a timeline of empty spaces retweets, and a likes tab full of women in USSR military uniforms is dunking on your game that features two female communist robots that could kill you by sitting on your face, you’ve failed to a historic degree.

During the chaos on Friday, David Z. Morris, CoinDesk’s chief columnist, tweeted that 'I don’t know what to say about venture-funded web and delivery startups having the exact same arc as crypto over the past three years. But that is what has happened. Down to their respective banks collapsing in the same week.' Well I do.

people have been breathing a sigh of relief that the government only bailed out depositors (who, it is assumed, are deserving victims at risk of losing their hard-earned payroll money), not SVB shareholders (who, it is assumed, are SVB executives and VC/finance ghouls); this is pretty silly, given that almost none of the VCs tweeting up a storm were ever asking for a shareholder bailout. in fact, almost all of SVB's shares are owned by institutional investors. some of these, to be sure, are asset managers for rich people, but yahoo also lists Vanguard, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Franklin, and Fidelity as big losers, so a lot of the losses are going to accrue to random people with 401(k)s who were never aware that they owned any SVB stock.

people have also been breathing a sigh of relief that the bailout wasn't structured like the 2008 bailout, and lmao: it's actually worse. in 2008, the government bought troubled assets off the banks, in exchange for the banks issuing the government the right to acquire shares of them. after the dust settled and "the financial crisis" """ended""", the government ended up spending $426 billion to acquire assets that it was eventually able to sell for $441 billion, costing the public -$15 billion. this bailout, in contrast, is taking the form of the FDIC acquiring SVB, selling off what it can, and then assessing other FDIC-insured banks extra deposit insurance premiums to make up for any money it can't recover that way -- so it's likely going to cost the government more, and the costs will likely be passed through by banks to random depositors, rather than being paid by stock traders on the losing end of trades.

this was 100% a bailout for venture capitalists and the only ways it appears not to be are pure marketing.

let's rock