kuiper is probably suffering from insomnia

I am a video game scriptwriter and sometimes work on YouTube videos.

[kuiperblog]

Alyssa Rosenberg has a great bit about how the critique that "Superman lacks tension because Superman is 'too powerful'" loses its teeth when you actually go into the real world, and you realize that you yourself have incredible potential to engage in pro-social acts, and most of that potential is unrealized.

Even as a mere mortal, there are so many things that are entirely within your power to do to serve other people and improve their lives, and yet you don't do them.

The thing that makes Superman truly "the best" isn't that fact that he flies or that bullets ricochet off his chest; it's the fact that when he sees someone in need, he stops what he's doing, and then he goes and helps them. You could do this, too! Often, you don't. But maybe if you spend more time treating characters like Superman as role models, you'll say, "you know what, it is worthwhile and good to take time out of my day to help this person."

[kuiperblog]

Why I am a slime on the internet

(This was originally drafted as a response to an ask-box submission from @artimies6 asking me to share my thoughts on Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. Tumblr, in typical fashion, decided to fling this ask into the unknown as soon as I attempted to reply to it)

I have been waiting my entire internet career for the opportunity to answer the question, “please share your thoughts on Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime,” and now that day has finally come!

I love this game. Everything about it is joyful and exuberant.

A brief digression

If you’ve spent time around midwestern baby boomers, you may have heard them use the folksy expression “shot out of a cannon” to describe a person whose behavior is lively and energetic. I get the impression that this phrase is the product of an era when the “human cannonball” stunt was among the wildest things a person could do.

I most frequently heard this phrase used in the discussion of radio hosts, many of whom were famous for the energy with which they started their broadcasts. One man in particular was famous for beginning his program with a literal howl: “Owwwwww! It’s the Wolfman Jack show!”

My exposure to radio as a child was mostly through “morning drive” radio programs, when my dad drove me to school and would turn on ESPN or some other talk show. As a kid, the jokes often went over my head, but the hosts talked fast and energetically, and they were good at making each other laugh, and laughter is contagious, so I had fun laughing along with them.

When I hear the phrase “shot out of a cannon,” that’s the kind of energy and exuberance that comes to mind. Now, look at the box art for Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime:

This is the face of a slime who has just been literally shot out of a cannon. And he couldn’t be happier! The folksy midwestern idiom is thoroughly vindicated.

Welcome to a world of slime

You might assume, as I did, that the title ‘Rocket Slime’ is based on this slime being some kind of special slime. Hundreds of hours of playing Dragon Quest games as a child taught me that slimes come in all sorts of varieties: there are normal slimes, of course. But there are also Spot Slimes, DrakSlimes, Wing Slimes, Tree Slimes, Fang Slimes, Rock Slimes, Halo Slimes, SlimeBorgs, Box Slimes, Gold Slimes, King Slimes, Gran Slimes, and Mime Slimes.

By the way, one of those slime types is made up. Can you guess which one?

If you guessed “Mime Slime,” you are wrong! That is an actual canonical Dragon Quest franchise slime. Also, if you guessed that one of the other slimes on that lists was fake, you were also wrong. I lied, I didn’t make any of them up; those are all real slimes that you can fight and tame and breed in the Dragon Quest Monsters games I played as a child.

So, of course, when I heard about a game called “Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime,” I was delighted. “They invented a new type of slime!”

But no, they did not invent a new type of “Rocket Slime.” The main character of this game is just a regular ol’ slime, whose name is “Rocket.”

What's in a name?

You may have encountered this product on Grocery Store shelves: “Baker’s German’s sweet chocolate bar.”

Obviously, German chocolate cake must be some kind of German confection, right? And the product that you buy at the store is called “German’s chocolate” because it’s the stuff that you use to make a classic German cake, right?

Nope! German’s chocolate came first, and when you use this chocoate to make a cake, you call it a German’s cake, naming it after the dark baking chocolate it was made from.

And what’s more, German’s chocolate isn’t German. Note the constant use of the apostrophe+s at the end: It’s not German chocolate, it’s German’s chocolate, so named because it was formulated in the 1850’s by Samuel German, an American man who is from England, not Germany.

But wait, there’s more! Because you see, “German’s” is not the only place on this package where we saw an “apostrophe s” at the end of a word. Note that this is “Baker’s” chocolate.

It’s a product of The Baker Chocolate Company, where Samuel German worked when he came up with the formula. Obviously, they picked this company name because they make products for bakers, right? Nope! Once again, note the placement of the apostrophe: the chocolate has this name because the company was founded by James Baker.

It was America’s first chocolate company, and its original chocolate was not intended primarily for baking! While Samuel German’s chocolate is indeed intended for baking, that wasn’t created until more than half a century later.

So, The Baker Chocolate Company is named after a man named Baker (not necessarily because it has anything to do with bakers), and German’s chocolate is named after a man named German (who is not German), and Rocket Slime is named after a character named Rocket (who is not a “rocket slime.”)

Rocket’s identity as a “generic slime” enhances the story. It makes him more of an “everyman.” Not everyone can be a King Slime, because King Slime is a species; it’s something that you’re born as, ensuring that Slime society will forever be a hereditary monarchy. But anyone can follow the example of the legendary Dragon Quest Hero, Rocket Slime.

This game is a really neat game and I really like it

Dragon Quest Heroes Rocket Slime is absolutely charming, through and through. This is no small part thanks to the localization. For example, the Platypunk gang (who serves as the game’s main antagonists, responsible for kidnapping your friends in the game’s inciting incident) talks like a bunch of wiseguys, which the game actually refers to as “wiseguys.”

Every bit of dialog in this game is a delight. And it’s not just the dialog, but the names: the Platypunk gang is led by notorious Don Clawleone. Item names, too: when the spiked iron balls evolve, they become “irritaballs.”

But perhaps just as importantly, the game is actually fun to play.

In one section of the game, you have the overworld exploration, where you go around rescuing kidnapped slimes (which you carry around until you can toss them onto railway carts which carry them back to town), collecting items (which you also throw onto railway carts which carry them back to town), and fighting enemies, who you can choose to damage enough to defeat, or who you can throw onto a railway cart, sending them back to town, where your slime companions will, ahem, “deal with them.”

Rocket engaging in the time-honored tradition of flipping turtle enemies onto their backs to render them helpless

This supposedly doesn’t involve anything sinister: all of the monsters that you send back to Slimenia like it so much that they choose to stay voluntarily, and they become NPCs who you can talk to back in town.

Look at how rapidly this “bad guy” is rehabilitated!

That, by itself, is enough that it could have been its own game. It’s really weird and cool that the game lets you go around picking up anything and everything and saying, “Yup, this is part of your collection now. You want to keep this 1000 ton weight that exists in the overworld for some reason? Send it back to town in case we need it later. Empty chest? That’s also an item, we’ll hang onto it for you, maybe it will come in handy.”

But then, you have the tank battles, as depicted on the game’s artwork. This is where Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime really makes use of the DS hardware: on the top screen, you have a view of the tanks as they fire projectiles back-and-forth, and on the bottom screen, you control Rocket as he furiously runs around loading the cannons.

This is what you were accumulating all of those items for: they are things that you can take into battle. Rocket isn’t the only thing shot out of cannon; those cannons will fire anything. Rocks, bullets, the aforementioned 1000 ton weights and empty chests...or your companions, because remember, all of the rules from the overworld apply: just as you can pick up friends (or enemies) and throw them into railway carts that carry them back to town, you can also throw them into a cannon that launches them across the battlefield. Or you can fire yourself.

Why fire yourself (or your allies) at the enemy? Well, if you manage to make it to the enemy base (without being intercepted by enemy fire), then you are inside the enemy tank, where you can do...all sorts of things. For one thing, you can attack the enemies to prevent them from filling up their cannons with junk that they fire at you. You can sabotage their tank, damaging certain parts of it. Or, you can grab all of the ammo that they were planning to load into their tanks, and just leave with it. Break out of their tank’s front door, march back across the battlefield to your tank carrying the enemy’s munitions, and launch it back at them.

This is why nothing the enemy does ever feels “cheap.” Does the enemy have better munitions than you? Cool, go over to their tank and steal it for yourself! And munitions can take all sorts of forms in these battles.

If two objects meet in midair, they will “cancel each other out” and fall to the ground. Cannon fodder is both offensive and defensive, in this sense. And some projectiles are better at defense than others: for example, if you launch an iron shield out of your cannon, it can absorb multiple projectiles before cratering to the ground. (A nice form of protection if you are trying to launch yourself through the air to invade the enemy base.) If you launch a boomerang out of your cannon, it will grab the enemy’s projectile out of the sky and bring it back to your base.

But by far the best and iconic part of every tank battle comes at the end, when you reign victories and Rocket is left with his jaw on the floor:

The first time I saw this sprite, I thought that Rocket was reacting with shock to his own victory. “Wow! I can’t believe I won!” However, after playing several tank battles, I recognized the pattern: Rocket doesn’t react with disbelief until after you get the loot for winning.

What, exactly, is the nature of his disbelief? Perhaps it’s, “Wow! I can’t believe I completely obliterated that tank, and all that survived was this cloth sack containing a sword!” Or perhaps it’s, “Wow! What an incredible reward! My decision to risk life and (lack of) limb is thoroughly vindicated!”

Regardless of how many times he claims victory, Rocket’s shock at seeing the loot back open remains undiminished.

This shocked expression by Rocket the slime has been my profile picture across social media for over a decade. Perhaps this is a reflection of my own posture toward the world: perpetually in awe with the new bounties that each day offers, undiminished by the consistency with which I am blessed.

It was G.K. Chesterton who said, speaking on the nature of God,

Because children have abounding vitality, they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”, and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.”

Just as Rocket gazes with awe upon his tank battle loot, so can I too can gaze upon every sunset, every sunrise, every full moon, and remain in awe at the wonder and majesty of their constancy.

[kuiperblog]

Rebel Princess is a delight

Ever since I acquired Rebel Princess a ~year ago, I bring it everywhere I go, and it really does feel like "a game for everyone." I have played it with my regular board game group, I have played it with my book club, I have played it with poker players, and I have played it with my boomer parents. Every single it has hit the table, it has been a delight.

It is absurdly simple. The game is the classic trick-taking game of hearts, with a more flexible player count (you can add/remove cards from the deck to accommodate anywhere from 3-6 players), and two key twists.

First, at the start of the game, each player chooses a card from a pool of 12 public domain fairy tail princesses which provides them with a unique power that they can activate once per hand. For example, Snow White's "Seven Dwarfs" power allows her to play a 7 or lower and declare its value to be zero. The Little Mermaid's "hypnotic song" allows her to force the trick-leader to play a specific suit.

The second twist is that at the start of each trick, you flip over a random rules card that tells you what direction to pass cards, and adds one additional stipulation that applies only to that hand. And these one-hand stipulation rules, while quite simple in their wording, can be quite profound in their effect.

The result of this is that Rebel Princess is a game that 1) feels simple to learn, and 2) constantly forces you to relearn how to play, as "one simple rule change" each round can completely upend your intuitions about how the game of hearts is "supposed" to work.

This sets it apart from most other games in my collection.

One of the things that board games are notorious for is the long front-loaded rules explanation. "Before we can begin having fun, let us spend 30 minutes learning how to play." Players hate spending a bunch of time learning to play a new game.

But players also enjoy the process of learning to play a new game. It can be fun to discover a new game and then see all of the emergent behavior that is incentivized by a rule that you're dealing with for the first time. This is why collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering are constantly introducing new rules with each new set (in addition to new character, new locations, new artwork, and new cards that you have to buy). It's fun to learn how to play something new.

Rebel Princess provides the best of both worlds: there is no lengthy up-front "rules teach" that demands a 10+ minute explanation before you can begin playing, because everyone knows how to play Hearts (and those who don't can learn in ~2 minutes).

And, at the end of every hand you get to flip over a new rules card and say, "okay, what this time? Oh, red cards are trump cards? Yellow cards are minus one point? Alright, let's see what happens." And then you see how one small rule change recontextualizes everything and challenges all of your assumptions about how the game of hearts is "supposed" to be played. You don't have to learn to play an entirely new game; you get to learn how to play an entirely new game.

And then you swap characters and play again.

[kuiperblog]

If you are shooting a film on your phone, invest in a $20 flexible tripod

One sign of amateur filmmaking I've started to notice a lot is when people go handheld purely because they didn't have support for the angle or height they were trying to hit. The classic "operator standing on a ladder shot" is a hallmark of amateur filmmaking.

To be clear, handheld is a totally fine as a creative choice. The camera doesn't always need to be on a tripod. There are some shots where having the camera be a little bit shaky is useful or visually communicates a specific tone or mood, like if you're trying to convey danger or urgency or whatever.

But it's really, really obvious when an amateur filmmaker is bouncing between coverage where everything else matches except for stability: both shots are trying to convey the same mood, but one angle is locked, and the other isn't. And in that sort of context, it's almost never an intentional motivated creative choice, and almost always shot on handheld because of some logistical constraint which resulted in them putting a guy on a ladder holding a camera.

My advice to all of these amateurs would be to get a flexible tripod for $15-25. They have flexible legs that you can bend and twist any which way. It's really easy to mount the camera at basically any angle.

You can wrap it around a railing or tree branch, mount it on a chair, put it on a weird uneven surface, tilt it into a high angle, or whatever the shot calls for. You can get a clean locked frame in basically any environment.

Just to state the obvious caveat:

That this is a recommendation for a very specific type of amateur: obviously, this $15 purchase will not work for heavier camera/lens/cage situations. This is for lightweight setups, where you are recording on a phone or GoPro.

And a slightly less obvious caveat:

Flexible tripods aren't great for repeatability. If you need to match an angle later for pickups or reshoots, you want something you can mark and reproduce, and with the flexible tripod it can be hard to hit the exact same tilt two weeks later. So if you are being disciplined about tripod height and tape marks, this is obviously an inferior replacement for that. But as a replacement for lazy handheld, the flexible tripod is great.

[iapislazuli]

had a dream the new online buzzword was "qualityslop". people would say things like "you're only enjoying it because it's good"

[kuiperblog]

This is actually how people react to A24 films

[kuiperblog]

The Running Man (2025) is an interesting movie

I recently watched the new Running Man movie with @alexanderwales. I went into the movie saying, "I hope it's good." I came out of the movie saying, "I wish it was good."

That being said, I can highly endorse the experience of watching The Running Man with Alexander Wales. If he ever invites you to go see a movie with him, you should take him up on the invitation. We both came out of the theater and immediately began discussing a vision for what a better version of the movie would have looked like.

(This post isn't going to "spoil the end of the movie" by telling you exactly what happened at the end, but it might spoil the end of the movie by telling you some things that didn't happen in the end. This post also quotes a conversation from the finale of Breaking Bad, and sort of vaguely gesture at several things that happen in the first 2 episodes of Vince Gilligan's newest TV show, Pluribus)

One part that both of us particularly enjoyed came during the opening credits, where we get a long sequence of Glen Powell walking through the dystopian city on an ordinary day. It's a cool introduction to the world. And it really felt like it was setting us up for something to take place here later in the film, like the movie was teaching us about how the city and the Network compound are laid out.  This could then be paid off later in the movie when, instead of walking peacefully through the city as police mill around, Glen Powell might have to run through as those same police shoot at him.  Classic setup and payoff, except that moment is not paid off.

There are many moments in Running Man (2025) that feel like the setup for something that is never paid off. For example, there is a moment where Glen Powell defeats one of the "Hunter" mini-bosses, and the big boss Josh Brolin eggs Glen on, telling him to kill the Hunter. Glen decides to spare the man. This feels like the setup for a "defeat means friendship" moment, where the mini-boss (who just heard how big boss Josh Brolin was rooting for his death) decides to join Glen in his rebellion against the system, which would have gone with the whole "worker solidarity" theme, where even the people who are directly working for the oppressive Network are part of the working class that suffers under it. It felt like a setup for a moment later in the movie where the Hunter returns and helps Glen Powell out of a bind, a narratively-satisfying moment where he gets "rewarded for his good deed," but that moment never comes.

Alexander Wales also reminded me that the entire premise of the movie starts with giving us a "ticking clock" of 30 days, with the protagonist starting with a stack of 30 tapes (one of which must be mailed in every day as proof of life), and I can easily imagine a version of this movie where there's escalating tension over the 28th, 29th, and finally 30th tape, but this whole conceit is basically abandoned and forgotten by the start of the third act.

We're told several contradictory things about Glen Powell.  Glen Powell is a man with a propensity for violence; we're told at the start that he's the most angry contestant the show has ever had. But for a guy who is introduced to us as unhinged, he very often finds himself being "the voice of reason" in his encounters with a cast of colorful characters he encounters along the way.

Chief among the contradictions of Glen Powell's character is that he loves his wife and daughter more than anything in the world…but he signs up for the murder game show that no one has ever survived and will surely leave his daughter an orphan (albeit one with access to better medicine).  One could see his decision to participate in the murder game as a "heroic sacrifice" for the sake of his sick daughter, but that's immediately undercut when he gets help from a friend in the underworld who says "you know, I was about to offer you a job; you didn't have to go on the murder game show."  And if that's true, that kind of changes everything! That, combined with his appetite for violence, felt like the setup for a Walter White moment where at the end he's forced to admit, "I didn't do this for the family. I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really…I was alive."

And that never comes. He has no character flaw and requires no growth to become the man the world needs him to be; the only decision he has to make is accepting the invitation to be a hero, which is something he was already doing from the very start of the movie.

On the whole, Running Man (2025) gives the impression of a movie that was assembled in the editing bay. There was a moment in the beginning (where Glen Powell first visits Josh Brolin's office) that had really obvious ADR, like something in the original script wasn't working and they were trying to fix it after the fact. And there's an early beat where we basically have a dream sequence to push the main character to move onto the next setpiece.

Running Man is a fascinatingly bad movie. I do not mean "fascinatingly" as an intensifier; I mean that it's bad productive ways. It produced a post-movie conversation that I don't think I'd trade for a "tighter" and more forgettable 7/10 thriller. In that sense, it actually succeeded in "drawing me into its world." I was not bored; the ways in which it was bad invited me to imagine what a better version would look like.

I felt an inverted echo of that experience later in the week, when I found myself trying to explain the new Vince Gilligan show Pluribus, which does some very interesting things in the first act.  I said "Pluribus does a really good job of anticipating the questions that you might have if you were actually a character put in this situation, and then having the character actually ask those questions, and then she actually gets answers!"  I added, "I could easily imagine a version of Pluribus, where they take most of the stuff you learn in episode 2, and instead take an entire season to reveal it, simply by having the main character not ask the obvious questions right away."

In the same way that Running Man (2025) invites me to imagine a better version of what the movie might look like, Pluribus invites me to imagine a worse version of what it would look like.

Not all media works like this. For example, I didn't come out of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman imagining what a worse version of that movie would have looked like. I just enjoyed the movie on its own terms. And while I'm not sure that makes it better than Pluribus, it does make it less interesting to think about and talk about, because it's dealing with "one big question" that is at its core mostly an emotional question. There's something about Scorsese's movies that often feels "self-contained" to me, in that they don't create a design space that invites my introspection. I enjoy his work, but I seldom find myself pondering it. And part of that is by intention and design: Scorsese is doing character studies; he's not setting out to create an interesting world that invites my imagination to explore it. 

The Running Man (2025) is not a good movie. But it is an interesting movie. And sometimes that's better than being good.

[kuiperblog]

Word crimes I have personally witnessed

Since my early days on the internet, I have kept a file where where I record phrases that people have said on the internet that have really razed my hackles.

“Thanks for your inciteful comments”

Are you thanking me for starting a flame war?

“Right of passage”

This is what you have when you’re a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

“Free reign”

Sometimes the monarch offers you a 100% discount.

“Slight of hand”

They’re very dainty hands.

“Doesn’t phase me”

Some people might be turned incorporeal in situations like this, but not me.

“Sight your sources”

They’re beautiful sources. Gaze upon them and appreciate their splendor.

“This peaked my interest”

Now that my interest is at the summit, it can only go down.

“Rein supreme”

The horse is in charge now.

“For all intensive purposes”

These purposes are quite vigorous

“Deep seeded”

I’m sowing six feet deep.

“Wet your appetite”

I’m very well-hydrated before dinner.

“Mute point”

I’m going to articulate this entirely using gestures.

“I’m honing in on your location”

You probably went through a lot of whetstones on the way here.

“Baited breath”

The opposite of bad breath: it’s such a pleasant odor that few can resist its allure.

“For piece of mind”

Young Frankenstein’s assistant should have been willing to pay for this instead of stealing a brain from the university laboratory.

“Sneak peak”

Sometimes those summits can really catch you off guard.

“Tow the line”

I assume this is what tugboat operators do.

“Reek havoc”

Sometimes a stench is terrible enough to cause chaos.

“per say”

You owe me performance royalties for using that phrase. I charge $50 per say.

“Cease the day”

This happens earlier in the winter, especially after Daylight Saving Time ends in November.

“One foul swoop”

Not to be confused with a fowl swoop, this one is probably up to no good.

“Tongue and cheek”

A match made in heaven.

“Cold slaw”

You should keep your shredded cabbage in the fridge after adding the mayo.

“Here, here!”

I’m paying close attention to the location of the applause.

“Safety deposit box”

Where we keep our OSHA-compliant gear.

“I don’t want to take this for granite.”

Of course not, it’s clearly bismuth.

“Tenants of the faith”

I’m pretty sure it’s a violation of city code for a non-residential church building to charge rent.

“Coming down the pipe”

You don’t want to know what’s in the plumbing.

“Pallet cleanser”

The forklift operator is expected to use this to keep things sanitary.

“Extract revenge”

I’m going to attack my nemesis using this syringe.

“Statue of limitations”

Carved marble can last a very long time before expiring.

“Case and point”

I’ll case the joint, then gesture with my finger to draw your attention to anything suspicious.

“Chalk-full”

Rock climbers carry bags that are like this.

“I’m going to pour over the data”

Please don’t spill your coffee on spreadsheets.

“That’s just an old wise tale”

You shouldn’t be so dismissive of elderly wisdom!

“Jerry-rigged”

Old Jeremiah is always up to funny business.

“Don't give me short shift”

If you're getting paid by the hour, you don't want your employer to send you home early.

“This peeked my interests”

That sounds like an invasion of privacy.

[kuiperblog]

Japanese vs American attitudes around removing shoes when entering

When I went to Haneda, I noticed that the Japanese people kept their shoes on when entering, but several Americans visitors removed their shoes out of habit.

This is because in American culture, it is considered customary and polite to remove your shoes before entering someone's airport departure concourse. (This is a unique quirk of American culture and not shared by Japan.)

[kuiperblog]

The tweet being quoted is of course obviously wrong: the fact that the current market price of gold is ~$3,000 per ounce is contingent on gold maintaining its current rarity, and the market price of gold would be considerably lower in a world where gold was more abundant.

But the person who has showed up to dunk on this tweet is wrong in a more subtle (and more annoying) way: gold being abundant would not make it "worthless."

We intuitively understand that many types of mineral are useful for things. For example, iron useful as a construction material (especially if you make steel out of it). And titanium offers a similar strength at less weight, making it useful if you're trying to build spaceships.

If the earth suddenly gained a huge amount of iron, this would not cause iron to become "worthless." Ditto for titanium.

If we had a magic machine that could instantly create more lithium and cobalt, that would not be a "worthless" invention: we would use the machine to create minerals that we could use to make batteries; we could make more of the grid solar, energy would be more abundant, and that would have the effect of making us all richer (in tangible ways, like cutting the price of your energy bill, and in other less-immediately-obvious but still tangible ways).

Adding more resources to the world would make the world richer, not poorer, because we could do things with them! This is true of iron, titanium, and cobalt. It is also true of gold.

Gold is useful! It has a bunch of unique properties that allow you to build useful things out of it!

If you've ever installed a CPU, you're probably familiar with this sight:

Intel did not put a gold top-coat on your CPU pins because they were expecting you to display them to ostentatiously broadcast your wealth. It used gold because that's the best material for the job!

Gold has low electrical resistance, and it doesn't tarnish, which means that properties like resistance won't change over the lifespan of the chip. Palladium-nickel is too porous and prone to cracking; silver tarnishes too easily, platinum is harder to solder.

The Intel chip in your PC has gold because in a counterfactual world where they instead had to use a different material, your CPU would be worse at doing the the things that it's supposed to do.

In fact, there are a lot of applications where gold is just straight-up better than copper, aluminum, tin, and nickel, but we end up using those (worse) materials anyway just because gold is too expensive. If price were no object, you'd really rather wire your house with gold than copper, but we use copper because it's less than 1% the cost. If gold were more abundant, we wouldn't have to settle for second-best!

But there is another way in which the annoying tweet is wrong that people would remain poor even if we accept the false premise that "gold would be worthless": those suffering under the resource curse of gold could be considerably better off!

A world where gold is valuable is a world where dictators who control a limited supply of gold have a major source of wealth that is mostly decoupled from human capital. A country whose main export is gold has considerably less incentive to do things like "build schools" and "ensure that children aren't malnourished" than they would in a world where their main export was microchips or movies or software, because in order to create chips/movies/apps, you need to have a bunch of skilled labor and you can only get that skilled labor by building schools and ensuring that your people's cognitive capacity isn't being diminished by childhood malnourishment. (In case it's not obvious, this point generalizes to many things beyond "just" building schools and getting nutrients into children.)

So, if "gold became worthless," it's quite conceivable that people could be better off: eliminating that specific source of wealth would mostly have the effect of reducing a particular kind of inequality that tends to make a tiny number of people rich at the expense of everyone else.

(That is, of course, accepting the premise that gold would become "worthless," which it wouldn't, because we can do useful things with gold: it can't be worthless because it literally has worth even absent any shared notion of it being a useful "store of value." Gold is like titanium; it's not like a piece of paper with Benjamin Franklin whose usefulness is entirely contingent on constructed factors. If humanity went extinct, aliens would struggle to find useful things to do with $100 bills, but they'd find plenty of useful things to do with all of the gold that they found on earth. This was even the premise of an extremely silly sci-fi movie starring Harrison Ford, Cowboys and Aliens.)

The only time when I really feel comfortable dunking is when it is a "counter-dunk," so I will float the possibility that perhaps this tweeter would benefit from taking his own advice to "take an economics class."

[kuiperblog]

Guards of Atlantis II is wonderful

Guards of Atlantis 2 is great, and it's great largely because of things I assumed couldn't be true based on how it is usually described, so I'll refrain from explaining what it's like, and instead try to explain what it is.

Guards of Atlantis 2 is a board game that I bought for €59 + shipping during a crowdfunding campaign. (This is supposedly a discount from its "retail" price of €75, though it is not and apparently never will be available at retail.)

It is a team game: there is a blue team, and an orange team. Each player controls one "hero" card on a hex grid, and you have cards that do things like "move 2" or "attack 4" or "defend 6," or fancier things like "swap places with a friendly unit" or "push an adjacent unit up to 2 spaces."

While the action cards follow a few basic templates, each playable character has a collection of action cards that are distinct enough to give each hero a unique identity, like "good at ranged attacks," or "slow tanky brawler," or "glass cannon."

The teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick. The first time we played a 4-player game, it took us around 2 hours. Our second game added a 5th player to the table and took around 90 minutes. (There's also rule variant that makes the game potentially longer for those who prefer more "epic" struggles.) This is a game that is totally reasonable to bring to a weekday "board game night" and honestly something that wouldn't feel too out of place on the shelf of a store like Target.

Here is the part where I feel like I start providing the sort of information that gave me an incorrect impression about what this game would be:

You can attack enemy heroes, but most of the time you are attacking enemy minions, which provide 2 gold when defeated. At the end of each round (which lasts 5 turns), players get to spend their gold to "level up" and upgrade their abilities. As you level up, it increases the "gold bounty" that the enemy team gets for killing you.

In addition to attacking enemy minions for gold to level up, you are trying to win the "minion battle." If all of the enemy minions in the current wave are eliminated, you execute a "wave push," and the fight moves closer to the enemy base. Fighting closer to the enemy base is harder, but if you push the minion wave all the way to the enemy base, you win. (Your other win condition is killing enough heroes on the enemy team.)

What I have just described sounds very much like a MOBA, and that is very much how Guards of Atlantis II is marketed. That is in fact the entire Unique Selling Point and Core Value Proposition of this product. And in many ways, this "MOBA board game" label is descriptively true. However, it is not MOBA-like in many ways, notably:

The minions do not move or perform actions. They sit on the battlefield, providing passive buffs to friendly heroes (and debuffs to opposing heroes), waiting to be harvested for a 2 gold bounty. There's no "maintenance phase" where you have to figure out what the minions do. This is great: the game is all about the heroes; the minions matter, but the minions are just there to make you stronger.

The default map does not have "lanes." When you play a 2v2 or 3v3 game on the base map, everyone is in one lane in the middle of the board.

Units do not have hit points. Every attack against a minion is lethal. Every attack against a hero is also lethal, unless the defending hero blocks it by discarding a card from their hand that has a defense value that matches the value of the attack. (In a sense, I suppose your hand of remaining cards could be seen as your "health pool.")

Notably, the lack health points means that there is no tracking of health points: there is never a point at which you have to look at an enemy and ask, "how much more damage to kill that thing?" This makes it a breeze to play compared to other hexgrid-based games like Gloomhaven.

Most saliently, I said it above, but I feel obliged to restate it: the teach is short. The actions are simple. The turns are quick and snappy. This is not what I expected when I heard that it was a "MOBA"-style game. This is not a game where you have to spend a bunch of time consulting the rulebook as you play to figure out how things work; you can completely learn the rules in <10 minutes, and then just go in and start doing stuff. You play a card, you do the actions printed on the card, the rules and phrasing are clear and unambiguous.

The other thing that gave me the (false) impression that Guards of Atlantis II was a certain type of game was the nature of the crowdfunding campaign.

I mentioned that I paid €59 for a SKU that is "the base game." The base game contains 7 heroes to choose from. However, you can also buy a €40 "hero pack" that is essentially an expansion that adds 5 heroes with interesting new abilities that are generally higher complexity. This also has the effect of raising the max player count from 3v3 to 5v5, as the back side of the board offers a larger map with multiple lanes.

Did I say that you can buy a €40 hero pack? I meant that you have your choice of up to five different hero packs for €40 each. Or, if you don't want to choose, you can buy all of them, if you are the sort of person who wants to expand the base roster from 7 playable characters to 32. For such people, they helpfully offer an "all-in" tier which gives you the base game for all the hero packs for €249.

That gave a certain impression when I walked into this game: in my mind, it was that sort of Kickstarter game, where you pay $250 for a giant box of nice-looking plastic miniatures that sits on your shelf for years unplayed because nobody you know wants to surmount the massive teaching burden that must accompany a $250 purchase.

But the reviewers at So Very Wrong About Games assured me this was worth the purchase, and so I bought it. And I was delighted to discover that the game that I bought for €59 shipped came in a reasonable-sized box that I can easily carry with me to board game night, and that people are happy to play with me because the teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick.

It's so easy to just start playing the simple action cards and executing what they tell you to do. Within several turns, everyone was able to begin talking strategy around the table. "He just played his highest defense card. That means we can probably get a hero kill if we go for a double attack." "Hey, can we win this minion push? I can kill these two over here if you get the last one on the other end of the map." "If you can prevent me from dying this round, I promise that I will be able to clear this wave by myself." It's a delight. It's the sort of game where you don't feel like you're playing with and against the ruleset; you're playing with and against your friends.

It's also a game that I feel a bit guilty about recommending, because it's not a game that you can easily obtain, as it was only available during a crowdfunding campaign. I was happy to pay €59 + shipping; I would have been considerably less happy to pay the $150+ that copies are now selling for on ebay.

But because it's a great game, and one that plays best with 6 players, people who own copies are often eager evangelists who are trying to find people who are willing to play with them, and if one of them ever extends an invitation your way, my recommendation would be to take them up on it and not to be intimidated by what the game appears to be, because it's really quite approachable and the sort of thing that won't ask for more than 1.5-2 hours of your time on a weekday board game night: the teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick.

[kuiperblog]

Nobody knows what will be popular in 2 years

I was recently giving advice to a younger writer asking for "business advice," and I gave a version of the advice that I usually give: "focus on improving your craft; the question of 'how to sell this book' is one that will be easier to answer once you've actually written the book and have a complete manuscript."

More specifically, if you estimate that your first book will be done in 2027, then you shouldn't be spending 2025 doing "research" to figure out things like "what's the best ad platform," or "what style of book cover works best?" because the knowledge that you gain in 2025 might be obsolete by the time it's time to publish in 2027. Just write the book and figure out the business side later.

Even your choice of what genre to write in shouldn't be informed by what you think is popular, because nobody knows what will be popular in 2 years.

After uttering that sentence, I wondered, "is it actually true?" So I went to Google trends, and typed in "Romantasy books," and lo and behold, ~nobody was searching for this term 2 years ago.

Here's a graph put together by Alex Newton from K-Lytics showing interest in "Romantasy books" compared to interest in "Paranormal romance books" over time:

It's currently among the hottest genres on the market (and probably an uncontested candidate for "fastest growing" over the past 2 years), but you probably wouldn't have seen it coming in April 2023 if you were researching "what are the hottest book genres right now?"

The popularity of "Romantasy" in the current market caught a lot of people by surprise. That being said, there are some things about the state of the book market in 2025 that are utterly unsurprising: the most popular genres on ebook platforms are romance, fantasy, and various blends of mystery, thrillers, and suspense. This was true of the market 2 years ago, 5 years ago, and 10 years ago. These genres are "Lindy."

It's really hard to predict short-term trends. If you saw in 2009 that "vampire romance novels are really popular right now," and then spent 2 years writing a vampire romance novel with the idea that this would be your ticket to success, your book would be hitting the market in 2011, at a point when vampire romance was already on the down-swing, and you might find yourself disappointed with the performance of your book as you entered a crowded market. The thing that's been surging in popularity for the past 2 years may no longer be resurgent if you travel 2 years into the future.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 was the first movie in the Twilight series to do worse than its predecessor at the box office, marking "the beginning of the end"

Again, see "the Lindy effect," or as mama used to say, "easy come, easy go."

Of course, even in 2011, when vampire romance novels had begun their descent in popularity, I still would have given the advice that "if you want to write a vampire romance novel, and the idea of writing vampire romance is what gets you excited to actually sit down and start typing, then you should write that, because the biggest thing you need to achieve to become an author is to get your reps in, and it still counts as 'writing' regardless of whether you're writing fanfic, forum roleplay, or a genre that is rapidly waning in popularity."

(Interestingly, "paranormal romance" has sort of become a Lindy genre: if you released a vampire novel in 2011 riding the coattails of Twilight hoping for commercial success, you would probably be disappointed. However, from the vantage point of 2025, could reasonably observe "despite the decline in the popularity of vampire romance, paranormal romance managed to remain a somewhat popular genre over the past 15 years," then that's a somewhat different proposition: a genre that has remained somewhat popular for over a decade has a good chance of still being somewhat popular a ~decade from now, and if you're lucky you might even catch it when it's on an upswing -- maybe in 2027, people will tire of romantasy and drift back to vampire romance.)

Spending several months of your life writing a "declining genre" is only a "waste of time" if you're doing it purely for cynical reasons and chasing book sales rather than developing your own craft. And empirically, the people who seem to achieve career success by "chasing trends" are the people whose turnaround time for a complete novel is closer to ~2 months rather than ~2 years, and they have the ability to do that because earlier in their career, they got their reps in, and now have no trouble cranking out ~3,000 words per day. And regardless of how cynical you intend to be, I think that's a valuable skill to have: the only piece of "career advice" I have for authors that really generalizes is "be prolific."

If you look at the release schedule for ACOTAR, you'll see that the first 3 books came out over a 3 year period from 2015-2017 -- and this overlapped with the 7-year period from 2012-2018 during which she released 8 Throne of Glass novels.

Sarah J. Maas did this well before "romantasy" was a part of the lexicon. TikTok did not exist yet. She did not achieve commercial success by "following trends," and if you wish to plan out a career that looks like Sarah J. Maas, it probably does not look like "look at what is popular in 2025 and then do exactly that."

[kuiperblog]

My parents and I just talk about movies we've seen

I have a ~weekly phone conversation with my parents, and we rarely make it past the ~1 hour mark before the conversation turns to the topic of movies and TV shows.

Whenever the conversation goes substantially over 2 hours, it just consists of us looking at Letterboxd and Rotten Tomatoes together.

Representative excerpt from our most recent conversation:

Me: Okay. I'm looking at the Rotten Tomatoes page for Facing the Giants. Guess the critics score and audience score.

Dad: 13% and 93%.

Me: Close! You're within striking distance of both. It's 17% and 85%.

(My parents then spent several listening to my review of Facing the Giants based on what I remember from seeing it at church when I was a teenager, and how even then, it was offensive to both my artistic and Christian sensibilities.)

Another representative "trivia question" from our most recent conversation: "Guess the top 3 most popular 70's movies on Letterboxd." After they get The Godfather and Star War with their first 2 guesses, I spend several minutes prompting them with hints like "Robert DeNiro" and "Martin Scorsese" and "I don't think Mom has seen this one, but I'm 100% sure you've heard of it" before revealing that the answer is Taxi Driver.

This is the kind of conversation that is utterly engaging for my family, and utterly dull to anyone not participating it, and I apologize for recounting it and putting it onto your tumblr dash. But I bring it up because I talk with my parents ~weekly, and sometimes we run out of things to talk about, and whenever we go down this rabbithole it almost always pushes our "lazy Sunday afternoon" conversation past the 2 hour mark, and what could be a better way to spend my Sunday than yapping with my parents about nothing? (Maybe the same is true of you and your loved ones!)

[kuiperblog]

Where do you find Jason Pargin's stuff these days? I haven't thought to look since Cracked went down the drain

For starters, Jason Pargin has a Substack, where he occasionally posts essays in a style that's reminiscent of his work at Cracked.

A lot of Jason Pargin's rants about pop culture are on podcasts hosted by the Cracked alumni, where he'll make a guest appearance whenever he has a new book to promote (which is all the time). From time to time, he'll do "roundup" posts on his Substack where he says "hey, if you want to hear all the podcasts I've been on recently, here are links to all/most of them," here's the most recent round-up post.

I particularly enjoy his guest appearances on the Gamefully Unemployed podcast, which is where you're most likely to find him talking about movies and TV. He also had a good appearance on the Flightless Bird podcast, where Jason Pargin and David Farrier got to participate in a bit of mutual admiration, with David being an enjoyer of Jason's latest book, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, and Jason being a fan of David's documentaries, like Tickled (2016).

Jason also has his own podcast (cohosted with Cracked alum Brockway and Seanbaby, also Cracked alum) called BigFeets, where they discuss the TV show Mountain Monsters, which is not a good TV show, but a fascinating one. It usually takes them 1-2 hours to recap a 45 minute episode of television. (Also worth listening to: all of Jason's guest appearances on Seanbaby and Brockway's other podcast, the Dogg Zzone 9000.)

HOWEVER! The thing that Jason is now famous for is his TikTok, where he has accumulated 58.5 million likes, which I'm led to believe makes him quite successful and by most definitions a "TikTok star." (Jason has often reflected on how weird it is that he, as a visually unremarkable 50-year-man, has gained so much popularity on the platform where "the cool kids" hang out.)

Jason originally got onto TikTok because he was told that "that's where the book people hang out," and it seems to have worked out for him: he credits his TikTok popularity with his latest book (I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom) tripling the sales of his previous book.

Several times a week he will post short-form videos to TikTok. Some are nuggets of insight, some are shitposts, all are enjoyable. At this point I basically use the TikTok app exclusively for watching his videos. (Some of his TikTok videos are often duplicated across his accounts on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram/Threads, but I believe those other sites have duration limits that prevent him from posting his videos there; TikTok is probably the best place if you're trying to find "all his videos," even if a small number of his videos get taken down from TikTok for completely ineffable reasons.) His handle everywhere is jasonkpargin

[kuiperblog]

Where Star Wars went wrong

Quoting Jason Pargin, who articulates it better than I could:

"In any kind of a sane world, The Mandalorian should have run for 150 episodes at least. They had a formula here that could have worked forever.

"It's a formula that has always worked: a heroic stranger wanders into a strange new land and meets a bunch of colorful characters, usually under the thumb of a powerful threat. The threat is usually in the form of a villain who's played by a famous actor just chewing the scenery. He uses hits wits and his courage to get out of it and then he moves on.

"Have Gun, Will Travel" ran for 225 episodes from 1957-1963. It's where Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame got his start.

"The sci-fi space adventures we had years and years ago used to run forever. Star Trek TNG had about 180 episodes, Deep Space 9 had about the same number, even Voyager -- the show that we think of as being a "lesser series" -- had 172 episodes. And here's the thing: most of those episodes were really good!

"But because of the way the business works now, and because of 'corporate synergy,' by season 2 of the Mandalorian, they were brainstorming "how do we get this back to Luke Skywalker and the Death Star?"

"By season 3, fans were lost, because some huge plot events had occurred in a completely different series, because they needed it to connect to their Boba Fett show. And now, the Mandalorian is dead. They're gonna wrap up the story in a movie, and that's it.

And the crazy part is, this was always the perfect format for Star Wars: it always should have been a short form serial! That's what George Lucas was ripping off when he made the film back in 1977: serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

These were little 12-minute long episodes that played as one continuing story, but each one was its own little lighthearted adventure that usually ended on some kind of a cliffhanger.

"This is why so many of the most hardcore Star Wars fans who are old like me only like two of the movies, because by the third film they were already just repeating beats: they were attacking yet another Death Star.

They ran out of ideas so fast, because this is not the ideal format for this universe. The Mando and Baby Yoda Show is the ideal format! This should have run for the next 20 years! They even set it up so that the star wouldn't even need to be on set for most of it, because he wears a helmet!

"I think some fans object to this, because they think of it as making Star Wars smaller, that you're reducing it to 'just a TV show.' But it's the exact opposite: it lets you expand the universe, because you're forced to to keep coming up with new places for him to go, and new people for him to meet, new villains for him to face -- you're not forced to just keep coming back to the Death Star again and again, and the Sith, and the Jedi.

In Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the Starkiller Base destroys five planets. That's mathematically five times more tragic than the destruction of Alderaan.

"And if you want evidence, just look at Star Trek! It's the show that expanded the universe. The Star Trek films were just action movies that are very forgettable. But I guess the world has changed, because they don't even do Star Trek that way anymore.

Picard ended its run after 30 episodes. Discovery concluded after 65. Hopefully, Strange New Worlds marks a return to form for the franchise.

"I don't get it, because it seems like a version of this show that runs until the year 2040 would have just printed money. The merchandise sales alone would have covered the production costs. Instead, it's 24 episodes and a movie that I think everyone has already stopped caring about."

[kuiperblog]

Tidy your living space with Pimsleur language tapes

I believe that Pimsleur is the best way to start learning a new language if you care more about oral ability than literacy.

It's also a great way to tidy your apartment.

While learning a new language is something that's done just using your voice and headphones -- theoretically freeing up your hands for other activities, like video games -- I find that speaking in an unfamiliar language requires such intense concentration that I cannot do anything that involves using a screen while speaking or focusing on an unfamiliar language.

Anything that puts words on my screen and engages the language processing part of my brain is right out, and even tasks like steering my go-kart or moving my reticle to an automaton's head require too much focus for me to do them formulating a response to the woman asking me "koen wa doko desu ka?"

Thus, while listening to language tapes might seem superficially similar to listening to a podcast in my native language, I find that many things I typically regard as "podcast activities" are off the table when my brain is sending the signals to my mouth to form the words "koen wa asoko desu" or "iie, atode tabemasu."

My hands limbs should be free to do whatever they want while I'm learning (aside from the moments when I find it useful to "talk with my hands" and point to remind my brain that I'm saying "over there" or "no, no,"), but for the most part, all I can really do with my body as I listen to the language tape is pace around my home. And as I pace, I pick up the glass off the counter and put it into the dishwasher. And pick items out of my laundry basket and fold them. And take the folding chair propped against the wall and transfer it to the closet. And by the end of my 30 minute lesson, I find that I've added a few new phrases to my vocabulary, and that my apartment is a bit tidier than when I started, and at the end of a week my apartment has the appearance of a home that has been the beneficiary of several hours of tidying up.

[kuiperblog]

Two facts about Jamie Lee Curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis starred in movie where she trades places with her daughter (played by Lindsey Lohan)

Jamie Lee Curtis was in a movie titled Trading Places

These are two independent facts that have nothing to do with each other.

[gsirvitor]

[ffspleasestop]

[isaacsapphire]

Dumb question, but how the heck does Costco function? I know they pay their employees well, and their prices are supposed to be good. What’s the magic/trick/scam here?

[kuiperblog]

A big one is that Costco stocks fewer unique items. A typical Costco location will have maybe ~4,000 SKUs, whereas a Target might have ~80,000 SKUs. This has several benefits:

Fewer SKUs means quicker inventory turnover

The higher the sales volume is for an item, the easier it is for sellers to move.

If a SKU is obscure or unpopular enough, it might never get bought, winding up as "dead inventory." (Maybe Target never manages to find a buyer for the last 2 bottles of sriracha-flavored mushroom ketchup.)

Costco only stocks the most popular ketchup SKUs that will move off the shelf quickly.

Think about what it actually means for a product to "move off the shelf quickly." That's not just a poetic way of saying "people are really eager to buy it," it means that Costco inventory literally spends less time on the shelf. When a huge part of the retail cost is the cost of keeping items on the shelf (and paying for the rent, utilities, security, etc), "less time on shelf" = "less inventory expenses".

And aside from the inventory costs of having a shelf on the item for longer, and just think about the time value of money: in a world where deflation means the dollar shrinks with every passing day, every extra day that an item sits on the shelf before being sold is a day that it is losing value.

Consider what it means for the cash flow of the business: suppliers typically get paid "Net 30" or "Net 60," which means that the retailer pays the supplier 30 to 60 days after receiving inventory. (The suppliers are essentially extending the retailer a line of credit -- this is something Dan Davies described in Lying for Money, and which I summarized in my book review.)

If the product sits on the shelf for longer than that, then the retailer has "cash flow problems," and they probably have to find a line of credit since they are now paying for inventory that they have yet to make a sale on.

When Costco products "move off the shelf quickly," they have the opposite of these types of cash flow problems: they make the sale, get the money, but still have another 20+ days to pay their supplier. This is called "negative working capital" and essentially amounts to getting an interest-free loan from your supplier.

Some inventory depreciates on the shelf

This is related to the above point about inventory turnover. I mentioned "the time value of money" which is real but sort of marginal; inflation doesn't reduce the value of a dollar that much over a 30 day period.

However, there are some items that decrease in value the longer that they sit on the shelf. Big examples of these are electronics like TVs. A TV that is $4,000 today probably won't be worth $4,000 in 12 months. It loses value for every day that it spends on the shelf. So once again, Costco's approach of "stock fewer SKUs -> get faster turnover" is preventing this kind of loss.

Fewer SKUS means higher sales volume per SKU

This is more marginal than the other factors, but bears mentioning: instead of having a little bit of many things, Costco has a lot of a few things. Just as you can save money by "buying items in bulk" from Costco, Costco can save money by "buying items in bulk" from its suppliers.

Costco has less shrinkage

Costco, which charges an annual membership, has a shrinkage rate that is around a tenth of a typical retailer. (Reportedly, Costco shrinkage is 0.1-0.2%, average is 1.6%.)

Shrinkage is a huge deal when you consider that net retail margins are pretty tiny (Walmart has a net profit margin of 2.5%, Costco's is 2.4%).

We can't really do math using the net margins since those already have shrinkage baked in to the calculation of costs, but consider a hypothetical example of a retailer that has 5% net margins if we consider everything except shrinkage (so we're factoring the wholesale price of the goods on the shelf, the wages of the employees that stock the shelf, the cost of literally keeping the lights on and paying for all other utilities, etc etc.)

For this hypothetical retailer with a 5% margin ("net except for shrinkage"), that means that when they sell a frozen pizza for $10, their total cost is $9.50, and they make a profit of 50 cents on the transaction. But if someone steals a frozen pizza off the shelf, they lose $9.50.

In other words, when one pizza is stolen, they need to sell 19 pizzas just to break even!

Fewer SKUs means lower operational/labor costs

A non-trivial amount of the labor cost of a Target location is the time that employees spend stocking the shelves. (I am reporting this based on my own experiences as a 23-year-old Target employee, rather than industry research, but my entire job was putting inventory on the shelf, sometimes just a few bottles at a time.)

Suppose Target sells 10 different kinds of ketchup and stocks 6 bottles of each SKU, while Costco sells 2 kinds of ketchup and stocks 30 of each SKU. Target will much more frequently encounter the situation where a single SKU runs out and they need to send an employee to restock the shelf, even if it's just to put 10 bottles on the shelf, whereas whenever a Costco resupplies the ketchup shelf, they'll be putting 40+ bottles there.

(The above is not a real example -- Target would have more bottles of the popular SKUs like Heinz classic and fewer bottles of the less-popular SKUs like "Hunts reduced sugar ketchup" but hopefully this imprecise model is still useful as an illustrative example.)

Also, this is once again just "reckoning from my perspective as an employee," but it just seems to me like Costco has fewer operational costs due to the way they move inventory around on the floor. I have been at Costco location where it seemed like "restocking" was just driving a forklift and placing a pallet at a designated spot, whereas as at Target the process more often involved a person physically going to the stockroom, finding a specific box, bringing out a relatively small quantity of product, carefully arranging them on the shelf, and breaking down the cardboard box.

I'm sure that Costco employees spend some of their working hours doing "small annoying things," but the modal Costco employee seems to be accomplishing more with an hour of their time than I did with one hour of my time as a Target employee. Also, Costco probably has higher employee morale than Target because Costco doesn't force its employees to bring their own boxcutters to work. (That observation about boxcutters is not really all that germane to the discussion of "how is Costco so successful," but it emerged from deep within my soul as a former Target employee.)