On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Hey there, homesteader! If you're a FrontierVille fan, you're going to need this guide. Why? Well, one of the surprising things about FrontierVille is that it's got no place for players to see or display their achievements. Most games supply a way for players to proudly display, and keep track of, in-game milestones. These could come in the form of ribbons (FarmVille), medals (Happy Aquarium), statues (Pet Society), etc. Without this future knowledge, you can't anticipate tasks, so you can't plan ahead to make sure you've got everything you need. In FrontierVille, achievements are called "Goals", and they seem to appear and disappear like the wind. Sometimes, there can be as many as three goals at once. Sometimes, until you clear one goal, you can't see what the next one may be. Some goals can only be completed through sheer chance. Another annoyance is that you could complete a task, but be forced into a do-over, just because you did it before the...