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Strive Hard update — Ketamine Dealer, Mt. Shasta aliens & Palantir bunker fever dream
Play the update: airomatic.ai/strive-hard
Chapter 1 ends on a yacht called Diligence. Last update added FlareUp and Corgi Café. This one goes sideways and underground: Oakland plush-compound logistics, a mountain full of unintelligible purpose, and a Marin bunker where surveillance has anxiety.
Unlock chain (spoiler-light)
- Finish toward the yacht peak → talk to the guy in the fox onesie
- Map pin: Ketamine Dealer (that’s the label — Oakland, Dylan)
- Optional Mt. Shasta crystal / “contact” path
- Map pin: Palantir HQ (Marin Bunker) — only after the lattice notices you
Miss the fox on the boat and the Oakland pin stays dark. The Bay is full of doors you have to actually open.
Ketamine Dealer (Dylan)
Dylan is not a normal network connection. Furry onesies (fox on the yacht, raccoon at home). Plush toys in a military hierarchy. Mushroom bins and jars in the hallway. An otter advisor named Lieutenant Squelch.
At his place you can:
| Choice | Vibe |
|---|---|
| Bag and leave | Pay, get weirded out, preserve remaining sanity |
| Movie night | A Wrinkle in Time (Oprah as Mrs. Which) on ketamine — leaves you with self-diagnosed MKUltra Programming Disorder |
| Mt. Shasta run | Galaxy-print Prius, chakra crystal activation, lights that are “not a plane,” and a profound alien purpose download delivered in pure new-age enterprise speak |
The contact scene is meant to feel holy for eleven seconds — galactic GTM, root chakras of surveillance, soft underbelly of the cosmos — and then the comedown hits: you cannot remember what they were on about. Classic. Your phone buzzes anyway.
Palantir HQ (Marin bunker)
Recruited because you “touched the lattice.” Secret door in a hillside. Badges that check your soul graph. Murals for tunnels to Aspen nuclear silos (metaphorical, whispers an analyst, then: they’re not).
Alex Karp is mid–fever dream: AI drones trained on their own telemetry and developed taste. He needs your half-remembered gifts to tune the stack before the stack tunes civilization. Tray options include espresso, an NDA the size of a novel, and lines “to keep sharp.”
War-room branches:
- Actually help (stipend, temporary savior of the ontology)
- Soft sabotage (rename threats to “main character energy”)
- Clone a USB of high-profile tech executive surveillance graphs — pocket it, or confess and “red team the ethics”
- More Karp lines for “cognitive edge”
Texts from Dylan and Karp unlock with the arcs. Home hub copy will nag you if pins are waiting.
Why ship this?
Strive Hard was always about SF founder culture with the polite filter off. This pass leans into the esoteric Bay Area under the startup layer: dealers who talk like mystics, mystics who talk like product managers, and national-security cosplay that still offers you a consulting stipend.
Still zero affiliation with any real company, yacht, mountain, or bunker. Rated R for bad takes, onesies, and classified vibes.
Try it
- Play: /strive-hard/ — Menu → Fullscreen if the iframe is tight
- Tip: At yacht midnight, choose the fox. Then open Map.
- Prior posts: Launch · FlareUp + Corgi
- Co-write more chaos: Contact
Want Series A board drama next, or more Shasta fallout? The group chat — and the otter — are listening.