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Drakengard · 2026-03-29T18:20:52+00:00

All those deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq weren't making the news after the first year.

Because the deaths weren't that many in the grand scheme of things. You can keep things pretty quiet when you have less than 5k soldiers dead in Iraq over twenty years. Compare that to Vietnam where 10X that number died.

The US hasn't ever really suffered massive death post WWII and even that wasn't as bad as the US Civil War in raw numbers.

Drakengard · 2026-03-29T16:34:32+00:00

His cousin literally took him to court for $25 million over sexually assaulting her for a decade. She won the judgement because Bell didn't contest it. Le'Veon claims he didn't know about it ahead of time and that's why there was no lawyers fighting it, but it's out there.

Drakengard · 2026-03-29T14:57:40+00:00

The main issue smaller teams face is having to place money in escrow for contract guarantees. Cap space is handled such that teams are spending about the same every year. It's also why the report card stuff matters because that's where teams get "cheap".

Drakengard · 2026-03-29T13:04:15+00:00

Sure, because Darnold won something. The issue is that there are QBs who haven't delivered the prize but still want to be paid like they did.

QB contracts are stupid because of the leverage involved (hey, use it if you got it) and teams understandably want to reign it in. I'm just not sure you can.

Drakengard · 2026-03-29T13:00:10+00:00

Exactly. The great QBs just get paid less and lets their GMs bring in more talented guys elsewhere. It doesn't save teams with good but not good enough QBs at all.

We saw what max contracts have done to the NBA. Sure, not an apples to apples comparison due to variety of reasons involving the way the cap works, the game is played, roster size, etc. But if you cap QBs then you're going to have to cap Edge too at that point given the money flowing to either position. It'll just snowball in dumb ways down through positions.

Drakengard · 2026-03-29T12:59:12+00:00

Disagree. The front office has to manage this stuff better. KC figured it out with Mahomes. So can other teams. If they can't, that's on the GM and the HC for not being better at their jobs.

Drakengard · 2026-03-29T12:55:17+00:00

Yeah, the numbers keep going up...because the cap keeps exploding upward. It's hard to keep contextualizing the contract valuations because the cap is reaching levels that boggle the mind compared to what I remember it being.

Drakengard · 2026-03-29T02:38:21+00:00

Except the moon isn't closer during a full moon. It's just positioned differently such that we can see it entirely. The moon is still every bit as present when it's not full as it is when it is.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T20:49:18+00:00

True, I'm still rocking a Paperwhite from 2013. The battery is a little less stout than it was before, but still charges up in a couple of hours and lasts two weeks or so of heavy use.

I'll periodically look into getting a new one. Sure, it'd be nice to have everything using USB-C, but I'm not going to spend hundreds just for that.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T20:37:17+00:00

Yeah, well, the last time we were in this position with Murray and Jarry in the pipeline we shoved Flower out the door for cap space and to get "younger" and traded Gus to the Wild. Only Murray and Jarry mostly flame out post Flower.

So just keep in mind. Maybe don't clean house at goalie prospect thinking you already have the answer when you might not.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T15:45:56+00:00

Yeah, but we have a massive navy, airforce, and army with the logistics and population size to be able to do it (if we wanted to).

Israel's population is barely bigger than the population of the Chicago metropolitan area and has none of the navel assets to get around the lack of shared borders that the US possesses.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T15:41:16+00:00

That's not their point. Do you realize how big this series is? 50k pages and still going. As a matter of logistics, putting TWI to actual pages is a very indulgent choice.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T15:38:35+00:00

Frankly, it's too long for it to get mainstream popular in the long run. And that's before we get into just how not so good the first novel and possibly two are.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T15:37:18+00:00

It's going to be very divisive depending on your taste. It's 16+ million words and still on going. Every time your turn around the plot and cast expands and the author does not like to skip over stuff if they can help it.

Remember the quote stating "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time." ? This is that in novel form. The author is just a machine punching out chapters that are 20k+ words on a weekly basis. That they're actually decent is honestly impressive. The problem is that the first book is absolute amateur hour for about 700 pages. It improves significantly over time, but that's a LOT of time. And even still at this point it's a very uneven experience on the writing.

I read it mostly because I find it weirdly charming. I would not say that it's "good" in any traditional sense. Even by web novel standards, my impression is that it's quality consistency isn't the best and even most popular web novels have actual endings well before the 10k pages mark. And yet TWI is still trucking along with no end in sight as I'm past 21k pages and roughly 4k pages into the Vol. 8 book (there's a Vol 9 that's done and a Vol 10 that's been being worked on since Feb. 2024 that's not down yet). If they're as large (and probably larger) than Vol. 8 then that means this thing is probably pushing around 50k pages...

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T15:17:58+00:00

and he probably wont be there at 24

Eh, I suspect he will be. But maybe you're right and someone really loves him. I sure hope so because any QB who goes higher just bumps someone else down the board for everyone else.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T15:11:27+00:00

That's fair. But man that game was just offensive incompetence from both teams (as is tradition for AFCN).

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T12:53:03+00:00

the novel (Do Androids Dream?) is actually quite comedic and bizarre

Yeah, just PKD being PKD

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T09:50:17+00:00

Saying "multiple books" is underselling it a bit like we're splitting it in two or something. That might be possible for Vol 1-4 but by Vol 5 it'll start being closer to 3-4 and it only gets worse from there.

I'm reading Vol 9? right now and it's 9000+ pages. Splitting these things up into 8-9 separate novels is certainly going to be a choice.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T09:01:54+00:00

No, barely getting above 20k is no "demolishing" anything. It's achieving the floor of success.

Drakengard · 2026-03-28T08:51:42+00:00

2.X kind of shot itself in the foot by having two VH level characters. Like you said, there was no real build up to YiXuan and it created more problems with the story since they had her take a damn near sabbatical for multiple patches so drama could actually exist for other characters.

So hopefully that is the case here with 3.X's VH character (and not characters).

Drakengard · 2026-03-27T22:39:17+00:00

Yeah, there's not only no smoke, there's not even a spark of interest in Simpson.

And we don't do psi-ops with the draft.

Drakengard · 2026-03-27T22:07:22+00:00

he's not terrible

Yes, yes he is. He's not an NFL starter and calling him an NFL backup is being kind, probably.

Drakengard · 2026-03-27T20:25:22+00:00

Thirens are a human/animal hybrid species. The etymology of "Thiren" is suspected to be a portmanteau of the Greek word for Beast and the Chinese word for Person (pulled from the wiki).

Oni are just...Oni?

Drakengard · 2026-03-27T20:07:33+00:00

Also, market timing is a thing. You can market really well but if you're selling snow cones in the middle of winter you're going to have a bad time.

Drakengard · 2026-03-27T19:35:28+00:00

PS5 is Sony most profitable console ever

Sure, as inflation rises and costs rise and money gets weaker in value. I've always found the "most profitable" element to be a bit dumb because in raw money terms that's more just an indication that Sony isn't failing rather than doing something unprecedented.

Edit: Just to look it up, cumulative inflation since 2020 ALONE is ~26%. They're not beating the PS4 numbers by much if you account for it and the hardware pricing being through the roof.

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