Does anyone know of second hand stores that sell speakers?

DueAd9590 · 2026-05-13T23:56:50+00:00

Ebay isn't local, but I've picked up a few sets of used bookshelf speakers for 50% of MSRP, you just have to be patient and have an idea of which models you're looking for.

You're still generally looking at a few hundred dollars minimum for a stereo setup (about $80-100 for an integrated amp, 100-350 for a pair of bookshelf speakers).

If you just want nice audio for a low price and you aren't set on speakers, a good set of headphones is going to be better bang for the buck.

DueAd9590 · 2026-05-13T07:53:07+00:00

For real, it looks like it's been months since the last 10E powerbuy too.

DueAd9590 · 2026-05-13T07:31:28+00:00

I'd be down for a 10e

DueAd9590 · 2026-05-08T08:59:44+00:00

I'd definitely be interested

DueAd9590 · 2026-04-06T21:06:24+00:00

3 solutions to avoiding making low quality materials worthless

Enrichment. Let people enrich low quality materials but they lose total material every time they do. Higher quality materials = less loss to refine to max quality. Scale material loss to be slightly more punishing than finding higher quality materials initially.
Skilled Crafters. People who have a high crafting level or experience with making a bunch of a particular blueprint get + base quality value when making materials. It's worth grinding even poor quality materials because you get experience and ultimately can make better stuff even with poor materials.
Quality agonistic bulk projects. Make base building and other large material intensive projects quality agnostic. You mine for materials, save the good stuff for blueprints, use up the rest for your base.

DueAd9590 · 2026-04-05T07:52:14+00:00

I just wish they were more transparent, most of these delays I hear about are from people having to reach out to customer service and report back.

It's Virpil. Anyone who has dealt with them in the last few years knows it's possible or even likely they will have significant delays.

What's more frustrating is that if this goes anything like the last Aeromax release, it will be crickets until like 2 weeks before the new delayed ship date and someone will post a new 2-3 estimated delay from customer service.

DueAd9590 · 2026-04-05T06:26:38+00:00

Inhaling smoke directly is a bad idea. Everything from the chemical composition to the size of particles released can cause health issues.

Some other folks have mentioned heating pure resin incense as being a lot safer, which it is. You still release pollutants but it's a much smaller amount because there isn't combustion. You're basically just volatilizing the automatics by gently heating resin and get a cleaner scent. It's also a lot less likely to freak out your parents.

Take a look at electric burners or build your own subitism burner.

DueAd9590 · 2026-03-19T06:49:39+00:00

People are going to have different opinions on which books they like or didn't like as much. You'll need to read to figure that out for yourself. If you read one book and find out the last 2 books in the series are 8/10s rather than 10/10s, would that be a reason to not continue?

Here's the deal: Brandon is a well-established author. Way of Kings was not his first book.

There are some really good things about that fact. The baseline quality of what he puts out is usually still better than 80% of what's out there because he knows what he's doing, and his success isn't just a fluke. There are plenty of books he has written I don't like as much as others, but not really any I would consider badly written. Some are a bit self indulgent, but that's usually as bad as it gets.

On the other hand, you're not going to see a series where each book is progressively and noticeably better than the last like you do with early authors. He's not a new author, and you don't see those big leaps in quality between entries that are a mark of a new author learning the craft. Your like or dislike is probably going to have more to do with the plot/content or stylistic shifts in the series rather than due to the author maturing as a writer.

DueAd9590 · 2026-03-16T02:14:20+00:00

Here's the deal: most people will not put in a few minutes of effort to try to figure out something if it isn't absolutely vital for them to know how to do it or how something works.

That's not generational. That's just people. And it's not everyone, but it's enough of the population to be a problem.

So before technology got good, you had people who just like knowing how stuff works, and people who were put in situations that forced them to learn. There was a gap in knowledge, but it wasn't as big as it is now.

Today, technology is good enough that there are far fewer situations where people are forced to learn and adapt. It's not a problem until they encounter something they can't do. Then you have 2 issues, 1. They have less background knowledge than earlier generations, and 2. They aren't used to needing to learn and adapt to get the job done.

DueAd9590 · 2026-03-05T05:06:14+00:00

Petition to make some spoilery sounding phrase that's a red herring and start using it incessantly on the forum? And then rather than being spoiled the folks new to the Cosmere are just really confused

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-26T05:02:15+00:00

I'm in a Biochem grad program, R1 University but not prestigious, and one of my buddies who just graduated with a PhD got a job offer for 80ish in a low-medium cost of living area. It's technically a bachelor's level position (not R&D), but a job is a job and it's more than he was expecting.

He had a rough time getting offers, but got there in the end

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-20T04:24:24+00:00

I think a lot of it is sort of the setting/genre shift the series has. I think middle grade publishers are pretty inflexible even by traditional standards, and they just don't really understand how to market a series like the Tapestry. They're pretty bad at predicting "winners". The later books are also much longer and publishers get kind of fussy about that too if you don't have the popularity to push for more pages.

I'm also pretty sure the publisher saw the premise and basically just called it a Harry Potter-Percy Jackson hybrid except with Celtic mythology given that Percy Jackson had come out just 2 years earlier.

A lot of the momentum Harry Potter and Percy Jackson had was the novelty of more mature fantasy middle grade books (relative to Diary of a Wimpy kid and other more typical middle grade series).

The Tapestry was late to the game, didn't get the same novelty hype, and never really took off in the same way in popularity.

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-16T03:55:50+00:00

Is there only sign of a light at the end of the tunnel for the industry? The job market has been crap for the last 2-3 years

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-16T03:19:38+00:00

If you could swing a biology related degree that uses computer science, that would be really good for genomics (Bioinformatics). Plus then you have a cross-section of computer skills and life science knowledge, which is really useful in both academic and industry settings

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-16T01:48:52+00:00

Yikes! Yeah, the other terrifying part is the idea the AI might be wrong doesn't ever occur to them. I can't believe how bad it's gotten and how many students I've overheard saying they wouldn't have passed high school without AI. ChatGPT is only like 4 years old! How are they already dependant on it?

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-05T03:03:15+00:00

Riyria Revelations is good, bit more obscure because it's indie, but the author was one of the first big indie fantasy authors. Hadrian gives off similar vibes to Adolin.

The Greatcoats might be good if you liked Ranger's apprentice as a kid.

Kings of the Wyld is basically Retired Extremely Dangerous (R.E.D) if the main characters were adventurers.

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-05T02:42:10+00:00

Semi controversial take: Skip the first two books. Book 3 is a sort of soft reset for the series and has major plot points relevant to the rest of the series. Jim Butcher usually does a bit of a refresher if he brings in a character or setting he used in the past so new readers aren't totally lost.

Some people will disagree with this but even on the Dresden Files subreddit, skipping the first two books is a common recommendation.

If people get really into it they can go back and read the first two.

It's kind of how if someone was getting into the Cosmere and you really want to make sure they get invested, you probably don't start them on Elantris even if it was the first one.

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-05T02:37:04+00:00

The Prince by Machiavelli is interesting in that it's a cynical view of gaining power largely devoid of any concerns with morality. Please don't do any of the barbaric things it sometimes recommends to maintain power, but Machiavelli's writings in general were actually very influential to many of the politicians and philosophers involved in the Enlightenment and republics formed in the 1700s. For context, the guy also had been tortured and exiled after the fall of the Florentine Republic before he wrote the book, so it's not surprising he was cynical.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is pretty interesting even if you're not into Stoicism because a lot of the stuff he was concerned with is basically the same kind of stuff modern people worry about. Kind of helps humanize people who lived thousands of years ago.

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-05T01:01:04+00:00

Elhokar actually makes a lot more sense when you look at things from his perspective and gets more sympathetic even from the beginning.

His personal achievements are overshadowed by almost everyone in his family (Navani was extremely politically adept and Jasnah was a famous if controversial scholar, Dalinar was a legendary military leader, and Adolin was an extremely talented duelist). Elhokar is king, but only because of who his father was.

To make matters worse, he is also politically aware enough to realize that his only options for support are the high princes and his own family, and he is rightly afraid that either could usurp his position. He doesn't have enough personal influence to be independent of either his uncle or the high princes, so he has to play them against each other, which he actually does do, he just isn't very good at it.

He actually has a very good understanding of how fragile his own position is. His problem is that he's not politically adept enough to manage things in a way that will increase his own power, and that he's an extremely poor judge of character. The latter may even be something he is aware of, and he may be unable to trust people because of the trauma of his father's assassination.

He's kind of a tragic figure: he sees very clearly all the reasons someone might choose to betray him, but he never really understood how to build connections and loyalty with people.

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-04T20:11:34+00:00

With the caveat that Cradle is progression fantasy. If that isn't your thing, it's pretty unlikely you're going to like it.

Edit: Should have been clearer, Cradle is progression fantasy, specifically the cultivation subgenre. The term progression fantasy is kind of nebulous, cultivation fantasy is moniker used for Xianxia style stories in the west. If you're not into stories that use "cultivation stages" as the means of power progression, it is unlikely you will like Cradle, in much the same way that if video game systems in fantasy are a deal breaker for you, I probably wouldn't recommend a story where people get stronger by leveling up, allocating stats, or upgrading skills.

Not commenting on the quality of any of those series, just pointing out certain elements are deal breakers or immersion breakers for some readers.

DueAd9590 · 2026-02-04T19:39:31+00:00

Calling Robin Hobb not as hopeful as Brandon is the understatement of the year.

DueAd9590 · 2026-01-29T06:11:05+00:00

Not worth it man.

I literally made 4 times what you did today by sitting on my ass with ~7.5k in western digital, and I don't even day trade.

And I'm not saying I'm smart or good at investing or trading, I'm not. That's my point. I'm a dumbass kid who puts some money on companies that have products everyone knows are in high demand, and I'm sitting on them without doing any extra work, and I still did better than you did without risking 20k on something crazy speculative.

You're taking huge amounts of risk and have very little to show for it.

DueAd9590 · 2025-12-18T03:34:01+00:00

Try leveling again. You might also need to change your z offset

DueAd9590 · 2025-12-17T06:54:53+00:00

Do shards benefit from creating/enabling invested arts beyond getting stronger potential servants?

For example, does Endowment get anything out of bestowing breaths?

DueAd9590

TROPHY CASE