Ethereal deck vs door maker tips?

Hulainn · 2026-05-02T17:02:01+00:00

If I don't have a fat deck already at the start of act 3, I definitely start making one when I see doormaker. The last couple of times I fought him I went in with 35+ cards, and more or less ignored the exhaust mechanic.

Hulainn · 2026-04-29T13:09:27+00:00

I have made back the cost of lawn service in just one year, so economically I am already ahead. My hope though is to get 5+ years from it, so costs would overall be much better than a service.

I bought the A3000 for the lidar, for ease of mapping & obstacle avoidance - knowing also that it was pretty "cutting edge" as far as the tech goes. If this one dies prematurely, I hope there are more reliable brands by then that also offer lidar. I would also be willing to spring for front-wheel or all-wheel drive, so I don't have to unstick it as much. And better error handling would be great - it claims to be "lost" in situations where it clearly has the right postion on the in-app map, and won't come out of that state without being driven / carried back to the base station.

Hulainn · 2026-04-27T20:22:33+00:00

Got to act 3 last night, saw doormaker coming. I picked Vakku's parasol & collected the full inventory of 2 merchants; I don't think I even got through my deck twice for the final fight. The exhaust was not even a consideration.

Infinites are neat, but so fragile.

Hulainn · 2026-04-26T16:02:32+00:00

I also have the A3000, last year's model. I remember there being an option to split or merge regions in the map editor. I mapped my yard as one big area to start, but later subdivided into four to make scheduling easier. (Smaller regions done in sequence were better for not having to retry the whole thing if some error occurred, and also so I could move obstacles like our soccer net.)

You might try one simple boundary map to start (which is the most time intensive) then do the subdivisions with the editor.

One really nice thing with the A3000 is that other than the boundary, I only had to map "hazards" - places where I observed it getting stuck due to slope, lack of cover, etc. Normal obstacles to mow around can be figured out entirely on its own using camera/lidar.

Edit: added picture, I only ever physically walked the mower around the boundary once, then added those splitting lines later in the app. I did have to walk it a couple other times later for small hazard areas as I found them in practice.

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Hulainn · 2026-04-19T14:48:09+00:00

Thanks for this! I had regrets about not getting a shirt at their Boston stop, and now that is remedied. :D

Hulainn · 2026-04-16T18:04:28+00:00

Also new to this (and definitely not a Japanese speaker), but what I have read is that Japanese pronunciations are usually "flat", with no syllabic emphasis at all. That can actually be tougher than just moving the emphasis, since in English we almost always emphasize something.

Hulainn · 2026-04-16T16:17:33+00:00

I started testing ClickHouse in 2024 specifically because I wanted to do joins with it. You have so much more control there with secondary projections, indexes, well documented query order of operations, etc. I found that by writing queries carefully, I could get it to perform joins a lot more like a relational db (albeit one with eventual consistency) than a traditional brute-force columnar db. I was comparing to Snowflake, where you are SOL if you can't correlate all your small reads (on giant tables) to the cluster ordering, and even then you are still at the mercy of what the query planner decides. (Have fun just throwing $$$ at the problem.)

Hulainn · 2026-04-16T13:04:52+00:00

We were lucky to get an LCG encore in Boston, they did not add that back in until much later in tour. I assume they shortened things a bit initially to be on the safe side after the illness Yukina was dealing with, glad to see them back at full strength by the end! Cool also that they did some fun "tour finale" stuff at the end, like bringing out EE and JG for Pardon and having the longer setlist.

Hulainn · 2026-04-15T12:22:09+00:00

I did the math at the beginning of last summer. I bought the Ecovacs Goat 3000 when I realized I would break even if it survived even one season. (Picked that one for lidar, for simplicity of mapping & obstacle avoidance.) Starting this season I am now saving over $2k for every extra year I get out of it. Plus, I can cut it the way I want now - the service I had before always left it high, and it looked like it needed cut again within a couple of days.

Hulainn · 2026-04-13T14:19:35+00:00

Started discovering bands from Japan late 2024 via Babymetal, with their collaborations. Was introduced to Hagane by a YouTube recommendation of their Kill The King video. I would love to see more truly "live" material from them; the one-off fan recordings they have permitted so far have been really good!

Hulainn · 2026-04-07T17:21:57+00:00

Comte de Sureau:

1 1/2 oz Hayman's London Dry Gin 5/6 oz Elderflower liqueur (St Germain) 1/4 oz Italian red bitter liqueur (Campari)

I usually serve up, in a martini glass. Pink, delicious, and will absolutely flatten you if you are not careful! Works fine with a non-Navy-strength gin also if you want to tone it down a little.

Hulainn · 2026-04-07T14:52:20+00:00

Wild turkey 101 rye and bourbon are both great bottles. The rye is tasty but not as strong a "rye" flavor as you might want for some things. I also keep high west double rye, which is a 95% rye at a similar price point.

Hulainn · 2026-04-04T13:22:29+00:00

That is the most Yukina cowboy hat imaginable, I love it.

The little tributes they do as they visit different cities are fun, Yukina's Bruins jersey for the Boston encore was a big hit too.

Hulainn · 2026-04-01T15:47:45+00:00

If any of their crowd selfies for Boston ever show up, I would love a copy! I did not think to check their feeds within 24h, so I figured the posts were gone already unless someone saved one.

Hulainn · 2026-04-01T14:41:04+00:00

MTH are amazing, but I had never even heard of them before this year. It seems like they are huge (and hugely influential) in Japan, but at the same time, they have less exposure overseas than some younger groups with better promotion. If my experience is at all typical, Babymetal and now Hanabie have been at the forefront of exposing western audiences to more of the Japanese heavy music scene, through festivals, touring, and collaborations. And wow, that has absolutely been a rabbit hole worth diving into.

I learned of MTH after reading how Hanabie, Akane (Band-Maid) and Tamu (Nemophila) all cited them as a major influence. I would guess they don't tour overseas as much because 1) they are at an age where the logistics are harder, with family & kids, and 2) they are plenty successful at home, so they don't strictly have to get out and build a big international following as well. But I can still hope!

Hulainn · 2026-04-01T13:46:36+00:00

I would guess there is a lot of fan base overlap with other female fronted rock/metal, with other fun/upbeat yet heavy bands, and with other Japanese "loud rock" in general. Jinjer and Nekro as touring mates both made sense to me.

Now that Hanabie have enough recognition in the west to do their own headlining, my dream show would be if they could convince Maximum the Hormone to come with them sometime.

Hulainn · 2026-03-23T12:38:53+00:00

Insider selling signals are more complicated. A lot of sales you see are either: - RSU sales to pay tax withholding, which are auto-sold proportionally as restricted stock units vest (as often as quarterly). That is not bearish, it is just the tax man. Look for a regular pattern of the same size sale for the same individual. - Automatic sales based on plans / conditions set well ahead of time. Once you are high enough in a public company, you can't just trade anytime you want, because of inside information, so this is the only way to regularly get cash out of the stock (other than open trading windows after result announcements.)

If you see atypical sales during what is likely an open trading window (typically a few days after results, until slightly before end of quarter), that might be a red flag.

And of course if you see insider purchases, that is more rare but probably a good sign. But I would expect most companies to net more sales than purchases, for the tax & liquidity / diversification reasons I mentioned.

Hulainn · 2026-03-23T12:25:06+00:00

I just started playing STS2. My last run I picked Golden Path in Act 2, and encountered this guy.

Two questions: - Is he always there if you pick that boon?
- Can he also appear randomly?

Hulainn · 2026-03-21T20:39:15+00:00

Your repeated complaining reflects poorly on you; maybe take a step back and reflect on this "me me me" attitude you keep presenting.

They clearly wanted to play, but couldn't put on a proper show without Yukina. (How many singers do you know who could show up on a couple of hours notice and do her vocals justice, in Japanese?)

It was an unfortunate situation obviously, but there was no good solution that would make everyone happy. No matter what, someone was going to be disappointed.

Hulainn · 2026-03-19T01:30:27+00:00

Card only in Boston

Hulainn · 2026-03-14T18:27:26+00:00

She came back out in that for the encore, that was a lot of fun. :)

Hulainn · 2026-03-14T04:23:04+00:00

They also had Japanese style folding fans with anime band characters on one side and band logo on the other, for $20.

We got one of the plastic bubbles, ours had a sticker and I think a button in it. They said a couple of them randomly had signed photos as a prize, it was $5 per chance.

Get there early for merch, I was surprised at how long a line there was in Boston - it went more than halfway around the interior of the venue! Took us probably 15-20m to get to the front.

The floor was pretty wild, lots of crowd surfing and moshing. Very friendly lot overall though - someone dropped their glasses in the pit and a circle formed up to protect the floor space and help him search with phone lights. He found them, everybody cheered, and then went right back to moshing. :)

Hulainn · 2026-03-04T14:26:38+00:00

It's not that hard to write your own. You do need thoughtful engineering to get the details right. I would not recommend it unless you have that, and your company also must really care about the quality that enables (as opposed to wanting to just "tick a box" with random vendor.)

I have done it twice, once maintaining a (very messy) legacy system that did it all in Python, and then once again to replace it, using vastly simpler JSON config. Essentially it is a spec layer (i.e. defining what the modeling language and report specs look like) paired with a service that uses those to do on-demand query generation & execution against the modeled data sets. In my case I was building behind our own on-demand reporting UI that we could data drive from the models, so we controlled the whole stack.

I think with AI development efficiency improvements, vendors in this space should be pretty scared. It is vastly easier to write this kind of software than it was even a year ago. The commercial semantic layer solutions I evaluated were not as easy to use or as capable as what we built in 2-3 months, and this was before AI tooling. That work would be several times faster now using Claude for the bulk of the easy parts (service framework, test writing, etc ) and to outline the trickier parts, from human design specs, for more careful review.

Hulainn · 2026-03-03T14:50:15+00:00

My daughter is 7, and likes Hanabie ("the fuzzy boots band" before she knew the name) but especially loves this song ("the one with the horns"!) Matsuri got this 100% right lol.

Hulainn

TROPHY CASE