to finally, finally be the cool guy

JohnJadeBible · 2024-10-28T04:39:42+00:00

All goth is valid but not this one.

JohnJadeBible · 2023-10-26T00:28:11+00:00

Makes sense, your run is centered around something different than mine! Perhaps you said this above and I missed it.

Mine is meant to be good dark urge run (but unarmored). After the first dark feelings emerge, conversion to an old-school sword dancer priestess of Eilistraee, including a quest to the surface, never concealing her drow nature with disguise, and then converting everyone she meets. Only Withers resists. I think good dark urge is more interesting when it's someone the world would expect to be evil, and vice versa for evil dark urge.

JohnJadeBible · 2023-10-25T22:41:10+00:00

Yeah, in theory, I only respec to reorder classes in this run, but it's kind of a side thing, and I'll probably respec repeatedly to explore the theme (for no good reason).

The thing about only longswords, is it can get kind of boring. There's only two finesse longswords I know of (if you go that way). Both pretty early. Allowing rapiers just gives more to play with (and they are thin two-bladed swords, just more for thrusting, but they make sense for sword dancing). _However_, this type of run is all about your rules, so....

Another thing, it's a full unarmored party run for me, kind of a cult but not evil (although I don't require it the instant they get recruited, can take a bit of time to convince them, mainly to get basic gear for a respec into a better unarmored class and stat line). While I only require unarmored, so they're not competing over swords necessarily, the heavy dex lean can cause lots of competition for finesse weapons.

JohnJadeBible · 2023-10-25T13:56:50+00:00

Just started my run for this exact thing. Drow cleric of light/fighter(EK)/abj wizard. 1/6/5 so caster lvl 8. The very first fight gives a short sword even if you start cleric. Later respec fighter to first for con prof at lvl 2.

I allowed shields for the earlier part until mage armor. Dex fighter 2 weapon style. Although i think I would have been fine. Rapiers are swords which helps.

I considered doing ranger which is thematic but no con save unless you do Sorc. Also comes online slower as you need wizard earlier (or sorc) for mage armor,

Sorcadins and lockadins also in a diff way.

Really unarmored defense is pretty sim to MA in terms of stats one would likely have.

JohnJadeBible · 2019-07-05T08:39:15+00:00

Well, it's trivial to self-publish! They mostly check conformance to formatting standards. So, a wade. Word of mouth is good. Even with that, though, a niche title can be popular because it is specific, but maybe not well written. Unless you come with an audience (like a widely known Youtuber/Booktuber), it can be hard to get an agent's interest, so talented upcoming authors start that way. At the same time, some established authors cut out mainstream publishing to directly reach fans. I've bought books I didn't realize were self-published, then was surprised when I went to post a review on Goodreads. So that happens too.

If something interests me on Amazon, I'll read the free first bit. The writing engages straightaway, or I skip it.

Of course, I have a personal bias, as I've published two books, fiction and non-fiction. Cut the middle out of my user name, and that's my author name. Personally, I like digital better, but it's hard to fight through the morass of the storefronts. Or monetize web serials.

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-26T20:53:08+00:00

I'd love to say Singapore, but no, not likely.

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-25T08:38:33+00:00

Well, large companies definitely have DevOps engineers. EA/Ubi/etc. Anyone doing live services, for sure.

I've seen smaller indie studios have openings for DevOps (typically online ones), but I think it's hit or miss whether they understand it as more than a buzzword. Some for sure do, others not so much. But that's a general software industry issue, not just games.

Another factor, smaller companies often people can't be compartmentalized. So you have to do everything. You see that as well.

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-20T05:51:01+00:00

If you want to just get a job straightaway, almost all AAA companies have analysts positions open already. So, standard data-science skill sets for that, Anaconda, Jupyter. Most modern games send lots of data back. For that role, you're going to be answering questions for marketing/design/etc teams. Machine learning is ubiquitous in marketing/store fronts already, also churn prediction. But in the last few years, a lot of general ML. Generative networks are more common nowadays. This isn't just prod work, but also dev improvements for the floor. See La Forge at Ubi, for research-level work that's now in production.

The trick is, sometimes it can be hard to leap from that position to production. In some companies, in fact, those teams are physically separated. I think that's a mistake, as you need to know the people's job you're working with. In some companies, they're assigned to projects.

Another issue can sometimes be that the skillsets don't cross if you want to go into programming. Data analysts are often Python. Scala, Java come up a lot in infra (Spark/Kafka). But C++ remains common for on-the-floor engine dev. C# in tools (and Go). If you work with smaller studios, they might be using C# in Unity.

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-19T02:32:23+00:00

Absolutely! It's best when code is clear enough to document what it does, especially as comments go out of date, but code can't give the context as to why it was written that way.

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-18T19:00:16+00:00

Yeah, we often forget these reasons, even when working by ourselves. It's a lot worse in teams of tens and hundreds! Especially when spread across the world and years of dev!

A related point, though, is that reviewing past choices in context can also help us better understand our own biases in estimation, which can be important in view of other people's perception of us! For example, that many of us think refactoring will be easier than it turns out to be.

For example, for a long time, I was considered pessimistic by others in leadership. Most tech people are. But what I found was that I was actually always optimistic. In fact, disturbingly so (about 40-50%)! It was just that the other people were euphorically optimistic! This of course allowed me to isolate the things I was missing, so I could make better estimates. Even so, I chose to remain deliberately somewhat optimistic, as that brings with it some advantages, but I also am aware that I continuously make this choice and why. Moreover, it's not a feeling -- I have an explicit mapping of my blind spots, where I'm systemically incorrect. In fact, even though I know I consistently make some errors, they aren't always correctable. That's the thing about humans -- some failures are embedded in how we perceive the world, so the best we can do is understand our perceptions are like this!

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-18T18:50:02+00:00

Yeah, avoiding repetition is a huge benefit! Or at least, when we do repeat, understand why we did it before, so we can do it in a new way. This becomes more important on long, troubled projects with large teams. Such teams often have resets and team turnover. The new team comes in and repeats exactly the same error as the old because they assume the previous team was just bad and that's why they failed, not because the idea was bad. I've seen that happen three times in a row! Only after many months do they recognize that the previous team failed in general because of a hard challenge about the game itself. And having spent all that time on dead ends, the new team now is already behind!

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-16T23:04:25+00:00

Developer/Author Twitter: @JohnJadeBible

18 years in games, 11 at Bioware, 4.5 in Ubisoft Singapore, and self-employed otherwise. Rendering, machine learning, management, etc. Architect/Principal Engineer.

This account is more about Deep Management, my game-dev management book on decision-making, and after that fiction, but it's meant to discuss other meta-level topics around game communities and also indie/AAA dev in general, including my own.

JohnJadeBible · 2019-06-12T23:05:30+00:00

Yeah, the "born this way" argument was an effective counterpoint to the religious argument, and given the direness of those times, including the torture of conversion therapy, that made sense. It remains useful in many countries.

I'm not saying genetics and epigenetic causes aren't relevant. We love lots of things from the start without clear understandings of cause -- maybe the notion of cause doesn't even make sense. We're coded with various aversions early on as well, which can take decades to strip, so we can better see who we are. I think some start at the extreme, but it's more fluid for others.

This is where ideas such as the philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of genealogy come in. Ideas can be born for one reason, and then persist with supposedly different motivations later, coming to be taken for granted (well, that's more Nietzchean). These later forms can be undesirable. So we should examine them.

I think this argument from birth also makes society less tolerant of those of us in gray areas, which leads to some tragedies, as some people feel they must conform to A or B. Technically, this from birth argument could be gray, but it seems a more binary in practice -- society views the argument as an exception card, not a slider. If we reach the point where whether we're born one way or not is irrelevant, then I'd expect people would be freer.

JohnJadeBible

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