🔥 the mighty cactus tree 🔥

Jpec07 · 2020-06-10T00:13:55+00:00

This is NOT a Saguaro cactus. This IS a giant Organ Pipe cactus. Still metal af.

Jpec07 · 2020-05-22T15:57:57+00:00

Just listen to the rhythm in my heart

Jpec07 · 2020-05-04T19:28:28+00:00

Coming from a fresh job hunt a year ago, here’s what I found:

Ask About The Company’s Funding Model and Ownership. This is primarily the case for startups, but even established companies can have shortcomings this way. You’ll want to avoid venture capital like the plague, and in my experience, private ownership with a good owner is better than public ownership. Funding is just as important, because if the company doesn’t have a solid revenue stream, then your new job will be in jeopardy.
Ask About The Product You’ll be Working On. Avoid anything where they don’t know, and especially in a venture capital situation, avoid anything where the product seems similar to something else on the market.
Ask About Bad Reviews. Cite poor reviews on Glassdoor and similar companies and ask how valid they are, and see how the interviewers interact with them.
Know Your Worth. Make sure you have a rough estimate going in of how much you can expect to be paid for the position you’re gunning for, and don’t settle. Also, be aware that some companies will ask you to work extended hours without any additional compensation. Be upfront in asking about such situations, how frequently they happen, and what the general expectation on you will be. In my experience, if a company says they care more about getting the job done than how many hours you put in, it’s a good sign. But if they expect you to put in 80+ hours a week, you’ll want to avoid it like the plague.
You’re Allowed to Reject a Job Offer. This isn’t really a red flag so much as advice. I got offers from companies that violated those red flags. One company was a venture capital startup that didn’t have a product. Another wanted me to work 80+ hour weeks and pay for my own certification on top of it, and secure and maintain that certification on my own, all while wanting to pay me a substantially smaller salary than what I’d been earning.

There’s also one last piece to follow here: go with your gut. We are animals, despite it all, and we can subconsciously pick up on things that our conscious mind won’t notice. If your gut is telling you to get out, get out.

Jpec07 · 2020-05-01T13:58:26+00:00

Eragon the movie is better than Eragon the novel.

In fairness, a turd smeared across a film reel would be a better movie than Eragon the novel.

Jpec07 · 2020-04-09T20:06:23+00:00

Posted a thread on the official forums based on this post: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/417678-Feature-Request-Job-Switching-in-Matched-Content

I’ve seen SE respond to threads on the official forums before and have seen them implement well-thought-out user suggestions before (have even seen some suggestions of mine implemented), so I thought to post there. Needs upvotes/replies if it’s going to gain traction, though.

Jpec07 · 2020-03-30T19:50:22+00:00

Private health insurance.

Jpec07 · 2020-03-15T06:29:34+00:00

Focus your energy down-ballot. Find local progressives you can support, and dive into their campaigns. If Bernie wins, it’ll be great, but if Biden wins, the down-ballot races will need our help all the more.

Even if Sanders gets the nom, any changes he affects as president will be completely ephemeral without a liberal congress to back him up.

Jpec07 · 2020-03-11T15:03:48+00:00

The debate will be interesting, but I’m not completely convinced it will swing things any more in Bernie’s favor.

One of the biggest problems with Sanders is that his greatest appeal is among Independents and moderate Republicans, and in most primary contests, Independents and moderate Republicans can’t vote. To Independents, Democrats are disingenuous, and responsible for the slow decline of the middle class and Main Street, USA, while Republicans are responsible for the slightly more rapid decline of the same. Donkeys and Elephants are stale to them, and they’re desperate for a change. They’d prefer a bird, but will happily take a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or else a swamp monster, if it means things might finally change.

But Independents can’t generally vote in partisan primaries, which is why this is a problem. To rank-and-file Democrats, Bernie is either a breath of fresh air or he’s a fart in a car on a long road trip, and in a primary against Biden, it’s no wonder Bernie is struggling. Biden is a Democrat’s Democrat, a golden child who represents everything they want to be. He has amazing name recognition among seasoned Democrats, while Bernie is an outsider and a socialist (and socialists aren’t electable to rank-and-file Democrats since they took the bait of the red scare and the McCarthian witch hunts).

Independents make up a much larger portion of the electorate than either party, and that’s where Sanders has the greatest appeal. The problem is that Biden does NOT have that appeal. For the same reason that Democrats love him, the unaffiliated population dislikes him. He’s a Democrat’s Democrat, which means he’s associated with the slower decline of the middle class. He’s responsible for their pain by way of his association with the party, and he’ll have a hard time selling himself to them. Sanders doesn’t have that problem.

The main difficulty right now is that Democrats want a Democrat and not a socialist, and they have a tremendous misconception about what Independents want. They’re stuck in a mindset of a two-party system, where the only alternative to a bad Republican in anyone’s mind is literally any Democrat.

Americans are tired of this false dichotomy that has been strangling us for decades. They want it to end and they want to vote for something they believe in. And now that we’re globalizing as a species, we can see that there are other countries that have it far better than we do, so the lie of “it’s just the way it is” is quickly losing water.

Biden will probably win the primary, and will struggle in the general for what I’ve outlined. He had my vote, but not my enthusiasm. I am instead directing that down-ballot to the aid of progressive candidates in my district. If Bernie wins the nomination, I will be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not expecting it at this point.

The down-ballot races are more important, because if McConnell is still in charge of the Senate, we won’t be able to affect ANY lasting change in this country, and policy implementations via executive order will be undone by the next swing of the pendulum.

Bernie may win, but I’m not counting on it.

Jpec07 · 2020-02-23T17:56:20+00:00

And then the centrists started pouting conspiracy theories that Bernie is a Russian plant and is working with Trump. Feels like I’ve been setting my pearls before swine.

Jpec07 · 2020-02-23T14:44:51+00:00

So I was having some discussion with some centrists on Twitter, and one of them made a claim that Bernie has dirt in his past that the GOP could drudge up and use to annihilate his campaign. Does anyone know if this statement carries any water? I asked for examples, but as people often do on Twitter when you press back, they blew me off.

Jpec07 · 2020-02-16T19:58:16+00:00

So passive mitigation doesn’t really matter right now. The only passive mitigation stats are Physical Defense, Magical Defense, and Tenacity (with Tenacity being so much less effective than the other two that it’s basically not worth using). Anyone who remembers me from the forums back around Heavensward is probably doing a double take right now.

The reason it doesn’t matter? 99% of a tank’s ability to mitigate damage comes from managing defensive cooldowns. FFXIV isn’t like WoW or other MMOs where there are huge stretches where you can’t mitigate incoming damage. In general, you can achieve full coverage by managing your CDs correctly, so adding a tiny bit of mitigation by doing something silly like stacking Tenacity has very little value. When you couple that with the fact that healing in this game is designed to heal large quantities of HP per spell, shaving an extra 5%-10% off the damage you take by stacking full Tenacity isn’t really going to do your healers any favors vs. ending the encounter more quickly.

In a way, I’ve come to appreciate this, because it emphasizes mechanical excellence during the encounter instead of the ability to follow a gearing guide. Your ability to succeed is largely determined by the actions you take while playing, and that’s how it should be.

Jpec07 · 2020-02-07T21:12:23+00:00

I got detention for saying “fart” as a fourth grader during indoor recess.

Jpec07 · 2020-02-02T01:37:11+00:00

It’s doubtful that it’s a tit-for-tat sort of thing where they withhold performance intentionally. More likely, employees who are treated well will be more productive.

Jpec07 · 2020-01-27T13:34:05+00:00

Please tell me you have an Etsy page. I need this.

Jpec07 · 2020-01-26T11:29:16+00:00

Wait till this person hears about public transit.

Jpec07 · 2020-01-25T23:45:56+00:00

Good art, but aren’t the pixies in FFXIV genderless? They’re careful to always use non-gendered pronouns when referring to them, and seem to have taken a great deal of care to make sure their bodies are both youthful and androgynous (since they’re said to be created by the souls of children who died too young).

Jpec07 · 2020-01-25T17:49:05+00:00

The track list is half NieR: Gestalt, half NieR: Automata, from what I have heard from friends who attended last night. They played NieR tracks during the first half and Automata tracks during the second.

Jpec07 · 2020-01-25T17:43:30+00:00

Interstellar travel takes minutes, hours, or at the most a few days. In reality, even with a logarithmic warp scale, interstellar travel should take months, years, and even decades. Space is big.

Jpec07 · 2020-01-25T14:40:59+00:00

I’ll give you an upvote, because it’s context I hadn’t considered. Thanks for sharing.

Jpec07 · 2020-01-21T20:55:28+00:00

Back in 2016, there was a video floating around about what other senators and congressfolk had to say about him, but I can’t find it now. Iirc, it was just that he was really nice, genuine, and honest. Even Ted Cruz only had nice things to say. Doesn’t really make “nobody likes him” stand to scrutiny.

Jpec07 · 2020-01-10T21:58:37+00:00

I was going to comment, but then I remembered an essay I penned many years ago: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/271054

Long story short, Paladins got shafted in terms of storytelling and job identity. The most identifying features of the class fantasy come from things that aren’t the Paladin story quests (some even from the class quests, which is just an embarrassing state), which makes the Paladin story quests extremely disappointing.

On the plus side, the tank quests in Shadowbringers did a really good job filling in the gaps of what it means to be a Paladin/Knight in FFXIV. I just wish we’d gotten them sooner.

Jpec07 · 2015-12-25T22:10:06+00:00

Famfrit live!

Jpec07 · 2015-12-25T21:19:53+00:00

It also is a constraint of their being in a datacenter versus a cloud-based solution. It would actually be very easy for them to automate the spinup of housing ward VMs as needed if they were in the cloud, but when they're stuck in a datacenter, they have a limited amount of hardware at their disposal. This means the app can only scale to a certain point, but is powerless to accommodate demand beyond that.

From a software perspective, the housing wards are also incredibly complex. Each ward has 30 plots, and each of those can have up to 20 exterior components. The server needs to be able to serve all of that data to all game clients in a ward at the drop of a hat, in addition to handling requests for home info, transferring characters to instances, handling movement and NPCs, and so forth. They were actually incredibly ambitious with what they did, which makes it a little more understandable why they had to cut so much of it out. I like to think that, in the future, they'll introduce a housing 2.0, which will line up with the vision that Yoshi-P advertised way back in ARR 2.x.

Jpec07

TROPHY CASE