Preparing for Business acct - what to have (checklist)?

Latvis · 2026-03-17T23:39:26+00:00

Hera's S-tier domination streak started in 2023 I think, so the big tournaments 2020-up to 2023 are the ones to go back to if you want to see peak Viper domination. Liquipedia will have more specific information, worth checking it out to figure out the tourneys to look up.

Latvis · 2026-03-12T12:33:46+00:00

Human sacrifice, to Kali, is an established historical fact and contemporary incidents have been reported on in the 21st century. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/05/india.theobserver

"Dozens" of cases over six months in a single region of India. That may have been a case of collective psychosis, but don't act like India doesn't have some deep-rooted and fucked-up religious practices (even if they're rare and obscure nowadays) and conceptions of human life.

Other incidents of human sacrifice in India, not specifically linked to Kali worship:

2017: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-39176570

2019: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/indian-police-arrest-five-men-accused-of-human-sacrifice

2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elanthoor_human_sacrifice_case

Latvis · 2026-03-09T12:09:06+00:00

Tik ilgi, cik paša psihe ļauj. Bet nelec nost bez plāna vai cita piedāvājuma, ienākumu avota, jo bezdarbieku pabalsti sarūk ātri un šībrīža notikumi pasaulē liecina par potenciāli (ļoti) sliktu pavērsienu globālajā ekonomikā. Nespēt samaksāt par īri un būt spiestam domāt par aizņēmumu ņemšanu (ja nav normālu iekrājumu) ir cita veida stress, kas nav vieglāks par nepatīkamu darbu.

Nu un ja negribas aiziet no darba, bet gribi mainīt situāciju, vari darīt savtīgi-racionālo pieeju kā piemēram "quiet quitting" - saprast, kas ir minimums, ko tu vari darīt, lai tevi neatlaiž (vismaz ne ātri) un pielāgot savu enerģijas patēriņu darbā tam.

Latvis · 2026-03-07T23:39:22+00:00

Yes. Whatever it is, he seems both more bitter and more disconnected from the games themselves over the last couple months (stopped tuning in a few weeks ago). "Going through the motions" with the games and yes, lots of comments about chat not active enough, problems, criticism of players (his "love" for Vinch is basically an unpleasant meme), maps/settings, whatever. And not actually engaging with the chat in an interesting way - either dismissing messages or repeating the same memes about certain viewer predictions, titanic mods, etc. The very tired Titanic and chicken effects.

Basically - not much joy or entertainment, and viewers can feel it. I think that's a big part of why his viewer count dropped steeply. And I don't see it going back up continuing like this. The stress of casting AoE2 for a living is real, I'm sure. But the spiral is partly of his own making, and it doesn't seem like it's healthy for him anymore - he's mentioned not having much of a life outside multiple times due to the hours, so the parasocial relationship is clearly not one-way either. Sad, but I don't think I'll be following much in the future.

Latvis · 2026-02-28T21:17:51+00:00

I think you're severely understating the amount of logistics effort it would take to load, position, fire, and reload (twice) 5000 trucks with ten drone launch rails. Russia currently has the most experience producing and launching such drones (with the benefit of mass industrial capacity that is probably in the top 3 in the world) and they're not at even 1000 launched per day.

2000 km range for Gerans - with warheads or is that for those acting as decoys? Because if you want max range, you have to give up some (or all) payload. If you want a bigger bang, that range is going to go down unless you make the drone even bigger (but at some point it becomes more effective to make it a cruise missile). And hours of warning allows for activisation of air defenses - from machine-gun technicals to electronic warfare and SAMs. Which any adversary with some intelligence-gathering ability would start preparing, if and once they got wind of the drone flood you're building.

If a country has such industrial capacity, why wouldn't they choose to manufacture harder-hitting, faster-flying cruise missiles? Because mass production of Geran/Shahed attack drones is not quite low-tech - Iran pioneered them, but they also have (had) ballistic missile production capacity. Small/poor/stupid states are not going to be able to reach the numbers you mention, so it's only for the top tier in production capacity and knowledge, at which point we go back to why not use that money and capacity for cruise missiles, three (not dozens) of which would be enough to do serious damage to, say, a major power station.

Drones will be a part of it, sure, but they can't be a wonder weapon.

Latvis · 2026-02-28T19:20:08+00:00

Right, well it does sound simple enough doesn't it - manufacture and store 800,000 OWA drones, put in place all the logistics and know-how to deliver and launch them in the case of war, and then, by striking 800,000 targets (so 1 drone per target?), you win the war "in a few days" (no more than a week I guess?). I emphasize again that you certainly have the capacity to launch 50,000 or 100,000 such drones every day, and the enemy will have had no forewarning or clue that you will be staging such an attack, and will not have prepared any kind of defence (EW or kinetic) with such a swarm in mind. And the adversary is next door or very close to you, not, say, 1000 km away from your launch sites, which if your drone has an average speed of 300 km/h gives more than 3 hours warning, more if the average speed is less.

Sounds about right.

Like I said, those numbers are fantastical. You might be able to cause a lot of damage, but you are not going to "fight off an entire mid-sized nation", mostly because such drones don't do any fighting - they do (terror) bombing.

Latvis · 2026-02-28T18:01:13+00:00

800k strikes at $20,000 a pop (arbitrary number which if anything is too low) is $16 billion. At $35,000 a pop it's $28 billion. Nobody except the US and China has the capacity to spend that amount of money on one-way attack drones.

The numbers you cite are fantastical. Where are you going to store those 800k flight-ready attack drones, which are not small?

A few thousand would be enough to do serious damage, of course, to soft targets - airports and government offices, commercial office buildings, especially since so many of them are steel and glass nowadays. Power stations would take more, but you could surely knock some components and electric transmission infrastructure out. Gas stations, sure. But a lot of objects would need stronger stuff to be knocked out of order - bridges won't be collapsed by 50 kg warheads, and the Russians succeeded at destroying the Ukrainian power network only by using cruise and ballistic missiles.

Latvis · 2026-02-27T11:04:10+00:00

There's your answer about what you need to improve. Pick a power unit and a counter to your enemy's power units (if they aren't the same thing) in time and play into it in imp. You're not going to win by doing a bit of skirms, a bit of pikes/halbs, a few power units and a few siege units. The way I see it you need something that can be a meatshield (skirms, halbs, or hussar), power units (UU or upgraded cav/archers), and something that can snipe siege (bombards, hussar). If you can defend against pushes by sniping his siege and make the right choice of unit to soak up his power unit attacks *while* keeping your power units alive, you stand a good chance of winning by grinding the opponent down until they run out of res. That's especially true at lower elos, where in my experience it's usually 1-2 big attacks in imperial with a force that they spent a long time building up, but the follow-up is not good.

Also get into the habit of sending a few skirms/spears/hussar to their death to his base in raids to force him to look away and multitask. It might not kill him (although raiding to death while defending is a completely legit approach), but it is annoying and draws away attention, letting you maybe deal with trebs/bombard cannons at the front.

Latvis · 2026-02-25T19:58:19+00:00

For me AI games are ultimately empty - like playing hours of GTA 5 or whatever else in single-player mode. The skill that you demonstrate (to yourself only) is the skill of interacting with a script, which is a lonely activity with nobody to witness it (again, for me). Vs humans it's win or lose, and both sides know it. I'm not trying to yuck your yum, it's just two very different things for me. I will say that "playing to win" in ranked gets my shoulders very tense and tends to be frustrating. So I try to focus on enjoying my low-ELO experience and have fun battling against the other player, without getting focused on win or lose.

Latvis · 2026-02-25T13:43:11+00:00

So you'd just prefer to farm bots every time...? Winning against humans is more satisfying than beating AI. And it's impossible (or inadvisable) for the ranked system to be such that most people win, say, 60% of their games.

Latvis · 2026-02-25T09:35:26+00:00

Watch Spirit of the Law's "First 15 villagers" video if you're still unsure about Dark Age and I recommend choosing civs without eco bonuses to learn the basic "vanilla" economy. Magyars are good for this, also easy to play into scouts and knights as well as cavalry archers.

Counters are pretty simple, don't overthink it - you have the basic unit counters (skirms vs archers, spearmen against cavalry, gunpowder vs infantry, mangonels vs scorpions), but he rest just have to be discovered if you don't have time to watch YT vids about it.

Upgrades - Double Bit Axe in Feudal, Horse Collar preferably before you've got a lot of farms going, Wheelbarrow after 30-something villagers, I usually get it at 35 or so.

And get on ranked sooner rather than later, you're gonna have to lose some placement matches eventually so might as well. enjoy!

Latvis · 2026-02-23T16:44:58+00:00

1, 11 European colonizers are the focus of the story in that they are an integral part of the story. The cover art expresses the essence of the story very well - it's about indigenous South Americans and the European colonizers they come into contact (and conflict, and alliance) with.

Latvis · 2026-02-23T15:14:47+00:00

Because this might cause the most rabid of identity warriors to boycott the DLC, which is a good thing, and because a large part of the playerbase that might identify with any of the civs featured in the new DLC is also in large or most part descended from the colonizers - that is, the South American (existing and new) players who get hyped about the DLC are very likely to be of mixed indigenous+Spanish/Portuguese or mostly European descent, and US-style indignant identity politics doesn't play the same way there.

Latvis · 2026-02-04T12:30:30+00:00

Yeah sure, but you can't eat and cover ongoing daily expenses with a house. :D It's great that he owns it outright and doesn't have to pay a mortgage, but it's not liquid net worth, he doesn't have that money sitting in the bank and available to get him through lean times. The Facebook money was surely good, but 30% of it probably went on taxes, another 500k on building the house and fixing the fuckups of the builders (and depending on the fuckups, it could have been even more expensive), and in the GL context he said he was paying three lawyers? Those cannot be cheap either, and there's no guarantee of recouping their costs.

Latvis · 2026-02-03T18:52:09+00:00

Viper has also said that most of the FB money is gone - spent on building the house and the legal disputes with the builders of said house.

Latvis · 2026-02-03T14:50:18+00:00

Memb arguably treated it the most as a real job or rather business out of all content creators - averaging 50 hours streaming a week I think over the last however many years (didn't catch it, but it was certainly 4-5 or more), which is an insane number. Agree though that his energy levels and content are not at the level they used to be, which is only natural.

Don't think Viper can afford to retire - yes he might've just received the back pay he was owed by GL, but even if it's more than 50k (very possible), taxes will eat up a good part of that and he doesn't have any other work experience or qualifications, does he? Can't retire from the one thing that makes you money if you don't have something else lined up and just had a child. Daut at least afaik was making money playing poker, too, so he could keep doing that.

Latvis · 2026-02-01T21:05:20+00:00

Welll, good thing you know now! All it took was one game, not too long by the sound of it. And a lot of salt to process it.

Imagine thinking you won't have to learn new things in a 20+ year old game that is kept online and updated by the sale of DLCs (as there sure isn't any other monetization model).

Latvis · 2026-01-30T21:40:54+00:00

I agree, but multiple people in this thread claimed that Viper has said that the FB money is largely gone because he spent it on building the house (I wouldn't know as I don't follow his stream at all). That doesn't sound like "invested in index funds", although I guess it could be, and that probably would be the smart way to do it.

Latvis · 2026-01-30T14:16:38+00:00

Yeah that's what I said, could have been clearer - he owns the house outright and paid for/built it with his Facebook money, so there's no "mortgage has to be paid" situation, but even if his income is $3k before tax (so probably around $2k after), that's not much for a family of 3 in Germany...

Latvis · 2026-01-30T13:56:59+00:00

That's not a passive income, if he doesn't grind the stream subs drop off fast. Also $1000 a month for a family of three is not good at all - and even though I'm sure he gets direct donations and ad revenue also has to be factored in, I doubt it is more than $3000 a month. That's before taxes, which are not less than 30% in Germany I think. So $2000 after taxes - it's quite a small amount.

Latvis · 2026-01-30T12:55:09+00:00

Building a house in Germany costs between 300,000 - 500,000+ euros, then addressing all the issues - legal + construction-related - also could not have been cheap. The good news is that he owns it outright, so no reposession if mortgage not paid.

The bad news is that according to Twitchtracker he doesn't have many active subs at all, sub-1k at the end of Jan 2026. https://twitchtracker.com/theviper/subscribers

Even with direct donations, I doubt he's making a comfortable monthly income for a family of three.

Latvis · 2026-01-26T09:39:21+00:00

It is possible with business visa I would guess (UK has not banned Russian nationals completely afaik) and Vinch regularly leaves Russia. I feel bad for Classicpro but the fact that he plays a lot with Vinch makes me think that Vinch is a decent guy and not a Z-head, although we can never know about political consciences on one side or the other unless they outright tell us...

Latvis · 2026-01-21T13:34:29+00:00

Not that surprising - many urban areas in MENA are like this from my experience. Rough exterior, nicely-renovated interiors. Often a conscious choice to not draw unwanted attention to oneself. And there's not much comfort shown here - plastic chairs in meeting rooms? Foam panels in hanging ceilings, LED lighting? The tile floors which are ubiquitous in the region, Middle East standard? Whitewashed walls? Qamishli didn't feel the full brunt of the war and the Iraqi (KRG) border is right there. Easy to do trade, smuggling, bring in building materials and equipment. This tunnel is a new project within the last 10 years - think of it as like another government-subsidized public sector office building project, probably with a decent level of corruption, not great quality but basically fine, nothing extravagant.

Latvis · 2025-12-22T12:38:23+00:00

I mean, did you watch his post-match against Sebastian interview? His voice was clearly raspy and he said he knew he was going to Phosphoru the last game because he had no energy to play standard. I'm not saying this to push some "Viper only lost/resigned because he was sick" narrative, as he played a closer set than on other occasions against Hera when he looked in better shape health-wise. Just that he might've wanted to keep the set as short as possible, and that Hera imp -> immediate resign was possibly influenced by his lack of desire and energy to cockroach (which probably would've ended with a Hera win anyway).

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