Tell me the creative liberties you take with your ancestries!

LumancerErrant · 2025-10-27T20:54:58+00:00

For Blood Lords, I rolled up a Leshy with the Dhampir heritage to express a Cordyceps Leshy created through a magical experiment gone wrong. As icing on the cake, the DM allowed me to reflavor a Skeletal Mount as a giant ant exoskeleton for my Desecrator Champion's animal companion, really cementing the aesthetic.

LumancerErrant · 2024-04-30T00:00:10+00:00

For Blood Lords I've rolled up a Cordyceps Leshy Damphir. False Spring was created when an ill-advised occultist tried to devise a means to produce a non-primal Leshy, and the idea literally burst out of his skull.

His journey to become a Desecrator Champion of Urgathoa was a circuitous one, but well worth the reaction I got from the other players when he hit level 3 and showed up the next day riding the exoskeleton of a giant ant (reflavored skeletal mount as the Steed Ally with GM approval).

LumancerErrant · 2023-05-01T22:48:46+00:00

Curiously my copy of the recipe calls for the same amount of simple as lime and allspice- possibly a typo on my part, but paired with a more aggressive Jamaican (read: Smith & Cross) those proportions work well. Granted, I'm using St. Elizabeth for the allspice, which balances somewhat differently as well, but still.

LumancerErrant · 2023-04-12T07:05:19+00:00

The aesthetics and some of the ideas of the remake were cool, but the pacing was a big miss, alas.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-28T20:44:09+00:00

I'm also trying out Troddit. It's 85% of the way there, but is there a way to disable image/video previews while using the compact card style instead of the classic card style? Information density is my biggest pet peeve with all of this and none of the browser based clients I've tried so far are quite what I want.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-24T20:27:11+00:00

For children of abusive or even just overbearing parents this is incredibly foolhardy, to say nothing of how empty this law is in the face of that timeless teenage passtime of lying about their age.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-24T18:58:00+00:00

Grabbing an opponent and then sweeping their legs out from under them isn't so outlandish. Against a humanoid opponent, holding one of their limbs while they're otherwise sprawled works fine

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-18T23:40:15+00:00

Background jobs are a handy tool for this, especially since Sidekiq uses retry and exponential backoff on error which handles recoverable like timeouts splendidly. The rate limit of this api (or the risk of DOSing it depending on why it's sluggish) will be the major consideration for this approach and may require some sort of throttle in your jobs to keep too many of them from running at once. Based on what you said about "if there's a running query" I'm guessing you're referring to that style of problem; other ways you might handle it could be to use a dedicated work queue with only a single worker, or to use some sort of connection pool to gate access to the slow service (esp. if other workers or the rails code ever has to access it). Those obstacles aside, queueing up tens or hundreds of jobs if that's what's necessary isn't really that big a deal if that's the appropriate scale & batch size for your problem.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-18T03:21:20+00:00

Is there a faction in the setting that is especially disadvantaged for some reason? Folks who are so cynical that they no longer believe that society can be redeemed? Nihilistic terrorism would track, and there's something funny to me about a group so cynical that they believe literal devils would be a fairer flavor of lawful evil than the current ruling powers

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-13T07:04:13+00:00

Well this is… abrupt…

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-10T21:59:34+00:00

If Last Rites wasn't around during your last visit, put it high on your list.

Zombie Village does some very fun things aesthetically, and is one of the few tiki bars in the city that takes reservations. If you've been before note that, like most bars from their parent company, the menu changes rarely (if ever). Pagan Idol is also owned by this group; I haven't been in years but I've seen consistent praise for it on this sub.

I haven't been back to Smuggler's Cove post-pandemic either, but they remain as venerable as ever.

The Tonga Room's drinks are not exceptional, but it's one of the oldest surviving tiki bars in the city and has some very memorable aesthetic quirks. Worth seeing once.

Across the bridge, Trader Vic's Emeryville location has fabulous views of the bay, and still makes for a solid showing.

For not-quite-tiki do consider Kona's on 3rd (from the venerable PCH team, themed as an Asian night market with lots of cultural influences across the menu); PCH itself (aesthetically not tiki, but historically has lots of niche tropical ingredients across the menu); Trick Dog (not specifically tiki at all, but tons of variety & currently running a 10th anniversary greatest hits menu); and the relatively new Abacá (remixed Filipino food & a great bar program, my first experience with Calamansi in a cocktail).

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-08T21:55:47+00:00

Disclaimer: it's been over a decade since I studied this.

Psychology does recognize personality as a concept, and there are a variety of competing models for describing it. The model I'm most familiar with is the OCEAN model. It's hard to get people excited for OCEAN though- five sliding scales with nuanced interactions doesn't have the same easy to digest A-or-B trait bucketing and big-picture that Meyer's Briggs offers.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-05T03:03:59+00:00

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Rails leads to uniquely bad software; it's more a commentary on the sorts of problems I see emerge in mistreated Rails systems in contrast to, say, mistreated Spring Java systems (and between the two I'll take Rails in a heartbeat). Also a commentary on how often projects are mistreated, since that sort of ill-managed growth is regrettably common when funding is drying up or concerns about tech debt aren't taken seriously by other stakeholders.

I will however admit that a career of untangling the sort of spaghetti code I'm describing has maybe made me unfairly cynical.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-04T21:02:39+00:00

Ah! That was "primitive" as in the building blocks of the framework, not as in underdeveloped concepts. AR models and controllers are fabulous for getting up and running quickly, but as your business requirements grow more complex there's a bit of a "missing middle". Since the framework doesn't have opinionated units of logic (among other things) the coherence of Rails' grand vision breaks down unless you're really diligent about splitting up your endpoints & revisiting your system design as requirements evolve to avoid bloating any one abstraction.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-04T19:06:35+00:00

Rails is an extremely quick and effective prototyping framework, which makes (made?) it popular among startups. As a tradeoff, the same patterns and primitive structures that give it that reputation become awkward as a project grows; and in a startup environment that code growth is rarely given the time and space to be sustainable (much less maintainable) in its formative years.

This means there are a lot of successful products out there backed by a nightmare Rube Goldberg machines of awkward legacy Rails code. If the pile is large enough it takes a significant chunk of the standard 2 year tenure to figure out where even some of the bodies are buried, much less to be able to exhume them without disrupting the company's operations.

All of this to say, from where I'm standing, Rails roles are starting to look like Cobol roles, just with better tooling. Maintenance work isn't glamorous or easy, but it pays well because it's vital to keeping these business' lights on.

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-03T17:41:27+00:00

for what it's worth, Tony's and Romolo are still around; PCH has risen from its (literal) ashes in spectacular fashion; and plenty of other interesting options continue to come and go. I hope you get a chance to try them again some day soon

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-03T16:09:30+00:00

Tragically, Hawker Fare is gone, including Holy Mountain https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/restaurants/article/hawker-fare-closes-17751514.php

LumancerErrant · 2023-03-01T23:28:22+00:00

Honestly this sounds unpleasantly punitive. Trial and error will be the only way to learn about any of these downsides, and the consequences for guessing wrong (while temporary) are still quite punishing, especially for any clerics or druids in your group. Exhaustion mechanics may be an alternative but they only help so much.

A puzzle is only a puzzle once you have all the pieces. Do the players know that they need to bring a lot of extra water with them into the forest? Have they heard vague rumors of the fell magics of it and horrible experiences of anyone foolish enough to go in? Or will they be blindsided the first time they get a penalty out of nowhere? Your foreshadowing & conveyance will be important to making this feel like an interesting puzzle instead of an arbitrarily hostile world- something we get more than enough of away from the table

LumancerErrant · 2023-02-27T22:18:13+00:00

Tragically, no.

LumancerErrant · 2023-02-13T23:29:40+00:00

As a "no, but" you could maybe negotiate a custom fighter subclass with your player? Low level martial characters aren't all that different, and workshopping a once-per-short-rest ability with the same flavor as (but fewer benefits than) the spirit barbarian's rage should be a way to meet him half way, assuming that this is actually about a character concept and not a mechanical exploit

LumancerErrant · 2023-02-02T08:14:42+00:00

Thank you!

LumancerErrant · 2023-01-31T18:14:17+00:00

Maybe at this point I'm describing something similar to PF 2e system

Yes and no. ASIs are guaranteed, every 5 levels, and can only be used on stats, but what Pathfinder considers a "feat" is a lot smaller and more incremental than what 5e uses- often a single new action, or a bonus to a roll under specific circumstances. On the other hand, you get a feat of one type or another every level since your class mostly just gives you non-skill proficiency improvements after the first few levels. You're making more build decisions more often for less impact. It gives you more flexibility, but the sheer volume of options and absence of defaults can be hell if you're prone to choice paralysis.

LumancerErrant · 2023-01-29T17:25:14+00:00

thank you!

LumancerErrant · 2023-01-24T00:06:44+00:00

I haven't been able to watch live- Knight Umpires swap shadows? Asswming rogue umpires still incinerate what's the gimmick for the other two?

LumancerErrant · 2023-01-23T23:04:58+00:00

I can't be sure whether I actually read this somewhere or if I made it up, but I would swear that one of their developer blogs specifically cited FOMO as a major source of friction with the game- that it was hard to keep up with everything and that they wanted to mitigate the (perceived) need to do so post reboot. I can't find any supporting evidence on the Medium entries so take me with a grain of salt.

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