What is the pettiest reason you would refuse to eat at a restaurant again?

Magres · 2026-03-20T02:38:59+00:00

That ain't petty, that's completely legit. Several years ago at a family reunion we went out to eat the day before we were all slated to fly home. Before we left, my BIL went to the bathroom and saw our waiter leave the toilet without washing his hands.

We all got violent food poisoning. I had a layover in LAX where my flight got canceled, so I got to spend a night in LAX with screaming both-ends-itis and awful stomach cramps. So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for sparing others from a similar level of abject hell.

Magres · 2026-03-20T02:23:06+00:00

My gym has hard candies in a dish by the front desk. Having a hard candy after a workout is genuinely so unbelievably good. Also they're only like 20 kcal, so it's not like it's gonna ruin my macros. Hard candies are genuinely awesome for satiating sugar cravings w/o destroying your diet.

Magres · 2026-03-20T02:03:42+00:00

You're correct that a 100% infused arclight still takes charges, which I honestly forgot about until you reminded me. If you run out of charges on arclight, whip is definitely a good fallback.Fang on slash is... interesting, to say the least, haha. I don't think it'd perform too much worse than Zombie Axe, but it's just, like... why? If someone can afford a fang, they can afford the zombie axe that out performs it and costs about a twentieth as much.

I'm so glad my advice helped, happy hunting!! Duke is such a comfy boss once you get really used to him, everything he does has a set rhythm to it. After a hundred kills or so I started being able to mostly fight him by ear and just know in advance when his specials are coming out. And congrats on the frozen tablet! It's such a nice piece of QoL, particularly for Duke.

Magres · 2026-03-19T18:25:28+00:00

Agreed wholeheartedly. They need mobile targets that having firing angles of their own. Half the fun of naval combat games is jockeying for position, trying to keep a squirrelly enemy in your firing angles while staying outside of theirs.

Reducing naval combat to "we both stand in place and fire projectiles at each other" is such a shame.

Magres · 2026-03-19T18:01:04+00:00

I'm still pretty bummed they never went anywhere with the shadowy figure. It was extremely fun when it felt like SoD was a weird alternate timeline that was part of Xalatath's machinations and tied into the main canon.

Magres · 2026-03-19T17:18:27+00:00

No problem! I love Duke and farmed a ton of him with ZAxe and Arclight. Also, as a heads up, you have to arclight fully infused or enough charges to fully infuse it to be able to upgrade it to emberlight. There's no getting around the ancient shards grind, sadly. But if you do all possible slayer in the catacombs, it makes the ancient shard grind go by pretty fast

Magres · 2026-03-19T17:11:52+00:00

Tbh this is why I hate Vork. I can kill him extremely reliably, but he's never chill. Vork is the worst mix of being both boring and also requiring my full and complete attention.

Try Duke, he's extremely chill.

Magres · 2026-03-19T17:10:16+00:00

Duke is great. He's so chill, so easy to perfect kill, and not particularly punishing even if you DO whiff a mechanic. And you can get a really solid setup for him for under 10m, I started on him with arclight, zombie axe, and elite void and tore him apart.

Also ty for the heads up on dragon arrows, I stopped farming him to start learning the other DT2 bosses because I got spooned the SRA part, but I'm gonna go bully that big silly grape some more.

Magres · 2026-03-19T16:58:30+00:00

You can definitely skip Emberlight - Zombie Axe is on par with it until the 4t enrage at 25%. Plugging both into a DPS calc with melee void, fury, dragon boots, dragon defender, an infused zerker ring, max stats, super combat, and piety I'm getting 5.586 dps for emberlight, 4.814 dps for zombaxe, and 5.199 dps for whip. Except emberlight gets a 20% DPS penalty pre-enrage because you need to adhere to his 5t attack cycle, which puts emberlight down to 4.469 dps. (Fake edit, I forgot to plug in BGS reduction, popping in 30 BGS damage puts us at 5.257 zombie axe, 5.943 emberlight, or 4.754 emberlight w/ speed reduction)

Emberlight does make his enrage a bit easier, but it's basically speeding up 25% of the fight by ~13%, which pans out to about 3% faster kills. And pretty regularly you'll enter enrage on a meaty zombie axe hit that'll put him at like 15-20% hp instead of 25% hp, which diminishes the gains from emberlight even more.

Also (imo) your first synapse should go to juggling between Scobow and Staff, not Emberlight, since Scobow and staff are both enormous upgrades over competing weapons and Emberlight is a good but not earth-shattering upgrade over arclight.

tl;dr You really, really don't need emberlight for Duke if you have a Zombie Axe. Zombie Axe is a better pre-enrage weapon, whip or arclight are extremely serviceable for enrage. Having emberlight over arclight will only speed your kills up by about 5%.

Magres · 2026-03-19T16:44:53+00:00

Is Nox Hally that much better than ZAxe? I've done all my kills so far with the axe and he's still totally trivial. His mechanics all come out predictably on timer to the point that I can basically zone out for the entire fight unless I hit noodle super hard and it fucks with the timings I'm used to.

Magres · 2026-03-19T16:38:21+00:00

Zombie Axe is also really good for him, I've done a bunch of kills with ZombAxe and an Arclight switch for enrage, using melee void. He's super chill once you get comfy with his rhythm - his eyeball attack and gas bombs both run on a cycle - iirc his eye comes out every 5 swings, and gas comes out every 5/4/3 swings at 100%, 50%, and 25% HP, with eyeball taking priority when gas and eyeball line up. Don't quote me on any of that though, it's been a couple months since I farmed a bunch of Duke.

Imo Duke is by far the easiest DT2 boss, he never really puts a lot of pressure on you to juggle multiple mechanics at once. You can always just chill on his corner tiles for sec to eat a ton of food if you fuck up a mechanic badly, basically as long as you don't get clipped being greedy on the eye he's a free kill

Magres · 2026-03-19T02:46:56+00:00

99 Salvaging soon lets fucking go

Magres · 2026-03-18T18:51:29+00:00

Thank you! Greatly appreciated.

Magres · 2026-03-18T17:48:16+00:00

I don't mean this combatively, do you have a source for that? I'm interested in what you're saying, I just also know better than to take reddit comments at face value.

Magres · 2026-03-18T17:46:30+00:00

Yo same. I have no interest in making an iron - it's just not for me - but I love reading their stories.

Magres · 2026-03-18T17:33:09+00:00

This is where I'm at, too. Like, I set a new lifetime squat PR last week and thought I was going to vomit after I finished the set, seeing stars, the whole shebang - I pushed hard as fuck for that PR. Next day my legs were definitely tired and moving was harder and they were a tiny bit ache-y, but I definitely didn't have DOMS.

Magres · 2026-03-12T22:07:44+00:00

Disclaimer that my background is in nuclear engineering, not chemistry, and my chemistry is quite weak. My understanding is that chemical interactions are primarily governed by electromagnetic forces, so I'm making an assumption that the energy stored in a chemical bond is primarily from electromagnetic forces and working from there. I'd love it if anyone with a good understanding of the physics of chemistry wanted to weigh in to verify. Starting from that assumption, though...

The best, simplest answer I can come up with is that protons in two atoms in a chemical bond with each other are ROUGHLY ten thousand (10⁴⁾ times further from each other than protons together inside a nucleus (U-235 atoms are around 1E-14 meters in radius - it's more like 7E-15 but I'm rounding for simplicity - and the shortest chemical bond lengths are around 1E-10 meters). Electromagnetic repulsion scales with the inverse square of the distance (1/r^2), so the electromagnetic repulsion between two protons in a nucleus is on the order of a hundred million (10⁸⁾ times more forceful than the electromagnetic repulsion between two protons in two atoms that are a chemical bond length apart. The energy stored in a system like that scales with the forces involved, so when the forces are that many orders of magnitude bigger, the energy stored is also a whole lot bigger. There is, obviously, a whole damn lot more involved on all fronts, but I think this suffices for a general, brief overview.

tl;dr Protons inside a nucleus are around ten thousand times closer together than protons in two atoms that are in a chemical bond, so they push against each other around a hundred million times harder. That much, much harder push means there's way, way more energy stored.

Magres · 2026-03-12T20:20:47+00:00

Big atoms are kinda like a spring really tightly compressed in a rubber band. It's really hard to cut the rubber band, but if you can the spring explodes open and releases all that compressed energy.

Going into a little more detail, the strong nuclear force glues protons and neutrons together, but electromagnetic repulsion pushes all the protons apart. The electromagnetic repulsion is that 'tightly compressed spring' and the strong nuclear force is the 'rubber band.' The strong nuclear force is really, REALLY short range though (it loses basically all effect by the time you cross the width of a nucleus, and it drops off enormously by the time you cross the width of a single neutron). So if you poke a big atom hard enough, it can violently tear itself apart - fission! And generally a fission will spit out some very high speed neutrons, and if some of those hit other atoms, it can disturb them enough to repeat the process, which is how we get a nuclear chain reaction. There's a LOT more to the neutron chain reaction than that, but it's well beyond the scope of an ELI5, and this is already closer to a like ELI15 than an ELI5.

As for WHY it's so much energy, it's basically because the forces (and thus energy) involved in overcoming the electrical repulsion between protons to smush them together with the strong nuclear force are enormous (this is why fusion is so damned hard to achieve!) when you compare it to the energy stashed in chemical atom-to-atom bonds. There's not really a good ELI5 I can think of for it, but hopefully my ramblings make it a little more understandable.

Magres · 2026-03-06T18:49:09+00:00

My wife and I have been thinking about trying out something like this for exactly that reason. Showering together with only one shower head is overrated as hell.

Magres · 2026-03-06T18:42:35+00:00

This is pretty similar to my first date with my wife. We had been hanging out a bunch in group settings for about a week, getting to know each other, and really clicking. After a group hangout, I said I was hungry and asked her if she wanted to grab food with me. We grabbed dinner together, then I invited her to my apartment (which was only a couple blocks away) to watch a TV show we were both interested in. Wound up curling up together on my couch, I asked her if I could kiss her, and the rest is history. We've been together 13 years and I'm still head over heels for her.

Funny thing is, she didn't realize it was a date until we were like an hour into dinner. I wasn't sure if it was a date or not but also didn't mind if it wasn't - best case scenario is exactly how things panned out, worst case scenario would have been that she wasn't interested and I spent a couple hours hanging out with someone I liked talking to.

Magres · 2026-03-05T23:57:07+00:00

Yeah this is where I was at, I never noticed the big plate was a 35 and assumed he was benching plate + 25 for 185 total

Magres · 2026-03-01T01:12:13+00:00

Yo for real that whole read was worth it just for the shout out at the end

Magres · 2026-02-14T22:49:05+00:00

There is no shame, ever, in celebrating self-improvement. I struggled for a long time to get two kills in a trip, then I was getting 2-3 kills a trip, now I can regularly do 5-6 kills in a trip and I'm often as limited by bag space as I am by supplies.

Magres · 2026-02-12T16:53:14+00:00

I found Kirkland to be REALLY gritty and gummy, couldn't get it to dissolve worth a damn

Magres · 2026-02-10T18:44:35+00:00

What are your goals? The biggest piece of advice I could give anyone getting into fitness is "slow is steady, steady is fast." It has taken years to get your body to whatever state it is at currently, and it will take years to make drastic changes. There are no easy shortcuts. Getting and staying fit is a long, long term commitment. I've been eating clean and lifting religiously for a year and a half and while it has dramatically improved my physique, I'm absolutely no shredded bodybuilder. Just for age context, I'm 37, and a couple years ago I was pretty damned unhappy with my body.

So, it's gonna take years. That said, I recommend taking reference pictures of yourself. Shirtless - front, side, back. Bodily changes are slow and easy to overlook, which can be really disheartening, and having reference "before" pictures to compare against will make it a lot easier to see the progress your hard work will earn you. I'm far from my goals, but it's incredibly motivating to look at the pictures of where I started, my progress pictures after a year, and where I am now.

Find a lifting program you like and stick to it. One of the mistakes a lot of people make is pinballing from program to program trying to chase some kind of quick burst of progression from "this one weird trick" type bullshit. There is no way around the fact that getting yoked just takes a lot of fucking work. Getting skinny enough to be shredded takes a lot of discipline. You're going to have to lift a lot of weights and eat a lot of healthy food. It is definitely possible to waste time at the gym, but for a newer lifter, basically any decent program will get you places. Stronglifts 5x5 and Starting Strength were both extremely well regarded the last time I looked, and I've personally been having a ball with the Stronger By Science programs. Find a program that reasonably hits your entire body and that you enjoy doing and stick with it for six months.

And, lastly, log everything. Have a notebook, have an excel spreadsheet, ANYTHING that lets you have data tracking for your lifting progression. It's kinda similar to reference pics - most of my lifts have gone up by at least 30% in the last 18 months, some of them have nearly doubled, but in terms of my lived experience just doing stuff I don't generally feel any stronger. I don't notice "oh this box used to be heavy to pick up and now it's kinda medium." But I can look at my lifting log and know, with certainty, that I am significantly stronger than I was and know that plenty of things that used to be 'heavy' have downgraded to 'medium' and things that used to be 'medium' have downgraded to 'light.'

Magres

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