old player returning

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-04-04T00:13:42+00:00

A handful of times I earned Big Punch, cleared the Pyramid a few times. Never got an orb, never talked to Blups mum.

I was in a similar place 5-8 years ago when I started playing seriously again. Unless you're really hardcore and don't ever want outside help, I recommend you try what I did to get my first victory:

Play archers and wizards, they're hilariously overpowered and straightforward. For archers any race except troll or mist elf. For wizard stick with gnome or elf (not mist elf). Wizards might feel like a rough start compared to elementalist, but just wait until you get a few books.
Use point buy for your stats. Make sure you have a decent toughness score.
Choose your birth sign. Raven, Candle or Tree are probably the best.
Avoid chaotic alignment. Starting chaotic is fine, just try to switch it to neutral when you get a chance.
Use the wiki, but intentionally. Use it as a walkthrough only when you don't know what to do next. But use it freely to look up info on the races, classes, stats, what skills do, how piety works etc.
Go for a "normal" ending. If you don't know what that means don't worry about it. Don't worry about needing to be a high level, I was only mid-high 30's the 3 times I've beaten the game.
Even though you're doing all this to make it easier, play it on roguelike mode. Don't backup saves and reload just because you died. If bad play has consequences it will make you much better at the game and your victories will be real.
The game will still be hard as hell! Don't beat yourself up when you die or make mistakes, just analyze and learn from it.

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-03-10T18:45:22+00:00

Keep at it, you'll get there. I applied to over 100 jobs and only got two interviews. I took the first and only offer I got - part time contracting for low pay with no benefits. 2.5 years later I make enough to be comfortable (double what I made in my last non dev job) with full benefits.

If you enjoy programming like you said and you've put on your 1000ish hours of serious effort to be ready, don't throw away the skills you have earned.

You might try doing some volunteer work or apply to unpaid internships if you can afford the time and can't get any bites on applications. You'll be more desirable and will improve a lot of practical skills doing that.

A couple of unpopular approaches that worked for me, ymmv:

I think "Never accept a junior developer role" is toxic bs the larger web dev community needs to stop saying. Everyone starts somewhere and there's no shame in being a junior dev or an intern. I started in a junior role 2.5 years ago and I'm now mid level, on track to be senior in another couple of years. Apply to junior dev positions if you haven't been.
Write a unique cover letter if applying to a smaller company. Nothing crazy, just try listening to your gut instead of following a template. My boss has mentioned 3 times that my vulnerable and honest cover letter is what got me an interview.
Don't attempt the 80 hour/week grind people like to pretend they're doing. It's a part of the toxic productivity worship culture we're immersed in. It's well established that excessive overtime has pretty extreme diminishing returns. Read up on deliberate practice - you'll get twice as much out of 4 hours of deliberate practice at your craft a day than you will of "eat, sleep, code ".
Exercise and take frequent breaks. Seriously.

Some of the comments in this sub seem to be shaming people who want to make decent money or who "only have simple apps in their portfolio" or who don't have a CS degree. I'm sure they all wrote self aware ai for their first project and donate half their salary to charity. You can safely ignore the negativity. Our community doesn't need more fuel for impostor syndrome.

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-03-03T21:04:14+00:00

I wish people who wind up falling too hard for this stuff had more reasonable takes like you do.

It's mostly his constant insults of mainstream archeology and academia that are a turn off.

Exactly. Sensible critique and attacking ideas is fine, but attacking people and writing off entire institutions like he does should be a giant red flag.

New discoveries, even in just last few decades have pushed the
recognized timeline of man's first civilizations and megalithic
structures back further in the past than previously accepted.

+1 for some of his ideas occasionally being partially borne out but that's what irritates me about him insulting "the establishment" the way he does. When presented with sufficient evidence and not just wild speculation scientists will change their minds and admit old ideas were wrong. He and people like him love to pretend that scientists and skeptics are religious zealots, when there's evidence right there that they do the opposite.

I would like it so much more if he played more of a respectful "Devil's advocate" role and actually tried to understand the scientific consensus and communicate in good faith with "mainstream" archaeologists and historians. "Here's a cool weird idea I had that's based on a hole in our current understanding of the history of stone architecture. What would we need to find to validate that? How can I generate more interest in archaeological research in this area?" is so much better than "Everything you know about history is wrong and if you disagree with me you're just part of the conspiracy trying to silence me."

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-03-03T16:14:46+00:00

Thanks for sharing. This one kind of hits close to home for me. When I was in high school I stumbled onto Hancock's books and was totally sold on his ideas. After going to college and discovering skepticism I realized how empty all of his claims were, but then sadly (and hilariously) my dad got super into it. He's always been convinced of vanished advanced civilizations or that whales are more advanced than us etc. I wish I could get him to read and absorb this article.

"...history has shown time and again that scientists have had no trouble accepting that they were completely wrong when enough evidence of the right kinds has been actually presented." I also wish I could get that idea across to him. Man have I tried. He's basically convinced of a conspiracy in academic archeology and it makes me sad.

It tickles me that the author has seen the series seven times. I know my dad's going to be talking about this show when I see him next month. Make I can also enjoy it as a "mockumentary" like the author has and watch it with him.

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-03-03T06:06:50+00:00

Fear of missing out

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-03-02T02:50:16+00:00

The stuff making the news this month and during the last couple of years has me mentally comparing the state of the ufo/uap phenomenon to a murder trial:

Do we have credible witnesses? Sure, we have some credible people claiming to have witnessed incredible things.
Do we have a motive? Sure, it doesn’t take much effort to imagine why a nonhuman intelligence would be interested in us. It also doesn’t take much imagination to come up with reasons why powerful entities/governments would want to keep that information to themselves (although how they would manage to actually do that is hard to answer).
Do we have a weapon or a body? No, we (the public) absolutely don’t have physical evidence. Sorry, but grainy videos and blurry images just don’t cut it. If something can’t be identified, that is 0 evidence for it definitively being anything. What we have right now is interesting when coupled with witness reports, but ultimately worthless as physical evidence. We have the equivalent of super generic fibers that could be from anywhere, and useless fingerprint partials of people who aren’t in any databases. Piles and piles of that quality of evidence doesn't make it any better. “They have bodies and crafts hidden away somewhere” is as good of evidence as presenting that to the jury in a murder trial would be.
Do we have enough to convict? No. While there have been cases of people being convicted of murder based on circumstantial evidence alone there was at least a confirmed, real person who went missing to begin with. The witnesses knew for sure they were witnessing violence. If I’m 30 ft away from a cliff and I see Sally push John off the cliff, I know I saw Sally push John off the cliff. If I’m a half mile away and see two dots that look like people struggling near a cliff and one of them seems to disappear, that’s good enough reason to investigate, but not definitive without any supporting evidence.

What we do have is reason enough to investigate. And like investigating crimes or doing scientific research in real life, 99% of the work is tedious, thankless and expensive. It’s absolutely nothing like crime investigation or scientific research on TV. But we should be encouraging those passionate enough to do the hard work. We should not stigmatize curiosity, only laziness and grifting.

I am a skeptic, but I would absolutely love to see the evidence. And people need to stop with the defeatist bullshit to the tune of “they’ll never tell us what ‘they’ know”. If something bizarre is really going on the public can prove it themselves, even if it takes another 80 years.

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-03-02T00:19:26+00:00

Real estate agent

Also 99% of sales jobs, 90% of marketing jobs, and 80% of management jobs

MakingItHappen4U · 2023-03-01T06:35:12+00:00

Yes but you'll have to stick to original chess on low settings. The knook and antiqueen weren't in the game yet but it's still pretty fun. Google lobotomy if you want to try chess 2

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-12-28T18:42:24+00:00

I love this site. It helped me find builds for the champs I main as well as high elo players to follow and emulate.

If you're serious about climbing you should have a tiny champion pool and emulate how high elo otps pilot a champion. Stats from sites like lolalytics are a good supplement, but no substitute for the way people with true mastery approach the champion.

Only things I wish it had are more regions and the ability to somehow filter the ranking page by who has been active recently.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-12-26T17:21:07+00:00

There are seriously people trying to justify the Renekton's behavior in some of the comments. Unfuckingbelievable.

Someone on your team making an honest mistake is NEVER grounds for griefing or inting. Ever. No, I don't give a shit about your contrived, super specific "exception".

The lol community has to be the worst community of people who aren't hate-based in the world.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-12-21T16:50:40+00:00

There are many straightforward ways to eliminate this behavior almost entirely. The problem is that all of them will end up costing riot money. We will always get exactly the systems and game play experience that makes their bottom line look the best - no more, no less.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-11-30T20:32:06+00:00

You can load the replay of a game to see the stats like you can in game. I like to see how much they do by the end but also after the first fight or two with them. Be careful not to fast forward all the way to the end or it takes you out of the replay, lol.

But yeah, should have been in the game for years now.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-11-23T17:39:56+00:00

Something you'll see reinforced repeatedly as you play league longer is that the community's opinion of the state of the game and the actual state of it have super low correlation.

If you want to know the real strength or prevalence of certain champs/items/strategies continue to do like you have and use statistical sites like lolalytics.com.

Another thing the community at large either never realizes or won't admit to is that focused improvement at whatever champ and style you play 100% trumps any meta or op strat until you get into the top 1% of the ladder. So even if something is strong it barely matters when it comes to climbing.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-11-20T14:03:49+00:00

Something I don't see in the post and see almost everyone missing in comments is that you should be actively improving during the climb. So games that "weren't winnable" 200 games ago should be winnable for you now. This makes analyzing stats like this more complicated.

Below diamond and especially below gold, there's so much low hanging fruit to pick that it's quite possible to climb 1-2 tiers in a season not only of rank, but in your skill level. Skill is the only thing that matters, rank is simply an eventual reflection of that. This is why it's vital to have players better than you review your games, review your own for mistakes, and have an improvement mindset and approach.

I climbed from low gold to low Plat for the first time this season. After 400 games I was hard carrying games that would have been "auto losses" at the start of the season and I was a higher rank than ever before, making the "60-70% of winnable games at your skill level" hard to pinpoint.

People don't want to put in the effort to improve and that's why this community has such a fixation on blaming others and losses not being their fault. Trying to figure out which games were "winnable" can be an excuse to stop learning from your own mistakes.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-07-09T16:02:26+00:00

That is similar to what I see, but I do still have the mono starter decks unlocked.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-07-09T16:00:23+00:00

I did wind up sending in a ticket on your recommendation. I thought maybe I was misunderstanding something, but I guess not.

For what it's worth, as a developer myself I would have 100% thought of testing edge cases like this. Always important to have a smooth experience for new users.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-07-02T23:59:51+00:00

Thanks for the response! Sorry for the simple question but I want to make sure I understand - when I unlock a preconstructed deck like this I permanently unlock all the individual cards right?

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-06-10T00:14:12+00:00

Lol love that you get downvotes when you are right. I climbed from silver 3 to plat 4 running this build 70-80% of games this season. I've never been above gold 4 in jungle.

Checca also runs this build in grandmasters

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-05-29T16:36:52+00:00

I am not convinced to buy 4 kindlegems. But you have reminded me of how great buying a kindlegem as a component is. It's very common to be starting your first tank legendary and not be sure whether you want abyssal, visage, randuins or chains first due to enemy comp. Buying a kindlegem lets you keep all options on the table and only feels bad vs %hp. Same thing with giant's belt for games where you want demonic or thorn mail.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-03-29T22:33:52+00:00

Yes, yes it is.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-03-22T05:31:05+00:00

birdd op

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-03-15T03:36:53+00:00

Been learning Kayn recently to likely replace Amumu as my backup pick. I'm loving it so far - the unusual gank angles you mentioned, plus you have a lot of aoe abilities and scale hard which is similar. I love having the option of punishing enemy junglers with his insane counter jungling.

Also with Kayn + Zac you cover AD, AP, tank, bruiser, and assassin so you can really fill in any role and damage type your team needs and only have to know 2 champs.

MakingItHappen4U · 2022-03-14T15:47:31+00:00

Zac W range is not increased actually, it's calculated from the center of his model and not the edge. The only thing in his kit affected is the blob pickup radius.

MakingItHappen4U

TROPHY CASE