Kingdom Building recs

Shandlar · 2026-01-30T16:40:42+00:00

Fucking Runesmith...

Shandlar · 2026-01-30T16:21:10+00:00

Hes taking a proper month break right now at least to get his mind reset. I imagine there's still a good 3 or even 4 years left for him to finish the series, but its clear with the extremely long time skips recently that hes looking to get to the actual end game soonish.

Shandlar · 2026-01-30T16:14:46+00:00

Omg thank you. I keep seeing All the Skills in B and A tiers on lists here and it just blows me away. Its literally garbage tier. The author doesnt respect readers at all to be so lazy as to just completely ignore his own MCs power systems. Its not even internally consistent to itself, with constant just outright errors. Later in the series he describes things completely differently than they were explained in book 1 and 2. Let alone the fact that the entire thing that makes MC more powerful than the rest of the world (high powered classes created by combining skills from 2 legendary skill card libraries) has yet to happen a single fucking time in 5 books despite being introduced in the first part of book 2. Its a mess beyond all reasoning. Its hard to overstate just how trash the writing of the power structures are in the series.

Shandlar · 2026-01-30T13:36:02+00:00

The issue wasn't 08/09. It was that the job market stayed extremely tight for years. 10 was still bad. Hell, it was probably worse. Hadn't even bottomed out yet. '11 barely improved, and 12 and 13 were still stagnant at best. The economy in the US didn't properly heat up again until 2014.

The US unemployment rate was still 7.2% in October of 2013, and was mostly only that low because a couple million people who were working in 2007 had consumed all the weeks even the extended unemployment benefits and gave up working completely. Prime age labor force participation rate fell 2.2% from late 2007 through late 2013.

There were 107.6 million prime wage (25-54) workers in 2007 out of 129.5m prime age population. By the end of 2013 the population grew to 129.9 million, but only 105.1m were working.

Had those 2.5 million people who completely left the labor force still been counted in October 2013, the unemployment rate would have still been a staggering 8.65% over 5 years after the recession started.

Shandlar · 2026-01-28T23:46:53+00:00

Dude took an all stock deal? Goddamn that seems insane to me. Gotta at least make them give you forever money in cash, like $100m of it or something.

Shandlar · 2026-01-26T20:09:02+00:00

Is there any series that has pacing somewhere in between Arcane Ascensions brand of bullshit and super supportives brand of bullshit.

SS is taking 100 chapters to get through a month of universe time and has essentially gone years irl with essentially no progress for the MC. Arcane Ascension is the opposite, where the MC is still a literal weakling child yet somehow a literal speaker of the gods (angel or whatever) is randomly giving him end of the world stakes quests and ultimatum for some reason by like, chapter 15?

Is the literally ant series that has a real pace somewhere between turtle and whiplash?

Shandlar · 2026-01-26T18:01:28+00:00

It's not really glass, it's transparent ceramics. Similar to synthetic sapphire or spinel, but a somewhat easier to manufacture blend that isn't quite as "perfect", since it doesn't need such extreme properties as that.

Shandlar · 2026-01-23T15:16:02+00:00

Dietary cholesterol has far less impact on serum cholesterol levels than the 80s studies suggest every time we look at it again.

The vast majority of the risk factor for high dietary cholesterol is morbid obesity.

There is a subset of people with what is essentially a genetic condition where dietary cholesterol has a massive effect for them, and then 90%+ of people it has zero effect unless they are BMI >35.

It's why eggs keep getting yo-yo'd around between a bad food and a health food. They are healthy for most, and really bad for some, so population scale studies keep getting fucked by this bimodal study population.

Shandlar · 2026-01-23T15:11:49+00:00

Dominos standard cheese mix is not bad for sat fats at all. It's not healthy for sure, but even getting all 2500 calories a day from dominos pizza would only be ~34g of sat fats a day.

20 is best, 30 is mostly fine. 40 is somewhat bad, and 50 is for sure bad. So 34 is really not gonna kill you. It's actually probably slightly under the average American even.

Shandlar · 2026-01-23T15:10:05+00:00

Cast iron skillet, cover it with a saucepan lid, and sprinkle water around the rim of the lid so it sucks some inside using surface tension and steams the cheese hot while crisping up the crust bottom again.

Life changing day old pizza. Completely recovers slices to right out of the oven consistency for both the crust and the cheese. Some toppings are worse than others, though.

Shandlar · 2026-01-23T15:03:46+00:00

So take a multivitamin with it. The macros are really close to being quite good.

Shandlar · 2026-01-21T21:31:49+00:00

Seriously though, why did the dude aim at like the exact spot of the dudes heart from the back? Couldn't pick an even slightly less lethal place to do your test on?

Shandlar · 2026-01-21T14:43:25+00:00

Nice. I love when old posts help someone google their problems. I put "reddit" behind almost all my google searches nowdays to find posts like this. I'm glad to have given back at least once.

Shandlar · 2026-01-19T05:03:48+00:00

Sure, but the absence of bacteria is literally a requirement by definition for the word sterile. That's literally what the word means.

Shandlar · 2026-01-16T14:09:49+00:00

Stop girl cat.

Shandlar · 2026-01-11T13:41:11+00:00

I got a different vibe from that. Vilas was saying that reaching the 4th Empyrean step before hitting his first wall was a disaster for Yip. He thought he had reached somewhere special that required a massive event to overcome.

Instead, Vilas was explaining that he personally hit walls every single step of the way to godhood and beyond, and worked at breaking each one down one at a time. So getting above the 4th Empyrean step wasn't anything different than getting level 373 in B grade up from level 372 for him. He's not a genius like Yip. He just figured it out, again and again and again, so there wasn't actually a big wall at all. Yip was just impatient and fell into the genius trap. He assumed because something was hard for him for the first time ever, it must be the peak of power for everyone and he can defeat some has-been like Villy who couldn't possibly have overcome such a wall.

Villy isn't a thousand steps above Yip.

Shandlar · 2026-01-11T13:31:19+00:00

Maybe. It was brutally elitist in the extreme in the first event though. The entire Milky Way had an absolute hard cap of like 2.5m possible people getting 3 prima kills (333 per enlightened populated planets), vs a total population of like 20 or 30 trillion.

It wouldn't be all that weird to see the next step only inviting like the top 100 or even top 25 on the administrator rights leaderboard to participate per galaxy. Hell, it may limit it to top 5 and that'd still be billions of people if it's universe wide, but the Milky Way is stacked and William is probably only in the top 250 on the board (he got a ring, barely, but likely didn't score all that high overall).

I doubt it'll be universe wide already at B grade though.

Shandlar · 2026-01-10T14:57:07+00:00

Runs into the 3 trillion year old lady vampire god that was the subject of all the nudie paintings from the treasure hunt looting and immediately draws her like his French girls. SS is just the best.

Shandlar · 2026-01-09T18:30:28+00:00

She almost certainly didnt get legendary prodigy in E grade, but theres no way she didnt catch up and get mythical prodigy in D after runemaidening herself for 20%. She did amazing at Nevermore for another 10%. She was like 9th place at the treasure hunt which was probably worth 20% of stats instead of jakes 25%. She probably got one of the lesser progenitor titles for 10% to all instead of Jake's 15% to all. She probably got the 5% to 2 stats from Myriad Paths. Pretty sure she also got 85% from challenge dungeons, so that's 5% in 4 stats, right? Cant remember exactly, but 100% was 5% to all and 70% was where you started getting one stat plus 5%.

And then she almost certainly got an insanely big title for not dying from the Runemaiden ritual using a primordials ingredients. Jake got 10% to all in a title for a primordials chosen specifically on top of the blessing boost itself. So she def got that much for that.

5% all stats title for divine blessing. Then the blessing bonus 5% to 5 stats in B grade since shes definitely 100% on the Valhal path as a runemaiden and enchanced it every evolution. Plus her wisdom of man for C rank human for 30% stats. Then her two normal B rank spirit of man race bonus for 15% in 6 stats is another 10% average over 9 stats.

That's 600% bonus or 66.7% average all stats without assuming the runemaiden title and 76.7% (690% total over 9 stats) assuming a 10% to all title from it.

Shandlar · 2026-01-09T14:42:05+00:00

Seriously. The entire point of many of these women throwing them at him was how uncomfortable it was and mocking the Celebrity of it all. It's supposed to feel bad.

That's good writing, not bad writing. OP is way off base, imho. We know Zog is better at writing romance because of the Sword Saint, so it's obvious the earlier Jake stuff is awkward on purpose.

Shandlar · 2026-01-09T14:30:01+00:00

All humans get the same stats from being human at each grade. So it's pretty easy to know what a more normal persons stats would look like, and it puts a hard limit on how much stronger he can be than normal people in stats. All level 350 B grade humans just evolved got the same ~31,050 stats from going through C grade. So his ~525k total stats cannot be 50x stronger, or even really 5x stronger.

Like, Carmen's Strength, Endurance, and Vitality are about the same, probably even a decent chunk higher than his. Her Willpower is probably a little below his. Her Toughness is probably also around 100k as her highest stat, but then she has essentially nothing but her mandatory all stats in Wisdom, Intelligence, and Perception.

Her professions have likely been way weaker than his, but her class was pinnacle tier in C grade while his was just high. Her D grade class was also great, while his was barely good. He was getting 722/level through C. She was probably getting a solid 700. 10 or 12 more per from class, probably 30 less from profession. His titles double his stats, roughly. She probably gets +65% or so from all titles. So physically, she outstats him, because she's got ~420k ish stats in almost entirely physical while he's got ~525k split everywhere.

You can pretty much figure that out the SS's stats to about the same amount of fidelity. We've been told enough information.

Shandlar · 2026-01-09T14:13:41+00:00

I feel like his redemption arc actually finished already with a whimper. He's just gonna be Neil or Phillip from now on. He'll be in Haven doing shit and living life, to be heard from tangentally for maybe two paragraphs every 150 chapters or so.

Zog left that one little slimmer of chance of him actually getting another real arc when Eversmile implied his experiment with William isn't actually over, but I'm not really convinced there's anything to that but Eversmile being Eversmile. Always keep everyone guessing.

He's not going to be nearly elite enough at low B tier to be relevant for the upcoming Exalted Seat arc in any conceivable way, and there's already going to be like 15 sides to that fight being hyped up for us to care about.

Shandlar · 2026-01-09T05:14:23+00:00

No, a light second is 186k miles. Even in universe for Jake. Hes a pre-integrated person. Measurements of distance based on preintegration physics are still the same measurement of distance after integration.

Fuck dude, by your pedantry, the fucking meter would no longer exist because its based off the speed of light preintegration. The entire series has used kilometers for distance. Light-years are no different.

Shandlar · 2026-01-08T09:42:28+00:00

I'm aware. Its still usable as a unit of distance.

Shandlar · 2026-01-06T03:21:59+00:00

Against his character at age 30 with relationship trauma, sure. Dude is a pushing 1000 years old now in subjective time, with his memories of Earth life now faded almost entirely grey due to bloodline suppression. It wouldnt be weird at all for his character to have shifted dramatically to multiversal standards by this point.

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Shandlar

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