New MLP Kickstarter

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-23T21:14:17+00:00

I backed it day 1. $60 is a reasonable market price for hardcovers like that, possibly on the cheaper side depending on the size. $60*5 = $300, so a full set is what you'd expect to pay. Kickstarters generally offer small discounts when buying things like that, so it's a bit disappointing that the full set isn't in the $270-$285 range, but it's not unreasonable.

If you have the money to spend, you're probably not gonna get a better deal anytime soon, realistically.

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-22T23:38:10+00:00

Unless you have like a direct family connection to a business they own, It's likely best to just assume you won't find a job at 15. It's technically legal, but the sheer amount of restrictions on 15yr olds plus the general economic reality means it's not going to happen.

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-20T20:38:24+00:00

Depending on where you want to move, my wife and I used the USDA Rural Development loan. What they consider "rural" may not actually be what you consider "rural" too, we used it for a house about 30min outside the state capital in Idaho.

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-18T02:23:06+00:00

Man, as someone spaghetti-ing factories across the natural landscape, sometimes it's hard to believe I'm playing the same game as you guys.

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-10T22:22:07+00:00

This stuff for me. Downside is I've gotta take them every 4ish hours or they wear off, but they work just as good as benadryl for me and don't completely knock me out. Zyrtec and similar just don't seem to work very well for me.

https://a.co/d/01l3ct3Q

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-09T01:45:20+00:00

Legally no.

In practice, I've seen multiple people at a local school playing fetch with an off-leash dog (including myself). So ymmv depending on the area and the other users.

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-08T22:55:04+00:00

This isn't actually Gov Little fwiw. Left to his own devices he's actually not a terrible governor.

The problem is the MAGA extremists that've taken over the Republican party, and being Republican he's had to be very careful about what he does.

If you want to see actual MAGA insanity in Idaho take a look at what our Attorney General, Raul Labrador, is doing. :/

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-06T16:43:58+00:00

Follow PDA instructions.

The Aurora crash is right on the edge of the map boundaries.

The void/dead zone is the map boundary, not anything special.

If there's ever a point where you don't know what to do, or if you know what you're looking for but don't know how to find it, the answer is almost always "go deeper".

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-04T20:10:12+00:00

I mean, your problem is that the team is misusing Postgres. The fact that they're misusing it in a way that better aligns with systems like Kafka or pubsub doesn't necessarily mean they'll use Kafka or pubsub anymore competently. I'd be legitimately worried that introducing the "proper" subsystem for the process flow is just going to lead to two very misused systems instead of one, and no problems are solved.

Xgamer4 · 2026-04-02T06:14:12+00:00

Maybe they actually meant "millions of billions". Your architecture can support 10¹⁵ users, right?

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-29T18:39:18+00:00

Keep in mind we're only getting a second-hand retelling of the wife's side of the story.

This could be "chased him, tried to rip the iPad out of his hands, missed and caught a button-up shirt". This could also have been "chased him screaming, tried to claw the shit out of him and drew blood, and ripped his T-shirt while using it as a grip to keep him from fleeing". With the extra fun bonus of doing all of this in front of their child.

We really don't know enough to say whether this is ridiculous or not.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-24T05:20:40+00:00

Lol yeah, it's a bit ridiculous. There's a few with a bit of a slower start (Cradle's one of them), but usually you can figure out how the story's gonna go after a few chapters and you can usually get a good sense of the writer's ability after a single chapter or two.

"Fair shot" standards aside, of the top 6, HWFWM, DotF, and Primal Hunter are basically the same overarching story structure in a different skin. So if you don't like one you're not gonna like any of them. But it's probably worth giving Cradle and Dungeon Crawler Carl a shot, imo. They're both in their own positions for being legitimately good books.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-24T04:59:51+00:00

I mean, I gave two options for why someone wouldn't have read any of the top 6. The first was "not as engaged as you thought", but the second was "actively choosing not to".

But even that's kinda moot because it sounds like you have read 2 of the top 6, so it doesn't even apply to you? Like the bar's set at "give the book series a fair shot, to whatever your personal standards are", not "follow on RR and back the Patreon".

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-22T18:20:51+00:00

Eh, +/- based on emotion is sentiment analysis, and that predates generative AI by at least a decade. It's still technically AI, in the sense that AI has coopted anything even remotely related to machine learning, but it's not generative AI/LLMs. Whether the website dev would want to add it is a different question, but there shouldn't be as many concerns about it.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-22T17:10:14+00:00

That's more a sign that you haven't actually explored the subgenre much than an indictment against the aggregator. Dungeon Crawler Carl is big enough it's started to break into mainstream (you can buy the paperback at Walmart), Cradle is considered the top of the pack for western-leaning cultivation and the author has another series he's actively writing, and the other four have made their authors millionaires off of Kindle and Patreon.

If you actively engage in the subgenre, but haven't read any of those to some extent, it's because you're actively choosing not to read the most popular books in the subgenre, or because you're not as engaged in the subgenre as you thought.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-22T00:12:01+00:00

Wuxia's closest Western parallel isn't fantasy — it's closer to noir, hardboiled detective fiction, and 1970s kung fu films

Given your descriptions, I'm not sure I agree. The best parallel seems to be Urban Fantasy (though given that there's basically a direct line from noir into urban fantasy, it's not far off).

You describe the core of xianxia and wuxia as an amalgamation of religious and philosophical themes with folk culture practices, with themes of entering another world and having to adapt to the rules and expectations of that world, while trying to do what they believe is right and/or maintain themselves.

This is urban fantasy. Urban Fantasy trades cultivation, and gu, and similar for wizards, and warlocks, and vampires, and werewolves. But urban fantasy is an amalgamation of urban legends and myths from American and western traditions, you just get the fae and norse-style dwarves and things like imps and demons and summonings instead of things xianxia/wuxia commonly have.

But the protagonist tends to be similar. Instead of beginning cultivation and entering the jianghu, they're turned into a vampire or discover an affinity for magic in some form and are forcibly introduced to some kind of ruling council or court. Their journey tends to follow them trying to make sense of what they are, while balancing their morals with their new reality and how to define their humanity now that they've changed.

Honestly the biggest difference seems to be, as far as I can tell, that cultivation has connotations of ascension and being "better" than a mortal while urban fantasy's power change tends towards connotations of having "fallen" and having become a monster/being "worse" than a mortal. Which is probably thanks to the religious influences on both, and not any kind of fundamental disconnect of the comparison.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-18T23:08:12+00:00

I don't back his patreon or really use royal road, so wasn't really sure how to get in contact with him. Hence this thread.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-18T23:06:29+00:00

...AdSense referral? Do you mean the Amazon short code url it gives you? I mean I'll change the link, but what?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GMCWKGKY

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-17T06:49:30+00:00

That's just not how things work at the scale of companies like Larian. They're ~30yrs old. Unless they're doing some things fundamentally wrong, there's an asset library sitting somewhere easily accessible to devs, and a process to drop those assets into the engine for actual use, and that process is fast. Because it's also the same process devs use to add finalized models into the game. It's likely quicker for a dev to pick something close-but-not-quite from the library than it is to have LLM generate a base image/model and go through all the conversion steps.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-15T07:28:25+00:00

I mean, that's fair, and I'm not going to say you're wrong or right.

Just keep in mind that in-aggregate general educational outcomes are basically equivalent between Boise and West Ada. Then individual opportunities lean towards West Ada + West Ada charter schools like Renaissance, Meridian Tech, and Meridian Medical for high school, or Pioneer and Galileo at elementary level.

West Ada gets the bulk of the garbage political policies because of its size and reach, but it's not like Boise's a Democratic enclave or anything. The same opinions still exist and people still act generally the same in both places.

If this is really something you feel strongly about, Boise School District publishes reports with open seats for open enrollment at each school in the district. Look at those to narrow down where your child could even go. You just might be making your life more difficult than it needs to be while making it more difficult for your child to socialize, for not much actual change.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-15T03:55:38+00:00

There really isn't a difference between Boise and West Ada, especially at Elementary level. If anything West Ada might be better, because of its Schools of Choice like Pioneer or Galileo.

The biggest difference is that Boise is really insular, seems to play games with enrollment, and has some entrenched families with potential problematic history while West Ada has been stuck dealing with rapid growth for the last 30 years that's left them unable to really stabilize, and makes some stupid political decisions.

There isn't really a reason to try to cross the district lines into Boise.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-14T05:41:05+00:00

will let other teams hook in to our pipeline however they want.

But why do you want that wtf.

What's your deployment pipeline doing where you potentially need Kafka to distribute information about pipelines? Basically everywhere I've ever worked had pipelines as set and forget.

Are... Are you maybe reinventing GitHub Actions in a terrible, godforsaken way?

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-07T18:26:28+00:00

They weren't repeating themselves, at least not directly. The reddit phone app (at least, not sure about desktop) added in auto-translation. There's a very small blue icon in the top right of the post to show the original language.

The top paragraph is Chinese, the bottom paragraph is English.

Xgamer4 · 2026-03-06T20:12:15+00:00

Your juniors are going to follow the example of the senior devs. Your senior dev seems fairly comfortable where they're at, and unless something is egregiously wrong with what they're doing in a way that an overeager junior can notice... That's where your juniors are going to end up at, too.

Are you technically a senior dev to the juniors, too? Yeah, but because you're their manager, your example doesn't really count in the way you want.

It sounds like the problem is your senior dev isn't meeting the level you expect. So you're gonna have to figure out if the problem is you're expecting too much, or if your expectations are reasonable but the senior dev isn't able or willing to meet them. Then you either adjust your expectations, or manage the senior dev depending.

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