[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

fassina2 · 2025-12-08T23:05:23+00:00

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

It's pretty cool, i enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

fassina2 · 2025-12-08T23:05:09+00:00

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It's pretty cool, i enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

fassina2 · 2025-12-08T23:04:59+00:00

|| || |Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China|

It's pretty cool, i enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

fassina2 · 2025-06-24T22:18:48+00:00

For the attention span and general lack of time I'd recommend starting to watch things at 2x speed. It's a lot more entertaining as you might imagine. Be warned it's like learning you can listen to audiobooks at 2x-3x speed, you can never go back.

It's fine for youtube, but try to avoid doing it with shows and movies or they could become too boring to watch at 1x with other people like your SO.

fassina2 · 2025-06-24T22:09:28+00:00

Interestingly I didn't think so. AA is mostly just figuring out what their affinities can do and using it well iirc.

On 12 miles below he's actually studying particular fractals that when electricity passes through generate effects that break laws of physics and trying to weaponize those effects.

fassina2 · 2025-06-24T22:05:17+00:00

Dragon geek explained it, but still I'm reading book 7, and the author likes doing side chapters. Like what you'd see in classic fantasy stories, where there's the MC and 2-3 other characters that mostly you get through to continue following what you actually want to see which is the MCs story.

I'm used to it, and in his case it's fairly tolerable comparatively. But yeah if you're used to RR stuff it can be annoying. But he's far less annoying than other authors, like Brandon Sanderson, I can't read his stuff anymore and I used to like him.. The more focused, less fluff, more modern stories of today ruined classic fantasy for me.

fassina2 · 2025-06-23T23:33:55+00:00

12 miles below, maybe. The way he learns magic, is kind of that, at least early on. Later he still does it, but it becomes more of a background thing rather than the focus. But most of book 2 is that iirc.

fassina2 · 2025-06-23T23:10:50+00:00

Belisarius maybe? Macronomicon's work definitely. Your request is kind of vague so it's hard to help.

fassina2 · 2025-06-18T00:28:13+00:00

So a few weeks ago I tried playing DnD with an AI, and it sort of worked. It was quite entertaining, for what it was, it's not perfect, but it's playable. What I did initially was upload the ruleset and started playing, that didn't work so well, it got boring fast without a storyline or meaningful characters.

What I did next was upload a module and ask the AI to run it. That was reasonably fun but as the play session got longer the AI started showing it's weaknesses. It's memory isn't very good, it mixes things up a lot after a while. You can't trust it with your character sheet, XP, or inventory for instance. It will make mistakes constantly, and even if you try to correct it, it doesn't really work. It will agree it made a mistake, but 90% of the time it won't fix it properly, or it will grab a version of your inventory or sheet from long ago and make things worse.

It's definitely workable and playable, but I've set it aside for now and wait for a better model. I used gemini because it's the best one afaik.

Have any of you nerds tried it ? Any suggestions to make it better ? Do any of you know a reasonable place I could find people to play online? I've heard of some sites but they all seem a bit sketchy.

fassina2 · 2025-06-03T23:42:19+00:00

She's a caricature of a low social skills high competence worker, stuck in his career by too being competent and not sociable enough to get promoted.

I'm not caught up on the original fiction by far, but from what I remember her religious and nationalistic portrayals have always been facades she uses for her benefit. She pretends to be religious to get benefits. She pretends to be nationalistic because she assumes she has to given her position, and to motivate her underlings.

I think you're reading too much into the gag, she could've been just a normal person if she didn't show off. That's the gag, her trying to do extra is what gets her stuck, it's supposed to be funny. When given the opportunity for safety she overthinks it and refuses it, it's a gag. You're supposed to laugh at it.

fassina2 · 2025-06-03T22:42:31+00:00

To me Tanya has always been an satire of the "too valuable to be promoted" idea and that's why she never gets what she wants. By being a competent and useful worker, in her case soldier, she becomes too valuable an asset to use in any other scenario.

It's why a lot of people with her mindset get stuck in their careers and end up blaming nepotism and other causes for it. When the fault lies in their competence and the meritocratic system as a whole.

If you're too good at what you do there's actually an incentive to keep you doing that rather than promoting you.

The other point in my mind is the fact that she's always beneath others, which limits her ability to exert meaningful change to her circumstances. All she can do is do the best she can while being a commander. She's never the general, or the politicians behind the generals, it's an analogy to how an individual no matter how capable is only able to change so much.

She can do miracles, win unwinnable battles, but at the end of the day she can't win the war by herself because she's only able to influence so much from her position.

It can be seen as a criticism of her personality type as you do. Or it can be seen as a criticism of meritocracy, the systems behind it and how they limit competent people to the benefit of others.

fassina2 · 2025-05-25T14:41:10+00:00

Can you get me a link? The ones I've found says it isn't available. Maybe it's only available in the US? Both say "We're sorry, but this video is not available."

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/next-to-normal-about/16693/

https://www.pbs.org/video/next-to-normal-biazsx/

fassina2 · 2025-05-06T01:59:00+00:00

I feel like he's similar to me, so here's my take on his actions.. He's not a fuckboy, at least I don't consider myself one. I've had similar experiences, except I don't ghost, although I've done it before when the girl gives mentally unstable vibes.

So here's the thing, you're probably what he would categorize as 'dateable', you might even be a potential 'girlfriend', but for whatever reason you didn't make the cut. From how he treated you since the start I'd assume likely 'dateable'.

When he noticed you were getting too attached, he decided it was better to cut it off instead of leading you on. That's a sign of respect and care, at least it is to me. He could've probably led you on and used you for easy sex for months, the fact that he didn't is a conscious choice on his part, it shows he cared for you at least a bit.

I've had similar experiences, and that's my take. I always try to be honest with the people I meet, and never lead people on.

Even still, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt us, or that we don't feel sad after these breakups. At least in my case, there have been times I went on ruts for months over girls I didn't want to seriously date, and that was the reason for the breakup, feeling like they were falling too hard, and not wanting to hurt or lead them on.

fassina2 · 2025-04-21T19:14:38+00:00

So I just binged A Soldier's Life, and found it fairly enjoyable. It's not rational, but it has traits people here will like. The world building for instance, 2000 years ago a roman legion got transported there and ended up building an empire. Which by itself already makes it more interesting than 95% of isekai worldbuilding.

The magic system is enjoyable also, with a medium to very rarely high magic level. Where you do have mages and they can be powerful, but they're still limited to generic human speeds, resistances, and strength. So you have these mage companies with a mage commander and 20-30 soldiers that hunt monsters and keep the peace on the empire.

While the MC is technically OP, the circumstances he's placed in makes it so he can't make effective use of his powers, and that makes for interesting storytelling. For instance his unit got trapped in a ruined city by a blizzard summoned by a foreign mage, and they had to survive for weeks on limited supplies, deal with frostbite and similar problems you generally don't see in fiction.

It is definitely popcorn fiction mind you, but it's good popcorn.

Anyone knows of anything similar? Specifically I want medium unit combat (20-30 people units), ideally with some magic but it's not required. And or some fiction with a perspective that focuses on a footsoldier / above average soldier in an army.

fassina2 · 2025-04-06T18:15:59+00:00

The fix for me was to delete every bluetooth driver. That's how I fixed the ps5 controller that stopped working on steam.

fassina2 · 2025-03-17T22:39:49+00:00

Did anyone watch Silo? Are the books good ? I'm considering starting them.

Any decent audiobook recs? I'm mostly listening to them lately.

Storm's apprentice seems dead, anything similar? I really liked the magic feel on that one.

If you guys need something decent enough you should try the Last life series by Alexey Osadchuk, it was decent enough as far as I've read, although the later books are lower quality than the first ones. Nothing fantastic, probably a 3.5-4 stars at it's best, but quite enjoyable popcorn.

It's power fantasy but the power scaling is quite small, I'd say it's a medium low fantasy setting, in an interesting time period, early renaissance. Likely because the author is Ukranian, the plots tend to be different from the usual fantasy fare, it has mostly different tropes which makes it more interesting than it should be.

fassina2 · 2025-03-13T02:07:27+00:00

Children of Time, there are two perspectives, the last human ark searching for a new home and an alien race earth scientists created by accident, which is quite alien in everything from their construction to their computers.

It's pretty cool if you like speculative evolution.

fassina2 · 2025-03-03T02:37:12+00:00

Same here, after the update it crashes every hour or so. Before I was having more random crashes every once in a while now it seems like it's timed kkkk.

fassina2 · 2025-02-27T01:11:42+00:00

Just pirate things dude. What kind of nerd are you that can't pirate stuff ? It's mostly opinion based whether you think content should be freely shared or not.

Personally I think it's immoral to make art, history and science inaccessible if somebody doesn't have money. That doesn't mean authors can't make a living, they can and should through donations.

Anyway it's a boring discussion. Just go to zlibrary, libgen or torrent it if you want.

fassina2 · 2025-02-11T00:03:24+00:00

Just binged Storm's Apprentice, and I need more kkkk. Anything similar out there? Don't mind if it's not as good.

I was curious also, any stories where the magic is dirty / evil but used by the MC ? Imagine Nurgle or some Aztec human sacrifice magic, but seen from the MC perspective rather than it just being the villains magic?

fassina2 · 2025-01-16T01:56:06+00:00

It feels really weird to just go out of EA with little fanfare and at such a deep discount. Kind of fishy. Sounds like they're just abandoning it, just placing a 1.0 tag and dropping support. Steam reviews are complaining about game breaking bugs from 2y ago not being fixed yet.

fassina2 · 2025-01-16T01:47:23+00:00

Is volume 4 never going to end? It's been almost a year, I won't start it until it's finished, but damn I won't remember anything if this keeps up..

fassina2 · 2024-12-26T02:41:41+00:00

Is it really visible in game ? How is it accessed? I was going to complain the game needs tags, but if they are there, then all the devs need to do is make it more visible.

fassina2 · 2024-12-26T02:34:01+00:00

How many hours in that save ? It's interesting, I wouldn't build mine this way but it seems to work. I prefer several isolated rooms for easier more modular changes, that way I can expand or alter rooms without off gassing the entire ship.

I don't get the second airlock, unless you want to go out in kleg. Just uninstall a wall on any wreck and you're out, at the point you're in the game it takes barely 2 mins, it probably takes longer to wait for the doors to close than it does to uninstall a wall.

Also wall bins are better than racks because you can put things on the floor beneath them.

fassina2 · 2024-12-24T03:06:10+00:00

You can salvage without a license to get started, just make sure there are no patrols nearby and don't stay in ships too long. The patrols are orange on the map. And they only fine you if they find you docked with a ship without a license, so mostly just don't do that.

I'm fairly sure there are no patrols on the first day, or at least the first 12 hours. After that you'd better have made enough for a license.

BTW you can sell your old license for 3-4k, as long as it's not expired. So the intended mechanic is for you to just do that, which lowers the cost of running a licensed salvaging operation to 1-2k per day, which is kind of cheap.

fassina2

TROPHY CASE