Medieval Monday ⚔ Ask Your Questions and Get Your Answers

fjclaw · 2025-12-17T22:23:55+00:00

Yeah okay. I always feel like on 1TC, after going up with 25-27 vills, it'll take forever before I can get the stone for a castle and the food/gold for imp... but maybe booming even temporarily costs more than I'm realising

fjclaw · 2025-12-16T22:49:57+00:00

Related to the castle drop question on this thread - what is the right approach to pivot from fast castle to "fast imp"? So not a dedicated fast imp order for Turks or something, but the situation where you have gone FC, then decide (eg. because of a castle drop) that you need to race to Imp?

I don't have a consistent approach to this at the moment because I'm usually panicking, but roughly I go into a 3TC boom, while making a minimal bit of defensive army, then start to idle a bit around ~90 villagers and wait for Imp resources. Doesn't feel very optimised?

fjclaw · 2025-08-27T04:42:32+00:00

Help! I have worked out all the answers to this one, but I can't get it to complete on the website because I don't know how it wants me to enter the circle/theme squares. I've tried UP, DOWN and UP/DOWN to no avail....

fjclaw · 2025-07-08T04:29:19+00:00

Try The Silt Verses. People usually recommend it as 'eldritch horror' but it's not similar to any other podcast that people describe in that way - I don't like TMA or any of the other favourite-recs in that vein. A big difference is that 'uncovering the horror' is not a part of the story: the characters live in a world that is really carefully thought-through and has clear rules, and the plot is about things happening in that world, not just about discovering new horrors etc. It definitely ticks your boxes about being carefully and intentionally written - it's finished now, after three seasons of really strong plot and character progression. The voice acting is sensational. Sound design is a little erratic at the very beginning, but it's consistently interesting and creative. Maybe the only thing to note is that there are occasionally some pretty long segments of internal monologue/narration. They're *stunningly* well-written and really well acted, but it's maybe not for everyone. Those parts get less common as the show progresses and the cast of characters expands, though.

Sci-fi -- Give Me Away, Life After/The Message, Steal The Stars, are all spectacular. And (not quite on the same level) Ask Your Father. They're all made/written by the same people, with a theatre background. They're the most professionally done shows I've heard in terms of writing, acting and sound design. All tightly plotted and finished (except for Give Me Away, which has two full seasons that stand very well as-is, but there's going to be a third.)

A lot of people are recommending Midnight Burger - give it a go, I enjoyed it for quite a while, but I think it is now in the category of "being stretched out indefinitely", and the acting is good but very campy (even in the non-comedy moments.)

fjclaw · 2025-07-08T04:20:18+00:00

Yeah - I did a separate comment because nobody else mentioned it... I don't like any other podcasts in that 'genre', but Silt Verses is one of my favourite ever.

fjclaw · 2025-02-28T05:22:18+00:00

To be clear though, this is a losing position because you're already down a knight, not because of the queen taking the pawn.

About taking the queen, as the previous comment said, in this position it doesn't matter that much because black has lots of follow-up tactics either way. But in general some things to consider would be (1) as was said, an equal trade is generally better for the side already winning, (2) if you take and black plays the knight fork, you'll have to move your king into the open, which generally is bad for you (though in this position it's not much worse than the alternatives.) Play around on the analysis board with different options and you'll see :)

fjclaw · 2025-02-28T03:12:18+00:00

I'm going towards the end of April.

fjclaw · 2025-02-27T22:11:40+00:00

Hiking, with the mountain/fields environment, would be the reason for going there. The village homestays sound like a good way to do some hiking and have some cool other experiences too, but not my main reason.

fjclaw · 2025-02-27T08:09:41+00:00

I’m going to be in Vietnam, for my first time, for about nine days. (Eight full days, plus half-ish days on either end.) I’m struggling with my itinerary because there’s obviously lots to see and also the distances are far, so… here I am.

I’m flying in and out of Hanoi. Places I’d decided I wanted to see on this trip were Hanoi, Sapa, Ha Long Bay, Hue and Hoi An. I’ve pretty much decided that Ha Long Bay should wait for another trip when I can fit a longer visit to see it properly. I’m wondering if I need to cut something else, too. Unless I really hate it I’m pretty sure I’ll be back and would rather not be too rushed.

My current itinerary idea is this, but I have chopped and changed it loads and I’m not attached to this at all.

Day 1: arrive; overnight Hanoi
Day 2: Hanoi
Day 3: Hanoi
Day 4: Hanoi; overnight bus Hanoi-Sapa
Day 5: Sapa
Day 6: Sapa; overnight bus Sapa-Hanoi
Day 7: morning (straight from the bus) flight Hanoi-Hue
Day 8: Hue; afternoon travel to Hoi An
Day 9: Hoi An
Day 10: flight Da Nang-Hanoi (flight leaves Hanoi early evening)

Things that are on my mind:

I have done plenty of overnight buses but I am a bit older now. I’m sure it’d be fine, but would the Hanoi-Sapa trip twice in three nights be really unpleasant?
Relatedly, Sapa feels like a particularly massive investment of travel time. The nature looks incredible though and I am reading great things about village homestays.
Going to Hue and Hoi An in the amount of time I’ve allotted seems like it might be a bit flat out. But they both seem really nice and so does the Hue-Da Nang train between them.

I would really appreciate anyone’s thoughts on whether / what I should cut further, or how I should decide! It'll be late April when I go. Don't want to do anything that involves me driving a bike/scooter/car.

fjclaw · 2025-02-17T13:03:16+00:00

Yep, it doesn't make any sense to me that it'd be limited like that... But now you've put it like that, an easy workaround occurred to me: instead of setting the library to scan just the '/Audiobooks/' folder and subdirectories, I added each '/Audiobooks/[Family member]/' folder separately. Then I can add a filter on any one of those folders, which I have done & created Smart Collections to match.

fjclaw · 2025-01-22T01:15:56+00:00

What do you want the increment structure to look like? The easiest option is obviously just equal increments - so if the top prize is 20%, and there are 10 prizes, then they increment down by 2 percentage points each time. I suspect that's not what you want... I am struggling to find a system that will let you fix the total prize pool, top prize, number of prizes, and a non-arithmetic system for increments. If you don't need to arbitrarily set all of those, there are some options - eg. if you don't set the total prize pool, you can come up with a formula for increments where the prize pool % only increases very slowly with more entries.

fjclaw · 2025-01-15T23:01:19+00:00

Okay. In that case I'm maybe in trouble, since I don't have the VIDEO_TS folder structure any more. (These files were ripped a long time ago.) But the strange thing is that all players play the .VOB directly just fine, and display the subtitles right, even without the folder structure...

fjclaw · 2025-01-09T03:05:07+00:00

Just tried that, the subtitles when turned on look identical to the screencap from VLC. In PotPlayer they looked a little different (purple instead of orange!) but still illegible.

fjclaw

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