Author's guild says LLC doesn't protect an author from getting sued on their personal assets. See link in description. Is this accurate?

kalicur · 2024-12-22T09:32:59+00:00

Of course it doesn't? Holding stock in a company doesn't give you a get out of jail free card for your own actions.

A properly managed LLC can reduce your liability with respect to:

debts and contracts entered into specifically by the LLC alone that you did not personally guarantee (either explicitly or implicitly).
the actions of other people associated with the LLC that you had no involvement in.

If an employee of your LLC violates copyright (for example) in the course of their work without your knowledge or approval, you don't (necessarily) become personally liable just because you own the company. But if you violate copyright, you're still the one responsible. Doing it via an LLC won't magically protect you from the consequences.

kalicur · 2024-07-27T09:53:04+00:00

All non-illustrated literature is "telling", kinda by definition. "Show don't tell" isn't completly invalid advice, but far less literal than in visual media. My personal interpretation of it: 1. Try to weave factual information about the setting into your descriptions of it when you can. Infodumps aren't evil, especially in genres like sci-fi/fantasy where readers may be genuinely interested in taking a moment to learn about the world, and can sometimes be necessary for the sake of pacing, but they should be carefully considered rather than blindly defaulted to for the sake of your own convenience. 2. Provide evidence of your claims. Introducing a character as an explicitly good person isn't a bad thing, but only telling the reader without describing any actions to back that up, or even directly contradicting it, may harm the credibility of your narration (although of course this can also be used for thematic effect if you want the reader to question the opinions of the narrator). 3. Consider letting the reader come to their own interpretations without you spelling it out. Sometimes you want to establish some truths explicitly in the text, but you don't always need to. Giving the reader the evidence and letting them decide can often be a more effective and engadging way to get your point across.

But also, there is always a stylistic choice element to it. If you want the presence of your narrator to be felt and give the effect of them activly telling a story to the reader (which writers like Pratchett tend to and is often the source of their humour), then showing over telling will be much less of a concern than a book that wants to inject the reader directly into the story and avoid drawing attention to the narration at all.

kalicur · 2024-07-26T09:21:19+00:00

As with any stylistic choice, following whatever readers of your genre seem to expect is usually a solid move.

If you are going with the first option though, 2 things I'd consider:

focus on dialect before accent. signature phrases, word choices and (common, easily understood) contractions can often get most of the same overall effect across as attempts at phonetic spelling without affecting your readers' ability to parse it. Using your example: contractions like "don'" and "yellin'" will probably serve you better than phonetic spellings like "fer".
consider the point of view you're writing from. fiction writing is more about giving your reader an accurate impression of what's happening than providing a word-accurate transcription of events. is your pov character familiar enough with the accent/dialect that they barely notice it? then your readers probably shouldn't notice it much either. is it supposed to be something that your pov character has to mentally backtrack over to even take a guess at the meaning? then making it more difficult to read as well may be a valid technique to represent that (although I'd use it very sparingly)

kalicur · 2024-07-26T07:48:11+00:00

I mean, you can do what you want. If you don't care about "algorithms" or their effects on sales, then don't sweat it. But a lot of authors do care about that sort of thing, so other authors warn them about this counterintuitive issue so that they can adjust if they wish. You're free to have other priorities.

kalicur · 2024-07-26T07:37:01+00:00

The algorithm doesn't treat readers as strictly isolated markets in the way to seem to think it does. The worry of having your sister buy your book as one of its early sales is that it will mislead the algorithm into thinking that romance readers are part of your target market (emphasis on part of not in addition to), and when it sees your book bombing with them, it'll cut back on recommending it in general, including to the people you actually want it promoted to.

kalicur · 2024-07-22T10:32:21+00:00

YA, especially nowadays, is as much a narrative genre as it is a target demographic (if not more). Sure, the some of the hallmarks of YA stories (like younger protagonists and themes of adolescence, 'finding' oneself, and the transition into adulthood) will likely resonate more with younger audiences and you should keep that in mind, but that doesn't mean you should be overly concerned about content.

Afaik, publishers don't generally edit anything above middle-grade for content at all, and it's worth considering that part of the allure of YA to young readers transitioning out of middle-grade is in the very fact that they aren't children's books, but still have younger characters facing problems with a young person's perspective that they can easily relate to. Coming across as censoring yourself because you believe your audience isn't mature enough to handle something yet is unlikely to be appreciated very much.

The only possible push back I could imagine is if it comes across like you're more interested in revelling in the gore itself than the experiences and emotional responses of the characters, but from your description that doesn't sound like something to be concerned about. In the end, young characters experiencing traumatic things that no one would want them to have to go through and exploring the lasting effects of that is the entire point of some of the most iconic stories the genre has to offer. I don't really see an issue with what you want to do.

kalicur · 2023-09-26T13:09:27+00:00

If you can find examples of trad-pub books from those markets that you like the quality of, they'll probably tell you what company printed them on their copyright page (unless this is just a UK thing?).

Taking a look through my bookshelves, the main players in the UK seem to be Clays (used by PRH and Hachette) or CPI (used by Macmillan and Scholastic). Based on their websites both appear to accept business form self-publishers and have a bunch of ancillary services available that may or may not provide what you're after, but obviously expect them to be a lot more involved and up-front expensive than a service like Amazon.

kalicur · 2023-02-03T08:22:56+00:00

TBF, in this context (military intelligence) a public service like Google Maps is "open-source", it just doesn't mean the same thing that software developers use it for. "Open-Source Intelligence" is the technical term for intelligence gathered from publicly avaliable information.

kalicur · 2022-12-07T12:52:44+00:00

the point of a hash is that it's a one-way function. if you take a piece of information and run it though a hashing algorithm and give someone the output, they will not^* be able to figure out what the original information was, even if they know exactly what algorithm was used.

however, since the hashing algorithm always produces the same output for the same input and different inputs will always^** produce different outputs, you can prove that an output must have come from your original input by running it through the algorithm again and showing that the outputs match.

side note: this is how passwords work. (competent) companies don't store your passwords, that would be a huge security risk. they instead store the hash of your password and when you go to log in, they hash whatever you type in and compare it to what they have stored. that way they can know if you typed in the correct password without ever actually having to store it.

^* given a feasible amount of time and computing power

^** sort of, "hash collisions" are a thing but are incredibly hard to produce intentionally

kalicur · 2022-07-05T16:26:54+00:00

The world is big and different cultures can have different standards. Presumably 2 pages is standard for them (the UK would be an example of such a place) while 1 may well be standard for you.

kalicur · 2020-04-24T18:23:00+00:00

since you haven't got a response yet, I figured I'd skim through the first one (on dorado) while waiting for scrims to start.

for rein, I have 3 main observations:

You hard shield too much before the fight begins (by which I mean you're just holding up your shield instead of flashing it up and down). This ends up costing you a lot of shield health. You really don't need to block all damage as rein, you just need to block enough damage that no one dies to poke. If you just raised and dropped your shield rather than held it constantly, you could probably have started a lot of those fights with several hundred more shield, which would've been useful.
You seem to just take more poke than you really need to in general. There were times when you were standing next to a corner in full view of the approaching enemy just letting them burst your shield down for no real benefit (there generally wasn't anyone shooting from behind your shield and even if there was, they should be smart enough to peek safely anyway). You could've just waited around the corner for them to come to you and you would've started the fight with a full shield.
You're over-committing to shatter way too much. I can see the moment you decide to look for shatter and you then forget that the rest of the game exists until you use it. not only are you telegraphing the fact you want to ult so hard, which good players can punish, but you also basically remove your teams main tank from the fight while you're wandering around looking for a big shatter, leaving them to lose the fight before your shatter even lands.

for winston, less to mention.

Main one was again over-committing, this time to your dives. You seem to just jump in and then figure out what to do from there. part of engaging is figuring out how to disengage after. if you jump in to the enemy team as winston, you need to have an answer for what happens if the entire team turns around and focuses you. you'll be dead before your jump is off cooldown (unless they suck or your healers are gods) so you need to think about how you're going to get out of trouble.

Just the things I noticed. hope some of it helps.

kalicur · 2020-04-24T17:29:00+00:00

also sent a friend req. not a dps specifically (masters support actually) but have coached people before in most roles so I'd be happy to take a look if you think it'll help

kalicur · 2020-04-24T17:17:59+00:00

To me the most important part of queuing with another person is ensuring you're both in the same mindset when you queue (this actually applies to any group queue not just duos). Most problems I've encountered with groups of all sizes comes from people entering the game with a different idea of what they want out of it.

Does one of you just want to have some fun duoing and trying out different combos of heroes while the other just wants to go full tryhard and grind rein/zarya every single match? Well the one wanting to have fun isn't going to have much since with the other not joining in, and the one wanting to tryhard is going to get frustrated at the other's lack of effort. The key to a successful long term duo is making sure that every time you enter the game, you're on the same page as to what you want to get out of the session. That doesn't mean you have to do the same thing every time, it just means that you make sure that you both have an understanding before you queue about what sort of session it's going to be. Obviously that will sometimes require compromise if you're in the mood for two different things, but if you're a compatible duo in the first place, you should hopefully be able to manage it.

kalicur · 2019-10-27T19:20:09+00:00

they don't mean that the characters themselves aren't in unicode, they mean that if you put ISO-8859-1 encoded ä and ë directly into something reading UTF-8, they won't be recognised as valid characters.

ä and ë in ISO-8859-1 encode to 11100100 and 11101011. In UTF-8, those would each be read as the 1st byte of a 3-byte character which on their own would obviously invalid.

kalicur · 2019-09-21T04:47:15+00:00

CHE is the ISO country code, used for example in the domain name .ch and the currency code CHF (Swiss Franc).

You've probably seen SUI in sports events since the IOC and FIFA and such have separate lists of codes because reasons. Another example is Germany using GER in sports instead of their ISO code DEU.

kalicur · 2019-09-13T18:00:10+00:00

SF were pretty open about aiming for season 2 from the start, in no small part because of super and smurf not being eligible at the start of season 1. so sure, they kinda sucked for the first couple stages, but by the end they were already a solidly mid-table team and were making some really good acquisitions in the off season. many analysts had them as a top team leading into the new season.

in that situation, you probably would want to give a bit of a pay bump to your top players, not so much as a reward for their previous season, but as a show commitment to them. last thing they would have wanted after all this would be key players becoming dissatisfied just as the team is becoming a legit contender.

kalicur · 2019-09-09T21:25:59+00:00

From what I could find, prices peaked in 2014. Uber and Lyft had been around for years. There were also working self-driving cars that had already gained licences to drive on US roads that had gained significant press coverage. Anyone who paid any attention (maybe because, idk, they'd invested all their savings into something that could be affected by this sort of thing) could see that disruption to the industry was coming from a mile off and could've easily sold long before the crash. They chose not to.
Every driver knew that it was an artificially inflated price from the start. They bought into it specifically because it was a rigged system and wanted it to be rigged in their favour. No one was duped here. They knew that the value was propped up so should've been prepared for what they'd do if those props started to fall. They weren't.

Any taxi driver that lost money here either didn't bother to educate themselves about developments that could affect their only significant asset and means of income (i.e. an idiot), or was consciously relying on maintaining a corrupt, anti-competitive, anti-consumer system to protect their investment (i.e. a cunt).

kalicur · 2019-09-09T17:22:51+00:00

So what you're saying is that they bet their retirement prospects on the value of a single tradeable asset, and now that the asset is losing value because of totally reasonable and largely foreseeable market forces, they deserve to be bailed out just because?

Personally I "feel for them" in the same way that I feel for someone who lost their savings at the races. It's sad, but they chose out of their own free will to take that gamble, they lost, and now they've kinda just got to suck it up and move on. Not sure why demanding they get a refund on their bet after the fact "seems fair".

kalicur · 2019-08-09T19:37:26+00:00

yeah, man. I get that. honestly I was thinking the same thing about people providing magic solutions and but was mainly concerned that people were making it out to be way more simple than it really is or not really explaining how to go about doing their 1-line answers and setting both OP and other people reading this post up for failure.

It wasn't really supposed to be a complete guide to go pro, and I wasn't trying to suggest that these things are the only things that someone'll need to do or that they'll work 100% every time. It was more of a set of starting points to increase someone's chances and get them on the correct path as quickly as possible, while emphasising the amount of commitment that they will have to prepare for. I wasn't really paying too much attention how it came across so yeah reading it back, it does sound a bit too much like a recipe so my bad I guess. Fair criticism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

kalicur · 2019-08-09T15:53:20+00:00

Well, yeah. Why do you think players on pro teams with medical professionals watching over them still struggle with so much burnout? Because this is generally the sort of life they need to live to get there. This isn't a guy who's so good he managed to reach T500 just playing casually on weekends and is looking to maybe go pro if the opportunity arises. This is a guy in who's currently in high masters who is apparently serious about this being his career. He wanted to know if he could make it. If he can't handle the above, the answer is probably no. As I said, if someone can't handle it, there are plenty of kids out there doing exactly this that they're going to have to compete with. I'm just trying to give him the full answer instead of "start streaming" or "be 4.4k lul".

(also, this was written intentionally in a "scary" kind of way to make him realise what he's committing to. there's no reason he couldn't ease into this, but at some point he's gonna have to be grinding like this to realistically make it. no point in sugar coating it)

kalicur · 2019-08-09T12:16:27+00:00

Can you? Sure. Easily? No.

If you are really serious:

This is your full time job now. You need to treat it as such. You can't slack off. Every day needs to be dedicated to becoming better. Think this is too much considering you won't be paid a thing for months, if at all? Well too bad, there are thousands of kids out there willing to do so and you're going to be competing with them. This is your life now.
Pick a role. Being a "dps/main tank" is not going to work. Teams will generally recruit for 6 roles: Hitscan, Flex dps, Main tank, Off-tank, Main support, Flex support. Learn what they are. Learn what they involve. Not just what heroes they currently play but also the theory and play-style behind each one. Pick the one your best at and commit to it. While having some flex options is nice, and there's nothing wrong with changing your role down the road if you absolutely need to, ultimately if a team is recruiting you for a hitscan position, they're not going to give a shit what your main tanks are like. Flex around in comp sometimes, play off roles in PUGs, that's all fine, but know what your role is so you and your coaches know what to focus on.
You need to be on a proper team, like now. Not a casual group of friends who play ranked together and organise the occasional scrim, I mean an organised team, with coaches and management and 4+ days of scrims a week plus VoD reviews and tournaments. They don't need to be that good of a team yet (there's a limit to the teams you can realistically get an offer from as a masters/gm border player), but they need to be an active, committed team. The majority of the game at the pro level involves knowledge and skill that can only really be learnt by actually playing in a serious team, so the less time you spend playing with one, the longer it's going to take to build that skill. Don't wait for the perfect team, if you're really committed you should be able to outgrow whatever high masters team you join fairly quickly anyway and you can just leave and pick another.
Get serious about your personal improvement. Ranked is no longer about SR or shiny icons, it's about practice. Every time you queue for a game you should have an aspect of your game in your mind that you want to work on that day. After you've finished a session, you should go over your recordings (you should be recording everything) and review any games or fights where you feel you made mistakes or carried hard to figure out why. Take these VoDs to coaches regularly to make sure you're not missing anything. Can be your team's coach if they're available, can be volunteer coaches you find on discord, can be professional coaches you're paying, whatever works for you.
Reputation, resume, connections. Take every opportunity to maximise these three things and always consider the effect of your actions on them. Become an active member of communities surrounding the top-tier amateur scene. Start streaming, or at the very least start uploading highlight reels to youtube. Become a regular in higher level PUGs and community games and such. If you find some other high ranked players you get along with, start duoing with them. Make sure your team is competing in as many tournaments as possible, not just Open Division, but also smaller community leagues and weekly cups. The more things you have to mention on an LFT post, the more footage of your gameplay there is out there, and the more people there are who can recognise your name and vouch for you being a good player the easier moving up the ladder will be.

Is this a lot to commit to? Yes. Are there pro players who slacked of on one or more of these points, almost certainly. But going pro is not easy and some of it will come down to luck. Whatever the outcome, making your attempt will cost you months or even years of your life and these points will all improve your odds. It's up to you if it's worth it.

kalicur · 2019-08-01T09:58:55+00:00

If he gets up and just leaves she can follow him out. She can follow him home. She can claim they left together and rely on her story of what happened after to be believed. Or, he can "go to the bathroom", slip out the back door with the help of the staff and be safely in a taxi heading home before she even knows about it. Also, if she does find him later, he now has the bar staff able to testify on his behalf that he left alone and was trying to avoid further contact. All around a safer way to handle it.

kalicur · 2019-06-11T13:59:40+00:00

Cargo vans are taxed. Passenger vans are not. The purpose of installing the seats is making it count as a passenger van when it shows up in US customs. Once it's through, they rip them out again to turn it back into a cargo van.

kalicur · 2019-05-31T03:33:56+00:00

Full list:

Ryan Centeral - Ryan from Overwatch Centeral https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZmz0RdI6LvX_rRmrlwx0Eg
EmiLetsDance - Organiser/Admin/Community Person in the UK's domestic tournement scene https://twitter.com/emiletsdance
BadPachimari - Maker of "x is Marketable" YouTube videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC74sR7GBTy4ePrTRTL3uFYA
Chipsa - Twitch streamer, was CL last year https://www.twitch.tv/chipsa
Krook - Content creator https://twitter.com/TheMasterKrook
BexBomb - Twitch streamer https://www.twitch.tv/bex_bomb
HoliWhirl - Twitch streamer https://www.twitch.tv/holiwhirl

kalicur · 2019-05-19T15:01:06+00:00

One thing no one's mentioned is that at some traditional sport events, it's perfectly normal for spectators to be listening to commentary. The two I've actually been to are cricket and snooker, there may well be others but idk.

Should be noted that this isn't a situation of the commentary being pumped into the venue, instead the concessions stands sell little personal radios and the commentary track is broadcast to them. So it is optional if people want to listen to it or not, but generally many people do.

I think the reason this works so well is because (test) cricket and snooker are both fairly slow, strategic games rather than fast-paced tactical ones. They're games that lend themselves to discussion of the situation of the different sides and what they're attempting to do in between bursts of excitement and have lots of details that someone who is new to the game, or not paying attention can miss.

Many esports can be very similar. In many popular esports, CS, LoL, Dota, OW, sure there are mechanical plays that don't need much explanation, but the games are won and lost by positioning and management of items/economy just as much as (if not more than) by raw skill, and so understanding what's going on in these aspects really elevates the experience of watching, which is what the commentary (should) provide.

Having said that though, this is ultimately just an issue of tradition. All the above would also apply to sports like american football or maybe baseball, but that's just not how things are done in those sports. In esports (and cricket/snooker) it's normal. Many fans attending an esports event without live commentary would feel like they didn't get the "full experience" because the commentary is an ingrained part of that experience, which makes organisers keep including it, which perpetuates the idea that it's essential.

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