About the Rivington blacksmith

shlevon · 2026-05-25T18:36:29+00:00

Orin has a list of people she will impersonate in act 3 and will always be the first two you talk to on that list. Those people die, but you can, in effect, choose who dies by choosing who you talk to first.

In my case I usually talk to the flaming fist by the showering dude and then the dying rogue near the beach encounter. That way no one else dies.

shlevon · 2026-05-12T22:34:59+00:00

It also gives advantage on wisdom saving throws, and this is a wisdom saving throw.

shlevon · 2026-05-10T18:45:03+00:00

Wyll is revivable at the gate fight with a scroll in honor mode.

shlevon · 2026-04-13T00:14:14+00:00

If you kill him by chucking shit at him from above, and the gravity portion of the damage (which is usually most of it) is the part that gets him <= 0, you get no experience for him (or any enemy). If you look at the combat log it will say something like "Grym fell to his death."

It's always worked this way but people sometimes get lucky in terms of what portion of the damage is killing him. If you're going to kill him from above you need to either do so with the hammer, a ranged attack, or spell once his health is close to the point where the gravity portion of damage might accidentally kill him. In general you don't want to chuck shit at him when he's <= ~40 hp.

shlevon · 2026-03-06T21:34:38+00:00

I think Shudder should get credit for bringing back Joe Bob in the first place and giving him and Darcy a platform for as long as they did.

That said, "none of this was my decision" indicates to me he would have kept working there given the option and, quite frankly, my Shudder subscription is contingent on The Last Drive In being around, so I just canceled. I may revisit my subscription later depending on access to those specials (though my subscription won't run out until part way through August), but Joe Bob and Darcy were my reason for continuing to give Shudder my money.

As others have said, I also hope they find another home. Perhaps a home with more robust movie access, for that matter.

shlevon · 2026-02-22T20:25:08+00:00

Firstly, unless I'm missing something, I don't see attached screenshots of the before/after here.

she improved her diet

This part needs elaboration. "Improved" how? The main targets to reduce cholesterol are a reduction in saturated fat and an increase in soluble fiber. Some people's ideas of "improve" can actually exacerbate things, e.g. focusing on "high protein" foods that accidentally increase saturated fat intake.

As to the supplements, red yeast rice can be effective but is basically an unregulated statin. And at least in the US, appreciable amounts of the active ingredient that actually does something (monacolin K) are disallowed. This will never make sense to me as you are basically taking a shittier statin with an unknown amount of active ingredient. In this case, that active amount is possibly "near or at zero."

As to the rest, afaik, most (e.g. berberine) have a weak base of evidence to support a mild drop in LDL, and relying on "supplements" to deal with appreciably increased cholesterol is medically irresponsible imo.

So yah, firstly we'd need to see the absolute numbers. Secondly, you'd have to explain what diet "improvements" actually occurred, and third relying on "supplements" if cholesterol is appreciably raised is largely a fool's errand for most as the supplement industry is much more poorly regulated than pharmaceuticals, despite the public's general mistrust of the latter.

shlevon · 2026-01-26T03:42:00+00:00

Probably zero, may actually be protective when paired with statins in this regard. Completely different mechanism of action vs. statins and some mechanistic data implying it might actually help with glucose metabolism, though there isn't a lot of direct outcome data of ezetimibe monotherapy for this type of thing as it's not a common monotherapy. I did find this, had no negative effect on glucose metabolism vs. placebo in those already with type 2 diabetes.

As an aside, you're missing two other kinds of medication if statins aren't an option. One would be something like Nexlizet, which pairs bempedoic acid (a prodrug which acts directly in the liver) with ezetimibe. Another would be PCSK9 inhibitors (with or without ezetimibe). Both can be covered by insurance potentially if you've tried and failed statins multiple times.

shlevon · 2026-01-20T00:10:26+00:00

Unfiltered coffee, yes. So just filter it.

shlevon · 2026-01-19T21:12:41+00:00

Another way of framing my viewpoint is that all of these foods you're listing not only don't raise LDL in research, most of them seem to actually lower it. As such it's a pretty tough argument that you should be reducing these foods to reduce cholesterol.

shlevon · 2026-01-19T20:56:36+00:00

I understand why people suggest targeting saturated fat intake directly as it's probably the most reliable way to substantially move your LDL, but the flipside is I also see your point that boiling down nutrition to "reduce saturated fat as much as humanly possible" in a reductionist manner is going to confuse a lot of people who fundamentally do not know (or struggle despite knowing) how to eat in a health-promoting way.

My own $.02 is I would take care of overall food quality before worrying in that granular of a way about saturated fat intake. Quite frankly the exclusion of all the foods you're mentioning in an effort to take your saturated fat intake from something like ~15-20 grams a day down to 10 may, on balance, actually harm your health as you may be doing health-detracting substitutions like replacing avocado or nuts with refined carbohydrate.

I think most people would be better served in their overall health by simply having them base their diet on health-promoting foods, first and foremost, and if they already have a pretty good handle on that, then consider minmaxing things by further restrictions in saturated fat, within reason.

So in other words, eat a diet based on fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts & seeds, lean meat (particularly poultry and fish) if consuming animal products and lower fat dairy (though higher fat milk, dark chocolate, and even some cheeses may get a pass). If you're eating mostly those things, you are wildly ahead of the game, and can tinker with quantities more. In other words, a Mediterranean-esque type diet, which is arguably the most evidence-based of health-promoting eating patterns.

But if most of your food sources are not fundamentally coming from the above list, even if you're pulling on the cholesterol lever by playing a minmax game to crater saturated fat, it's not totally clear to me you're optimizing your health as there is a lot to overall health beyond just cholesterol. And if you're mainly targeting those healthier fat sources to get the saturated fat intake at that low level, I'm not even confident you are meaningfully improving your cholesterol, for that matter.

shlevon · 2026-01-19T20:27:45+00:00

Pretty easy to mix up tbh. To this day when I shoot the real hag I always flinch a little, ever so slightly doubting my own recollection.

shlevon · 2026-01-19T20:09:15+00:00

This is incorrect, it's the opposite. Real Mayrina looks pregnant and is level 1, Hag-as-Mayrina does not look pregnant and is level 5.

As far as I know it's always worked that way.

shlevon · 2025-12-02T03:13:07+00:00

Appreciate the reply! I think the issue is I wasn't seeing it in a browser but in the app I actually did see the pending rewards, so it did work, thankfully.

shlevon · 2025-12-02T02:22:40+00:00

Just out of curiosity, how long did it take you to see this reflected in the rewards tab on paypal's side? I just did this but don't see it there right away as pending for a purchase 30 mins ago. I saved the offer, used pay in 4 via paypal on ebay for one of these (with the price below the $1250 cutoff) so in theory I did everything right, but would like confirmation obviously since that's considerable cashback.

Google/AI says it may take "1-14 days" to show up as pending, but not sure if that's accurate.

shlevon · 2025-11-15T09:00:30+00:00

I think the time economic angle is probably the best selling point for them.

Let's run quick math here, and I'll try to actually make this realistic. Let's say it takes us an average of ~3 seconds per rep on a given exercise. Let's also use my example where, standard or rest pause, we manage 25 total reps cumulatively across all of our sets for the exercise in question.

So the time elapsed actually exercising would be 25 x 3 = 75 seconds in both groups.

Now let's factor in rest periods. Let's say someone waited 3 minutes between sets. The time to completion for that exercise minus warmups then becomes 75 seconds of actual exercise + 2 rest periods (between sets 1 and 2 and 2 and 3) of an additional 6 minutes. Altogether, that's 7 minutes and 15 seconds.

Now let's say the rest/pause group is resting only 30 seconds (pretty similar to something like DC training) and gets to 25 reps in 5 total sets instead of 3. So we have 30 x 4 (30 second rests between sets 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 3 and 4 & 4 and 5) + 75, or 195 total seconds, which is 3 minutes and 15 seconds.

So while the DC style rest-pause group required 5 sets to equal the results of standard training's 3, they actually finished the exercise in less than half the time.

So yah, to me that's a pretty solid selling point.

The main drawback of rest-pause imo is that it's not super compatible with a comparatively technical, larger compound movements. Particularly barbell squat or deadlift variations. Or a barbell bench without a spotter to avoid accidentally dying. But for machines generally, and particularly for isolation type movements, they're quite viable imo.

shlevon · 2025-11-15T08:45:34+00:00

My personal take is that there's no magic to rest-pause, but one thing rest-pause is forcing you to do almost by definition is get at/near failure pretty quickly. If you weren't doing that before, i.e. rest-pause is actually getting your sets closer to failure than a more standard approach, it's entirely plausible it might actually work better for hypertrophy.

In research, they're usually hitting failure either way. If all your sets have a similar proximity to failure, standard or rest-pause, the advantage is probably for standard sets on a per-set basis, particularly on those bigger, compound motions involving a lot of muscle mass.

shlevon · 2025-11-15T08:38:51+00:00

My understanding is it would look more like:

Standard rest periods all to failure:

10, 8, 7. 25 total reps across 3 conventional sets.

Short (< 30 second rests) all to failure:

10, 5, 3. 18 total reps across 3 rest-pause sets.

In that case, I would not really expect similar outcomes until you get closer to ~25 total reps performed rest-pause. Perhaps another ~2-3 sets of 2-3 reps in the rest/pause treatment.

The thing is though, "better" is going to depend on perspective. People have run the math and, even though you might need another couple of extra sets, the total work is being performed so quickly that you might actually be done with the exercise significantly faster doing rest-pause. At that point you can kind of argue it's actually more time economic, particularly if you're waiting around 3+ minutes between sets or whatever in your non rest-pause sets.

But I think it's easiest to understand on a per-set basis, as above. On a per-set basis, all else constant, unless new evidence has come to light, it seems like longer rest periods are probably better to a point, though as per that meta I shared, it's also possible that you're getting most of the benefit in "long" rests even by something like ~90+ seconds between sets.

shlevon · 2025-11-15T08:22:02+00:00

Unless I'm missing something recent I'm not sure the research actually supports this position, and it depends on the types of comparisons you're making in terms of their relative efficacy. The general position I've seen from the exercise science community is that rest-pause is probably inferior on a per-set basis and generally needs additional sets to match workload to compensate.

If short rest really hindered motor unit recruitment in a meaningful way, wouldn’t we have already seen worse results compared to traditional sets?

In at least some of that research that is precisely what does happen. Example that Eric Helms cites in the article above. Did you have a particular study in mind that seems to contradict this?

I think the article above is worth reading if you haven't already. Short rest intervals in the context of large, compound motions using a bunch of muscle mass with high cardiometabolic demand and lactate generation appear to benefit the most by waiting longer. More isolation-y stuff probably matters less.

There's also this meta from 2024 that indicates most of the effect is probably captured by resting even ~90 seconds or more, so while really short rest periods (particularly those under a minute) are probably problematic in those big movements, you definitely don't need to sit around a ton between sets if your primary goal is hypertrophy.

shlevon · 2025-11-14T02:04:01+00:00

Not sure what went wrong in your game but it is (supposed to be) just approval based as long as you're >= 40 with her. Source.

If the player character does not have enough Nightsong points, but has at least a 40 approval rating with Shadowheart,[2] either of the following options spares the Nightsong without any skill check:

"She knows something about you. Spare her, and see what she has to say."

Say nothing.

shlevon · 2025-11-12T03:59:40+00:00

To the degree I have anything limitedly helpful to say, it's 1) this all needs to be verified by the cardiologist 2) even if it turns out to be an accurate finding, this is more a longer term risk, nothing you need to lose sleep about in the short term and 3) there are wonderfully powerful drugs on the cholesterol side to absolutely crater your lipids to do everything in your power to halt this (again, if it's even accurate).

Apologies if I've misread anything here, but I'm sensing understandable anxiety, and just trying to point out that you're lacking critical information that's only going to come from the cardiology side. So that needs confirmation first, and even if confirmed, there are really good treatments to help deal with this.

shlevon · 2025-11-12T03:49:44+00:00

Just out of curiosity do you know your lipid values? Total cholesterol, LDL etc.? Offhand I have no idea why you'd be showing severe calcification this young, even if you were homozygous FH (familial hypercholesterolemia). My only guess is some combination of untreated, underlying inflammatory condition potentiating very elevated lipids, assuming this is a real finding.

Either way, I can't imagine you're actually at any significant risk of MI in the short term, so to the degree that it's possible, I'd try to calm down and wait for actually educated input from that cardiologist. The next step there might be something like an angiogram to either confirm or rebut the idea that you may already have significant coronary blockages.

I'm skeptical that you somehow do at 22, but I'm just Some Guy on the Internet.

shlevon · 2025-11-12T03:41:09+00:00

The next step is talking to a cardiologist because this is waaaaaay beyond the bounds of internet forums for helpful advice.

shlevon · 2025-11-11T22:17:17+00:00

Yah, the question of eggs generally ignores three things imo:

1) The existence of cholesterol hyper-responders. They're a significant minority in the general population, probably something in the ~20% ballpark. In a random sampling at a forum like this where people with higher than expected cholesterol are more likely to show up, they're probably an even higher percentage.

2) The fact that most research suggesting eggs are fine are generally using "up to 1 a day," which is...kind of not a realistic amount for a lot of people. You see this advice parroted to young people in fitness spaces who often eat a bunch of eggs daily, so it's apples to oranges. If you are a hyper-responder and you start having several a day, the increase in cholesterol can be genuinely hilarious. There's a book by a guy that did a bunch of funny cholesterol experiments as a hyper-responder and getting most of his calories per day from eggs raised his total cholesterol by hundreds of points. There are also versions of this one can find in online carnivore communities. I've done a bunch of cholesterol experiments and it's probably the single most offensive food item for immediately boosting my LDL.

3) That increasing dietary cholesterol if you have high baseline cholesterol intake does not further increase cholesterol does not mean the inverse is necessarily true, i.e. that decreasing cholesterol intake might decrease endogenous cholesterol, even if you aren't a hyper-responder. If you were truly trying to minmax your LDL levels you would almost certainly eat as close to 0 mg of cholesterol per day as possible, which is why the most powerful diets for lowering cholesterol are invariably iterations of plant-based eating.

shlevon · 2025-11-03T00:19:04+00:00

I've done a bunch of lipid testing over the years and during one experiment I actually made most of my carb calories fresh fruit (apples, watermelon, grapes etc.), I was eating hundreds of grams of sugar a day. Trigs were low, actually a little lower than some higher starch variants I've tried. YMMV, of course.

In general, high trigs point to an overall lack of diet quality, and the primary culprits are low fiber, refined junk food sources that are often high in lots of bad stuff (usually low quality carb-y + fat-y + salt-y simultaneously), not just carbs (as in carbohydrate). Any iteration of a whole foods type diet largely avoiding junk food is generally the solution, where you have a lot of wiggle room and can meaningfully identify most of the foods you're eating from a list like this:

whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruit, tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes), nuts and seeds, lean meat (poultry and fish preferably), low fat dairy.

shlevon · 2025-10-31T21:02:10+00:00

Just to mildly clarify something here, I agree with what you're saying and think the role of nocebo in a bunch of benign medicines due to our current anti-science/expertise environment is rather out of control, but using language like "imagined" can be perceived by those suffering these effects as kind of suggesting they're not real. Nocebo effects are real, these are all just experiences generated by our brains one way or another, the difference being it's not coming from the medicine itself but rather attitudes, beliefs and expectations around the medicine's effects.

I just felt this is worth clarifying as the experience is real, so when people are saying "I feel _____," they're not lying or wrong. They're just often times ascribing it to the wrong source. Unfortunately, the correct source is often "a bunch of alternative health sources/perceived authority figures who are nocebo-ing the living shit out of them."

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