In a wonderful turn of events: Captive’s War is narrated by the cery same narrator!

I’m currently listening to Livesuit by James SA Corey. It’s part of their new series that released this year called The Captives War. It’s a Novella/Interquel pretty typical of their release style.

It takes place in an incredibly unknowably distant future for humanity. We follow a squad of Livesuit infantry who have fused their bodies with technology to fight an unfathomable legion of alien conquerors. An enemy that has never lost a war then uses the best traits of conquered races to continue their war.

Why it’s so good is because the author(s) have an incredible way of describing people and the world they interact with. Images are vivd and believable. While being so alien, and futuristic Corey manages to write a world you can imagine yourself in.

Additionally, their novellas always take place in the same world, but are completely stand alone stories from the main series so the depth of world building is just… chef’s kiss

Both writers were originally working on writing RPGs and TTRPGs so their style just brings me back to sitting at a table with friends, some drinks and a Character Sheet for a hopeful lvl 3 wizard.

Ahhh I see. Thank you!

Ja jestem Kurwa. Dziękuje bardzo.

I’m OOTL. What Linux thing are you talking about?

Interesting! I never really found the combat to be all that tedious or enemies too difficult so long as you kept up with alchemy, oils and gear upgrades.

Obviously, different strokes for different folks. There’s a reason one of the difficulties is story only.

I try to get everyone to try playing on Death March, no fast travel.

I did my first playthrough like this. There’s so much to see in the world and so many paths to take. Fast travel is neat and all but you may miss out on so much. I took it a step further and also didn’t leave regions/nations until I completed the map. I found more incidental quests by taking a wrong turn or a shortcut over a hill than I did by following the main quests.

On Death March: It’s actually not hard at all and feels like how the gake should be played. What it actually does is forces you to look at the bestiary, learn or guess weaknesses and attack patterns then use potions, spells and pils to fight enemies. It actually feels like playing the witcher as lore accurately as possible. Going to the local herbalist, buying supplies, meditating then hunting down the enemies.

To add on: After a certain level is reached there are a multitude of tile combinations you have to avoid or they cause a hard crash. I believe oldschool tetris used to be played until the very first hard crash and that’s where everyone thought the record would end. Prior to that was the development of rolling which allowed players to get past the original game over state that sped tiles up too fast to react to.

Now we have players so proficient they’ve memorised crash states, and are rolling over the game.

I wonder how long until Points + Prestige become an antiquated measuring system.

Media literacy skill: 0

I’ll just add that according to modern Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC) the current definition of a military target may include schools, hospitals, religious sites and culturally relevent monuments should they be used by enemy forces.

Even in WW1 and WW2 when these rules were being written, if your enemy was hiding in a church, that was okay. But if they stored munitions or fired from the church, it and everyone in it would be considered valid military targets.

It was designed that way in order to stop soldiers from hiding in hospitals and schools saying “You can’t shoot us, there are women, children and the sick in here” while they used that amnesty to kill countless others.

Just a distinction a lot of people tend to miss when they talk about “The Geneva Convention.”

You’re in for a good couple of weeks to months of reading depending on how fast you read.

Really fun set of series. Reddit had a great Asimov sub with recommended reading orders since Asimov had the tendency to publish things in a weird timeline. Any way you choose is a fantastic time though.

The robot that was bestowed with unimaginable precognician that survived for 20 Millenia patiently guiding humanity along the right path as prescribed by the Zeroth law of robotics forced on it that drove all other robots mad?

The robot that at every turn was curtailed by human lust and greed? That had to do horrible things because humanity lacked the foresight to see that charging a living being with “Doing no harm to humanity or by inaction causing harm” would be just awful for that soul?

Pretty sure Demerzel always worked in the shadows for the greater good. Especially when operating as Olivaw.

Seems to me like humans are the ones that kept messing up the laws of robotics. Not the other way around.

Aren’t the books really more about how the rules work but humans just can’t accept them so we constantly alter them to our detriment until the robots go away for a while and then take over largely to our benefit?

I mean… Kind of Asimov’s robot series? Except the androids/robots were trying so hard to stay to the rules and protect humans but at every chance they could humans fucked that up or refused to see the plan.

At least as I recall, the robots basically came up with multi-millenia spanning plans that would solve all of humanity’s problems and then humans were like: “Cool. But what if we made robots detectives and they could also target people we don’t like?” Then the robots fucked off for a while and a bunch of stuff happened and… Yeah. Asimov wrote a lot of books.

Just gonna put this album here.

edit: Well, I’m surprised this got downvoted considering the entire theme of the album is a CME knocking out telecommunications and computer systems on earth leading to a total collapse of human society. Just a fun thing I came across and was reminded of with all the solar flare memes lately.

In case anyone confuses him with Linus Torvalds:

Install Calibre on a computer and use that. Browse online sailing forums for your favourite books and new releases. Then support the authors financially by buying their paper books directly from them or their publishers.

If you buy your books from them digitally use a DRM remover (Like the plugin available on Calibre) so you can forever own your books and move them to any device you want in any format you want. Forever.

Bro. Bro.

Belle province, all dressed steamies and an “Italian” Poutine. My god.

Sure as fuck ain’t Italian or a good meat sauce but as a combo that shit slaps.

Define authentic taste for me.