Zagorath

Since you like D&D, my rec goes to Erin M Evans’ Brimstone Angels series. It’s set in the Forgotten Realms, the default setting for 5th edition and the setting used in both the recent D&D movie and the Baldur’s Gate video game series. Brimstone Angels stars two tiefling twins and their dragonborn adoptive father. One of the twins accidentally stumbles into a warlock pact with a devil, and the series is largely about dealing with the consequences of that.

It’s so well written with excellent characters. And when the final two books (five and six) go to the dragonborn kingdom of Tymanther, an area and culture comparatively unexplored by FR canon, Evans gets to really bust out her worldbuilding chops and put her background in anthropology background to good use.

The good thing is, IMO you don’t need a very big investment to decide if it’s right for you. If you get through the prologue of book one and aren’t interested, it’s not for you. Evans does an amazing job of condensing her style, tone, and themes into the prologue of her books specifically for that reason (and because the first few actual chapters are often slightly different in tone).

If you’ve read the 2014 PHB, you’ve already read some of it. The quotes in the tiefling section and dragonborn section come from the prologue to the first book and from the 4th book, respectively.

Brimstone Angels is a lot tighter than some of the sprawling epic fantasy recommended elsewhere. It’s comparatively easy reading compared to some of the great recommendations others have made like Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, or Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. It could make a good palatte cleanser between books like those, if you’re so inclined. Though I found myself wanting to binge the whole thing.

Only downside is, last time I looked, you literally cannot get the first book in paper. It’s ebook or audiobook only, since it’s been out of print for a long time and second-hand copies go for instance amounts. When I looked, the rest of the series was easy, but that may have changed; it’s been like 8 years.

Just please don’t make a grimdark Drizzt clone at your next D&D game!

My rec goes to Erin M Evans’ Brimstone Angels series. Another set in the Forgotten Realms starring two tiefling twins and their dragonborn adoptive father. One of the twins accidentally stumbles into a warlock pact with a devil, and the series is largely about dealing with the consequences of that.

It’s so well written with excellent characters. And when the final two books go to the dragonborn kingdom of Tymanther, an area and culture comparatively unexplored by FR canon, Evans gets to really bust out her worldbuilding chops and put her background in anthropology background to good use.

The good thing is, IMO you don’t need a very big investment to decide if it’s right for you. If you get through the prologue of book one and aren’t interested, it’s not for you. Evans does an amazing job of condensing her style, tone, and themes into the prologue of her books specifically for that reason (and because the first few actual chapters are often slightly different in tone).

If you’ve read the 2014 PHB, you’ve already read some of it. The quotes in the tiefling section and dragonborn section come from the prologue to the first book and from the 4th book, respectively.

Only downside is, last time I looked, you literally cannot get the first book in paper. It’s ebook or audiobook only, since it’s been out of print for a long time and second-hand copies go for instance amounts. When I looked, the rest of the series was easy, but that may have changed; it’s been like 8 years.

Wait, what’s the drama? I’ve just installed Revanced on a new device in the past month and it seemed fine?

Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/

I mean, I still have an Amazon account. I even used it, less than two weeks ago. But that was the first time I actually used it to buy anything for nearly a decade.

People shouldn’t hold themselves too strictly to any sort of puritanism. Avoid the worst options as much as you can, but when it becomes infeasible for you, make an exception. That’s much better than just always going with the bad option.

I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription

Revanced. Or YouTube with an ad blocker. While supporting creators by directly buying albums/merch.

But I don’t think it hypocritical, necessarily. People can inherently only care about so much. For a long time I stopped shopping at Coles and went to Woolworths instead, because I was pissed more at Coles than at Woolworths over a couple of specific things. Then more recently Woolworths did even more to piss me off, so now I mostly shop at Aldi. At no point in this was it not accurate to say that both Coles and Woolworths are horrible duopolists that screw over their suppliers. But one had at least not been so blatant about its gross hypercapitalism bullshit by marketing the idea of brand loyalty and consumerism explicitly to children. So while both were always bad, one seemed the slightly less bad option. Until it didn’t.

D’ya watch Wololo last weekend? What a tournament!

Though as good as the aoe2 tourney was, I think aoe4 had them beat this time. So exciting and tense, completely unlike the previous aoe4 Wololo.

I’ve had two PCs over this time period. One came with a pirated copy of Windows (bought overseas) and I later installed a legit copy with my uni’s licence. The other I transferred that same licence across to after building the PC myself.

I wouldn’t have described it as a golden era. More like a constant, steady, quiet sense of improvement.

I’m talking about the whole period of like 2010 to about 2018.

A decade ago things were looking really positive for the future of Mac gaming. It felt like more and more games were coming out supporting it. I’m not sure if their transition away from Intel has hindered it, or if it’s something else, but it definitely seems to have stalled.

Plus, the move to Apple Silicon has killed the back-up option of Bootcamp. Or I assume it has, I’ve not been a Mac user since before the transition, when my ageing MBP died and I just found I didn’t need any laptop to replace it.

paying Microsoft for an operating system

To be fair, I haven’t paid Microsoft for my OS…ever. And it’s not even piracy.

I got a licence for free through my university when I was in uni. And Microsoft seemed happy to let me keep using it and even upgrading it. I started on Windows 8, upgraded for free to Windows 10. If my PC didn’t have a processor that seemingly arbitrarily they decided can’t run Windows 11, I could be on that today.

Funhole isn’t exactly hidden but you might not see it if your instance isn’t federated to it.

Not only have I not seen it, I can’t even find it when I go looking for it.

the user needs to be smart enough to do whatever they’re asking anyway

I’m gonna say that’s ideal but not quite necessary. What’s needed is that the user is capable of properly verifying the output. Which anyone who could do it themselves definitely can, but it can be done more broadly. It’s an easier skill to verify a result than it is to obtain that result. Think: how film critics don’t necessarily need to be filmmakers, or the P=NP question in computer science.