Turniper
8d ago
Dude, you contribute enough that I remember your name. That puts you in a pretty select group, I barely remember 10 posters from here and I went to HS with one of them and regularly text another. I really enjoy your travelogues and I'm happy you're part of this place.
Medicine payscales in England are between half and a quarter of what they are in the states. Finance is usually between 70 and 90% of stateside equivalents. I can pretty much guarantee all but the most senior consultants (What the UK calls fully qualified docs, basically post residency/post fellowship) in the UK are nowhere close to what a VP in finance is pulling in.
Turniper
14d ago
This is a very pro-anomie sort of take. If my video game playing was eclipsing all my other recreation time, or my porn watching was impacting my sex life, or arguing with people on the internet was filling me with bile, I'd want the people in my life to bring that shit up. It's 2025. 'Just a boyfriend' isn't a thing. The title doesn't mean they're family, but it is definitely not a sign they're not serious and heading in the direction of either a lifelong relationship or proper marriage.
Turniper
14d ago
Try getting really good at cooking and the slightest bit hurt whenever you slave away over some delicious medium calorie dish and she only grazes at it?
I'm not being facetious. This is how several cultures handle forcing people to eat more. Shame is a powerful tool, and there are far more effective forms of it than shaming people for their personal failings. Handling cooking for a home grants one a great deal of power over the health of the family, for good or ill.
Turniper
17d ago
I look like a half irish half mexican man in his early thirties wearing a gigantic grey leather witch hat drinking from a glass gourd. I assume all the other posters are roughly this level of eccentric.
Turniper
17d ago
Yeah, they're interesting people. But she recently came back cancer free, so that's nice at least.
Turniper
17d ago
I write https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/104317/between-beast-and-buddha-a-drunken-monkeys-journey , a vaguely JttW inspired xianxia story about an alcoholic monkey daoist.
Turniper
17d ago
I mean, given the whole one of his wives having cancer thing, idk he does.
Turniper
18d ago
I don't really think that's true though. It's not a substantial risk factor. Acting rich is far more likely to make you a target than merely prudently investing a modest amount of wealth. The majority of retirees fit that criteria, and most of them make it through life just fine without becoming a target. Like, the very idea you should forgo a wife and kids in order to avoid being targeted for having a modest amount of money sounds absolutely insane to me? That just doesn't happen.
Turniper
18d ago
Nice! I just hit 200 on my current story, nipping at your tail! I put yours on my to-read list, always looking for good new scifi. Haven't really found anything recent that scratched the itch since Theft of Fire.
Turniper
18d ago
Better to get divorced, charged, or threatened when you've got a million in the bank, a paid off house, and an umbrella liability policy than when you don't have any of the above. For some things, there's preparation. For others there's not much more you can do than have a good attitude and a steady hand.
Trying to mitigate every possible risk just ends with becoming Brian Johnson and probably dying at 82 anyway.
Turniper
1mo ago
So, they could do virtually zero damage, mortally offend most of the entire western world by deliberately targetting a religious site, and get properly nuked in return? The offense to deterrence ratio on that plan does not pencil.
Turniper
1mo ago
My car is 18 years old. I think it's gotten one wash in the last 6 years. I tend to wash it whenever I needed to vacuum it anyway. It's perfectly serviceable.
Turniper
1mo ago
Why not just use one of the many existing commercial solutions? That's what we did last I dealt with OCR'ing PDFs, just used Azure's API and then processed the data. Would be surprised if a raw vision model is cheaper or higher quality.
Turniper
1mo ago
I'm really glad we got an update to this. I was invested.
And uh... Yeah, that sounds like a cult. Always amazed the millions of documentaries we get about these seems to have made approximately zero dent in their ability to pop up.
Turniper
1mo ago
I mostly don't. I belong to product discords so I can ask questions about their code's weird behavior. This works great for me but they've probably answered my question a thousand times and I can't google their previous response.
I hang out in writer's discords so I can sometimes get muted for a day for making a joke that tangentially references drug use in a channel that allows the presence of children. This is stupid but I'm not gonna get bothered by it. It's just easier to taboo whole topics of conversation than make intelligent calls about the difference between a joke that references something and corruption of the youth.
If I actually want to, y'know, chat with people? I either use my own server or a friend's server. It's pretty much the only way to avoid officious mods, big public channels wade through so much shit on a daily basis that anyone who mods one will eventually become trigger happy. For the notifications: If a channel gives me a notification I don't need literally once, I mute it forever. You're basically never gonna regret muting things on discord in my experience.
Turniper
1mo ago
Xianxia, chinese cultivator fantasy. The second is book 2 of that same series, about an alcoholic monkey daoist loosely inspired by Sun Wukong, and the third is a weird sort of deconstruction of romantic tragedy set in fantasy post revolution not-france.
Turniper
1mo ago
Steadily making progress editing my first novel, and writing my second and third. Been averaging 6k words a week written for 3 months now. Remarkable how fast 25k words a month turns into books. Excited to get to the point of publishing. My first book is going through the royal road->kindle unlimited pipeline, and the initial reviews have been pretty damn good. I'm quite proud of it. I just need a title, been calling it 'Between Beast and Buddha: Book 1' in my head for ages now.
Turniper
2mo ago
These things are not unrelated. People like you more if your infodumps feel like stories than if they feel like condescending lectures.
Turniper
2mo ago
Oh, I finished my first proper book a few weeks ago. I still have editing to do, a cover to commision, layout to complete, and a marketting campaign to plan, but the text itself is largely finished. I don't expect to be doing any more development edits beyond continuity fixes.
It's gotten pretty solid reviews from free readers (It's serially published now, it'll go down when it launches on Kindle Unlimited). I had some unsolicited interest from publishers and agents, but I'm leaning towards just doing it all myself because even a 'good' publisher's cut is 50-60 percent on ebooks, and that's just not worth it to me. Probably gonna try to partner with a publisher for the audiobook, because I know a guy current DIY'ing that, and he's spent into the five figures already.
Overall, I'm quite happy and proud, but it still doesn't quite feel real. I don't think it will until I have a physical copy in hand.
Turniper
2mo ago
Idk about his jurisdiction, but they generally do that? I get a yearly letter even though mine are paid, with my balance and any proposed changes to the tax regime.
Turniper
2mo ago
If you read the complaint, it sounds like they did exactly that, considering Dennis was served a foreclosure notice in person. I'd assume he got a heckuva a lot of deliquency notices too given that he lived at the address in question. It's right in the middle of page 3. Haven't read the full thing, but I can't say I'm feeling very sympathetic, it sounds like Dennis received repeated notices over the course of 12 years and just ignored them. They were probably addressed to his Dad, but you really should read any correspondence from the government addressed to your dead dad if you want to keep his house.
At my alma mater they took mathematician calculus, which was regarded as being on the same level of difficulty as the engineering calculus track, so I'd assume so.
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