Turniper
5d 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
6d 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
16d ago
These things are not unrelated. People like you more if your infodumps feel like stories than if they feel like condescending lectures.
Turniper
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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.
Turniper
30d ago
Nah. Ours did a bit last year, and we just voted in 3 people to the board who ran on 'roll back the due hike and stop bothering people about clover in their lawn'. We got exactly that. It's like any other form of democratic government, you get what you vote for.
Turniper
30d ago
Ugh. This reminds me I need to get back into rigging for my game project. AI generated 3D animation clips can't come soon enough for me.
Turniper
1mo ago
I can think of plenty of alternatives. For example you could have an entirely status based society. Nobody has property, control over an object's disposition lies with the highest status person who currently is using it in some way. Falls apart pretty hard for consumeables and investment, since any arrangement of capital is fundamentally not durable.
You could also have a society where all property is truly communal. And we just execute anyone who tills over a flower bed to plant something new, or cocks up a chemical factory testing a new formulae. Execution is a little hyperbolic, but basically incredibly strong rules and manner based order that strongly discourages anyone from messing with anything under threat of ostracization or physical punishment.
These alternatives just kinda suck, which is why we have ownership. Because otherwise a small minority of people will do antisocial things.
Turniper
1mo ago
Nah. It'd be tremendously ineffective. People would just lie. If we wanted to effectively do immigration enforcement bureaucratically, it should be handled by drivers licensing or E-Verify processing. A point of contact where people need to show up in person, and we're already expecting you to present and verify documents.
But there's no political will to do that, and deporting people who commited minor crimes lets the masses lap up blood without doubling the price of berries at Walmart.
Turniper
1mo ago
Aight, I'll bite. There isn't one. There's no form of collective ownership that doesn't involve the same definitional characteristic of denying someone some form of right over the property. Even the most enlightened form of communism will entail restricting some member of the community from doing some thing to the property. Even a nomadic society with the most minimal form of ownership imaginable will still provide exclusionary rights over personal property, and have rules about who gets preference in occupying any given site.
Turniper
1mo ago
I don't think most of the country finds 'we should not use effective tools to enforce our immigration laws because it will encourage illegal immigrants to engage in more criminality' to be a very persuasive argument.
Turniper
2mo ago
How is such an obvious target not immediately blown to pieces via airpower? The only reason the houthis are getting away with their current operations is precisely because they aren't doing stuff that presents an obvious stationary target.
It's not just the ships the pirates face, but the nations that back them.
Turniper
2mo ago
Closing in on 130k words on my current story. Couple more months and I'll officially break 5 figures of income from writing fiction (Across 2 years). Pretty good for not having actually published anything yet, it's all been donations.
Turniper
2mo ago
As opposed to what? It's not like a ceasefire would result in frontier states not rearming, or sanctions being lifted. All that is gonna happen anyway, and Russia appears to be fine with it.
Turniper
2mo ago
Except America isn't an empire. Because the nations that you claim are our vassals are not our vassals and will not act like our vassals if pressed to do so.
Well, except Japan. Japan is arguably our vassal. Hence why they're buttering up Trump, because their future existence is actually to some degree predicated on American security guarantees.
Turniper
2mo ago
Slow writing week, only 4k words.
Got a fair bit of programming in, still ripping parts out of previous projects to build something newer and more tightly scoped. Basically Warframe if it were a slower, more tactical, dungeon crawler. The goal is to build out a very limited multiplayer mission shooter so I can focus heavily on really perfecting combat. Then maybe build it out into a full game as I go. It's been fun revisiting some of my older features. Chat has a much more scalable api backend now, and I'm really looking forward to revisiting active ragdoll + poise. It was already quite fun knocking dudes down, I'm really looking forward to playing with poise breaking crowd control spells. Sending people flying with spikes of earth and gusts of wind should be a very fun playstyle even if I give it minimal damage.
Turniper
3mo ago
Ok, dropping anything in a 10x leveraged index trade was stupid. But if the money was in gold before? Man, you'll be in the green inside 5 years. Don't sweat it.
Turniper
3mo ago
For me it's not really about the activities, but the times and places I've left behind. I often miss the easy serendipity of college, where I didn't need to create a partiful and blast reminders in order to get 10 people to show up to an event. Shit, I could get 10 on a tuesday with 1 message to a group chat, now everyone needs a week notice because they have plans and 30 minute drives and on-call at the smoke alarm installer (Not a joke, one friend literally has this job and gets called to drive 2-4 hours to fix the smoke alarms at big corporate campuses).
But we can't live in the past, and tbh I'm not sure I'd want a bunch of college student friends right now even if the age gulf it wouldn't be a little weird. My current guests never clog sinks with vomit and the incidence of awkward friend group damaging breakups is down a solid 50%.
I definitely do miss just being able to walk places and have events going on, but that's a choice I made in exchange for living somewhere I can actually afford a house, so c'est la vie.
Turniper
3mo ago
Poor writing week, basically got nothing done on that front. But I'm at 116k words now and I have enough for my latest chapter I'm confident I'll finish it sunday, so I don't feel too bad about it. I've been consistently posting 3k words a week for almost two years now, so I'm pretty confident in the rhythm that comes and goes.
Did get some good work done on my current game project. I wrote a MMO chat client a while ago, but it used the same server as the rest of the game to send messages (Unity + Darkrift), so it wouldn't have been remotely scalable. Local chat only basically. I've been lifting the best parts of that project into a new one, and as part of that I rewrote chat to use Server Sent Events on a standard C# api backend. It works pretty well, but mostly it's just a tech trial for a lot of the stuff I'll be using everywhere else on the project. I'm gonna be trying to rework the original game into more of a Warframe-esque session based dungeon explorer/horde fighter, so the API will be taking on much more heavy lifting since there's no way I'll be letting player clients touch the DB. That means the shared DLL needs to be pretty airtight and support: Unity editors, MongoBson, and Json serialization, since the same class will probably be used for all four features because I don't want 4 copies of everything.
Anyway that's kinda all procrastinatey work, because I'm still reworking the game design a fair bit. Will probably start trying to make some devlog videos soon. Want to do a sort of 'building in public' style thing for this project, with tutorials, a discord, and early access keys in very early in alpha for people who follow development. I've realized that ultimately I don't have a ton of enthusiasm for a big single player project, I really just want to build an MMO. And I think starting with a smaller session shooter lets me sidestep some of the more insane networking issues and persistence concerns and just focus on building out good combat.
Turniper
3mo ago
Yeah, this is the main reason I don't write at coffee shops too much. I find food courts work pretty well, because not only are they less likely to hassle you about not buying anything since there's so much space, but also you can get a real meal if you do wanna spend money. Main downside is they can get loud, so you need headphones or the right one. I write a lot at my local hmart, since on weekdays it's only loud during lunch rushes and after 4 pm.
Turniper
3mo ago
Everyone's trying to rules lawyer the object level demand but if you stop and think about it for half a second this was obviously a PR move intended to play out in the perceptions of non-employee citizens. I'm not convinced it's a good one, but everyone saying it's useless/illegal/going to be ignored is missing the whole point. It makes federal employees as a group look bad regardless of how they react to it. You respond? The worst responses will be used against you. You ignore it? The low compliance level is spouted off on X for two months as Elon claims federal employees don't think they're accountable to citizens or their democratically elected representative. It whips up support for DOGE's role and potentially for actual action later (Through congress, which has always been the only avenue we were ever gonna get lasting fedgov headcount cuts through).
Turniper
4mo ago
Oh wow, this sounds exhausting. Did ya'll know about the differing perspectives prior to having a kid or did it come up later?
Turniper
4mo ago
Text -> Image -> Spritesheet -> 3D Model models are actually already here. They're just pretty bad at giving you usable topology, but you'll probably begin seeing AI generated assets in production games inside a few months. Not big or moving stuff, but static medium poly assets like crates or plants.
There's a few on huggingface, and an integration called BlenderGPT they're working on.
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.
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