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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I’m so happy and surprised to see you bring up IoG! I think the game qualifies as obscure these days since I never see it mentioned outside of SNES retro groups.

    It’s my favourite story of any game on the SNES. For those who haven’t played it, it’s a coming of age story about a group of friends travelling together. What makes it so special to me is that although your character (Will) is the only one in the party who does any fighting (you’re not a typical RPG fighting party) your friends are still travelling through some dangerous situations with you. Outside of combat, your character is just another one of the group, albeit the main PoV character for the story.

    I love it so much! The story was written by a woman science fiction writer, Mariko Ohara, which I think was pretty rare at the time. I didn’t learn this fact until recently and as a kid I never would’ve known but looking back at it, the game is so much the better for it. The characters just feel so much more like real people than I’m used to from games of that era. Even the Final Fantasy games of that era, as great as they are, have characters that feel more like cartoon characters than real teenagers.






  • A lot of IPAs are gross. Some are quite good. Bitterness is the most maligned of all tastes. Tons and tons of bitter things that people love and every one of them is a love/hate acquired taste thing.

    Grapefruit, bitter melon, bitter black coffee, any sort of bitter beer (IPAs aren’t the only one), heck even burnt sugar!

    The biggest problem with IPAs is that crappy/inexperienced brewers use the bitterness of hops to cover up brewing defects. This leads to really gross aftertastes or overwhelming bitterness and only hipsters like drinking that crap.


  • It says she earned $3400/year since she began writing the book (2012) and that her book is in the top 20% of book sales. Yes, it’s an unsustainable amount of money to support yourself on, clearly. You could earn more money stocking shelves at the grocery store.

    But here’s the thing: she wrote one book in a decade!

    Nora Roberts, at the peak of her career, was writing one book a month (now she’s only writing one book every three months in her 70s)! And the great thing about writing is that it builds momentum: the more you write, the better you get at writing, the faster you can write a book, the more you build a name for yourself, the more sales each of your books get.

    There’s no problem here. Anyone who wants to can publish a book! You don’t have to go through a big publisher and collect a tiny royalty. You don’t have to take an advance. Just self-publish and keep all the profits yourself!

    Edit: I do want to say that I’m all for a basic income (implemented as a negative income tax). People shouldn’t be living on the streets and starving to death in the modern days. But that has nothing to do with books and there’s no reason to be sponsoring people to write books that nobody wants to read.


  • I read the link. It doesn’t say what you think it’s saying. The perception you’re getting is that there are millions of authors out there, that they’re all writing full time, and that 80% of them are earning less than Monica Byrne.

    There are simply huge numbers of books that essentially don’t sell at all. I’m talking about technical manuals, academic books in niche topics of research, and even textbooks for courses that only a handful of people take. We don’t need a system to support these authors because they’re not trying to support themselves by writing books. Rather, the books they write are basically a side effect of their day job.

    The barriers for publishing a book are extremely low today. Most university campuses actually have book printing and binding services available which professors use to make textbooks for their courses. For unaffiliated individuals you can get a book printed and bound in China for extremely low prices (think cheap enough to print a hundred copies to give out as Christmas gifts to friends and family).




  • It took her 12 years to write a book! That’s not a successful author, that’s a hobbyist.

    Look at an actual successful author like Nora Roberts. Since the start of 2012 she’s published 57 books!

    And before you say “there’s no way those 57 books are as good as the one book which took 12 years to write” let’s look at reviews on Goodreads:

    The Actual Star by Monica Byrne (2704 ratings for a 3.88 average rating).

    Private Scandals (2012) by Nora Roberts (10151 ratings for a 4.01 average rating).

    And that’s just one random book I picked by her. Many of them are way more popular than that (hundreds of thousands of ratings on Goodreads).

    The point is: if you want to make money as an author (of books, video games, YouTube videos) you can’t ignore your own productivity. Taking 12 years to write a 624 page book is extremely unproductive! That’s 4383 days (including leap years) to write 624 pages for an average of 1 page per week. A part time newspaper columnist writes several times that output and probably spends no more than an hour or two working on it.

    Edit: Just a side note. Lord of the Rings also took 12 years to write. However Tolkien was a full time professor at Oxford during that entire time.




  • I didn’t say they were irrelevant, I said they’re tools of survival. They’re obviously useful. People without any emotions at all just sit there with what looks like a catatonic state.

    But being a slave to your emotions is nothing to aspire to. Far better to pick the emotional states you want to have. For me it’s enjoying deep focus on a task, having a lively conversation, sharing a great meal, laughing at a great joke, or cheering on a great play in sports.

    Being a slave to your emotions is like being a ship tossed about on stormy seas. Emotional regulation is a skill that must be learned like any other. We’re supposed to teach it to young children, though increasingly I find myself meeting adults who don’t even have the basics down. People screaming at each other like angry birds!

    The tougher one of course is learning how to overcome depression. That may need different strategies for different people. Mindfulness works for me but maybe not for everyone.