While it has many similarities to a pre-order, you typically can cancel a pre-order before delivery for a full refund (although looking it up Nintendo digital order do not allow refund). For better or worse, refunds don’t really happen with crowd-funding. Also with crowd-funding, the “pre-order” is contingent on a…

I think this would make a great article... and a great video.

Wait... this is fairly like the first part of Andromeda TV series(another Gene Rodenberry inspired show). Where a galaxy spanning “Systems Commonwealth” (basically the Federation, except humanity wasn’t the founder/most powerful species in it). collapsed due to a civil war and hundreds of years later a powerful…

IThis one only requires all of one extra book worth of patience to start to unravel... compared to say Brandon Sanderson cosmere series where the greater story is sprinked across dozens of books... and i gave up after reading 8-9 of them.

fair enough. it can't hurt to wait until the third book is out as well.

It was a bit confusing... but Gideon did avoid the standard, long expository chapters on the how the world works like you are in the tutorial level of a JRPG game. I will say that the author was bold in leaving readers of the first book so much in the dark, and even in the second book... there are a lot of…

I note your complaints as valid based on what you’ve heard about the second book. At the same, I really think you should give the second book read. I recently finished the second book and this is one of the first “middle” episode of a trilogy that is much more than a “filler book.” The author took an incredible risk…

This tool doubles as a zombie infection disabling device.

It’s like sitting at a $1/$2 limit table in a casino. You can’t learn anything about the game or strategy there because the low stakes encourage people to play far more recklessly than they would when playing for ‘real money’.

Yea and 40% of those space shuttle craft were eventually destroyed in flight, killing 4% of all the people who ever rode on them.

Interesting... I’ll add with Esslemont books to my list. As I’ve gotten older I feel like I’m looking more for guilty pleasure light escapist reading of stories with the tradition tropes - unlikely MC hero (or anti-villain) and motley band of companion go on adventures for fun (whether that’s because I’m getting older…

Brandon Sanderson (who finished Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) is impressively prolific in outputting books, although he is some how juggling multiple “worlds,” all of which exist in a greater interconnected universe ... so the books for any single world sometimes are farther apart (I’m only really partial to…

He created something that no one asked for, which is too slow to be useful for much longer,

Are you sure your tax rate is 37%? That is the highest tax bracket in the US and only is applied to earnings over $518,400 a year. Also the tax rate is applied to your income in tiers (i.e. you get taxed at 10% for your first $10k, 12% for earning 10-40k, 22% 40-84k)... meaning that even if you were earning $518,400 a…

Washington (where Amazon is based) has no state income tax :P Still the fact remains that people who say that Bezos pays “less than me” like treq simply don’t understand taxes and is saying incorrect things just because they feel good and are memeable.

Now it’s a whole another issue of whether that ~$400,000,000 in…

That’s incorrect. While his salary is low. His wealth comes from his stock... (as the article states) which he sells regularly... he pays the top tier capital gains so 25%... meaning that of the $1.8B in stock he sold in 2019, he paid about $400,000,000 in taxes.

For better or worse, he’s built a company, Amazon, that a lot of people in the world depend on, either for the “touchless” goods, cloud computing (Netflix, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter depend on Amazon Web Services), or for jobs (yes many of the jobs are exploitative). So when the pandemic hit, his company is setup in…

It does feel like double the price that I wanted in my head... but I think that’s just because we are so used to mass produced products on Amazon being so cheap - but if you want novelty products in short production runs... thing get expensive.

It’s not just chosen one... it’s the white savior Chosen One... from the previous white savior, to the new white savior. I watched it to the end and I found it mildly entertaining, but ultimately not memorable.

Minor Spoilers:

As you saw in the first episode, the African American nun is offered, but immediately refused…

“Tech” is just a clickbait buzzword writers like to use to invoke bogeymen. Technology is part of basically all industries and business now... from farming to energy to hotels (AirBNB) to taxi cabs (Uber). Writers like to add it even if the person is a lawyer, a salesman, or a corporate executive that would be doing…