Zagorath

Zagorath, 10 miesięcy temu

At one point Jason talks about how tragic it is that it takes a death for the council to do something about making a road safer.

Which is definitely true, but gods even that makes me wish I had a council as good as the ones in Montreal. Brisbane City Council doesn’t even give a fuck when there is a death. There can be a cyclist die on a road where safety advocates have been saying for years there’s a dire need for safety upgrades, and they still won’t even countenance improving the safety. They’d rather spend council resources repeatedly removing the ghost bikes set up at the location memorialising the killed cyclist.

Zagorath, 10 miesięcy temu

First of all, if you don’t wanna watch it, you could just…not watch it? No need to vice signal by announcing it to the whole world.

But second, you don’t pay for Nebula to watch this one video. You pay for Nebula as a way to support the dozens of creators on the platform, including many of the best urbanist channels including the one whose community you are currently visiting. And to get this and all the other Nebula-exclusive videos on the platform, most of which are merely addendums to public YouTube videos, but some of which are full exclusives. And to get all the videos ad-free.

Zagorath, 10 miesięcy temu

but he is also one of the most entry-level urbanism YTers

Is he? He’s certainly very common entry-point into urbanism, but I don’t think that’s the same as being entry-level. I actually think he’s the best of the big urbanists.

Oh the Urbanity often seems to excuse some poor urbanism, and even when they aren’t doing that I find them far too neoliberal for my tastes.

CityNerd is brilliant, and he has a bunch of excellent videos. I particularly like the ones where he shows his gravity model for high speed rail. But he also does a hell of a lot of listicles which I can’t say are the greatest of high-quality content.

RMTransit does some good videos on fundamental topics, but his scope is very narrow—almost exclusively public transport, rather than other urbanist topics like cycling, walkability, different kinds of density & zoning, etc. I find them to be frequently very dry and not really focused as much on urbanism as it is on technical considerations. Interesting, but often more for the same reason I watch Wendover, rather than the same reason I watch NJB.

City Beautiful is probably my second-favourite of the urbanists. He covers a great diversity of topics in great quality. There’s just something that for me at least means I less often feel the calling to rewatch his videos to double-check a point then I do with Jason Slaughter’s videos.

Zagorath, 11 miesięcy temu

If it’s at all of interest to you, there are a bunch of good novels set in the Forgotten Realms, too.

There’s a pretty great thread from just a few years ago on the Candlekeep forums where someone read through every single book and gave a brief review of them. I can’t remember their opinion in great detail, but the biggest authors (Ed Greenwood and Bob Salvatore) were relatively lowly rated, while Elaine Cunningham and Erin M. Evans consistently rated much more highly.

I’ve never read Cunningham myself, but I’ve read all of Evans’ FR novels and am a huge fan. Plan to read her non-FR novels once I’m finished with what I’m currently working through, if I can find a copy that’s not from the rainforest company.

Zagorath, 11 miesięcy temu

Was trickier to find than I thought because of the unorthodox title. But here it is.

It’s a 35 page thread with others chiming in with their thoughts as the original author makes his way through the list, and some summing up on pages 33 & 34. And technically still ongoing as new books slowly trickle out, though most of it was finished in 2020.

Unfortunately it looks like the author never fully finished his wrap-up either. He said he was gonna do favourite series, fav individual books, fav authors, and misc comments, but only ended up doing the first two of those as far as I could see.

Personally I mostly read through the reviews of Evans’ books back when I first saw the thread, and my vague recollection was that he/others liked them and mentioned also liking Cunningham, but I could be misremembering.

Happy to provide my own review of Evans’ work if interested.

Zagorath, 11 miesięcy temu

I’ve really struggled with the first of Evans’ Brimstone Angels series for a long time, too. The rest of the series was easy to come by, but the first one goes for over $100 second hand.

My local library had it for a while, but seems to have gotten rid of it. Thankfully, all Evans’ books are excellently narrated in audiobook, and are also available in ebook (including easily pirated, which I don’t feel too bad about considering I’ve bought the physical copy of all but the first, as well as the audiobooks of all of them).

I would guess the same should be true of Cunningham’s works, though I haven’t looked. (And the quality of the audio narration may not be as excellent. I know the narrator of the small number of Greenwood books I read was less than stellar.)

Zagorath, 11 miesięcy temu

Evans only has one standalone novel and one 6-book series.

The standalone: The God Catcher is set in Waterdeep, and is about the daughter of a minor noble who flunks out of wizard school and becomes a rogue, getting caught up in the scheme of some dragons who have found a way to bypass Waterdeep’s mythal and get into the city. It’s a fun ride.

The series is the Brimstone Angels series, about two twin tieflings abandoned at birth and adopted by a curmudgeonly single dad dragonborn. The prologue shows one of the twins accidentally forming a warlock pact with a devil. The biggest ongoing appeals of this series are:

• the nature of an infernal warlock pact and the relation between the warlock and patron
• the experience of a race that internally is absolutely no different to humans (unlike, say, half-orcs, which are canonically actually more likely to be aggressive) but which are perceived as evil
• the politics of the Nine Hells (her patron becomes, especially as the series goes on, a sort of deuteragonist of the series, and we see a lot of internal political dealings, schemes, etc. between different devils of different ranks)

If you’ve read the 5e Player’s Handbook, the quotes that are at the start of the tiefling and dragonborn racial entries both come from this series. The tiefling one is part of the prologue of book 1 (Brimstone Angels) and the dragonborn one is—from memory—from book 5 (Ashes of the Tyrant). The last two books are especially good if you’re interested in dragonborn, or if you like creative fantasy world building in general, because Evans’ background before she got into writing was in anthropology, and the dragonborn culture was not very heavily fleshed out previously, so she had a lot of leeway to do some really cool unique work with them. She’s got a number of articles on her blog about draconic language and dragonborn culture as sort of fun supplemental material. Here’s part 1 of “playing a Dragonborn in the Forgotten Realms”. There are also parts 2 and 3 of that series, plus 2 posts of the draconic language.

Book 4 is set in Cormyr, and deals a lot with Cormyrian politics. The closest parallel to which in more popular fantasy that I can think of is Wheel of Time’s Andoran succession crisis

Book 3 was explicitly part of WotC’s The Sundering, a series of books set around the time of the Second Sundering, the in-world explanation for the rule and setting changes between 4th and 5th edition. But Evans was allowed to set all of her remaining books 3–6 during the intermediary period, so book 6 climaxes basically right as the Sundering itself is hitting the world, which plays into her story threads in a major way.

There’s stuff about how Asmodeus came to be a god, how tieflings came to look like they do in 4th and 5th edition, how Azuth returned to life after being presumed dead, and a brief excursion to Toril’s twin plane of Abeir, the magic-less land ruled by dragon tyrants from which the dragonborn escaped.

There’s one other of her blog posts that I’d like to recommend, but I’m putting it down here because it’s a little different. It’s less a lore thing and more something interesting in the writing. Good if you want interesting ideas for narrating at a table, maybe, but mostly interesting if you’re interested in hearing about the writing process. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys seeing the “behind-the-scenes” of movies and the like. It’s this one where she’s talking about how she weaves in a game mechanic into the narrative in a seamless but necessary way. Specifically, how she used a 4e “healing surge” in the first book, a mechanic that was often derided by people who didn’t like 4e because of how unrealistic it was, but which she utilised in a way that was both flawless and entirely necessary (because the character doing it had used an ability that required they be below half health, and then later in the same scene used one that required they be above half health, to be faithful to the game rules).

But yeah, it’s safe to say that I’m a huge fan, and highly recommend her. Unfortunately if audiobook is not an option, book is the only way to get the first Brimstone Angels book, unless you’re lucky enough to have a library with it. But at least when I was buying 6 or so years ago, all the other books in the series were easy to get a hold of.

Zagorath, 11 miesięcy temu

Oh, I’ll just also add that she’s got two other books set in her own world that I know of. I think at least a third is planned. And next year the classic MMORPG RuneScape is releasing a book set in its world’s past written by her. I’ve not read any of these, but plan to.

Zagorath, 11 miesięcy temu

No worries! If you didn’t already see it, I wrote a fairly lengthy review of the Evans novels in response to another user a few comments down in this thread.

Regarding Drizzt, my understanding is that “mixed things” is basically right. Some of the books are very well-liked, and others are not so much. My own personal experience is only that I’ve tried listening to the audiobook of The Companions, the Drizzt novel which is the first of The Sundering series. But I’ve ended up bouncing off of it twice, just not really caring about the characters.

Zagorath, rok temu

your passwords are still as safe as your master password is

They’re as safe as your master password is…and as the encryption is. LastPass famously got hacked recently, and in the aftermath of that many users noticed that their vault was encrypted using very small numbers of rounds of PBKDF2. The recommended number of rounds had increased, but LastPass left the number actually used too low for some users, rather than automatically increasing it. Users of Bitwarden and any other password vault should ensure that their vault is using the strongest encryption available.

Self hosting wouldn’t really be a huge help there

Well, self-hosting makes you a smaller target. The most determined attackers are likely going to go after the biggest target, which is going to be a centralised service with thousands of users’ vaults. If you host it yourself they probably won’t even know it exists, so unless there’s reason for someone to be specifically targeting you (e.g. you’re a public figure), or you get hacked by some broad untargeted attack, you might be better off self-hosted from a purely security standpoint.

(That said, I still use centrally-hosted Bitwarden. The convenience is worth it to me.)

Zagorath, rok temu

Yeah at this point it’s considered likely that LastPass vaults are being cracked, based on LP being the common link between various other accounts that are being breeched.

A small number of rounds of encryption being the default for users with old enough accounts is believed to be a significant part of the issue. It means even if their password was a good one, the vault can be brute forced comparatively quickly.