If you told me this was one player's attempt to make a single work of fiction out of a few year D&D campaign, I would completely believe you.
I'm not sure why it kind of works honestly. Perhaps it is just that it is so earnest and unabashedly straightforward in its definition of good vs evil? In the plot driving power of radiation and the mutations they engender? In the "hidden powers" of the human mind (very 1970s)? It is just so... unabashedly silly and yet genuine at the same time.
My childhood gaming group has been playing (but has not completed) Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader.
We noticed that the items mentioned on public facing wikis often seem outdated or just incorrect. So two of us, Warren and myself, decided to see if we could use a free weekend to vibecode a wiki derived directly from the game.
In total, it took us about 5 hours to put together our own item wiki almost entirely through vibecoding.
The meat of the problem was getting the item database from the game. As a starting point, we just scanned through the list of files and found a rather likely "blueprint" file (.jbp). A blueprint file is a JSON file that lists all the in game assets, looking at it in a hex editor it seemed like a good place to start.
Now, I was convinced that we needed to write a parser to parse this file, put together the uuids to actual art assets, and then go from there. We spent about 30 minutes on that. However, Warren thought it might actually be easier to write a mod using their mod tools that would allow us to parse the running game itself. We were not sure which approach would actually be better, so initially I walked down the path of the parser and he walked down the path of the mod.
At some point, he got the mod to at least install correctly. I am eliding over a huge number of times that he basically made some changes to the mod, reloaded the game, and then attempted to load the mod in the game. But it eventually worked! This was a real win as we discovered that 40KRT is a Unity game written in C#. This is wonderful as it means that we can use introspection on most objects. Now I don't really get how the [namespace|object graph|whatever] system in C# actually works, but it allowed us to ask for all the objects at root and then recursively walk down the object graph. There was some confusion about getting the references in objects as we kept getting empty caches, but we did some sort of thing that forced them to be realized (I forgot how), and then we had a tree of all the objects in the system. We then added an http server to our mod so that we could make restful request to our running server from our LLM, which certainly helped in walking the tree (both for us and for it). We then had the LLM just poke around until it found what looked like the items. It was able to capture the items and then we wrote it into a giant json file.
Concurrently, we built a site that actually hosts this data. I remember once reading about mcmaster.com and how their site is legendarily fast because they just put everything in a single file. So we did the same thing for our site. You just download the "large" (185k compressed) items.json file at load, and then every interaction (search, filter, ordering) you do afterwards is just client side. You do of course load images dynamically as needed, but I am still impressed by how often the "just give them everything at the start" philosophy of web development works.
The final section was taking the texture data for the items and projecting them (I am not clear on all this) so that we could view them as images. I then looped it all together to include the images in the site.
I was impressed that we were able to build a working item wiki of a video game based on "live" (running game) information in just half a working day. As an observation, I think that with LLM assisted coding, having a diverse team may be more important than ever. Part of the reason we were able to accomplish what we did is that we both are rather different types of programmers (I am web/CRUD/startups, he is computer graphics). The fact that we had different ideas about how to do different things was actually quite beneficial, as experimentation is cheap when you are using vibecoding, and the LLM is tireless in trying out different paths. LLMs do have endurance, but they don't have much taste. Pairing LLMs with a group of people with "reified" (though perhaps divergent) sensibilities allows for the pairing of their infinite endurance with humans' earned experience. It was fun!
Ok, not really 5 stars (I rate that as "nothing could be improved", and this isn't perfect), but 5 stars if you have been following along and largely enjoying the series.
The last 2 books have been a bit rough in my mind. I was simply floored by just how little happened in the previous book. Contrasted with this book, which had so many great scenes... it is just weird. I wish he had largely elided the previous book and just combined it into it's two adjacent books.... Anyway.
This book is just so many great scenes. I am just reiterating them form myself so I remember
Nynaeve & Lan
My name is Nynaeve ti al'Meara Mandragoran. The message I want sent is this. My husband rides from World's End toward Tarwin's Gap, toward Tarmon Gai'don. Will he ride alone?
So freaking great! You know he will never fly the Golden Crane on his own. You know that he is a great man that could lead but is honor bound not to. You trick him into taking the long route home, and you seed news of his coming to everyone on his way. Damn. She knows he is going to be furious with her, but she does it anyway because she loves him. Just. Freaking. Great.
Mat & Tuon
“Matrim Cauthon is my husband,”the High Lady said in a loud, clear voice. Everyone froze where they stood. “Matrim Cauthon is my husband.”
Karede felt as if Hartha had kicked him again. No, not Hartha. Aldazar. What madness was this? Cauthon looked like a man watching an arrow fly toward his face, knowing he had no chance to dodge.
“Bloody Matrim Cauthon is my husband. That is the wording you used, is it not?”
I mean, it is good that it finally happened. I never felt that strongly about Tuon and Mat, but I really enjoyed their sorta 1940's screwball comedy romance.
Perrin and Faile
Finally, this captive story is resolved. I mean, yes, it is tragic that he killed the man who in multiple situations saved Fail (though also abducted her in the first place). But honestly this whole thing was kind of a boring sidequest the entire time. I feel like this story was supposed to temper Perrin, who is largely more sensitive than either Matt or Rand. In that regard, I guess it succeeded (he cut off a guys hand), but it was just a little dull. Also, I just find Faile kind of annoying as a character. I remember telling someone more than 20 years ago that I thought she was going to die as a character (and I still don't know), but that may just reflect my exasperation with her.
Egwene gets accepted by a bunch of novices
Good for Egwene. I find the whole idea that the White Tower literally chose to keep her alive so preposterous that I am just whatever on her whole plot at this time. This whole arch feels a little on the "Yes Mr. Bond, but before I kill you, first let me tell you what I am trying to accomplish, and also give you plenty of time to potentially escape from this trap" level of plot line. I am just having a real hard time understanding why she wasn't just dissapeared, stilled, and killed. She is instead allowed to run around and become a possible martyr (or, to her credit, a coup-leader) in the actual white tower. It just... I try to make allowances for the will of the pattern sometimes. :]
Rand looses a hand
This was boneheaded move number 2 by Rand (admitedly, he is under pressure). But damn man, you literally walk into what is so obviously a trap. You have become so high strung that you literally have no one to rely upon. And you are so arrogant that you didn't just like, slow the role down so that you could wrestle the power before walking into obvious danger... Dude.
Taim reveals himself
"What would you have me say? Fair is fair? Equal shares? Accept 'very well' and ask who will let you bond them. Besides, you must remember the old saying. Let the lord of chaos rule." The chamber erupted with men's laughter.
Pevara had never heard any saying like that. The laughter made the hair on the back of her neck try to stand.
Ok, the setup and scene is kinda cliche. Feels like the end of a serial that is designed to get you to read the next one. But damn, I don't know why, it really hit pretty strong. It was actually a pretty great end to the book.
Anyway, having captured all that for my future self, my suggestion to you (if you ever need to re-read these), would be basically to just skip the previous book "Crossroads of Twilight" (read the online summaries) and go directly to this one.
This is peak Jordan.
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I left after the first act. Wasn't terrible, but I felt that I had effectively read the first 100 pages and decided I didn't want to finish this book.
It's interesting, because the actual physical detail (characters, surroundings, buildings, etc) are so bare that your mind's eye only visualizes the players most of the time. Kind of like one of those plays with no props, set pieces or character costumes. In a weird way, this let's you focus on just the personalities, without spending too much time thinking about the environment.
I appreciate this author's ability to add humor into most situations. Things go from harried to lethal, and yet throughout it all our author keeps the tone light, mostly through (verbal) quips and jabs, and to a lesser degree by the characters sort of having a fatalistic-but-we-are-never-going-to-give-up type ethos.
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It is just so dreadfully dark and dull. And the last act seems to last forever. I love the idea of focusing on the villains rather than batman, but although the acting is inspired, the actual character's core feels hollow.
Have to give it credit to the sound design for including the labored breathing of the Penguing though, that was inspired.
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Disney is really scraping bottom here. The writing in this film is just bad. This remind me of late term Daniel Craig Bond films, where he just goes from one random setpiece to another because some flimsy evidence connects the two.
I think I (and I assume most of the audience) predicted basically the entire plot of this film in the first 5 minutes of it's runtime. Maybe they revealed too much in the trailer?
What are the major feelings I am supposed to take from this? She overcompensates and he has trouble showing his affection? Ok, so we have an adventure and then we literally state our weaknesses and our confessions to each other verbatim? This is storytelling?
Altogether just kinda dull.
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In some sense, it is really his wife that is the main driver in this film.
I mean, maybe I am making too much of it, but it seems that she is the principal agent of the entire film.
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I couldn't quite say why, but this movie felt a whole lot like "The Tree of Life (2011)". I guess it is another exploration (to some degree) of the notion of Grace. Interestingly, Grace in this film is embodied in a sort of naturalism/witchcraft.
I also thought the mixing of a sort of magical surrealism into the story was well done.
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I'm currently in St. Louis and so thought it would be fun to watch this. The musical numbers were good, and I was surprised that both "Clang Clang Clang goes the Trolley" (The Trolley Song) and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (of the same name) were from this film. Which I thought was fun.
Weirdest parts:
Also, Grandpa seemed to be the only fully functional/formed adult in the entire family, so props to him.
I think I most wanted to see this film to try to place the optimism and pride that people had in Saint Louis at the beginning of the 19th century. Saint Louis at the time had almost twice the number of people as it does today. Saint Louis was central and growing city at the time. It is interesting to see that even in the fictionalized wonder of this film. I imagine the population collapse of modern Saint Louis would quite surprise someone from 1903.
I just finished an entire book and I genuinely think almost nothing happened in it. I am now reading the reviews and noticing that many people say it is best to just skip this one entirely. I am too much of a completionist to do so, but in recommending this series I would advise anyone else to skip this and just read the online summaries for this one. It is almost entirely a book of just world building and characters. Honestly, I am kinda impressed by the pure audacity of the whole thing.
This book perfectly hits what it aims for. It is a bit too "let's take a 90's New York cop show and set it fantasyland" for my taste, but you have to admit, it did a pretty damn good job of it.
The packaging was very familiar to anyone watching broadcast tv in the 90's. Clean, efficient writing. Pacing was good. I was genuinely entertained and would certainly consider reading the next in this series.
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I wish I had someone with me who deeply appreciated this series. Watching it solo, I thought it had some surprisingly prescient things to say about the disconnect from reality, the multiple versions of yourself online, and the loss of humanity that might occur as people join the Wired (internet).
I got these insights through my own experience, but I have been told that to (really) get lain, you might need to read more about it online. I am not sure that I will, and I am always a little hesitant to recommend something that can only be truly appreciated with further context.
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This is one of those movies that I largely enjoyed because I think it might be reflective of a culture or lifestyle (Shanghai, single mother) that is very foreign to me.
China, more than many places, is a country that is very difficult to get a "everyman on the street" read on. I think maybe something comes through in works like this, though maybe that is like judging American culture via the Barbie film.
I genuinely wonder how Robert Jordan sketched out this book? The next book evidently runs concurrently to this one. So when he wrote this one did he do so as a basic "background material" for the next book? Did he plan to do this ahead of time or did he make the decision to do so when he realized he had a bunch of B plots that he needed to partially resolve before he got to the "big action" end of this book.
Anyway, two major events happen in this book, and it feels like it should be a bigger deal, but you are so sort of overwhelmed by the amount of background noise going on that it is hard to even place them in perspective.
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The soundtrack and some of the special effects are the only redeeming thing about this film. If I had to point a finger I would say the editor/cinematographer are most to blame. It's hard to describe a visual medium as noisy, but it is all I can think to describe this. Slow motion scenes to excess, character arcs that just occur with no explanation, plot holes that you could drive a Recognizer through. Just... subpar.
I notice how much cleaner and professional most writing is becoming on the internet. I've also noticed that the average articles seems to have ballooned in size. Seems like every writer suddenly fell in love with emojied bulleted list.
I suspect that the reason for this is that more and more people are using AI to guide their writting. I'm not criticing anyone for doing so, the LLM can almost certainly write better than you ever could.
My own writing is weak. Stylistially I constantly put things in parentheses that should be better expressed as separate thoughts. I loose the tense of the paragraph all the time. I wander around ideas without finishing them. Sometimes I don't even bother to spellcheck. Tons of problems.
But I think that I am going to stick to writing without LLMs. For three principal reasons:
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A tight 90 minute thriller with no car chases and minimal action. Actually, there weren't even necessarily any "bad guys" in this film, depending on how much your adhere to Realpolitiks. Not to say that there weren't abhorrent characters, but they seemed to all be guided by differerrent interpretations of their reality.
And the movie, despite being very short, actually gave you enough time to at least begin to gather what those different interpretations were.
Honestly a pretty impressive feat in such a compact film.
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Felt like Napoleon Dynamite meets Sicario. Also kind of reminded me of Taken in the sense that things are being done that are so high visibility, and yet the world as a whole does not seem to react to them (just like in Taken's evidently lawless France).
A kind of gross movie about boring people doing nonsensical things.
I think the only character I actually liked was Benicio Del Toro's, he had a cool vibe to him.
If I did not love these characters like family, I would admit to myself that this is just not a very good book.
For one thing, it is Mat'less, which is weak.
We spend a whole whole lot of time in Egwen's power struggle as Amyrlin, which has it's moments. And I wonder if the notion of a ruler taking extraordinary wartime powers felt like a fresh idea at the time? I don't know, seems so common these days that it feels kinda hackneyed. I raised a serious eyebrow when supposedly only 1 Aes Sedai was aware of the implications of what they were doing. That seemed kinda forced.
Anywho, a little happens in this book, the weather gets better, and then there is a big boom at the end. Fin.
I went to the Yasukuni Jinja Yushukan museum in Chiyoda City, Tokyo. Roughly (if I remember correctly) 1/2 of the exhibit is on pre WWI excursions, with the last 2 being WW1 and WW2.
It is also a rather interesting museum if you want to hear the "other" view on the geopolitics leading to WWII. Unfortunately, these are not the sorts of conversations that are even remotely worth having on the internet, so I will leave it there.
Interesting museum, recommend.
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I was in a bit of a mood in Shinjuku and just wanted something to relax to. I saw it at the 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku, which was a luxury theater on I believe the 17th floor of a tower. It was an interesting experience as people actually seemed to be hanging out in the lounge before the film. Popcorn and drinks were included (with refills) up to the start of the movie. I'm curious if this luxury film model will work out any better here than it has in the United States. Still, it was enjoyable.
The film was pretty cool in terms of animation. I have seen one previous in this serious (I think the train one?) and other than a brief recap from my friend know nothing about this series. I always think it is interesting how often Japanese animes tend to like to humanize even the "bad" characters, this one was no exception.
I've read this before (twice), but this is genuinely a great book. I think few authors are as observant, critical, and yet still forgiving of human foibles as Jane Austen was.
I probably last read this something like 15 years ago. One thing that I didn't remember from the book (relative to the film) was how long the scene at the end where Darcy and Elizabeth discuss their misunderstandings is. I guess the film had replaced my memory of it.
Actually, on the subject of lost memory, I feel that when I saw the film in theaters 20 years ago it literally ended on Keith Sutherland saying "... send them in, I am quite at my leisure". I thought that was just an incredible end to the movie, not showing the love of the characters but implying it instead. However, when I watched it again on home video I was suprised to see that there was an ending past that scene with Elizabeth and Darcy at moonlight I believe, recounting their love and all that. I much prefer the film ending on Sutherland than the scene of the happy couple being the ending, it is just so confident an end to a film. With that said, the actual "couple at moonlight" ending is actually closer to the book (though incredibly compressed).
Anywho, it makes sense not to have the "remembrance" section of the book in the film, as you literally just watched all those scenes less than 2 hours ago. While it does make sense in the book, as you read each of those scenes many hours (wall clock likely days) ago. Just an interesting example of how certain things in literature are not translatable to film.
I am actually relatively new to drinking coffee (I'm a tea man). With that said, I quite enjoyed Austin's coffee culture. I like the energy from having other people around you who are focused. I enjoy the pleasure of listening (ok, evesdropping) when two friends catch up. I appreciate the education of watching two businessman negotiate a preliminary deal.
It has been more than a decade since I regularly worked at coffee shops, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it.
My only real regret was that in Austin I had to drive myself to each coffee place. It was also not uncommon to drive somewhere and find that I could not find any reasonable parking. Someday self driving will fix this, but it is still a thorn in what is otherwise an almost completely enjoyable outing.
This got me thinking that I should travel somewhere with the intent of partaking in "cafe culture" on the daily. I want to be able to travel (ideally walk) to nearby cafes, roughly 2 a day, and work for several hours at each of them. I am thinking go to the first cafe in the morning for a few, then break for an extended lunch, and then do another extended cafe session in the evening. There are lots of options (Vienna, Melbourne, NYC), but many of those are more money than I am willing to spend at this time. I decided that I will do a sort of limited tour of East Asia, starting in Tokyo, and then moving on to Seoul and then Kuala Lampur. I am planning on spending roughly a month at each of these 3 locations. At this time, I only have Tokyo booked in terms of hotels. I will play the future by ear.
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I.. I did not love this film.
It is odd, I feel like the individual pieces (even up to entire scenes) are quite good. However, the whole is just less than its parts. What was our character's growth here? Who sacrificed what for whom? What big emotions were at play?
I don't know man. I just couldn't figure out what Luthor's motivation even was here? Why was he so bent on this? Something about humanity not having to shine in Superman's beneficent aura? Really? You are going to potentially destroy the world for that?
Superman's transformation was just... kinda vapid. He was good because biological mommy and daddy told him to be good, then he learned they were actually bad, then he was sad, and then he was good because adoptive daddy tells him to be good. Like, you are 30+ years old man. I just don't get it.
As I said, lots of the individual scenes were great, but when you back out and ask "why are we here? What is he trying to accomplish? What is the point of this subplot?" it is just weak. Why are we having a scene where superman white river rafts down a proton stream holding a baby while his dog rescues him?" Why is Lois lane and like 5 other people in Mr. T's baseballmobile like doing something... aren't they reporters? Why do the Green Lantern's splinter at the most opportune time to help him?
What is anyone's motivation here?
It just does not add up to much honestly.
