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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • So, ignoring the fees involved in making it happen at all (which I assume the person did, because wow.) Say they spend ⅓ the price of the car to get ⅔ again as much use out of it. That’s a profit. They’re probably looking at replacing the car and not the battery when thinking about it, so it’s really good then. And they probably assume the device is transferable, so they can get more than one use out of the investment.

    So they’re selling themselves on almost 2x performance that they can apply to all future batteries or cars and thus they extend the life of each car in the fleet by a lot.

    And if it’s doesn’t live up to the claims, they pay ‘nothing’ and reap any benefits they managed to get out of it. And SURELY it would give at least SOME benefit, right?!

    It’s absolutely stupid and foolish, but it’s not one single thing that makes it stupid or foolish, it’s a cascade of assumptions and estimations that makes something stupid sound plausible. There’s a world where the person “logic-ed” their way into buying this scheme—and either way it was a scheme—that was sold to them as no-lose.

    They just had to forget all the other associated costs. The real world is probably either that they were completely incompetent and bought “battery rejuvenation technology” or that they tried to payout to a buddy and were had.


  • There’s a reality here where someone saw this as a no-lose situation. Either:

    A. We get some improvement, but it doesn’t reach their claims so we don’t go forward.

    Or

    B. We get the promised improvement and it’s actually worth it.

    They missed a few obvious issues in that the cars may become safe or get worse longevity from the experiment. That and the contract process took time and money if they had a reasonable expectation of failure.

    Still, it’s not entirely stupid and so long as Mullen got NOTHING besides a scam record, this could be a win.






  • Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson (secret project 3) - it’s obvious by the art direction that there’s a romantic aspect to this and it’s obvious by the book that he enjoys writing this sort of thing for his wife!

    Gleanings by Neal Shusterman (Arc of the Scythe 3.5) after finishing the series, this short story collecting fills in gaps that sometimes don’t need to be filled. The main series was a 1-2 punch of a captivating story in a fascinating world. Book 3 did NOT let go.

    Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is a travel audiobook my partner and I are reading during trips throughout the summer. Stellar series so far and this one is so fun to read together as we have to stop every few minutes to go “did she just say that?” Or “wait, so NOW my theory has to be —-, right? Or is it…”

    American Gods by Neil Gaiman I’ve barely started, And Small gods by Terry Pratchett I’ve barely started and it’s my only non-audiobook of the bunch.




  • Glaive0@beehaw.orgtoLiterature@beehaw.orgHeist books?
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    1 year ago

    I only have poor recommendations after wracking my brain:

    The Tower of the Raven by Ann Leckie is the closest I’ve come to a fantasy heist that’s accessible. The heist component is present, but that’s not a tag I’d add to the book without stretching. It does some deeply fascinating things, though.

    Then in completely inaccessible fantasy heists we have Skin Game. Book FIFTEEN in the Dresden files. While the series has some other decent heist-like moments, this is a HEIST. And it’s one of the top 5 books of the last few years for me, maybe #1.

    But in 3-4 years of my records, that’s about it for heists I’ve read.





  • For me, TotK has been great for forgetting what’s next. The whole game is chunked into small little tasks that string together. It’s rare that I’ve managed to set a goal and gone straight to it. It’s usually “warp to x in order to do y but now, z is on the way and it says to go to b. But b redirects me to do g,h, i, and j before I can fight my way to c. Aaaand whoops I just finished temple and I was just trying to deliver eggs to the shop keep.

    That may not be to your taste, but I’m enjoying the happy accident moments of the game. I feel like a diagram of the quest flow would look similar to a technical diagram for the whole us postal system. Just play in the sandbox and have fun. You’ll eventually get where you’re going!



  • This was sort of me. I couldn’t use my eyes to read a book after college. Something about college took that from me. Maybe that’s when I really dove into social media, maybe I never had quiet space to just read. Either way, undiagnosed adhd and some degree of dyslexia went a ways towards breaking my looong time visual reading habit.

    But, I never stopped reading audiobooks. Almost a decade out and I’m still recovering my visual reading, but I downed 13 books and novellas this month via audiobook. (And finally finished an ebook I started in February!) Reading is now an inevitability rather than a goal.

    I read almost exclusively sci-fi and fantasy, but slip in non-fiction or classic fiction every so often.

    So, for me, it’s read what you like and read how you like.

    Side note: books that I really want to ready that aren’t at my library as audiobooks are the sole driver of me getting back into visual reading. Being audio-only locked me out of a LOT of books that I really want to read. So, unless that matches you, I have no idea how to reincentivize visual reading other than that.