The last digit of pi is clearly the i, which would be equivalent to 19 after converting to base 10.
Thalfon
joined 1 year ago
I use Downpour. They all kind of have the same pricing service. $12ish for a monthly one credit, buy more at the same price. Downpour lets you either use their app for syncing or just download the MP3 and/or M4B (a format similar to MP3 but with chapter stops for books) to use however you'd like.
Though I'm not sure it supports gifting. Someone else suggested Libro.FM which is very similar but I know does have gifting.
I avoid Audible personally, they've historically taken a huge cut from authors. I can get basically the same deal everywhere else. If you're curious check out Brandon Sanderson's various posts or media releases about the topic.
Interestingly I can think of a couple games that get around the mon-game issue you mentioned, and in pretty different ways.
Ooblets (which I haven't played, but appears to be popular with 91% positive on Steam) has you grow your mons in a garden, and rather than pitting them in fights with other critters, you do dance battles. It appears to be a bit more slice-of-life vibes but with the monster-collecting element.
And Cassette Beasts (which I have played, would recommend to anyone who likes monster collectors easily, and is 96% positive on Steam) dodges the issue in a different way. You don't actually capture and train monsters... you record them, and that recording lets you transform into that kind of critter. Successfully record a Traffikrab in a fight, and you can then transform into one later. You are still fighting the wild ones, but you aren't enslaving any or having them fight for or serve you in any way. The equivalent of trainer battles is fighting other people who also do this.
I don't know exactly how it works in the US (probably it varies by state), but to give an idea, in Canada employment can end typically in one of three ways: quitting, being fired, or being laid off. (Some other less common cases exist of course like long term injuries or medical issues etc.)
Generally being fired means it was somehow the employee's fault (anything from not being good enough at the job to being caught doing something actively wrong), while being laid off is due to lack of available work (when a business has to scale down, or dies completely). Laid-off workers can start collecting employment insurance almost immediately, and have certain rights to getting their job back if the company suddenly has work available again, among other things (i.e. it's not meant to be possible for employers to use layoffs as a way of getting rid of employees they can't or don't want to fire).
A fired employee can't get employment insurance as immediately since they're seen as at fault for their own job loss from a legal perspective, but if the firing was wrongful, then they might have legal recourse against their employer.
The US is again probably very different in details but the basic difference of employee-at-fault job loss vs the work no longer existing is essentially the same, I think.
After Jones Soda did the six-pack of Thanksgiving dinner themed sodas (including Turkey & Gravy), this kind of thing just doesn't surprise me any more. I guess it's meant as more of a novelty thing than something people would actually use in seriousness.
I picked Caithe's Bloom (I think it's called, the dark purple dagger), since it fit my ele outfit. I got the reading glasses skin which a couple weeks before I'd been complaining about being unavailable in the gem store, so I guess for once the RNG gods chose kindness lol.
Tyrian 2000 is an easy choice given it's permanently free on GOG. It's a really fun old shmup with story and arcade modes, lots of difficulty settings (look up cheat codes if you need to make it harder) and a pretty solid amount of weapon customization. Still very much holds up today.
Annette Marie has a number of series set in her world of The Guild Codex. Urban fantasy where guilds of "mythics" (mages of various sorts) live hidden from the mundane world. The first series The Guild Codex: Spellbound is a good place to start, featuring a normal human woman stumbling into a bartending gig for such a guild. That 8 book series within the world is complete. Book one is "Three Mages and a Margarita."
Super engaging, and has great audio narration if you're into that as well.
Pretty close to the same at least. The main distinction would be that the Steam version still requires a copy of Steam to be running and logged in on the computer you copy it to, which at least means Steam has to have been online once ever to get the account logged in before using offline mode. GOG has offline installers that can be backed up and used without any client.
For the vast majority of use cases, it's a pretty minor difference, but one way in which it might be significant is that the GOG installers will never stop working, but if one day years down the road Steam were to shut down, the Steam version could only run on computers that could be running offline-mode Steam. There'd probably be ways to break that simple bit of DRM, but a legal offline installer is a very nice bonus for things like archival sites or research applications.
It's the kind of thing that even if you're not choosing to use it, it's nice that it exists, and hopefully it can continue to.
I took that zip file and imported it at Storygraph. That site isn't perfect either but at least it's building up instead of falling down, and seems to have heart. Also its recommendations, while hit and miss, are a lot better than what Goodreads has offered in the last couple years.
The two things I occasionally go back to Goodreads for at this point are the list of releases by authors I'm following, as you mention, and an FSF book club I'm in over there. That said I haven't bothered tracking my books on GR for a while now. I really can't see it turning around any time soon, especially now it's Amazon owned, and Storygraph deals with that aspect of things very well.
I've also seen Bookwyrm mentioned around here lately as a Fediverse alternative. I'm not familiar with it or its features, but it'd bear looking at for comparison.
I largely limit myself to ebooks or audiobooks now, which generally means I've no need to purchase a book before the very second I intend to read it, unless I expect to be somewhere without internet for a while and need to predownload stuff.
If there's a book in interested in but won't be reading right away, then I put it on a TBR list. Previously on Goodreads, ATM I'm using Storygraph. Then when I'm looking to read something new I skim through the TBR list and pick something off of it to borrow or buy. In that sense it's less a backlog and more a menu lol.
The Founders Trilogy (book 1: Foundryside) by Robert Jackson Bennett uses a system of magic called Scriving wherein objects have written upon them instructions that sort of convince the objects that the laws of physics work in different ways. Over long ages engineers found ways to build engines for scriving that had commonly used instructions and essentially allowed more advanced technologies by creating "programming languages" of a sort, if you will, that work in proximity to the engines. So you get this very advanced society with technology built over this magic system, and a main character whose MacGuffin allows for messing with others' scriving as your setting.
I quite enjoyed the trilogy, and they seem to fit the kind of vibe you're looking for. Over the course of the books they dive a lot into both the way the magic functions and the history behind how it came to be as it is.