Archive for June, 2023


My Oxford French Mini Dictionary

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
June 10, 2023

My Oxford French mini dictionary has a vagina but no penis. It has sperm but no menstruation. No fucking, only sex, and a pregnancy without a womb.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has honour without traitors, self-sacrifice without self-doubt.

There is a kangaroo but no platypus. There is God but no Bigfoot or Chupacabra.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has heaven and hell without apocalypse, without utopia, without rapture.

In the world of my Oxford French mini dictionary, there are workaholics but no slackers. There is neither heroism nor apathy, only complacency. Obedience without caricatures.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has knives and guns and bullets but no cotton candy, no colouring books, no dollhouses.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has no serendipity or randomness or rumination, only cold consequences. There is neither hedonism nor stoicism. There is only boredom.

There is no unpredictability.

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What a massive disappointment… (Or why I ended up getting a refund for Diablo-4 after an hour of gameplay)

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — Leave a comment
June 6, 2023

I did not think the game would be so bad that I’d have to refund it – never did that for a game before, but wow. This is something else… (Also, this whole post is a rant. Sorry, just gotta get it off my chest. Feel free to sound off and/or tell me why I’m wrong.)

I grew up playing Diablo-1 and Diablo-2. Dumped a lot of time into Diablo-3 when that came out, too. I really, really hoped D-4 would be better after the FUBAR they committed with D-3. (Remember when your character was basically a Terminator, walking through the halls of heaven and destroying everything in its path with zero effort? Good times, great worldbuilding, very wow, much impressive.) But JFC, right from the start, D-4 seems to be the least demanding, most ridiculously casual game of the entire franchise.

This is a rant. Feel free to close it. 🙂 If this helps at least one other person avoid purchasing the game, cool.

To start, the graphics were amazing. That first cut scene? Wow. Also, the character customization window was excellent. As for the rest…

  1. The sorceress starts the game with zero spells. Her only weapon is a stick that also doesn’t cast spells. 🙂 That’s not a sorceress – that’s an over-confident applicant to the mage school. (Compare and contrast D-2 at least giving you a rudimentary magic staff from the start.)
  2. No option to chat or even listen to the mysterious delirious stranger whose very presence kicked off a quest. Why? Just…. why? At least let me hang out and listen to his ravings. But nah, zero freedom.
  3. Can’t loot any of the animals I killed. (Killing a goddamn bear with one shot was pretty funny.) Can’t harvest their hide, or blood, or horns (that deer had so much potential), or souls, or teeth. Lame. Wasteful, even.
  4. Novice-level spells cost zero mana and can be fired non-stop. O_o That turns the dynamic into a plain old “point and click.” There’s zero tactics involved – and I made sure to play on the “experienced” difficulty level, not the newbie level. Remember how in D-2 you had to run around and conserve your mana while a bunch of mobs chased you? Yeah, so there’s an infinite source of basic-level magic now, apparently.
  5. Speaking of running around: no stamina bar anymore, either. Every character is now a marathon runner, woot!
  6. Somewhere after Diablo-3, the world lost the belt technology. 🙂 Shame, really: I guess they all wear suspenders and/or togas now. You can carry a ridiculous amount of gear in your inventory now, but gods help you if you decide to carry more than 4 potions on your person.
  7. The first big boss (X’Fer or some similar cliché fantasy name, all X’s and apostrophes) got defeated just by clicking on him, holding down the button for a couple of minutes, and occasionally stepping aside. Smooooth. Compare and contrast with the horror that was the Butcher in D-1, or how ridiculously difficult it was to kill Blood Raven in D-2.
  8. Accidentally clicked on the non-obvious exit right after killing the boss. The game wouldn’t let me to climb back inside the tower to pick up the loot. Why? Just… why? Skyrim came out 11.5 years ago, and even that gave you the freedom to backtrack, unless you specifically jumped off a ledge. Seems like the future gameplay will also be straight and one-sided like you’re a one-dimensional character.
  9. Again, the cut scenes make for nice eye candy, but that’s wayyyy too much cut-scene material for just the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay. (Compare and contrast: in the TV show Heroes, it took 9 episodes of build-up before they even showed the face of the villain Sylar. Here, we have the big bad monologuing at the very beginning.)
  10. Speaking of monologuing: the British accents in the intro cut scene (three looters and a scholar) were kind of amusing, though kind of cliché. But what was up with everrrryone in that village trrrying theirrrr best to do a strrrrronk Easterrrrn-Eurrropean accent? It felt so damn cringy, almost like watching “Orange is the New Black” again. Maybe my memory is failing me, but I don’t recall such an overabundance of thick ethnic accents in any of the previous games. Characters had foreign names, yes, and each NPC’s voice conveyed some aspect of their personality, but can you imagine the inhabitants of D-2’s Lut Gholein doing super-thick Middle-Eastern accents just for the fun of it? JFC…
  11. The leveling is way, wayyyyyy too fast. Five levels just for clearing out a ridiculously easy boss and a few skeletons?.. I logged out in disgust and got my refund ASAP, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I also scored 10 achievements along the way. (“Newwww achievement! Your character met their FitBit goal for the day by walking 50 steps!”)

tl;dr – shoddy writing, poor gameplay design and worldbuilding, zero challenge or tactics involved, and the dev team probably had fewer RPG players than the dev team that created D-3. 😦

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New e-book! And a giveaway! :) “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE”

Filed under: writing — 2 Comments
June 1, 2023

Okay, so the title is a bit of a mouthful, but you gotta be thorough with those things. Also, there are zero other e-books that have “lean-FIRE” in their title, and that’s just a damn shame, eh. (For the uninitiated: “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is the frugal version of that movement.) You can download my shiny new e-book over here. It’ll stay free until the end of Friday, June 2. I may do another giveaway in the coming weeks… If you like the e-book, please leave a 5-star review so others would be able to find it too!

As for what the book is about, I’m just going to shamelessly plagiarize my own e-book description here…

I retired at 34. I can teach you how.

My story doesn’t involve huge inheritances, rich relatives, or cushy jobs obtained through the Good Ol’ Boy Network. I’m a double immigrant: from Russia to the US when I was 16, from the US to Canada when I was 32. I never made six figures, never got huge scholarships, and my first job after college was as a box packer at an Amazon warehouse. (Thanks, recession!) Over the years, and by necessity, I mastered the art of frugal living and taught myself how to earn more, spend less, and invest the rest.

This book grew out of my personal finance blog, with a few extra chapters thrown in. Consider it your instruction manual for achieving frugal early retirement, aka lean-FIRE. (FIRE is a financial movement: it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.”)

This book is written in a conversational and informal (sometimes too informal) style, and it has something for everyone who wants to improve their financial situation. Even if you don’t replicate my journey entirely, you’ll still be able to avoid some huge mistakes and boost your savings rate.

This e-book is hands down the most book-like e-book I’ve ever written: for one thing, it’s long (317 pages, woot!), and consists entirely of my own writing, unlike so many of the public-domain e-books I’ve spliced together. In theory, I could’ve tried to pitch it to publishing houses to get it printed like an actual real-life book, but from what I understand about the industry, nowadays they prefer authors with huge social media platforms, and that’s not something I care to maintain. (You, dear reader, are part of a small and exclusive club!) So e-book format it is, then.

This e-book has a lot of rather personal information that average people never really share with one another: money permeates so many aspects of our lives, yet it’s considered faux pas to bring it up, especially so when you’re doing better than those around you. Not gonna lie, I had some doubts about releasing it, even as I cleaned up all my old blog posts and wrote a couple of new chapters.

I ended up clicking that “Publish” button anyway, and that’s due to two simple reasons. First, no one will remember any of us 150 years from now: our internal struggle, shame, or awkwardness don’t matter one bit in the grand scale of things. And secondly, if my e-book can help at least one person (and ideally, many more) streamline their financial situation and retire earlier, then all of this will be worth it. In fact, one of my PCT hiking buddies has already thanked me profusely: he’s a lawyer, but he never got a chance to learn the ins and outs of personal finance – until now. Looks like I’ve already accomplished my absolute-minimum goal – let’s see how many more I can help, eh?

And so, without further ado, head over here if you’d like to download the e-book for free, and please feel free to share the link with all your friends: my e-book has something for everyone. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope even more to get a shiny 5-star review from you afterwards. Have fun!

P.S.: To celebrate my e-book’s release, I’m also doing a two-day giveaway on most of my other e-books over here. Personally, I highly recommend 50 shades of yay: great thinkers on happiness. It contains useful perspectives on happiness from great thinkers across the millennia. (We could all use that in this stressful time!)

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