u/SaconicLonic

I was told to check out The Culture series of books. I was kind of warned that Consider Plebas was actually one of the weaker books in the series but still worth my time.

I enjoyed the world building of this books, but the story overall is just these odd episodic adventures, that ultimately culminates in the absolutely most unsatisfying ending I think I've ever read for a book. It feels like the ending for a DnD campaign where the DM just gave up on it and said "Rocks fall everyone dies" and that there was little point to any of the mystery or McGuffin of the campaign. I am seriously baffled by it.

I really liked the world building and the direction for the characters was interesting. Not to mention a lot of interesting prose throughout. But overall the ending of this one just turned me off to any future Culture novels. Is it worth pressing on or are they all this nihilistic? I don't even know if nihilistic is the right term here, as at least some nihilistic novels like The First Law books feel like they have a point. I am having a hard time seeing what the point of this novel is.

I just really wanted to give a big shoutout for all the accessibility options they provided in Mina the Hollower. In particular, is the ability to turn off the Soul-like mechanic of the game, ie you die you lose your experience and you have to get back to that point or kill the enemy that killed you in order to get it back.

I know to a lot of gamers they quite like this function of more challenging games. I know when I first played Dark Souls I did find it an interesting mechanic. It does give stakes to death in a certain sense, and can give that dopamine hit of when you get them back.

But over time this mechanic has only become one thing to me, and that is that at some point I will feel underpowered and probably have to grind to get back XP I lost. Or there will be a section where I have a lot of XP and grind until I reach the next level to achieve some sense of safety.

I'll even say that I feel like FromSoft themselves has been walking back this aspect of their games a lot since its inception with Deamon's Souls. In Demon's Souls check points are a long way apart, comparatively Elden Ring has checkpoints all pretty close together that actually greatly encourages exploration and never makes it feel like it is a terrible risk of a 5 minute run back where you are at great risk of losing all your XP.

Mina the Hollower is still a pretty difficult game without this XP loss feature in place. It makes me question if it even needed it in the first place. It honestly just feels like an added layer of frustration on top of a game that doesn't need that to artificially enhance the difficulty. It makes me kind of hope that for any future games that decide to include a Souls-like mechanic that they provide this option. I say this as someone who finds that a lot of devs who make Souls-like games do a bad job of getting the difficulty down.

Apologies upfront, I don't know much about electronics. I am just having a very hard time identifying what kind of wire this is being used in this LED kit I have. It is really tiny and doesn't seem to fit with what a lot of stuff I find online. The 1 marking here indicates 1cm. This connection is very tiny maybe just a 2mm. I tried looking this up even with AI and didn't feel like I was finding the right thing.

https://preview.redd.it/g9jzhpvp5t3h1.jpg?width=1932&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8fa1a4f6292f726dd3d37654c14c3033e9f266b9

https://preview.redd.it/k4f4uwlq5t3h1.jpg?width=1932&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7b2626ad81f6d7fed9c67ad63574d08fd2cb5f08

A model kit I am building has a specialized 3rd party LED kit that has these tiny little wires, and I cannot track down the right wires for the life of me through websearches or even AI. One of the wires broke and seems like it could easily be replaced if I just knew what kind it was. The company that made the LED kit only provides contact information that is through QQ or WeChat. I do not wish to give out personal information that is required to start a WeChat account, but I was told this subreddit could be helpful in this. Please contact me for more information. I'd be willing to offer $5 if you can obtain this information (which I could send through Venmo or paypal).