“Acted alone” pretty much always means stochastic terrorism. Very few people radicalize themselves.

It’s in a weird halfway position, though it’s less cRPG and more action RPG with each iteration. The character creation in Daggerfall wouldn’t be out of place in a tabletop game.

The Elder Scrolls, infamously. Since they are open-world games, they use heavy level scaling so you can explore wherever you want from the very beginning.

It was alright in Morrowind. There, your level just controlled which enemies appeared, so you wouldn’t encounter high-tier daedra in the overworld until your level was in the teens and you actually stood a chance.

Oblivion utterly fucked it up by having everything scale to your level. You could revisit the starting area and a normal bandit would be wearing a full set of magical heavy plate worth tens of thousands of gold while demanding you hand over twenty coins to pass. Combine that with a weird player leveling system that punished you for picking non-combat skills or leveling up as soon as you could, and people loathed Oblivion’s leveling mechanics.

Skyrim’s scaling was somewhere in the middle, which lead to combat being inoffensively bland the whole way through.

I think Blackwater renamed to avoid tarnishing whoever was hiring them, not because they themselves disliked their reputation. If their employment wasn’t at the mercy of elected officials who have to care about optics, I bet they’d still be parading around their old name with pride.

It’s been decades and the first name that pops into my head when someone says ‘PMC’ is still ‘Blackwater’. Do you have any idea how much war crime they’ll need to do to get back that level of brand recognition?

If it worked anything like the GLOO Cannon from Prey, I would have been satisfied even if it were the only major innovation in the episode.

The downfall began when Ubisoft abruptly wrote Lucy out of the story after Kristen Bell asked for more money. Then they killed off the literal main character one game later, and nowadays you’d be excused for forgetting Desmond ever even existed given how little the modern day matters to the plot.

But then I was thinking the guy probably isn’t running on foot with four tires

He just has to think outside the box.

They forgot Rule One.

The crash I referenced was caused by having the scrollbar enabled IIRC, and it was fixed earlier this year. It made it impossible to launch the main activity without crashing if you’d enabled that setting, so users were sharing workarounds to launch directly to the settings screen without loading any communities so they could disable it.

Sync has had serious issues in the past such as an easily triggered, reproducible, guaranteed crash on open, with the dev not putting out a fix for months. This neglect goes back several years, to back when Sync was a Reddit client. Most infamously he disappeared for over a year when his UI refresh wasn’t well received.

The app is great (I’m only on Boost due to user tags requiring a paid subscription in Sync), but his response time to issues is glacial. And it doesn’t help that it’s by far the most expensive client if you want it ad-free, and features that used to be free now require an even more expensive subscription to use on top of that.

I found that the initial euphoria helped me get out and do things I normally wouldn’t (like catch up with friends and family I’d lost track of over the years), and the satisfaction from that helped keep me naturally happy after the false euphoria faded. Your mileage may vary, but actually getting things done for once helped a ton with my related disorders like anxiety and depression and things weren’t nearly as bad even when I started feeling normal again. And remember, the medication’s ability to let your brain feel motivation doesn’t fade, only the euphoric feeling.

The danger I see is that I think I need to up the dose to match the euphoria from the start, while I actually need to get to the point where it’s 0 % euphoria, 100 % noradrenalin.

That’s one of the main things my doctor warned me about when I started taking Vyvanse. He said that even though it might feel like your medication isn’t working as well, to not to chase that rush because it won’t actually help your symptoms and you’ll quickly become tolerant of the higher dose as well. All you’ll accomplish is paying more for a higher risk of side effects.

Not to mention if you appear to be a drug seeker they might decide to switch to a different, non-controlled medication that doesn’t work nearly as well as what you’re currently on.

Also a constant feeling like a hundred bucks, better than many recreational drugs.

Be aware that the euphoria is a temporary side effect and will only last for a week or two. The “actually being able to do things” part will remain, but feeling like a hundred bucks is due to the drug literally being an amphetamine and will fade as your body becomes tolerant of the dosage level you’re taking.

It’s a social media thing. Supposedly posts get deprioritized by the algorithm if they contain “family unfriendly” words like kill or drug references. No idea if it’s actually true or just a myth, but it’s why users edit out innocuous words in these screenshots.

Evie became a rich adventurer badass married to Brendan Frasier, so it worked out alright for her.

Mouse, because the first thing she did when I brought her home was fall asleep on top of my computer tower.

Edit: more cat tax. I wish I had a better camera at the time.

My previous cat loved chin scratches, the harder the better. She’d throw her whole body weight down on your fingers, to the point I worried about hurting her. When she jumped up on something, before doing anything else she’d make sure to visit the corner and rub her chin against even the sharpest edges with distressing force. I swear she was a masochist or something.

Cats are weird. I miss her.

Edit: blurry cat tax.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

Yeah, it’s twelve bucks to unlock scheduled backups and cloud syncing in Swift Backup, but then again this post is about paid apps. :)

Titanium Backup hasn’t been updated in five years, and I think that update was just to meet requirements to stay on the store. Their last changelog entry is adding the menu icon after Android ditched the physical menu button. There are a bunch of settings that are broken or do nothing due to changes to Android over the decades (TB has been around for so long that it supports Android 1.5).

I’ve been using Swift Backup as a replacement these past few years. It’s closed source but was recommended to me, and I haven’t run into any problems yet. Is Neo better in some way, aside from being FOSS?

Now I kind of want a Flintstones RPG.