I’m just confused by the notion that discord could replace forums. To me it’s always been a messaging service first and foremost. You can have something resembling a forum discussion on some servers, but that’s really just allowing users on a specific server to make a channel with a specific subject for live discussion to happen at, it just happens that since it’s so niche that people leave messages and come back to it later forum style.

And that’s not even to mention how discord’s search functionality is garbage, or how anything on a discord server is basically non-existent to search engines.

Not one that I think I would actually want, but one I’ve thought a lot about is absolute bodily autonomy in the same way that you can control any aspect of your body consciously but without deliberate thought then it’ll default back to unconscious control. Want to grow taller? Start kicking that system back into drive. Want to lose weight? Start absorbing energy less efficiently or burning more calories fruitlessly. Have a random pain? Start to monitor that area and sensing for any particular anomalies.

If the control can go all the way down to the microscopic level then you’d be a walking advancement factory for every medical field. The primary issue would be trying to make practical recreations of the medicines and procedures you’d help create, and even then you could try bioengineering cells to recreate your medicines and procedures. You’d also likely be able to effectively never age by correcting the errors in your cell reproduction. With enough time and effort you could probably spawn a clone of yourself to go out and continue to help others.

If you allow the caveat that this also works on anyone/anything that you can touch, then the limit for what you can cure or at least aid with is bound only by what you can touch, analyze, and solve in time.

Nightreign has essentially that with one of the bosses you can fight and it’s genuinely the worst boss in the game, imo. You spend 30-45 minutes building up a kit with your teammates only to be given a sword which is literally mandatory to damage the boss in phase 2. And even then basically all you do with it is charge up then fire off projectiles while the boss flies around in the sky. Easily the least interesting boss fight in the game.

You could always play with mods. One of them adds pollution scrubbers, which you can surround your base with to make sure biters are never prompted to attack in the first place. I have several hundred hours in one save that has a metaphoric wall of filters that has yet to be attacked outside of a few instances when I was expanding.

Out of curiosity and just for the novelty of doing it, I found another mod that made a combinator device which would output the current pollution for the chunk that it was contained within. Using that, I set up a whole system to turn on the exact number of scrubbers I needed to prevent any pollution from leaving my base. Never actually implemented it because it was wildly impractical, but it was a fun project just to see if I could do it.

tl;dr: I use a Note 20 Ultra with stock Samsung ROM because I’m not convinced there’s a good custom or stock ROM that well supports the stylus, but I’m open to suggestions if anyone has one.

My number 1 feature in a phone is having a built in/included stylus. I do a lot of programming stuff which I usually find is easier to plan out ideas for how I want to structure things by drawing it, it’s also easier for writing out math for some of said ideas, when an interesting question comes up, or when I want to show someone the math on how something’s done, and I’m currently learning Japanese so it’s helpful for working on my kana penmanship and learning kanji, especially learning kanji stroke order.

I’ve used other styli in the past and know that palm rejection is pretty much a must have feature. It’s incredibly annoying and cumbersome to hover over your phone to not engage the touchscreen, or have to specifically hold your phone in portrait mode so that your hand is naturally off to the side which doesn’t pair well with how we generally write horizontally. Because of this, I don’t consider dumb styli at all and only really consider powered styli that have an active connection to the phone.

The last time I was searching for a new phone, this requirement (and a few others like expandable storage via microSD card, 5G support, supported my network, etc) ruled out almost every phone on the market save 2. There was some Moto 5G discount model that for some reason had a smart stylus, then the Samsung Note 20 Ultra. I don’t recall the exact reason I didn’t go with the Moto 5G, but I believe it was something like issues with build quality (being a discount model) and the stylus wasn’t very good meaning it would defeat the entire point of getting the phone. So I went with my current Note 20 Ultra.

All of this is to say, I never really considered changing the ROM because I have doubts how well other ROMs would support the stylus. I’ll fully admit it’s not my most used feature on the phone, but there are hundreds of other phones that have a good screen, support fast charging, support Bluetooth, and have expandable storage. My first feature that would significantly rule out options unfortunately rules out almost all options, so I don’t trust that there are many ROMs out there that would even decently support the stylus.

That all being said, I’d be very happy to be proven wrong. I don’t like Samsung’s bloat and would love to move away from a lot of it. The only other Samsung device I own is their galaxy tag trackers which is currently the only reason I’ve logged into a Samsung account on my device otherwise I’d be happy to get rid of it and not give them more information.

Maybe I’m missing years of video game discourse but I don’t know what you’re talking about being alone on this hill. I’ve been using VR since the Google Cardboard and as long as you temper your expectations it’s been plenty fine since even all the way back then. The experiences on the Vive and Index are a bit clunky but otherwise I have fun with them every time I use them.

The first generation Pokemon games all used significantly less power to maintain their RAM battery saves than Pokemon Gold, Silver, and Crystal by virtue of not having a real time clock constantly ticking the power away. RBY saves only needed to maintain the power for the save itself and did no additional work on top of that.

Original GSC cartridges would last about 10-15 years, whereas RBY could last 20-30 years. We’re currently in the span of time where many RBY cartridge batteries will be failing but it’s still possible to find ones with functional original saves on batteries just barely holding on.

Many people like to try using physically larger batteries when doing replacements, but most of them don’t realize the batteries aren’t losing charge at the end of those many years because they’re drained and out of power. RBY saves use so little power from the battery in the cartridge that they won’t fully drain it after 30 ish years. Instead the battery saves fail because the batteries themselves fail after 20-30 years. Picking the larger button cell batteries won’t help since they’ll still have the same total lifespan and will still lose charge at almost the same rate as the spare batteries that weren’t installed in your cartridge of choice.

Don’t know the second one, but first is 100% Ascendance of a Bookworm. Absolutely love the books and would highly recommend them if you can’t wait for more of the anime.

Took wayyyyy too much scrolling to find a Reigen quote from MP100

Hell yeah, love me some Nichijou! I oughta give it another rewatch with some friends one of these days

I’ve been banned off of Line for the crime of doing literally nothing. I created an account before a trip to Japan so I could add Japanese people I already knew or might meet while there.

I made the account without any significant issues, got the QR code to add a friend then got an unspecified error any time I tried to add them. I tried adding an official account with the same error. I looked it up and saw some suggestions about waiting a few days to try again so I did just that with the same results for any official account or my friends account. My brother made an account and tried to add our friend with the same results, then found that when using my QR code it said the account didn’t exist.

After digging more into it and trying to figure out what was up with Line’s support directly all I could find was an FAQ that said if you got an unspecified error when adding someone then it means your account violated Terms of Service for sending illegal messages, harassing people, etc that type of stuff. Still have yet to figure out how exactly either of us did any of those things before we could send a single message, but I’m sure it’s a very good and logical reason which would surely also explain why Line doesn’t answer my tickets or emails. Surely.

Better Call Saul. I liked Saul in Breaking Bad and learning more about him and his past was great, but I hated knowing how low he has to be by the end for Breaking Bad to make sense. The higher he climbed in the show, the more of a tragedy it became. Just had to put it down some time near the end of Part 2 when he started doing stuff to his brother.

On the one hand I do still want to know what happens to his brother, but on the other hand I hate watching a car crash I know is about to happen before its shown the first signs of drifting into the wrong lane and (mentally) shouting at the screen to stop making stupid decisions.

Worth mentioning that although I acknowledge Breaking Bad would not really happen at all if not for Walter and his pride, but I still despise how much he lets his pride destroy him over and over again. As such I also don’t particularly care for the later seasons of Breaking Bad, but at least with those I didn’t really know the end so I didn’t know how much it was going to keep going downhill beforehand. Oddly enough for this reason I feel like I may have enjoyed Better Call Saul more before having watched Breaking Bad.

I have a trip to Japan coming up very shortly that I’m looking forward to. Made a few Cafe reservations a little while ago, I’ll be riding with a drift instructor around a few tracks at Ebisu Circuit, planning on visiting Nara to see the deer, going to a few PokeCenters, and visiting a bunch of second hand stores for books, games, and merch.