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.

• Reviews are mixed: not a great start

Agreed, puts a damper on everything else that follows.

• Requires 3rd-party account: fuck that

Also agreed. If I buy a Steam game, I’d generally much rather it be accessible through Steam and do not appreciate when games are sold on Steam for other platforms.

• 60 euros base game: expensive, especially when the game has mixed reviews

Not the worst price, but yeah I’d definitely expect a much better review score to justify that price. In the absence of a good review score this would be something I’d have to know I’m going to enjoy before I’d consider buying it full price.

• 175 euros DLC’s: are you fucking kidding me? On top of 60 euros for the base game, there’s another 175 fees for content?

I don’t know for certain about this particular game, but I do know people were shitting on Monster Hunter: Rise for the exact same reason: a seemingly exorbitant amount of DLC available from release implying it’s a cash grab and just trying to milk more cash out of the player.

That being said, in my opinion MHR wasn’t even half as bad as the naysayers would have you believe. MHR on release on Steam had a lot of DLC, sure, but it didn’t launch on Steam. It launched on the Switch then later was ported to Steam with all of the same DLC they had worked on since its launch a year prior.

Almost all of the DLC was exclusively cosmetic skins, and almost all of those were part of bundles available for significantly cheaper prices than each one individually. I don’t recall the exact prices but I believe it was something like buy 10 skins individually for $2/ea or buy all of them in a bundle for $5. The real price for any sane person for all 10 skins would be $5, but this showed up on Steam as 11 DLC items with a total of $25. Multiply this by the 6-10 ish bundles they had on the title’s release on Steam to get a huge quantity of items and a massively inflated price compared to what anyone who wanted everything would realistically pay, assuming they paid attention.

I don’t know that CoD is doing a similar thing here, and I certainly wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, but I dislike this argument against them because it can be very misleading.

• purchasable CoD points: so pay to win?

Not necessarily P2W, but yeah I’m not a fan of MTX either and again wouldn’t give CoD the benefit of the doubt to have a good or fair monetization model.

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.

There’s also Clone Hero