Periodical cicada nymphs from Brood XIII are crawling out of the earth and moulting on trees, leaving husks like in the picture. For the next several weeks they'll be everywhere in the affected area. Then they lay their eggs in young tree trunks and other such supple plant stems, which hatch later in the summer only to burrow back into the earth for 17 more years.

I may return with other cicada facts as more come out. Very curious to see if it's any different from the last time in 2007 due to climate change

I've been looking at phones to replace my Pixel 4a as the battery goes and it becomes increasingly silly to get it replaced instead of getting something new. I don't like huge phones, which i consider to be anything over ~6.2". Everything under that is either:

• A Google Pixel with poor efficiency, thermals, and call reliability
• A Samsung Galaxy S with a high price, locked bootloader, dodgy privacy, and bloatware
• A miscellaneous brand with abysmal software support lifespan, variable bootloader lock status, and little to no custom rom support

the ASUS Zenfone 10 would have been honestly perfect for me - sub-6" screen, headphone jack, good performance. But they just haaad to remove bootloader unlocking despite promises to the contrary so now you have to settle for one more OS update and three more years of security updates for something that costs $600+. blurgh.

RIP Arkane Austin. I know at this point the people who made Prey aren't there anymore but it still stings

Me without hexbear for less than half a day: !kitty-cri-screm !aaaa

I do not have the type of social life to tolerate downtime well

Interviewing for a job where I'd either be working 11pm-9am four nights a week or one 14 hour day and two 10 hour days or something.

My mom is very skeptical about the overnight, and I'm aware there are health risks, but if they offer it I don't think I've got much choice as I am currently sans job. I'm already a bit of a night owl, is it manageable if I take precautions?

Do you buy them? Will you refuse to buy conventional if organic isn't available, broadly or on a per product basis?

I confess I've always blown off organic foods as kinda silly (unless you've got a sensitivity to whatever's in the conventional stuff) in large part due to overlap with GMO panic. Still, as we hear more about microplastics and harmful chemicals showing up in most everything I've been wondering if it'd be good for my long term health to be an organic andrew

It will take hold of you, and you will regret it's absence

\- a stupid idiot who thought they could explain why arbitrary age limits are a poor heuristic for experience to a /r/politics user

god typing that out really sells the stupid idiot part huh

Last year I was employed at a decent paying job with good benefits, doing work that mattered. Now I'm seven months unemployed, out of benefits and still getting ghosted by employers. Most everything else has remained the same (no friends, uncertainty with my gender and how I want to live my life, stuck living with my mom) except that I started seeing a therapist ~10 months ago who I really like.

It just feels really, really bad. I'm assuming other people have had this experience in their life already (I am both fairly young and a late bloomer in most respects), so I guess I'm asking how you dealt with it and how things got better, assuming they did :aware:

you can also commiserate with me if you like

thanks gamers

Also here's a pic of Goonin' Gary since I don't think I ever posted one !

Apparently temporary until the supreme court rules on it, still very funny

Todd and his consequences !todd

I've got one on Tuesday that looks like my best shot at a new job since I got laid off in the summer. It's with a vice president of the company and the person whose position I'm filling since she got promoted

I'm just a little weirdo, I don't know how to make them want to hire me !boohoo

Tbh idk what the difference is between this and previous "creation club content" but it's amazing to see todd coming back to the Skyrim well for more money

!lathe-of-heaven You have been warned

Damn Apocalypse is a really cool Fallout 4 mod suite to make survival gameplay more interesting, but it falls victim to this and it makes me sad

Idea: Gathering meat from animals requires crafting a hunting kit at chemistry stations, encouraging vegan playthroughs that leverage settlement farms as an alternative

Too Far: All non-meat food recipes are soups that have been changed to require purified water, which is also now more costly to craft and no longer available from water purifiers (which just give dirty water now).

Idea: Split radiation into ingested radioactive particles (from food, drink, and weather) and tissue damage (environmental hazards like radioactive waste).

Too Far: All food gives ingested radiation, so you basically have to be constantly drinking liquor or slamming anti-rad drugs to counteract it or you enter a death spiral of radiation sickness. You're telling me that EVERYONE else in the commonwealth is getting an IV drip of radaway on a regular basis just to survive??

Idea: Explosions from fusion and fission devices behave differently (i'm not entirely sure how this even works tbh)

Too Far: Robot explosions leave potent, long lasting sources of radiation that almost necessitates use of a hazmat suit unless you want to take prohibitive rad damage. THis is especially annoying when tackling Automatron, a robot focused DLC.

It's almost enough to get me to make my own overhaul, but I've never modded before. Plus that next gen update is on the horizon and it would suck to put in a lot of work only to find a dependency has been permanently borked because of it (like .Net framework and Skyrim AE)

Organized by spoiler tags because there's a fair bit here.

Also worth mentioning I played using a slightly modified version of the Wasteland Survival Guide, which uses the Tale of Two Wastelands mod.

WRITING & STORY

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I am not a big fan of how much of your character (age, parentage, childhood experiences, etc.) is decided for you in Fallout 3. To me, it felt more like less possibilities than anything else. This is made even worse by the fact that nothing interesting is really done with these fixed story elements. Your relationship with James is never meaningful in the short time it exists, never actually put to the test, explored, or reinforced beyond a few off-handed "I'm proud/disappointed" comments. Your youth and inexperience in an alien and unforgiving world never causes meaningful challenges. So what was the point of setting this all in stone?

The main plot is an instrument to get you exploring the wastes, and offers little in the way of twists or turns. Will you be generally good or incredibly, irrationally evil? Gee, we're spoiled for roleplaying choice here. Tranquility Lane is somewhat interesting conceptually, I guess. Overall there's supposed to be a theme of sacrifice, but again the concept is not engaged with in any meaningful way beyond "Your dad sacrificed himself, so you should too, and you're a bad person if you don't." Here are a few ideas to play with off the top of my head:

• How is a sacrifice changed if the thing you're giving up isn't really yours to give?
• Is it any more or less valid to sacrifice in imitation of another person?
• Is sacrifice noble by virtue of the act itself, or must it have tangible effects to be worth anything?

WORLD & EXPLORATION

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This is often lauded as Fallout 3's big advantage over New Vegas. The map is denser, and you're not funneled down a particular route beyond the nudging of the main quest. But do either of those things matter if most of the world is so uninteresting? There are unique and worthwhile locations like Mama Dolce's or the Dunwich Building, don't get me wrong, but they are massively outweighed by meaningless ones. What's the draw of yet another random power station, or a car crash? It's even worse in the city proper, where everything is broken up by uniform metro tunnel segments. When you've gone through one tunnel, you've generally gone through them all, so it becomes a massive bore to do anything in D.C. itself.

New Vegas is not totally innocent by comparison. It too has random locations that serve only as dungeon crawling fodder, but a lot less of them. To me, that means less content padding, and while it truthfully could use a little more to explore in some of the more lifeless regions, I much prefer it to the alternative.

KARMA

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A lot of my umbrage with the Karma system comes down to the name, as it implies an objective good/evil rather than how you're perceived by the denizens of the Wasteland. If you ignore that it's fine, basically a more simplistic and abusable version of the faction reputation system of New Vegas. I actually played with a mod that ported that system to 3, but since the game wasn't designed around that it changed very little.

DLC SUMMARIES

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Mothership Zeta: A mediocre corridor shooter suffering from major tonal whiplash compared to the main game. IMO aliens should be cheeky one off easter eggs in Fallout—giving them a whole DLC just feels too wacky. The Alien Blaster is a great weapon, though, and I mained it for the rest of the game.

Operation Anchorage: Short and forgettable. Conceptually I like the wrinkle of the simulation being purposefully altered to glorify pre-War USA, but beyond that barely developed idea it's head-empty, combat-focused content in a game with mediocre combat.

Point Lookout: I dig the misty, dank wetland and southern gothic vibes, and some of the side quests were enjoyable. However, the main plot really falls apart once you meet Calvert. The player character's motivations, already stretched perilously thin given they have no particular reason to be in Point Lookout, are entirely absent after that point beyond mild curiosity as to how it will all play out. Also enemy NPCs are scripted to do 35 bonus damage with all weapons, and that ignores your Damage Resistance. Thanks Bethesda!

The Pitt: This one just made me feel icky. It's so brutally miserable, and neither ending feels good. I sided with Werhner and the slaves, but his backstory makes it clear that he doesn't really care about them and is just using the revolt as a pretext to seize power for himself. One gets the impression that nothing is really going to change in The Pitt, no matter who you leave in charge. I'm all for morally complex storytelling and decisions in games, but this was less morally gray and more morally pitch-black.

(...is this how it feels to be UlyssesT when Game of Thrones gets brought up?)

Broken Steel: I'm sure this was much more appreciated back in the day for fixing the silly main quest ending, allowing you to play after it, and raising the level cap. Without that context this is nothing special, just a lot of fighting Enclave. The one exception is that I enjoyed the side quests! "Holy Water" and "The Amazing Aqua Cura" were some of my favorites in the game, though very short.

MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS

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• Companions are so two dimensional compared to New Vegas, you get so little sense of their personality beyond the base level elevator pitch. I ended up rolling with Dogmeat and Fawkes, the former because dog and the latter because I felt like he could really use a friend :')
• Conceptually, I actually don't mind Three Dog's excessive extolling/disparaging of the player's actions. Galaxy News Radio is essentially a propaganda outlet (he even calls it "Radio Free Wasteland"), so it makes sense that he's going to eschew all nuance and paint you as Jesus or Satan. Still, I wish he would shut up about Bryan Wilks so I could listen to music.
• Percentage based speech checks are dumb and encourage savescumming. Charisma modifying that percentage chance does give it more use than in New Vegas, but only in terms of reducing the expected amount of reloads to pass your check. I used a mod to institute threshold based speech checks and didn't miss the RNG one bit.
• I actually don't mind the Brotherhood being so goody two shoes here. Given the autocratic nature of Brotherhood chapters, the Elder having a change of heart and steering his chapter in a more altruistic direction makes sense. What I DO mind is the split with the Outcasts not having any real effect. They get no attention in the main story despite being a major player in the Wasteland, given their tech and manpower. No, Operation Anchorage doesn't count.

CONCLUSIONS

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Playing in 2023, 15 years past its original release, it's easy to look at Fallout 3 and see all the ways it has aged poorly or was never that good to begin with, especially in comparison to New Vegas (which is what I've done in the above almost exclusively). And while my impression is indeed pretty lukewarm, I think 3 deserves kudos as an early pioneer of open world exploration RPGs as we know them today. Like Seinfeld, it's hard to see how groundbreaking something was after the ground has been broken and everyone has taken notes. And of course, if we didn't have Fallout 3, we almost certainly wouldn't have New Vegas, so that's worth something.

Although I've alluded to playing New Vegas in the mega I'm actually doing Fallout 4 survival and having a good, if challenging time. Might make a similar post about it when I'm finished, but who knows when that'll be.

Just finished my second playthrough of the base game and first time through the DLCs. The base game is largely about as great as I remember it—quality drops off somewhat towards the end, and you can tell when something was meant to be expanded upon but had to be cut down and shipped for time reasons (cough cough Reason of State cough cough) but overall engrossing and thoughtfully conceived.

Hearts of Stone is my favorite of the two DLCs purely based on vibes. It's that Brothers Grimm style bleak folk tale energy amped up to 11, with great character building and atmosphere.

Blood and Wine was also cool. Toussaint's storybook beauty is certainly a change of pace from bleak Velen, seedy Novigrad, and ruggedly scenic Skellige. Main quest is interesting, love my boy Regis, and even knowing he's a fictional character it makes me happy that Geralt gets to retire and hang out in beautiful wine country with his partner (team Yen btw). Even went and watched the 10 year anniversary video after finishing and it was very :bloomer:

Now I'm gonna replay Thronebreaker since I've got it on steam now and am thoroughly gwent pilled again. Then maybe perfecting my Fallout Tale of Two Wastelands modlist and finally experiencing Fallout 3??

My Pixel 4a is getting its software support dropped, meaning no more security patches and increasing vulnerabilities. So I installed LineageOS for microG, a fork of LineageOS that has microG. I chose this one because LineageOS has good support for "older" devices like mine unlike GrapheneOS, and getting microG bundled in the fork is a turnkey solution for getting me access to Google services when I need them.

The installation process itself was very simple, I just followed the guide on the LineageOS site and ignored the optional stage for installing a GApps package since I already had microG. The pre-install work was more complicated, and required downloading a few tools and drivers for the Android Debug Bridge (adb) to work. I think this is the biggest barrier to entry - if you can get everything set up for the install, you shouldn't have any trouble with it.

After loading in and getting basics like Wifi and fingerprint lock set up, I was off to the races. The install comes with a very lean set of FOSS apps, as well as F-Droid to grab more. I immediately went and got Aurora Store off there so I could access the Play store and all its apps, which worked without a hitch. In fact, everything I've installed has worked as well as I would expect with the stock ROM with the exception of Google Contacts, which would not sync from my google account (and I can't even definitively say this was a ROM-related issue). Even my banking apps work despite my device not passing the SafetyNet check. Your mileage may vary depending on your apps and their requirements, but I myself was pleasantly surprised. The only thing I think I'm losing out on is NFC payments using Google Pay, but that's not a big deal for me.

Barring that one exception, everything just works and I'm glad I went this route. I was already happy with my Pixel 4a, and buying a whole new phone just because Google decided it couldn't be bothered to update it anymore would've left a bad taste in my mouth, especially as I'd be giving up features (headphone jack and fingerprint sensor on the back) I value. Now it's time to ride this baby out for as many more years as I can.

• Atmosphere is great. Not only is it aesthetically interesting, but the brutalist architecture and midcentury décor are a great complement to the game's themes. The Federal Bureau of Control is an arm of the US government, and predictably choked by bureaucracy and procedure. Institutions like the FBC are the closest thing most people have to alien intelligences in their lives - uncaring, inscrutable collectives that seem to know everything about you, or at least more than you're comfortable with, and channel that info to unseen ends. They were there before you were born, and will be there after you die, and will probably file a report about your death to be locked away in one of countless file cabinets, just for archival purposes. The environmental design of the Oldest House reinforces this uncanny bureaucratic vibe, which dovetails nicely with the actual alien threat which has infiltrated it to wreak havoc. The Hiss corrupts locations with cubic outgrowths and harsh red glare like a cancer's spreading mutation, suspending corpses in midair and pushing mindless singsong babble out of their mouths. Chef's kiss.

• Great performances, ESPECIALLY in the multimedia. Dr. Darling's presentations could be delightful or haunting but always interesting (also, the FMV fit so well into the game's style). Arish's VA might be my favorite of the tertiary characters, it just sounds really authentic. I generally thought Courtney Hope did a great job as Jesse - my only complaint being there were a few places where I expected a lot more emotion out of her, and it felt strange for her to be so restrained. Could be up to direction though.

• Story was... sufficient, but elevated by the atmosphere and performances. The plot never really wowed me, and I only failed to predict certain story beats because I WAS expecting to be wowed and figured they surely wouldn't go the predictable route. For something that takes extensive inspiration from the SCP project, I really expected things to go a little more off the rails, although I appreciate that there was at least one "content screw" moment.

• Gameplay is solid. Yeeting random bits of sheetrock at aliens never gets old, and the shooting feels good enough. I thought the different forms of the service weapon were cool, although I pretty much used Grip and Pierce the entire time. The mod system, however, felt strange. There's a lot of different ones, some specific to each weapon form, but I usually just stacked whatever increased my DPS for weapon mods, and a mix of stat and ability boosts for personal mods. I think I would've preferred Bioshock style upgrade stations, or otherwise another system with less randomness.

• DLCs were okay. AWE is an extended ad for Alan Wake 2, largely disconnected from the main story with one or two standout scenes. Foundation is a bit of falling action for the main story and offers some interesting lore and a different environment, but feels largely anticlimactic, especially given the lack of emotional stakes as compared to the main story.

It's an easy recommend at its current $10 sale price on Steam if you're looking to get lost in a very intentional, unique setting for a little bit.