My dad basically gave me this scenario once.
Dad: My phone's been kind of puffy recently, the back's all blown out. Probably all the coolant at work corroding it. Still works alright though.
Me: Dad, that means the battery is super volatile and it could explode into flames at any moment. Get rid of it immediately.
Dad, rolling eyes: Well aren't you just a little ray of sunshine?
I got him to replace the phone.
Nah, that picture was made for SCP-1875, ChatGPT didn't make it. This is just a meme.
Longing for some kind of terrible impossible ultra-mod that combines all FromSoft swamps into one nightmarish überswamp challenge
I have a Mobile Pixels one, it's certainly been a big help. Power and picture from the same USB-C cable. It was kind of hard to install (have to adhesive on some magnets correctly, glue wasn't too great, I recently replaced them with some other adhesives I bought online, worked good so far).
For the most part it doesn't give me any issues, does what I want of it, but if I have one complaint it's that when I'm playing a game that uses my laptop's graphics card, I will usually have to unplug and replug the screen back in because it begins fizzling out like it's losing power or signal. Functions fine after though. It's slightly annoying but not that big a deal.
Overall I don't regret my purchase, I just wish it was a bit more polished with an easier and more reliable mounting process and not fizzling out when I play intense games.
I occasionally roll dice as theatre myself. In my last session, I had a troupe of traveling performers that I rolled for on each act to see if they did well or not, with each roll hidden from the players, and I would then describe the outcome to them. Most of the rolls were real, but some performers I had already decided would fail from the beginning, because they were plants for the enemy faction and had a plan going on in the background that depended on their failure at the act. But of course I still had to roll to not set off any alarms. Going to be fun when my players later piece together "oh, that hypnotist didn't actually fail, they just used mass suggestion to make everybody believe they did so they don't come under scrutiny." If a player catches on - one actually did pretty quick - then great, let them have the victory, but in general it's one of the ways I like to create expectations so I can subvert them or use them to sneak things by. The enemy faction is very guerilla-oriented, so it fits their MO pretty well.
On a more general scale, when it comes to hidden rolls, if I really need something to succeed, I'll make the roll not a matter of whether they succeed, but who succeeds. Keeps the story moving if I realize too late that that roll shouldn't have happened because a failure brings the game to a halt.
Gorilla warfare is the Navy Seals one, under a different name.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. Despite only having a laptop 3070, and not a desktop 4090 that others are seeing slowdown on, I feel like the numbers Steam is feeding me for FPS is a lie because it says I'm getting 40-50fps but it feels smoother than that for some reason. I am seeing significant slowdown in the capital but other than that I'm not getting bad performance, or bugs, and the microtransactions are easy to ignore because everything is easily obtainable. I've been having a blast for the most part, and when they get out some patches maybe I won't even see slowdown in busy areas. Maybe.
The one thing that gets my goat is the one save system. For the benefit of anybody reading, there IS a way to delete your save on PC, disabling Steam Cloud sync, deleting the file, starting a new game, then turning sync back on and telling Steam to use your local files rather than your cloud files when it complains about a conflict. But the fact remains that this should be a feature within the game itself, not basically cheated in. I frequently restart games because I get distracted and go play something else, come back, can't remember the plot. This is a major roadblock for me, though of course not one I'm encountering just yet.
I've got a high opinion of the devs at Capcom, as they seem to be genuinely interested in making great games.I rarely have a bad time playing a Capcom game. It's just... The execs. And things like the microtransactions, Denuvo, and the one save system reek of stuff the execs tried to shoehorn in that the game didn't need to try and bleed the users dry. I'm just grateful that, for the time being, these changes don't affect me much, but you're right, it does make me feel a little guilty to have a good time while others can't even play it.
The main thing that keeps me from reinstalling and trying to play Skyrim again is the thought of having to do Bleak Falls Barrow for the billionth time. Yeah, I could mod around it, but I just don't care enough to figure out how for a game I pretty much always play through the first few hours of and then drop for another three years anyways.
That was Rama, yeah.
No, no, I know these guys. It's just the Goodfeathers. Watch, one of the ones on the left is gonna start beating up the one on the right in a little cartoonish dust cloud kind of thing. Hilarious.
Keith Ballard is excellent for puzzle games - and, well, most other game types that show up there. He's my personal favorite.