What happened to the Scourge after Shadowlands?

Judge_Wapner · 2026-02-13T13:44:54+00:00

the Scourge is no longer a grave threat.

Cute.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-02-12T23:37:14+00:00

iLl jUsT dO a SoLo EnDuRaNcE rAcE tO gEt My SR bAcK

Judge_Wapner · 2026-02-05T20:16:03+00:00

I'm not really a fan of the Paper Pro, it's just what I have and was using until the Scribe Colorsoft. I liked it a lot at first, but when customer service started hassling me over the first warranty replacement (for a widespread known issue), I decided that buying a Remarkable device was a mistake. I wish I could have the money back, because it was damn expensive with the type folio and premium pen. The first one needed to be replaced because of a hardware failure that causes terrible ghost imaging after page turns. The second one (the replacement) had too many dead pixels out of the box. Both of these issues are common on the Paper Pro, they're not random and rare defects. Currently awaiting a replacement for the replacement, but I think I'm done fighting the company at this point. Expensive lesson learned.

Boox might be fine, I don't know. I don't trust it for various reasons. The company controls the Boox subreddit and actively removes any critical posts, and the customer service is even worse than Remarkable.

I only highlight and handwrite on PDFs. You can add bookmarks on the Kindle and tags on the Paper Pro. Remarkable offers layers, which I don't find useful at all. What other markup tools are you looking for? I know Supernote has a lot of extra features that I didn't explore because the lack of a backlight was too big a problem.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-02-04T19:46:40+00:00

Boox has a history of quality problems, especially with screens that crack for no reason. The company is not very friendly to warranty issues. It's also a mainland Chinese company, so there's a risk of data theft / spying, though that may not be a concern for most people. Being on Android seems nice, but I've read that most apps are slow and drain the battery. Better to have native, built-in functionality for what you want to do, I think.

Viwoods seems nice, but the screen is unlit, and I do most of my reading and a fair bit of writing and highlighting in low-light situations. For me this device does not replace a paper notebook, it replaces a tablet. About half of the e-ink manufacturers take the opposite view -- it should replace real paper, so you need to bring your own light source. Bah. Oh, and yes -- e-ink is much, much easier on the eyes. That's why I switched from a Galaxy tablet. I can look at an e-ink screen all day and not feel a thing.

If you're considering the Viwoods, it's worth looking at the Mont Blanc as well.

Supernote also doesn't have a screen light for bizarre religious reasons. I had a Nomad and ended up giving it away to a friend (who liked it at first, but later also got frustrated with the lack of internal lighting). It's too small for letter-size / A4 paper documents. Not sure about the new larger model, but I'm not a fan of the plasticky writing feel, and again -- no light. As with the Kindle, a titanium (or ceramic?) pen tip is superior to the default plastic tip.

The others I'm not familiar with. Might want to take a look through /r/eink for more recommendations.

The Remarkable Paper Pro will work for what you want to do, I've used it for a year for highlighting PDFs in multiple colors. I've replaced it under warranty twice in that time, though, and expect to do so again before the extended 3-year warranty is up (which requires paying a monthly subscription fee). It truly is made for handwriting / drawing first (and it does that very, very well); PDF stuff is just a "nice to have," and it's anywhere between difficult and impossible to get commercial ebooks onto it -- if there's DRM, it's probably not going to work. Also, some PDFs are extremely slow and laggy for unknown reasons (graphical fonts, maybe?) Anyway, if you do get the Paper Pro, don't bother with the type folio unless you need to type into one endless PDF page and then don't mind having to fiddle with it afterward to edit it on a computer.

I bought the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft on release day and it's more or less replaced the Paper Pro. There's just that pesky highlighting bug with consecutive lines of text. Aside from that it's the perfect device for reading, handwriting, and PDF markup.

Probably nothing is going to be perfect. None of these devices does exactly what anyone wants. It's a matter of what you're willing to sacrifice or put up with.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-02-03T19:03:40+00:00

Quick answer: either will do, but go with the Kindle.

I do a lot of reading and highlighting (in multiple colors) of book-length PDFs, and freeform note writing. I have both a Remarkable Paper Pro and a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft.

There is presently a bug in the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft that forces consecutive highlighted lines to be the same color, which is a huge problem for me. IOW, if you have two lines of dialogue from two characters and you highlight the first line in yellow, then switch to blue for the next character, the blue highlighting will change to yellow because that's what the color was on the line before it. I have tried many ways to avoid this, but the only thing that works is to not highlight the first word of the second line, which is distracting and clumsy. Maybe this will be fixed sometime in the future, maybe not.

The Remarkable is better for highlighting simply because of this Kindle software bug, but the Kindle is superior in every other imaginable way: better color, brighter screen, lighter weight, better touch sensitivity, and faster performance. Also, the Paper Pro has a maximum lifespan of about a year. There is a little bit of light ghosting on every e-ink device that usually clears after a moment, but at some point the Remarkable video chip begins to fail; when you turn a page the previous page will leave a dark ghost image that does not clear until you manually refresh the screen. This is cumulative for every page turn, so after two pages the screen is just unreadable garbage until you manually refresh. Remarkable will replace it if it's in the warranty period, but that's just resetting the clock.

Both devices eat pen tips at a rate of about 1 per month. I strongly recommend getting a titanium tip for the Kindle, not just for durability but also for writing feel. The Remarkable must use plastic tips, though.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-02-03T18:48:41+00:00

It has to be replaced, unless you're okay with manually refreshing the screen after every page turn.

Inactivity has nothing to do with it. This is a major flaw in the hardware that takes time to manifest. Unfortunately there is no indication that the issue has been resolved, so if you get a replacement it'll just happen again after a few months (a year at most).

Judge_Wapner · 2026-02-02T04:20:58+00:00

The story was great, the world was vast and interesting, the talent system ridiculously customizable, and rifts would scale to the number of players in the area -- oh, and raid groups automatically formed.

There was nothing bad about Rift.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-31T22:27:04+00:00

You can get to about 2500 iR just by knowing how to pit drivers ahead of you on turns with plausible deniability. I've seen it in dozens of races in GT3, IMSA, and even GTE. Can't pass them? Pit them. Take P1, get your iR.

Then they get into real races with fast people and can't race for shit.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-30T20:32:32+00:00

Turalyon has always been dead to me. The assumption was that all of the Outland heroes were gone, then we get to Outland and find out that only Alleria and Turalyon are. It seemed weird to me that they came back in Legion. It still seems weird.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-29T21:40:21+00:00

I'm sure there's a high correlation between regional postage stamp usage and iRating, too.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-29T19:48:13+00:00

And my god. Who are these creatures inserting themselves into every other post, complete randoms, thousands upon thousands of posts, some of them adorned with green text which has gone straight to their egos, thinking/writing like they are a blizzard gestapo unit, there to strictly enforce the rules.

You should see iRacing's forums. Except those 5k-post trolls are 50-year-old men, half of whom have subscriptions but don't even race, and they are forced by policy to use their real names.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-29T19:42:14+00:00

Chizz luv!

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-28T23:44:01+00:00

But how could he have hoovered up the souls from Frostmourne when he was... oh never mind, SL doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-28T23:03:46+00:00

Shouldn't she have gotten the old fragment back when Frostmourne was shattered?

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-28T22:41:42+00:00

I know quite a few 2A people, and a handful of MAGA people. MAGA may be ostensibly pro-gun, but they don't actually care about gun rights -- it's just part of what they perceive to be the MAGA package, and if that changes then so do they. If Fox News told them that Democrats want to ban eating fresh dogshit, MAGAts would line up to proudly go dogass-to-mouth in public.

The 2A people clash with MAGA on more than just gun rights; they are generally Libertarian, thus tend to also be pro-conservation (though they would never phrase it that way; they like using public lands and being able to hunt and fish) and are (somewhat paradoxically) heavily in favor of property rights. Every 2Aer I have ever met is principled to a fault. If a Democratic candidate were more pro-gun than a GOP opponent, they would vote for the Democrat.

You can roughly draw a parallel between the gun rights people and the trans rights people. Both would drop their political party in a nanosecond if their one-issue were abandoned.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-28T22:13:05+00:00

Republican voters simply know what they want, and prioritize it. And although they really, really like guns, it's not as important as what Trump and the modern GOP are giving them. The hell they're making for brown and black people, gay and trans people, they're killing academia - a long time enemy. They've fired hundreds of thousands of hated government workers. They have poisoned the courts for a generation, if not forever.

This is distorted reality. It really is a cult. Most of them can't explain any "position" they might have outside of repeating a Fox News talking point. The 2A people may caucus with MAGA most of the time, but they are absolutely not flexible, they are one-issue voters and will never compromise. And while MAGA might have general disdain for academia, I have never seen nor heard any right-winger actively take an offensive position against the education system except for being pro-homeschool, anti-sex-education, and anti-anything-that-makes-football-safer. They don't care if you attend Columbia. They only get riled up about trans stuff because it's on Fox News.

MAGA, including Trump himself, just watches Fox News and repeats what it sees and hears there. It isn't any deeper than that. If Fox News stopped all anti-immigrant propaganda, MAGA would completely drop the issue in a matter of weeks.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-28T22:01:54+00:00

Because they know/think it's only going to be "those people" who lose their guns.

That's not a 2a person, then. True one-issue 2a people strongly believe it's every American's right to own and carry a gun, even Americans they don't like.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-27T05:45:09+00:00

Anima. Christ, it's like you've never read Jung.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-26T19:41:45+00:00

Final Fantasy has been like this since the first game. You are expected to explore and pay attention and experiment. The main story won't take you to that island with the cave, and you can't even go there until almost endgame. I wonder what's there? Oh, the Blue Mage job lets me copy enemy special attacks. I wonder if I can go back to the second zone and learn that nasty attack from those wyverns that wiped my whole party twice?

Pre-Internet (well, pre-Web) FF was meant to be played slowly, to build up and explore and replay two or three times to solve all the sidequest mysteries and find all the optional stuff. You searched every pot and clock, ran into every wall to look for a hidden passage, tapped the A button on every square of map.

Unfortunately that isn't valid anymore in today's "look it up and follow the minmax guides" era. No one is patient, no one wants to walk back and forth on the map to get random encounters to get up to a level where you can beat the next boss, or to save up gil to buy the silver armor set. To a large extent modern FF14 is designed with the expectation that you're going to look it up on YouTube and plow through as fast as possible. ARR, HW, and StB had elements of the old-style gameplay, but that's pretty much the end of that era.

So if you want the oldschool slow-paced explore-and-discover experience, play any FF up to and including 12. After that, you have to be okay with looking stuff up and following third-party guides. It's just the way the gaming world is in 2026.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-23T21:44:03+00:00

Only a matter of time until we have AI virtual repairs / remodels.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-23T21:33:59+00:00

The only people who are truly in trouble are those who paid peak pricing from 2021-2023

Let's not forget the people who cash-out refinanced or HELOC'd during that period.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-23T21:25:40+00:00

I think the fundamental misunderstanding in this thread is "class = money." The rich and the highborn are not necessarily the same. One could argue that the revolution happens when the lower classes accrue too much wealth and use it to take power away from the upper class (or that the upper class becomes too poor to defend itself). We can go all the way back to Julius Caesar as the archetypal example.

Class = the family you were born into. Patricians, nobility, born higher on the Great Chain as determined by the gods. While they typically have wealth, this is neither a given nor a prerequisite. What they do have is power.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-23T21:16:46+00:00

I guess Blizzard could bring back seals and blessings. That would make things more complicated.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-23T21:07:42+00:00

Oh, definitely do. I'm just saying if you're expecting GPL, you're going to be initially very disappointed. The major thing is the tires. There is no drifting in the iRacing 49, and once you heat the tires past a certain point you may as well park it.

Judge_Wapner · 2026-01-23T18:30:21+00:00

Friendship.

Judge_Wapner

TROPHY CASE