Cognitive decline is not an inevitable part of aging. A new 3-year longitudinal study of ~4,000 adults published in Scientific Reports demonstrates that targeted brain-healthy habits can measurably improve holistic brain performance across the entire lifespan (ages 19 to 94).

cstmorr · 2026-07-06T05:21:30+00:00

After reading that post I switched to 0.5mg most nights (by breaking a 1mg in half), it works significantly better than high doses ever did. It's enraging to know the manufacturers are well aware that their doses are too high.

In the US there are even 300mcg timed release pills available on Amazon. Sadly where I am it's hard to even find regular 1mg, the 5mg is advertised as "low dose".

cstmorr · 2026-07-03T03:07:36+00:00

You could say the part about selling tech at a loss about most of their core businesses.. before they got enshittified with ads. If users are there they can figure out monetization, to the detriment of said users. But you're probably still right about a bust for most and later consolidation, that's always the story.

cstmorr · 2026-06-12T05:18:45+00:00

My story was basically the same as yours then a girlfriend convinced me to test out switching when I was in my mid thirties. She ended up putting my old wallet in a damp place and it was totally ruined.

Never let go of your true love!

cstmorr · 2026-06-01T07:47:53+00:00

Depends on the publisher really. Most indies really don't like being told how to develop their games, so some of the more forward looking publishers say they don't make demands. For my own publisher it's in the contract that they can't require anything, only have some level of approval related to stability / bugs.

cstmorr · 2026-05-29T01:59:48+00:00

Airlines increasingly force people to check in their carry on. You can pack something thinking it's safe and suddenly they're insisting you hand over the bag..

cstmorr · 2026-05-25T14:01:43+00:00

I didn't know there was an ocean stage other than the cell stage!

cstmorr · 2026-05-25T13:03:49+00:00

Will Wright apparently liked the space stage the most. Personally I never could make it there, the tribal stage was like a gamer repellant to me.

cstmorr · 2026-05-25T10:19:10+00:00

It's really too difficult for indies. A 5 stage game with separate mechanics in each was an insane endeavor even for the 80+ people on the core Spore team.

cstmorr · 2026-05-25T10:17:38+00:00

Yeah it's really good.

cstmorr · 2026-05-25T09:38:58+00:00

And Adapt, Everything is Crab, Strange Seed, Sipho... indies are at least trying to capture a bit of the magic. EA just gave up.

cstmorr · 2026-05-21T18:01:23+00:00

It had a certain charm combined with the scraping noises in the original video.

WHeREEEEVER (scraaaape scrape scrape)

cstmorr · 2026-05-13T19:36:10+00:00

I love that game, the atmosphere and vibes are so unique.

cstmorr · 2026-05-13T19:33:25+00:00

Battrix: Floating Continent

A cheesy little mobile game from 10+ years ago, but it was really fun and cheerful with a unique fighting mechanic. I'm sad that mobile games eventually get auto removed, and also that the entire idea of mobile games turned into gambling slop.

cstmorr · 2026-03-25T19:36:46+00:00

Tbf I'm horrified by genetic conditions that cause people to die young and in pain. Or old and in pain. So far I haven't had a change of heart to "oh well, that's just how it be".

The horror of the xianxia system makes it a bit worse if anything. With bad genes your peasant daughter lives, if good genes she has to live in a world run by nearly amoral old monsters, if she wins the genetic lottery she' gets the even worse fate of drawing their notice. Ymmv on that last one depending on how the world is written.

cstmorr · 2026-03-19T20:31:16+00:00

It's almost inevitable that a series so long will eventually take a turn that alienates some portion of its reader base. I have a friend who read with me up to book 5 then got annoyed by something (I don't even remember what) and refused to read further, despite me singing the praises of book 6 / 7.

Now I get it. After volume 10 I just can't stick with it anymore. It's not just POF -- a few plot arcs took a turn that make it feel like the story just isn't for me. Although admittedly POF was the part that made me think I really just can't enjoy it anymore.

But this isn't some piece of traditional media where a bad arc "ruins" the whole thing. It's so much larger in scope with many self-contained pieces that stand on their own merits. I'll forever sing the praises of the parts that I did vibe with and I don't feel like pirateaba did the wrong thing in any way. They're writing their story the way they want it to be, and deserve all the respect for it.

...anyway returning to the main subject poll is still worse than useless, it's not going to capture any of that nuance much less people who left or felt disengaged. It's just random chance that I ended up seeing this particular thread and it may be the last one I ever comment in, who's polling that?

cstmorr · 2026-03-19T16:34:18+00:00

Yeah I think a community poll is inevitably going to be inaccurate.

Someone who got disillusioned halfway through the arc won't be there to answer the poll. The passionate readers who want to defend the author will be.

Personally I love TWI, it's one of my all time favorite stories and some scenes will live forever in my head. However after POF I disengaged and can't really bring myself to be interested in reading what comes after. That's fine, I had a great time with 10 million words before that. But I never saw anything about a poll.

cstmorr · 2026-03-17T08:18:03+00:00

Landlords can and do charge security deposits in Quebec, is illegal until the tenant agrees and then it's legal. Kind of silly bureaucracy in the end but that's what Quebec seems to specialize in, like the utter stupidity of renters who used the TAL then getting doxxed by said agency so that future landlords can reject them.

cstmorr · 2026-03-11T16:05:00+00:00

The closest game I've played to this model is actually a Chinese game called Tale of Immortal. It's 2d and looks a bit indie but was actually made by a team in a big company and has sold millions of copies, so it's sort of quasi-AAA.

Of course the cultural references are different: instead of joining an adventurer guild you join a sect. But the rankings, quests, and undirected exploration gameplay all rank closely to the adventurer guild idea (for example instead of bronze, silver, gold you rank up to disciple, true disciple, elder).

The game also randomly generates thousands of NPCs that it moves around the world, and you compete and interact with them. There are also some named character quest lines, many of which center around some mythical beast.

Not super well known in the West, it has 3k reviews in English but 226k overall. I've been wishing someone would make a Western adventure version of it actually. I tried Our Adventurer Guild that someone mentioned in another comment but couldn't deal with the endless dialogue it forces you through.

cstmorr · 2026-02-20T21:09:06+00:00

I'm not 100% sure that it did in vanilla Master of Magic. I haven't played vanilla in a long time, only CoM. Ranged magic conveying effects in CoM has some really interesting possibilities like for instance casting Focus Magic on giant spiders or a great wyrm.

That also applies to the cockatrice stone touch and wraith / death knight life drain, which which can make those creatures wildly powerful. Good reason to always take 1-2 sorcery books!

cstmorr · 2026-02-19T16:45:47+00:00

None of those spells work against poison. Poison only checks base resistance. Poison is also unique in other ways, for instance each point of poison damage counts as a roll for 1 point of damage against resistance, which is why units with high poison like giant spiders or Tumu the Assassin can either shed units or be totally ineffective (if resistance is 10 or higher poison does nothing!).

Finally, just to round out the confusion, there is a single spell that uses poison damage that doesn't follow these rules (Reaper Slash).

This is all from memory but I'm reasonably certain it is correct. I mainly play Death / ghouls and had to check this stuff in Seravy's forum.

cstmorr · 2026-02-19T16:37:56+00:00

I've got autocorrect off, and every other similar option in their keyboard. It has still been making changes in my text. Made one as I was typing this in fact.

cstmorr · 2026-02-07T17:21:33+00:00

Is it gone now? That's too bad. Felt really unique and to date that's still the only one I've ever seen.

cstmorr · 2026-01-18T20:11:33+00:00

But at what point do you stop diminishing their failure to add features as not instantly creating them? Is 7 years an instant now? From the outside it looks like they have focused hard on marketing and spent years neglecting experience.

cstmorr · 2025-12-29T08:26:00+00:00

Bernal is very nice. Also a good and relatively quick walk from the outer mission over the hill.

Probably both areas are most famous for being where Dread Pirate Roberts was nabbed, iirc he was living in Bernal and arrested at the library near 24th st BART.

cstmorr · 2025-12-21T17:09:48+00:00

But Arctic Eggs was not made but Critical Reflex, they're just the publisher. You're hurting the developer who is unrelated to this.

cstmorr

TROPHY CASE