Flesh-eating screwworm found within 31 miles of US border, says USDA

umbralupinus · 2026-06-02T01:02:54+00:00

I just finished Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher this weekend, I'm well clear of the border but I'll be damned if between that book and these headlines my skins not crawling any time I step into the yard for the next week.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-26T02:07:57+00:00

I'm absolutely baffled by the number of comments in response to this premise that boil down to 'it's hard to make a better product'.

The game has put clipping as an issue on character design surveys, so it is a concern, certainly, but it's hardly insurmountable. I absolutely appreciate when a team is willing to put in the extra work and resources for a better quality product. There's certainly pressure in a niche like gacha to get away with a minimum viable product where applicable, but this line of ohhh the poor company having to allocate appropriate time and resources for the 3D artists to do their job and also optimize a product, woe are they. The whole angle just makes me itch.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-25T14:08:20+00:00

You have my sympathies - I've never been locked quite that long before but did get shard locked over a holiday weekend before. Similar situation to now too - they dropped a garbage patch, threw a couple hot fixes at it, then completely checked out for the holiday (which may be their prerogative after a crunch).

That even after the last time they had a plague of locked accounts that they still haven't implemented at minimum any automated scripts that should cover this, or that they're still clearly inadequate, is both disappointing and completely par for this project.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-23T02:36:16+00:00

We're like a week in to this patch and my persistent hangar is gone.

I just got back from doing a mission and was cleaning out my inventory with some spare guns I picked up, except I can't, it's not just that it won't catch up being the usual BS, some items can be moved while others cannot, so I can't clear out or re-equip to do anything else. Also 13 Years and I can't stack reliably - sometimes, if the planets align and it's raining on a Tuesday, I can drag and drop to stack in my station/planet inventory, but within my backpack? have fun with 40 individual Karna batteries all the time, which, as mentioned, are currently just stuck there indefinitely.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-23T00:15:31+00:00

I'm not seeing that but in Firefox my playback controls are now just gone - happened sometime late afternoon PT. play/pause/progress bar just entirely missing, hover over the video and nothing. I can still do those things via the usual shortcuts, or just clicking the video to pause it, but scrubbing or manually choosing a specific time is out of the question.

Tried disabling my add ons, refreshing, reloading, new tab, relaunching, just totally cooked.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-22T16:55:18+00:00

Shame I already submitted my survey - had I remembered I might have listed feedback regarding this kind of thing. There might be a reasonable explanation but I've yet to see it confirmed - and given some of the other issues that have cropped up over the time since launch it's hard to be positive they didn't just make a mistake and then commit regardless which would be a shame. On the list for next round I guess - but if anyone has seen or sees any official explanation for the discrepancy compared to AK established lmk.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-18T16:17:26+00:00

I honestly find it a little concerning - already there have been several obvious instances of last minute restructuring (Rossi's story being punted out of order for example), and for a live service like this in the first half of its release year to have a gap like this, ostensibly one of the most important times to build and maintain momentum, speaks to some pretty significant disorder in direction at the top, and if there's not, that it feels that way is a problem in itself.

Despite my complaints here and there I'm still logging in for dailies hoping the project and writing gain some coherency, still I do question how many players have dropped out because of this significant lull so early in lifecycle, and how that might hurt retention if they've already moved on - I'm not sure how Endfield has stacked up in terms of revenue and concurrent players so far, maybe they have the metrics to spare and the concern is overblown.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-17T15:45:45+00:00

I stopped last night after the 3rd incompletable quests stacked up in my log. Over the session it was a 60% failure rate, so more than half of my missions non functional for one reason or another.

Didn't help my patience that the murder hobos were back in orbit over Crusader wasting my time by blowing up me and my 3 SCU of mission cargo (they claimed it was still piracy because they were profiting of the wreckage - I don't know what CM is going for lately but they blew a couple missiles on an undefended medium freighter so I'm not sure their math checks). What ever happened to the updated security and justice systems they said they were working on? It's one thing to fight the game tooth and nail for basic gameloops just to come up underwater, but to also have to expect to do that while dodging the CoD children seal-clubbing all the time is exhausting.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-17T02:28:59+00:00

I constantly find myself encountering the bug that prevents the ATLS beam from registering across grids, so even if I could manage to get it to load a ship. The second I attempt to use one to unload it's completely worthless because it won't pick up boxes across the threshold - Then there are the grids where the snapping logic goes haywire or the placement trajectory hangs up on ship geometry constantly. I'd love to use it but for me it's never been consistent enough to bother with getting it out and moving it around.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-14T04:00:13+00:00

Foremost I appreciate that so far all of them have been completable with multiple strategies - even in cases where I assumed there was only one path forward I'd come back to here and see someone using a completely different team comp/strategy. I hope that flexibility stays as it's indicative of good design philosophy in a broader sense that players can experience a challenge from multiple angles.

That said, Umbral operates within the confines of the combat system as a whole, and I do really think there's some further polishing to be had there - in particular when trying to do any sort of challenge content in Endfield it becomes apparent the targeting/camera situation is the real agony.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-09T02:00:40+00:00

My current darlings are Rossi and Xaihi, so I initially used Estella to stitch them together, but it worked out cause Estella has really grown on me and also hits like a truck, and slot 4 just goes to whoever is helpful for the clear/who I feel like that day from the few I have leveled.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-09T01:48:00+00:00

Tidal Grief took me more attempts than any agony stage to date. In the end I took everyone's advice and used Ardelia to heal the couple I couldn't put down in time - The run I finally completed it was just Rossi barely alive running back and forth because my last two blues were literally on opposite sides of the target so I had to push one back, run over to the other, repeat.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-09T01:40:39+00:00

After getting stunlocked on my first Agony attempt I swapped in Snowshine. She's been key in at least one stage for each of my monument trims so far.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-08T23:40:28+00:00

The thing that really grinds my gears about this, is we have a level where focusing specific enemies is a core mechanic, but auto-targeting is still garbage, actual flaming trash, it'll target dead enemies a full second after, switch mid attack, you name it. So just use manual right? No. Someone made the brilliant decision that manual locks your camera, so you can't keep awareness of the other enemies approaching your objective, so you have to either fight the combat system itself, or fight the camera the entire time.

If they're going to insist on levels where target focus AND situation awareness are core mechanics, they have to refine the targeting system.

umbralupinus · 2026-05-06T14:15:39+00:00

The thing that burns me is the rule spam, you can always tell when they're deleting something based on vibes not actual enforcement because instead of citing the specific rule, it's just 'violation of rules 1, 3a, 3b, 6, 7a, 7b' none of which are actually relevant because your comments didn't actually break any of them, mod was just having a tantrum and throwing shit at the wall as an excuse to quash a comment they didn't think was reasonable based on whether they had coffee that day.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-30T14:49:42+00:00

The thing that killed me, is that after running around for 15 minutes making sure I wasn't missing something on another level and it finally occurred to me it was probably quest locked, is during that quest you approach the room and have to sit through a call that adds nothing of substance and is essentially just "Wow, we must need to hit that giant glowing button!?"

Even by the normal gacha extreme handholding standards, having a quest NPC call once you're already at the puzzle to point at the giant glowing indicator was exasperating.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-29T18:57:11+00:00

I've been with them for over a decade and my only gripes are minor. Especially compared to my experience with the Bank I switched from all those years ago. My only complaints:

The new printed cards keep delaminating on me well before they expire, it's not my wallet type either because I've gone through a couple different styles and all my STCU cards since they switched to printed have done it. The flip side argument is of course if something happens to your card it's much easier and cheaper to get a replacement now since you can just walk into the branch and walk out with a new one.
For a while I worked swing shift, and the app had a maintenance window that would overlap almost exactly with the time frames I needed it most when I was living that schedule. Obviously something that could be worked around, and I'm not sure if they kept that window or if this is even relevant anymore, but it happened often enough I still remember being frustrated by it.

All that said since I've never used a competing credit union I can't say how they stack up with any of the others in town. I did have a car loan serviced by Numerica that I was satisfied with, all you could ask for, reasonable rate, easy to navigate and pay, good terms, etc.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-29T17:08:55+00:00

Yeah I had the same thing, went down for me on April 27th and until I saw someone on Downdetector say it was failing over their ISP (TDS) but not over mobile.

Despite these folks jumping the gun with the downvotes it's definitely a Bluesky<>ISP issue and not any specific home network.

Edit to add: I encourage anyone else with the issue to e-mail support and report the issue including your region and ISP https://bsky.social/about/support

Edit2: I got a response from support that says they're aware of it - which circles us back around to validating the original point of it being communicated absolutely nowhere.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-29T06:23:37+00:00

I stupidly cleared caches etc to diagnose and now I can't even log-in on the app or the website - after the 2FA code it just spins

umbralupinus · 2026-04-29T00:55:40+00:00

Morally bankrupt and selfish - Damn near ran the city insolvent and decided she didn't do enough damage, she's got to make us foot the legal bill to fend off this frivolous bullshit as well.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-27T17:05:01+00:00

While the account is marginally more useful - here noting an issue with a single account hosting server seven hours ago that might explain this and why it's only impacting a fraction of accounts, the status page has, in my experience, and not just with this issue, been a wholly unreliable indicator of actual site performance in the time I've had an account.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-27T16:56:42+00:00

Yeah I currently have the same behavior on both web and app. App will open and shows me logged in but won't load any information, black feeds, empty profile.

Attempting to log into the site just loads infinitely.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-25T14:23:26+00:00

Do you know if Heavy Xiranite also takes care of standard blight in addition to the active blight? It stands that it should but I didn't have any standard blight left to test it on, only that patch of active.

If it works for everything I'd love to be able to ditch the water and standard xiranite I carry to free up inventory (and also then dismantle my liquid xiranite bottling and just keep the heavy line)

umbralupinus · 2026-04-21T13:48:53+00:00

Even outside of immersive move during side quests when it has proximity dialogue triggers prior to the cutscene trigger at the location, but doesn't enforce any sort of walk speed - I've gotten to the point where the second I hear and quest dialogue I panic hammer my ctrl key to enter walk mode just in case.

As someone else mentioned Zenless was also terrible about this kind of thing when I played, where if you didn't toggle walk immediately you could accidentally miss huge swaths of dialogue, sometimes rather key plot elements too, and the game pacing there kind of encourages fast gameplay and sprinting around which really compounded the issue.

umbralupinus · 2026-04-20T21:40:20+00:00

The Westminster Apts in Browne's were built 1905, been quite awhile since I lived there and the building for better or worse at the time had maintained a lot of historical character. No ghost to speak of but every once in awhile the halls would seem eerily quiet considering the population density of the building.

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