In my headcanon, the Borg eventually reach a truce with the Federation, and over time eventually become full-fledged members of the Federation. That’s CRAZY right?..Is it? I mean, the Federation warred with the Klingons and Romulans, and look how those relationships changed over time.

How about the Borg’s willingness to join? What we’ve been seeing over the years is that the Borg adapt. Their willingness to adapt had been established from their very introduction as a faceless hive-mind. Over the course of the franchise, they’ve experimented with individuality with Locutus, Borg Queens, becoming so infatuated with individuality that they even dispatched 7 of 9 to live amongst Starfleet to investigate directly, and then instead of efficiently assimilating her to gain her knowledge, they choose not to re-assimilate her so that they could ask her about that experience and avoid corrupting that knowledge via assimilation. Why is the Borg so interested? The Borg found that Federation individuality had repeatedly repelled Borg invasions when Borg calculations indicated that they should have won, and even after re-adjusting for past failures, the Borg still found themselves stymied in encounters with Starfleet. The Borg were even saved from total extinction by the ingenuity of individual creativity and a temporary alliance with a Starfleet ship. That is a huge motivator for the Borg to re-assess their approach and look for a new way to adapt to prevent their vulnerability to a similar event in the future.

Would the Federation be open to it? Like I said, they’ve allied with past enemies before. Ex-Borg members of Voyager served with distinction. Borg tech has proven invaluable to Voyager’s return. Most importantly, Borg Drones are not undead zombies! Assimilation is a reversible condition, and that means that instead of hating the Borg for killing their loved ones, the Borg ARE their loved ones. Moreover, Borg assimilation is a weapon of mass diplomacy. Chakotay found that the hive-mind allowed warring alpha-quadrant races to all live in harmony in the Delta Quadrant, and losing access to the hive-mind allowed their old destructive conflicts to creep back in, and ultimately they reinstated a local hive-mind to regain peace. Chakotay joined that hivemind and came away from it with unparalleled understanding and empathy for the other members of the collective, and an overall positive experience, and he disconnected with immediate recovery and no ill-effects!

That is a game-changer, it allows the Starfleet to show up on the door of a new alien race, and those aliens would naturally be cautious, suspicious, mistrustful of the Federation’s intentions. First contact is extremely dangerous. An alliance with the Borg could allow Starfleet to establish first contact by saying, “We come in peace”, assimilating the alien envoy, and then the alien representatives would know that Starfleet truly and honestly means to “come in peace”, casting aside all suspicion of ulterior motives. Starfleet then disconnects the alien envoy from the local hivemind, and then those envoys can go home and sing Starfleet’s virtues to the rest of their race.

I guess it could have been worse, looks like the arm is still on…for now. I expected him to die from that.

8 pullups is great. To get to high rep counts you need more overall weekly volume. One thing you can do is don’t think just about how many you can do in 1 session, but instead per day or week. For example, when I was specializing to get to 20 in a row, my preparation would simply be 5-6 sets of 10+ reps, but the progressive overload is that the total for the day’s work started at 60, then I would add 5 reps to the total quota for the next week’s working sets. That achieves the “progressive overload” requirement to stimulate growth. It is MUCH easier to add 5 reps at some point in the day than to add 5 reps right after the end of the last set. The progression is stronger if you cluster your work together, but if you can’t progress in clusters, then you space it out until you can progress. Eventually around 85 reps per day, the 20 in a row became feasible. So by this point most of my sets were 14-17 reps.

This is similar to how you progress in body building or strength training, at an advanced level you can’t progress every workout, so you may add an extra work day elsewhere in the week. Or you just add an extra set to one of those days, the spacing gives you more window for progressive overload and thus progress over 2 weeks or cycles instead of every week. The growth isn’t as rapid when spaced, but growth will still happen.

Also if you aren’t lean, get lean. Pullup reps scale very strongly with weight loss, so if you’re packing excess bodyfat, your reps will be pretty significantly depressed.

I hope one day my life will settle down enough that I can care for a dog properly.

That’s an awesome achievement! Keep up the good work, stay locked in and the next PR is coming your way!

Voyager is scratching that itch for me. Its pretty apollo-like, which is close enough to RIF for me.

Hmm, may also possible that vendor/carrier versions of the app carry more ads. This would nevertheless still be an android problem because I don’t think Apple allows other companies to do that with their apps.

It’s possible the company itself needed to cut costs, maybe because they screwed up their budgeting. It’s not necessarily because of anything you did.

It looks bad, but try replicating it.

When I search two dots, I find exactly the matching app, with screenshot previews and details about it. I get only 1/4 of the screen as ad suggestions. The rest of the screen is related suggestions (non-ad suggestions). So about 3/4 is non-ads for me vs. 1/8th from the OP screenshot.

If I search something more generic like “card battle games”, I get a listing of about 7 games, with tags, and zero ads.

I think what’s shown in the OP is what remains after the user has already read the details and approved installing the app. Considering that this is the end of the user story, what else should be on that page?

Or maybe he’s got a different version of play store than me from A/B testing? Anyway, try it out yourself. I don’t have a problem with too many ads on playstore, my main issue is more that the good apps go to apple store first and only sometimes port to android because apple users are more lucrative.

Hm, can you elaborate further? I don’t think you’ve supported in your point in that you say that AI art can achieve the same subjective outcome of invoking emotion and getting a person to think, but you concluded that it’s not the same.

I feel like there’s a finer point you want to make but haven’t gotten across yet.

Yeah I have that too! 20 minutes to dawn leans much harder into the bullethell genre and less about the skinnerbox progression aspect of vampire survivors. It’s much more challenging with fewer ways to make successive runs easier. I should get back into that one since a lot of updates were probably made. Back then it felt like the starting pistol and character as stronger than all the unlocked weapons and characters.

I have been absolutely hooked on this game. I loved Vampire survivors and Holocure and this was a great blend of those games with a diablo aesthetic.

The part that makes it so good is the sharply tuned enemy design to feed you levels steadily with interesting enemy movement patterns to dodge. Well done! Has such a good balance of challenge and progression.

MyFitnessPal. I had heard of it, but counting calories is a pain in the ass, no way I’d waste my time with that shit.

Workplace gives it to me for free, so why not take a look? Damn it’s so fast and easy and it has made such a huge difference in dirt success. Just wave the camera over barcodes and the rest of the data falls in place. When you actually get enough protein instead of thinking you’ve got enough protein, then you don’t have to feel hungry in a calorie deficit.

It seemed like a frivolous app, but it turned out to be the biggest driving factor for success. The key thing is, I didn’t realize how much it appealed to the nerd gamer instincts. The same way out optimize a build/load out for increased performance like in Diablo, that’s the same way rewarding feeling you get when you figure out new life hacks to optimize your macros even more to pack even more food into your calorie budget