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TWSBI has been good, in my experience, for fountain pens. But I haven't tried many different brands, just a handful.

Sorry! Just wanted to say why people might, in case you were actually asking. 😅

I went on an international trip last year, to a Spanish speaking country. Felt incredibly good to be able to actually communicate with people who do not speak English! I didn't think I really could, as hard as it is to understand natural-speed speech. Turns out conversation w/ patient native speakers is much easier than just listening.

This year, I'm getting back into Japanese more. Caught up on my Anki and SRS stuff, getting back into the habit of watching videos, and starting to dig into the 2nd volume of the textbook.

I'd say it's going well!

I upvoted the post, but the caps and mulitple exclamation marks tempted me not too. Feels a little overbearing.

But overall, I guess I'm more glad to see the excitement than I am annoyed by the yelling.

Checked this in my state a few years ago, ended up getting like 50 bucks back. Took a while, I forgot about it by the time the check got here. Seemed like the state treasure was happy to have his signature prominently slapped on there.

Jeremy Parish has less than 100k, and constantly puts out great retrospectives on the nooks and crannies of retro game history.

While the Retronauts podcast he's involved with is well known, I feel like his YouTube kinda flies under the radar.

There are dozens of us!

Yeah, I also wish they'd have better support, but Linux players are not a huge group.

Steam Deck and Steam machines have helped a lot though. Without Valve's weight behind it, trying to game on Linux would probably be a lot worse.

Not far off from what already happens from the race-to-the-bottom popular content found on YouTube, in f2p games, and on social media.

AI slop will get better at grabbing, holding, and harvesting attention. Kids will grow up on it and adults will get comfy with it, shortening attention spans. They'll end up under-educated and under-ambitious, leading to a more gullible, more anti-intellectual population.

I don't have any sources to cite, it's all vibes. I'm already a product of manipulative media. 💀 That, and some of this is exaggerated inter-generational grumpiness.

(This is not even touching on the potential for propaganda that a lot of other answers are getting at.)

Yep, that is indeed what I was thinking of (though I don't have a link handy either).

Didn't mean to imply that's where experience levels were invented. The clarification is appreciated though.

And even thought I was alluding to that DQ comment, I'm sure it wasn't the first game to adapt experience levels, and across the board making things easier wasn't always the impetus.

Don't know about CRPGs in particular, one way or the other. But in general I agree with you op.

If you level up, and it means your stats go up and all your enemies level up and stay at the same balance with you, it's pointless. It still affords a moment of happiness 'cool I levelled up', but in a much less satisfying way.

The point of level up early in RPG video games was, to my knowledge, so that any one with time and patience could beat a game regardless of skill. The idea of level scaling is almost the exact opposite, to remove the advantage of levelling. They cancel out and both player level and enemy level should be removed if that's happening.

That's assuming a 1:1 unversal scaling though, which is rarely the case. In the details it can be tuned to something worthwhile - which enemies scale, how much they scale, etc.

Still, my thought is when games want level scaling, they should consider why. If you want players not to overpower enemies via stats, maybe get rid of the stats (or don't change them on lvl up). Levels can still augment your player with new spells, unique abilities, or more options. Or maybe more carefully consider the placement of enemies and what their default level and stats are set at. Or maybe consider a lower level cap, or a lower range of stat values.

The possibilities are wide open, but level scaling done poorly can make level ups feel like a punishment.

Yep. Not even always ads exactly, but just dummy notifications to make your dumb brain keep opening the app or website (which is kind of a self ad).

Most apps I have to disable or heavily tone down notifications in some way to get them to stop yapping about nothing. Even then, sometimes you can't get notifications you do want without junk.

Yes. ❤️