Luminara

I'd have to say that it was the general lack of progress displayed over nearly a decade that put the kibosh on the successors. None of them were showing any sign of a live release before Co* was brought back, after all, so it's not like Co* being back changed anything.

Or... Miracle Whip you. 😁

It's nebulous.

A sandwich just isn't a sandwich without the tangy zip of Miracle Whip.

Get out of my mind. OUT. NOW.

Considering that we live in a time when practically anything said or done is bound to send someone into a tizzy because too many people have become reliant on having someone to "protect" them from the horror of having to mature emotionally, and we're dependent on nanny states and Internet police to guard us from imagined and perceived offenses, instead of growing up and letting the meaningless, petty stuff slide, I see someone acting as a hatpin aimed directly at the over-inflated egos of everyone, including himself, to be heroic. At the head of a global broadcasting network which reaches over a billion people, he'd be the perfect anodyne to a lot of our juvenile snowflake stupidity. And entertaining. Besides,

Cats are obligate carnivores, the apex land predator (barring humans, of course). Human beings are not only larger, but are easily identified as carnivorous predators by cats (the eyes give us away. front-facing binocular vision). So yes, blinking indicates to the cat that you're not going to hurt it. It can see that you're not sizing it up for a potential conflict, or meal, because you're breaking eye contact. The look away at the end is especially reassuring for the cat. You speak cat well. 👍

Cats experience fear and respond to it accordingly (being small mammals, that typically means hiding until the perceived danger has passed), but they don't have panic attacks in the same way that we do. Panic attacks result from over-thinking situations, responses, behaviors, et cetera. Cats don't over-think anything (and yes, they do think, and learn, and are intelligent), they never would've evolved to become the top land predator if they had nervous disorders and experienced fits of paralysis or breathing issues every time they stopped to consider the possibilities in front of them. What your cats are experiencing is perfectly normal transitional anxiety. They're in a new home, with new people, and cats... well, they like things to stay the same, and things aren't the same right now. They'll adapt. You'll adapt, too, by learning to understand them when they're communicating with you (body language, eyes, ears, tails) and responding appropriately when you know what they want. Time and patience. Speak softly when they're near. Give them pets and scritches when they ask, play with them when they're playing (or encourage them to play, with something crinkly, or a stick/fishing toy, or even something as mundane as making faint scratching noises with your fingernail), but don't go out of your way to force them to accept you. The cat decides when it's time for interaction, but don't distance yourself from them (unless they're explicitly warning you not to touch them). Very few human-cat relationships are "love at first sight" situations, most develop the same way human-human relationships do. Learn to hear their voices (again, body language, eyes, ears, tails (vocalizations tend to be... punctuation, rather than primary communication)) and interact on their terms. Either in this thread or in another, I talk about May, one of the two cats I have now, not wanting to be picked up or held when I first met her and brought her home. At this point in our relationship, if I leave the cabin, she's standing on the love seat when I return. If I don't pick her up, she launches herself into my arms. That change came over the course of about eight months. I didn't try to desensitize her to her aversion to being held, I didn't make a single attempt to coax her into my arms, she decided that she was ready. I gave her affection, I played with her, and I gave her the time she needed to trust me. That trust was worth the wait. With time, patience and learning to understand what an animal is saying, you can develop a rapport with any animal, even wild ones. Cats go out of their way to make it easy on us... apparently, we make great pets.

Fund foster homes for abused and molested children. Provide grants for dementia research, cystic fibrosis research and cancer research. Build a cat rescue village. Buy the BBC and hand it over to Jeremy Clarkson. Begin colonization of the moon and Mars.

Whichever group worships fictional aliens and stages naked protests. If I'm going bad, I'm going big. And bat-shit crazy. In the buff.

There are a few Arena pet badges with no progress text, only a placeholder counter like that. 100 Sky Raider Force Field Generators would be my guess. Edit: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Hero_Gladiator_Badges#Independent_Gladiator_Badges Those. You can isolate which one it is by defeating one relevant foe of the appropriate type for each badge and checking the counter.

👍

Repel with a tesseracted magnitude.

Repel with an inverse magnitude.

Carnival/circus strongmen were the original inspiration for the external underwear. Tights were added for color and modesty so the comics could be marketed to children.

Blubmarines? BLUBMARINES!

Taxi driven by a slender, brown friend. Dragon who bonds for life when it hatches and can go between. Motorboat. No, the other motorboat. Vroom vroom motorboat, not brown chicken, brown cow motorboat. Heli-carrier. Marbles. Lots and lots and lots of marbles.

Major pluses to living in Paragon City: All citizens have super strength, above and beyond what even Incarnates have. Pesky heroes interrupting your daily stroll with a fight on the sidewalk? Move them. All citizens are invulnerable to all damage. Hug that giant octopus! Meander casually in and out of burning buildings! Smile and wave as highly toxic radiation passes through you harmlessly! All citizens can phase shift at will. Locked out of your apartment? No problem! Worn out after the walk to work and anxious to reach your office? Take the straight path, right through the walls! Cute neighbor taking a showe- wait, no, don't do that.

You tying one hand behind your back and proceeding to split a cord of wood, versus someone else tying one of your hands behind your back and you proceeding to split a cord of wood. Difficulty is difficulty. Having someone else impose the restriction on you doesn't magically legitimize it, in any way.

Issue 28 fascist patch notes: Inspirations, which are at least 10,000 times more detrimental to the gaming experience than gaining one level, and are all but unconstrained in usage, have been removed. All enhancements provide a "very strong incentive to use them", and players shouldn't have to choose not to use them, or to use SOs instead of IOs, or to use common IOs instead of set IOs, or any other variation thereof, so they have been removed. Teaming has been redesigned. Teams now consist of one General and seven expendable troops. Failure to be on a team at any point after logging in will result in permanent deletion of the character. Any team with fewer than eight characters will be penalized. Archetypes, and all corresponding powers, have been removed. All characters will now have access only to Brawl and Rest. Sprint is still in the game, but it's only usable by Generals. Expendable troops can't be permitted to run. Individuality was creating discord amongst players, so all costumes will now consist of a black shirt and tan slacks. You may recolor the shirt to black, black or black. The pants will remain tan. All missions, story arcs, *Fs, trials and other content not specifically listed has been converted to Personal Missions. You may move your character in Personal Missions. Enjoy the game. But not too much, or we'll send the politzei to your house and have them beat you with a sack of cancer-riddled dicks. Oh, we left the level shifts active. There's no point being a fascist asshole if you can't backstab your own supporters, after all.

Do you have a design document which no-one else has ever seen? No? Then that's an opinion. Unsupported, and contrary to the existing evidence, no less. The presence of levels 41-50 in the previous end-game content took away from all of those experiences and none of those tasks were designed with those levels in mind. Progression isn't always smooth, but it's better than stagnation. No-one's twisting anyone's arm to force them to push to T3 Alpha immediately. That's the player's choice. The player is doing that. The player chooses to mail him/herself Empyrean merits so he/she can blitz through the Alpha process, or to run Heather Townsend's arc ten times in under an hour, or whatever their preferred method is. If anyone doesn't want to churn through Alpha tiers at breakneck speed, then they don't have churn through Alpha tiers at breakneck speed. It's their choice. No-one has to dash straight to T3 Alpha, because nothing in the game forces the player to do so. And nothing in the game requires the player to use that Alpha enhancement in regular content. That is also a choice. Furthermore, once you arrived at T3 on the original servers, the exact same situation was in effect. You apply some meaning to the existence of a couple of weeks of grinding, but there was none. Whether it takes you a year to hit T3 Alpha, or a couple of minutes, the end result is identical. You're still +1 in the end. The problem is not, in fact, the +1, it's that there's no longer a large and well-funded development team continually working on additional content to make use of that +1, but that doesn't make the +1 itself a problem because it's optional. It may not be the option that you prefer, but it is an option and you do have the freedom to utilize it. Choices have consequences. Want the T3/T4 Alpha boosts? Slot the enhancement and deal with the +1 level. Don't want the +1 level? Remove the enhancement and deal with the loss of the boosts. Want limitations applied to everyone so you don't have to make choices and accept consequences? Start your own server and Mussolini it up.

Indeed, but the other aspects of Alpha enhancements can have profound effects on characters which are just as impactful as +1 level. Going from struggling to manage endurance to never having to glance at the bar again is a real game-changer, for example, and completely unrelated to the level shift despite being functionally attached to it in the rare and very rare tiers. Being 50+1 makes defeating critters easier, but having a pile Recharge Reduction applied globally also makes defeating critters easier, and, again, they're a package deal on Alpha enhancements. Yes, critters are going to miss more frequently when you're +1, but 4.5-5% extra Defense (from Agility) is also causing them to miss more frequently. The +1 is not the only function of the Alpha slot making your end-game experience different, and specifically targeting that +1 is like insisting that the frosting on the cake is fine, it's just the rosettes, which are made of the same frosting, that you object to and would like removed... from everyone's cake, because, again, you think we'd all be better off without them. It abrogates the freedom to choose that already exists and ignores the reality of the other aspects of the Alpha slot being just as responsible for giving players a feeling of being over-powered. Taking away peoples' ability to make that choice isn't a solution, and arbitrarily denying them the level shift because you don't want to exercise your ability to make that choice isn't good, it's fascism. That would be perfectly acceptable.