https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

Just gonna put this here in case you want to read about how similar third party candidates in a two party system negatively impact the outcomes of such candidates.

This type of mentality is how Trump gets re-elected. And it’s looking more and more like it will be the end of democracy in the US if that happens.

When fallout 4 was in development, Bethesda had to crunch and have non-developers who had little to no experience in the engine (like writers) work in the creation kit to flesh out the rest of the game. This led to many quests being implemented entirely separate from each other with little to no input from other teams or staff members and is a major reason why fallout 4 base game feels so disjointed once you actually start exploring it.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they had to do the same thing with starfield.

Most paradox games I’ve seen have an unlocker you can find online that just enables all the DLC.

I was kind of hoping for that as well. But I guess it would be less a remaster, more a remake in that sense.

I don’t really think Risk of Rain Returns is a remake just looking at it. It’s still 2D after all.

This is what happens when your political role models are all authoritarians.

But blaming others for this is not really accurate. Trump was raised to be a POS from birth.

It’s a pleasant surprise the CI are updating this game after launch considering the original 2014 release was pretty much immediately abandoned. As someone who actually kind of liked the original, I hope people are enjoying the remake.

It’s not surprising if one considers the goal of the Republican party in education is school choice ala charter schools. Stripping the public education system of it’s ability to effectively do it’s job has been their goal for a long time. Indoctrination is a tool that the right in the United States takes full advantage of.

Besides myself, I have two other friends that also stopped at a Masters or dropped down to a Masters for similar reasons.

I’m really happy this approach worked for you. It is possible to get rid of them yourself if you come up with a plan and stick with it.

I am, however, surprised to hear that bombing your house worked. Commercial fogging products, despite their claims, are not strong enough to kill them and will just drive them into hiding or into nearby units if you’re in an apartment building. Every pest management professional I’ve worked with has always told me to never fog for bedbugs.

I will say to anyone that reads this in the future, just because the immediate situation cools down and you don’t see them anymore, doesn’t mean you are free from them just yet.

Bedbugs take 10-20 days depending on environmental conditions to hatch. Their eggs are always laid in out of the way places you usually wouldn’t look and are cemented in place so even vacuums won’t pick them up. They’re smaller than a grain of rice and usually require magnification to see. Fogging products are ineffective against these, so even if they work against the bugs you can’t see, they won’t damage the eggs.You have to wait then out until they hatch. Residuals get around this by sticking to the surface of the egg and surrounding surfaces from adult bed bugs spreading it around. When nymphs hatch, they walk on the surface containing the residual and pick it up themselves.

If you do self-treat, you’ll need to repeat your treatment at least 2-3 times with a regular cadence to be certain that they are gone. Commercial bedbug extermination supplies usually come with instructions telling you how long you have to wait before reapplying it as well as how many times you should.

Some more facts about bedbugs that people might not know: Your average bedbug moves at about the speed of an ant or thereabouts. If recently fed, they move significantly slower, hence why they generally feed in the night, or during any other period where you are having an extended rest. Just like every other parasitic insect, they inject you with a combination anti-coagulant and numbing agent so you stay bleeding for a while and don’t feel a thing while they’re doing it.

Your bodies reaction to it varies from person to person, but you generally become desensitized to it over time. I’ve seen cases where the person doesn’t have any reaction to the bites at all, either during the time they are bitten or afterwards. That’s the worst type of reaction to have since most people only detect them when they’re actually bitten or after their body reacts to it and forms a welt or scab.

Also, bedbugs do not bite with a puncturing device like a mosquito. They scoop like a bulldozer would. If you look really closely with a magnification device, you should be able to tell that rather than a pin style hole at the site, you’ll see what appears to be more of a recess or well in your skin. Its not a guaranteed method by any means, but it can help differentiate their bites from those of other insects.

Due to the destruction they cause to your skin, you should never pick scabs that form on them. They will stay bleeding for whole minutes at a time and only a styptic pen can reliably stop it. They cause prolonged damage to your skin. I have what is essentially a scar on my left ankle from one where for over a year it looked like the surrounding skin had just died. It only recently started to heal back to a normal appearance/lighten.

Note that you should never rely on bites alone for identification as there are a whole array of common household insects that bite humans.

Yes, they can. You should only be throwing things out if they are clearly infested or your pest management professional tells you to.

Publish or perish.

Academic publishing is in a very weird place and is very, very political. Its true that authors have to pay to have their papers published in most journals or conferences after they’ve been accepted, but like all things academic, this is highly dependent on the field. Some universities will reimburse professors publishing costs, others need to pay out of pocket or with grant/public funding.

While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs, I would wager that most well known researchers would avoid such avenues of publication due to prestige. The larger journals and conferences have review boards where the top scientists in the world sit on them. As a potential published author with such an outlet, its a great honor to even be considered. Most researchers don’t want to take the risk of going with a less prestigious outlet if it will run the risk of smearing their image or damaging their ability to publish in better outlets in the future.

Source: Was a Doctoral candidate that ran the whole ringer besides the dissertation.

I love when people who have clearly not had bedbugs link the Mark Rober video as if its the gold standard for eliminating bedbugs. There’s good bits in there, but he doesn’t tell the whole story and makes it seem like they’re easy to get rid of, which is actual misinformation.

The methods discussed in that video only work if you catch them from day one or as preventative measures to not get them in the first place. Bedbug females can hold onto the materials they need to reproduce for weeks before they actually start laying eggs. Furthermore, bedbugs release a stress pheromone when their environment is upset that alerts other bedbugs in the area that they should run and hide. Once this happens, you are SOL as you just made your situation far, far, worse.

DE, steam, and heat are only viable as control methods, not elimination methods. Methods that kill on contact will only make the situation worse as you need to allow bedbugs to return to their hoarding to spread the exterminant around. That’s why professionals use residual sprays to deal with them, not on-contact killers.

DE can and should be used alongside a professionally applied treatment, but you should never use it with the expectation that it alone will completely eliminate them. Bedbug nymphs are very similar to cockroaches in that they can squeeze into surfaces slightly larger than the human hair. If you see any bedbug regardless of life cycle stage, especially during the day, odds are you already have an infestation and should treat it as such.

I highly recommend working with a pest control company that uses Apprehend. Its a state of the art fungal insecticide that leaves a residual that survives for a minimum of three months after being sprayed and kills bedbugs within 24-48 hours of making contact with it. You can buy it online, but most people aren’t going to go the lengths necessary to learn how to properly spray it or how to treat for bedbugs longterm, which is what you need to do.

Also, for those using DE: Rockwell makes an insecticide called Cimexa. Its 10x more effective than DE and can be used on baseboards, crevices, and other nook and crannies in your house or apartment. You can also mix it with water and it will leave a residual spray that is good for 30 days after treatment.

Bedbugs in each life cycle can live up to 18 months without a blood meal, but they require a full blood meal to molt to their next life cycle stage. When treating for them, you want to seal anything you suspect of being contaminated in an air-tight container and not disturb it for at least 18 months, otherwise you risk reintroducing them to your living situation and starting everything all over again. Anything you want to be able to use immediately, you can seal in an air-tight container with a Nuvan strip for a minimum of a day or heat treat it using a specialized heat treatment enclosure if the item in question is not heat sensitive.

If you suspect you have them, check your mattress (especially in seams or tufts) and box spring first and be on the lookout for obvious blood stains or black pepper like markings on your sheets. Those are obvious indicators of a possible bedbug infestation and are the first things an exterminator will look for other than moltings or live bugs.

In order of preference bedbugs prefer living in:

• wood
• fabrics
• metal/plastic

Wooden furniture in particular is extremely susceptible to them. Once they establish a foothold, its usually better to throw the furniture out then attempt to salvage it. Bedbugs can and will live in anything if it means not being exposed or otherwise easily detected. This includes electronics like TVs, computers, laptops, remote controls, amongst other common household items.

If you think you have them, most extermination companies will do a free consult if you call them or visit their website to setup an appointment.

Source: I lived in an infested apartment complex for three years before being able to move elsewhere. Obviously, I didn’t know this before moving in or I would have looked elsewhere.

P.S. Most governments do not recognize bedbugs as anything more than a nuisance because they do not spread disease. In the US at least, we nearly had them eradicated in the late 80s before the EPA made the decision to ban heavy chemicals to treat them without offering any viable alternative. Private companies do not receive subsidies to treat them and due to their pervasive nature, once an infestation happens in a neighborhood or shared living arrangement, they spread very easily and make for very valuable repeat business. The best thing most people can do is educate themselves on the signs and proper response scenarios when they are detected. You want to approach them rationally. The natural response is to trigger a fight or flight scenario where you either go crazy trying to treat them yourself or you throw out all your furniture. Both approaches are wrong, and both approaches cause far more damage than good.

It shouldn’t be surprising given that Bethesda had all of their staff working on Fallout 4 in the GECK and they still barely managed to come up with a MVP in time for launch.

Bethesda of today just isn’t what they used to be. For Elder Scrolls, they peaked with Morrowind when they were near bankruptcy and were forced to throw all their chips into the ring. Oblivion was OK, but had severe balance issues. The storytelling was alright, but you could tell that Bethesda had already started their formulaic approach to the series by this point. Heck, that may have even been the case going from Daggerfall to Morrowind. I won’t even talk about Skyrim. They’ve milked that game for so long, its honestly just shameful at this point.

And for Fallout… Well, Bethesda has never made a competent Fallout game. I realize its their IP now, but they don’t get what the original vision of the series was when Interplay held the rights to it. They butchered the lore with Fallout 3 and couldn’t even create a coherent or compelling story in 4. The only reason NV is so beloved is because Obsidian developed it and at the time, they were employing former members of Interplay.

My issue with Starfield is that they attempted to enter into the sci-fi genre by basically copying existing works. A lot of the mechanics are basically ripped straight from No Mans Sky or Star Citizen. The story isn’t really compelling. And somehow, the dungeon design has gone even more downhill. I won’t even address the fact that they attempted to make a space sim in the now extremely old creation engine.

Edit: It seems to be a contentious issue on the Internet to point out flaws in any Bethesda game. I have over 500+ hours in each mainline Bethesda game released since Oblivion. If I didn’t love their games, I wouldn’t have played them so much.

It’s very important to still remain critical of the things we love, especially if they bear some type of nostalgia factor like Bethesda games clearly do.