I use a Kaweco Sport as my daily driver.

Bonus: Nobody ever "borrows" it at work because it confuses and terrifies them.

Greetings Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada....

I am with you on every one of these points. The image selection process is terrible now, where before it was quick & simple. And in the past couple of updates, sending larger images and gifs was sporadic until now I always get an error. I was happy when they added message reactions, then puzzled when they just stopped at six, half of which are rarely useful.

I've been a paid user for years, but now I'm causally shopping for something else. If they're giving up on their app, so am I.

Seriously. USA is like the generic video game starter character before anyone's had a chance to customise it and level up. At all. And I say that as someone who lives here.

As someone else who lives in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I use Amazon for stuff I can't find locally. Our local (and family owned) grocery & hardware stores are not much more expensive, so I tend to buy essentials there and save Amazon as a last resort. Amazon's pricing isn't anything special, and being able to talk to a knowledgeable shop owner is more than worth the extra few cents in price.

She vaguely thinks there may be something out there but it has zero bearing on her life. I think that makes her functionally an agnostic atheist.

It has been surprisingly un-stressful so far, probably due to the ridiculously supportive community there. The best part is that everyone's submissions go live at the same time every week, so there's a whole new playlist of brand new music to enjoy!

First of all, excellent username. Second, I would love a chance to win the Tomb Raider I - III remaster just for the nostalgia. Third, the cool new thing I've done this year is take part in WeeklyBeats, a year-long challenge to create and post a new music track every week of 2024. So far so good! Fourth, I don't have a decent meme to share but here (if I can get photos to work) is a photo of my void.

Another vote for the T480. I have a T480s running Mint and it's been lovely. No driver issues and for office/light media creation/consumption it seems to work without a hitch.

A Mary Sue can fail, but those failures don't usually have a massive impact and are easily reversed without the feeling that the MS had to struggle to earn the reversal.

The more flaws a character has, the more they have to work to balance them out. Readers are more likely on the side of a character that has to work and make sacrifices to make it through the difficulties the plot throws at them.

Random Example: Diana Rowland's "My Life as a White Trash Zombie". Protagonist Angel has a criminal record, drug addiction, abusive home life, and generally makes very bad decisions. Because of her life course, she has very few resources (she can't go to the cops, nobody she knows has money or connections, etc) but she can think quickly and has a sort of desperate resourcefulness. Because everything is working against her, she has to fight for any positive forward movement, and one misstep can be a serious threat - and those happen frequently, undoing any success and forcing her to burn her resources to try a new path. IIRC in one of the books the B-story is her trying just to earn her GED as the main plot around her is utter pandemonium. Just that struggle to graduate high school is a herculean task given the deck stacked against her. Readers aren't thinking "how will she win", they're thinking "well what's going to go wrong this time?"

TL;DR: If every time your protagonist has a setback the readers shout "can't she ever catch a break?" instead of "ah she'll just breeze through this" you should be doing okay.

YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A MOUSE

It's been around for a while. Over a decade ago Target ran a cheeky back to school advert featuring a slow pan across school cubbies with lunch pails all labelled with variant spellings of "Braiden". I thought it was hilarious.