this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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The "modern" XCOM games cheaped out on their game mechanic budget.
The game Phoenix Point made by a much smaller studio with fewer resources came up with a vastly superior way to tackle hit probability. In that game you can free aim using a reticle made of two concentric circles. The outer circle represents where your shot(s) have a 100% chance falling inside of. The inner circle represents where 50% of your shots have a chance of being inside. The more accurate weapons have smaller circles. Then when you shoot the game simulates the path of your shots and any character or environmental object that gets in the way will be taken into account. If you fire a burst or shoot a shotgun, you're not bound to only 100% hitting or 100% missing. You can have a partial number of rounds or pellets hit the target, while others might miss, be blocked, or even hit another enemy or ally if they were sharing that cone of probability.
This makes the whole thing feel far more real than the shitty dice roll system XCOM relies on that just feels cheap and simplistic in comparison especially for a game of that price. Too bad that overall Phoenix Point had difficulty curve issues and the story was not every interesting to me at least.
If they ever make a new XCOM game I really hope they make that mechanic more like Phoenix Point's. And also lose the arbitrary turn limits that they've introduced in XCOM2 because they force a reckless game style that I absolutely hate in those types of games.