u/Key_Photograph1662

I’ve been thinking about drones and how their only real options are move, hack, glyph hack, or recall. I don’t think drones should become remote XMPs, but I do think there might be room for a limited “Drone Overload” mechanic.

Basic idea:

Once every 24 hours, you could overload your drone on its current portal. This would recall/destroy the drone and trigger a redeploy cooldown.

The overload would not be a payload or bomb the drone is carrying. It would be more like the drone destabilizing after charging from the portal’s XM. Because of that, you could not move a drone onto a portal and instantly overload it. The drone’s normal movement cooldown would have to finish first.

Possible rules:

- Once per 24 hours

- Drone must be off movement cooldown

- Drone is recalled/destroyed after use

- Fixed weak XM-drain / damage pulse from the portal center

- Better at damaging mods than resonators

- Mod damage is indiscriminate, regardless of faction

- Weak against healthy, charged player portals

- Naturally better against Machina because red portals are often low-charge

- Could recall other drones sitting on the same portal

- Little or no AP

- Should not reliably neutralize player portals or break fields remotely

I think this could make drones more interesting without replacing in-person play. It would be useful for surgically weakening Machina, clearing unwanted mods from your own portal, stripping mods from enemy portals, or knocking drones off a portal.

The main balance point is that it would be slow and limited. You would have to leave the drone sitting there through its cooldown, then spend your once-daily overload and lose the drone for a few hours afterward.

Would something like this be balanced, or would any drone-based overload mechanic still be too much?

I was working on my goals. I was doing them every day, just not on the same calendar day everybody else was using.

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I’ve tried setting small goals before. Nothing crazy, just squats, pull-ups, walking, drinking more water. Stuff that should be easy to keep track of throughout the day.

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But y’all know night shift. Our “today” gets confusing fast. I’d finish work in the morning, log my activity, and then either manually change the date or accept that the app thought I missed it because midnight passed while I was still working. That’s like goals resetting at noon for normal people.

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So I’d start strong, my data would get all wonky, I’d try fixing my logs, then I’d lose trust in the tracking and give up. Rinse and repeat. The goal itself wasn’t failing. My tracking was.

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What finally changed everything was tweaking my setup so I could decide when my day ends. If I consider 8 AM the end of my day, then 1 AM still counts for the day I’m actually living.

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It might seem trivial, but changing how I set the end of the day made a huge difference. I’m not suddenly super disciplined, and I’m definitely not a perfect goal-getter, but I’ve managed to stick with some goals longer than I usually do because I stopped letting midnight be the deadline for success or failure.

Something occurred to me today because of a random call-of-the-void thought.

You know the kind: “What if I jumped?” “What if I swerved?” Just some completely random nonsense that pops into your head for a split second.

I’ve never really felt guilty for those thoughts, because I don’t choose them. They just appear. I notice them, think, “Well, that was weird,” and move on.

It occurred to me that temptation can work the same way.

A thought popping into my head is not the same thing as choosing it. The first flash is not the failure. Entertaining it is.

An intrusive thought dismissed immediately, no matter how vile, is less dangerous than a thought we choose to feed, no matter how mild.

The goal is not to never be tempted. The goal is to stop feeding temptation until it loses its grip.

Lately I’ve been finding a lot more peace treating temptation the same way I treat a call-of-the-void thought:

“Well, that was weird.”

And then moving on.

App name: InTrack

Platform: Android

App link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inbrands.intrack

I built InTrack because most habit trackers assume your day starts and ends at midnight.

That works for some people, but it gets messy for night shifts, off-hour schedules, habits logged after midnight, or routines that make more sense around sleep or personal schedule than the calendar day.

Feature graphic and screenshots from the current Play Store listing.

The main idea is:

Private offline habit tracking for your real day — not just the calendar day.

Main features:

- Custom day boundaries

- Offline/local tracking

- No account

- No ads

- No analytics

- Multiple tracker types

- Groups/routines

- Widgets

- Reminders

- Streaks and stats

- Export/share options

It works for normal daily habits too, but the flexibility is there for people whose routines do not fit neatly into a standard calendar day.

I’m open to blunt feedback on the positioning, screenshots, and whether the “real day, not just the calendar day” hook makes sense.

That is probably the most annoying part of night shift / weird shift work that day walkers don't really think about. The world is built like everyone wakes up in the morning, works during the day, handles errands after work, and ends their day at midnight.

But if you work nights, midnight is not the end of anything. It might be lunch. It might be the middle of your shift. It might be when the day is finally getting started. Then you get off work and half the world is closed, appointments are awkward, sleep is treated like laziness because it happens during daylight, and most apps still assume your “today” resets at 12:00 AM.

I actually like the peaceful part of nights. Less noise, fewer people, different rhythm. But it gets old feeling like everything is designed around one kind of schedule, and everyone else just gets whatever is left over.

Even computers do it. So much programming assumes the day ends at midnight, and changing that logic is way more annoying than it sounds. Logs, reminders, streaks, stats, calendars, everything starts breaking unless the system understands that a calendar day and a real-life day are not always the same thing.

I’m not a preacher, just a believer sharing a thought that has stuck with me for years from Genesis.

Before there were nations, crowds, churches, families, or communities, there was one man in a garden with God.

God made the world, placed Adam in it, gave him purpose, and walked with him. Then He made Eve because it was not good for man to be alone.

I know there is a lot more theology there, but one thing I take from it is this: one person was never too small for God’s attention.

God did not need a crowd before Adam mattered. Adam was enough for God to create, provide for, speak to, and care about.

That does not mean we are meant to live selfishly. Once there is more than one, we are called to love, serve, share, and bless others. But I think a lot of people need to hear this:

You are not too small for God.

You have always been enough for Him to befriend and to care.

For a long time I kept looking for apps and tools with the same thought: “This should exist. Why does this not exist?”

Eventually I got frustrated enough that I stopped just looking and started writing down ideas. That turned into a list of things I wished existed, ranging from habit tracking to logistics tools.

The weird part is, I’m not a software engineer. A year ago, I barely knew anything about programming. But I finally had tools that let me ask questions, break things, fix things, and slowly learn enough to keep moving instead of giving up immediately.

The biggest lesson so far has not been “technology can magically do everything.” It has been that starting matters more than feeling ready.

I’m a few months in now, and several hundred hours into trying to build my first real project. It is nowhere near perfect, but it is far enough along that I can honestly say I made something instead of just wishing someone else would.

What surprised me most is that it gave me a sense of purpose and momentum I honestly had not felt in a while. Instead of just consuming things, scrolling, or wishing tools existed, I suddenly had something difficult that I genuinely wanted to keep pushing forward.

What helped most was lowering the goal from “build the whole thing” to “figure out the next step.” One screen. One bug. One error message. One confusing concept. Then the next one.

I’m still not an expert. Not even close. But I’m a lot further than I was when I started.

Has anyone else had frustration push them into learning something they always assumed was out of reach?