small indie games

Same here, they’re like a palate cleanser, and they fit a busier schedule better than a 200+ hour open-world immersive experience. There’s a place for each, but I really have become fond of pleasant little indie games.

I don’t know if that’s something that can be done in one session, but I have a group of friends that have been playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 every week for a couple months now, and they really enjoy it.

Man, this is deeply dystopian. While state and federal regulators are having a conniption about TikTok/ByteDance gathering information on Americans, that same information is hoovered up by all the other social media companies and freely sold by data brokers. The response should be sweeping privacy legislation and regulatory reform, but I have very little confidence that will happen in the near future.

It’s the niche stuff that made Reddit useful. For example, Amazon reviews are no longer trustworthy, but there were really good recommendations in reddit threads about which devices or products worked. The DIY subreddits were incredibly helpful. I got good recommendations for motorcycle tires and ultralight backpacking gear and Android apps and hotels in particular destinations from reddit. I got walkthroughs on how to set up a Plex server or do a particular project with a Raspberry Pi on reddit. With so many subs, there was almost always a thread for what I was looking for. That was the value. I expect it will take a while to rebuild that elsewhere, but I’m sure it will be recreated.

My amateur opinion: Apple makes beautiful and thoughtful devices that are tightly integrated into a system of services that work well. But I don’t use them, mostly because of the closed nature of that ecosystem, and also because they are consistently more expensive. Back when you could jailbreak and sideload apps on iPhones, I had a series of iPhones and they were pretty good phones, although iTunes always sucked. While they were around, iPods were clever. But I preferred to buy music from a variety of places, I wanted to install apps that I wanted and not what were available on the App Store, and I really didn’t like the user-hostile decisions Apple made to sell more hardware. Getting rid of the headphone jack was one of the worst decisions to me, as was Apple’s dogmatic refusal to use USB-C until European regulators recently forced the change.