This is a great way to think about it… as much as I would love to completely drop the companies I hate like Microsoft or Google or Twitter, sometimes you have to use it for school/work/etc. (Good God I hate Teams.) Like food conglomerates it’s just far too hard for the majority of people to live off the big tech grid.

I just bought Subnautica and Cities Skylines, so I’m looking forward to playing them both.

Wow, thank you! <3 Hal is a masculine name (and I pretty much go by it all the time) but if I say my name is Halley, people just tend to assume I’m a girl. I really thought it was a gender neutral name… I’m autistic so I can’t tell as easily as other people lol. I guess my advice is: when you’ve picked your name, ask other people whether it reads as fem or masc! I know you’re cis but it can still be really annoying for people to assume you’re a gender you’re not because of your name.

I wanted a science-based name because I’m a little nerd lol. I considered Kelvin at some point. In the end, (and I really can’t remember why I specifically chose it) I named myself after Edmond Halley – Hal as a nickname, as a reference to HAL 9000 of course.

Honestly, I sort of regret it, because Halley isn’t as gender neutral as I thought and everyone considers it a girl name. I wish I’d been more out there and straight up decided to call myself Truck or Brick or something.

I’ll add that if you can’t find it on libgen, or if you’re looking for comics and manga ie things that might not be on there, FMHY is a great thing to google ;) includes audiobooks if you’d prefer that to reading. Includes direct downloads as well as torrents.

That said, depending on what you want to learn, there may be a youtube video on it. There’s tons on youtube for certain subjects like video editing or coding if that’s what you’re interested in.

Edit to add: if you’d rather buy a physical copy, ebay and AbeBooks are great sources.

A Hat in Time: 50% off at £12. A really cute 3D platformer.

Wobbledogs: 40% off at £10. Looks and plays like a pet simulator but is almost more about genetics and seeing what kind of bizarre “dogs” you can create.

Let’s Build a Zoo: 45% £9. I’ve seen this described as similar to a Bullfrog game (think Theme Hospital) and that’s good way to put it. It’s a zoo simulator, but full of silly humour and things you can do, like butcher your animals for meat. A big feature of the game is breeding, including crossbreeding animals to create hybrids like a snake/pig monster.

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper: 80% at £2. It’s an old game and the dating shows, and nor is it a brilliant masterpiece of writing (it’s Sherlock investigating Jack the Ripper after all) but it does scratch the detective game itch. It’s fun to explore London as it was in Sherlock’s day, and it does provide its own theory as to who Jack the Ripper was, as well as laying out the events in a way that are much easier to follow than reading a book. I’d recommend it for true crime and mystery fans and I look forward to the other games in the series.

My picks for some (actually) hidden gems :)

Going to stay with a friend in a few hours. We’re planning on smoking, watching cartoons, maybe some light gaming, then finishing it off with watching the new Transformers movie on Sunday!

I have not considered that, I think I’ll bring it up with my DM… it’s my first “all-evil campaign” so I just figured we’d be good to play without putting some guidelines in place! I’ve talked to the DM before about the player but I think next session I’ll talk to the player in private, tell them cooperation is key. They have a lot more experience with regular RP than tabletop which is probably where these issues are coming from.

I really think A Series of Unfortunate Events is so worth a read as an adult. It’s fun, meta, plays with its presentation of words on a page. And towards the end the story dovetails into allegory and metaphor, which is a lot more than I bargained for in a children’s book.

As others have said, ads. The app is also overrun with spambots posting links to scams to buy followers or ForEx or whatever they’re selling. The algorithm is really, really bad, at least if you’re an artist of any kind. IG was one of the first apps to attempt to steal TikTok’s short-form video format, which means it’s hard to get your content out there if you’re just posting images. And there are a LOT of content reposters.

If you guys are interested in romhacks/fangames/Pokemon games with a little more meat and difficulty to them, I heartily recommend Pokemon Infinite Fusion. It’s based on FR/LG, with a slightly different story (but it’s still essentially Team Rocket doing Team Rocket things), with the big difference being that you can fuse Pokemon. Every Pokemon in the game is fuseable, giving you a MASSIVE possible amount of combinations. You can play it classic mode, like a regular Pokemon game, but there’s even a randomised mode which changes it up so every wild encounter and trainer battle uses randomly fused Pokemon. It’s great fun!

As for whether modern Pokemon games hold your hand too much, I dunno. I do recognise they’re made explicitly for children, so I can’t tell you how much is too much. In fact, I remember as a child being stumped enough that I quit playing Diamond halfway through because I thought the gyms were ‘too hard’. I still enjoy the newer games (I don’t care what anyone says, I loved SwSh) but I don’t let their shortcomings get to me as I recognise they’re children’s games.

Ours have started ripening too, not quite ready yet. But: while my mum was in the garden with her back turned for a second, our dog went and ate one right off the plant! Watch out if you have any greedy dogs in your home ;)

This is exactly how I feel. For as much (deserved) hate as Twitter gets, it was great for small communities. I’ve made best friends off Twitter who I still talk to daily. And it was amazing to connect to people like artists or game devs. Reddit is the same – I won’t lament the easy entertainment, I’ll lament the absolute wealth of information that might be lost in comments and text posts if the site becomes harder to search. Google itself is already trash if you’re trying to find real reviews of products or troubleshoot something, what happens when adding “reddit” to the end of the search no longer helps?

The base games are all available on GOG! A lot of the custom content for it online has been lost to time, though may still be available through archive.org snapshots. But if you want to just enjoy the base games, they’re there. I was obsessed with the Creatures series as a child.

You have got to use AdNauseum. It obsfuscates your browsing data, making it harder for companies to track you and give you targeted ads.