Things got a bit weird before the invention of the pencil sharpener

Brain getting bigger, I think

That does tend to simplify the aerodynamics modeling

Horses evolved this way so they could forever be giving you “the finger”

Hmm let’s see. So the Subnautica games are survival games with a lot of exploring, uncovering mysteries, finding logs, figuring out what happened to you, the alien civilization, the ecosystem, etc.

If you like Obra Dinn, recommended elsewhere in this thread, The Case of the Golden Idol has some similar energy of looking at scenes and solving who’s who and what’s what and how this person died.

Chants of Sennaar is a game where you decipher fantasy languages and learn about the peoples that speak them while progressing up a tower and solving puzzles.

Viewfinder is a surreal-perspective puzzler with lots of narration and backstory from the characters

Sable is an exploration game with puzzles to solve, in a fancifuil sci-fi desert world with towns and NPCs and crashed spaceships to explore

The old Escape Velocity trilogy (though nowadays you’ll need a classic Mac emulator to play them) are top-down ship captain games where you fly your ship around, trade, fight, do missions, usually have multiple storylines going on at once, lots of planets, ships, stations, factions, etc. The modern game Endless Sky is explicitly molded on the EV series.

Sunless Seas and its sequel Sunless Skies have some similarity to EV mechanically, but with a lovecraftian, steampunk aesthetic to the world, and lots of world-building.

Beyond Good and Evil is a third-person action game that has good plot, characters, and worldbuilding, and there are updated versions available that run on modern hardware.

Bastion is an isometric action game a little like Diablo in the combat mechanics but with no numbers for you to worry about. Explore the aftermath of a most peculiar apocalypse and discover the world that was and the peoples who lived there. Good characters and worldbuilding.

Deep underground, near the earth’s core where it’s still warm

Fun fact: soccer has no official rule against manipulating the ball with your eye lasers

It’s definitely not always done with general anesthesia in the US, unless standards have changed in the last couple decades? I had all mine taken out in the 2000s with just local.

For me (I use Kavita) it’s because I want to be able to just pick up whatever device is in front of me at the moment and pick up the book where I last left off even if it was on another device

They’re charging how much for 10^-12 sq ft?

“Hostage negotiations now entering their fourth week between the U.S. and Hamas over the release of hostage Elon Musk, however in spite of intense diplomatic overtures and offers of significant concessions the U.S. still refuses to take him back”

I also use SponsorBlock for YouTube, which skips sponsor segments in YouTube videos (and optionally other kinds of segments like intros, self promos, etc.) it’s crowd-sourced for identifying the segments but for almost all the videos I watch someone has already marked at least the sponsor segments

Next they’ll eliminate the stripe and put up share-the-road signs with the stick figure

When I first learned that Reddit would be pricing out third-party apps I was angry and upset, but I still entertained the notion of maybe continuing to use old.reddit on the desktop (until they inevitably killed that). I like many of the communities there and didn’t want to give them up.

But then came the AMA and the leaked memo and the crushing of the protests with threats and strongarm tactics. Everything spez wrote dripped with contempt for the community and the moderators that had made the site what it was through their unpaid labor. The message became clear: “Let the little users cry it out. They’ll have their little tantrum and then they’ll settle down and accept that the reality is that we can do anything we want to them and they have to just accept it. Their communities, their conversations, their culture, it all belongs to us, not to them. We have everything and they have nothing”.

I’m not going back to that.

Shhh no one tell spez there’s still RSS feeds

I never stopped using RSS even when it supposedly “died”. Right now I have FreshRSS running on my raspberry pi since I like subscriptions and read state to sync between my machines but don’t like to depend on some company for that. I use Reeder for my iOS devices, which can sync with FreshRSS.

For all folks say RSS is dead, I find a lot to fill it with. Blogs (yes I still read blogs like it’s 2005), webcomics (most comics with their own site offer one, and webtoon generates them for its comics, though it looks like tapas doesn’t or at least I can’t find any feeds there), tech news sites, scientific journals, lemmy and mastodon generate feeds for users and communities, even YouTube still generates feeds for individual channels. There’s a lot of feeds still active out there.

It’s very interesting and I remember wishing for a long time that “two-server” protocols like email would start being made again. I already switched from Twitter to Mastodon last fall and don’t regret that in the slightest. The community here seems nice so far, and the UI is simple and clean.

I’ve encountered some glitches like the live-update feature seemingly changing what post I’m viewing and mixing comments from the two posts. The instance I picked has had some performance issues and has gone down a couple times, but I’m chalking that up to a mass influx of users and activity (of which I’m very much a part).

I could use a browser extension that just adds an “open this post/community/user in my home instance” button when I’m browsing another instance so I can interact. Also some ability to put a link to e.g. a community in your post text that automatically sends you to that community via the instance you are viewing the post in.

It seems like a cool idea. The idea of picking a server to sign up for didn’t throw me for a loop like it does some folks; just like email, right? I think it needs a better way to interact on other instances though. Like for this one, I found lemmy.world from a link on Reddit, then opened this post. But I couldn’t vote or comment because my account was on midwest.social. So I had to copy the [email protected] community spec from the sidebar, go over to midwest.social in another tab, click the search button, paste the community spec there, re-find the same post, and now I can comment. Ideally I’d instead just be able to comment directly on lemmy.world using my already-logged-in account on midwest.social, or at least go directly to viewing the post via my own server with one click. Functionality like this would probably require a browser extension but that’s better than nothing. I actually found one for Mastodon that’s supposed to allow something like this for that service but so far I can’t figure out how to get it to do its thing, and I don’t think it supports Lemmy at all so far.