Mostly Cities Skylines 2. The performance is not great, but it’s passable with the settings turned down and the actual city building is really good. Right now I’m working on a big expansion to my city further down the highway, just got the water/power lines run between them so it’s one big happy grid exporting the extra to other cities. Already looking forward to the things I’ll do differently in my second city!

Also playing some Super Mario Wonder on the side, which is fantastic. Great mix of easy fun levels and hard-as-nails secret special levels. Very fun!

Performance is not great, honestly. On my 3090 I had to sink settings to medium to get around 45 - 60 fps. However it does look nice, and even 30 fps is perfectly playable for a relaxed sim where my reaction speed doesn’t matter.

Playability is fantastic once I got the settings lowered. Love the changes to water and power, roundabouts are neat, roads are easier to manage, and the progression system has been surprisingly engaging. I really like the game and I’ll definitely keep playing while they work on optimizing it.

I can tell I’m really into a game when I end up ditching the objectives to just screw around. If I’m following the quest arrow I’m probably just in it for the plot or for some completionist urge, but if I really like the game I’ll start wandering off the main path to just enjoy the environment and satisfy my own curiosity about things.

I actually use M365 and OneDrive. I still get periodic pushes to use these services on Windows 11. The upsell pressure from my OS is getting really bad.

@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social is the author of the SMBC webcomic and he posts funny stuff pretty frequently.

@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org does art with open source tools, including the open source Pepper and Carrot comic.

@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to posts dumb memes constantly.

@Popehat@mastodon.social posts smartassed yet accurate commentary on current legal news.

"The paths divide the players from the rules. But we’re the ones who chose to plaaaaaaaay…

…the game."

I figured it would be that unique CRT visual quality that kind of enhances the pixels. Never even considered that the sounds would also come out more the way the designers intended. Cool!

As I recall, both games also had secret music tracks on the disc that weren’t in the game, but were really excellent. Playing those games as CDs blew my mind back in the day!

Well that’s as authentic a retro experience as it gets!

The full soundtracks to both games are on the Fat Man’s Bandcamp, which I linked up above. Also, the “greatest hits” collection album 7/11 is on Spotify. It’s surprisingly easy to listen to these days!

The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour remain top-tier for me. The music was half the experience, turn it up and just enjoy that creepy vibe while solving puzzles. And they’re all on The Fat Man’s Bandcamp now!

Also, there’s an industrial rock cover album on vinyl currently looking for funding on Kickstarter. I’m super excited!

Nope. I quit cold turkey on June 30 and haven’t been back. Well, not on purpose, at least. Sometimes a Google result sends me to Reddit, but when it loads I just close it and move to the next result. Lemmy works fine for everything I used Reddit for.

I just use the mobile website. It works and doesn’t harass me to use something else, which are both huge improvements from Reddit!

The Space Quest Historian does YouTube videos about classic adventure games with full playthroughs, historical deep dives, and creator interviews. He also actually hangs out here in the Fediverse: he’s on Lemmy as @SQHistorian@lemm.ee and on Mastodon as @sqhistorian@dosgame.club.

Also, SQH’s band Error 47 does industrial rock covers of retro game music and is criminally under-subscribed. They’re currently working on an album covering The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, which I’m really looking forward to.

I’ve also been really digging Quake Speedruns Explained lately, which is a really chill dude talking about one of the oldest and most competitive speedrunning scenes around.

I try to ask myself what the motivation of the FOMO is. Does it come from me, or is the platform/game/whatever designed to make me feel that way?

If it’s coming from the design of the thing, and I notice that design, that can immediately change my attitude toward it. It’s not “I want to play one more game” anymore, it’s “this game is pressuring me to play one more game.” Does the game have my best interests at heart? Am I comfortable with being pressured by this game? I find those questions really reframe the FOMO and help me step back from it.

If the FOMO is actually coming from me, now it’s a question of priorities. If I’m spending time watching one more video on this platform, there’s something else I’m not going to get to. So the question for myself is “out of all the things I can be doing right now, is this the thing I want to do most?” Sometimes the answer is yes! I might take want to catch up on the latest news if I haven’t checked in today. But if I’ve been doomscrolling for hours, the answer is probably no. And framing that as a choice between a bunch of activities instead of the simple FOMO choice of one more click makes that easier to see.

Lemmy scratches the Reddit itch for me. It doesn’t have all my old niche communities yet, but it’s got enough for me to log on and see what’s happening in the Internet.

Also, I haven’t been pestered to use an app since I got here, which is so nice. Reddit was getting more and more aggressive about that before I quit.

This article’s evidence that the #TwitterMigration failed is that when he shut down his server, 25% of the servers he notified didn’t respond back. I’m not sure that means what the author seems to think it means. It’s not like every user has their own server. And when you let anybody build a server in a network you’re going to see a lot of failed launches. Honestly, with the explosive growth Mastodon had, retaining 75% of all those new servers is pretty impressive to me.

Mastodon did not immediately replace Twitter worldwide. That’s fine, growing that fast wouldn’t be sustainable. But it did get a ton of new users, a lot of visibility, and enough activity to provide content for anybody who signs up. Onboarding kinda sucks, but once you follow enough people and hashtags it absolutely scratches the same itch Twitter did for me. I’d hardly call that a failure just because it didn’t instantly become the next social media monolith.

I was a mod on Reddit so I was personally aware that for years Reddit’s mod tools have been totally inadequate for the job, that Reddit has been promising to give us something better, and that Reddit has failed to deliver. Honestly, it was even worse than just not delivering: we’d get new tools that didn’t solve the main problems, were only available on the iOS app, coming to Android eventually, and coming to the websites never. Third party API tools were the only thing that made modding vaguely functional, even on a small sub.

I’m also a supporter of accessibility in apps, which is also something Reddit has been promising for years and Reddit has failed to deliver. Again, third party API tools are the only thing that makes Reddit vaguely accessible right now.

Reddit’s API changes are not realistic to implement in a single month. This was made clear early on and Reddit has refused to budge. So at this point Reddit is knowingly upending an ecosystem that makes their site usable by groups of users with no first-party replacements ready. And given their history of failing to deliver these very tools, I have no confidence that they will ever do so.

And THEN the Spez AMA happened. I was hoping he’d listen to the community, engage with our concerns, or at the very least actually do an AMA. Instead he got caught lying, he got caught astroturfing, and he inadvertently made it clear that the real issue was that he was butthurt over these third party apps being better at business than Reddit was. Oh, and later we found out the Reddit CEO really admired Elon Musk’s handling of Twitter, a platform I left for all the reasons Spez seems to like it.

Even if none of these issues affected me personally (which they do), Reddit has made it clear that I just can’t trust them to run a fair and functional platform. They do not take their obligations to their users, mods, and business partners seriously. If they don’t like the way the game is going, they’ll change the rules without warning. They will promise features they will not deliver even when those features are essential to their site working for the users who keep it alive.

I don’t want to help Reddit build what Reddit wants to make anymore.

Donut County is only $3.89. It’s a short, funny, cute puzzle game where you make everything fall in a hole. Really good.

Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth is $12.49 and a much better 80hr RPG then it has any right to be. And I never even touched the second game in the collection!

Plan 9 From Outer Space redefined bad movies for me. It’s inexcusably bad. Many bad movies are really just doing the best they can with the skills of the cast and crew. But the filmmakers of Plan 9 From Outer Space just keep making decisions that are so much worse than they have to be. It’s amazing to watch.