I’ve been happy not using Amazon since 2010!

For paper books, find a good local bookstore first. Then for online ordering, bookshop is good. B&N is iffy ethically - they helped crush a lot of smaller stores in the 90’s, but they aren’t part of the current tech giant oligarchy either. Target will usually have a section of best-sellers. If you have to buy from a big store, maybe offset it ethically by donating to a library.

For ebooks, Bookshop is good! They point out which of their ebooks have DRM and which don’t. For some cases, you can also buy books directly from the publisher - these basically never have DRM in my experience. I mainly experience this with technical books and tabletop RPG books.

ProtonMail, or the Steam game compatibility layer?

It is available on F-Droid, if you add its repository. QR code here: https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox

Steam Deck owner here. The default browser is (or was?) FireFox on my Deck, no Chrome.

Code Vein is a Soulslike with an excellent animé-style character creator.

Morrowind has mods that make characters prettier (this is an understatement). I highly recommend them.

It can’t be explained directly, by itself. They’re part of a bigger picture.

Straight men are attracted to women on the whole - legs, arms, waist, face, chest, back, it’s all good. Whatever force it is that makes us attracted to women, it’s not something that we chose or decided. We just do.

Since boobs are a sign of femininity, they’re attractive to us on exactly that level! They fit into our idea of what women look like.

I block meme communities and AI art. I’ll unblock AI art once the machines figure out how fingers work. I don’t block porn except when it’s outside of my interests (I’m not into men or furries, for example).

You might consider unblocking the meta communities - it can sometimes be illuminating to see how other places are run, and give you ideas to improve your own instance.

We don’t have downvotes on my instance, and it’s an amazing difference. I recommend it!

I generally just upvote everything I like, no real thought process involved.

Thank you! I hadn’t heard of Qanba before - they definitely have some interesting joysticks.

As someone who routinely watches YT through Invidious and NewPipe, I haven’t changed my habits.

The Electoral College.

It sure is. And “stop giving your money” is excellent advice for free-to-play software.

I love Signal, and I have persuaded people to use it a lot. That said, it is definitely not the gold standard for privacy. It’s a good-enough compromise between actual unbreakable encryption and trivial for anyone to use. It’s always been valuable for that reason, and still is.

Don’t worry about Molly - it uses a variation of the same code that Signal does, so they don’t need “help” to get critical fixes that Signal receives. Use it if you like it!

The actual gold standard for privacy would be logging in through TOR and sending GPG-encrypted messages that way. And there’s an app which does this, too - it’s called Briar. (No phone number needed, either!) It’s not as seamless to set up as Signal is, though.

No mod capability, or at least not that I’m aware of. But it does run on Android! https://f-droid.org/packages/me.thanel.dank/

I use Dawn. It still works!

Breakups suck, and there’s no shortcut to getting through them.

Time will help you heal. You will go through the morning cycle - look it up, if you need a refresher - and the end of the cycle is “acceptance”. Look forward to it!

Nice! I will admit to not having played many Survival Rogues so they’re not prominent in my thinking, so I’m glad you mentioned them.

The fact that you can say “rougelike card games”, and we all know exactly what you mean, is precisely why we should name that genre. There are plenty of folks who want to seek out roguelikes and not be inundated with Slay The Spire clones. (I like them just fine, personally.)

FTL is what I’d call an Action Rogue, even though it’s pausable (and actually a lot, maybe all, Action Rogues are pausable).

I haven’t played The PIT - I need to look it up.

The idea of classifying based on progression is one of the most important ideas here, you’re right about that. But I also want to capture the idea that the core gameplay itself - grid combat, real-time, cards, JRPG-style battle screens, whatever - is important.

I still haven’t signed up for ProtonMail. Doesn’t sound like a good idea with this going on!