OpenTTD is fantastic. The graphics might give new players pause, but if you like building networks or logistical puzzles, or just like trains, it’s still one of the best in the genre.

BAR is great – Total Annihilation was always one of my favorite games from childhood and BAR feels the most like it compared to other spiritual successors like SupCom/FA and other community projects. I actually tried to contribute a couple commits to the project but I don’t think they took them.

It’s not open source, but I do want to mention Barotrauma here – it’s not totally unheard of, but I don’t think many people realize that it’s a spiritual successor to SS13. Supports a lot less players, but still up to 12 or something on the bigger ships, and it manages to turn the absolute insanity of SS13 into a compelling survival game that still has plenty of goofiness.

facepalm it’s not an “ad tracking component”, it’s a test of a new API that, if adopted, will let sites opt in to a much less invasive anonymized system for evaluating the effectiveness of their ads, instead of the current crazy amount of personal data they scrape. The data is anonymized in a double blind scheme, and it’s already way less data than every ad is grabbing.

All of which can be disabled.

Not if your bartender is properly trained and not a lazy piece of shit.

Remakes can be awesome – the recent System Shock remake is an excellent example of doing it right. The problem, as it always is, is capitalism and greed, which lead to lazy money-grabbing remakes of games that didn’t need it. Many games that get remakes should have just gotten patches – Dark Souls is a prime example of this. The remake barely looked better than the original and changed things about the gameplay, not necessarily for the better.

Sacrifice

Hugging, definitely. No playful wrestling since high school, and what there was there was definitely more motivated by competition and testosterone than affection.

As for snuggling, I wouldn’t want to snuggle with anyone that I didn’t have at least some sexual attraction to, unless I was in serious emotional distress and just needed it for the reversion to childhood. So I don’t snuggle with guys. I don’t know of many straight women who snuggle with their platonic friends either, beyond like sharing a blanket for a movie.

This is off the top of the dome and given more time I’d probably change this significantly, but here’s 10 of my favorites from a multitude of genres:

• Rain World
• Outer Wilds
• Stephen’s Sausage Roll

(Those are pretty firmly my top 3, all totally mindblowing experiences that surprised and awed me multiple times)

• Spelunky 2
• Getting Over It
• Peaks Of Yore
• Satisfactory
• Dark Souls PTDE
• Hunt: Showdown
• Morrowind

Honorable mentions for Guilty Gear and Tekken as series, and I have a special place in my heart for the 2000 title Sacrifice, which is my eternal top pick for a remaster/remake.

That just makes it a more effective filter for what you’re looking for. Many people on the apps aren’t interested in a long text conversation and would rather get to know each other in person. If you prefer conversing online for a while, then count it as a win if someone ignores or unmatches you for sending them a long message.

Yeah it’s pretty disappointing. Their analytics blog used to be awesome too, tons of cool insights and it was obvious that they knew what they were doing. I assume the entire operation got bought up by VC money in the gold rush of Tinder clones.

The problem is not that people are typing on phones… It’s that all of the apps are now driven by profit-maximizing algorithms instead of algorithms that try to find your best match. OkCupid used to be the best dating site hands down because of the match percentage from the questions, but now it’s just Different Tinder. You can still have great heartfelt conversations on mobile dating apps, it’s just harder now.

Stop using GitHub. Especially if you’re working on anything that corpo interests will frown on, but just generally, there are plenty of alternatives (both git and non-git) that aren’t owned by Microsoft.

Brother beards have been in for like 10 years.

I think $55 total? $35 for my initial package and I spent $20 a few years ago for a cooler starter ship because I was enjoying the game and wanted to support development. I think the $35 package is now $45 – I bought in on the original Kickstarter – but that price gets you full access to the game and all the ships/hangars/etc… you just don’t start with them, and instead have to earn in-game currency to buy (or rent) them. I wouldn’t want a super expensive starter ship anyway, it skips too much of the early game progression.

There’s nothing remotely close to this in SC history. Also full access to SC is actually less than the cheapest Tarkov package.

Piracy is a literally victimless crime. Definitely support indie devs if you can afford it, but no one should feel guilty for downloading and running software.

Fedora is a great first distro! I do recommend looking at the GNOME ui, as it’s what Fedora (and vanilla Ubuntu) use; I really like GNOME but it’s not for everyone as it’s pretty opinionated and innovative. Linux Mint is another popular choice for newcomers, it uses a very simple UI that will be very familiar to any Windows user.

I still don’t see a single actual advantage of W11 over 10. The OS drains more system resources so it’s less performant, and every other “feature” I’ve seen looks like a double edged sword at best, or an anti-feature at worst.