Warning: all of those games contain stuff that can fuck you up if you’re not expecting them, so check trigger warnings as required. That said, I’d also add OMORI and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass to the list - IMO they are much better than OFF as both games and stories while playing with similar themes.

The problem here will be that Elon’s new X logo is really just an existing Unicode character: 𝕏. It’s appeared in maths papers for decades. This isn’t like the golden arches - there’s nothing novel there to trademark.

I’d say start with Wrath and don’t bother with Kingmaker. Wrath is just much more interesting both as a game and as a concept, and there’s no shortage of replayability there - the amount of variability between paths is crazy. That said, whichever game you start with, I’d strongly recommend you download a mod to trivialise the management minigame (kingdom management for Kingmaker, crusade management for Wrath). They’re a) not fun, b) difficult (and unlike the rest of the game have no difficulty settings), c) have nothing to do with the core RPG gameplay, and d) can brick your campaign if you screw them up.

Also, you know about Baldur’s Gate 3, right? It’s coming out in two weeks after a very long and successful early access period and it very much looks like all the crazy reactivity of Wrath on a full AA budget.

People like you are why AdNauseam exists, FYI. If you make the non-adblock experience intolerable and then ban adblockers, people have a nasty tendency to fight back rather than knuckling under. I say that as someone who’ll whitelist ads - or donate to - sites I use regularly that aren’t run by shitheads throwing video ads in my face and selling my data to the highest bidder.

I mean, let’s not forget the whole sex predator thing. Their image is going to be faeces smeared on a bathroom wall until Guillemot goes.

A tip isn’t a story in itself, it’s a suggestion of where to start looking for one. “Hey, I’m off the record here, but some shady shit is going down at my job and you might want to fire off a Freedom of Information request for x, y and z or talk to a and b” is a pretty good tip.

Quite a boring answer from me:

• Steam deck, which gives access to a large subset of PC games and also just about every console up to the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era plus the Wii via emulation (no jailbreaking required).
• Switch, which gives access to a lot of the best WiiU games as expanded ports plus some spruced up versions of Nintendo’s back catalogue.
• PS5, which gives access to most of the best PS3 and PS4 games via PS+.
• Xbox Series S/X, which has backwards compatibility with the Xbox One and Xbox 360 for some (most?) games.

There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.

Have you tried Shelter 2? It’s not quite the same thing, but you play a lynx with five adorable cubs trying to survive in a wilderness setting. (Warning: your playthrough will likely involve some or all of your adorable cubs dying.)

Putin’s now fled Moscow to Tver. He’s made himself look weak and scared, which is incredibly personally dangerous for any strongman dictator and IMO completely rules out a trick. He might well have sanctioned Prigozhin’s earlier outbursts - he certainly kept to the rule of pretending that Putin himself was infallible, and only being given bad advice by Shoigu - but the only way this ends now is with either Putin or Prigozhin dead.

Russia has already instituted conscription and civilian terror tactics and done everything they really could do to win the war - there’s no further escalation available to them except into the realm of chemical weapons or similar, which would trigger further escalation from the west. And in the long run, NATO can outspend them - Russia’s only real source of aid is China, who will be demanding greater and greater concessions in return. On a strategic and geopolitical level, Russia lost a long time ago, and the only reason they haven’t withdrawn already is that it wouldn’t be survivable for Putin personally - he’d get couped the moment he showed weakness.

Don’t get me wrong, Prigozhin is an irredeemable monster who’s been at the head of some of the worst atrocities in Ukraine and who has based a lot of his appeal on his pyrrhic victory at Bakhmut (while also attacking Shoigu’s failures). But if the coup succeeds, he’s a monster with the political wiggle room to withdraw Russia’s dick from the Ukrainian beehive by blaming all failures on Shoigu and Putin destroying the great and powerful Russian military through their corruption and incompetence and blah blah blah stab in the back blah blah western decadence blah blah blah. And he will have significant political incentive to do so, since it will clear the way for the oligarchs to start making money again as sanctions lift.

If anyone in the comments doesn’t know about Civvie11 on Youtube, he’s the best source of long-form boomer shooter reviews and well-edited playthroughs on the platform. MtPain11 (a.k.a. Dean of Doom) is also amazing for Doom WADs specifically, that whole community got revitalised with the release of DOOM 2016 and just keeps going from strength to strength.

It would make me mad too, which is why I already had it in the second line. 😋

If you want to discuss something specific, IMO the only thing out there that beats a forum megathread is a very large community/subreddit dedicated to the topic. Now that Reddit is dying and Lemmy is still growing, that means if you want a place to discuss something like a specific tabletop RPG system then a large forum’s your best bet. Thankfully there are still a few of the ancient giants left around…

Yep, that’d do it! 😄 Thanks for the Cradle rec, I don’t like giving Amazon money but it does sound good - you might have just tempted me into it…

Ah, look at everyone recommending action roguelikes. The Berlin Interpretation is dead, long live the Berlin Interpretation! I’ll happily n’th Caves of Qud and Cogmind as amazing turn-based traditional roguelikes, and I’ll add to that pile the following lesser-known gems:

• Dungeonmans: Very much a no-frills traditional roguelike but also a very good one and probably the closest thing out there to “DCSS but better”.
• Tangledeep: Borrowing more from the Japanese side of the genre, with things like pets and item dungeons and sharply limited healing.
• DoomRL/Jupiter Hell: This is what it sounds like, a turn-based top-down version of Doom where cover and movement are everything. DoomRL is the original free version, while Jupiter Hell is the souped-up Steam version stripped of all trademarks.
• Rift Wizard: This one is weird but amazing - you can only attack via magic, you have a limited number of casts of all your spells, and you need to clear an entire level before advancing. But you have a mostly-free choice of new spells each level, and the goal is to put together something hilariously broken before the game outscales you.

Some other notable traditional roguelikes which I think are less good than any of the six above but still worth playing, are:

• Angband: A truly ancient free game whose roots go back to the mainframe days. Still has living variants in addition to vanilla, of which IMO the best are Sil and FrogComPosBand.
• Nethack: Another truly ancient free game from the mainframe days, this one was really intended to be a puzzle an entire university would work together to solve. If you try it today, expect to need spoilers.
• ADOM: The last of the ancient free trifecta, this is less arcane and more story-focused than Nethack but has some truly awful dick moves. Spoilers are an absolute must. Sort of like a proto-Qud. The original is free, but there’s an enhanced tiles version on Steam as well.
• Golden Krone Hotel: A more modern game where you flip between human and vampire.
• Sproggiwood: A highly streamlined traditional roguelike where a given dungeon run will last less than an hour, but there’s metaprogression between dungeons.
• Brogue: A free fantasy roguelike that, like Cogmind, completely eschews experience points.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: A free roguelike immersive sim set in the post-apocalypse, complete with zombie hordes.
• Hydra Slayer: A math roguelike. You can only kill a hydra by cutting off all its heads, and if you don’t cut off all of them then some number grow back. Your weapons do things like halving the number of heads, or cutting off exactly three heads (doing nothing if there are fewer than three).
• HyperRogue: The hyper stands for hyperbolic geometry.

Besides Practical Guide to Evil (already mentioned), Beware Of Chicken has very similar comfy slice-of-life progression vibes to the more chill parts of Wandering Inn but with none of the RPG trappings. It’s your stereotypical xianxia setting with a hilariously overpowered isekai protagonist, but it works because the overpowered protagonist rejects cultivation and runs off to the middle of nowhere to farm rice away from all the crazy people, and then the story actually sticks to that premise rather than using it to quickly establish a setting before immediately dragging him into the wider world. The focus is very much on the bonds between him and his found family, and when there’s danger it’s typically either a larger problem or because he’s not around to solve it.

By the way,

A Practical Guide to Evil is amazing and one of the few webfics out there on par with The Wandering Inn, but I would’t really call it a progression fantasy - viewed in LitRPG terms, it’s a very rules-light system. If you’re Named, you hew to either Above (good) or Below (bad), you have three words representing things you can do exceptionally well, and you become both bound and empowered by stories. This idea gets used to its absolute fullest, and the viewpoint character becomes a master of the craft - on the surface something might look like a truce negotiation between armies, while actually being a pitched battle between the Named on each side for control of the narrative. It’s also got great representation. There’s a roughly equal gender balance, most characters are non-white, and queer characters are disproportionately well-represented including a very prominent (and wonderful) ace character.

In terms of background and history, the evil empire of Praes has traditionally been run according to the good old principles of demon-summoning and flying fortresses and sentient tiger armies, since when you’re empowered by stories these ideas can work… at least in the short term, since in the stories Evil always loses in the end. The Black Knight and his band of Calamities took that personally - “half the world turned into a prop for the glory of the other half”. He and Empress Maleficient took over and started running things more rationally, doing things like looking at orcs as people with the capacity to be terrifying shock troops rather than as random cannon fodder to be thrown away in their hordes, and specifically avoiding all the stories that lead to eventual defeat. They were able to take over the stereotypical Good Fantasy Kingdom of Callow, Praes’ traditional arch-nemesis. The protagonist grew up in Callow after the takeover, in one of the many orphanages set up by the Black Knight - orphaned children being a classic source of heroes - and her ambition is to join the Legions of Terror and effect change from within. In the first chapter of the story, apparently by happenstance she comes under the Black Knight’s tutelage, and things go from there.

Also, it would be remiss of me not to mention that it’s now finished(!) and the author is working on another story, Pale Lights. It’s early days yet, but so far it’s shaping up even better.