You’ve also got their coverage of the 2016 election, where it’s a matter of settled fact that they slept on an FBI investigation of Trump for things we now know actually happened while putting Clinton’s emails on the front page at every opportunity.

You’ve also got them giving a platform to dreck like this - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/immigration-stephen-miller.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur - which includes lovely bits like “The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is near a record high, and increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics.”

I’m not one of those people who has accumulated an entire drawer full of examples and is able to provide you with 400 bullet points of what’s wrong with the NYT, but maybe two more will help push you to investigate a bit more? The NYT may publish left-leaning content sometimes, but they are not an actual ally of the Democrats, let alone the progressive or far left. They routinely publish Republican lies uncritically, and their perception as left-leaning is one of their best weapons.

You’ve got some moderately highbrow and transhumanist stuff in there; have you tried Greg Egan? The two starting places I like to recommend are the Clockwork Rocket books (natives of a universe with alternate physics explore it and figure out what’s going on, kind of Flatland turned up to 11… and then up to 121…), and Permutation City which I think will meet your “some very interesting ideas” and then keep accelerating.

I think demand for legendary armor is high and sustainable enough that the situation may continue pretty much indefinitely. The grind required is huge, and a lot of people are undertaking it with great enthusiasm, and looking at the examples provided by other legendary equipment supports the claim that interest will hang on more or less indefinitely. I’m still constantly running into people who want to do raids to work on that armor or Coalescence, fractals for Ad Infinitum, etc, and those projects have been available for years.

Note that I’m using the word ‘may’ here because all this is wild speculation about what players will do en masse; it’s not a hill I’m going to die on.

Your analysis stops before you consider how one might actually make money from rifts, specifically by using the essence you loot to make motivations and selling said motivations on the market. Just poking at it casually yielded ~160 gold from motivation sales for me recently, some of which was of course eaten by the other materials needed for motivations. It’s worth noting that besides activities mandated by the story, I used zero motivations myself - there are plenty of people tagged up and doing them, and you want t1 and t2 rifts for this purpose more than t3 anyway. I wasn’t very seriously trying to make gold with this, just running around with friends who wanted to do rifts for their own reasons or collecting xp to fill in mastery tracks.

Deciding whether this is a good way to make gold relative to other options would require significant work, but that’s where you want to go if you want an answer.

Does the cult have a good plan for healthcare? If so, please send me your newsletter, manifesto, religious tract, pentabarf, whatever.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is pretty astounding, offering an incredible level of detail and degree of freedom, plus just lots of zombies to fight.

I use my Deck in desktop mode a lot of the time, but let’s go with games I just play with it in handheld mode, since my list seems to be different.

• Siralim Ultimate
• Chronicon
• Demon’s Tilt
• Satryn Deluxe
• Stellaris
• Vampire Survivors
• Time Break Chronicles

I finished Overload this weekend, so I’m wandering through my backlog looking for a next thing that sticks with me for more than five minutes. Oxygen Not Included doesn’t seem to be cutting it, so… we’ll see. I’ve got Cataclysm: DDA around as a light diversion until I get pulled into something, and there’s always Guild Wars 2 and Deep Rock Galactic.

I love the last additional arrow at the bottom on the excessively-signed post.

What else is good in this area?

At least bookmarked; I just have to give this a try!

Symphony of the Night has an entire pile of bangers and is my clear winner in this category.

I’ve actually set my Deck up with a wireless keyboard and mouse and a monitor and spend a lot of time using it in desktop mode. The “real” gaming PC is still around, but it’s a fallback. So I’m arguably playing Beehaw on it right now, but I just alt-tabbed away from Overload to do this. I’ll play Guild Wars 2 on it for a while tomorrow…

Utopia is pretty universally agreed to be the most important DLC. Past that, Overlord is a good pick since they’ve made vassals something you actually want beyond RP reasons and it makes them much more effective, plus it adds hyper relays. I like Galactic Paragons a lot, a lot of people think Federations and Apocalypse are pretty essential, and at that point you’re into picking and choosing what you’d like to have more of.

My grip on AAA is definitely weak. but Stellaris works very well both in terms of performance and ability to work the interface; using and customizing a community profile recommended.

I am paradoxically okay with winding up paying to be a beta tester! …if it’s for a tiny indie studio doing something weird, interesting, and experimental where I can join a Discord and talk to people about it. That’s a fun experience. To hell with paying a major corporation for the privilege of being any form of sucker.

I was focusing on Overload a bit, which I’ve found to be a fun homage or spiritual sequel or successor or whatever to Descent. It does a pretty good job of addressing the problems of players potentially getting lost and disoriented in complicated 3d spaces, and it absolutely preserves the fun of wandering around, trying to spot robots before they’re already firing at you, and then frenetically blowing them up. Lots of fun exploring and poking around for secrets and figuring out how to win fights. I feel like I’m only okay at it, I’m playing on a medium-ish difficulty and taking significant advantage of save-anywhere to decide I didn’t actually screw up that last fight that badly, but I’m having fun anyway. A bit daunted by how difficult some of the later levels are turning out to be, though…

Anyway, I was doing all of that - plus other things, I have a bunch of gaming balls in the air right now - but then No Man’s Sky had a new expedition come out. I only got the game in the last year or two and haven’t been interested in it at the same time as an expedition happened, so I spent last night focusing on it. It seems okay? It’s nice that my knowledge of the game allows me to render some tasks that might be arduous completely trivial, like knowing exactly what weapon to go fetch and what to do to get my hands on a quad servo fairly quickly. I think I spent too much time early on just getting a bunch of basic supplies lined up, but now I’m moving through everything pretty quickly so maybe that was correct and has paid off; I’m definitely overthinking the experience a bit. It doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal, overall - it’s not a major transformation of the game or anything, it winds up being what it says on the tin, just a quest line to go do to unlock some cool stuff. The cool stuff is actually mildly appealing to me, which is nice and a bit unusual.

I can go on, I found a novel (to me, anyway) way to break Chronicon a few days ago, but I think that’s the appropriate amount of rambling.

I looked at this thoughtfully a while ago and decided that my baseline level of interest in fishing qua fishing was too low. I’ve at least thrown it on the wishlist now, thanks for the info.

I despise stealth in video games, and Heat Signature is the only game with stealth elements I have ever unequivocally enjoyed. Very glad to see it getting some attention here.

I’m not sure Siralim Ultimate qualifies as “underrated”, but it’s the kind of game where if the idea resonates with you it’ll keep you happily busy forever. It’s often compared to a Pokemon game, but I think it’s better described as Pokemon meets a dungeon blobber.

At its core, you build a group of six creatures and go into a procedural dungeon where you will fight other groups of similar creatures, picking options like fighting and casting spells. The creatures each have special traits which change game rules for them, and your job is to take advantage of this so that you win these fights. Your character also has perks which act as additional modifiers, and fusing creatures and slapping artifacts on them means you can apply even more changes to how everything works.

The interesting part emerges from the fact that these traits are generally not modifiers like +3.5% damage on Tuesdays; they are instead drastic and game-warping options like “If this creature successfully attacks, there’s a 50% chance that a dead creature on its team is resurrected.” That by itself is kind of hugely impactful… and it’s also kind of basic and boring for Siralim. Now let’s fuse it with a monster that immediately gets a free attack if the enemy attacks any other monster on your team, now we’re starting to cook.

Your actual goal isn’t to play fair, it is to fold, spindle, and mutilate the game’s mechanics to allow your team to win in increasingly unfair and ridiculous fights. It’s also pretty good at letting you control your level of challenge, incidentally, but you are at some point going to have to win against enemies with their own completely bonkers tricks. If you enjoy figuring out how to warp complicated rules to your benefit and stack absurdity atop absurdity, this game is calling for you. It’s absolutely got indie jank, by the way - the graphics aren’t amazing, the game sometimes grinds along very slowly processing all the silliness, and while it has lots of reference material ingame there’s still just way too much information to take in.