Hmm let’s see. So the Subnautica games are survival games with a lot of exploring, uncovering mysteries, finding logs, figuring out what happened to you, the alien civilization, the ecosystem, etc.

If you like Obra Dinn, recommended elsewhere in this thread, The Case of the Golden Idol has some similar energy of looking at scenes and solving who’s who and what’s what and how this person died.

Chants of Sennaar is a game where you decipher fantasy languages and learn about the peoples that speak them while progressing up a tower and solving puzzles.

Viewfinder is a surreal-perspective puzzler with lots of narration and backstory from the characters

Sable is an exploration game with puzzles to solve, in a fancifuil sci-fi desert world with towns and NPCs and crashed spaceships to explore

The old Escape Velocity trilogy (though nowadays you’ll need a classic Mac emulator to play them) are top-down ship captain games where you fly your ship around, trade, fight, do missions, usually have multiple storylines going on at once, lots of planets, ships, stations, factions, etc. The modern game Endless Sky is explicitly molded on the EV series.

Sunless Seas and its sequel Sunless Skies have some similarity to EV mechanically, but with a lovecraftian, steampunk aesthetic to the world, and lots of world-building.

Beyond Good and Evil is a third-person action game that has good plot, characters, and worldbuilding, and there are updated versions available that run on modern hardware.

Bastion is an isometric action game a little like Diablo in the combat mechanics but with no numbers for you to worry about. Explore the aftermath of a most peculiar apocalypse and discover the world that was and the peoples who lived there. Good characters and worldbuilding.

For me (I use Kavita) it’s because I want to be able to just pick up whatever device is in front of me at the moment and pick up the book where I last left off even if it was on another device

One thing to look at if you’re going this route is whether your router supports NAT loopback (a.k.a. NAT reflection or NAT hairpinning). This feature means that you can access your server via the external IP (and therefore via the ddns domain name) even from within your network. It’s really useful for phones and laptops that might be on your home network at some times and off somewhere else at other times, so you don’t have to change configurations on e.g. the Nextcloud client, or remember to type in different addresses inside and outside the network. Some routers just do this, some don’t, some it’s a setting you have to turn on. The router built into my ISP-supplied cable modem didn’t support it so I got my own router and put the ISP one into bridge mode.

When I first learned that Reddit would be pricing out third-party apps I was angry and upset, but I still entertained the notion of maybe continuing to use old.reddit on the desktop (until they inevitably killed that). I like many of the communities there and didn’t want to give them up.

But then came the AMA and the leaked memo and the crushing of the protests with threats and strongarm tactics. Everything spez wrote dripped with contempt for the community and the moderators that had made the site what it was through their unpaid labor. The message became clear: “Let the little users cry it out. They’ll have their little tantrum and then they’ll settle down and accept that the reality is that we can do anything we want to them and they have to just accept it. Their communities, their conversations, their culture, it all belongs to us, not to them. We have everything and they have nothing”.

I’m not going back to that.

Shhh no one tell spez there’s still RSS feeds

My list for my raspberry pi 4 (4 GB):

• Nextcloud (synced cloud storage, like Dropbox; it can do more with plugins but this is all I use it for)
• FreshRSS (RSS reader)
• Wallabag (read it later, like Pocket or Instapaper)
• Gitea (git project hosting like Github; admittedly I don’t really use this one much)

I never stopped using RSS even when it supposedly “died”. Right now I have FreshRSS running on my raspberry pi since I like subscriptions and read state to sync between my machines but don’t like to depend on some company for that. I use Reeder for my iOS devices, which can sync with FreshRSS. For all folks say RSS is dead, I find a lot to fill it with. Blogs (yes I still read blogs like it’s 2005), webcomics (most comics with their own site offer one, and webtoon generates them for its comics, though it looks like tapas doesn’t or at least I can’t find any feeds there), tech news sites, scientific journals, lemmy and mastodon generate feeds for users and communities, even YouTube still generates feeds for individual channels. There’s a lot of feeds still active out there.

It’s very interesting and I remember wishing for a long time that “two-server” protocols like email would start being made again. I already switched from Twitter to Mastodon last fall and don’t regret that in the slightest. The community here seems nice so far, and the UI is simple and clean.

I’ve encountered some glitches like the live-update feature seemingly changing what post I’m viewing and mixing comments from the two posts. The instance I picked has had some performance issues and has gone down a couple times, but I’m chalking that up to a mass influx of users and activity (of which I’m very much a part).

I could use a browser extension that just adds an “open this post/community/user in my home instance” button when I’m browsing another instance so I can interact. Also some ability to put a link to e.g. a community in your post text that automatically sends you to that community via the instance you are viewing the post in.