Got addicted to AudioSurf 2 over the weekend. Have a small handful of songs on microSD on deck and it’s pretty fun. Otherwise, did some Shotgun King and not much else besides Shattered Pixel Dungeon on my phone. This quarter of college has kinda drained me because of 2 freaking classes I hate.

I personally have a soft spot for 2D platformers from the Sonic series since I got a copy of the Sonic Mega Collection on gamecube when I was young and loved it. I don’t care if some games do a better job of having worlds where they’re speedy like Green Hill or slow like Carnival Nights (or whatever it’s called), I just like running across the screen. Same thing applies to the 3D games (even the flop I still think was a pretty good game: Sonic '06). Hell, I’m the type of guy who absolutely loves the beat-em-up style gameplay they introduced in Unleashed just for the Werehog sections. The gripes I tend to have are more or less either skill issues or being unable to play around the glitches in the case of '06 (despite not having played it in over a decade).

I’m also big on the Ratchet & Clank style 3D shooter platforming (only played 1, 2, size matters, Into the Nexus/Pirated Booty, and am only in the beginning of deadlocked). I love some of the more wacky weapons (plasma whip, bouncer, black hole gun, etcetera) you can get in the series, which allows me to not get ultra bored part way through the games. The stories also capture me, for the most part, in a first playthrough. They’re not something I take super seriously, so I tend to have a good time with them. Probably my biggest gripe with the game, from what I can remember about Into the Nexus, is how short it felt in comparison to the original trio and size matters. Getting a copy of the first in the PS3 series of games soon, so I cannot wait.

I also had a pretty good time this year with Corn Kidz 64, a shorter platformer that plays like an n64 title in how it controls. Fun enough mechanics but my biggest gripe is how in the end I was left wanting more, in a “I want a sequel” fashion.

Though I did have the misfortune of playing Macbat 64 this year too. It just felt too generic and shovelwear, in my opinion, for me to like it. Play as a bat in small levels with simple puzzles and not much exploration, random mario kart inspired race level in the middle of the game, and also a 2D level based on kirby. I don’t remember the story being much better either. Personally not a game for me.

Here on Lemmy is my favorite considering that’s what I use most on the Fediverse. Second would be the only other one I use: Mastodon.

KDE Plasma. I am not good with making edits/tweaks to desktop environments and really like how MX has it set up.

As far as I’m aware, there are no ways implemented. Got no idea because I’m not smart enough for this type of thing. The only solution I could think of is to implement a paywall (I know, disgusting) to raise the barrier to entry to try and keep bots out. That, and I don’t know if it’s currently possible, but making it so only people on your instance can comment, vote, and report posts on an instance.

I personally feel that depending on the price of joining, that could slightly lessen the bot problem for that specific instance since getting banned means you wasted money instead of just time. Though, it might also alienate it from growing as well.

Brok The Investigator. There are multiple endings, but each different ending has a linear enough progression, even if the first time you have no clue as to what ending you’ll get. The only thing you need to do for different endings is making different choices.

Simple enough game set in a world where the poor, slummers, live in the polluted, rundown slums while the rich, drummers, live under the high quality dome. You play as a crocodile (alligator?) who is a detective, a slummer named Brok who lives with his teenage cat son Graff. Not saying much more because spoilers, even though the drummer and slummer and the polluted world thing are kinda minor spoilers despite learning about them real quick in chapter 1.

The occasional puzzles aren’t too hard to figure out, at least I thought so for all but one. And if you don’t like the combat mode, I’m pretty sure there is a way to turn it off, though I’m not sure how it affects gameplay/choices. Though, the upcoming DLC (whenever it releases) doesn’t look like it’s gonna be linear since it’s all about the games combat system and adding bonus challenges to fights. So I’d probably avoid that if you aren’t playing the game for the combat.

If nothing else, I might look into something like that.

I would add a small partition, but I’m always anxious about stuff like that because I seemingly always hear things about windows messing with Linux partitions and breaking dual boot. That, and I am running out of space on my 1TB drive it came with. Two or three years of me using it thinking that I’ll never fill it up before I upgrade computers and suddenly I have to worry.

Probably gonna keep my desktop running win10 by then because I’ll hopefully have a new desktop by then that I can easily set up Linux on. Got too much on my desktop to move over and I certainly don’t know any tools able to make the process any easier.

Probably gonna just use it as an experimental PC that I can test out server related things on.

Looked through all of my games on Steam Deck and forgot I had a few. None of them I can’t say I’m really interested in right now, but I’m somewhat excited about Psychonauts because I’ve heard good things about it.

I’d believe that LGBTQ+ fans are allowed in Saudi Arabia the day Hell freezes over. I have an easier time believing all the multi-billion dollar international companies around the world are going to disband of their own free will and give people the equivalent of $2 million USD.

I’ll have to look into it because I’d love to have some VMs on my laptop since it way outperforms my desktop specs wise

Got back into Yooka Laylee after a fairly long hiatus. Still on the first 2 levels because of the high amount of exploration and things to do, so I’m not far at all, but definitely having fun.

If I could get vbox to work* on my laptop or find the drive to learn QEMU, then I would have plenty on there. For now I’m just stuck with plenty on my desktop running win10.

*I have installed it a few times on my Debian based distro, but I swear every time I do nothing to it and it destroys itself. Works fine one day, then the next I turn on my laptop, after the only changes being that I created and ran a VM and it decided to hate me and not even boot the program. I think I’m just cursed.

And if he ever tries to screw over the country by threatening US national security or blackmailing over it, I hope the relevant 3 letter agencies come knocking on his door one night, whisking him away to a place nobody will ever see him again.

Nothing brings together enemies quite like a common goal: oppressing everyone who isn’t themselves.

I have a feeling this could very well end up in similar fashion to g*gle talk and IRC. Let’s hope it doesn’t, but I don’t have enough faith in large companies not trying to completely destroy the Fediverse for profit.

Sadly reaching the end of Pokemon Unbreakable Ties beta 4.

Also ended up downloading Frogatto recently because I’ve heard some good things about it and so far a couple levels in it’s fun enough. Not fun enough that I’d be giving it glowing reviews across the board, but fun enough to play on occasion.

The biggest issue with Mozilla if they didn’t decide to put some form of AI stuff in Firefox is that their competitors could use it as ammunition to fuel an as campaign painting Firefox as not only out of touch and outdated, but less secure because they don’t have AI security.

I can guarantee if average person, like my middle aged parents who aren’t very tech savvy, saw an ad pointing that out (no matter how untrue it is) I’d be told about it the next chance they got, proving they believe it.

They have to keep up with what their competitors are doing or get left behind and die a slow and painful death. AI is just the latest trend to be added, and Mozilla is just trying to keep up to ensure whatever remainder of normies still use Firefox don’t decide to abandon ship.

I personally don’t like it, but what other options are there?

Absolutely agree with point 2, not just for Mastodon, but others like here on Lemmy or Misskey or whatever it may be.

The process of finding an instance can sometimes be annoying because you might find an instance that sounds alright, like I did for Mastodon, and then find that there’s the problem of sign-ups not available. That, and signing up for the instance I got on then had a waiting period for account review and all that before I could do anything.

I assume, from what I’ve heard, all you gotta do for threads and bluesky is just sign up and start posting with less effort, which is what the majority of people want.