Deck: just finished Citizen Sleeper last night.

Frame: The Mailroom and Scared by Squares

Counter Strike: Source

Please excuse the dirty screen! Atomic Purple case with holographic buttons from deckbuttons.com and accent skins from dbrand. I also usually have the Killswitch case on, but this was taken just after I had completed all the surgery to replace the shell.

SWORN if you like Hades. It’s pretty transparent that they just said “What if Hades, but rip out any depth to the story, make it up to 4 player multiplayer, and change up the pantheon of gods” then made that, but it’s still fun to play.

Esoteric Ebb is a self-described Disco-like (referring to Disco Elysium) where you play as a cleric investigating a local tea shop that exploded. You have the typical RPG stats that you distribute points into at the beginning (so you can basically make whatever class you want despite your job being a cleric at the beginning), and as you go through the game, the stats are represented by different parts of your psyche that will comment on and influence your actions. The writing is genuinely hilarious and the sheer amount of content could keep you coming back for many playthroughs with very different experiences each time. I’ve never played a video game RPG that captures the experience of playing a TTRPG as well as this one does.

I hadn’t seen Mina the Hollower mentioned in this thread, and I really enjoyed that earlier this year too. It’s a more modern take on 2D Zelda game with more focus on skill difficulty (harder enemies and some brutal platforming) than puzzles. It has some great pixel art in the style of a Game Boy Color game and is packed full of secrets to discover. It’s got a really great soundtrack too!

1000xRESIST and Pathogenic

1000xRESIST was on a lot of underrated games lists last year when it came out, and I kept putting it off because the plot points I had heard about seemed very heavy, but it is a beautiful piece of art. It’s a very cinematic game with a lot to say about identity, family, and the pain we inflict upon ourselves. Saying anything about the story would probably ruin it, but it’s a walking sim with some light puzzle elements.

Pathogenic is a rougelite twinstick shooter where you play as an infection fighting through the human body and upgrading along the way by adding internal upgrades that power up external upgrades like tentacles that allow you to move or appendages that shoot/attack. It’s almost the complete opposite of 1000xRESIST. Basically no story and all gameplay.

Just to give you an idea of what she thinks “success” for Xbox looks like, she said around the time of the last major layoff and studio culling that she wants the Xbox platform to hit a daily player count of one billion users. So literally enough unique user accounts to cover one in every eight people on Earth will need to play within the Xbox ecosystem within the same day for her to be satisfied. If you count mobile, I can see hitting north of 200 million, but executive expectations are detached from reality.

Fuck 'em. This far into Meta’s descent into a capitalist surveillance platform, they should know what kind of company they work for. They only find it to be a problem if they aren’t “finding meaning” in the “interesting technical challenges” of turning people into data points.

Or Mina the Hollower…

I use both for different use cases, so I’ve never used the same directory for an Obsidian vault and Logseq graph. Pretty sure they would both be able to read and write the markdown files, but would features like Logseq block references and queries work in Obsidian? How would Logseq treat Obsidian bases?

The use cases are different for me, personally. There are some minor (on the surface), but major (depending on how you use the software) differences between them out of the box:

• Logseq is focused on daily journal pages and pages with lots of linkages, the idea being it keeps you on focused on tasks without feeling like you are spending too much time tinkering, organizing, or like you have to build out a perfect system right away. I like it for work because it lets me work “in my notes” rather than needing to work “on my notes” if that makes sense. I’m aware of similar Obsidian setups, but having it work out of the box in Logseq means many of the other design choices in the program are made with this workflow in mind.
• Every note is structured as a tree with hierarchical items (blocks) nested within one another. This means every block has a reference, so it’s easy to create and maintain links to different pages. Obsidian does support block references out of the box, but you have to insert them for every line you want to reference because it isn’t set up to enforce a tree structure by default.
• Tags and note links are interchangeable. I would actually say this is the main point against vanilla Logseq compared to Obsidian. There are plugins you can use to give tags different behavior to links though.
• The community seems smaller and there aren’t as many plugins. Many plugins don’t seem to be well supported or maintained, but they are usually pretty focused on solving one particular problem.

I use Logseq for work where being able to reference blocks is more useful (especially for task management), and Obsidian for personal projects where I feel a more free form PKM with customization options is nicer.

Please please please, fuck off Randy.

After not ever having set up a gaming focused distro, I gotta say, I was shocked at how seamless CachyOS makes it. Outside of creating the install media, installing CachyOS and getting everything set up to game takes like 10 minutes.

I feel like Worf would make for an excellent navigation voice. Just imagine:

“It would be most honorable to keep left at the fork.”

“Today is a good day… to arrive at your destination on the right.”

I saw a guy walking around town the other day with a sign that said, “Are we great yet?” and felt like that was a great little slogan that confronts Trump supporters with the fact that all of this was supposedly being done to restore whatever personally idealized version of “great” America once embodied to them. Pretty sure the majority of people who voted for Trump wouldn’t even say that using federal agents to murder Americans in the street for exercising their constitutional right to protest is included in their own personal definition of the “greatness” that they feel America needs to get back to.

I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys point and click adventure games. The time mechanic can seem a bit constraining at first, but unless you’re clicking on everything or exhausting every conversation topic, I think you’d be able to figure out like 80% of the mysteries just by pulling at relevant threads. The only advice I’d offer is to remember how to get to all of the journals and notes you collect because the game doesn’t have a traditional inventory system, and there were a couple of times I forgot about information I’d previously collected that’s needed to solve some puzzles because it’s a little buried. It does a great job of establishing the atmosphere, and if you’re in the mood for a creepy mystery, this is an all-timer.

Silksong, but I put that on hold as I think I hit my skill ceiling in Act 3.

In the meantime, I’m playing The Seance at Blake Manor which has been really fun and is perfect for the Deck.