The Outer Wilds

All due respect to the other recommendations in this thread (The Witcher 3 is in my top 3 favorite games ever), but I get the sense you’re looking for a similar vibe - that self-paced, quiet, almost lonely exploration where, though you do have a goal, the point of the game is to wander the world and discover things. While most of these recs (and most open world games in general, so it’s understandable) have a strong story focus, The Outer Wilds will give you that quiet, unguided exploration BoTW does so well.

(And I know explicitly turned down souls-likes, but Elden Ring also hits that vibe super well. If you’re really stuck for something to play, it might be worth a try with one of the magic-focused builds that significantly reduce the skill needed)

I recently got a Kobo Clara Colour and I’ve been quite pleased so far. It was trivial to upload all my books from Calibre onto it. Not the cheapest, but the resolution is sharp and you can actually turn off the backlight unlike some others.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is like Skyrim but with better combat and dar King Arthur themed.

Potion Craft is a game where you run an alchemist shop, entirely stylized to look like medieval paintings.

Buddy Simulator 1984 is a game about a digital companion that likes you too much.

I could give more, but I never see anyone recommend those, and you have a lot of recommendations in this thread already.

“In a world of black people, be white”

Baptists are Protestant homie

Looks like the latter

The backwards-compatibility stuff already in this thread is all true, but also they don’t know how to remove some things. Microsoft has wanted to entirely replace Control Panel with Settings since Windows 8 came out, but they gave up. And rewriting the whole operating system from scratch would take decades and still inevitably lose compatibility with some of the random old software mentioned here.

What happens if you hold a sign that says “Palestine Action” on it?

That’s because human perception exists on a logarithmic scale! It’s called the Weber-Fechner law, and it was one of the first studied psychological phenomena, before psychology as a field was even defined.

Interestingly, our sense of the “bigness” of numbers is also logarithmic. This is why there have to be explicit explanations of the massive difference between a million and a billion - our brains instinctively and erroneously think “eh, it’s like double.”

~edit I can’t type~

It’s actually way easier to treat sewage than it is to desalinate water: https://www.waterandwastewater.com/how-is-desalination-different-from-water-reclamation/

Boy Boy

Neon White, Cyberhook, and Crumble are all excellent, though you might be looking for a more traditional platformer.

Blue Fire is decent and definitely worth checking out while it’s $4 right now.

Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you’re right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn’t do if not for personalized recommendations.

As for games, I don’t want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn’t personalized, I wouldn’t see nearly as many small games as I do.

Would you be willing to share why you don’t like the “corpo spying”? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I’ll never even consider.

VeggieTales is giving them too much credit - there’s good moral lessons in there! (And the creator said all the botanically-fruit male veggies are canonically trans??)

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air for saying Kirk’s killer was right-wing and that they’re trying to use Kirk’s death for political points.

Full story Machinima style series are rare, but if you just want heavy editing and a somewhat coherent plot as opposed to nearly unedited gameplay, Alpharad and LarsBurrito might work. Alpharad heavily edits his videos and usually writes a script to go over the gameplay that does a good job pulling a story out of the footage. LarsBurrito does a similar style, but also often does themed playthroughs where he writes the script to flavor the playthrough to fit whatever character he’s roleplaying as.

If you want actual story but are ok with significantly less editing, Mianite is a series I rewatch every once in a while in a similar way you describe. The scripted story doesn’t really start picking up until a significant way through season 1, but there is still enough conflict between the different players to make it more than just a Let’s Play.

Indeed. The sources I’ve read seem to lay blame with games not usually patenting mechanics (which apparently is all patent officers look at for prior art, not other games), meaning it needs active challenging to be thrown out.

PocketPair is based in Japan, which is where the previous, more directly problematic patents have been filed mid-litigation. While there is clearly prior art for the US patent, it isn’t quite as comically broad as the Japan ones, and since Japan doesn’t seem to care about prior art, those remain the most concerning to me.

In the US, yes. In Japan, it would appear such a concept does not exist.

Yeah but not raw milk straight from the udder (unless you enjoy salmonella), letting it dribble down your chin and get in your beard (unless that’s what does it for you I guess, you do you)