‘A AA AAA AAAA’

I prefer the same PS layout, but some other people complain about the left stick not being under the ‘default’ thumb position, and thus like Xbox controllers more.

It’s the all-time great PS controller, except I can’t actually hold the bottom protrusions in my hands.

What’s not to like? Just don’t hold the controller with your hands like you would normally do!

The constitution of some countries in the West includes the privacy of correspondence. Idk how many countries and how that privacy is interpreted in any particular cases.

IMO it should be argued, in the Europes, that this covers electronic correspondence too, and thus ChatControl and its ilk are unconstitutional.

There’s a small strategy game called ‘Antiyoy’, with simplistic mechanics, which works for short-ish games: you can do a stint while waiting in queue or such. Iirc ‘Antiyoy Classic’ is entirely offline, while the regular one has an online mode. Both have no ads and near zero permissions, unless something changed since I last played.

You can try ‘Diplicity’ for an online strategy a-la ‘Risk’ where you bargain and do alliances with other players, until one of you wins the whole thing. There’s no randomness. It’s an implementation of the board game ‘Diplomacy’.

‘Hocus’ is a nice spatial puzzle with impossible geometry. Iirc it requires payment for additional levels, but has no ads.

The app ‘Fabularium’ runs text adventures, i.e. games where you type your actions and read the description of what happens. There are a myriad of such adventure games, many with novel mechanics. You’ll need to download the games themselves separately, mainly from IFDb.org. ‘Fabularium’ isn’t the only app that runs text adventures, but I like it and it supports more formats than some other apps do.

OpenTTD is fine on a tablet — though controls aren’t specially adapted, they just emulate a mouse. On a phone screen the controls are too small and everything is crowded.

The enlightened know that it’s just a super-condensed retelling of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s and Alastair Smith’s ‘The Dictator’s Handbook’.

Regarding email, consider buying a personal domain for your email address. You specify the ip addresses of the email provider in the domain’s DNS, and on the provider’s side specify that the domain is for your email box. This way, if the email provider doesn’t work out, you only need to change the DNS records to another provider, instead of changing the email address on accounts (which is often impossible).

However, not all email providers support custom domains, and some only do that on paid tiers.

the amount of pro genocidal statements and cheers for extremism

whenever you bring up topics like treatment of minorities, lgbtq+ rights, feminism etc, people normally dont comment on this stuff or make a “harmless joke” out of it

Not sure what corners of Reddit you’re browsing, but from what I’ve seen on r/all, the active majority don’t make extremist statements and don’t make jokes out of minorities (with the exception of the weird “women am I right” on r/SipsTea). In fact, Reddit is pretty leftist by US standards, considering USians are the majority of active posters and commenters.

However, it does have a penchant for ridiculing both Pakistanis and Indians — which, though, is lately supported by Indians themselves posting videos of uncivil behaviour on r/indianrailways and such. Plus, Indians and Pakistanis on Reddit do disparage and dismiss each other — idk about any particularly extremist sentiment. But this disparagement is typically limited to Indian subreddits, which mostly consist of ethnic Indians — judging by the prevalence of Hindi — who I guess have strong feelings on the matter (dunno about Pakistani subs, as I haven’t seen them).

Also, Reddit is implementing automated moderation lately, which does stuff like detecting bigotry based on nationality. This moderation is very stupid and ineffective so far, as it removes one comment and issues a warning, while hundreds of comments with the same sentiment are visible plain as day, but don’t contain the same keywords. Meanwhile many completely innocuous comments are getting hidden because the automation felt wonky about them.

Reddit is leftist by US standards. Even though Spez is reportedly Republican, that doesn’t seem to be reflected in the platform’s operations. Instead they’re ruining it by making the content shittier and introducing stupid crap like automatic moderation that shadow-hides many comments for no good reason.

Good question, especially considering that the site is owned by Fandom, Inc. now.

I’ve seen several sites dedicated to old games go down in just a few recent years.

Alternatively

in addition to my kinda broken English, I have a really shitty Danish

Thankfully, not much difference between those, eh.

For spoken English, I greatly recommend audiobooks and podcasts. They typically have better narrators, so are easier to understand. As a bonus, one can listen to them while doing household chores and such — for me, consumption of books greatly increased with audiobooks compared to snatches of books here and there.

It’s just that I made a resolve recently-ish that I need to properly get into stories in games. Unlike back in the day, when I played through ‘Half-Life’ 1 and 2 and gathered pretty much nothing about the plot. ‘Disco Elysium’ seems to be the type of a game where a lot of the story is in the details dropped by the characters, reading materials, etc.

I’ve been recently replaying the original ‘Deus Ex’, and had Denton crawl around every level for hours, reading each newspaper and poster he comes across. The papers do in fact frame the main story, clarifying the relations between factions and such.

An extreme case of this is apparently the ‘Elder Scrolls’ universe, with which the community gathered sizeable lore and history that goes several layers deep. I’ve never played the games (perhaps for the best), and only happened upon a tangential discussion about this, but the impression was that they’re deciphering it like ‘Ulysses’.

Stuff about the setting that I learn from the characters. Perhaps you have better memory than me.

Steam has notes built in

This is great to know. I need to see if Steam accepts my copy of the game, for which I didn’t pay to the company after what they did to the developers.

But he’s a professional detective, presumably with the skill to gather information and put it together. Meanwhile I’m a professional scatterbrain who writes down notes for programming projects that take more than a day. It would be unrealistic for me to roleplay as him, especially if I step away from the game for a couple weeks and forget most of the details. If I can code while hungover, he probably can do detective stuff while hungover.

I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it’s been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I’ve heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.

Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain’t no way I’m remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.

I’ve put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.

That creature looks uncomfortable. Also, it’s been a while since I did anything D&D — aren’t those stats buffed a whole lot?