Katamari Damacy. It has a reputation for being silly Japanese nonsense, but the gameplay is brilliant, the graphics are timeless, the soundtrack is incredible, and it has some surprising thematic depth.

I feel like doing that automatically would just encourage instances to defederate if their larger communities didn’t like the cut of another instance’s jib. The culture clash would be harder to tolerate if content were mixed by default like that.

Maybe an easier way for end users to do it themselves? Like making a feed of multiple communities under one topic.

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It’s actually pretty rare for dictatorships to have only one legal party. Even North Korea is nominally a multi-party state. Such minor parties are just token controlled opposition ofc, but they serve to give a flimsy “democratic” veneer.

America’s trajectory rn is aiming closer to the illiberal/managed democracy of Hungary under Viktor Orban, where there are true opposition parties with an actual chance at winning, but the media, government, and electoral system is strongly biased against them.

Annoyingly, it initially seemed to work well on my iPad (only lacking right-click support, which upped the difficulty nicely), but now it only shows the multicolored loading screen forever. Not a cookie thing either, since it does the same thing in a private tab.

I just wish it would prioritize the top from the last 6 hours while showing older stuff below. Because slower communities feel dead when you visit and see no posts (even if there was one seven hours ago).

Thomas Manga: “No, I just wanted to make him jerk it.”

I see this claim so much, and it’s bullshit. Harris didn’t make a single policy concession to get Cheney on board. And why would she? The entire point of having her endorse was to send the message of “Trump is so dangerous that even people who disagree with me are choosing to support me.”

This might be more of a blogosphere-era thing I guess. Even when most people blogging did it for pleasure rather than work, it was always considered polite to “hat tip” (h/t) the source of a given link, if you happened to find it on someone else’s site.

When you share something cool, link back to the original creator or where you found it from.

Petrichor: The smell of rain on dry ground. One of those things everybody knows about but lacks a word for.

The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey’s Beads. It’s an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn’t be possible.

Maybe, but you definitely see more niche flavors like pistachio, coffee, mango, pineapple-coconut, rum raisin, etc. Hard to believe apple would be less popular, unless it’s more expensive to make for some reason.

Southeastern US. This is my first time seeing apple-anything ice cream on the shelves, from major national brands at least.

This particular one is apple pie, but the ice cream itself (minus the pie crust chunks) would be great on its own.

It’s a well-constructed skit – unabashedly silly, with just the right amount of ironic detachment. I love how after Pumpkins shows up, the couple just coolly analyzes the regular monsters that were making them scream moments before. The music is ridiculous, Tom Hanks demeanor is ridiculous, the dancing is ridiculous (with a dash of sexual weirness at the end). And it comes full circle with him genuinely scaring them in the end.

I do think that them doing sequels and trying to spin a mini-franchise out of it was stupid though.

ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.

Trailer

You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.

You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)

Here Comes the Sun. Simple melody, timeless lyrics, and it’s the most-streamed Beatles song out of an already strong and memorable catalog.

Heckjumpers