Roughly in order of how much I enjoy them from most to least. (Not that the later ones are bad. Just that they’re more low-key.)

Mindustry is amazing, but as I mentioned above, really really addictive. (The commercial game it’s most often compared to is Factorio.)

Then there’s Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Amazing dungeon crawler.

Endless Sky is a great space mercantile sim.

Luanti is a Minecraft clone.

Unciv is a turn-based civilization development game.

And if you’re wanting to do emulation, there’s Lemuroid. Also, EasyRPG, an engine for playing RPG Maker games like Yume Nikki. Oh, FreeDoom is a great implementation of Doom for Android.

Those are the ones that’ll keep your attention for a good long time. There are tons of much simpler games that are still fun like Frozen Bubble and Hyper Rogue. And plenty of games that I haven’t really gotten into very much but that people really seem to like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Man. There are a lot now that I’m listing them out. Lol.

Jesus. People get big mad about this stuff.

The problem isn’t mobile games, and it’s not console games, and it’s not PC games. It’s the profit motive and corporations and enshittification. And there’s plenty of that going on in games for mobile, console, and PC. (And, for that matter, TTRPGs. And it’s not like the 300 different collectors editions of Monopoly released every year aren’t enshittification at play.)

Addictive gotcha mechanics are shitty when they’re tied to microtransactions. Even when not tied to microtransactions, I think they can still be shitty depending on the specific circumstances, and it’s definitely wise to responsibly manage your (and/or your children’s) engagement to not cause other problems in your(/their) life. But is addictiveness in a video game inherently a bad thing? I don’t think so. All games cause dopamine squirts whether it’s Pong or a slot machine. That’s kinda the point of games. There are plenty of Open Source games out there that cause big addictive dopamine squirts. (Mindustry, anyone?) And such games aren’t made to milk whales. They’re made because someone wanted to create and play such a game.

Don’t be talking too much smack about shovelware! Low-quality games create their own vibes. Some are accidental masterpieces. Both of my favorite two YouTube gaming content creators do a lot of their content on really low-quality games. This series got me to buy Radiation Island and I had a great time playing it. And here is a great video on all the shitty official games based on the movie Avatar.

“Gaming is as much about socializing as playing” is an awesome outlook to have on gaming! Addictiveness in games can be… concerning. But sometimes particular games are the key by which your kid can be involved in peer group. I’m not saying that automatically trumps any downsides and you should let your kid spend $∞ on Fortnight skins or whatever. But I think probably in most cases a balancing act is superior to a hard “yes” or “no”.

I should probably specify that I’m admittedly an old fart who doesn’t know shit about mobile gaming. (The only mobile games I play are Open Source ones on F-Droid.) And the only modern console I have is a Switch, and I don’t have any plans to get one soon. I’ve played a lot of Breath of the Wild, though. And a fair amount of Tears of the Kingdom.

Some final thoughts:

• Open Source gaming is awesome.
• The way they’re doing anti-cheat on PC is fucked-up.
• But so is the way they lock down consoles and phones.
• Hack your games. Hack your consoles. (If you don’t hack it, you don’t own it.) Get your kids interested in hacking stuff.
• …responsibly, of course.
• Play games with your kids! (And not just the ones you want to play.)

Who’s going to tell them about prions?

So, I’ve been using Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pis for some “desktop systems” as well as for a janky-ass NAS solution, but that project is kindof dying. They go many months in a row sometimes without any package updates. It’s wild. And when people ask WTF is going on and offer beg to be allowed to help in some way, the admins lock the thread.

So, I’ve been looking to switch my Raspberry Pi’s to something that doesn’t depend so much on some “project” out there to be able to continue to use.

The main Gentoo project fully supports ARM. And even if it didn’t, it’d be a lot easier to use Gentoo without support than Arch.

Switching my main box (not a Raspberry Pi – it’s an x86_64 system) to Gentoo was basically for the purpose of trying out Gentoo again and evaluating whether I want to take the plunge and switch everything to Gentoo.

Aside from that, there’s SystemD which is yucky. (Yes, I know about Artix, but when last I tried it, it didn’t really feel “ready for prime time”. It depends a lot on the main Arch repos.)

Plus, I do kindof like the idea of “more control over my system(s)”. Configuring/compiling my own kernel (yes, you can do that on Arch, it’s much less “in the spirit of” Arch) to make it as minimal as possible and disable everything I don’t need. And of course USE flags are a plus if you want a light system.

Anyway, those are my main reasons.

Me too!

I used Gentoo almost exlusively from like 2003 to maybe 2012 or 2013. I switched to Arch about then. But quite recently I made the switch back to Gentoo on my primary box and I’m happy I did.

Only thing I still need to do to really make it long-term sustainable for my particular use is to set up a build server on my network. My “primary box” is in the room where I sleep and I need it dark and quiet when I’m sleeping. Can’t have MOBO color-shifting LEDs and fan sounds overnight. And I can’t compile something like Chromium in less than the 15-to-16-ish hours I’m awake in a given day. (And I’d prefer to compile it myself rather than using a binary package.) Hence the need for a build server.

A salamander. I see what you did there.

I’m a “completionist” sort of person, so I’d start at the beginning. Not saying I recommend doing so. It’s just a quirk of my psychology.

I upvoted this before I saw what community it was in. Now I wish I could upvote twice.

Oh look what instance this was posted on.

Nah, that’s an organizer. You’re thinking of the type of aircraft that flies by flapping its wings.

What’s the deal with moths? Am I out of the loop and it’s just the new beans/stroganoff/poop-holding?

Oh, no idea.

English.

Yeah, I think “a slice of bread” is a lot more common than “a bread slice”. Not to say I haven’t ever heard “a bread slice” used. I’m sure I have at least a few times. It would be pretty rare, however.

Though, I’m not sure “a pizza slice” is all that much more common. Maybe there are regions where it’s very common? Or maybe it’s more common in certain contexts? Like maybe sell-by-the-slice pizza places might tend to refer to “a pizza slice” rather than “a slice of pizza” when talking with coworkers? (That said, I’d imagine they’d just shorten it further to “a slice” since the “pizza” part would tend to be obvious in that case.)

Also, @eager_eagle@lemmy.world mentioned “water bottle”. I think if I hear “a water bottle” rather than “a bottle of water”, I’m probably going to assume it may or may not be an empty bottle intended for water rather than a bottle filled with water as “a bottle of water” would imply.

Way off the topic of programming, but linguistics is fascinating too!

The Go programming language documentation makes a big deal about how it “reads from left to right.” Like, if you were describing the program in English, the elements of the Go program go in the same order as they would in English.

I say this as someone who likes Go as a language and writes more of it than any other language: I honestly don’t entirely follow. One example they give is how you specify a type that’s a “slice” (think “list” or “array” or whatever from other languages) of some other type. For instance a “slice of strings” would be written []string. The [] on the left means it’s a slice type. And string on the right specifies what it’s a slice of.

But does it really make less sense to say “a string slice”?

In Go, the type always comes after the variable name. A declaration might look like:

var a string

Similarly in function declarations:

func bob(a string, b int, c float64) []string { ... }

Anyway, I guess all that to say I don’t mind the Go style, but I don’t fully understand the point of it being the way it is, and wouldn’t mind if it was the other way around either.

Edit: Oh, I might add that my brain will never use the term “a slice of bytes” for []byte. That will forever be “a byte slice” to me. I simply have no choice in the matter. Somehow my brain is much more ok with “a slice of strings”, though.

I’ll try to say this delicately enough to not get banned…

The modlog (which also contains the full text of my post) cites as the reason for the removal of my post “rule 1” which according to the sidebar is “Be civil and nice.”

I think they consider any criticism of the government of Iran to be “incivility” and/or “meanness”.

(Hopefully I’m not misinterpreting the mods here. Mods, please feel free to step in and correct any such misrepresentation.)

My grandmother was similarly god-like at the NES Dr. Mario.

Removed by mod

No, that’s a U.S. state in the north-west of the contiguous 48.

Oh shit, is it just the eventual end product of teenage rebelliousness?