LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.

I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me “this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!”… admittedly they didn’t know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point… they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn’t know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.

Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah… Syncthing isn’t a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device… and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace and approach you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism… COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.

Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing’s GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!

That is great to hear, definitely seemed like FreeCAD was REALLY basic in the past, but there is such a big gap for a really fully featured FOSS Cad software!

Well we can’t live without a modern game that acknowledges how awesome Total Annihilation is as an idea so effectively that means we can’t live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?

I mean Forged Alliance Forever is amazing and I am zero percent bashing it… and ok I guess we would still have Planetary Annihilation, and that game looks pretty awesome too…so I suppose technically we could live without Beyond All Reason but I doubt even the Planetary Annihilation devs would be happy about that world, I know the FAF community wouldnt be happy lol.

When Jupiter or Saturn finally wins some competitions are they going to get their medals in the form of precious metals aersolized into a vapor and stuffed into a mason jar?

Rubber Bandits is a nice alternative to Boomerang Fu too

In terms of twin stick games, Voidigo is currently giving Enter The Gungeon a run for its money.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle

i recommend this bundle, donut dodo, round guard, indie guards in that bundle,

Also Hyperparasite in this one https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle

Spelunky 2

Chronicon

Caveblazers

Heroes Of Hammerwatch

Helldivers 1

Barony

Terraria (of course)

Broforce

Duck Game

Don’t Starve Together

Nuclear Throne (of course!!!)

Streets Of Rogue!! (keep your eye out for Streets Of Rogue 2!!!)

Wobbly Life

PlateUp

Glitchbusters

Ember Knights

Bones Cafe

Shovel Knight

Rainworld Downpour

Petal Crash

Definitely Sneaky But Not Sneaky

Sigma Impact

Cassette Beasts

Spirits Abyss

Cosmos Quickstop

DIG

Farm Together

Death Road To Canada !!! <-----

Knight Squad 2

One Step From Eden

Mutant Football League

Rampage Knights

Maniac (who cares it isn’t co-op it is hilarious as a pass and play)

X Morph Defense

Monaco

Tricky Towers

Himno the silent melody

Dungeon Of The Endless

Adventures Of Shuggy

Renegade Ops

Omega Strikers (online team based)

Cryptark

Ms Splosion Man

Full Metal Furies

Battleblock Theater

Colt Canyon

Cook Serve Delicious series

Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!

facepalm silly me

Thank you for the thoughtful response

It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

The Sea Will Claim Everything

https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/

I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.

I think this meme might actually be perfect

Yeah if bicycles had been discovered before fossil fuels I think history would look very very different and it is a great point.

It is interesting looking forward too, 20th century might have been all about fossil fuel burning cars but the future is electric bicycles and tricycles. After all, the bicycle as a form of human powered transportation was perfected in the development of mountain bike, road bike and cruiser bike types during the later half of the 20th century, and so as a “cutting edge” technology electric bicycles take almost no new development and R&D to figure out what works.

Certainly a myriad of forms of electric bicycles will arise (like the bakfiets), but it is interesting how titanic a shift the adoption of electric bicycles will be and yet they didn’t require the development of totally new technologies to make this transportation technology function. Take a mountain bicycle, strap a battery to it and boom you have by far the most effective form of transportation ever developed in terms of a human carry-able vehicle that can transport you hundreds of miles over virtually any kind of terrain (so long as people have at least walked that route enough to make a trail).

The battery pack slots on electric bicycles will become the place people strap the power banks everyone is increasingly carrying around to power their mobile devices. I heard someone describe their perspective as a tank crewman about how infantry carrying around big heavy rifles is silly, they pointed out “why carry a gun when your gun can carry you?” and I feel the same exact way about electric battery banks on electric bicycles.

I know most of this reply has been in relation to the future of the bicycle, but the incredible explosion of electric bicycle use that is happening (and will continue to happen all over the world in rich and poor countries) I think necessarily points to the fact that bicycles were an innovation with a lot of latent possibility that was passed over by history for quite a long time (and bicycles just kept getting better mostly in the background). I think it points to the validity of your question, what would have happened had history focused on the bicycle sooner?

I think a reasonable touchstone here is the open source rts engine called the Spring RTS Engine. https://springrts.com/

There have been lots of games (mostly but not limited to total annihilation-likes) built on the Spring Engine over the years, and I think the engine has a name well suited to an open source platform for building games on. It is short, easy to remember and crucially though the obvious motivation to build the Spring Engine was to make a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation in a 3D engine with arbitrary camera movement…. the name “Spring Engine” doesn’t artificially limit the suggested possibilities of the engine to just TA clones (see Zero-K or Spring 1944).

I would go with something really simple like Block Engine or Blockworlds Engine and just toss out the Minecraft association anyways, but that is my own two cents no one asked for lol.

I think VoxeLibre is a great name. MineClone needed to go as a name and I honestly don’t like Minetest either since it implies that the game is janky and half finished, which it isn’t but even if it was there is no sense cementing that longterm as the name of the game in people’s minds.

Anyways, great news in my opinion!

If you want to do something about it just go play beam.ng or motor town or another racing game from a smaller dev.

Nebulous has a conquest mode that is in testing at the moment that sounds extremely promising. The base gameplay is so good the game doesn’t need much, just a bit of progression between battles and choices to make about who to fight next.

Transcendence is a classic, the dev is still working on the game and the first early version came out in 1995 so rest assured if the game peaks your interest there is a lottttt to sink your teeth into there!

I don’t know how I came across Star Sector but games it reminds me of:

• Mount and Blade obviously (the open world with roaming bands you encounter)

• Transcendence is a game where you only play as a single ship but this is one of longest developed 2d top down ship games and it deserves mention.

• Battlevoid Harbinger is much simpler but the game is well suited for mobile and the tactical battles are actually extremely interesting, there is a lot of thought to how you approach situations and which direction you choose to go through sectors.

• Silent Sector, I haven’t played this one but it seems to be well reviewed. This is a game where you fly mostly one ship I think.

• Subspace Continuum is a deep cut lol, old multiplayer 2d spaceship combat game with really realllllllly deep combat mechanics and a very high skill ceiling. You pilot a single ship. Mostly dead :(

• Nebulous Fleet Command is a good pick if you want Star Sector but 3D. It actually controls fantastic on my steamdeck and I am reallly REALLY impressed by the UI, tutorials and general control scheme as this game is basically as in-depth with radar, targeting, guided missiles as you can get without going for a modern day military sim (like command modern operations or something).

• Space Rangers HD: A War Apart looks bonkers, haven’t played it but it deserves a mention for just being so off the wall and obscure

• (Microsoft) Allegiance is an old space combat game kind of like Empires Mod or Natural Selection 2 where one player per team is the commander who plays the game like an RTS and all the other teammates play the game like it is a spaceship combat game. It is 3D and multiplayer but I feel like there is some shared DNA here with picking the right fights so you can upgrade your fleet and then taking enemies more head on.

• Armored Brigade is worth a mention, yes I know it is an entirely different genre of a Cold War gone hot realistic military game, but the top down visual style and the really interesting delayed orders system I think might be interesting to check out as a fan of tactical spacecombat games. The effective range of main battle tanks in this game alone is terrifying.

• The Last Federation by the makers of AI War also deserves a mention here because I LOVE the clever twisting of game mechanics (these developers are great at that, see Tidalis lol) where you play a single spaceship amidst warring factions but that your goal is to UNIFY them. You are an extremely powerful alien from a dead race with a powerful ship and you want to stop the galaxy falling into war but you are only one ship and you have to think about the political/diplomatic implications of every move you make. It gives the game structure of star sector or mount and blade where you roam around fighting and negotiating with much bigger factions than yourself a broader shape and arc to the experience. Very cool game, I haven’t tried it yet either though.

• Star Traders: Frontiers sigh imagine if it had combat like star sector??! Or imagine Star sector had its non-combat elements fleshed out this much?

• Helium Rain looks very very interesting in the way it simulates economies and let’s you interact with an open world but it is 3D

• Children Of A Dead Earth is probably the only actually realistic space combat game, I want to try it

• x4 series or whatever seems like it has great options for building up companies with automated ships going everywhere never tried it though

• 3030 Deathwar Redux is a great singleplayer 2d space game with a well done story and fantastic looking grim cyberpunk pixel art. I love the commitment to going with a point and click style art scheme for everything outside of the spaceship cockpit. This game nails the vibes and I think other game developers making space games should take another serious look at just how efficiently point and click games can convey the feeling of place with a single backdrop or two and some music (imagine if a space game like Star Traders: Frontiers had the art style of The Sea Will Claim Everything?? Ooooff that would be dope).

• The Dominions and Conquest Of Elysium series, I know this is a different genre but there are a ton of shared mechanics and strategies here and I need to mention them in case a space strategy fan hasn’t stumbled onto them yet.

• ΔV: Rings of Saturn rightfully takes a closer look at space mining as being something that is fun, exploding spacerocks with lasers shouldn’t be like a more boring version of a basic MMO quest right? It should be like playing a game of pool but you are ON the pool table and the pool balls can crush you (I suppose Hardspace: Shipbreaker deserves a similar nod for making us consider how foolishly we handwave away the fun of disposing of our unwanted starships by abstracting all the fun plasma-torch cutty bits into a single “sell” button) .

sigh ok sorry one more deep cut and I will stop, I am just having too much fun going through the cobwebs of my brain lol

• Approaching Infinity is a turn based roguelike game where you play a spaceship captain roaming the universe with very very simple graphics but the gameplay is absolutely superb and deep as hell. Yes, the graphics are awful hahaha but the abstracted tile based nature of the game means that complex systems can more easily be built and developers have more time to focus on balancing those mechanics so that a player always feels like they have interesting choices to make. A difference here though is that a big part of the game is exploring a wildly different planets with different hazards and resources, this game is kinda a bit like No Man’s Sky if it had completely opposite design goals.

I of course have a deep love for coffee, I am always trying to get myself more into tea but usually it just doesn’t do it for me.

I do like green tea quite a bit though.

Any recommendations for non-dairy milk that goes well with black or green tea?

I do I just wish they believed in me.

sigh

I would be absolutely amazing at this job, I do this naturally, I am inescapably an agent of chaos.