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.

Halo 3 released closer to the original Sonic the Hedgehog than today.

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.

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.)

Played a few minutes of Altered Beast (1988) on an incredibly shitty Genesis emulator I f̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ rose from its grave in the closet last week.

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

It’s a fine idea but feels like it’s maybe past its prime in terms of active maintenance? Like I checked out my old neighborhood in the suburbs of a large US city and the primary road through it (which the area is named after and has a very big visible welcome sign indicating that) was misspelled. I don’t have an account and didn’t care to learn how to edit it, but I did drop a note flagging the error. Then I browsed some of the other notes and noticed they were all multiple years old. Even Manhattan was littered with months- or years-old notes with only a handful of them marked resolved. Maybe they were just hard edge cases not easily fixed, but it gave the impression of a database that has not been broadly maintained for years.

Heckjumpers

My nightly routine before bed:

• Smartle (simple word game)
• Chronophoto (guess the year five photos were taken)
• TimeGuessr (guess the year and location five photos were taken)
• Connections (NYTimes categorization game)
• Spelling Bee (NYTimes letter game)
• Hurdle (basically five linked Wordles)
• Wordle
• Strands (new NYTimes letter game)

Also try to play AntGame.io at least once a day to get a decent score.

I thoroughly enjoy MetaFilter (one of the last surviving community blogs from the 90s) and Tildes (a more recent attempt at capturing the same feel). Text-heavy discourse, minimalist design, human-scale moderation, and moderately gatekept (MeFi has a $5 fee, Tildes is invite-only). PM me if you’re interested.

Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We’re all better together. I really hope you reconsider.

“WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, DON’T MAKE LEMONADE. MAKE LIFE TAKE THE LEMONS BACK! GET MAD! I DON’T WANT YOUR DAMN LEMONS! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?! DEMAND TO SEE LIFE’S MANAGER! MAKE LIFE RUE THE DAY IT THOUGHT IT COULD GIVE CAVE JOHNSON LEMONS! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! I’M THE MAN WHO’S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! WITH THE LEMONS! I’M GONNA GET MY ENGINEERS TO INVENT A COMBUSTIBLE LEMON THAT BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!”