Air blowing over my skin is the worst.

Bright lights are bad, but they're nothing compared to having a fan actively moving air across me. I can feel every bit of turbulence and it's so distracting that it makes me want to stab something or tear my own skin off.

Now that it's Summer everyone and their mother at work wants to have a personal fan on their desk or use a shop fan on the floor to keep cool and when I have to work with them it's torture.

I'd rather be hot and just drink more water.

Farming? Really? Man of your talents?

I really like how the web serial Sideways in Hyperspace handles this problem.

In short, the faster ships catch up with the slower generation ships, facilitating trade, arranging transport for those who want to leave, and allowing them to become extrasolar cities and stepping stones to the wider galaxy.

My Laptop will be 15 years old this year.

It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.

Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.

Still runs fine. She's a trooper.

CHLOE YES!

I think the joke is that it's a rating rather than a sample.

So this doctor gets 1* reviews vs the 4.5* doctors.

This one is a bit better for chronic pain.

My phone only goes off silent on the rare occasions I've been asked to be on call for an emergency project at work.

So like three times in the last ten years.

Tunic is a solid 10-15 hour adventure game, and I highly recommend playing without spoilers as several experiences are information-locked like Outer Wilds. It's an isometric adventure game heavily inspired by Zelda with some Souls influence bleeding into the lore, mechanics, and boss fights. Replayability is limited to speedrunning and challenge runs.

Bastion is a wonderful adventure game with a heavy focus on combat. It's a precursor to Hades from the same developer, and shares the same mechanical DNA minus the rogue-lite elements that Hades introduced. The followup game, Transistor, is also worth checking out, though it didn't quite hit the same highs for me as Bastion. Both are 10-20 hour adventures with limited replayability if you want to achievement hunt.

More games to check out:

Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2

Journey, Abzu, and The Pathless

Subnautica

"Come again?"

Yes.

It's a toss up.

My favorite time was when I tried to pour myself a bowl of cereal. Got the bowl, milk, and cereal out. Poured the cereal into the milk jug. Put away the milk, cereal, and bowl. Walked away for some reason. Came back and couldn't find the bowl of cereal I just made. Looked all over for it. Finally gave up and got the milk, bowl, and cereal out to try again. Poured the cereal into the bowl this time. Poured the milk. Cereal is coming out of the milk jug. Suddenly flash back to a few minutes ago when I was picking up spilled cereal off the counter and shoving it into the milk jug because it missed when I tried to pour.

The worst time I was so sleep-deprived that I managed to throw some trash in the toilet and then I peed in the trash can.

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.

That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies.

You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not.

You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

• Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)

Psychonauts (the original, not the sequel, though the sequel is also good) is a Summer Camp themed 3D platformer. It doesn't quite meet your "low stakes/chill gameplay" criteria as it does have combat and mildly challenging boss fights and platforming, but it nails the rest. It's easier than Tunic. Maybe worth checking out.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons strictly meets all the criteria listed, but it's ultimately a tragic story. If "some kind of impact" includes leaving you in tears, check it out.

Okami is a Zelda style adventure set in feudal Japan with immaculate vibes. You play as the sun goddess Amaterasu in the form of a wolf bringing light and life to a land ravaged by demons. The world is cold and dark at first, but you bring spring and summer on your heels.

Finally, two favorites from my childhood are the Spyro series and the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series. These are 3D Platformer collectathons and neither of these series are even close to any of the examples you provided, but they are bright and colorful and in my heart they have feelings of Summer Vacation and staying home all day to play video games.

Firewatch was a recent purchase for me which I mildly regret.

As a walking simulator it's wholly dependent on the quality of its story, and the quality just isn't there. It starts strong but the ending is rushed and without a coherent resolution. It does so much work to set up multiple dramatic mysteries and then haphazardly solves half of them out of nowhere and forgets the rest in the final scramble to finish.

Nice graphics. Great voice acting. Neat concept. Needed more time to cook and left me feeling like I wasted my time getting invested in the story.

A recent release? Diablo 4 I guess. I don't really regret it since I knew what I was in for. I bought it to play with my best friend, and we had fun together until he got bored and frustrated. My hopes were high but my expectations were minimal and it still barely managed to meet them.

Gave Valheim another shot.

The last couple times I've tried it I struggled picking up momentum and progressing in the game, as the initial tutorial seems to be missing a few key steps so I end up spinning my wheels not knowing what to do next.

This time I had Christmas break time to fuck around and find out. Pushed through the initial hurdles and actually made decent progress, including soloing the first boss. It's a solid game so far, but it could communicate its expectations a bit more clearly.

I picked up Monster Hunter World again last night after playing some Dark Souls Remastered and itching for more of that style combat. I forgot how much better it was than Rise, and I never got around to playing Iceborne. Having a lot of fun with the new stuff, and I think it'll be my default game this week.

You're meant to compress your belongings before they go in the bag, then decompress them when you need them.

Just beat Factorio (launched a rocket) for the first time a couple of days ago. Feels good.

Default settings, and I got the Lazy Bastard, no lasers, no solar, no provider/buffer/requestor chests, and SLaTfAtF achievements in one go after about 80 hours in.

Continuing the Factory for now to farm the 20m Green Circuit production achievement. Slowly transitioning from a main bus factory to a city blocks factory. Blue circuits are my bottleneck, so I'm working on scaling up production off-bus.

Planning to go for the speedrun achievements next weekend. Want to 100% the game before the new expansion they've been teasing drops.

The factory must grow.

My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.

Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn't really get anywhere with that.

Eventually I had money and time to put together a "proper" gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I'd had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.

Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I've only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.

Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It's got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.

Yeah. Every few years in the Winter or whenever I get particularly stressed my hands and feet break out in red bumps with absolutely maddening subdermal itching. Biting and chewing is absolutely the only way to get proper (albeit temporary) relief.

Two weeks later all that skin is dead and I'm peeling like a lizard for a month straight. It's awful.