When you have a goose that produces a reliable daily supply of golden eggs do you:

1. keep collecting your daily egg
   or
2. see if giving it a good kick or two gets you more eggs

It kinda feels like this whole mess is giving me permission to leave. Like when you know that you are in an unhealthy relationship but don't know how to get out of it and suddenly your partner says that maybe you should start seeing other people.

Mastodon doesn't push content into your face, you get only what you ask for: the people and hashtags you follow. One caveat is that hashtag follow works much better if you are on a larger instance with more users and their follows pulling in more posts for a given hashtag.

For a specific example I am on mastodon.social and I follow a handful of individuals and a few hashtags (#boardgames and #emacs are probably the biggest ones) and I see about 50-80 posts a day which is plenty for me, especially if I dig into their threads.

I think a lot of the old core group will actually end up leaving by the end of this business. The question is will it matter. Can the site be successful as it transform itself into an also-ran tiktok-clone?

The good news is that those of us who move on won't have to worry about it anymore.

In Timeline-α the Visitors didn't turn away in disgust and Contact was approved. The Uplift process is well underway, environmental conditions have been stabilized and restoration is progressing well. Space travel is still restricted to the Solar System but Humanity is on track to full Membership. Ambassador Harambe has resumed his duties on the Council.

Hive. The original version has larger tiles, the mini version is more compact but should still work as long as it's not too windy. Hive Carbon is worth checking out if you prefer that color scheme.

For Azul I wonder if the new Azul Mini might work better, smaller tiles but the boards have indents to keep tile in place. And much better score track.

Just interact with it. Share your thoughts, post comments, make threads. Be nice. Bring friends if you like it.

This is what I have from Steam on my Linux laptop, similar HW, a bit older:
Baba Is You, The Binding of Isaac, Celeste, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Darkest Dungeon, Dicey Dungeons, Enter the Gungeon, FTL, Hollow Knight, Into the Breach, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Monster Train, Opus Magnum, Slay the Spire, Spelunky.
And traditional roguelikes are always good: Crawl, Brogue, Nethack.

I am currently playing through Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, both are excellent and play great on the deck.

You asked for AAA but I will mention some of my deck favorites from the indie side too: Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Hotline Miami 1 and 2 and Monster Train.

Table-riffle, split into smaller decks if needed. Easy to learn and not too bad on the cards since you bend them much less than you'd with a regular riffle.

I enjoyed watching this video about how the pros do it.

1. Turn based gameplay, especially as it's done in classic roguelikes. Also like it in turn-based strategy (XCOM etc), going back to Rebel Star on the Spectrum.
2. Deckbuilding. I love it in boardgames so it's fun to see it being explored in videogames too.

I am usually not a huge fan of such tools but I am kinda ok with flatpak. The fact that it doesn't need a daemon (or even root) and the relatively sane CLI makes it passable and I use it when the alternative is more painful.

One particularly fitting use case seems to be managing non-Steam packages on the Steam Deck. It funny to see non-Linux users managing to install and use all kinds of stuff through it.

Mastodon does allow following (and pinning) hashtags. It's a relatively new feature, was added in version 4 at the end of last year. Totally OK to prefer Lemmy though, there is no wrong way to use the Fediverse.

We had a lot of fun with Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (also known as "Gotta Save the Space Bunnies") which is not split but local co-op on a shared screen.

Been on Gentoo for a long time. My current image has been rolling forward since 2008 which is when I switched to 64 bit but I started using it long before that.

I value transparency, control and customizability. I occasionally look into other options (and use them at work and in other contexts) but haven't yet found a better fit for my personal preferences.

/r/boardgames and /r/emacs for me. I can get some of my boardgame fix on Mastodon but the more the better. I see that there is a ![email protected] but not very active so far and not sure if the mod is still around.

Edit, apparently both exist!

Since we are in [email protected] I will ask the question: How would you design Vampire Survivors: The Boardgame?

My take: The one thing I would definitely want to preserve is the massive power escalation, both for the player and the enemies. Perhaps a deckbuilder with upgradeable cards? Like the transform cards in some Ascension sets but more increments. Each turn you'd have to deal with a large number of enemy cards that are arranged in a grid around you. Your cards would give movement, attack and defense. You'd be solving a quick spatial puzzle each turn to get the most out of your hand.

• Regicide is very impressive in its weight class and considering that all you need is a standard deck of cards. No reason not to try it
• In the pandemic-family my favorites are Pandemic: The Cure which turns Pandemic into a dice rolling romp and Pandemic: Fall of Rome, has cool cube movement and dice based combat rules. One step up is The LOOP which is somewhere between Pandemic and Spirit Island, uses card driven actions and has a push-pull mechanic
• Aeon's End and Heroes of Tenefyr for deckbuilding. The latter is kinda like a multiplayer co-op Friday, fun push-your-luck decisions
• Shipwreck Arcana for co-op deduction.

Honorable mentions: Mantis Falls for 2p semi-coop. You have to work together to get to the end of the road but there is a 50% chance that your partner is an assassin biding his time.

I am taking this as my permission to play on rookie!

Classic roguelikes have the most longetivity for me. Crawl, Brogue, Nethack.