There are two good options: Host your own blog yourself, or join a blogging platform that isn’t corporate. I personally use BearBlog but I’ve heard good things about Write.as as well. These two have free blogging options and don’t sell your data. If you want to host it yourself (which is safer), check out Hugo.

Ultimately, bots scrape the entire internet and there’s no guarantee they will honor robots.txt of a particular website (which tells bots what they are and aren’t allowed to do). If it’s on the internet, people can scrape your content and there isn’t much you can do about it. That shouldn’t stop you from writing or blogging, just don’t post very personal data.

Also, feel free to join us on !blogging@programming.dev!

“Merge pull request #8 from [branch name]”

Not the most exciting but hey, someone has to do it.

It’s a two part story:

1. The mobile market mostly targets kids and boomers and their resistance to microtransactions has been basically non-existent, making the market quickly become predatory and full of spam

2. Modern app stores have become abysmal, making it impossible for smaller games to see the light of day. 99% of google play is a dumpster fire, and the 1% that is decent isn’t published by a multi-billion dollar company so you’re unlikely to ever see it. There are good games out there, but the way the algorithms and ads work makes them constantly pushed down in the list. This isn’t “a problem” to a company like Google because they’re making bank off of all these ad spaces.

Anyways, most good games are paid, but here’s a list of stuff I’ve enjoyed playing on mobile:

• Fancy Pants Adventures

• Bloons TD 6

• Dicey Dungeons

• Dead Cells

• Slay the Spire (but the mobile port is rough on small screens)

• Knights of Pen and Paper +1

• The Enchanted Cave 2

• Let’s Create! Pottery

• BAIKOH

• Data Wing

Probably a lot more I forgot. Have at it.

Has it ever been better?

Actually, yes, by a big margin. Back in ~2011 mobile games were actually trying to be great. Games like Edge Extended, World of Goo, Bounce Boing Voyage, Zenonia 2 & 3, etc.

I remember early Humble Bundles being full of exciting games for mobile, now you’ll be lucky to find just one of them that isn’t filled to the brim with MTX or ads.

A mod launcher is a program that lets you set up and configure mods for a game, then launch the game with everything set up for you. They exist because configuring everything yourself can be a real pain.

Good read, and I think you might want to look at OnlyOffice. It’s open source and while it is kindof a shameless Microsoft Office clone, it does seem to support LaTeX when adding equations. Not sure how well it works as I don’t use it though. The slides app is pretty decent, the only bone I have to pick with it is that there aren’t many animation types and most of them are very basic. Otherwise, might be what you’re looking for.

Edit: I just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. Select LaTeX, type your equation, then select professional in the dropdown menu and it’ll show the equation.

TL;DR you’ll enjoy it if you like casual puzzle games lol.

Voxelgram is a spiritual successor to an older game called Picross 3D. Picross 3D is a 3D version of a popular logic puzzle called Nonograms.

Levelhead is a fantastic mario-maker esque platformer. The official campaign is a little over 10 hours long and is pretty good but its main draw is its incredible level editor and infinite number of quality levels online. I can’t recommend it enough. Sadly it never got as popular as it should have but there’s still a massive backlog of online levels to play.

Someone else mentioned Distance and I agree. It’s a futuristic racing game with some horror elements. The campaign is short, but there’s a great amount of levels in the workshop. The multiplayer modes are also pretty fun if you can grab a few friends (there’s split-screen too).

Inkbound is launching from early access soon and while I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest roguelike out there, it’s a lot of fun and very unique. It’s essentially a co-op turn based RPG where you and other players play all your turns at the same time. I’ve played a lot of singleplayer too and the game feels well balanced there.

Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.

I’ve reached a point where I avoid these types of updates. An update post like that either means nothing important changed or they’re up to something.

A while ago I saw that style of patch notes, updated an app, and suddenly I can’t use it anymore because it got limited to a maximum of 2 devices. Another time I updated an app putting a harmless “we improved the user experience” message, they put dark mode behind a paywall. This isn’t counting the number of times an app got redesigned to make the user experience worse for no reason. Maybe they wanted to justify hiring 5 UI/UX interns in that quarter or something.

The patch notes look harmless, but my god, they are usually up to something.

FWIW not everyone using source control is a programmer. I’ve seen artists in game dev using GUI tools to pull new changes and push their assets.

Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can’t even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera’s website.

I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.

downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

I think it’s the complete opposite. Platforms with downvotes tend to be less toxic because you don’t have to reply to insane people to tell them they’re wrong, whereas platforms like Twitter get really toxic because you only see the likes, so people tend to get into fights and “ratio” them which actually increases the attention they get and spreads their message to other people.

In general, platforms without upvotes/downvotes tend to be the most toxic imo. Platforms like old-school forums and 4chan are a complete mess because low-effort troll content is as loud as high effort thoughtful ones. It takes one person to de-rail a conversation and get people to fight about something else, but with downvotes included you just lower their visibility. It’s basically crowdsourced moderation, and it works relatively well.

As for ways to reduce toxicity, shrug. Moderation is the only thing that really stops it but if you moderate too much then you’ll be called out for censoring people too much, and telling them not to get mad is just not going to happen.

My idea for less toxicity is having better filtering options for things people want to see. Upon joining a platform it would give easy options to filter out communities that are political or controversial. That’s what I’m doing on Lemmy, I’m here for entertainment, not arguing.

I made a guide a while back explaining everything. It’s easier than it looks, you’ll just use a manager like Lutris or Heroic and download the newest version of Wine-GE, then your games should work.

Pretty interesting, reminds me of Vintage Story. Thanks for sharing.

Hell, probably.

I used to play it a lot about a decade ago. Good times.

It’s just not very good compared to any other kart game. Aside from the fact that it’s very dated, the driving is slow, the levels are wide and uninspired, the racing itself is very simple. SRB2Kart is another open source karting game and it’s sooooo much better.

I hope the rumors are false. Hasn’t hollywood ruined enough franchises by now? At the very least give us a remaster of the original trilogy, they’re timeless masterpieces.

Whoops. I forgot to mention this. I’ll add a little section for it later…

Go to Steam settings --> Storage. There you can add your 2nd Steam folder and be able to move games back and forth. You can select many games and click “Move”.

Thank you for the kind words :)