My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.

Balatro came out two months ago.

I have 93 hours in it.

Yup. Zorin’s another great Debian-based distro. I’ve been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I’m a fan.

Man… Anybody remember “Back Orifice”? The late nineties were weird.

If not vanilla Ubuntu, I’d still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it’ll be easier to find fixes for it.

What you’ll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a “family” (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

The major families at the moment are

• Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

• Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven’t used it in a decade, so I won’t say much about it here.

• Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. … Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros… But not necessarily in distros from other families.

In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don’t have to allow it. But given that there’s no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe

My wife has hella aphantasia. And facial blindness. She jokes that she would make the world’s worst eyewitness to a crime - she wouldn’t be able to recognize the perp or be able to describe 'em even if she could!

But as it has turned out, she’s been having trouble hearing as she’s grown older. We keep the subtitles on and avoid dining in even slightly noisy restaurants. Anything besides nearby face to face speech is a crapshoot.

So she saw an audiologist who ran the standard battery of tests and said “Your hearing is fine… But have you heard of auditory processing disorder?” Turns out that a portion of our auditory processing overlaps with a bit of our visual processing. For my wife, whose visual systems don’t all work right, her ability to filter noise and extract meaningful sound has started to degrade a bit. Mechanically her hearing is fine. But she can’t process the signal right - possibly related to her aphantasia.

There’s a lot we don’t know yet about aphantasia. Like synesthesia, it’s only been described medically in the very recent past. But if you ever start struggling to understand conversations… Check for auditory processing disorder alongside the rest.

For my wife… well, sge was able to get hearing aids - which look sleek now - and it’s been night and day. Instead of shifting frequencies, these are like noise canceling headphones on steroids. She’s suddenly able to follow conversations in noisy environments that would have been impossible before! So… if any of that sounds (heh) familiar - there’s help available!

Google: It’s a three-pronged attack: sub-liminal, liminal and super-liminal.

Lisa: Superliminal?

Google: I’ll show you. (leans out of window) Hey, you! Code in Golang!

Carl: Uh, yeah, all right. Lenny: I’m in.

Mechanically - both games are puzzle games in the same rough 3d-platform-puzzler vein as Portal. Instead of solving puzzles with teleportation however, you’ve got laser beams and force fields.

On a more metaphysical level, the first game is a philosophical investigation of what it means to be human - to be alive and an individual.

The sequel is a meditation on what makes societies succeed or die.

Both games are fun, the puzzles are just hard enough to be interesting with a sprinkling of well-hidden secrets. But the real reason to play The Talos Principle is if you’ve got an interest in philosophy - the storylines are deeply interested in asking some very big questions. … and they don’t provide answers either - the game poses questions and allows you to answer as you see fit.

If you liked FO3 you’ll like 4.

It’s a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.

The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.

Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.

As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.

It’s a good fuckin’ game. It’s just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.

This is why I loved thee Demon’s Souls approach - single player game with crowd sourced miniboss AI.

If you haven’t played it already - Inscryption - by the same author - is also really good.

… and I should lay off the emdash for the rest of the night.

And it’s currently $5.00 on steam. You know, if you’re price shopping.

Well - I played both and I quite enjoyed Heaven’s Vault as well.

I played HV through twice - once for the story and then a second time to see how far I could alter that story with different choices. My wife even played a third time to try for a really particular set of events.

The translation game in HV goes much harder than Chants’. After the first playthrough, you get longer and more challenging texts to decipher.

Also - there’s no backtracking really required. The game is pretty strict about telling you where you can and cannot go and reacting to what you found or didn’t find. You can cut whole plot lines in HV and it’s no problem.

Which makes it one of the better games for replayablity in my mind.

It is - for sure - slow paced. Almost meditative.

Oh man - I loved WRoEF, but the bathtub segment has ensured I can never play it again.

Ugh - this game!

I loved it. The mechanics of The Scene is still one of the most amazing bits of storytelling I’ve seen in a video game. I think about it frequently when I’m considering how video games can tell stories in ways that movies or books just can’t.

The game as a whole is good, but a little uneven IMO. But I’d put that scene up there with Braid for the sheer impact of storytelling-via-videogame-mechanics.

If you don’t already know… the “corrupt” text in the terminals is where a lot of the semi-secret story clues are - especially in the beginning. If you want to know how to read it, lemme know and I’ll tell you what you need. Otherwise, no spoilers.

That said, the puzzles in the game are pretty consistent throughout, so if solving 3d spatial arrangements of laser beams isn’t fun for you - it’s not gonna get any better.

Also… A big part of playing Death Loop was figuring out the proper order to kill everybody. … and sadly, there’s only one order that will work. So once you know the order, a big part of the challenge is eliminated.

It would have been really cool if the game selected a random ordering for your character at new game start and each target’s vulnerable timing changes accordingly. Something similar to how some of Dishonored’s missions could have multiple solutions.

… but I get why they didn’t. Dishonored had mission variants just switch up some text which is relatively cheap compared to having fully different behaviors and speech and so on that would need to be created just for the tiny set of players that not only finish but replay a game.

As someone who played through Dishonored 1,2 and all their respective DLCs multiple times, I was sad that Death Loop didn’t have the same level of repayablity baked into the overarching structure, but I still quite enjoyed the game itself. I just finished it once and moved on.

“Fun” is in the eye of the beholder.

If OP is having fun with Java, that’s awesome.

Classes are Data plus the code required to modify that Data. The idea is to encapsulate data modifications into one thing (a Class) that knows how to modify all the Data as a single unit. This lets us write some code to describe, say, a Scrollbar widget. The Class for the widget combines all the Data for a Scrollbar (position, orientation, bar size, total size, etc) with the methods that read or modify that data (scroll up/down, change size, draw, etc).

That’s the first Big Idea of OOP - that data should be grouped with the functions that modify it. If you don’t have that - as in C - you have to write functions that only work on a given data type but which are namespaced separately. You get functions like void set_scrollbar_pos(void* scrollbar, word pos) which become verbose in a large project. (I’m not saying this is the worst thing in the world, just a different style.)

The second Big Idea of OOP is message passing. Now that we have code and Data bundled together, it would be nice if Objects that share functions of the same essential type and intention could be swapped out interchangeably. So instead of directly invoking a function on an Object, we send a ‘message’ that says something like ‘if you know how, please draw yourself on screen, relative to X,Y’.

Of course, since plain English is hella verbose, the actual message is going be something like “draw, X,Y” and the Object receiving the message then sorts out if it has a method called “draw” that can use the provided X and Y. If so, it runs the code to do so. If not, you get an error.

Messages like this mean that you can swap out compatible Classes for one another. E.g. you can ask any collection of widgets to .draw themselves with a single method and let the compiler/interpreter generate the machine code as needed. That reduces the amount of boilerplate for engineers by a lot! Otherwise, trying to work with any collection of heterogeneous Objects (like a List of every Widget contained in a Window) would need to have essentially the same code rewritten for every different Type needed - a combinatorial explosion of code!

Tl;Dr -

• Classes help organize code and simplify state management by combining data with the functions that manipulate that data.

• Classes reduce the amount of boilerplate code needed by allowing methods with the same “shape” to be called interchangeably.

Everything else about OOP is essentially built off these two ideas. I hope that helps.

This - and don’t worry that this is somehow “cheating”. It’s how a ton of programmers got their start. Old farts like me learned a lot by messing around with GORILLA.BAS