I’ve been looking around for demos that would actually be more fun to play on the deck than playing on my PC. Right now I’m eyeing up one called Combat Complex that is a twin-stick shooter ARPG with shooting mechanics that look really juicy! I’m hoping to get it installed tomorrow and give it a shot 🤩

I’ve been using Raindrop for about five years. The solo dev really impressed me with his responsiveness to user feedback, so I started paying for premium ($30/yr) even though I don’t really need the extra features.

I’ve used the mobile app, Firefox extension, desktop app (Linux and Windows), and the web app. All have worked flawlessly and have grown more feature rich without ruining the user experience.

The features I use the most are:

• Endlessly nestable folders that I can give my own icons to make them significantly easier to navigate around
• Public collections so I can save my favorite GIFs and memes on a public page I can refer back to and share
• Tagging, descriptions, and notes so I can save a lot of context for each bookmark and why I saved it
• The built in preview for the mobile app feels buttery smooth, so I seldom open tabs in my mobile browser when I’m visiting my bookmarks
• The main premium features I actually use are the broken link detector to find links that no longer exist and the permanent copies of those pages

I haven’t had a chance to use the REST API, but it appears to be documented quite well.

Overall I’ve had such a pleasant experience that I’ve never looked at any other option.

Was anybody else young enough to get endless entertainment out of those demo disks that held a dozen demos on them?

Oh, that sounds really cool!! I haven’t actually used chatGPT so I’m not familiar with the pricing or free limitations of it.

Recently I’ve been really enjoying LM studio for D&D related things. I’ve created separate conversation threads for different topics, plots, and characters. So, when I ask a question it already is aware of the context behind my ask and it tailors the response accordingly.

For example, I recently had a one-shot and I knew I wanted to have a powerful sorceress who controlled minds. So I spun up a new conversation and typed out the basic info. Then I asked the LLM what her favorite form of torture was, how many people she had mind controlled, and what her lair might look like, etc. It worked better than I thought it would, although some of the responses seemed pretty cookie cutter 😅

I used Notion for managing my D&D campaign until I noticed I was approaching the limitations of what the free tier offered. That sent me looking for an alternative and I ended up settling on Skiff Pages (at that time I don’t even think they had email, drive, etc). It didn’t have all the features that Notion did, but it was functional, easy to use, and they were frequently adding improvements.

It’s kind of funny to me that they ended up getting swallowed by Notion in the end. I’m just glad that I’ve long since switched over to Obsidian. My Markdown files can’t get bought by Notion . 😂

Oh my goodness, the exact same thing happened with me and Guild Wars 2!!! 😱

I was a teenager at the time and my family burned logs to keep the house warm in winter. My Dad upgraded the smoke detectors so that they were all linked. In other words, if one alarm went off in the basement (where the wood burner was) then every detector in the house would go off.

This sounds great in theory, but in reality it turns out that the detectors would go off on a near weekly basis. Whenever someone tossed logs in the burner and smoke escaped. We got desensitized to the beeping and it became second nature to just cancel the alarm when it happened.

Fast forward to the closed beta for Guild Wars 2 and I was up late, trying to play every possible minute that I could before the weekend was over. My door was closed, headphones on, and I was REALLY immersed.

The smoke detector started beeping. And it kept beeping over and over and over. Normally, at this point my parents would’ve cancelled it. That kind of struck me as odd, so I opened my door.

Ruh roah, raggy.

A wall of smoke was on the other side of the door. And the smell was NOTHING like the usual wood burner smell. It really hurt to breathe and my eyes were not having a good time either.

After shaking my Dad awake, we called the fire department, got all the animals out, and nobody got hurt. The damage was serious, but the entire house didn’t go up. The upstairs needed rebuilt and there was a fair bit of smoke damage.

I don’t want to think about what would’ve happened if I wasn’t up playing that closed beta 😅

With what I’ve been through, I’m beginning to wonder if OP is telling the truth 😂

About 7 years ago I got a call from some random lady in her 70s. Turns out her husband passed away not long ago and every computer in the house had Linux Mint installed. She needed someone to help her with some various simple techy things that her husband used to handle.

I couldn’t help but wonder how this random lady got my phone number. Turns out that one day, my Grandfather went on a walk down the road and this lady was outside tending to her garden. I have no clue how the conversation shifted to the topic of Linux, but it did. And my Grandpa knew I was in college for Computer Science, so he just volunteered me for this task.

Fast forward to today and I still help her out once or twice a year with whatever random questions pop up.

I’ve had some luck blocking instances within mobile apps, but that doesn’t scale well if the number of toxic instances is constantly growing. I’m curious to see how this gets addressed in the long run (or if it is left as is, since it is technically working as designed).

On the bright side it’s always easy to spot a cheetah!