Areldyb [he/him]

I mostly rely on built-in “scheduled send” features these days, but in the past (and possibly future, can’t remember!) I’ve used Time Cave and been happy with it.

Pinball Deluxe Reloaded has been an excellent time-waster on my phone for a while now. It’s available on PC too.

Promising, but not ready for primetime. I spent the last two days using it as my phone’s default search after you mentioned it, and… well, I went back to Google, at least for now.

My second proposal — and this is a wild one — is that promotional notifications should just not be allowed. Or you can opt in to them if you desperately want to hear from the Starbucks app every single day, but you should have to go out of your way to do that and should not be the default behavior when you choose “allow notifications.” Just an idea!

The author calls out the Starbucks app here, but doesn’t mention how blatantly dark-patterned its notifications really are. Android allows apps to set up multiple notification channels, so you can selectively prioritize (or, more often, mute or block) notifications based on their content. Starbucks uses this feature… to create a single channel called “Promotions & order status”. You wanted to know when your order’s ready? Fuck you and your concentration, get double stars today!

I appreciate the notification controls Android gives me, and I use them aggressively. If an app pushes a notification that doesn’t actually require my attention, I block that channel, and if it does it again, I block notifications for the whole app. I agree with the author, though: I shouldn’t need to do that.

It’d be dictionary length to the fifth power, not times five.

I had to look it up: apparently an “egg” is a maybe-possibly trans person who hasn’t “hatched” into self-acceptance or self-recognition (yet). It seems like a really presumptive kind of thing to me, but also I kinda get it so maybe I’m an egg too 🤷‍♂️(🤷🤷‍♀️)

I use that list as well as the ones at https://github.com/antifa-n/pihole/ (though they haven’t been updated in years). I also use OpenDNS upstream to block their “Hate/Discrimination” category (among others).

I’ve been pretty happy with this setup, but I would welcome alternatives/additional blocklists.

Chrono Break

Would we say this is “world news”?

It’s a very uneven game (some 9/10 “this is cool!” gameplay loops bundled together with some 3/10 “how did this ever get released?” segments) and definitely not for everybody. The object pop-ins were noticeable, the sudden 2D-perspective-locks on later islands were worse, and it took me a while to really find a groove and get into the game, but once I did I had a great time with it.

If you want to continue playing, I recommend hunting down and completing all the “?” map challenges before working on other objectives. Some of them are designed to train necessary but non-obvious skills, and having a full map makes it a lot easier to get around and pick your battles.

Also, starfall events give you so many fishing tokens that Big’s fishing minigame becomes the single best way to gather resources and level up. It’s totally gamebreaking but it’s Big the Cat so it’s great.

The fact that they also hit targets in Pennsylvania means they’re more interested in making noise than they are in actually making a point, and their spokesperson even said as much. They aren’t hacktivists with any sort of consistent agenda, and news orgs shouldn’t present them as if they are.

Same. Been using Mint Mobile for years with few complaints (especially for the price!), but it was entirely unusable when I went to Canada for a few days.