supersquirrel

Hadean Tactics, Backpack Hero, Death Roads Tournament and The Way Ash Of Gods are all great deckbuilders for $16

(are game deals for games I think are good on the deck considered ok/relevant here or should I post them elsewhere?)

Don't sleep on the splitscreen potential of your deck!

I am on mobile I will have to edit with links later

Devador

Folk Hero

Battle Planet

Flipon

Galactic Thunderdome

Nom Nom Galaxy

Ultra Foodmess 2

Danger Scavenger

Jelly Car World

Bunny Hill

Super Volley Blast

Plunder Panic

Dungeons Of Sundaria

Herosiege

Hyperbrawl

Pool Panic

Suika Shapes

Bones Cafe

Endgame Road To Salvation

Dunk Lords

Mutant Football League

Shadowkin

Wizard Of Legend

The Crackpet Show

Shipped

Unspottable

Cosmos Quickstop

Super Blood Hockey

Lumencraft

Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix

Rubber Bandits

Blazing Beaks

Critter Crunch

Full Metal Furies

Petal Crash

Ms. Splosion Man

Chronicon

incompetent half-assing is rarely this morally righteous of an act too, since your one act of barely-competent-enough incompetence is transmuted into endless incompetence by becoming training data/qc feedback

I know this sub is about biodiversity but that is the mindblowing thing, the incredible diversity of minerals on earth (and my oh my the diversity is overwhelming) is a consequence of the incredible biodiversity of life, and it is not unlikely that it worked the other way too, a diversity of minerals may have been a formative part of the development of life.

A diversity of minerals/chemical may have facilitated the formation and diversification of life which fed back into the further diversification of minerals...

It suggests a beautiful perspective to understand ecosystems and the essential role of diversity for stability.

Operation Harsh Doorstop is a single and multiplayer tactical shooter with vehicles and large map support, it has mod support (a core objective of the dev) and crucially support for autodownloading server mods when players join the server.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

The bipod system is quite impressive and overall OHD has really solid tactical shooter mechanics... but this isn't only a game for realistic tactical shooter fans. Case in point some servers use the Casualfield mod which tweaks the game to play more like Call Of Duty.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3140994891

I am a huge fan of this game because the developer genuinely seems to be passionate about bringing a super solid big map multiplayer vehicle shooter foundation to the modding community, this game might seem a bit barebones right now but when you step back and consider how OHD is going to empower indie developers to easily get their hands dirty and start innovating on the shooter genre (and other kinds of games too) you can begin to see how exciting the future is for this game.

Just links to predatory microtransaction crap.

I am quite sure a human never bothered to look over or curate any of this, it is just algorithmically generated crap that boosts whatever scam pays out the most back to the play store.

The amount of damage that google has done to the growth of mobile gaming is unfathomable (in terms of growth and improvement not how big and complex the casinos pretending to be video games are).

Google needs to have their stranglehold over android smashed.

How pathetic and lazy, google needs to be broken up and it's stranglehold on android (the most popular gaming system on the planet by far) stopped.

Main Assembly is great, it is a vehicle maker physics challenge game with co-op... but if you stifle a yawn and think "I have trailmakers/other equivalent and meh do I need another?" the answer is yes, you definitely do!

Main Assembly is fundametally different, what makes it stand out from the pack is that you can easily mold 3d surfaces so the game ends up playing more like a powerful intuitive 3d modelling program than yet another iteration on a vehicle lego-style block building sandbox game.

Surfaces of wings are physically modeled in their contribution to lift, they arent just cosmetic, and it is this kind of thing that makes Main Assembly simultaneously a sophisticated simulation and and immediately tactile and intuitive experience.

Controls are superb on the deck, I recommend using fmCUK's "Usable V0.2" as a basis for a control scheme, most everything felt surprisingly intuitive given how generalist and powerful the tools are in Main Assembly.

Seriously good game, take advantage of the fact that it flew under the radar, pick it up for cheap, heck buy a copy for a friend so you have someone to play with!

"pancake" refers to a colloaquial term for tiny nimble classic recreational racing sailboats like sunfishes and lasers, essentially the hull is shaped like a pancake (well a bowl more like but whatever) and all of the lateral resistance to getting blown sideways (that would be provided naturally by a long slim hull that sat deep in the water) is focused on the narrow point of the single daggerboard and to a lesser extent rudder. This is what makes sailboats like this an absolute joy to sail even in fairly light wind in real life, they take almost no wind to go and can take advantage of passing bursts of energy from even the most capricious wind gusts, so it makes sailing them a very direct and deeply calming conversation with the immediate elements of the wind and water around you.

Sailing in light wind is fun in a chill way but for long sailboats that have a consequently big turning radius, often it is difficult to keep any speed when turning the front of the boat directly past the onblowing wind because you can't pick up any speed in that moment, you have to rely on inertia. A pancake sailboat like this is made to spin like a top with a flick of the rudder so that even in light wind the hull can carry momentum through multiple quick tacks (changing direction by rotating the bow past the direction of the onblowing wind) or jives (changing direction by rotating the bow the other way, so that it never directly passes by the direction of the onblowing wind, can be very difficult to control in a small sailboat like this).

With this kind of sailboat you basically have two controls, you aim the rudder with an articulated handle in one hand and you control the angle of the sail/boom through a rope held in your other hand that runs through a pulley. In real life you also are able to control the center of mass of your personal meatcube for minute corrections as well, but with essentially just those two control inputs an incredible variety and complexity of movement is possible.

Even if you have never thought about learning sailing, it is worth learning for its own sake because of how primal and direct learning how to sail a pancake boat like this is that only has one rope to hold and one rudder and that is the whole dashboard of controls. If you have ever met sailors, they probably are really intense and get all hyped about racing around in conditions that look absolutely awful to a non-sailor lol, but it is just as valid to sail around in light wind normal on a blustery afternoon summer day as wiser and lazier alternative to paddling a kayak :). Honestly it takes an astonishingly little amount of energy to move a tiny sailboat like this at a pace faster than you can paddle a kayak.

Pancake Sailor and the developers non-free games are marketed definitely pretty heavily towards VR, but Pancake Sailor actually works bloody fantastic as a Steam Deck game. It is an immediate cozy and chill experience, the moment you open the game and start playing. I can easily see myself talking with someone on the phone while I focus on the conversation and mindlessly sail around in pancake sailor.

Check it out! It is free!

Also the main game is on sale for $5 in the steam summer sale, the game doesn't seem to go cheaper, it isn't necessarily a super rare sale either though so shrugs honestly I recommend just downloading Pancake Sailor and having some fun!

This game will genuinely teach you how to sail, and the really wonderful thing is that if you learn how to sail a really really simple sailboat like this you will understand the basics of how to sail any sailboat, no matter how complex. Yes there are a billion more things to learn with larger sailboats with multiple crew and sails and ways to manipulate those sails... but at the end of the day you are trying to accomplish the same set of maneuevers that will become deeply intuitive to you if you practice sailiing a simple sailboat like this. Honestly, master a boat like this and if someone threw you onto a typical 40 foot monohull sailboat and you had to sail it back to a harbor to save your life, you would be fine. You would do a really shitty job, but again the fundamentalis are the same. This is a human skill I think everyone should explore through video games!

Warning though, once you learn how to sail every time you play a video game where sailboats are just normal boats but with an animated sail that magically changes the wind direction around.. or even if there are true sailing mechanics but they are shallow af, you will become very sad.... :( but then valheim will give you a hug and remind you that there are people out there that really do care.

There are some decent deals going on right now, not so much for AAA titles really, they don't seem to be going on sale much in my opinion in the past year or so.

Indie games on the other hand have been having some really great discounts.

Here is the /r/gamedeals steam summer sale thread

https://old.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/comments/1dpxrdr/steam_summer_sale_2023_day_1/

The thread you are really interested in is the Hidden Gems thread tho...

https://old.reddit.com/r/GameDealsMeta/comments/1dpxyff/steam_summer_2024_hidden_gems/

Even more so than steam... I think some of the recent Fanatical bundles have been really great for indie games, I bought almost everything from these bundles

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle

I also picked up a bunch from this one too

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-handheld-heroes-bundle

I really like the digital board games from direwolf like Instanbul, Everdell, Wings Of Glory. Concordia is also a brilliant digital board game and perhaps one of the best board games ever invented by humanity... (not kidding).

How about y'all? Have you picked up any good indie games for your steam deck lately?

Kinda spent a lot, but with a lot of these indie games, like the big metroidivania games and such I just don't think they are ever going to come down below $3, they aren't worth that little lol anyways.. but just look at the isthereanydeal stats for some of the indie games in the fanatical bundles they straight up destroy steam's "summer sale" in my opinion at least at a cursory glance.

For example, look at "Trinity Fusion" in the "handheld heroes bundle", Steam advertises it on "sale" for $12, but if you buy 5 games or so on fanatical's bundle it is $3....

...just saying, might be a good time to flesh out your steam deck's indie, local co-op, party and retro style catalog!

In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think using the fediverse vs commercial social media is thattt crucial of a difference for most (add a million qualifiers here except if you are black, queer, trans etc… I am talking in relative terms here) livimg inside the borders of colonial powers like the US, France, Germany etc..

Speaking as a hetero white dude who grew up with a decent amount of privilege the fediverse isn’t for the countless versions of me living within the borders of colonial powers…

It might have been programmers living within the borders of colonial powers that did most of the labor to create the fediverse, and most of the early users might have come from within colonial powers but I think it is important to recognize that the gift that the fediverse represents to the world is the capacity to empower people living outside the borders of colonial powers to own and run their own social networks instead of having some random Facebook employee who doesn’t have the time or basic knowledge of a country to make major decisions about what news accounts to moderate as dangerous spam and what to allow.

From a 30,000 foot view, speaking in broad terms and specific values and priorities, what do you think are the best strategies for flipping the script on the fediverse being mostly a tool used by people within the borders of colonial powers to one used by without and within?

I wonder about the capacities of fediverse software being useful as a compliment to HOT open street mapping type initiatives in the wake of disasters and just in general?

(Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing? I don’t really know)

choose your mapping style

HotOSM in Haiti

HotOSM Latin America and The Carribean

The Centre talked to Tyler Radford, Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), an organization dedicated to humanitarian action and community development through open mapping. We discussed HOT’s signature platform, OpenStreetMap (OSM), adding humanitarian data to satellite imagery, and how to recruit and maintain a massive global network of volunteers.