I'm not familiar with Pony Island, but I'd say that Inscryption -- which I quite liked -- has got other games like it, as it's a (good) deckbuilder. If I understand aright from skimming the description, what's in common is really thematic -- simple game with an "upgrade game" aspect tied to a horror theme. The plot gets gradually unfolded as you upgrade and has fourth-wall-breaking aspects, like the game starts to act differently, pretend to malfunction, etc.

Yeah, Katamari Damacy is definitely a "I wouldn't have played it from the description" game that I found to be a lot of fun. One runs around pushing a growing sticky ball that keeps having objects attach themselves to it. The game has enormous scale change as the ball grows. Simple -- almost a tech demo -- but and surprisingly fun, and I can't think of anything like it other than games in the series itself.

There's also a similar discussion on Reddit, some months back, that lists some interesting "unique" games:

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/14tqdqv/completely_unique_games/

I've got a couple games that maybe fit this category.

• Kerbal Space Program. This had a sequel coming out that apparently wasn't going very well and was cancelled, so right now, the possibility of . Spaceflight simulator, where one can design and craft spacecraft and amospheric craft, as well as space bases. One can fly to other planets, set up bases, set up satellite networks, etc. There are some "build your own vehicle"-type games, but not as much of a hard sim as this. Has a campaign to progress through, where one performs discoveries and conducts research. I'd recommend this to someone who hasn't played it and likes sim games.

• Kenshi. There's a sequel coming out, so maybe it won't be unique at some point. They player controls a squad that moves around the world in real-time -- there isn't an "overworld map". The squad can be split up into multiple squads. One can build outposts and defenses and such and have something of an automated economy. There's a tech tree. The world has various factions and dynamic control of regions, something like Mount & Blade: Warband. There are unique biomes to travel through. A fair bit of the world is placed. The world starts out in a mostly-hand-crafted, fixed state, but evolves over time. Character progression isn't based on point allocation, but on specific experience; have a character get hurt, and over time his ability to take damage will rise, and so forth. I think that this is still worth playing, though it's by no means a beautiful game and possibly (hopefully) will be surpassed by its sequel.

• Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. A real-time colony sim that can mostly run itself. One has indirect control for the most part; one directly controls upgrades, certain spell and structure abilities, and can spend money to create "incentive flags" to create missions for characters to fulfill. I don't know if it's right to call it a single-game genre -- it's a colony sim, and other colony sims exist, like Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and such. Populus and some god games have direct control over spells. But I don't know of any other colony sim that plays much like it -- most of the focus is on upgrades and on countering waves of invaders, and the gold economy is ununusual. The same developer tried making a sequel, but eliminated the "sandbox" mode, and turned it into more of a puzzle game, and that game didn't do very well. One builds a colony in real time. There is no direct control over the individual characters, but for certain actions, one can spend money to incentivize them to do certain things. Characters level up and purchase equipment using gold they earn and that you expend on them to purchase items. Some of your control comes from things like building inns to cause them to spend idle time in particular locations. Building construction and maintenance is carried out automatically by peasants. As adventurers spend gold at buildings, it comes back to your control. I think that I'd have a hard time recommending today due to its age (you're going to have 2d pixel graphics that are going to be tiny on a current computer).

• Pinball Construction Set. This is a video pinball game where the player can use premade elements to easily put together their own pinball board. Very elderly now, dates back to the early 1980s. I remember being absolutely fascinated by this back in the day. Since that time, there have been many video pinball games, as well as some systems that permit some level of authoring capability (e.g. Visual Pinball can run user-created pinball boards), but these require a lot more effort and expertise and "real" authoring tools to put together a pinball board; one can't just drop in in-game and start throwing elements together. I don't think that I can recommend this, as it's absolutely ancient today.

• Noita. It's based on Liero, but really not at all like it. It's an action-roguelite (well, that's a genre, but nothing really similar beneath that level of specificity) that has side-scrolling over an open world. Various materials interact and have their interactions simulated at a per-pixel level, something like the "falling sand" genre. However, there are enemies running around, and the player controls a character that walks and floats through the world. One can find various containers of substances; one can try and mix things together to manipulate the world. One finds wands with spells; one can combine spells and various spell modifiers on wands to create all sorts of custom magic weapons that can range from utility to offensive. The aim, as with many many roguelites, is to try to use some luck and synergies between various items to come up with truly game-breaking combinations. I can definitely recommend this game; I found it to be very good value-for-money.

Honorable mention:

• Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. This is not a single-game genre, but there have only been two successful games in the genre, and one, Carrier Command, is from the 1980s (and which I've never played). You control a carrier that moves along an island chain; it can create surface, amphibious, land, and aircraft and weapons for these. One has a limited number of AIs that can control some vehicles automatically; one can give general orders to these, control the vehicles directly. One can capture more resources from the islands to expand one's abilities. There was a remake of Carrier Command, which flopped, and a sequel, Carrier Command 2, a relatively-recent game, but unlike Hostile Waters, is really intended to be played multiplayer; playing single-player places a very heavy load on the player...so I have a hard time placing it in the same genre, even if it has many similarities and was inspired by the same game. While I enjoyed it and I think that it could still be enjoyed, it's getting a bit long-in-the-tooth graphically, and I recall it being a bit unstable even back in the day.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-have-solved-mystery-how-wombats-poop-cubes-180976898/

Bare-nosed wombats can excrete four to eight scat pieces at a time and may poop up to 100 cubes a day. After the wombat defecates, the furry critter collects the two centimeter-sized cubes and places them around their territory, possibly to communicate with other wombats or attract mates, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.

I imagine it depends on whether the opposite gender finds walls sexy or not. I don't have a good feel for wombat aesthetics. Maybe they're into pyramids.

EDIT: This looks more like Stonehenge-level construction than Great Wall of China stuff going on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat

Wombats leave distinctive cubic faeces.[9] As wombats arrange these feces to mark territories and attract mates, it is believed that the cubic shape makes them more stackable and less likely to roll, which gives this shape a biological advantage.

The engineering prowess of the beaver, Australian-style.

I bet the image of one surrounded by poo constructions makes them less-appealing.

I've never shot paper targets, but might this be at extreme range? I mean, those don't look like circular holes, so I'd assume that the bullet is tumbling for some reason.

kagis

Sounds like the term is "keyholing".

https://www.snipershide.com/shooting/threads/308-tumbling-at-almost-a-mile.194313/

Long range noob here with some questions. Basically I was under the impression that a .308 would be tumbling by the time it reached it's target when shooting out to a mile. Now the reason I believed this is because just last week I was shooting my .338 out to 1585 and having fantastic results. I decided to try out my Warner build .260 just to see if I could get some hits at this distance. I eventually did have about 3-5 hits on a 24x24" steel out of about 20 rounds. Upon inspection of the target there were clearly visible strikes that showed the bullet impacting sideways. Essentially keyhole imprints on the target

https://old.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/el6h5q/holy_keyhole_batman/

That keyholing image looks a lot like the image of the target that OP posted.

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_today-vid-canonical-featured-desktop,f_auto,q_auto:best/MSNBC/Components/Video/__NEW/tdy_trending_qtips_160121.jpg

Compared to a golf-cart or dirt bike, a Ladoga is much better-suited for mechanized warfare.

I don't know. Like, yes, by definition, a dirt bike isn't what a mechanized unit uses; that's a motorized vehicle. But...I think that there's a fair question of how well the roles can match.

Specifically for nuclear war, then yeah, obviously the Ladoga is better. It's got environmental protection.

But I'm not sure that light armor will necessarily have the role it has over past decades in the future.

The point of light armor is to deal with rifle and machine gun bullets -- as in ambushes -- and near-miss artillery fragments. It will work well for that.

I don't know what portion of actual damage to Russian forces is presently coming from those, though. I mean, if the armor isn't stopping what's killing the thing, it might not buy much. It won't stop top-attack ATGMs. It won't stop drones carrying heavier munitions. It won't stop guided munitions like GMLRS or guided artillery.

If we can provide enough tube artillery and shells, that might change. But if warfare here is characterized by mostly highly-accurate, long-range weapons capable of penetrating the armor that vehicles have...that armor might not provide much protection.

For an analog, think of how it used to be common for individual soldiers to wear heavy armor up until things like crossbows and firearms, long-range weapons that could penetrate it, killed it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_armour

As firearms became better and more common on the battlefield, the utility of full armour gradually declined, and full suits became restricted to those made for jousting which continued to develop.

It's not impossible that the same phenomenon could affect vehicle armor. Maybe not all vehicles, but it might make it a lot-less-valuable to have light armor.

And unarmored vehicles tend to be faster, which helps limit their time in a dangerous zone.

I think that a dirt bike, which might be good as a vehicle for a single person, maybe two, has some serious limitations -- it can't load up anyone if they do get hurt. It can't pull towed equipment. It has a limited ability to carry supplies.

But it can also traverse trails that four-wheel vehicles cannot. It can be easily hidden. It is inexpensive and can be easily provided in large numbers. It is light and can be delivered via air. Many people each on a dirt bike are less of a concentrated target than a group of people in an APC; against a weapon that light armor doesn't stop, the dirt bike may be more resilient than light armor.

In World War II, there were some very substantial successes that various militaries pulled off with bicycle infantry, which is pretty analogous; Japan's rapid movement in the Battle of Singapore is probably the poster child for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Singapore

The capture of Singapore resulted in the largest British surrender in its history.

Conventional British military thinking was that the Japanese forces were inferior and characterised that the Malayan jungles as "impassable"; the Japanese were repeatedly able to use it to their advantage to outflank hastily established defensive lines.

Despite their numerical inferiority, they advanced down the Malayan Peninsula, overwhelming the defences. The Japanese forces also used bicycle infantry and light tanks, allowing swift movement through the jungle. The Commonwealth having thought the terrain made them impractical, had no tanks and only a few armoured vehicles, which put them at a severe disadvantage.[25]

E-bikes can be very quiet.

There have been a history of unarmored vehicles that we've used in combat. And I don't mean the Jeep, but in contemporary times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Patrol_Vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Strike_Vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interim_Fast_Attack_Vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1161_Growler

In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal. Think about it as Schroeder, Merkel, Nord Stream. For some reason no one really talked about it.

It was left to Donald Trump to point out the contradictions and dangers in that position. When he did, everybody laughed and pointed to it as proof of what an idiot he was.

While I get that it was obnoxious to have the German contingent there laughing at him as he warned him -- prior to Russia draining down Germany's storage and then using it as leverage -- that was also not Donald-Trump-the-individual. That will have been at the tail end of a long chain of warnings from the American government that eventually made it up to recommending that the President publicly comment on it. Trump won't have been the one to identify it; he'll just have been the last messenger in a chain of many.

The New Balance of Power in Europe is going to look a lot more like 1848 than 1948. In place of the Austrian Empire, however, will be the alliance of the UK and Ukraine, bound in a hundred year Covenant to secure the peace of Europe.

Ehhh. I think that that's stretching things.

There were also EU member states who acted; the article is specifically talking about Poland.

I think that there is a fair accusation that the EU as an institution was not very active on this. I think that it's also fair to say that there are some members who took a long while to move. But the EU isn't a monolith, either: some member states did move.

And the EU-as-an-institution isn't static and unchanging, either. Like, I don't know what changes are being made, but I would assume that having been burned once, EU politicians are probably looking at what they can do to avoid a repeat. Countries don't normally just sit there are get burned over and over. I would be reasonably confident that Russia isn't going to be able to use natural gas access as leverage to split the EU again. Maybe it'll be changes to the Single Market, maybe political changes, maybe counterintelligence stuff, maybe mandates on some minimum level of supply diversification, dunno.

https://www.verizon.com/coverage-map/

This shows that Verizon has good coverage in part of Wanaque, moderate coverage in part, and no coverage in part.

The planning board's decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be 'unsafe' due to radio frequencies and rejected the company's notion of building the tower on the land.

I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don't see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don't build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It's not like this is the world's only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there's some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.

If I were cell companies, I'd just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.

I don't really use calendaring all that much, but when I do, I use org-mode agenda in emacs, which seems to do all the stuff that he's complaining about not having. It does a lot more than I use.

That being said, I get that that's probably not what he's after if he's not an emacs user.

and open-source.

Between the lead lemmy dev, dessalines, using Stalin as his profile picture and this guy using Goebbels, we've got a pretty WW2-retro vibe going on.

Sure. Heck, occasionally I do actually do that, like if I post a piece of information that I've looked up and then refer back to it later.

Ehh. I mean, if they were just banning sex toys, I could believe something like that, but doesn't explain why they'd ban stuff other than sex toys simultaneously:

Etsy is also banning nudity for human models, including "gluteal clefts and female nipples/areolas." If you're selling a sexy item of clothing, for example, you must censor body parts, use a mannequin, or opt for just photographing the clothing.

"Sexual language" concerning incest or "referencing familial relationships" will also be banned now. The examples Etsy lists are "Daddy's slut" and "Choke me Mommy." As of publication, these terms are still searchable on Etsy, and so is nude content. Searches for "porn" come up blank.

They are the largest residential homeowners insurers in California, insuring 1 in 5 homes.

"The rate filing that State Farm just made yesterday (Thursday), they're triggering a rarely used part of the insurance law," said Soller.

"It's a regulation meant to address a company's financial solvency. That's what they're saying and we're going to look closely at that, and we have some serious questions about State Farm's financial condition and we're going to get to the bottom of it. "

That actually sounds like a rather bigger deal that I first thought from the title, if they're on the brink of going under...

Hmm. If the concern is the Etsy brand value, I'd just spin it off into a new company that does permit it. If you've already built a network of people selling and buying stuff and the software to do so, terminating it just sends the value of that to zero.

I don't have a problem with doing this, but I don't think that it'll have much effect in policy terms.

Like, the states that are willing to guarantee abortion rights in their constitution are the states that are unlikely to pass a law ban abortions in the first place.

and Democrats across the nation hope similar measures mobilize supporters on Election Day.

I suppose it might do that, though.