Just make the main link a New York Times gift article link. Those aren't paywalled. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah.html?unlocked_article_code=1.L04.4Yla.tf3LG-_hbGcb&smid=url-share

I've only actually played the first game, but as I understand it, NiGHTS is a high-ranking Nightmaren just like the monstrous bosses they fight. NiGHTS happens to be powerful enough to be independent. Whenever the other Nightmaren mug a dreaming visitor, if the visitor keeps hold of one of their Ideyas, NiGHTS finds it more fun to help the visitor wreck everything instead.

Edit: corrected NiGHTS to they/them pronouns (and while I'm here, you can still get the Steam version of NiGHTS for free)

Entertainment-per-byte is an interesting problem. My solutions were tiny but highly replayable games. It's been fun to see other people's ideas, like writing things in Emacs.

Alright then, how about this?

For just 32kB (plus the size of a Game Boy emulator), you can play the amazing Tetris Rosy Retrospection. It's a romhack of the Game Boy Tetris that adds modern Tetris controls, handling, and features to make it feel much better to play without increasing the file size. I'm aware of the color version of this hack, but it doubles the file size to 64kB, so I'm only considering the regular Tetris Rosy Retrospection this time. Byte-for-byte, I can't find a better game to sink dozens of hours into.

Weighing in at 4.0MB, I present to you the SNES roguelike Mystery Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer (or Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fuurai no Shiren).

The original console "RPG you can play 1000 times". It's tough but fair. It stops just short of permadeath; dying sends you back to the start at level 1 with nothing, but you keep your side quest progress and any gear you had the foresight to send back to town before you died. Watch someone stream this sometime. It's turn-based, but the tension is like nothing else I've ever played.

I thought this was solid world building for a story. I think this witch lives in this balloon keeps all of her stuff there. At night, I could see her landing the balloon and sleeping in the deflated envelope. She forages around and recovers her magic, then uses magic to inflate the balloon and take off again. She could go where the wind takes her, or use her broom to tow the balloon where she wants to go.

Fascists should be afraid to show their faces in public, but this particular fascist needs to live long enough to spend time in prison.

Apparently people died there today. That's probably bad. Don't just assume the dead were worthless fascists. I hope it wasn't some innocent media person covering the event for their local news or something.

To take the survey, go to this campaign page and scroll down to the "take part" button to get the survey in your language. I basically just told them that I install Firefox ESR from Chocolatey. They were really interested in locale strings like "en-US".

Chocolatey, a command line driven package installer for Windows that works like apt-get for Linux. Replaces thousands of bloated installers with simple commands. My first step with an updated Windows install is to install Chocolatey, open command prompt, and do something like choco install firefox notepadplusplus gimp zoom windirstat winrar to install them all silently.

Source is George Takei on Mastodon, and there's a lot of discussion there too. I didn't know Spock Hand Emoji 🖖🏽 was a thing, but here it is.

You're right, and Snopes confirms what you're saying. They only ever appear to be standing next to each other in this one photo, ever. There's no evidence that they even greeted each other. I'm all for dragging both of them through the mud for the stuff they've done, but there's no need to make up a story that they did anything together.

I'm a Reddit refugee and I've been moving all the pictures and videos from my old niche subreddit to my new niche Kbin magazine. I'm afraid Reddit will collapse, and the collection of floaty things I've been building up will become lost media if it's not reposted somewhere else. I like the Fediverse's mission and I want to see how the Fediverse develops. Also, I want to have a complete and functional artsy magazine on Kbin to show the others back on Reddit that it can be done well.

For the past couple days, some of my posts have been making Fedia's home page and apparently other instances' home pages too. It's good to be seen, but I'm afraid I'm getting more attention than I actually deserve. I like seeing art of fantasy worlds and interactions, and I'm not alone in that. But, I'm afraid I'm corrupting your feeds with stuff you aren't looking for, just because I'm doing it first.