That’s fine, and in principle I understand the threat, but I think there are plenty of security experts who choose to just use cloudflare because some of the services they provide genuinely require their scale and they have a pretty steady history of making very measured decisions about where they need to leverage their position to improve security.

There’s never been any indication that they’re collecting more than they need to or exploiting it beyond the scope of the service they provide, and several scenarios where they have refused to cooperate with governments trying to do invasive things. I absolutely think “moderately secure” still applies to traffic routed through cloudflare.

The point is to not be compelled to a central service. Choosing a provider that does a better job is perfectly fine.

That applies to most of the internet, and Cloudflare has a long track record of not abusing that position, though.

Your actual browsing of lemmy is moderately private, provided you trust your server.

But nothing else is. By design, it’s pretty easy for anyone who wants to track activity on any federated platform to do so. They’re extremely open.

They definitely should be treated as super sketchy, because they are, but abandoning a project that doesn’t get anywhere near goals is part of the idea of kickstarter. It’s “this idea takes some minimum investment to make happen, and you (the funder) are willing to spend $X to make that happen if the critical mass is reached”. Abandoning failed campaigns is the core concept.

One random one that jumps to mind is a game I routinely see bundled on fanatical dirt cheap.

Ugly starts a little slow, and I think the writing is just weird, but the some of the puzzles are really cool, and there’s a good blend between pure puzzles and puzzles that require platformer execution.

I don’t know that I would have paid $20, and I paid less than the $7 it’s available for there now (it says for 10 hours), but I enjoyed what I played of it.

The reasoning is super transparent. It’s the only way it could do what it’s doing. 🤷🏼‍♀️

He wants all of his books in one index.

The game is learning.

There’s some reaction element, but the core loop is learning how to be optimally positioned to use your weapon, how to optimally pace your attacks, when your attacks leave you vulnerable. Then once you get that, you do the same with enemies. You learn where they hit hardest, what you can avoid, what their tells are, and when they’re vulnerable.

If you’re willing to learn and approach the game with learning as a goal, and understanding that you’ll die as part of that learning process, they’re great, because they do a really good job of creating difficulty in a way that almost all damage is predictable and avoidable if you know what you’re looking at and approach it the right way.

If you just want to button mash you’re going to have a bad time.

I love crown black. It’s definitely the cheapest I can buy without feeling gross the next day after a couple drinks.

Can you lock it so only you can upload?

It sounds like a useful way to share stuff with friends, but not if any random person can upload stuff.

lol the inflammatory bullshit title already decided it.

My habit of collapsing long sections so it’s less annoying to scroll probably doesn’t help either, but whatever.

I don’t disagree with that. But he’s almost definitely responding to all the vitriol directed at employees losing their jobs as a result of bad decisions passed way down the chain to them, and this article is trying to make it some gotcha hit piece.

I do think being in charge of monetization at a company that does so in the way almost any AAA studio does is an inherently unethical job and will have a hard time feeling sorry for him personally, since he’s willing to do that job, but people are also being miserable assholes to everyone else who just is trying to work on a game for a stable employer. And all he’s actually saying is “maybe don’t be an asshole to people”.

He’s very clearly talking about celebrating people losing their jobs, and does so without saying anything super crazy.

Good luck with that.

They didn’t do anything more than a handful of idiots no one wants to deal with is going to be bothered by.

They have a lot of perfectly fine games. If they were priced appropriately.

Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid are all pretty good 2D platformers (with Metroid obviously being one of the original sources of metroidvania as a genre). But tech has advanced to the point that one person, or a small team, can make 2D games every bit as good as theirs, many small teams have (with better art in some cases), and there are many better options that start at lower prices than their “huge discount mega-sale” price of $40-45, and discount even further beyond that.

Their games sell well enough, so clearly it works on some level, but it’s just generally doesn’t make a lot of sense to get a game like Metroid Dread over a game like Ori or Hollow Knight. Games aren’t fungible, and I get that, but I genuinely think a lot of indie games are better, better looking, and much more substantial than a lot of their 2D offerings.

This is stupid as hell.

There are Android ereaders. They’re mostly Chinese manufacturers, and I’ve heard more than one doesn’t follow the GPL properly with their modifications to Android, but the end result is freedom to use a variety of sources of books (including Libby and Hoopla from the library, among others).

I haven’t played with parental controls to know if they’re easy to access, but my most current Boox came with the play store installed and it’s pretty easy to learn how to adjust the display settings for different apps with different types of content.

Libation (add audible to your search to find it)

The interface is 100% of the reason I won’t use it. It’s by far the worst experience for navigating a library I’ve ever seen. It’s just access to your filesystem, except with effectively no files on the screen at a time.

There’s no tags, no ability to choose between by author, series, publisher, genre, etc, just a really bad presentation of your filesystem.