You've also got their coverage of the 2016 election, where it's a matter of settled fact that they slept on an FBI investigation of Trump for things we now know actually happened while putting Clinton's emails on the front page at every opportunity.

You've also got them giving a platform to dreck like this - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/immigration-stephen-miller.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur - which includes lovely bits like "The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is near a record high, and increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics."

I'm not one of those people who has accumulated an entire drawer full of examples and is able to provide you with 400 bullet points of what's wrong with the NYT, but maybe two more will help push you to investigate a bit more? The NYT may publish left-leaning content sometimes, but they are not an actual ally of the Democrats, let alone the progressive or far left. They routinely publish Republican lies uncritically, and their perception as left-leaning is one of their best weapons.

I think demand for legendary armor is high and sustainable enough that the situation may continue pretty much indefinitely. The grind required is huge, and a lot of people are undertaking it with great enthusiasm, and looking at the examples provided by other legendary equipment supports the claim that interest will hang on more or less indefinitely. I'm still constantly running into people who want to do raids to work on that armor or Coalescence, fractals for Ad Infinitum, etc, and those projects have been available for years.

Note that I'm using the word 'may' here because all this is wild speculation about what players will do en masse; it's not a hill I'm going to die on.

Does the cult have a good plan for healthcare? If so, please send me your newsletter, manifesto, religious tract, pentabarf, whatever.

I use my Deck in desktop mode a lot of the time, but let's go with games I just play with it in handheld mode, since my list seems to be different.

• Siralim Ultimate
• Chronicon
• Demon's Tilt
• Satryn Deluxe
• Stellaris
• Vampire Survivors
• Time Break Chronicles

I finished Overload this weekend, so I'm wandering through my backlog looking for a next thing that sticks with me for more than five minutes. Oxygen Not Included doesn't seem to be cutting it, so.. we'll see. I've got Cataclysm: DDA around as a light diversion until I get pulled into something, and there's always Guild Wars 2 and Deep Rock Galactic.

Symphony of the Night has an entire pile of bangers and is my clear winner in this category.

I've actually set my Deck up with a wireless keyboard and mouse and a monitor and spend a lot of time using it in desktop mode. The "real" gaming PC is still around, but it's a fallback. So I'm arguably playing Beehaw on it right now, but I just alt-tabbed away from Overload to do this. I'll play Guild Wars 2 on it for a while tomorrow..

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny. Brilliant, prescient, and genuinely a great work of literature all at once. The story of Rild, the telling of the metaphor about fire, so much else, it's been all these years and I'm still quoting it.

Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart. When my will to go on falters, this is one of the books I turn to for comfort. It's beautifully written, it's hilarious, and it just makes me feel better.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Spider Robinson. I genuinely have handed this book to a troubled young person and had them find a better understanding of the human condition between its covers. I didn't expect that, I thought I was sharing a cool book with them that was something I'd found influenced how I am, but it happened. It's kind of a big deal. It's also actually a lot of fun to read, it's just a collection of short science fiction stories set in a bar, right? ...right?

Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers, Lawrence Watt-Evans; Watt-Evans is largely a moderately obscure (as far as I can tell) fantasy author. I love the rest of his work because it's much more human than a lot of fantasy, with people who are bumbling and desperately trying to handle bizarre problems they're ill-equipped for and sometimes making their problems worse than they dreamed and also there are wizards. (I also like some of his worldbuilding choices, but let's get on with this). This one short story (that won a Hugo and stuff), though, lives rent-free in my head forever; it's got a simple point, which is that the world we're actually in has a lot of cool stuff, go enjoy it, but it makes it in a very fun way and, well, okay, enough, I love it.

Calvin and Hobbes. All of it. Bill Watterson is a visionary genius.

I can go on, I haven't mentioned Douglas Adams or Sandman or Transmetropolitan or fnord or ten thousand other things, but I have other things to do and should content myself with finite length.

Utopia is pretty universally agreed to be the most important DLC. Past that, Overlord is a good pick since they've made vassals something you actually want beyond RP reasons and it makes them much more effective, plus it adds hyper relays. I like Galactic Paragons a lot, a lot of people think Federations and Apocalypse are pretty essential, and at that point you're into picking and choosing what you'd like to have more of.

My grip on AAA is definitely weak. but Stellaris works very well both in terms of performance and ability to work the interface; using and customizing a community profile recommended.

I am paradoxically okay with winding up paying to be a beta tester! ...if it's for a tiny indie studio doing something weird, interesting, and experimental where I can join a Discord and talk to people about it. That's a fun experience. To hell with paying a major corporation for the privilege of being any form of sucker.

I was focusing on Overload a bit, which I've found to be a fun homage or spiritual sequel or successor or whatever to Descent. It does a pretty good job of addressing the problems of players potentially getting lost and disoriented in complicated 3d spaces, and it absolutely preserves the fun of wandering around, trying to spot robots before they're already firing at you, and then frenetically blowing them up. Lots of fun exploring and poking around for secrets and figuring out how to win fights. I feel like I'm only okay at it, I'm playing on a medium-ish difficulty and taking significant advantage of save-anywhere to decide I didn't actually screw up that last fight that badly, but I'm having fun anyway. A bit daunted by how difficult some of the later levels are turning out to be, though..

Anyway, I was doing all of that - plus other things, I have a bunch of gaming balls in the air right now - but then No Man's Sky had a new expedition come out. I only got the game in the last year or two and haven't been interested in it at the same time as an expedition happened, so I spent last night focusing on it. It seems okay? It's nice that my knowledge of the game allows me to render some tasks that might be arduous completely trivial, like knowing exactly what weapon to go fetch and what to do to get my hands on a quad servo fairly quickly. I think I spent too much time early on just getting a bunch of basic supplies lined up, but now I'm moving through everything pretty quickly so maybe that was correct and has paid off; I'm definitely overthinking the experience a bit. It doesn't really seem like that big of a deal, overall - it's not a major transformation of the game or anything, it winds up being what it says on the tin, just a quest line to go do to unlock some cool stuff. The cool stuff is actually mildly appealing to me, which is nice and a bit unusual.

I can go on, I found a novel (to me, anyway) way to break Chronicon a few days ago, but I think that's the appropriate amount of rambling.