I will always, always, always go to bat for Parade Killer. I think half my comments on Lemmy have been shilling for it. I desperately want more mystery games like it. Not just for the reasons you described, but because it so, so, SO completely nails the relationship between its aesthetic and its plot question about what it means to have institutional power in a institution that’s downright malicious. The player character is explicitly a tool of the evil Syndicate. Is she even interested in effecting change? Could she if she was? Is Paradise worth saving?

I’ve played a little. It’s okay. The one I was playing didn’t do anything approximating the Mind Palace and was very, very linear-- which I think is better than the Sherlock Holmes style games. It was the everything else about it that annoyed me into turning it off!

I love mystery games, so–

Love: When mystery games actively draw attention to the idea that you need to draw your own conclusions about what you find in the game, and make your own truth, instead of just following a track

Hate: when the above is expressed as a formalized “Mind Palace” mechanic à la the more recent Sherlock Holmes games. That’s just covering the track with a tarp instead of letting you build your own theories. Either let people accuse who they want with the evidence they have (once again I plug Paradise Killer) or acknowledge that there’s only one acceptable answer

That’s why I got Nebula. It’s not everyone I watch on YouTube, but it’s a lot of the best people, and they get a much, much larger amount of revenue from me specifically than they do from even YouTube Premium at a better price since you’re not also paying for YouTube Music on top of it. I was a devoted Google Play Music All Access listener, but true to form Google forgot about it and then replaced it with a worse service that costs more money. Spotify and Nebula as separate subs is as close as I’m going to get to the old school GPMAA/YouTube Red bundle and I don’t have to give a penny to Google for it

I used to use Boost all the time, and browsed the site when I was on my computer. Now that I can’t access it from my phone (the first party app isn’t happening lmao) I don’t feel much like using it on desktop either. Tumblr, of all things, has absorbed much of my traffic, and I’ve paid to remove ads on it because I’ve used it so much over the last ten years that I know it’ll be worth it, plus I’m hoping that if enough people pay for it they won’t go down the monetization rabbit hole as much as other sites have recently.

Lemmy is okay, but the hot/active post sorting is far worse than Reddit was (I’m still seeing days- old posts even when set to All) and the user base just isn’t large enough yet to have a consistent feed of stuff I find interesting. Both of those can easily change over the coming days/weeks of course.

All social media platforms’ viability come down to userbase and how fun they are to hang out on, and reddit has absolutely damaged both. It’s unclear to me what impact that will have for it long-term, but its time as the problematic but scrappy underdog in the space is over.