Whoa... !FloatingIsFun@fedia.io looks really good in PieFed's tile views! It's kind of what I was going for with my CSS. I think PieFed has a ton of potential, and I want to mess around with it more.

@Jerry@hear-me.social, if you just saw a spike of like 1GB of data getting federated in, that was me manually retrieving my first few hundred posts.

Edit: Oops, I tagged the wrong instance admin named Jerry!

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.

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.

Ooh, nice! I haven't heard of Ventoy before. I'm gonna have to try carrying Hiren's BootCD PE, Linux Mint, and Batocera all bootable on the same flash drive in my pocket.

I'm a fella of Mbin but I've still got my bag of tricks with me:

• Cirkul water bottle until I run out of cartridges for it
• Keychain with a key-shaped multitool and a double-ended USB flash drive with Hiren's BootCD PE (soon: Ventoy!)
• Wallet with one credit card and way too many gift cards
• Motorola Moto G Power 2021 running a stock Android OS I want to replace
• Anbernic RG35XX Plus currently running Knulli, a fork of Batocera
• Vital Hero Digimon Red where I should be wearing a good watch like my old Pebble
• Printed cloth face mask from Bluehalo or Level One Bar + Arcade
• I want to carry some cheap clip-on earphones again

Losing interest? How about some shorter games that are super high quality all the way through?

• Kirby's Adventure
• Super Mario Bros. 3
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
• Gunstar Heroes
• Mega Man 4 (and then Rockman 4 Minus Infinity)
• Tetris Rosy Retrospection DX
• Hammerin' Harry: Smash Smash Hammer Smash
• Klonoa: Door to Phantomile
• Streemerz
• Donkey Kong Country
• Star Fox 64
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

So, what kinds of games do you normally play? We can help you more if we know where you're coming from.

Check each game's entry on PCGamingWiki. They're a good resource for finding what it takes to get old games running well on modern PCs. A lot of times, the answer is either "buy it on Steam and use a community-made patch" or "buy it on GOG".

I'm curious, what games are you trying to get working?

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.

The Republicans in state legislature asked us to vote to give up our right to vote on things. All they accomplished was making us more angry at them.