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    1. Any thoughts on Bridgerton Season 4?

      Personally - and keeping it spoiler free - I thought Season 4 was much better than I expected it to be. It felt a lot more sincere and there was just a lot more going on than in some of the other...

      Personally - and keeping it spoiler free - I thought Season 4 was much better than I expected it to be. It felt a lot more sincere and there was just a lot more going on than in some of the other seasons.

      Wondering if anyone had any thoughts they want to share?

      11 votes
    2. What would you do with a video game style inventory?

      The rules are as follows: If you can lift an object above your head unassisted, you can put it into your inventory. There is no limit in the total quantity, volume or weight of objects in your...

      The rules are as follows:

      • If you can lift an object above your head unassisted, you can put it into your inventory.
      • There is no limit in the total quantity, volume or weight of objects in your inventory.
      • You can immediately store or produce a stored item to and from your inventory at will.
      • Objects will remain in their original state when stored in an inventory. From their perspective, no time has passed.
      29 votes
    3. Discussion for Malazan Book of the Fallen (Spoilers for the entire series)

      Warning: this post may contain spoilers

      I recently finished The Crippled God and loved the book and the entire series. I'm already looking forward to a reread through the series to notice new things and see how events play out from the perspective gained after finishing the series.

      I'm still trying to get my thoughts in order for this whole series, but I had some questions that I thought would be interesting to hear from people here after talking about it a bit with my coworker.

      What were some of your favorite characters?
      Favorite moments?
      What did you not see coming?
      How did you feel about the perspective shift on the Crippled God as the series progressed?
      Have you reread the series, and did you enjoy it more during an additional read?
      Anything else fun you'd like to talk about for these books

      Please note, this is a discussion of the 10 Malazan Book of the Fallen novels. I've yet to delve in to the rest of the Malazan series, and I am taking a break before I start on the Novels of the Malazan Empire series.

      19 votes
    4. Tell me about your favourite web-based logic puzzles!

      I was never a wordle fanatic, but I am hooked on this Alphable game now https://geoffpevlin.com/games/alphable/. I also play https://cluesbysam.com/. Do people know of other web-based (hopefully...

      I was never a wordle fanatic, but I am hooked on this Alphable game now https://geoffpevlin.com/games/alphable/. I also play https://cluesbysam.com/.

      Do people know of other web-based (hopefully free) logic puzzles like these? I like the daily format, but wouldn't limit myself to that if there are others that are also interesting.

      I've done all of the https://www.rustylake.com/ games too, which I quite enjoyed, but these types of puzzles require a little bit more time investment that I don't really have right now. (I also hated that some of the "logic" in those games did not seem to make sense to me, and I'd have to google the answer to continue with the game.)

      I also like https://timeguessr.com/ but don't return to that one as frequently because I can't play it on my phone.

      I really like in-person escape games but they are expensive and vary drastically in quality, so was very happy to find these types of games scratch that same itch.

      42 votes
    5. Midweek Movie Free Talk

      Warning: this post may contain spoilers

      Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

      Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

      8 votes
    6. My personal AI assistant project

      Let me start off by saying that I'm exhausted by AI hype. Being interested in LLM agent technology (AI agent hereafter for brevity) means skimming over a lot of hype for one or two useful, semi...

      Let me start off by saying that I'm exhausted by AI hype. Being interested in LLM agent technology (AI agent hereafter for brevity) means skimming over a lot of hype for one or two useful, semi reality based, bits of information. Maybe the part that I find the most frustrating is how effective the hype is. I don't know if there's ever been a hype cycle like this. Probably a big part of the reason for that is the internet has already proven, within living memory for most people, that technological revolutions really can change everything. Or mess everything up. Either way they generate a lot of economic activity.

      So this post is not that. I'm not going to tell you about how AI agents are the second coming for Christ. I'm not selling anything.

      Fairly early into learning about AI agents I wanted a way to connect to the agent remotely without hosting it somewhere or exposing ports to the internet. I settled on tailscale and a remote terminal and moved on, I rarely used it. Somehow the tiny friction of "Turn on tailscale, open terminal app, connect, run agent" was enough to make it not feel worth it.

      I know I'm far from the only person who had the same "I want it remote" thought, the best evidence: OpenClaw. It's just one of those things that everyone naturally converges on.

      If you're not familiar with OpenClaw, the TLDR is: Former founder with more money than he'll ever need vibecodes a bridge between instant messenger apps and LLM APIs. Nothing about it is technically challenging or requires solving any particularly hard problems. It almost immediately becomes the fastest growing GitHub repo of all time and is currently at number 14 for number of stars. It blew up the (tech) internet like very few things ever have. Within months he was hired by Open AI.

      OpenClaw now does more than just connect messaging and agents, but I believe that one piece is the killer feature. My tailscale terminal solution, combined with a scheduled task or a cron job and some context files could already do all of the things that OpenClaw can do, and countless people had already implemented similar solutions. But I think it was the tiny bit of friction OpenClaw removed that was responsible for a lot its popularity.

      I thought that was interesting but I have no interest in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw, or the "sentience" vibe for that matter, so I built my own tool.

      Essentially it's just a light secondary harness combined with a bridge between Signal and Claude Code. It does some other things too, things I wished existing harnesses did, some memory and guidelines, automated prompts and reminders to wake the agent up and have it do stuff, some context to give the agent some level of persistence, make it less LLMy, less annoying. None of that is particularly interesting though.

      Once I got it working (MVP took less than a day) and started playing with it, the OpenClaw phenomenon made a lot more sense. Somehow having the agent in a chat interface, with almost zero friction (just open the chat and send something) was cooler than it had any reason to be.

      I can't explain it any better than that at the moment. Not only was it kinda fun, it lent itself to a whole range of "what ifs". What if it could do X? What if I wrote a tool that gave it Y capability? I've been experiencing that for some time, but somehow agent in your pocket has a different feeling.

      Here's an example of a "what if". What if it could do our grocery shopping? I definitely want that. I already had a custom browser tool that I built for agent coding assistance so I was most of the way there. It was just a matter of teaching the agent to login and navigate a website, something they're already trained to do. Some hand holding, a few helper scripts, and an evening's worth of hours later and I had it working. The agent can respond to a shopping request by building a shopping list based on our most recent orders, presenting it to us for approval/edits in a Signal group chat, doing searches for any additional product requests and adding the finalized order to the cart. It could also checkout the order and schedule the delivery time but I'm doing the last 2 clicks manually for the time being. It's an idiot savant, it seems like a bad idea to give it access to my credit card. Maybe eventually.

      The fact that I can handle shopping with a couple of signal messages feels effortless in a way that handling shopping by connecting to my PC terminal remotely via tailscale terminal wouldn't have. Especially when I can include people in the loop who have no interest in tailscaling anywhere. Everyone can use messaging apps.

      I imagine before long solutions like this will be built in, either in the grocery websites and apps, or into the frontier harnesses themselves. There will probably be agents everywhere, for better or worse. Probably I'll wish that the agents would all fuck off. In the meantime it's exciting how easy it is to get these tools to do useful things.

      32 votes
    7. Bookmark management for non-technical people?

      TLDR; I'm looking for a free way to improve bookmark management without increasing cognitive load. I find that with the constant stream of information online, paired with my ADHD, I tend to know...

      TLDR; I'm looking for a free way to improve bookmark management without increasing cognitive load.

      I find that with the constant stream of information online, paired with my ADHD, I tend to know nothing in detail. So I bookmark so that I can return to the same articles regularly instead so that I can 1) stay informed with more depth rather than breadth and 2) contribute to online discourse when I see a gap.

      I'm using bookmark folders (by topic) for articles I want to refer back to regularly, and the built in "reading list" for things I do want to come back to but don't plan to keep a record of.

      But my bookmarks are overflowing because of all the other stuff I have folders for (admin logins, shopping, local services, social sites, online office stuff, literature and languages, fun stuff, etc).

      I also bookmark folders for these:

      • Politics (local/national)
      • Environment
      • Human rights issue #1
      • Human rights issue (n) ...

      These basically have 1) compelling facts in support of the issue or 2) important memorable counter statements to common misinformation.

      But I get easily lost among clutter, and I contend with brain fog. I've seen stuff about "second brain" online, but to be honest they're way too complicated for me (raindrop.io synced with this and that...). Is the folder system I'm using as good as it gets for people like me who need to avoid complexity?

      I'm currently on macOS & iOS but plan to return to linux when I next upgrade in a few years.

      Update: thanks so much for the recommendations. I've started using Wallabag to get essential articles organised and categorised with tags. This helps me remember their contents better and retrieve them more quickly.

      I'm also experimenting with Obsidian in parallel to see if it makes it easier or more challenging to do the same thing. It's the ideas within the articles I want to remember rather than just the headline, and some articles have a lot of different but useful information (for example, today I learned that if you earn more than roughly $33,000 per year, you are in the top 1% on the planet - one third of people on the planet live on $10 per day.). That was in an article about sustainable production and consumption, so the headline itself wouldn't necessarily help me remember that this is the article where that factoid lives.

      I have start.me bookmarked too and plan to keep my top 30 articles there.

      At some point I'll probably reduce the options from 3 down to 2 or 1. But whichever choice I go with, it's already much, much better than what I was doing before. Thanks again!

      28 votes
    8. What creative projects have you been working on?

      This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on. Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just...

      This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

      Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

      If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

      12 votes
    9. Steam Next Fest recommendations and game demos

      Steam Next Fest is currently underway, lasting until March 2nd. Coincidentally, I had just been thinking a little while ago that I kinda miss game demos. About a month ago I came across a little...

      Steam Next Fest is currently underway, lasting until March 2nd. Coincidentally, I had just been thinking a little while ago that I kinda miss game demos. About a month ago I came across a little twin-stick shooter called Minishoot' Adventures and ended up paying it more attention than any other random game I see that looks kinda cool, because they had a demo available. I installed it, played it for a couple hours, and instantly bought the full game once I was done. It's quite a good game, but they got my money primarily because the demo was able to hook me into making an impulse purchase, totally defeating my usual standard of decision-making about buying games.

      For Next Fest, Steam is recommending me a deluge of indie 2D platformers and metroidvanias, and I'm not sure if that's because those are the games in development that tend to have demos or if Steam thinks that's all I'm interested in (spoiler - I'm not). So, have you discovered any truly noteworthy upcoming games in this year's Next Fest? Also, what was the last demo to win you over?

      32 votes
    10. Colossal Game Adventure: February 2026 Lobbying Topic

      Welcome to the lobbying topic for CGA! This is your chance to try to sway people's votes by endorsing certain titles. Let people know why a certain game is awesome, or how a particular entry is of...

      Welcome to the lobbying topic for CGA!

      This is your chance to try to sway people's votes by endorsing certain titles. Let people know why a certain game is awesome, or how a particular entry is of historical value, or why others really need to play this gem of yesteryear.

      Lobbying is not limited in any way, so you can endorse/support as many entries as you like.

      Negative lobbying is also allowed, but please try to do it as fairly as possible. The point isn't to rag on someone else's choices, but it might be acceptable in cases such as "The camera controls unfortunately can be very frustrating" or "It's quite hard to get up and running." Basically: try to keep it to valuable information that people would want to know before playing, but not for the purposes of hating on a game in particular.

      Anyone can participate. CGA does not require membership and is always open to all.

      Importantly, this is NOT the final voting topic. This topic will remain up for 48 hours, after which we will hold the voting in a separate topic.


      A reminder on the voting mechanics

      Just so people remember how the voting will go and can plan accordingly:

      • Each person will have 20 votes to distribute among games they see fit.
      • Each person will be able to allocate a maximum of 5 points per Single Game/Arcade Special.

      A reminder on the culling mechanics

      And again, so people can plan for what happens to the list once voting is completed:

      • The top 6 games will be chosen to be played (or more in the event of a tie).
      • The top 50% will advance to the next round. They will start the next round with a base score of 70% of their vote totals.
      • The bottom 50% will be removed from the list.

      Game List

      All nominations and boosts have been added, so this is the final list of games and their vote totals that we will be deciding on.

      Game Rollover Votes
      Another World 19
      Back in a Flash
      Bloons Tower Defense
      Line Rider
      Motherload
      QWOP
      Stick RPG
      25
      Behind the Wheel
      Lego Island
      Rally-X
      Sega Rally Championship
      15
      Beneath a Steel Sky 15
      Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow 23
      The Colonel’s Bequest 15
      Crystalis 15
      Descent 18
      Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist 13
      The Genesis of Treasure
      Gunstar Heroes
      McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure
      Dynamite Headdy
      Alien Soldier
      Light Crusader
      0
      The Grue That Binds
      Border Zone
      Twisted!
      Zork
      15
      JSRF: Jet Set Radio Future 12
      The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past 15
      Lode Runner 12
      Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals 26
      Maniac Mansion 0
      Metroid 14
      Metroid Prime 19
      Mother 3 0
      Red Dead Redemption 0
      Resident Evil (REmake) 0
      Scroll Lock-on
      Einhander
      Ikaruga
      Paradroid
      Raid on Bungeling Bay
      Thunder Force IV
      14
      Sid Meier’s Pirates 24
      Space Rogue 0
      StarTropics 15
      Tetris 13
      Threads of Fate 15
      Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 2 13
      11 votes
    11. Save Point: A game deal roundup for the week of March 1

      Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week! Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle...

      Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

      Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

      Rules:

      • No grey market sales
      • No affiliate links

      If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.


      All previous Save Point topics

      If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

      4 votes
    12. What creative projects have you been working on?

      This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on. Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just...

      This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

      Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

      If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

      8 votes
    13. What are some bands you regret not seeing live (or, just never had the chance to see in the first place)?

      For me, the biggest is definitely Modern Baseball. To set the scene, it's 2016, I was in high school, and a girl I was friends with told me about this band Modern Baseball. I liked them a lot, but...

      For me, the biggest is definitely Modern Baseball.

      To set the scene, it's 2016, I was in high school, and a girl I was friends with told me about this band Modern Baseball. I liked them a lot, but I wasn't quite at my peak emo phase (that would come about a year later during my freshman year in college lol), so I didn't get super into them or anything. Anyways, a few months after that, MoBo came through our city on tour and that girl and one of our other friends literally offered to pay for my ticket to the concert if I DDed for them... and I said no.

      Fast forward like 7 months and Modern Baseball goes on hiatus in early 2017, a hiatus that continues to this day, though they played a few one-off shows throughout 2017. Anyways, fall 2017 comes around and I listened to Modern Baseball more and realized I really liked them... but they're on hiatus and I missed my chance to see them!

      Anyways, I mostly made this thread because the fact that I turned down going to that concert is something I still think about from time-to-time and I wish I went, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has similar stories or just stories of bands you wish you could have seen.

      27 votes