This year I wanted to make a point to support and follow more indie game developers. I thought I'd post this topic to spread some love. Let's share indie game projects and developers that we are currently following to help them get some more exposure. Here are a few from my end:

Pizza Tower:

https://pizzatowerguy.itch.io/

The demo feels so good to play. Controls are really tight and art/animation is really charming albeit eye-straining on higher resolution.

Guinea Pig Parkour:

https://twitter.com/GPigParkour
This game is not as far along as Pizza Tower, but the game-play footage looks superb. Seems like a taxing process considering the level of polish being demonstrated. Looking through GPigParkour's twitter, apparently this is something that they have been working on since 2016.

Headcannon (Stealth):

http://www.headcannon.com/vertebreaker.html

You probably know Headcannon as the development team behind Sonic Mania. Despite the amazing job they did on Sonic Mania they don't receive much of anything for their hard work. The only pay from Sega that they received was the commission to create Sonic Mania and don't receive any revenue from sales. A recent kickstarter for the game Vertebreaker had be be cancelled because they were unable to raise enough funds for it. The founder and head of Headcannon Stealth goes into detail about this in the linked video. I highly recommend you check them out and donate to their Patreon if you can. They certainly have the talent and know how to create some cool ass games.

Last night was the second semi-final of the Norwegian national selection (Melodi Grand Prix). This year there are 5 semi-finals, one for each region of the country, plus five songs that automatically qualify for the grand final.

Last week's semi-final was for Southern Norway, and last night four songs from Eastern Norway competed for a spot in the grand final:

Tore Petterson - The Start of Something New

Kim Wigaard & Maria Mohn - Fool For Love

Jæger - How About Mars

Rein Alexander - One Last Time

The qualifier was Rein Alexander with his song One Last Time, which will face 9 other songs in the grand final on the 15th of February. One of the automatic qualifiers were also presented during the show:

Didrik & Emil – Out of Air

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

This is a bit of a sibling topic to the one about changing habits for 2020. Rather than looking at habits specifically, I want to look at "swaps" that people can make.

What's something someone could change out for a better alternative?

A swap should be recommended if it is,

• more ethical,
• more sustainable,
• heathier,
• or just overall better in an individual or collective way.

Importantly: the swap should be both feasible and sensical, and should be something that is relatively easy to do. This isn't about making huge lifestyle changes but about taking what we're already doing and making it better.

Please give your reasoning for your swap, as well as any important caveats. Mentioning specific brands/companies is fine if that's an important part of the swap. Also, swaps can be for anything so don't feel limited to consumer products. Feel free to give good food/service/app/software/store swaps as well!

See my post below for an example, if the setup I've given here is unclear!

Simple question. For people's original poems posted in ~creative, should they be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

"poetry" is the broader category, and includes discussions about poets and poetry in general. However, when someone posts their poem, should that be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

The tagging guidelines say (or used to say - since I re-organised the Docs pages, I can't find this reference any more) that tags should be plural. That indicates that "poems" is the better tag. But the post contains a single poem, which makes "poem" the better tag.

Opinions?

EDIT: In the end, I went with the popular choice. When I looked at the tags used in ~creative, I found over a hundred topics tagged "poem" and only four topics tagged "poems". It seems that most people naturally choose "poem" when posting a poem, so I standardised the few differently tagged topics to use "poem".

I've recently started trying to improve my environmental impact, so I apologize for what might be a very basic question, but how bad is it to have items shipped/delivered to you, rather than picking them up from a store near you?

I'm specifically interested in two situations:

1. If I'm buying a specialty, zero-waste product that's not available in stores nearby, which is worse: having it delivered directly to my house, or having to drive a good distance in my own car to get it? Are the two roughly comparable, or is one considerably worse than the other?

2. I use a service called PaperBackSwap that is sort of like a big, distributed, online used bookstore. You give away books from your collection to people who request them, and for each book you send out you can request one to be sent to you. I like that it's putting books in the hands of people who specifically want them (as opposed to donating them or selling them to a used bookstore where they might be shelved indefinitely or pulped), but now I'm sitting here wondering how bad it is for that single hardcover of mine to travel halfway across the country. On the other hand, the book is getting reused, potentially multiple times if it then gets requested by others after that. Should I be considering this good reuse, or a waste of resources?

Outside of those two, I'd welcome any primers on the topic at large, as well as any best practices with consumer goods that I can start putting into place. I've already done a lot to find plastic-free alternatives to a lot of what I use, but I don't know if I'm trading one ill for another by getting them from places that have to send them from hundreds of miles away.