Just a random thought as a friend browses Nexus Mods. What are some of the funniest, craziest and wildest mods you've come across? I see plenty of talk about QoL mods and the like, but I feel like there's a lot of fun stories to be had with forgetting you modded some enemy to look like the Cookie Monster or custom weapons that shoot fish.

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam Sale topic.

An update for this topic: I've always used the number of Steam reviews for a game as a rough proxy for the game's audience size. It's not perfect, but it works well enough. Steam effectively made this canon in one of their recent sales. They had a Hidden Gems category and then broke the game list out into different tiers based the number of reviews each one had. I saved their taxonomy so I could use it here.

Feel free to tag or group your recommendations based on these if you like:

All the categories above, except for the last one, are how Steam defined their different tiers. I have some qualms with them using "Cult Classic" there, but I'm going to follow suit for consistency's sake.

I myself added the last category, because I think there are plenty of games worth mentioning with more than 1000 reviews that still have a solid Hidden Gem vibe but have since found bigger audiences and "graduated" from the label.

Please also see @KapteinB's recent post about Ukraine says missile strike destroyed kamikaze drones and Iranian instructors.

I wanted to touch on a few pieces of news and media that people might not have seen this month.

Yesterday, Pyongyang Says It Will Send Troops to Ukraine Within a Month - A military engineering unit will be sent to the Donetsk region to support Russian forces. While there are many foreigners who have intentionally and unintentionally signed up in a combat capacity that supports Russia, North Korea is taking a somewhat different stance here by overtly doing the thing that the west has been reluctant to admit doing themselves (sending advisors and other personnel to front-line adjacent regions).

There is a film coming out called 'Real' which is 90 minutes of unedited front-line footage accidentally recorded by a film-maker. Hopefully this doesn't just cater to the raw "combat footage" people, but also people who are into biopics/documentaries/war journalism/etc.

Sentsov, who spent several years as a political prisoner in Russia and is now fighting in the Ukrainian army, found the 90 minutes of shaky footage six months after the battle. He was going through old files on his GoPro camera and realised it had been switched on that day. ... I realised I had a very interesting imprint of that battle and of war how it truly is – ugly, incomprehensible, twisted and stupid."

Outgoing Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte will be the next head of NATO. The Dutch have been very strong supporters of Ukraine, so this bodes well for further support from a leadership role and might also benefit the relationship between Baltic states and northern Europe. Dutch F-16s and ammunition, along with donations from Belgium and Norway, should be arriving in Ukraine this summer for real this time. They've already made numerous deliveries of F-16s to Romania and other places where Ukrainian pilots are being trained. At the same time, the EU has opened accession talks to Ukraine and Moldova, which may allow for more support to be extended to the countries.

Last month, Russia replaced Shoigu as Defense Minister, which I thought had a Tildes discussion somewhere. Last week Putin sacked deputy defense ministers Nikolai Pankov, Ruslan Tsalikov, Tatiana Shevtsova and Pavel Popov. He then appointed replacement deputy defense ministers, including one relative.

Also of note, Ukraine is confirming that last month they destroyed the last Russian Kalibr missile carrier (ship) using Crimea as its port, with the rest having been removed from Crimea. But this was not the last ship, nor necessarily the last missile carrier, in the Black Sea as a whole. It does suggest that Russia's ability to launch deep missile attacks has been pushed back further, and right at a time when Ukraine has been able to position several MLRS within range of Crimea to hit the targets mentioned by KapteinB's post at the very top of this page.

Other Recent Headlines:

Ukraine signs security pacts with EU, Lithuania and Estonia - 27 June.

In his home near Ukraine's front line with Russia, Yurii makes a stand - A feature article/photo essay.

90 Russian prisoners returned in swap with Ukraine - 26 June.

US and Russian defence chiefs speak amid recent rise in tensions (over Ukraine)

Zelenskiy replaces commander leading war on Russia in eastern Ukraine

‘This country gave me a lot’: the Vietnamese people staying in Ukraine - I found this to be very interesting. These folks really have a lot of pride in their homeland/adopted homeland to fight for it. It's quite heartwarming in that way.

Key global powers fail to sign up to Ukraine peace summit communique - Spoiler, it's basically BRICS countries again.

Over the past couple of weeks Brandon Mitchell has posted a few videos about their crowd-funded offensive drones in the Kupyansk Front direction. I really appreciate what he's been doing in every capacity that he's supported efforts out there (initially in a non-combat role, etc.).

Feel free to define lesser known how you like. Here's my list. Most of these have fewer than 100,000 subscribers. Some of them have fewer than 10,000 subs.

Al Brady (32k subs)

Has a nice mix of sweet and savoury food. Has a lot of videos below ten minutes - there's a rapid pacing here that avoids the problems of TikTok / YT Shorts cooking. Enough time to explain what he's doing, no useless padding.

Baking on a Budget (40k subs)

A reasonably new channel (only 33 videos as I post this). He has a method for pricing the recipes, and we can always argue about whether that makes sense or not, but at least it's consistent across his videos so viewers get an idea of relative costs. The recipes are simple. They're aimed at providing tasty filling food for cheap. The production values are low - no fancy lighting, no fancy camera, the kitchen table looks a bit rickety.

BoSFinesse (6k subs)

He's from Bristol (South West UK) and has the regional accent to prove it. He visits and reviews street food and cafés. I love videos like this - show-casing normal eateries. It's rough and ready - he sometimes includes swearing. And he's usually positive, or occasionally very mildly not positive. But I like that. He does a mix of shorts and long form - the long form does tend to be a bit calmer and explanatory.

Bread and Food (400 subs)

Features food, mostly street food or bread, from Iran. I like the "show don't tell" aspect of these videos. There are loads of street food videos and I watch quite a few. Lots of videos are presented by people that I don't enjoy watching.

YumTopia (5.5k subs)

Another street food channel, again from Iran. This is the video that I really like - street food often looks like it has been rapidly cooked, but there are examples of slow cooked food. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDJowrQQisg

The Staff Canteen (152k)

At over 100k subs this probably doesn't belong here, but I think this fits here because many of their videos get fewer than 1000 views. Views are picking up recently. It's a great channel if you're interested in fine dining in the UK. There are a huge number of interviews with some very very good chefs here, and often they demonstrate one of their dishes.

Pete's Pans (9.5k subs)

He researches regional dishes from France, Spain, and Portugal and he claims to present traditional "authentic" versions of various dishes. I've only just started watching, and I'm not sure if I'll end up finding that he's not for me.

Over the past year or two I've been writing "reviews" (mostly a short paragraph or two) on Goodreads for books I've read, and I enjoy looking back on what I've read and what I thought about it. So I would like to do the same for the games I played, and also better organize my backlog so I know what's next to play. So I've been looking for a Goodreads-like for video games and found some alternatives, but I thought I'd check here if anyone has any recommendations.

What I'm looking for is:

• Being able to rate and review games played
• Some way to create lists (much like Goodreads "to read" shelf and the like)

So it's not a large wish list really. After a short search I've found a few sites that seem to fulfill those requirements and they look fairly equal, so I can't really decide which one to commit to (if any):

• https://www.backloggd.com/
• https://backloggery.com/
• https://ggapp.io/
• https://www.grouvee.com/

Since 95% of all games I play are on Steam, just using what's already there could work as well I guess. Collections could be used for backlog management, and the Steam reviews handle rating and review. But for some reason I'm apprehensive about rating games on Steam, probably because it feels very public and I'm doing this only for myself.

Another approach is to use an excel sheet (or similar) to keep track of everything, but it feels... Boring, I suppose? But owning your own data is always nice I suppose!

Do the people here on Tildes have any experience using any of the methods above and can recommend one? Or do you do something completely different than what I've listed here that's working well for you?

What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!