This one's a two parter-

I'm traveling to Portland for the week so I have a bit of a plane ride ahead of me. Recommend me some deep dive hour + YouTube videos I can download for the flight! I tend to drift towards science, technology, psychology, and some hank green esque talking heads about whatever.

Also if you have anything in particular you think I should check out in Portland let me know! Particularly interested in the niche spots. Still a bit tentative stuff but mostly plan to do the Tillamook factory, a tea room, PSU Farmers market, and ten falls hike.

Every year my friend group and I have a long weekend meetup where we rent a house and communally nerd out with each other. Lots of tabletop gaming; plenty of Magic matches; handheld consoles everywhere; etc.

I always bring my Steam Link so people can cast their Decks to the TV, and I'm looking for recommendations for games that would be good for hotseat play where people can pass around a Deck and each play a little bit of. (So, specifically single player games rather than multiplayer games.)

In past years Peggle and Peglin have been big hits with the group. They're immediately pick-uppable even by people who don't play a lot of videogames (of which there are a few in our group). They're also eminently entertaining to watch because it's easy to tell what's going on.

I'm looking for other games that would fit the bill: casual, simple, fun, easy to hand off to others, relatively quick intervals between players. If you have any recommendations, let me know!

Yesterday I did something stupid. I went to reddit and responded to a comment. The comment in question was talking about how popular the PS2 was because it also functioned as a DVD player. I pointed out that few people would have bought a PS2 because it was more expensive than a standalone device, and didn't come with a remote. People often get confused about this because the PS3 basically fit this description: it was one of the best and cheapest blu-ray players for quite a while. Naturally when I went back to look at reddit today I found a bunch of people saying "nuh-uh" and my response had negative karma.

There's a lot of revisionist history when it comes to video games. For the earlier generation, there seems to be this idea that the Sega Saturn couldn't do "real" 3D graphics and the Playstation couldn't do "real" sprites - in spite of a massive library of titles that directly prove that they both draw 2D and 3D graphics just fine - heck, there's a bunch of people out there who think Symphony of the Night on PSX is one of the best pixel art games of all time.

I don't really care much about these specific examples, because they're ultimately meaningless. It's not remotely likely that these "factoids" will make a difference to anyone's life. What I do care about, however, is what it says about society. We already know reddit is an echo chamber, but if we can't figure out what the actual truth of history was, we're doomed as a species.