Here are the apps I used that I’m not seeing.

• FoodNoms for calorie counting
• Waking Up for guided meditation
• Finch for gamified general mental health
• Future for asynchronous virtual training
• Tripsy for travel tracking
• Organic Maps for offline mapping
• Transit for navigating most US cities via public transit
• Fastmail for personal email (Apple Mail for work email)
• 1Password for password management
• Elaho for browsing Gemini
• Tidal for music
• Vellum for cool backgrounds
• SwiftScan for scanning documents
• iPlum for a cheap business phone number
• Kagi Search to set the Kagi search engine as the default in Safari
• Parcel for package tracking
• Mona for Mastodon

And I’ll second some others.

• Overcast
• Bookplayer
• Reeder
• AnyList
• Sleep Cycle
• Signal
• Obsidian
• Vinegar
• Noir

Yeah, definitely depends on who I’m recommending to. If it’s someone who’s pretty familiar with games, I think it would be Elden Ring. Love the sense of exploration and discovery in that game.

I switched fairly recently. I was on Ting before, and they appear to be quietly sunsetting that service after Dish Network bought them a few years back. Hoping the same doesn’t happen to Mint. It’s been great so far. Incredible value!

Yeah, come to think of it, I think this is a larger issue I have in life: I always have to be working toward a goal or else I feel guilty. I can see your point of view too though. If there’s no beginning and end, there’s no minimum amount of time you need to play. The goal is just to enjoy.

My perspective is basically the inverse: if there’s no beginning and end, there’s no maximum amount of time I need to play. 😅

I don’t feel this way about open-world games because they do usually have an end and you can skip a lot of the open-world filler content. I get this anxiety about sandbox games. I hate it because I really enjoy games like Cities Skylines and I’d love to get into Dwarf Fortress, but I can’t play them anymore because I could spend 1,000 hours in one of them and never finish. That open-endedness keeps me from playing.

Greater transparency under capitalism is always a good thing. I have to admit, one thing Trump did that I liked was to force hospitals to publish their prices. I can’t think of a good reason people buying a thing shouldn’t know how much it costs beforehand.

Just got around to playing (most of) Mother 3 last year. It has a lot of the same charm and is really interesting in its own way… but it still didn’t hit me quite the same way Earthbound did.

I lived for 5 years car-free in Seattle. I’m still car-free, but I’m currently doing a bit of traveling so no longer in Seattle (although I may ultimately end up back there).

It’s definitely challenging. I wish there was more train coverage and greater frequency in general of transit service in Seattle. Back when I first moved, car shares were plentiful which made it really easy to hop in a car if I really needed to — maybe 5 to 10 times a year — but that whole thing mostly fell apart. When I left a few months ago, Gig seemed to be doing pretty well.

I lived for 35 years in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it would have been near impossible there. Your world gets very small when you go car-free, and that’s a problem in places where everything is spread out assuming everyone will have a car and can quickly traverse the miles between places you might want to be. There’s a downtown in Knoxville, but until the last 10 years, almost no one lived there. There’s a lot more housing now, but basic amenities like a grocery store and drug store are, so far as I’m aware, still missing. Downtown Knoxville is less a place to live and more a theme park.

I was sad to hear the only full-service grocery store in downtown Seattle closed during the pandemic, but there are still plenty of neighborhoods that are totally livable car-free. Could be better, but it could certainly be worse.

Let’s see if I can offer one suggestion for each of these platforms. 😀

• Batman for the NES was the best Batman game until Arkham Asylum came out something around 20 years later. Sunsoft was pretty amazing in that era.
• Earthbound is my favorite JRPG ever. It was pure wish fulfillment for a tween boy, but even though I’m no longer that, it still holds up because it’s weird and charming as hell.
• I didn’t care much for the N64 — it always looked like a bunch of blobs with blurry textures to me, and the release cadence was abysmal — but I do fondly remember Blast Corps. It was great fun, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
• OK, four in, and I’ve already failed. 😅 I never owned a Master System.
• I’m not sure if Panic for Sega CD was actually any good, but it was cute and silly and that was enough for me. The correct recommendation here is probably Sonic CD, but that’s a boring recommendation.
• Uh oh. I never owned a 32X either. 😞
• I hardly remember anything on the Saturn. Someone has already recommended Nights, so maybe give Christmas Nights a shot. Games with a Christmas theme are relatively rare. 🤷‍♂️
• I can’t recommend my favorite Dreamcast game Samba de Amigo because you won’t be able to play it properly without the maraca peripherals, but the Dreamcast lineup was absolutely loaded so it’s not a problem. I feel like Shenmue embodies the promise of the Dreamcast: unbridled ambition but without the pieces necessary to quite meet that ambition. It might be rough today, but it’s one of very few games where you’ll be able to spend hours driving a forklift around. That’s gotta count for something. 😅
• I’m pretty sure Windjammers is the best Neo-Geo game.
• We’re spoiled for choice again on PS1. I have to go with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It’s a classic that holds up better than just about anything else on the console.
• I always thought most of the Game Boy’s library was garbage. Qix was neat, albeit simple. Oh, wait. You like JRPGs, right? You should try Pokemon!
• I’ll go with the 800 pound Gorilla for my GBC pick: Link’s Awakening
• GBA was another one of those killer platforms with tons of great games… but the best one is WarioWare.
• DS just had a near endless library of hits. Rhythm Heaven is one of my favorites. Bonus JRPG pick: Bowser’s Inside Story
• The only PSP game I played much of was Lumines, but it is actually really good.
• When I was a kid, arcade games were incredible because the tech was years ahead of what I had at home. Now, I see how predatory they were and have trouble feeling good about many of them. Here are a few I like that fly under the radar sometimes. Tapper is a really good game that’s fun for 5-10 minutes. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is one of those 90s beat-em-ups, but with an interesting theme. If you like those, you might also like the D&D beat-em-ups. They have some really light RPG mechanics. Shadow over Mystara and Tower of Doom. Was there another one? I’m not sure. Then, I know there’s near zero chance you haven’t played NBA Jam, but it’s just my all-time favorite.

Hope that helps!