I’m annoyed! Inoreader has introduced an AI Summary tool to their RSS feed reader! Why would anyone want that? People who follow blogs are reading nerds. Anyway, you should still add this blog and others to your RSS feed reader of choice, but now I’m looking for one that can synch what I’ve read but isn’t Feedly and Inoreader. If you have any recommendations, drop them in the comments
Chuck Jordan is spending a month only using his blog to post and taking a short break from Bluesky/Mastodon/etc. This sounds really nice and I’m strongly considering doing it for April. I encourage you all to join me. Not for any sort of moral reason, I just don’t want to miss out on good posts on social media.
This blog post on affirmations is how I learned about the IndieWeb Carnival, which seems to be a group that gives prompts on a blog post each month.
Video Games
Renga In Blue writes about a computer shop that had a game publishing business as a spin-off and their game The Colonel’s House.
Wraithkal continues doing very nice #ScreenshotSaturday posts for folks on Mastodon
Macintosh shareware developer John Calhoun writes about the shareware dev that inspired him, Duane Blehm. The developer passed away before John could even send him money for his shareware in the 80s so this post has John trying to learn what he can about Duane’s life from the materials that still exist.
Adrian Hon wrote a eulogy for Urban Dead, a MMO that ran for 20 years but is shutting down now because of new laws in the UK. While I haven’t played the game in many years, I’m always sad to see a MMO shutdown, especially when it was running just fine before the new laws came into effect.
WildWeasel of The Golf Shrine now has a blog. I liked this post about Daikatana and how it’s not too bad once you install the patches and get past the first few levels.
Rob writes a very short post about how if smaller, more focused games are the solution to the games industry’s problems.
Did you know The CRPG Addict is still plugging away at playing every crpg in order? They just played the German rpg Die Prüfung (1993).
Not a blog post but Damiano Gerli has a great thread on semi-obscure Spanish games.
Writing
Thom Cote has a short story on Neocities about worm tunnels.
The Lunar Flaneur has a post about dreaming about an anthology in their sleep and then putting it together.
Did you know that some of the folks from 90s pc game developer Dreamforge Intertainment started a sci-fi magazine a few years ago called Dreamforge? They just redid their site and you can read all the stories and poetry here.
TTRPGs
Seed of Worlds is doing better ttrpg blog roundups than I could ever do.
Music
My friend Erik just played music at monthly Enter the Void show in Minnesota. Check out the post for more info and neat noisy music.
Photography
Have some nice pictures of the Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve been to Grand Rapids many times but still haven’t been here yet.
Dev Logs
Lunar Division talks about developing Amberspire.
localthunk posts Balatro’s dev timeline.
Megan Carnes writes about creating music for every tarot card.
An explanation of how Eldritch 2’s save files work compared to the first game.
Farfama talks about TO:RI Development. The game looks beautiful!
Technology
The Works of Egan explains why you should start a blog. Obviously I will endorse that.
Chuck Jordan endorses the Reeder app for RSS feeds on Apple devices.
I just started reading your blog from the ChoiceBeat recommendation and I really enjoy it! My RSS feed reader of choice is NetNewsWire. It’s free, open source, and syncs quickly, but I believe it’s Mac / iOS only. I’m a longtime Mac gamer, so thanks for the heads up on that John Calhoun article.
Thank you for reading it! I heard really good things about NetNewsWire but yeah, I think it’s Apple products only and I do have a pc (but do use an iPhone).
What platforms are you looking for RSS reader recs for?
Windows and iOS
probably the best rss application out there is rss guard. its suuuuper customizable and is really good. its not on iOS though
I run a self-hosted instance of Feed on Feeds, a nice and simple PHP-based reader. Avoid the official site (it’s woefully outdated), but https://github.com/fluffy-critter/Feed-on-Feeds is the fork that I run. It does nearly exactly what I want in a reader, basically just giving me a non-algorithmic timeline of all of the stuff in my inbox, and being server-side it naturally syncs between all my devices.
It does require having a webhost with PHP but actually installing it is super easy and it doesn’t even need a database setup most of the time.