HipPriest

I use dark mode late at night, especially using amoled screens under artificial lights or with all the lights off in bed. I don't like using it when I'm outside, it seems off somehow.

The Precession To Calvery was hilarious from beginning to end.

You beat me to it because this game is genius!

Someone else mentioned Procession to Calvary - an adventure game set in a cut and paste world of renaissance art with a very surreal plot and sense of humour. Pythonesque.

There Is No Game is pretty hilarious, the voice acting always makes me crack up.

Agatha Knife is a funny point and click adventure game where you're a 7 year old girl who's a butcher and needs to set up her own religion sacrificing pigs in the basement for... Reasons.

The Kbin social API hasn't been released yet. When it is you'll be able to use it 'properly'.

I don't know when that will be though...

I like the part where they point out that writers probably have more leverage than they think about having a say - but then maybe many writers don't consider the ebook side of things when thinking about getting their work published.

It's obvious that 'they' are out to demonise IA as something like Pirate Bay whereas it really, really isn't. Aside from the massive amount of obscure reference material, I found BBC documentaries on there from the 80s about some history which is otherwise unobtainable. I can understand if there's some legal points which need to be worked out between both sides in order to keep the site going... but that obviously isn't what the publishers are going for.

Ah I was just going to their website and it was refusing to load the page. But then when I tried it on Chrome it was fine.

I'll have a play around later, cheers

Doesn't seem to play nicely with Firefox Android unfortunately. Which is ironic because Chrome on Android is one of the areas of Google I decided to experiment degoogling from just a week ago or so

I mean the article is specifically about Google search. Which might have gone downhill since whenever it first came out with the introduction of ads (sorry, 'Sponsored Results') but I'm not seeing significantly better competition for delivering search results. Everyone is still just aping the brand leader.

DuckDuckGo is obviously better for privacy for example but it doesn't seem to have any ambition except to deliver the same results as Google but without the ads and tracking which is ok but not a big enough draw except for people already concerned about privacy. Bing gets essentially the same results but if anything seems more spammy than Google with pop ups about making it or edge your default search engine or browser. It feels like other search engines just take Google search as something to copy and put their spin on it though.

I'd say search is one of the things Google is still getting right enough to earn its place as the leader. Some things it does well, some things it has badly declined on (someone above mentioned Google assistant hardly understanding anything anymore, when it used to be the best in this area too), but generally you can replace most Google things with programmes doing things their own way. Search engines just feel a bit like reskins to me

As a slightly different take I'd recommend SS-GB. Technically it's an alternative history novel whether the Nazis won WWII and conquered the UK.... But that's pretty dystopian in practice, especially when the main character is a policeman.

I don't know if The Trial counts exactly as a dystopia but it certainly conjures up the paranoia and confusion of being caught up in a beruacratic nightmare like you might find in a police state.

High Rise is a great satire on the class system translated to people moving into the then new high rise blocks in the UK - only the rich can afford the apartments at the top and so on. The first sentence involves the hero having to eat a dog to survive.

A Clockwork Orange has been mentioned already, but it's easily my favourite. And very different and more brutal than the film, which is also great but more its own thing. Alex is a much nastier piece of work in the book, and the last chapter of the novel isn't in the film

Trojan Box Sets are great compilations that give an all over taste. Some you may have to search for but I had an excellent one which I might be able to get the Google drive link for later