Not really “pink”, and lacks romance, but very pleasant: Dave the Diver. Cozy-ish game with nifty characters. Only thing would be I don’t know if you meant “no/minimal combat” because you don’t want the mechanics or the vibes. Dave has not particularly challenging combat mechanics, and paw patrol levels of violence levels (although you are catching and eating fish).

If you like park builders, Zoo Tycoon is cozy as hell. Beware the DLC trap though. You can get the base game with a lot of meat pretty cheap, but the DLCs are like $10+ each and not really a good value IMO. But the game has a great vibe with some really neat mechanics that try and imitate real conservation efforts.

What would check the boxes through a “Hot Topic” lens is Promise Mascot Agency. Surprisingly wholesome, completely off the wall, combat is all card/deck builder based… I… it’s a hard one to describe.

Doughnut county checks all the boxes but is rather short. Katamari if you haven’t done it.

I hear good things about, but have not played: Naiad, Tempopo.

Not exactly gear, but oxford heated grips are the best money you could ever spend.

I can only hope, meet me at the corner of hollis and morris.

edit: seriously, from someone from a border town, we stand on guard for thee.

I can’t stop laughing, it’s like every inhibition has died.

THANK YOU. I know I can scroll through it, but I get tired of waiting.

Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.

I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.

1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”

They do still exist, I have a specific but popular vehicle, and there’s a dedicated forum style site directly from 2011.

In a perfect world, that would be folded into the “fediverse” protocols, but like they’re already paying their own hosting etc. In the end that’s all reddit did: absorb some nominal hosting and IT for exposure. It made sense for hype niche communities, which is how reddit grew, but now that they’re killing control of the communities… Well… It turns out people were willing to pay for those servers back when they were expensive…

Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.

you are correct. On holiday with a few beers I’m surprised I got that close lol

For anyone in that spot of being savvy-ish but having fellow users that finally got used to plex:

A work around is Xteve and owncast. I was successfully able to make an owncast broadcast into a “DVR channel”.

Its cluegy but it does work. My tech level in this stuff is spotty. I’m used to stacks of tech but more for physical control systems (NOT consumer facing). But I was able to get that to work.

Edit: little bit of clarification: Xteve will let you add DVR to your plex server. It’s possible to tie owncast into Xteve. That allows users to cue into a “DVR” channel which is kind of “simulcasting” whatever you’re pointing owncast to. In my case it was a screen share of sportsball, but it could be whatever.

oh this seems like the worst thing ever. I used to have a lot spaghetti stuff reporting. I did not need to be spending this kind of money on ESPs…

thanks, the fact that there’s this level of insight in the community makes me comfortable of going down this road. I’ll keep an eye on integrations.

And it’s explicitly “not all data”? I’m really impressed by the community, I’d assume if a Philips lightbulb was getting access to geolocation data via HA someone would have noticed.

Clear answer, thank you so much. Glad to hear there’s a community. Worst case scenario I can always make it so a self-hosted voice to text triggers a script on a local device through a spotify API.

Glad to hear it, it’s not so much suspicious as the principle. It’s weird, I just hate the notion that if I bump up my thermostat a degree or two someone who I pay to give me music is keeping track.

this is fantastic, I’m really excited. I do have a follow up on non-hardware integrations though. I know when I download anything on my phone, it’s sharing all sorts of crap. Does HA allow integrations to do that? Going back to spotify example, I understand spotify can obviously track things on their end (what song they’re giving me etc), but integrations don’t let them see humidity in my basement right?

ESPhome is exactly the kind of platform I was looking to use. My hope was to standardize a design or two so I could have some I deployed where needed (garage, basement, etc). That’s fantastic, thank you!

This is PERFECT. Thank you. I need figure out Tailscale, I’m much better at the device level than networking, but your answers gave me what I’m looking for: Keep an eye on the device and how it’s used and it’s workable. Thank you!

I love this. I have a box I’ve been wanting to move to a family members place because they have fiber and I don’t. They’re heavy users of the plex server I have on there, so they’re happy to host it, but if I ever had issues around anything boot related I’d be down until I could physically get there.

This would also be awesome for troubleshooting some RasPi stuff where I kind of want the DE every now and then but mostly let it run headless.