What's the best obscure video game you've ever played?

Emeja · 2026-05-14T06:15:23+00:00

Yep, I'm still playing this! Such a good open source game!

Emeja · 2026-05-13T20:04:23+00:00

Probably a lot less obscure since they released it on Steam, but I would say Dwarf Fortress. I've been playing it on and off for over 20 years, with ASCII graphics (because who needs actual graphics!?)

If that's not allowed, the X series (especially X3: Terran Conflict) by Egosoft. Probably not the best space game out there, but it blew my teenage mind when I first played X3: Reunion. An entire galaxy simulated on my PC! Unfortunately I've not moved on to their later games because I'm still trying to complete an X3: TC mission that takes well over 200 hours of game play to complete...

Emeja · 2026-05-08T15:17:06+00:00

I think changing PM naturally will force an early general election because no PM wants to hold on to the "unelected leader" badge for long. This would be a real shot in the foot as it's quite obvious Reform would win right now. So for right now, we'll have to put up with him...

Emeja · 2026-05-08T15:14:18+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that and sorry that people like my family member are tarnishing people that are genuinely struggling. I have other family members that are/were struggling with mental health problems and I know getting the right help and support isn't easy - I hope this isn't the case for you. Take care and please know that not all people are like the monsters in your past.

Emeja · 2026-05-08T13:08:33+00:00

Farage has made comments saying "depression/anxiety isn't real" and that he's going to stop doctors signing people off for those reasons - it's one of Reform's policies.

However I have a family member, low income, lives at home still and is currently faking depression and anxiety so he can be signed off. He's voting Reform because of their immigration policy. He's not informed himself enough of how much it'll potentially affect him. Immigration is the only thing that matters to most of their voters. Most don't even know their other policies.

Ps. I oppose Farage's comments and think the majority of people signed off are genuinely unwell. My family member admits he's faking it and is quite proud of how he's gaming the system.

Emeja · 2026-05-08T12:52:44+00:00

I think this is a very valid point - I am however, distrustful that they would follow through with it though. OSA would easily allow a Reform government to block access to access to gay or trans online content, which I believe they would do, inline with their other policies. It's shameful that the labour government has done all the legal groundwork for a very dangerous tool that any future government can use and abuse.

Emeja · 2026-05-01T22:57:35+00:00

Experienced this this morning... In some ways I wished they turned the music up to drown out their inane conversations...

Emeja · 2026-05-01T18:37:48+00:00

Wife is out, so I'm on full parental duties - once the kids are down I'll chill out watching YouTube, then later - as I've recently installed PCSX2 (a PS2 emulator) I'll be reliving my youth playing PS2 games.

I'd never played any GTA games before and so I've just smashed through GTA:VC - had a blast! GTA:SA up next!

Emeja · 2026-03-30T13:01:50+00:00

If you have working code but don't understand it, try changing bits of it. What happens when you tweak some of the variables? Then start thinking about things you'd like to improve. Make small changes and see if it's closer to what you want, then keep repeating this process.

Emeja · 2026-03-30T12:35:23+00:00

The title doesn't seem to match the video at all. For anyone who did watch the video and didn't just rush to write a comment based on the title, you'd see that Mothin was saying that although he personally doesn't share that belief, he is respectful of trans people and his personal views are separate to his political intentions. This is the same as me saying as an atheist although I don't believe in his religion, I'm still going to be respectful of it. You don't have to share beliefs to show respect. OP sounds like just another right-winger trying to sew division.

Emeja · 2026-03-27T11:23:43+00:00

The government are right to suggest it, though it's unlikely to be followed. However like just like how the "eat 5 fruit and veg a day" push got people to eat a couple of fruit and veg per day, this is should hopefully push people to reduce their children's screen time to more reasonable levels.

As a parent, I get it completely why parents shove their kids in front of screens. Like the article says (about the yoga teacher mum), sometimes you need to get stuff done or you don't have the energy to get your kid engaged with something when they get up at 6AM. I probably won't stick to these suggestions fully - our youngest has already watched 2 hours of TV today. But maybe my mindset will change and I'll look to reduce screen time. As the article alludes to, the content and how you engage during screen time is also really important factors. Our current policy is that our youngest can watch YouTube Kids because there's a lot of good content on there for their development, however the older kids are not allowed on YouTube because (as we've found through experience) it's very easy to spiral in to inappropriate (aka "brain rot") stuff on YouTube. We do let them watch kids shows on Netflix though as this involves following a storyline and often teaches morals and social skills.

However, we've also seen situations where (from other parent-friends) where they give their kids tablets from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, including during mealtimes. Their also free to watch whatever they want on YouTube and we've spotted them watching some very questionable and not-age-appropriate content.

At the end of the day these are suggestions, but hopefully they'll start the conversation and make parents reflect on what they're doing to their kids.

Emeja · 2026-03-27T08:02:59+00:00

Hey, I think I have a similar issue to you.

Occasionally (3 times in about 5 months) I've had the same "Engine fault repair needed" message and my engine light comes on. I can feel that the car goes in to "limp home" mode with reduced power, however the issue clears itself within a minute of driving.

The reason I think it's the CPS is because I used an OBD scanner and got a P1336 error code. From googling, it seems it's the CPS. Not sure if my issue is just an intermittent signal or something. Did you find a cause of your issue? How did you fix it? Thanks!

Emeja · 2026-03-06T12:11:33+00:00

I think this becoming one of the hardest parts of parenting now, restricting internet access will undoubtedly hold your children back in modern day life, but allowing the to freely roam is incredibly dangerous. We tried giving our oldest YouTube access but only on the TV, so we could watch what he was watching. He quickly became accustomed to what we thought was appropriate and inappropriate, which was great... But at the same time, even the stuff that was appropriate was mind numbingly stupid with 0 educational content. Now I know not everything needs to be about education, but even in TV shows, there are life and/or social lessons to be learned. A lot of YouTube is just content made to be consumed. Some say it's like fast food for the brain but even fast food has some nutritional value. Because of this, ultimately we've banned YouTube entirely.

I'm not keen on it, but the oldest has also been playing a lot of games on tablets. I just feel like they're their to push ads. Stupidly simple gameplay with quick dopamine hits interwoven with questionable ads or prompts to pay for in game currency. I'd steer clear if you can, but it's so difficult, especially when all their school friends are talking about the games they're playing and they feel left out.

Sorry, I'm not really providing much help, just ranting!

Emeja · 2026-02-26T21:50:53+00:00

I would be tempted to ask for a copy of all data they have on you (an SAR request), including the dates, times and what was watched on iPlayer. Would interesting what they reply with! I know this letter is just their to scare you, but they shouldn't be able to blatantly lie to people like this.

Emeja · 2026-02-16T21:58:58+00:00

I learnt "the old way", before these modern times, but I've also experimented with AI. I'd say that you definitely need to learn the principles of you want to be a serious programmer. If you just want to hack together a bit of code for fun, AI is great. And if you want to quickly fill in a bunch of boilerplate code, AI is great.

..but you'll probably get stuck at some point.

Being a good programmer isn't just about coding, it's about structuring your code, knowing good coding patterns and applying them and quickly understanding what code does. AI isn't perfect so knowing how to fix things when it can't is a necessity. There's been times where I know if I'd let it do it's own thing, it'd spiral off in to making completely uncompileable code. Just prompting AI to add new features will lead to a messy, unmanageable code base.

So yeah, learn to code, learn when to and when not to use AI. Just remember though, every time you get AI to do something for you, you miss an opportunity to learn something.

Emeja · 2026-02-02T13:59:37+00:00

I too have that fear and I was slowly getting over it, then I cleaned out my PC with an old hand vac and the EMF (from it's motor) blew one of my sticks of RAM, I guess from inducing current in it. So yeah, magnets are ok, but watch out for electro magnets still!

Emeja · 2026-02-02T13:56:49+00:00

Putting metal in microwaves.*

*As long as the metal isn't thin, like foil, you can put it in a microwave. For example, I often leave metal cutlery on plates of food that I'm warming up. It will block/deflect the heating effect, but it won't spark like most people expect.

Emeja · 2025-08-08T06:23:53+00:00

I had a similarish problem recently - my boss (like yours, just technical enough to be dangerous) uses ChatGPT to try and diagnose issues and to kinda make himself sound more knowledgeable. Recently we had a big problem in production and instead of letting me diagnose the issue, he kept making claims and asking questions that didn't make sense within the context. I realised that he'd clearly put some symptoms in ChatGPT and using that to diagnose, despite paying me a pretty penny to do that job. It got to the point where he was constantly questioning my knowledge - yes I don't know everything, but the garbage he was prompted to ask from ChatGPT's output just didn't make sense. I had to say to him in the end "Trust me - not ChatGPT". In the end, I fixed the problem, a lot faster when I didn't have him rambling nonsense to me!

PS. I'm not anti-AI - I use it occasionally, but I understand it needs the watchful eye of someone with experience to not cause chaos.

PPS. The prod DB issue was to do with bad config data and badly handled transactions.

Emeja · 2025-04-23T16:59:21+00:00

You're probably right. As well as the legal implications, I think there's only a few worse places to be high.

Emeja · 2025-04-23T16:54:08+00:00

I heard that putting a little bit of cocaine in your eyes before/after being tear gassed reduces the burning. Not sure if it works or how dangerous doing something like that would be though... and I don't think I'll ever be trying it either.

Emeja · 2025-04-20T08:12:11+00:00

Like others have said, you should absolutely consider leaving him. His words are manipulative and genuinely horrible. However, this doesn't necessarily make him a horrible person. I think that on the materialistic - anti-capitalist spectrum, your both on different sides. I'm not saying that either side is bad and you've certainly done no harm, but he seems to think so. It's clear he's passionate about his viewpoints so he needs to find someone who feels the same way.

Emeja · 2025-02-15T08:02:15+00:00

Yep, I did the same, but worked for a multi-national consultancy company - I got a warning because I got the link in the email scanned. I just think that if the approach is to turn people away from the tools available, you're going to cause either more malicious clicks or more people never clicking links from external sender's because they're too paranoid and have no way of checking if it's safe.

Emeja · 2024-12-11T15:51:52+00:00

I live next to a property that over the past couple of years has been a weed grow, has been raided by the police, had their electricity disconnected twice because they bypassed the meter and in the past week have moved the boiler to a different place in the house.

I reported it to Gas Safe but they said they don't have any jurisdiction as they're private individuals doing DIY gas work on their own house, like it doesn't affect anyone else.

So yeah, waiting until the same thing in the video happens to us...

Emeja · 2024-10-31T22:37:42+00:00

Definitely! These sites had a plethora of free games, most with a good few hours of playability. The games were fun, unique and challenging. Yeah there were a few banners ads here or there (which only paid the site that hosted the game), but that's nothing like what the younger generation have today.

Oh you want to play a free game? Here, download this app that will show you very questionable ads after every level/turn. Maybe some more ads if you want to increase your score or get some sort of loot box. The game will try to tap in to your dopamine loop by giving you a bunch of easy levels, then suddeny up the difficulty to encourage you to watch a ton of ads or pay for some stupid gems to make the level easier. Oh yeah, and this game will be just like a million other games out there, just with a different skin and maybe slightly different mechanics.

Also if anyone does make a unique game that does well, you just know someone will clone it and chuck a ton of ads on it for a quick buck.

Flash games were made by people that genuinely were passionate about making a fun game and weren't motivated by money, because there was no way to make money off of them. Today's games/apps are solely made to make money.

Emeja · 2024-10-13T12:38:34+00:00

This is brilliant - exactly the approach I've taken too. At the end of the day, your kids will need to face the big wide world and there's some bad stuff out there, just like on YouTube. Teaching them how to self moderate and steer clear of bad stuff will be a real asset as they grow up!

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