wizardbeard

What's more important to you: having a relationship with them or changing their views? I don't mean this as some kind of "gotcha" thing. This is the choice you need to make.

You already have your simplest solution to this (don't talk politics with them), but you made this post because you don't like that solution.

Thankfully most things in life aren't so black and white. It's possible that you can work on them very very softly and slowly over time, but this all comes down to what you can stand in order to keep your relationship with them.

I personally think that attempting to avoid political topics with them is the best direction to go here, but it's not my parents or my choice to make for you.

Somewhere in my comment history, back when Steam did their 2024 yearly awards I think, I called out someone who was trying to defend Balatro's RNG by saying that players and modders had proven that only 1 in 5 RNG seeds resulted in a truly unwinnable game on the max difficulty.

I don't know how true that is, but it definitely lines up with my anecdotal experience of the game.

That would mean that at best, playing 100% optimally (the RNG is deterministic, so the same actions on the same seed lead to the same RNG outcomes), with the ability to cheat by undoing your moves and by seeing the rng outcomes in advance... at absolute best you could only have an 80% win rate on the hardest difficulty.

I enjoyed Balatro, but that is cuckoo fucking bananas absurd.

The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button... this is so beyond the realm of "just git gud scrub".

The kid is five, and it's an android device. You have options without trashing the thing.

Sideload some open source games through F-Droid, set up a simple emulator frontend/app with a few age appropriate games. Lemuroid is a pretty straightforward emulator frontend with a decent UI for a kid to poke the boxart they want to play and just go, but I'm not sure how much you could lock it down to prevent them from borking the settings.

Lock the kid's access to the app store the fuck down. Install an on-device-vpn based adblocker like blokada or rethink dns to block ads across all apps on the device. It might break some games but the overwhelming majority will just fallback to "you don't have an internet connection" functionality at worst.

You can look up how to enable adb on the device, then plug it into your computer and use https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater to remove/disable built-in apps you don't need. There's a ton you can do with adb to tweak the device, but uad is the most user friendly way.

If you want to push programming, others have mentioned a version of swift that's available on the kindle fire. Someone else mentioned Luanti as an open source minecraft clone, which I know is available through F-Droid (but can be quite janky due to not being made for phones/tablets).

Anyone looking to back it up: yt-dlp

That sounds like a software issue more than anything. You can "run" Doom entirely in a PDF document (by PDF supporting embedded javascript). Any ebook reader supporting that feature set of PDFs would be able to handle "full fledged" games.

What the article is saying is that they can use the bed as a back door into your home network. From there they operate at the same trust level as anything else on your local network, and anything on your lpcal network that would be vulnerable to an attacker on your local network would be vulnerable to them.

It's great!

Blocking the kind of unhinged people who dredge through someone's comment history for something to take out of context, comment personal insults, then edit the insults into image spam is still viable.

This is thematically similar to an idea I brainstormed with a bunch of college friends ages ago.

Instead of an RPG with a fishing minigame, a full fledged fishing game with a semi-hidden JRPG side mode. Like one of those weirdly detailed Dreamcast fishing games, then halfway through you start fishing up vaguely Lovecraftian things. Things get weirder until someone dies in an accident during a tournament, and when that lake reopens you fish his undead body out and start some JRPG shit with Cthulhu and Atlantis. Complete that and it goes back to fishing game like nothing happened.

This was before the trend of "secretly a horror game" indie games, and the tone was more goofy than it sounds.

Anyway, I'll have to check this out!

Speedrunning terms are a gold mine for this sort of thing.

Most obvious one is "gay baby jail".

What part of it? The app itself? There are alternative clients. The protocol? It's made for people to host app repos, not to ensure everything hosted in an F-Droid compatible repo is safe. The fact that reproducible builds arenct enforced? There's always a gap where you're trusting a third party unless you're building everything from source yourself.

It's the android equivalent of a package manager.

F-Droid is like any other place you get apps and programs to run on one of your devices: caveat emptor. At least all packages are open source so you can review yourself.

This is as absurd as saying you don't use linux because someone could typosquat a fake repo or app through the package manager.

Would be nice to have some more content there leaning more into the weird than the depressing.

Of all the jokes C&H could do about "mouthful mode", this is far tamer than I was prepared for.