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Friday Fun Thread for May 15, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video game thread.

I played through Aethus this week. Its a top down survival / mining / exploring / puzzle game. The ambiance of the environments was great. I eventually turned down the difficulty settings for everything cuz it felt a bit like a slog on standard difficulty. The Scottish accents were ok sometimes, but every time I heard "no" pronounced something like "no-er" I winced. The story itself was very anti-corporate. Which I knew going in from the reviews, but it was still a little heavy handed with it all. At this point an anti-corporate screed in a video game just feels as generic as you can get.

Still playing Starship Troopers: Extermination on occassion with the 1stmi (a light military sim group). They are fun to play with. I recently competed what they call a "harbinger run" which involves leading a 16 person group from the field (rather than staying with the squad at base). Its a fun balancing mix of shooting the bugs around you but also needing to maintain situational awareness of the entire battlefield.

Dropped the factorio playthrough. Didn't have enough takers, and I messed something up in map settings that would have required cheating to fix, or flushing approximately 10-15 hours of early game play down the drain to start again. Both options didn't make me feel good so I stopped.

Storytelling Exalted 2e for a bunch of friends for a few sessions now. (Not exactly a video game, but TTRPGs don't appear to be a common enough topic to warrant a subthread).

I can recommend jumping into a new setting as a DM. Even with pretty much no experience, it's been pretty fun so far, although I bungled a few things about the way a pre-written adventure should be ran, and will probably bungle more. The first thing one of my players did was to stuff a demon inside of a random peasant mook who was guarding him on behalf of the treacherous rich evil guy.

Setting and writing/wise, I feel that 1e Exalted is alot better. 2e does have more polished mechanics, however, which makes DMing a bit easier. Though it still has it's quirks.