There’s a couple US culture maps out there. I like ones like this that break up the big regions into smaller sub-regions

I like the light bit of history this page gives, but I don’t feel like it’s kept up with our current affairs. https://robslink.com/SAS/democd83/us_regional_cultures_map.htm

I’ve gotten sucked into The X-Com Files. It’s a megamod for the original X-Com game from 1994, built on OpenXcom Extended (an open-source re-implementation).
My first attempt at the old X-Com game lost my interest a few years ago, but OXCE brings plenty of QoL changes and the difficulty of the XCF mod ramps up slower than vanilla. Now I’m having a blast hunting cults, cowering from aliens, building bases around the world.

Thanks for the suggestion. Stated playing XCF and I’m hooked. I previously bounced off an attempt at playing open xcom, but XCF has been a good experience so far.

EU4 is one of mine as well. Been slowly working through the achievements, but they keep adding more!

Yeah Gargoyles! My first ascension was Gargoyle Earth Elementist, but I think EE has been nerfed since that ascension.

Silent Storm was a fun turn-based tactics game! Not as polished as something like the Firaxis xcoms, but more complete than a lot of other non-fantasy tactics games I’ve tried.

Sounds a lot like the TerraFirmaCraft minecraft mod. Actually, after some light searching, it seems Vintage story was inspired by the Vintagecraft mod which was inspired by TerraFirmaCraft.

Thanks for your post. You’ve actually somewhat brought me around on AI search with your perplexity example. My previous AI search experiences have been general LLMs like ChatGPT (Opaque source data means I have to verify with traditional web search anyways) and Google’s new AI search feature (I’m uncomfortable with google discouraging traffic to the broader web). Since perplexity actually shows and links its sources, I’m going to give a try for the next few days alongside my usual DDG searches.

I would be interested if you have an example of a search with mostly malicious results, since your stated experience seems disproportionate to my own. While I do concur that some results/websites are antagonistic towards my goal of useful information, I’m quite surprised to see someone say that they hate visiting websites in general. (Perhaps I’m missing hyperbole?)

A bit of a digression, but it amused me to see you say you struggle to word your query for search engines, because I’ve typically had more problems wording my query for LLMs. I wonder if this is could be attributed to communication preferences, or just due to me having used search engines for almost 2 decades.