I like Mini Motorways in creative mode for this purpose. You design road systems to connect houses with businesses using limited resources. The music is very peaceful and the pastel colours are very pleasant on the eye. While the other modes are a bit more stressful, creative mode is like a simplified city builder.

And of course the perennial favourite, Stardew Valley.

I have music playing in my head most of the time, by default. Only if I’m doing something cognitively demanding does it pause or the ‘volume’ drop to 0 but keep going in the background

If anyone needs a more comprehensive explanation:

• This comic became a popular meme many years ago
• Those memes evolved to include overly simplified illustrations, like depicting the characters in each panel as lines like I Iı II I_
• That last panel simplified looks kind of like the letter L
• L in Roman numerals is 50
• Turning back into digits, you get 1 2 2 50

83k Github stars in under 4 years is definitely indicative of an excellent project

GrapheneOS recently announced a working relationship with a top 10 Android OEM to officially support GrapheneOS builds, so that’ll give another choice once the first release happens next year. Though it’s been confirmed that it won’t be FairPhone, speculation is pointing to Nothing, Motorola, or possibly OnePlus. I’m pretty excited about this because I quite like GrapheneOS but have had hardware issues with every single Pixel I’ve owned (2, 2XL, 3XL, 3a, 7 Pro)

I need multilingual swipe typing support, and unfortunately nothing else comes even close to SwiftKey. AnySoftKeyboard is open source, and is pretty good for swipe support in one language

I imagine The Crew (2014-2024) somewhat qualifies - it’s got the entirety of the US in its map. While its servers were shut down last year, it was just relaunched by the community a couple weeks ago

And if you do this twice, you’ve got a calztwo