Terms of use

1. What this site is

Thumbstick Diary is an independent, informational website consisting of written articles about casual arcade and puzzle video games. It is written and maintained by one individual, Jonah Petrakis. It is a personal publication, not a business, and it does not represent any company.

2. What is offered here

You cannot buy, download, subscribe to or transact for anything on this site. There is no shop, no account system, no software served from these pages, and no service on offer beyond reading what has been written. Every game discussed is a free casual video game played for entertainment. As described here, those games take no cash from a player and return none; their scores and counters exist inside the software and convert into nothing beyond it. This site does not host, distribute or provide access to any of them.

3. No affiliation

No publisher, developer, studio, platform or application store has any tie to this site — nothing is licensed from them, nothing is approved by them, nothing is paid for by them, and none of them knows this page exists. Where an article names a game, a character or a mark, that name belongs to whoever created the game and appears here for identification and comment, which is what naming a thing in a review is for. Nothing on this site claims ownership of any of it.

4. Opinions, not statements of fact

Every score and judgement on this site is a personal opinion formed by one person playing on two particular devices over a limited period. It is not a technical certification, a professional recommendation, or a statement about how a game will behave for you. Games change after they are written about; a game described accurately in March may work differently in November. Where I am told about a change, I amend the entry and note the date.

5. Accuracy and updates

I take care over mechanics and I play long enough to be fair, but errors get through. Nothing here carries a warranty of accuracy, completeness or currency, whether stated or implied. Spotted something wrong? The contact page sets out how to say so and what happens next.

6. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, no liability is accepted for any loss or inconvenience arising from reliance on anything published here. Practically speaking, the worst outcome available is installing a game you do not enjoy and then removing it, but the sentence belongs on the page regardless.

7. Copyright in the writing

Copyright in the articles, the scoring criteria, the page design and the code sits with Jonah Petrakis. Lifting a paragraph or two, naming me and pointing back at the entry it came from, is fine and I am pleased when it happens. Reproducing whole entries, translating them, or pushing them into a system that regurgitates them elsewhere needs my agreement first. Asking almost always gets it.

8. Linking to this site

Link to anything here, freely and without asking. What I do object to is a link dressed up so the writing looks like yours, or presented as though I had approved of whatever surrounds it.

9. Availability

This is a small personal site on inexpensive hosting. It may be unavailable at times, entries may be revised, and pages may move. No commitment is made about uptime or permanence, although I have kept the same address since 2023 and intend to keep it.

10. Changes to these terms

Should any of the above be rewritten, the revision line beneath the heading moves to match. Whatever version is showing when you read the site is the version that applies to you.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Greece, where the site is written and maintained.

12. Contact

Anything you want to raise about this page goes to the one address I use for everything, which is printed on the contact page.