When this happens it’s often because a backend component gets rewritten and somebody decides that it’s too much work to re-implement some features for the new backend. It’s much easier to come up with a PR spiel for why removing the features is actually a good thing.

TIL. The wikipedia article with some more detail.

(early 8-bit era)

For Steam in general: If you are not in a major hurry to get a game wait for sales. There are major sales a few times a year and smaller ones all the time. Add games to your Steam wishlist to get notified when it’s on sale. Check steamdb for price trends.

The speech in Impossible Mission was sampled from a human actor not synthesized.

So what are you playing this week?

I started playing Ring of Pain. It’s a deckbuilder-ish roguelite. There isn’t really a deck, it’s more of a loadout-builder (or tableau builder in boardgame terms). Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is the closest thing I’ve played before. RoP is sort of like a 1d version of that. Fun and fairly unique mechanics, smooth implementation. Runs great on the steamdeck too, good controller support.

OCRmyPDF is what I use as well, had good luck with it on boardgame rulebooks that sometimes come with missing or partial embedded text. Combined with recoll and the Emacs pdf-tools mode I have it all indexed and at my fingertips.

On Android it’s the only reasonable choice so no question there.

On desktop I used Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/Conkeror for many years but switched to Chromium when I had to start over after the XUL-apocalypse. But lately I’ve been maintaining my Firefox setup more or less in parallel with Chromium and this week as it happens I am trying to make the switch back again. Mostly just to wean off the Google stuff. Will see how it goes.

Another (less-critical) motivation is that Chromium takes over 10 hours to build on my machine. Firefox is under 1 and it gets done way faster even if an LLVM or Rust build is involved too.

It’s been mostly comfort foods: Slay the Spire and Binding of Isaac.

In Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime you have to save the Space Bunnies!

I’ve give up on the Youtube homepage long time ago. Only the Subscriptions view (with shorts filtered using a userscript) and search results are usable for me.

This sounds similar to SLIME (and its fork SLY) for Common Lisp. These tools use their own protocols rather than LSP in part because they pre-date LSP but also because LSP is not a good match for everything they do. In addition to the usual LSP functionality like symbol lookup, xref and completion they also provide a very good Lisp REPL. It is easy to have the server side (called swank) running as part of an existing service which sounds a lot like what the post describes. For example I’ve used SLIME to connect to my live StumpWM sessions.

Some I don’t see mentioned yet:

• Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection ported to pretty much everything.
• Nethack (and its variants), Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Brogue are great roguelikes.
• For boardgame fans the original Keldon AI for Race for the Galaxy is open source and works very well on Linux.
• Fish Fillets NG is one I have fond memories of from many years ago.
• The Ur-Quan Masters is Star Control 2, another classic.

And why not phones too if the user prefers it that way. Can we have our user preferences back please?

Everybody is completely safe while rolled into the Katamari, the King of All Cosmos makes certain of that. It’s sort of like an amusement park ride. You can even buy funny photos of yourself screaming as you are getting rolled up.

This is such a simple ask and yet it seems almost impossible with modern search engines. They all seem to insist on second-guessing you. It’s a lack of respect for the user: “We know you are dumb but don’t worry, we will figure out what you really mean. Oh and don’t forget to watch your ads.”

My other pet-peeve is that they will almost never admit that maybe they just don’t have any good hits for the query. They insist on pushing some irrelevant crap in your face instead. I guess it comes down to needing to show the user something so that they can mix in those ads.

x86 Macs are not the greatest example of longevity at this point.

Thanks, yeah that’s the sort of thing I had in mind. To clarify sensible edits that improve the flow are totally fine as long as they are not the popular-youtuber types with flashy transitions, cutting to memes, screaming or making a face etc.

Side question: what are your favorite “non-obnoxious” ones?
No youtube-edits, no memes, no forced jokes, just good gameplay and game discussion.

archive.org link to the r/modnews thread. Needless to say it’s not going down great.
edit: updated link with a newer snapshot

• Brotato, you play with a single stick much of the time. Only need to push buttons between stages when you pick upgrades.
• Superflight, also single stick, you can make it as casual or risky as you want
• Dorfromantik, if you play casually and just make a pretty landscape

They all play great on the Steam Deck.

Shattered is my roguelike of choice on mobile (along with Hoplite if that counts). On desktop I play DCSS and Brogue. Used to play a lot of Nethack too. Never ascended in any of them but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

So you see YouTube, the thing is, I’m not gonna watch those stupid ads. I don’t care how short or long, it’s just not happening. No, not even the tip. I can use the site without watching the ads and maybe send links to my friends and they might give you some ad impressions. Or I can go do something else, get mad at Google and never spend another dollar at the play store and stuff. What do you think?

Yep, a “scratch your own itch” project is the best way to stay motivated.

Why bother with either of those for private personal repos though? Why not just regular remote repos over ssh?

That keyboard was excellent and the slider mechanism was solid! A lot of the later pkb phones don’t have a dedicated number row. And I really miss the physical Home and Back buttons, even later pkb phones lost those quickly. My only complaint is about the trackball. It was ok for some things but not accurate enough and got flakier with use.

I also loved early-Android UI. The modern stuff might be smooth but ergonomically it’s crap. For me the G1 represents a golden age, I am sad that I gave mine away.

What irks me is that it associates the genre with the wrong generation for the sake of being catchy. Should be “Gen-X shooter” if anything but I guess that doesn’t roll off the tongue.

Gotta be Thunderdome rules though.

I don’t normally use iOS devices so when I borrow my friend’s ancient iPad it is to play a couple digital boardgame implementations that are available for iOS but not Android: Finished! and Dead Man’s Draw

Finished! in particular is pretty addictive and very satisfying when you finally get that win.

For word games I really like the digital implementations of Paperback. Originally a boadgame but the app versions is great, epsecially for those who like both deckbuilders as well as word games.

I like the followup Hardback even more but haven’t played the app version of that yet.

Brogue is worth a try. I like the back-to-the-genre-roots minimalism and the hybrid-ascii aesthetics. I alternate between DCSS and Brogue these days.

Picked up Deep Rock Galactic based on recommendations in another thread, not very good at it yet but it’s a lot of fun!

I took a minimalistic approach and I simply dumb the feeds into my maildir using rss2email. I auto-tag them so they are well-separated from regular email and only show up when I specifically search for them, either using saved searches or by hand.

This avoids having to deal with a separate UI and another thing to keep an eye on. Been using this setup since google reader went away.

Did you ever play Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat? That was the flight sim of the same era that gave me similar vibes.

Stunts (1990, DOS) is what has stayed with me the most. Crappy graphics, unrealistic controls even for its time, buggy physics (a wrong move could launch you into the stratosphere) but for some reason we stayed up all night taking turns trying to shave one more second off the lap record on our favorite track.

I am taking this as my permission to play on rookie!