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.

(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.

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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!

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.

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.