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?

Make sure to check out Schnapsen if you haven't already. Great choice when you only have 2 players. I have a little blurb and links in my other comment.

Standard deck:

• Schnapsen (pagat, WP) - a 2p trick-taking game playable with a standard or German suite deck. A unique aspect of it is that the trick-taking rules change mid-round. In the first half you can don't have to follow suit at all, you can play whatever you want. When the draw-deck runs out or when one of the players decides to "close" the deck the rules change and you must follow suit or play trumps. The timing decision of when to "close the deck" is a really cool one and it's what makes the game.
• Regicide - is a co-op (or solo) that does a really good job at giving a varied game experience with a standard deck.
• Haggis - a ladder-climbing game that's playalbe with a standard deck with 2 players. Needs custom deck for 3.

Other:

• Mottainai - An amazing amount of game in a 54 card deck. Probably my overall favorite card game
• Sea Salt & Paper - Very addictive, especially on BGA. It sort of a set collection game with rummy-style hand management that includes some cool abilities you get when you get the right pair of cards.
• Love deckbuilders in general. Overall favorite is probably Ascension but also love Star Realms, Clank, Dominion etc. Happy to play pretty much any deckbuilder anytime.
• For Northwood - a solo tricktaker. How does that even work? Very well as it turns out! Excellent art and production too.
• SCOUT - another climbing game that works well at 2p
• Honorary mention to Hats which is this week's favorite. Has some of that Arboretum meanness but plays very differently. It has a card flow that took a while to get used to but very neat once we figured it out.

Thanks, we will definitely give this a try!
Do you keep all the cards in the game? Do they all work well in this competitive context? How about their powers?

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.

It shouldn't as long as you make sure that the numeric uid/gid of your user account matches the one from the original system. If that's not feasible then you can chown the tree.

I thought that slock was too complicated so I wrote a tiny one for myself in Go using xgb. Less than 100 lines and pretty straightforward but it makes some assumption about my personal setup so not public.

Not worried at all, I've moved on many years ago.

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.

Check out Perry@kbin.social's excellent Weekly Crowdfunding Roundup thread that I've just cross-posted.

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

Some of my current favorites:

• When I want something very easy to get into and relaxing: Orchard. Very quick setup, simple gameplay, focused on a single goal
• When I want something a bit heavier but still pretty chill: For Northwood, a solo trick-taking game (how can that even work? It does!). Recent game, inexpensive, good replayability, great value.
• When I want a nice comfy midweight euro: Newton is a great Italian-style euro that has a very smooth solo. Also online on Yucata.
• When I want something heavier but still pleasant: Fields of Arle or A Feast for Odin, some of Uwe's best. Arle is also online on Yucata, Feast is on BGA.

That looks neat! Remind me of the Keyboard Covers Samsung had for the S7 and S8. Those worked by covering up part of the screen and the physical keys were triggering the touchscreen and a special touchscreen keyboard driver. Worker pretty well and it was nice to have the flexibility to have the cover on or off. It could be stowed on the back of the phone when not in use.

The 128MB 192MB RAM was the real killer, there were compressed swap hacks to squeeze some more life out of it but Android and app memory use was going up quick.

Ah yeah, the headphone adapter was a PITA.

We had actual form-factor innovation back then, for a while phone designs still dared to try something besides the slab. Some real work went into that G1 slider mechanism.

You can still get them if you care enough, some of us still use them. There have always been at least a couple reasonably modern physical-keyboard Android phones available, there are a few choices today too. I never had to resort to a non-PKB phone since the G1.

I had both as well. The G2 had more powerful HW for sure but the keyboard was worse: no dedicated number row, no physical Back button (and the Home button was pretty sad too) and the slider mechanism wasn't as robust.

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.

I guess 2023 is the year of enshittification.