Background:

While playing games for the Backlog Burner, I was surprised to learn that the Humble App (which is a "free" perk of having a Humble Choice subscription) has a few games that are actually exclusive to it.

Part of the reason I chose to play games from the Humble App is that I don't expect it'll be around much longer. It isn't getting updates or new games added to it. Also, Humble Games, the publishing arm of Humble which released many of the games available through the app, was abruptly dissolved in 2024.

With this in mind, I went through the entire current library for the Humble App and tried to identify games that I could not find available for purchase/download elsewhere.

Below is a list of games that I consider to be "endangered" because they might become unplayable/lost media if (i.e. when) the Humble App does shut down or stop working.

If you've got the Humble App, it might be worth playing some of these sooner rather than later.

If you've got game preservation sensibilities, it might make sense to download and archive these for posterity.

Game List:

Here are the games that are, as best as I can tell, Humble App exclusives and in danger of being lost permanently.

For each title below, I tried to find a decent link that gave information about the game. Many of these simply don't have a lot of online presence.

Some of them have Steam pages linked, but in those cases, they're just placeholders and you cannot actually buy the game.

• A2Be - A Science Fiction Narrative - Steam page

• after HOURS - info link

• Crescent Bay - info link

• Divinoids - Steam page

• Elephant in the Room - trailer

• fistful of nothing - homepage

• Heeey! Park-Boy - Steam page

• Jawns - playable on the web but no download available

• Keyboard Sports - Steam page (note: I found an itch.io page with it available for download, but it is clearly unofficial)

• Lyric Sonata - gameplay video

• Operator - trailer

• Quiet City - trailer

• Rogue Mansion - Steam page

• Roman Sands - gameplay video

• Space Routine - Steam page

• Spoolside - trailer

• The Groundz - gameplay video

• THOR.N - gameplay video

• Woten - Steam page

• Yojimbrawl - gameplay video

• Zodiac XX - trailer

Feel free to check my work and let me know if I missed any, or if some of these games are actually officially obtainable outside Humble and I didn't find them.

Also let me know if I whiffed any of the links or if you find better ones for any of the games.

One thing that drivers me crazy is how cluttered my social feeds are these days due to all the photos and videos and link previews. It just takes up so much screen space these days.

Is there anyway to turn the photos/videos/previews into normal links like old school twitter? Maybe a chrome extension?

Inspired by a youtube video thumbnail I saw saying "Which Link would function the best in society?" I didn't watch the video, but that did get me thinking to how weird player characters can behave. You know, with all the walking into strangers' houses, constantly crouching and jumping while moving, breaking any containers we see in hopes of loot, using special powers for silly things... Destroying stuff just for the heck of it...

So! Here's my extended question: how long would a society comprised mainly of video game protagonists last? And I mean protagonists who behave the way players make them behave, not just how they're written by the story. And that includes still having all potential powers.

Can be based on specific past playthroughs, could just be generalizations of how they're typically played. How many protagonist characters could actually hold down proper jobs without getting fired? Who would be able to avoid causing heavy destruction in daily life? Or get arrested fastest?

How long would they be able to put up with other protagonists' weirdness before snapping and starting a city-wide battle?

Iranians right now are using a javascript based proxy to access the internet somewhat, it's what i'm using to access tildes.

I thought it'd be interesting to share, we don't have access to script.google.com but we do have access to www.google.com, so there's another method to access it and set it up.

Someone wrote a quick android app for it. link

It's limited from google's side as they've put a 20,000 requests daily limit on scripts, but it gets us online somewhat and... feels nice, to be able to have a way through.

We're also using github actions to download files to private repo's and download them from there (releases is still blocked, raw is not) which also seems to have a 2000 minute monthly limit.

From one side google colab also has Iran sanctioned so we can't access that, but that would be another way to get online aswell.

From another side we're also using DNS servers to tunnel traffic, but they get blacklisted after the user count goes up.

I was reading the potential gatorade-esque business idea thread @daychilde put up the other day and it got me thinking about all the potential business ideas my partner and I have been kicking around. I'm hoping folks can post their prospective business ideas here and folks within those industries and provide feedback, insight, or hurdles to the ideas. Kind of like the hobby thread from a few weeks ago. Excited to hear what everyone is thinking about!

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I feel as though I have lost touch with the idea of the OS as software.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for that all in one solution. Notes, reminders, calendar, etc. in one convenient app. Notion first, then AI came and fucked it all up. Obsidian was cool, super customisable, but I found that I don’t really need what it offers, stuff like linking and graph view aren’t that useful to me. The idea of a ‘second brain’ has always been interesting to me, but I could never find anything that made sense.

Recently, the thought hit me… “isn’t an OS just an super all-in-one app?”. This sounds stupid, but I haven’t actually considered the power of—in my case—macOS itself. I’ve just been using it as a portal for all these other bits of complex software, when surely it’s all built in?

Obviously finder would be the core of the system, but does anyone have experience with just… using the desktop metaphor as intended? Folders with files in them, that get opened in a program, and when you’re done, get saved back into the folder. Put things you use regularly on the desktop (or shortcuts to them, to maintain organisation) and delete them from the desktop when you don’t need them anymore. Again, it sounds stupid typing it out, surely the answer is “yeah dummy, that’s how you use a computer!!!!!” but… why do I have obsidian, and the photos app, and all this extra junk?

Going back to obsidian, for example. Surely, textedit (which has relatively simple rich-text editing, as well as plaintext) and some well thought out folders can get me where I need to go. It’s also widely compatible, since I can just… copy a file, should I choose to switch to Linux completely at some point.

I suspect this disconnect is a result of the iphoneification of personal computers, there’s a lot of layers between you and the file when you’re on a mobile device.

So, am I just talking nonsense? Or is it time, after these years of searching, for me to finally start using the computer as a computer again?

Hey Steam users, I'm wondering if you can help me troubleshoot an issue I am having with Steam Link. Some games work flawlessly, and some games just show a black screen (with game audio) on the Steam Link Client. I have tried this in various configurations and devices, but my host machine remains the same (PC running Bazzite)

I have tried this wired via router (to Steam Link on raspberrypi OS), wifi (to steam deck), and cellular via remote streaming to the android app.

The symptoms are the same on each setup. Games like Helldivers 2 and NMS run flawlessly, others are just a black screen.

Also, big picture mode runs great until you bring up the menu, and then the screen goes black.

Do you guys have any ideas?

SOLVED

thank you everyone for your suggestions! I switched to an X11 session and everything is working now with steam link!

I'm not some big psychonaut or anything. I haven't even had a proper trip outside of smoking some laced weed a decade or so ago. I microdosed shrooms (golden teacher) for a few years, but I topped out at 100mg twice a week. I've done about 2g of shrooms (different varieties), but at that level its more like a really great buzz off of alcohol with a little euphoria on top. Nothing crazy.

Anyway, I have a cartridge of NN DMT. I'm going to start light with only one hit, which should last only five minutes or so. I have a connect for ayahuasca, but it all seems to intense and drawn out and... just more than I want to do for a first go. I also don't really want to be that deep into something around a bunch of randos who also coughed up a couple hundred bucks to trip in some lady's living room.

I've been reading up on it for a while and have absolutely no anxiety about it. Even though its light, I'm still going to have a friend sit for me just to play it safe.

Ultimately, I don't have any grand expectations or anything. What I get out of it, positive or negative, will be good. I've read about higher doses actually improving the task-switching in the brain, which would be nice for my ADHD. I don't take any drugs for ADHD, depression, or anything, so I'm in a great spot on that front too.

Tell me your experiences (good or bad!)

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The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 174 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the visualizations and a rough comparison with the previous survey! Here's a few quick stats:

• 41 distinct countries are represented!
• Spread across the following continents:
  • America at 45.7%
  • Europe at 39.9%
  • Asia at 8.7%
  • Oceania at 5.8%
• With the top 5 countries of most responses:
  • United States at 36.2%
  • United Kingdom at 8.6%
  • Canada at 6.9%
  • France at 4.0%
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  • Yes at 74.7%
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  • No answer at 2.3%

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• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! I hope to see you in the next survey. :)

I somehow have money I need to spend, more than I ever had, and where else to put them than where I spend most of my awake time. So for the first time ever I've decided to splurge on a PC that isn't a low to medium budget one. For reference, I'm currently on a 10 year old 1070 GPU with a 1080p screen and the rest of my PC is either also 10 years old or at least 5 years old so it truly is time to upgrade.

It looks like it's 10-15% more expensive to self-build nowadays so what I'm about to pull the trigger on is a package/prebuilt deal. But I can still pick and choose (some) parts from this store. Here's the specs at the moment:

• GPU: ASUS Radeon RX 9070 XT Prime OC - 16GB GDDR6 RAM

This seems to be the most reasonable buy. The price is about 70% of Nvidia's equivalent in performance while the next stepup, a 5080, is more like 240% as expensive. I however got recommendations to get at least 5080 for good framerates in 4k gaming on high settings. I am currently on 144hz and have gotten used to about 100fps in most games, so ending up with like 50fps would suck.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

Something I play a lot is WoW, and that is apparently a very CPU heavy game, so this one seems the best choice in terms of performance in that particular game even though I'm reading it's somewhat overkill for most other stuff.

• RAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 - 32GB

I practically never multitask so getting only 16GB would have been fine I believe, and opened some room in my budget, however this is a limitation of the package deal and I cannot go lower than 32GB. Besides, this should be futureproof.

• Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING B650

• Storage: Kingston NV3 SSD - 1TB

• Case: DUTZO C740 Airflow Wood

• PSU: Corsair RMe Series RM850e (2025) - 850 Watt

Here's a link to the full specs and options to configure.

So.. is 4k a bad idea with this setup? Because I really want to.

I would probably settle for 1440p (widescreen even?) but I'm sure 4k would feel like such a much more massive upgrade. So if this build is not capable of 4k for newer modern highly demanding games, would downscaling in them look disappointing? If anyone has experience with that?

If I end up on 1440p, if anyone has experience with this part, what do movies and such look like? Would a 1080p download look strange and blurry being upscaled? And would a 2160p download look weird being downscaled?

I have also seen some posts about 4k being not worth it on account of just how tightly packed the pixels are - that unless it's a more than 30" screen, it's not even worth it? Any truth to that in you guys' experiences?

Sorry for the long post, but thanks for reading!

I think this might be a hot take, but as the cliché goes, please hear me out.

First of all, what I define by “new and radical” is something that is not only significantly different from what we had before, but it must also fulfill another criteria: it must become ubiquitous.

So, for gaming input devices, I would say that what Nintendo tried to do with the Wii didn’t stick. The technology wasn’t new, but its implementation was new and radical. It was a gamble, for sure. I loved it for what it could do (and, honestly, I miss it), but it’s been almost exactly 20 years now, and the Switch 2 has the double joystick, d-pad, ABXY, quadruple shoulder button combo that all other controllers have. That basic form factor is what became ubiquitous. Motion controls didn’t go extinct, but apart from aiming via gyroscopes, they’re not that common. Classic controllers though, they’re here to stay. In fact, in these last years, I’ve seen the market for controllers explode. It’s wild.

What Nintendo did with touch screens on the NDS/3DS did become ubiquitous though (even if they kind of pulled out of it): That input method is what mobile games rely on. Its home hardware are mostly smartphones. What was new and radical about it (and something that Steve Jobs explained well when he introduced the iPhone) is the idea of having one stylus/finger tip as the tool for for the input, and then designing the input methods (swipe, tap, hold, etc.) around it. Again, the technology wasn’t new, but its implementation was a radical departure from conventions at the time, and again, it became ubiquitous. I don’t see smartphones ever going away (or rather, slabs of glass that we swipe, tap, and hold our fingers on).

I think that there was a hot minute there where we all thought that VR was going to become the next big thing. The input for that doesn’t use technology or methods that are radically different from controllers (they are still just buttons, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, as far as I can tell), but combined with the (supposedly) immersive VR experience, they could have made up for a package that feels new and radical, except that... it became a niche, and I don’t see that ever changing. Baring a leap in technology that allows us to instantly plug into The Matrix, without any complicated setup, I don’t see VR becoming important in gaming, even if it becomes significantly cheaper. It’s just not convenient enough, and in the end, I think that convenience is king, and controllers/touch screens are the ultimate convenience.

You may be thinking about what Valve is doing with touch pads, on both the Deck and their new controllers, but I don’t see it catching on (not to mention that it doesn’t really feel all that radical to me). I’d love to be proven wrong (and I know that those touch pads can do way more than just replace a mouse, since they also have “zones” that can be mapped to, etc.), but in the end, I don’t see it replacing the third pillar of gaming input devices: keyboard and mouse. For PC games, especially certain genres, nothing will ever beat the convenience of that combo.

So, for gaming inputs, I think that we have reached the end of the line. If before the end of my time on this earth, something new and radical comes along that becomes ubiquitous, then feel free to come back here and rub it in my face. I’m willing to bet a lot of money that it won’t happen.

Now, let’s have a talk about form factors, or rather, the hardware.

I think that the Switch 1 and the Steam Deck really kicked off a golden age of handhelds. Indeed, it feels to me as if some new handheld device releases every week. It’s absolutely wild. I don’t know what changed since the launch of those two consoles. We’ve had handhelds since... what? The Game & Watch? Maybe earlier? I don’t know, but it’s been decades. Yet only now has the market for them finally grown big, maybe too big.

Why do I say too big? I would like to know why these companies keep developing new models. Are they really selling that many units and making that much profit? If they are, then wow. Good on them. I’m skeptical though. I hope it doesn’t lead to some market crash. I should add that, as someone who feels lukewarm about handheld gaming at best, I don’t understand why they sell so well (again, if they do). Yes, every time I see a new handheld, I want to buy one, just out of FOMO, but look: I have a Switch 2 and I always play it docked.

I had a GBC/GBA/NDS growing... for the sole purpose of playing Pokémon... always at home. With a couple exceptions on the NDS, I never cared for much else outside of that. It may be that I was conditioned to feel this way about handhelds, since my first console was a Nintendo 64. My preferred way to play games, is to comfortably recline on a chair, turn on a TV (the bigger, the better), grab the controller, and play in the comfort of my home.

I cannot relate to people who have the courage to take their $200, $300, $400, $500 (or more expensive) handhelds out into the wild, where they could drop from their hands (I’m very clumsy), get stolen, or worse, only to play on a tiny screen while sitting very uncomfortably. If you do this, please explain to me why you enjoy it. I genuinely don’t understand. I’m scared spitless just from yanking out the Joy-Cons from my Switch 2, let alone unplug it from the dock. I also don’t care much for mobile games for similar reasons: screen too small, games not that interesting for me.

Alas, I have to admit that handhelds have become ubiquitous. I’m not 100% sure, but I think that, as a form factor, they might stay around forever. I don’t think that smartphones, the other form factor that is ubiquitous, are going to completely replace them. Handhelds have the added convenience of analog sticks, buttons, and being gaming-first devices. Smartphones don’t have that.

The third and last ubiquitous form factor would be consoles and PCs. I group them together because I have a feeling that sooner or later consoles are just going to morph into PCs. I don’t know what Nintendo will do though. They seem determined to have complete control over their ecosystem, but that will require them to keep releasing new consoles with walled gardens. Can they become the Apple of gaming? Can they make this business model sustainable in the long term? I’m not 100% sure. Either way, “big, stationary gaming machines” as the third category, are here to stay.

VR could be a new and radical form factor, but for the reasons that I mentioned before, I think it will forever remain a niche. Other than that, I can’t imagine what else we could come up with.

Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you have a different take? Do you maybe have an idea of what could become ubiquitous in the future? Is there an input device or form factor you’d like to be more commonplace (like Mii with the Wii) or be invented (if it hasn’t been yet)?

Maybe I should reserve this for a different topic later, but I also don’t see video games themselves coming up with any new and radical gameplay mechanics anymore. I think we already have all the genres that we could possible come up with, and everything that feels new is really just a mashup of something that came before, arranged in a way that hadn’t been thought of yet... kinda like music.