It’s been mostly Isaac as usual but I picked up Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate yesterday and I like it a lot. It’s a fast-playing roguelite with a neat idea that’s implemented well. The game mechanics remind me of Hoplite on mobile.

The game is currently on sale and has a free demo. It has good controller input and low resource use, a great fit for the Deck.

I think links should be fine and useful in this case, I’d just avoid affiliate tags and such.

Not a huge fan of inserts and I end up tossing them more often than not but the basic Res Aracana insert is one that I find exemplary. It doesn’t make the box larger than it needs to be, it has room for both expansions and most importantly it serves as an ergonomic storage tray during the game.

I’ve seen third party inserts that looked tempting but they were too expensive and organized things differently from the way I liked. In particular I like to bag together everything that a given player color needs for their setup, that way I can just hand everybody their own bag for their personal setup.

My favorite accessories are a couple of very cheap sectioned trays that I use as component trays for almost every game and some simple card holders for games that need it.

I picked this up about 2 months ago. Took me about 100 hours before I could put it down.

Backpack Battles. It’s an inventory management based auto-battler. Chill game and I like spatial puzzle a lot.
The game uses the Godot engine and it runs great on the deck. The UI is very smooth and thoughtfully designed.
A neat thing about the battle system is that it’s fully asynchronous. No matchmaking delay and it even works offline. I believe it works by preloading a number of opponent-builds at the beginning of the run.

deleted by creator

Too much if I am honest about it. Currently obsessed with DRG: Survivor and I’ve put in an embarrassing number of hours in the last couple weeks.

I just checked the Quick Start rules in the rulebook, looks great! Really glad that they have included that. Reminds me of the similar rules in Baseball Highlights 2045 or Space Base and I always play with those.

Thanks for the excellent review!

Do you think that the early encounters will feel samey in repeated replays? StS is a “slow” deckbuilder in the sense that you don’t acquire new cards every round but only after encounters so you go through your starting deck a few times before you really start seeing new cards. This is fine in digital StS since it plays so fast but I wonder how early game feels on the table. How many rounds do early encounters typically take?

Picked up Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor a few days ago and I’m now 20 hours in, really enjoying it. It’s a very thematic translation of the original DRG into a survivor game. The terrain and mining are a great addition to the survivor formula, it’s not only for resource collection but it also gives a new twist to the positioning puzzle. The game seems very well suited for more content so I hope that it will keep coming.

If you have an email workflow that you like then something like rss2email might be an option. You simply feed your incoming rss into your email. You’ll want to auto-tag (or otherwise organize) these emails to keep them separate from regular emails. Then you use your usual email tools to organize them further.

I’ve been using such a setup for the past 15 years.

Great idea!

I’ll probably stick with Firefox but I will set this up using the Vimium browser extension which has a very similar hint based link selection.

Currently on sale for $17.99, new low.

This is a personal decision but I think it’s better to be pragmatic about it. If your country of origin permits dual citizenship I’d do the naturalization simply because it gives you more flexibility. It’s a more secure status, no need to worry about renewing or spending longer periods abroad. And you get to vote of course.

Citizenships and passports are bureaucracy and they don’t define who you are, that comes from your heart. I’d look at it as a practical matter.

My understanding is that Germany is looking to start permitting dual citizenship later this year.

I’ve done many hours of phonecalls on mine. Mic quality is acceptable, slightly mushy. Wind is an issue for example when riding a bike at higher speeds. Wearing a hoodie over them can block the mic too.

I’ve been using various Aftershokz/Shokz models for many years and well over a thousand hours. They are a great option for speech-focused contents like podcasts, audiobooks and that’s what I use them for. I almost never use them for music, the lack of bass (even with earplugs) just doesn’t do it for me. But I don’t find any earbuds satisfactory for music either so maybe I am more picky than most.

I agree with OP about the controls. They are workable but could be much better even considering the limited inputs. I particularly hate the choice of triple-click for backwards-seek and I mess up the timing half the time. Another pet-peeve is the loud beep on play/pause that cannot be turned off. Using the phone/computer controls instead of the on-device ones avoid these issues.

As far as models I originally got the Aeropex and later on “downgraded” to the OpenMove. The audio quality is comparable between the two, the only thing you are missing with the lower end model is comfort - but that is highly subjective! I actually prefer the way the OpenMove feels.

I really wish that there was more competition in this space. The Shokz products are a bit overpriced and slow to evolve and the rest of the options I’ve seen seems lower quality and worse form factor. Would love to hear if anybody has found a different brand that they prefer over the Shokz models.

SearXNG is great at what it does but it falls into the Bing/Google/etc-frontend category since it just forwards your query to one of the search engines it has modules for. It doesn’t have its own crawl and index.

I wish that was the case but sadly most of them are basically Bing or Google frontends or belong to entities that I trust even less. As far as I can tell there are very few independent crawls out there.

Roguelikes: DCSS, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Nethack

Costs a lot less than therapy too.