Most of my collection has come though Humble Bundle.

Wait, what? Comics?

goes to look

Huh. I haven’t been at Humble Bundle for ages. I had no idea that they’ve expanded from just video games and apparently morphed into a seller of comic books and apparently DRM-free ebooks and some other stuff.

I may have to start paying attention to them again.

EDIT: Though I just picked up their Hellboy collection to try it out, and I must say that the experience could use with a bit of polishing.

• There doesn’t appear to be a download-everything-in-a-collection-in-a-single-archive option. One can trigger a download of everything, but that starts a number of downloads, each of which downloads individually and, at least in my browser, also comes up in a new browser tab. I’d rather just pull down an archive with the full collection and unpack it locally. On top of that, there appears to be a limited number of files that can be triggered to download. One really needs to manually download each item in a collection with many items.

• Many of the comic books are available only in PDF, not some sort of raster image format like PNG, which is what I’d normally prefer, to feed into something like mcomix. In this case, use of PDF does appear to be justifiable, as looking at the first page of Crimson Lotus in xpdf at 1600% zoom, it does appear to contain some vector data, which will benefit from being able to zoom, though much of the page is raster. I suppose that I can always script up a bulk conversion to purely-raster data at a resolution that works for me, and end of the day, if there is vector data available, I’d rather have only that than a purely-raster option, so as to take advantage of future, high-resolution displays and zooming. However, I’d think that a lot of people might prefer to just have the option to get plain old raster images from the get-go.

EDIT2: It does appear that a number of people have run into this themselves and written Humble Bundle downloaders of various sorts on GitHub, so as long as one can handle using those, one isn’t really forced to manually download things. Still, does seem like an option that Humble Bundle should have provided.

EDIT3: This downloader appears to work for me, as long as one is willing to trust some random GitHub developer with tokens to a logged-in Humble Bundle session. It also has some features that I was wondering about, like remembering what things it’s already completed downloads of. However, from a usability standpoint, you’re talking about something like:

• Create a directory for the Humble Bundle downloader.

• Inside it, create a Python venv. ($ python -m venv venv)

• Activate the venv in the current shell. ($ . venv/bin/activate)

• Download the downloader into that using pip. ($ pip install humblebundle-downloader)

• Find the binary name of the Humble Bundle downloader (hbd), looking in the binary directory in the venv.

• In Firefox, authenticate to the Humble Bundle website.

• From that Firefox page, Settings->More Tools->Web Developer Tools->Storage. Find and extract the value of the _simpleauth_sess cookie, which proves access to an authenticated session to Humble Bundle.

• In the shell with the venv activated, run the downloader with the appropriate command-line options, quoting the cookie value, which contains shell metacharacters ($ hbd -s '<session-token>' -p ebook).

I’m okay with that, as I’ve used Firefox’s development tools before and written software in Python, but I suspect that that’s not the smoothest user experience for the overwhelming majority of people who might just want to download a bunch of comics without a bunch of manual nursemaiding.

That, but also, I think that ability to upgrade the GPU is likely more important than the CPU, these days. CPU performance and capabilities aren’t changing as quickly as those of the GPU, and there are more non-gaming parallel compute applications coming to the fore. If you want to extend an older computer’s longevity by putting a modern component in, I’d think that the GPU would be more critical.

They produced what is today’s standardized, modular x86 desktop. I don’t doubt their technical or business ability to establish a standardized, modular form factor in something approaching a laptop form factor.

The modular desktop is largely from them.

From a business standpoint, if I were Intel, I imagine that I might be very interested in leveraging my ability to do modular x86 systems. There is incoming laptop competition from ARM SoC systems, which are particularly weak on modularity. There, it’s not even just the laptop vendor making calls as to what components go on the system, but Qualcomm or whoever the SoC vendor is, so the consumer is even further away from having ability to choose what they get.

If you’re happy with your Framework laptop as of 2025, great, but this is hardly the end of the road. I want more than what Framework offers in 2025. Almost none of the things I want modularized are made modular by Framework today.

l’d like there to be a portable, modular PC, and I want one for myself. I’d like the ability to have a larger, replaceable battery (maybe with multiple batteries a la Toughbook that can collectively exceed 100Wh); a Synaptics-style trackpad with three physical buttons; more USB-C ports (at least Framework laptops can do this one); more memory; centered keyboard with Caps Lock and Left Control physically swapped; a desktop-style, physically-removable, larger, better-optics webcam that can be left in a small case and attached only when I want to use it; an HMD instead of standard display when we hit the point that they’re a viable display replacement; a case that doesn’t rely on a spudger to open; a case with space to put air vents somewhere other than the bottom so that using the device on a soft surface doesn’t obstruct them, and so forth.

However, I don’t think that it makes sense for all laptops to do that. Modularity does come with costs, and not everyone wants to pay them.

• Physically, more size and weight. Need more space to make all these individually-structurally-sound components. I don’t care about this, as I throw my laptop into a backpack, but some people will.

• More power usage to use more widely-separated chips. Phones can be light on power in part because they’re using an SoC, the opposite of modularity. I don’t care about this because I’m fine with just throwing bigger batteries at the thing, but some people will.

• Easier to test and validate that a fixed number of devices work together (not a big deal for me, as I’m fine with where desktops are today).

• Security issues. External bus devices have historically not been trusted, but internal bus devices have been. If I can get physical access to your laptop and I can easily replace an internal component, that might have security implications.

Framework is better than the norm for laptops, but a long way from where desktops are.

If the controller is recognized as a USB/Bluetooth audio device, you can probably see it and select it as default output device in the “Output Devices” tab of pavumixer (or whatever other sound device control program you might choose to use with your particular environment).

The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan

kagis

https://puyonexus.com/wiki/Puyo_Puyo_Chronicle

After being defeated, Satan joins the party and promises that the way back home lies at the top of the Color Tower, and all Arle would need to do now is scale it to return home.

Hmm.

I think “Satan as a playable character” might be one of those cultural-issue things that would come up when considering localization.

Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.

I suppose you’re most-likely aware of them, but if you wanted more turn-based Fallout, have you looked into Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3?

Have to see what happens with Kitten Space Agency.

If he breaks a law, he can be impeached.

There’s no recall vote.

I don’t think that the level of tariff on China matters all that much anyway once it hits the levels that it’s been raised to. Not many products where someone’s going to just keep paying a 145% tariff (for long, at any rate). Maybe more short-term disruption than otherwise, but outside of that, it’s increasingly just a number.

Of his tariff actions since taking office, I’d guess that this is probably the least concerning. You could argue the specifics, but there was support for at least some tariffs on at least some level of China, and much of the criticism I saw quoted from Republican legislators was that the tariffs needed to be on China, not countries like Canada or the world at large.

I assume that he’s keeping people from opening the mice to steal the ball. Would also make it hard to clean the rollers, though…

The U.K. and Australia are among the countries now being prioritized by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for a trade agreement. A person close to the White House told POLITICO Australia “is a little less complex in terms of their internal politics” than the U.K.

British chicken farmers, I imagine.

If I finally get inexpensive Windsor Red out of all this, that’d be one silver lining.

There’s a sequel Subnautica: Below Zero, and apparently Subnautica 2 is in the works and headed for Early Access.

He says that his most intense sexual experience was “making love” to the helicopter from 1980s TV hit Airwolf.

long sigh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JbbxzsXFmw

There goes more innocent memories of Saturday morning television.

If you’re super-into it, have you tried Port Royale 2, which also came out in 2004 and is kind of the same sort of game on the age-of-sail combat side?

There’s a lot more ships than the DLC ships. But yes, it’s almost inevitable you will end up buying a couple of them, because the DLCs let you spawn a ship for free every day.

In fairness, I didn’t notice that the game was F2P, no entry fee, so they have to get money from somewhere.