Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

It’s a Shame We Have to Betray Our Allies, Starve the Poor, Halt Scientific Progress, Destroy the Environment, and Eliminate the Freedoms Enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but at Least My Investment Portfolio Is Also Tanking - McSweeney’s

2025-03-13T23:30:00.000Z

“Mr. Trump has acknowledged, despite all his confident campaign predictions that ‘we are going to boom like we have never boomed before,’ that the United States may be headed into a recession, fueled by his economic agenda.” — New York Times. March 13, 2025

- - -

Listen, I’d love it if we could create a society that worked perfectly for everyone, but that’s not the reality we live in. In real life, you have to make choices—choices that lead to terrible outcomes for everyone.

I’m not anti-immigration. You think I relish the sight of families torn apart, my neighbors terrified to show up for work or send their kids to school for fear of an ICE raid? If I could wave a magic wand and no one would be deported, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But when I see the precipitous downward dive the stock market is taking, I know all that pain and suffering was worth it.

I don’t want trans people to have their dignity assaulted and their very existence called into question. Furthermore, it’s horrible to imply that people of color and women are the incompetent causes of every social problem. But when I go to the grocery store and pay just as much—often more!—than I did before the intensification of these attacks, by golly, I see the purpose of it all.

It’s heartbreaking to see the elimination of funding that was being used to feed hungry kids. And the disease-curing medical research we used to do! We can all agree: It would be way better if we funded such initiatives. But when I consider how much more quickly the prospect of affording a home during my lifetime has been vanishing, I feel a lot better about the uncured diseases and the dying children.

And sure, we’d all like common-sense limits put on corporations that harm the environment. I mean, drinking water that doesn’t poison me and breathing air that doesn’t launch me immediately into a fit of asthmatic coughs are two of my favorite things. But when I log in to my sinking 401(k) and realize I’ll have to delay my retirement an additional decade or so, it reminds me not to bother worrying about a future that might not even happen.

Look, it doesn’t feel great to abandon reasonable diplomacy and instead maximize our national embarrassment with each new short-sighted foreign-policy move. No one wants to cozy up to dictators, blame invaded countries for having been invaded, or launch trade wars on previously mutually beneficial allies. But when I consider that I’ll also be paying higher taxes next year, I stuff my shame deep down into a little box and forget about it. (It’s an empty box that used to hold my money.)

In an ideal world, citizens would enjoy freedom of speech. I don’t love it when people are fired or imprisoned for expressing opinions contrary to the administration’s. But then I remind myself: Global markets are also in freefall, so it’s, like, okay. Deep breath. This wasn’t all for nothing.

The last few months have been a moral catastrophe. At least there’s no economic upside.

Choi: announcing Casual Make - LWN.net

2025-03-13T18:10:59.000Z

Charles Choi has announced the release of the Casual Make: a menu-driven interface, implemented as part of the Casual suite of tools, for Makefile Mode in GNU Emacs.

Emacs supports makefile editing with make-mode which has a mix of useful and half-baked (though thankfully obsoleted in 30.1) commands. It is from this substrate that I'm happy to announce the next Casual user interface: Casual Make.

Of particular note to Casual Make is its attention to authoring and identifying automatic variables whose arcane syntax is un-memorizable. Want to know what $> means? Just select it in the makefile and use the . binding in the Casual Make menu to identify what it does in the mini-buffer.

Casual Make is part of Casual 2.4.0, released on March 12 and is available from MELPA. The 2.4.0 update to Casual also includes documentation in the Info format for the first time.

DXVK 2.6 brings expanded Nvidia Reflex support and lots of game fixes for Linux / Steam Deck - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-03-13T17:58:16.000Z

DXVK is a tool used by Proton that translates Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan. It's one of the projects that enables Windows games to run so well on Linux platforms like Steam Deck. Version 2.6 was just released.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Steam Spring Sale 2025 is live now - here's some great budget games for Steam Deck / Linux - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-03-13T17:44:56.000Z

Valve have launched the first of their planned four major seasonal sales for 2025, with the Steam Spring Sale launched featuring plenty of big discounts and demos.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

I've found an Alienware Area 51 RTX 5080 build that's worth the money - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T17:40:00.000Z

Alienware Area-51 gaming desktop is the kind of PC that makes console players jellous. It's big, powerful, and costs as much as a used car. But if you're dropping this kind of cash, you want to make sure you're getting the best deal.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 revealed with Titus back as lead - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T17:31:35.000Z

Saber and Focus Entertainment Publishing have announced Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3, another bloody serving of Adeptus Astarting with a fresh single player campaign and multiplayer component, plus unspecified "innovations that will redefine the standards of third-person action games". Saber will work on the new action game alongside Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, which they assure us will continue to receive updates for "years".

Don’t Let the Fact That I Only Criticize Democrats and Always Defend Trump Confuse You—I’m an Independent Centrist - McSweeney’s

2025-03-13T17:00:00.000Z

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve climbed the media ladder and joined a cadre of independent pundits like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson. And I did it with just an insatiable appetite for trolling liberals.

Of course, I’ve made a lot of enemies along the way—the socialist Democrats, the thought police, and all the blue-haired feminists who are too high on their own supply of DEI to keep a rational, emotionally uninvested, bird’s-eye, macro view of political issues like I do. They’re all just snowflakes who hate how a straight, white, cisgender guy like me can amass a huge following online by mocking their civic rights, socioeconomic grievances, and pathetic obsession with democracy.

But remember, I’m not actually committed to anything I say or do that provokes them into wokesplaining conniptions. I’m just asking questions. Or playing devil’s advocate. Or trolling for the lolz.

Life would be much easier for the woke if they remembered that, at the end of the day, virtually no contentious pieces of legislation or civil rights issues ever affect me personally. Politics, government, and public policy are just games for me, and I play to win. So, when I throw out a whataboutism here and a “both sides” there, I’m just tossing curve balls to strike out the libs who get so mad they start yelling. When they quit the debate and block me online, I win.

Although, sometimes, when I’m in danger of losing an argument, I say I used to be a Democrat myself years ago, before Democrats took a hard left to Commie Town. I even voted for Obama in 2008. There’s no way I can verify that for my haters on social media who point out that my earliest posts regularly hashtagged the Tea Party and featured the anti-Obama “NOPE” poster as a profile picture, but that just proves how much of an open mind I keep. I’m a classical liberal. It’s the liberals who have abandoned liberalism, not me.

I also sometimes claim I’m a demisexual or aromantic so I can demand liberals to support me and accept my opinions as facts because I have LGBTQ+ membership, and am therefore just as much an oppressed victim of the capitalistic, white, cisgender, heterosexual patriarchy as any of them.

Isn’t pedantic trolling fun?

That is why I laugh so hard when the woke mobs try to cancel me. Making liberals upset is why my fans love me, so I can’t be canceled. And I tally up all the times I get called a “Nazi” online because I’m a neo-Nazi at best on my most fascist days. Do I think the Nazis may have had a few good ideas? Sure. Not every single idea they ever had was about genocide and race wars, you know?

There is one downside to being an anti-woke internet troll, and it’s that the liberal elites happen to be involved in almost all this country’s good art, cultural innovations, and social fun.

I’ll admit it’s ironic that I spend ten hours a day calling the cosmopolitan, globalist, coastal metropolises “baby-eating communist shitholes where everyone is mugged and murdered by marauding gangs of thugs every day” when there’s no way in hell I’ll ever leave my big city and move to some flyover mining ghost town or farming county that I spend all day on my podcast celebrating as “Real America.” I’m not happy saying this, but elitist liberals shitholes are somehow where all the cool celebrities and parties are, where all the artists and tech geniuses live, where all the skinny and pretty people live, and where all the money, economic growth, and GDP come from despite how deranged the liberals are.

But because I get unfairly tarred as a Republican—remember, I’m an independent centrist—I don’t get invited to any of the good parties or media events. I may defend everything Trump does and excuse everything he says, but I’m barely on the political right at all. No matter how high I am at the top of the y-axis into the “authoritarian” end of the four-way political compass, I’m very much in the middle.

I just want to stop the libs from ruining America, and that might mean Trump will have to become a dictator and settle on a Final Solution to rid America of all liberals.

Just kidding!

Teardown is getting a multiplayer update, so you can rough up innocent walls with your best friends - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T16:55:33.000Z

Teardown is one of those games that's just fun to look at, with all of its completely destructible voxel environments. When it first got announced it kind of reminded me of those old Flash games where you had simple creatures you could shake around and chuck stuff at, the joy of it being to see how far you could push things.

Messing around like that is all the better with friends though, I reckon, and would you look at that, developer Tuxedo Labs have just announced today that a multiplayer update is on the way to the sandbox game.

Can't wait to bang my head while playing this survival horror that lets you hide from its monster using your webcam - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T16:50:35.000Z

I'm often put off by gimmicky horror games, but sometimes I see one and think "yeah, that'll be a laugh." This time around it's Eyes Never Wake, the debut survival horror from developer Allan Hedlund. Where some horror games in recent years have used your microphone to track how loud you're being, Eyes Never Wake uses your webcam to track whether your face is present or not.

No Assassin's Creed sequel has ever matched the weird poetry of the first game's towers - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T16:42:09.000Z

Maybe five or ten years ago, everybody was absolutely sick of climbing towers in Ubisoft games. Are we still? I’m not sure. If you’ve never scaled one of these landmarks, possibly because you have recently arrived from Mars, let me start you off on the ground floor. The open world tower mechanic dates back to the original Assassin’s Creed in 2007, and is a simple, perennially gratifying narrative loop. It goes like this: you spy the tower on the horizon, you scuffle and shoulder through the city towards it, you savour the ensuing clamber - all those sinuous parkour animations, the wind around your ears as the urban backdrop fades - and then you get a nice view of Creation that also renders the scenery more consumable, by unfogging your map and populating it with content.

Romany Gilmour, RIP - Irreal

2025-03-13T15:04:47.000Z

After my latest annual happy birthday wishes to Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon, MarkB sent along a link to David Gilmour and his daughter Romany singing Wish You Were Here at an impromptu appearance at an open mic night in a local pub. That was in September 2024. Shortly after MarkB sent the video, I was telling some friends about it and one asked me how old Romany was. I didn’t know but said I thought she was in her early twenties.

The next day, I decided to look it up and discovered to my horror that Romany had passed away in February 2025. She was only 22. My heart goes out to Gilmour and his wife Polly Samson. I can’t imagine the pain of losing a child like that.

[$] Warming up to frozen pages for networking - LWN.net

2025-03-13T15:01:58.000Z

When the 6.14 kernel is released later this month, it will include the usual set of internal changes that users should never notice, with the possible exception of changes that bring performance improvements. One of those changes is frozen pages, a memory-management optimization that should fly mostly under the radar. When Hannes Reinecke reported a crash in 6.14, though, frozen pages suddenly came into view. There is a workaround for this problem, but it seems there is a fair amount of work to be done that nobody had counted on to solve the problem properly.

PowerWash Simulator 2 has split-screen co-op for "twice the wash-power" - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T15:00:00.000Z

Zen-like spout splasher PowerWash Simulator is getting a sequel, and you need to get some mates: it's got both couch co-op and shared online campaign progression. It's also self-published by FuturLab this time, which likely means less Final Fantasy motorbikes but more revenue for the developers to make their own gilded nozzles. Here's a trailer.

PowerWash Simulator 2 devs tell us their tips for real life house cleaning - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T15:00:00.000Z

"Do they have any tips for how to get water stains off a plastic shower floor? I've tried everything," was Graham's pitch for a question to ask PowerWash Simulator 2 devs FuturLab following the reveal event a few weeks back. They're busy game development professionals, Graham, not your personal stain assistants. What kind of unscrupulous hack would use an interview opportunity to crowdsource stain removal advice?

Anyway, here's 13 members of FuturLab sharing their top cleaning tips with us.

Spectre Divide shutting down six months after launch reminds us how hard it is to make a live-service game - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T14:57:11.000Z

Crikey, it's still looking rough out there in the industry at the moment, isn't it folks? Yesterday unfortunately brought the news that another online game is shutting down, with the studio alongside it. In this version of the story that we've heard all too often recently, it's Spectre Divide, a tactical free-to-play first-person shooter whose whole gimmick is that you control your own character and a clone, allowing you to switch between them on the fly.

It was certainly a fresh take on the genre, but our former reviews editor Ed did wonder if that was enough to set it apart from Valorant or Counter Strike. As evidenced by developer Mountaintop Studios' imminent closure only six months after the game launched, it was not.

Seven new stable kernels - LWN.net

2025-03-13T14:53:51.000Z

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.13.7, 6.12.19, 6.6.83, 6.1.131, 5.15.179, 5.10.235, and 5.4.291 stable kernels. They all contain a relatively large number of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates for Thursday - LWN.net

2025-03-13T14:47:09.000Z

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (ffmpeg, qt6-qtwebengine, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (fence-agents and libxml2), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, ark, chromium, fake-gcs-server, gerbera, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, grafana, kernel, libtinyxml2-10, podman, python311, python312, restic, ruby3.4-rubygem-rack, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (jinja2, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-lts-xenial, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, netatalk, python3.5, python3.8, rar, unrar-nonfree, and xorg-server, xwayland).

Fast-paced turn-based tactics game Warside for fans of Advance Wars launches April 14 - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-03-13T13:13:34.000Z

It looks very much like Advance Wars. LAVABIRD and First Break Labs have announced that Warside is set for launch now on April 14th.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

InZOI's system specs make me want to see this handsome Sims killer running on a pocket calculator - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-03-13T13:09:27.000Z

The Sims players among us have been gazing cautiously at inZOI, a new neighbourhood and life management game from Krafton. I am cautious for essentially two reasons. One is that the game makes use of live generative AI: you can stuff its jaws with text, images and video to create items such as outfits and animate your pet humans, here known as Zois. Your Zoi's "actions and thoughts" are also based on "small machine learning" tech, which as the name implies is a teenier species of generative AI that commonly runs live on the user's own hardware. Going by the Steam page disclosure, the actual base game assets weren't AI generated, but then again, Steam AI disclosures can be rather unrevealing.

We've published a fair bit about the risks and potential abuses of generative AI tools in video game development, so we'll be looking at that in more depth when the game hits early access on 28th March. In the meantime, here's the second reason I'm cautious: inZOI's key selling point over its obvious (and massively updated) rival The Sims 4 is that it has photorealistic visuals, and frankly, they creep the hell out of me.

Palworld is getting crossplay in 'late March' - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-03-13T12:48:07.000Z

Pocketpair have announced that sometime real soon you'll be able to team up with players across different platforms in the popular monster catcher Palworld.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.