Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

Discord delay global rollout of age verification to improve transparency and add more options - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T18:24:46.000Z

In the ongoing crazy saga of the internet getting gated behind new age verification laws, Discord are putting on the brakes temporarily.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Insomniac finally lock in a Wolverine release date on PS5, so start placing your bets on a PC port launch window - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-24T18:05:45.000Z

Remember how literally only two weeks ago, PlayStation held one of their "Look at the State of the Place, You've Made Such a Mess!" presentations? There were plenty of announcements that landed with suitable aplomb, like a new Castlevania, a proper look at Silent Hill: Townfall, and a reveal of remakes of the OG three God of War Games. So it strikes me as perhaps a bit odd, and funny, that today Insomniac Games have, with quite little fanfare, confirmed the release date of their Wolverine joint.

Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? - McSweeney’s

2026-02-24T18:01:00.000Z

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as invested in keeping my job as the next weaver. When the boss brought in that big new power loom, I was pretty skeptical. He said once he got it up and running, we’d all be out of a job, so when the boys started talking about breaking into the factory after work and smashing the thing, I was on board.

Until, that is, I saw the funny tapestries it could make. There’s this one—sorry, I keep cracking up when I think about it. It’s a bowl of gruel, right? But it’s also a pirate! It’s called “Gruellino Piratino,” and… well, no, it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a silly character. They’re calling it “Nottinghamian brain-rotte,” and there’s a bunch of them. They’ve got King George III with a ham for a face, “Georgione Hamone”—I nearly cried when I saw it. My kids, at least the ones who don’t have rickets, think it’s hilarious.

Of course, the industrial pollution bothers me, and all the coal dust in the air is making everybody sick. Not to mention, the new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?

Just think of the benefits. Used to be, the wife had to run around all day keeping the kids entertained. Now she can just slap them in front of one of these funny new tapestries. They make these ones with silly cats on them, with big eyes, doing all kinds of stuff. They’re really cute. You have to watch out, though, because they churn out so many of these cat pictures that some of them are kind of messed up. Last week, Little Johanna, my youngest, was totally absorbed in one, and when I went to check it out, it was a picture of a daddy cat stabbing his baby. I took it back to the factory, but they told me they were generating them so fast that they couldn’t check any of the content they were actually producing. I know it seems irresponsible, but hey, it’s a small price to pay to keep the kids busy, right?

Am I worried about losing my job? Sure. It seems almost assured that eventually, my skilled craftsmanship and decades of experience will be replaced by a huge machine that churns out low-quality versions of what I used to painstakingly produce. Undoubtedly, this machine-slop will be cheaper to make, leading to the death of my craft and the loss of my knowledge, all so we can reflexively consume greater quantities of mass-produced garbage and keep the working class poor. I get why the Luddites are pissed, I really do. If these tapestries weren’t so darned funny, I’d be right there with them, bashing those machines to bits.

But I have to say, it all feels like a waste of time. I don’t have the firmest conceptual grasp, seeing as I’ve never learned to read, but I’m pretty sure technological progress is a law of nature, like gravity or death. The power loom, as we know, is inevitable, preordained by God, who works His miracles through the hands of rich and wise inventors. It’s foolish to resist it. We can’t possibly imagine a different social order—we just can’t! God decreed that George should be king and the power loom should replace handicraft, and anyone who says otherwise is just wasting their time.

If you want my advice, instead of going to the riot later and smashing a loom, we should all be taking night classes on project management. Now that’s a field they’ll never be able to automate away.

Don't fancy trying Marathon this weekend? Lucky you, as there's now the chance to have a go at Horizon Hunters Gathering - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-24T17:25:18.000Z

Is there something in the digital air this weekend? Bungie are finally letting anybody who wants a go have a go at Marathon from February 26th to March 2nd as part of the game's server slam, and now it looks like Guerrilla Games' recently announced live service spin-off Horizon Hunters Gathering is joining it with a playtest of its own.

FINAL FANTASY VII arrives on GOG with a new edition live on Steam too - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T17:18:40.000Z

Square Enix today released their slightly upgraded version of FINAL FANTASY VII, along with making it available on GOG too.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Elisp Pre-commit Hooks - Irreal

2026-02-24T16:29:55.000Z

Another short post today but one that some of you may find useful. Over at the Emacs subreddit, James Cherti offers a set of commit hooks for Elisp programmers. There are hooks that check for parenthesis consistency, byte compile to check for compile errors, native compile to check for errors, and even a hook to check for conformance to Elisp indentation conventions.

The project repository is here. It has a little more information on installing and using the hooks but essentially everything you need to know is in the reddit announcement.

If you’re an Elisp programmer and like to run some rudimentary checks before committing your work, you may find Cherti’s project useful. If, like me, you hate being constrained by arbitrary coding format conventions, you can choose to ignore the indentation checks. In any event, if you’re an Elisp programmer, you should take a look at Cherti’s post.

GNU Awk 5.4.0 released - LWN.net

2026-02-24T16:22:48.000Z

Version 5.4.0 of GNU awk (gawk) has been released. This is a major release with a change in gawk's default regular-expression matcher: it now uses MinRX as the default regular-expression engine.

This matcher is fully POSIX compliant, which the current GNU matchers are not. In particular it follows POSIX rules for finding the longest leftmost submatches. It is also more strict as to regular expression syntax, but primarily in a few corner cases that normal, correct, regular expression usage should not encounter.

Because regular expression matching is such a fundamental part of awk/gawk, the original GNU matchers are still included in gawk. In order to use them, give a value to the GAWK_GNU_MATCHERS environment variable before invoking gawk.

[...] The original GNU matchers will eventually be removed from gawk. So, please take the time to notice and report any issues in the MinRX matcher, so that they can be ironed out sooner rather than later.

See the release announcement for additional changes.

Fanatical's Play on the Go Elite Collection Bundle for Feb 2026 has some gems in it - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T16:20:26.000Z

Want some more games to fill up your handheld with like the Steam Deck or Legion Go? Check out the new Fanatical Play on the Go Elite Collection.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Seven towns that will never turn out to be Silent Hill all along - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-24T15:53:45.000Z

As if we didn’t have enough to deal with between despotic regimes, habitat collapse, and dodgy new technologies, Konami are on a mission to turn everywhere into Silent Hill. The recent Silent Hill f took place in a fictional Japanese town from the 1960s. The forthcoming Silent Hill: Townfall unfolds in Scotland. Konami have recently made ominous noises about taking the series to Central or South America.

The implication is that Silent Hill is a transferable metaphor, glomming onto unsuspecting nowherevilles worldwide. Well you can keep your filthy free association, Konami. A line has to be drawn. A line will be drawn here. Please find below a list of places that would never, ever turn out to be Silent Hill.

Firefox 148.0 released - LWN.net

2026-02-24T15:52:41.000Z

Version 148 of Firefox has been released. The most notable change in this release is the addition of a "Block AI enhancements" option that allows turning off "new or current AI enhancements in Firefox, or pop-ups about them" with a single toggle.

With this release, Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks as well as the Sanitizer API that provides new methods for HTML manipulation. See the release notes for developers for changes that may affect web developers or those who create Firefox add-ons.

Death Stranding 2 PC specs have been revealed, along with a "Portable" preset for handhelds - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T15:45:29.000Z

We now have the official PC specifications released for Death Stranding 2 and they actually seem pretty reasonable, so plenty of people should be fine.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Death Stranding 2's system requirements have washed ashore, and they're pretty reasonable - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-24T15:31:34.000Z

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach now has a big table detailing its System Requirements: On The PC. The good news is that, aside perhaps from needing a fairly beefy amount of storage space, Kojima and co's game about babies/Norman Reedus/walking shouldn't require you to invest in a space age rig ahead of its arrival on March 19th.

[$] As ye clone(), so shall ye AUTOREAP - LWN.net

2026-02-24T15:26:51.000Z

The facilities provided by the kernel for the management of processes have evolved considerably in the last few years, driven mostly by the advent of the pidfd API. A pidfd is a file descriptor that refers to a process; unlike a process ID, a pidfd is an unambiguous handle for a process; that makes it a safer, more deterministic way of operating on processes. Christian Brauner, who has driven much of the pidfd-related work, is proposing two new flags for the clone3() system call, one of which changes the kernel's security model in a somewhat controversial way.

Use your train to smash bandits into a cliff in the updated Fogpiercer demo - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T14:59:25.000Z

Your train is your deck in Fogpiercer, with an updated demo available in Steam Next Fest this is a turn-based strategy game worth your time.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Security updates for Tuesday - LWN.net

2026-02-24T14:33:30.000Z

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and munge), Debian (openssl), Mageia (gegl), Oracle (firefox, freerdp, gnupg2, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, java-11-openjdk, kernel, libpng15, munge, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, protobuf, and uek-kernel), SUSE (libpng12, libpng16, and openQA, openQA-devel-container, os-autoinst), and Ubuntu (gimp, libssh, and linux-azure).

Firefox 148.0 arrives with AI controls - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T14:14:19.000Z

As Mozilla promised they would, Firefox version 148.0 has been released and with it you now get to control what generative AI features are enabled or disabled.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Inspired by the classic DOOM RPG, the Dungeons of DUSK demo is out now - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T13:50:01.000Z

Taking the retro FPS Dusk and turning it into a retro dungeon crawler with a big sprawling skill tree - Dungeons of DUSK has a demo out now.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Stop Killing Games campaign offer update on latest EU meeting in livestream from parliament, while emphasising bipartisan MEP support - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-24T13:23:49.000Z

The folks behind the Stop Killing Games campaign aiming to push lawmakers into taking action to stop publishers shutting down the servers of online games in a fashion that leaves them unplayable have hosted a livestream from the EU Parliament building itself following their latest meeting with the European Commission. The group say that meeting went "fine", and used the stream to emphasise the bipartisan support their cause has amassed among MEPs so far.

Battling castles on wheels? Wanderburg might be my new favourite thing - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T13:16:35.000Z

Wanderburg is nuts. A roguelike where you build up a castle on wheels (or legs) and battle through various locations and it instantly hooked me.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Vampire Crawlers from the Vampire Survivor dev is promising but not quite there yet - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-24T12:28:19.000Z

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors has a demo out now for Steam Next Fest, and I've given it a run through to see the chaos.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.