Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

Hades 2's Melinoë can now run through Zagreus' underworld escape from the original Hades, thanks to modders - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-08T10:39:30.000Z

Open your mouth, Hades 2. Ah, it's as I suspected, you've eaten the original Hades! Don't worry, I don't blame you. You were only hungry, and the modders controlling your great maw were keen to see how Melinoë would cope with taking on the roguelike run through the underworld which Zagreus blazes through in the first game.

[$] An open seat on the TAB - LWN.net

2025-12-08T08:25:43.000Z

As has been recently announced, nominations are open for the 2025 Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) elections. I am one of the TAB members whose term is coming to an end, but I have decided that, after 18 years on the board, I will not be seeking re-election; instead, I will step aside and make room for a fresh voice. My time on the TAB has been rewarding, and I will be sad to leave; the TAB has an important role to play in the functioning of the kernel community.

Packages Or Write Your Own - Irreal

2025-12-07T17:19:14.000Z

A reoccurring theme on the Emacs forums is that it’s somehow a good thing to have a minimal configuration and by implication that having a small number of packages is also a good thing. Arguments can be made that a large number of packages can increase load times and memory usage but most of the arguments I see take the position that a small number of packages is an intrinsically a good thing.

Sludgefrog over at the Emacs subreddit makes the argument explicitly. It is, he says, better to write your own extensions instead of adding a package. Even sludgefrog admits that sometimes—when implementing a major mode, for example—a package is the right answer but thinks writing your own extensions is preferable.

There’s a point to made in his favor. In the open software realm—if not in the Emacs world—there are lots of libraries full of trivial functions that are easily implemented in a line or two. That can and has caused problems when the author withdraws the software or a library gets contaminated with malware. That, of course, is the theme of this famous xkcd comic. To some extent those problems are unavoidable but why subject yourself to them to get access to a trivial function?

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with using a package even if you could write the code yourself. We only have so many cycles, after all, so in the absence of other considerations, why spend them solving a problem that’s already solved?

The comments mostly take the middle ground that I’ve outlined: sure, write short fixes or functions but use packages for more complicated things unless you want to solve the problem yourself for educational purposes.

Of course, as always Emacs lets you have it your way. You can—more or less—use only packages or you can write everything yourself. Or you can, like most of us, mix strategies and do whatever is convenient in a particular case.

Six stable kernels for the weekend - LWN.net

2025-12-07T15:48:39.000Z

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.11, 6.12.61, 6.6.119, 6.1.159, 5.15.197, and 5.10.247 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users of these kernels should upgrade.

What's on your bookshelf: Santa Ragione co-founder and Saturnalia director Pietro Righi Riva - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-07T13:00:00.000Z

Hello reader who is also a reader! Today marks the sad and glorious return of Booked for the Week, our reliably irregular Sunday column in which games people talk about books. It’s sad because the original creator of this column, arch word baron Nic Reuben, is no longer full time at RPS. It’s glorious because this is one of the best columns I’ve ever read, and I’m delighted Nic has given permission to keep it rolling. He’s now got a Patreon, by the way.

It’s intrigue, not action, that makes Atomfall such a compelling Lake District trip gone wrong - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-07T12:00:00.000Z

Today’s advent calendar hails, in both setting and make, from the RPS homeland of the United Kingdom. Which means, like most of RPS, it’ll probably spend Christmas predominantly unconscious, driven into a coma by a combination of tiredness, pigs in blankets overreach, and acute exposure to King Charles. Best play it before then, eh.

It’s Atomfall!

The Sunday Papers - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-07T11:00:00.000Z

Sundays are for realising that he's coming. That he's inevitable. That, in a way, he's already here. You feel him in the back of your mind. Grinding his teeth. Picking his nose. Raking his nails across the palms of his hands. He hungers, a snarling hunk of robo-man-flesh yearning for the time his clarion call rings out through the space between each of our psyches.

Something terrible and insidious this way comes. He glues a cookie-cutter short back and sides hairdo to his usually bald bonce. He cries out to the great corporate entities for money and wares to show off. He dusts off a tombstone engraved with the words 'please wrap it up'. He howls at the moon. AWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Adrian Edmondson? "NO," he yells, jumping on stage. "IT IS I, KEOFF GEIGHLEY." You gasp in horror.

Embark dishes on all the goodies you'll get in Arc Raiders if you choose to prestige later this month - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-06T22:56:31.000Z

The eternal problem with online shooters of any flavour that has some variation on a levelling system, is that eventually you run out of room, and can't progress any more. That's why so many of them essentially allow you to reset your levels, or to prestige as it's often colloquially known. Arc Raiders is one such game that will feature such a system, and in a new blog post, developer Embark have outlined what you get when you prestige.

As Path of Exile 2: The Last of the Druids gears up for release next week, its devs , sort of, delay its 1.0 release date - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-06T19:05:59.000Z

A new trailer for the next Path of Exile 2 update, The Last of the Druids, was shared earlier this week, showing off all the cool things you can do in it! Which are mostly relegated to turning into animals, but in my eyes that is eternally a cool thing to be able to do, in a game or not. And with that trailer also came a release date for the update.

In true roguelike fashion, Slay the Spire 2 is only being made because of a 50/50 coin flip - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-06T18:22:08.000Z

Imagine a second, alternate version of our world. Everything is the same, on the surface. The sky is blue, the economy is in shambles; it's the unnatural order of things. And yet, you cannot help but feel something is different. Like there's something missing, or perhaps replaced. Ah, there it is - Slay the Spire 2 is not a game that even remotely exists. As it turns out, this world, our world, where the roguelike called Slay the Spire 2 does, or rather will, exist, is only the world we exist in thanks to the flip of a coin.

Converting Markdown Text In The Clipboard To An Org File - Irreal

2025-12-06T17:43:50.000Z

As I’ve said many times before, I don’t understand why someone would prefer to use Markdown over Org mode but there are such people. At the very least you may be working with outlanders who don’t use Emacs and therefore don’t have access to Org. Regardless, sometimes it’s convenient to be able to convert some Markdown text to Org mode.

Charles Choi has us covered. In this nice post he provides a bit of Elisp that will take Mardown from the clipboard, convert it to Org mode, and insert it in the current Org file. As you probably expect, he uses Pandoc to do the heavy lifting. That means you have to have Pandoc installed, of course. Choi also mentions that you’ll need to have the system clipboard and kill-ring integrated but I think that’s been standard for a long time. I don’t do anything special on macOS although I do have save-interprogram-paste-before-kill set to t.

If you sometimes find that you need to convert Markdown to Org mode, Choi’s code is a good way of doing so. The code itself is easy to understand and modify if you need to. As Choi says, you can invoke the function in several ways such was a context menu, a Hydra or Transient menu, a keybinding, or simply by calling it with Meta+x. Unless you find yourself using it all the time, you’ll probably find Metax and command completion more than adequate.

Romeo is a Dead Man sets its outlandish sights on a February 2026 release date - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-06T17:10:09.000Z

I can see it now… in the near future, the review embargo for Suda51's next game Romeo is a Dead Man, and as far as the eye can see the digital realm is scorched with 7/10s. Its maximalist shenanigans, techno-blasting soundtrack, and ridiculous premise puts it in a position where it couldn't possibly be for everyone, even if such a score is actually ideal for such a game, but when has that ever been the case for a Suda51 game? However, as I said, this vision I have is in the near future, because the hyper-violent action game now has a release date.

I helped a parasitic worm eat my neighbour's eyeball in 2025's weirdest horror RPG, and I'd do it again - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-06T11:59:00.000Z

Part turn-based RPG, part-survival horror, with a sprinkling of metroidvania goodness, Look Outside was always going to be my jam. But where it sank its grotty little hooks into me was how gleefully punishing it was. My first playthrough quickly became a cacophony of mistakes, but each one moulded my adventure in ways I never expected.

What are we all playing this weekend? - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-06T08:00:00.000Z

Waking up at the crack of dawn today, I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices did not have a comments thread in which to badger us to play Troubleshooter Colon Abandoned Children. I burst from the covers, ran weeping to my PC (this happens most mornings, to be fair) and discovered that I had forgotten to finish the intro for our latest What Are We All Playing This Weekend article. And now I have. So, what are you all playing this weekend?

Managing Light/Dark Scheme in MacOS and Linux - Take on Rules

2025-12-06T02:04:34.000Z

Related Links :: Tags: < emacs < programming < technologies

Summary: A code walk through of toggling dark/light scheme in Emacs.

On my personal machine I’m using Debian 📖 with the Gnome 📖 desktop. And my work machine runs MacOS. I have written an Emacs 📖 function (M-x jf/dark) that toggles between light and dark for either my personal machine or work machine. You can find the code up on Github.

First we have the general function (and associated alias for ease of typing):

(defun jf/color-scheme-system-toggle ()
  "Toggle system-wide Dark or Light setting."
  (interactive)
  (funcall
    (intern
      (format "jf/color-scheme-system-toggle:%s" system-type))))

(defalias 'jf/dark 'jf/color-scheme-system-toggle)

I’m opting to use a dispatch pattern, in which I dynamically construct the function name(s) to call based on the system-type variable. A disadvantage of this approach is that I’m defining functions for an Operating System (OS 📖) that is not relevant to the machine.

It would be simple to refactor, but for reasons of the example, I’ll keep them separate.

For themes I have the following:

(defvar jf/themes-plist
  '(:dark ef-owl :light ef-elea-light))

And I use the following command to set the theme based on the color scheme:

(defun jf/color-scheme:emacs (&optional given-scheme)
  "Function to load named theme."
  (let ((scheme
         (or given-scheme
             (funcall
              (intern
               (format "jf/color-scheme-func:%s" system-type))))))
    (modus-themes-select (plist-get jf/themes-plist scheme))))

For MacOS

I have the following:

(defun jf/color-scheme-system-toggle:darwin ()
  "Toggle the darwin system scheme."1’
  (shell-command
   (concat "osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" "
           "to tell appearance preferences "
           "to set dark mode to not dark mode'"))
  (jf/color-scheme-set-for-emacs))

To determine the MacOS color scheme:

(defun jf/color-scheme-func:darwin ()
  "Determine MacOS preferred/current theme."
  (if (equal "Dark"
             (substring
              (shell-command-to-string
               "defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle") 0 4))
      :dark :light))

For GNU/Linux with Gnome

The command for Linux and Gnome is as follows:

(defun jf/color-scheme-system-toggle:gnu/linux ()
  "Toggle the gnu/linux system scheme."
  (let* ((target_scheme
          (plist-get '(:dark :light :light :dark)
                     (jf/color-scheme-func:gnu/linux))))
    ;; Instead of all of the shelling out, we could assemble the shell
    ;; commands into a singular command and issue that.
    (dolist (setting jf/color-scheme-commands:gnu/linux)
      ;; In essence pipe the output to /dev/null
      (shell-command-to-string
       (format (plist-get setting :template)
               (plist-get setting target_scheme))))
    (jf/color-scheme:emacs target_scheme)))

The list of settings to change are as follows:

(defvar jf/color-scheme-system-toggle/gnome-settings
  '((:template "gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.color night-light-enabled %s"
               :light "false" :dark "true")
    (:template "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme %s"
               :light "default" :dark "prefer-dark")
    (:template "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme %s"
               :light "default" :dark "prefer-dark"))
  "A list of plists with three parts:

- :template :: command to run.
- :dark :: what the setting should be to be in \"dark\" mode.
- :light :: what the setting should be to be in \"light\" mode.")

To determine the current color scheme in Gnome:

(defun jf/color-scheme-func:gnu/linux ()
  "Determine Gnome preferred/current theme."
  (if (equal
        "'prefer-dark'"
        (s-trim
          (shell-command-to-string
            "gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme")))
    :dark :light))

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Netflix to buy Warner Bros for $82.7 billion, including the creators of Batman Arkham and Mortal Kombat - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-05T19:32:13.000Z

It’s after 5pm on a Friday, but no force on this Earth can stop me hurrying back to my desk to report on a large financial transaction. Also, we should have written this up earlier, but we were busy deciding which are the objectively correct 100 best PC games.

I’m not… sure we put any Warner Bros games in that list. I’ve just done a CTRL-F for “Batman” and got zero results. I know, WTF - Arkham Asylum is amazing. Mark needs to stop driving things and think about capes for a change. I’m sure Warner Bros aren’t too bothered about this gross oversight right now, though. Netflix have just revealed plans to buy their entertainment business for $82.7 billion in stock and cash.

Breaking Horses: the thrill of going off-map - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-05T18:24:59.000Z

Significant story spoilers for Horses follow. Also, here is some possibly appropriate music.

Why We’re Paywalling Our Family Christmas Card - McSweeney’s

2025-12-05T18:00:00.000Z

Season’s Greetings from the Mortons!

We know many of you look forward to opening your mailbox each December to receive the Morton annual Christmas card and extensive family newsletter. It brings us no good tidings to let you know that we’ve made the difficult decision to paywall it.

As the years have gone by, the letter has grown in scope. When we sent the first Christmas newsletter, we were just a two-person operation in a small home in Middlebury. Now we have to cover nine busy family members across four states. And sometimes Jessica has a boyfriend. It’s a big operation, and Clare had to learn Microsoft XL or whatever it’s called.

Everybody on our list will receive the Morton Christmas Card featuring a candid photo of us down by the lake, wearing matching outfits. And while we love everyone who receives our card, those who subscribe and support our family’s essential end-of-year work will get even more of our love.

Join the Morton Friend Tier for $17.00 to receive:

Three full pages of updates on the entire Morton clan: Clare (??) and Mark (68); Rachel (39), her husband Greg, their sons Declan (6) & Branson (4); Henry (36), his husband Ian, and their daughter Streisand (1); and Jessica (31)
A recap of our disastrous trip to the world’s most boring hole (the Grand Canyon)
An update on the feud with the neighbor we hate, who parks his F-150 on our lawn
Asides like the day Clare thought she saw Beyoncé at Safeway
In-depth detail about Mark’s toe fungus

This newsletter isn’t just some free social media post. We start working as early as September. It takes days to write and weeks to edit down from its sixty-page first draft. Each Morton family member plays a valuable role in its production, from fact-checking to updating the printer firmware to making tough editorial decisions, like telling me that I “mention Pete Buttigieg should be president” a “weird amount.”

Support our hours of work and upgrade to the Morton Family Tier for $26.00 to receive:

The newsletter printed on one of the few remaining pieces of gingerbread border marble printer paper that Clare hoarded when she found it at Staples in 1995
The grand reveal of who actually writes the newsletter (hint: It’s not really the dog)
One of Clare’s annual homemade ornaments
An apology for how last year’s candlestick ornament looked like a big glittery penis
Access to the Morton Family Games app with crossword puzzles, spelling games, and more

Complimentary subscriptions will be given to families who always send us boxes of Harry & David pears and families who have good-looking sons around Jessica’s age.

From all of us Mortons, we wish you and your family a joyful, peaceful, and blessed holiday season. And don’t expect any freebies on Valentine’s Day either.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain's rejoined Obsidian full-time to work on a mystery game, but plans to keep his YouTube chats going - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-12-05T17:14:18.000Z

He's back. Tim Cain, co-creator of the original Interplay Fallouts and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines programmer has emerged from semi-retirement, returning to Obsidian to work on a game he can't talk about yet because legal documents. For the past few years, the veteran developer's been contracting on a number of games, including Obsidian's own The Outer Worlds 2, having previously co-directed the first Outer Worlds.

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Navigating Websites - Irreal

2025-12-05T17:07:28.000Z

The other day, I mentioned that I took a long, excruciating train trip. The outbound trip had been so bad that we were confident the trip home would be much better. It wasn’t, of course. Most of you, I’m sure, don’t care very much and those outside the U.S. can snicker and gloat that at least their trains can provide a pleasant experience.

There is an aspect of the whole misadventure that should concern most Irreal readers, though. The Amtrak Website. It’s horrible and turns the idea of being user hostile into an art form. Rather than dwell on the trip, I was going to crawl off into a corner and do my best to never think of it again. But then I saw this xkcd comic. As he so often does, Munroe perfectly captured the infuriating futility that one feels when dealing with websites designed by those suffering from psychopathy.

Again, I’m sure the details won’t interest most Irreal readers so I’ll spare you. Suffice to say, avoid their Website if you can.