Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

"We all have strong opinions within the studio" – even Microsoft's own game developers are hesitant to use AI - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T20:00:00.000Z

Microsoft are telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our day-to-day lives, the sooner we will 10x ourselves. Yet the corporation are still only finding haphazard pick up by videogame developers, including some of their own studios.

As executive producer Susan Kath tells me, the Elder Scrolls Online team haven't yet found a part of development where they can use it. "Right now, we generally use it for things like this," Kath says, indicating our call. "A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that."

But, in the case of art, coding, or writing, generative AI is not something the team are using in Elder Scrolls Online's development, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. "I don't know what our decision is going to be, because we're still having conversations about where we go with that," Kath says. "Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future."

"What goes up must come down," Razer's CEO says of rising RAM and GPU prices – but admits "It is bad" right now - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T19:00:00.000Z

As the price of RAM, GPUs, and even SSDs climbs ever higher off the back of AI data centre demand, it's causing a significant price crunch for hardware manufacturers. "It is such a volatile situation at this point in time it is hard to figure out pricing," Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said in a recent episode of The Verge's Decoder podcast. "I don't know if I can pick a number right now as I speak with you and [be confident in it] by the end of the podcast."

The rapidly increasing prices mean the company are keeping schtum on how much their next round of gaming laptops will cost. "This is something that concerns me," Tan explained. "The RAM prices are going up and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and in the reach of gamers out there."

But it wasn't all doom and gloom during the CES podcast recording.

I, Don Quixote, Vow to Conquer Greenland - McSweeney’s

2026-01-22T18:00:00.000Z

“In a free-wheeling speech to world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump…touched on his desire to obtain Greenland from Denmark…, America’s contribution to Nato, and wind energy in China.” —BBC

- - -

Fellow knights, I have traveled a great distance to be here in beautiful Davos, Holy Roman Empire, to attend this year’s meeting of the Knights Templar. I come bringing truly phenomenal news from La Mancha. This week marked the one-year anniversary of my knighthood, and after twelve months of roaming the plains atop my trusty steed, Rocinante, I have slain giants, restored chivalry, and transformed our scoundrel-plagued lands into the safest in the known world.

My detractors insist that all of my enemies are imaginary and that I am picking fights with bogeymen simply to satisfy my own deluded fantasies. That just shows you how threatened some people are by the incredible job I’m doing cleaning up La Mancha.

Yet, despite my efforts to combat lawlessness, I continue to be denied the Noble Peace Prize—the annual prize awarded to the nobleman who has done the most to establish order throughout his fiefdom. I can only assume this is a deliberate snub, especially considering I am the man who created the Board of Peace—the council of Christian knights committed to bringing peace to Jerusalem by launching a crusade against the Mamluk Sultanate. If starting a holy war doesn’t merit a Noble Peace Prize, I don’t know what does.

If Europe’s nobility refuses to laud my commitment to peace, then I see no reason why I should continue those efforts. That is why I have decided to conquer the Viking territory of Greenland, regardless of how many of my critics call it “petty” or “pointless” or “kindergarten logic.”

Besides, who is to say that Greenland belongs to the Vikings, or to the indigenous Thule people who were there before them? Possession is determined by the possessor. Sort of like when I “took possession” of Dulcinea even though she was underage and didn’t consent—another so-called scandal my adversaries like to bring up time and time again.

When I first saw Greenland on a map, I thought it was giant. As it turned out, it only looked gigantic because of the way it was drawn on those new maps by Gerardus Mercator. But just because Greenland isn’t literally gigantic doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a gigantic acquisition for the people of La Mancha.

Some are saying that occupying a territory thousands of miles from La Mancha, with which we already have an alliance, will do nothing to make our people safer. But those are the same naysayers who thought that destroying windmills was a bad idea. The fact that there’s now a word, “quixotic,” to describe a quest that most people believe to be foolhardy is just further proof of my singular genius.

Europe’s leadership has long pursued a failed strategy when it comes to windmills. There are windmills all over Europe now, and one thing I’ve noticed is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing. Just look at the Dutch. They’re famously short, poor, and miserable.

To this day, I attack any windmill I see until I’ve hacked the vanes to pieces with my sword. And, sure, that’s a clear violation of the Nobleman’s Agreement to Operate Windmills—or NATOW. But disregarding that agreement will be the best decision La Mancha has ever made. If there are any windmills in Greenland, you can be sure I’ll destroy those too.

In the meantime, I’ve sent a special envoy to Greenland, led by my trusty squire, Sancho Panza, to broker the peaceful transfer of the territory to La Mancha. If that fails, I’m not ruling out taking it by force. I’ll happily go to war with all of Europe if I have to. After all, it’s exactly what a Noble Peace Prize winner would do.

[$] Linux Kernel Runtime Guard reaches its 1.0 release - LWN.net

2026-01-22T17:43:15.000Z

The Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is a out-of-tree loadable kernel module that attempts to detect and report violations of the kernel's internal invariants, such as might be caused by an in-progress security exploit or a rootkit. LKRG has been experimental since its initial release in 2018. In September 2025, the project announced the 1.0 version. With the promises of stability that version brings, users might want more information to decide whether to include it in their kernel.

Turnbound is a lovely plinky mixture of autobattler and inventory Tetris, where play order is decided by a cat's bum - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T17:19:13.000Z

Out today in early access, Turnbound is a tile and turn-based autobattler about mythical heroes trapped in a haunted boardgame, where the starting player is chosen by flipping a coin bearing a picture of a cat’s anus. It’s saying a lot for Turnbound’s mellow, fairytale ambience and rich, rosy tile designs that I consider the cat’s anus a positive – a touch of whimsy, rather than just, well, that feeling you get when you’ve been flashbanged by a picture of a cat’s anus. Rare indeed are the videogames that contain a cat’s anus, and rarer still are the videogames in which the cat’s anus isn’t grounds for a refund.

Xah Talk Show 2026-01-21 Ep748 emacs lisp, write command to eval selection, fsharp, JavaScript. - Xah Emacs Blog

2026-01-22T17:05:44.000Z

2026-01-21

Xah Talk Show 2026-01-21 Ep748 emacs lisp, write command to eval selection, fsharp, JavaScript.

Open your cute Orcish vampire gob, Hytale's next update has summonable skeletons and non-scary snakes to shove in there - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T16:53:26.000Z

The second post-release update to Hytale is currently set to rock up this weekend, but the notes outlining what it'll include have rocked up a couple of days early. As with last week's first update to the early access sandbox, this is another pretty beefy one, and especially noteworthy if raising the dead's your jam or you share Indiana Jones' main fear.

When Should You Use Visual-line-mode? - Irreal

2026-01-22T16:28:15.000Z

Over at the Emacs subreddit, floofcode complains that he doesn’t like the way visual-line-mode handles moving from line to line. He found that everything worked fine without visual-line-mode so he wondered when is visual-line-mode useful.

If you read his post, you’ll notice that he had visual-line-mode turned on globally. That explains a lot of his frustration. As nice as visual-line-mode can be, you definitely don’t want it enabled all the time. It would be a disaster when writing code, for example.

The thing about visual-line-mode is that it considers all the text between line feeds to be one long line and soft wraps the text to fit your screen size.That’s useful even when you’re just dealing with text locally but I find it essential for my blogging. If I set a hard line size, it gets carried onto my blog and really messes up the displays of people with smaller screens or windows such as those reading Irreal on a phone. With visual-line-mode, the text gets flowed to fit the target screen.

So the answer to floofcode’s question is that visual-line-mode is definitely useful but mostly when you’re writing prose such as in Org-mode. I use it whenever I’m writing prose but never when I’m, say, programming or using some other specialized Emacs mode. For instance, I don’t use it in my Org based tax files because they’re mostly tables and don’t include long sequence of text. I generally set it on a per file basis except for my blog where a hook recognizes blog posts and sets it and some other appropriate modes.

World of Warcraft devs Blizzard will offer folks a free wardrobe change just before Midnight, following fashion fee furore - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T15:45:23.000Z

Fine, we'll let you hop in whatever the MMO equivalent of Superman's phone booth is for a single round of free outfit transmog just before the launch of March's Midnight expansion. So have degreed World of Warcraft makers Blizzard, in the face of vocal vexation among players unhappy about a sudden hike in clothes changing prices that arrived with the game's latest patch.

This isn't the only time Midnight's ended up under a microscope fore money-related reasons prior to release, but it is the first time the ire's been exclusive to fashionistas.

I love that somebody is making a single-player flight sim dedicated to formation flying - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T14:36:22.000Z

Often, the gaming internet depresses me with *gestures expansively*, but sometimes, it delights me with some relatively specific and impassioned Thing like, in this case, a single-player aerobatics sim dedicated to formation flying. Created by Japanese indie CloveTek, Dancing Wings – The Aerobatic Simulator is as far from yer Ace Combats and Delivery Must Completes as you can get while still having wings. A bunch of wise guys have tagged it “Automobile Sim” on the Steam page, but ignore them! I expect they're just sore about never having performed a genuine Immelmann turn. Here’s a trailer.

30 years of ReactOS - LWN.net

2026-01-22T14:28:36.000Z

ReactOS, an open-source project to develop an operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows NT applications and drivers, is celebrating 30 years since the first commit to its source tree. In that time there have been more than 88,000 commits from 301 contributors, for a total of 14,929,578 lines of code. There is, of course, much left to do.

It's been such a long journey that many of our contributors today, including myself, were not alive during this event. Yet our mission to deliver "your favorite Windows apps and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust" continues to bring people together. [...]

We're continuing to move ReactOS forward. Behind the scenes there are several out-of-tree projects in development. Some of these exciting projects include a new build environment for developers (RosBE), a new NTFS driver, a new ATA driver, multi-processor (SMP) support, support for class 3 UEFI systems, kernel and usermode address space layout randomization (ASLR), and support for modern GPU drivers built on WDDM.

Rust 1.93.0 released - LWN.net

2026-01-22T14:25:02.000Z

Version 1.93.0 of the Rust programming language has been released. Notable changes include in updated version of the bundled musl library, thread-local storage for the global allocator, some asm! improvements, and a number of newly stabilized APIs.

Security updates for Thursday - LWN.net

2026-01-22T14:17:59.000Z

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gpsd), Debian (inetutils and modsecurity-crs), Fedora (cpp-httplib, curl, mariadb11.8, mingw-libtasn1, mingw-libxslt, mingw-python3, rclone, and rpki-client), Oracle (gimp, glib2, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, kernel, mariadb-devel:10.3, and thunderbird), Red Hat (buildah, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana, kernel, kernel-rt, multiple packages, openssl, osbuild-composer, podman, and skopeo), Slackware (bind), SUSE (ffmpeg-4, libsodium, libvirt, net-snmp, open-vm-tools, ovmf, postgresql17, postgresql18, python-FontTools, python-weasyprint, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (glib2.0 and opencc).

Helldivers 2 gets new stealth missions today, and its super-slimmed install size version is finally ready to take over - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T12:45:48.000Z

A new Helldivers 2 patch has arrived ahead of the slightly delayed Redacted Regiment warbond also making its sneaky debut today, January 22nd. In line with that warbond's stealthy shushness, this patch has seen Arrowhead add in new commando missions designed to reward those who know when to crouch-walk. They've also revealed that the slim build that's been in beta for a little while is finally ready to take the reigns from the standard version and its very chunky install size.

Beware: the Killer Egg will return to Battlefield 6 multiplayer, along with Battlefield 4's Golmund Railway map - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T12:41:15.000Z

Battlefield 6’s efforts to break ground while Gittin’ Back To When Battlefield Was Gud continue with the announcement of two forthcoming maps in the EA shooter’s second season, which begins 17th February. One of the maps is Contaminated, a brand new field of battle that is comparable in scale to Battlefield 1’s St Quentin Scar and Arras in Battlefield 5. The other is a remake of Battlefield 4’s Golmud Railway – a big, grassy vehicular affair, based on China’s actually existing Golmud-Lhasa railway line.

"It is out of the question to let a boss run rampant" - Ubisoft workers strike against "disastrous" cutbacks - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T11:13:12.000Z

Ubisoft’s bloodbath of game cancellations and restructuring yesterday has attracted the expected fiery response from unionised workers, with the French game industry union Solidaires Informatique calling a half-day strike today. Cost-cutting and potential layoffs aside, the strikers are protesting against Ubisoft’s decision to mandate a full return to office, with workers given an annual allowance of work from home days instead - something a publisher executive has justified as a move “to enhance collective efficiency” and “the sense of belonging”.

Nexus Mods' latest modathon isn't a typical modathon, it's a first go at the same for multi-mod collections - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-22T10:28:01.000Z

With their latest Fallout modathon having wrapped up at the close of last year, mod-hosting site Nexus Mods have decided to try something new with their latest event designed to supercharge mod creation around a specific game or theme. Rather than asking folks to submit fresh individual mods like usual, the modathon that's about to kick off is all about putting together chunky multi-mod lists which can overhaul a game in one fell swoop.

These user-assembled modlists, dubbed Collections, are a feature Nexus Mods have been pushing for a number of years now, so it's not surprising they're now serving as the subject of a modathon for the first time.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 22, 2026 - LWN.net

2026-01-22T00:47:48.000Z

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

Front: Singularity; fsconfig(); io_uring restrictions; GPG vulnerabilities; slab allocator; AshOS.
Briefs: Pixel exploit; telnetd exploit; OzLabs; korgalore; Firefox Nightly RPMs; Forgejo 14.0; Pandas 3.0; Wine 11.0; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Rule your own, slightly socially awkward knights in the round table management RPG Sovereign Tower - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-21T22:56:00.000Z

You ever accidentally find out that you're the sovereign of an entire nation as dictated by a prophecy even though you're technically just random nobody, and so you wind-up being the one to have to make all the decisions about how your nation is run? No? Well, that's fine, but if you'd like that to be you, I'll introduce you to Sovereign Tower, a management RPG where you send off your knights of the round table to deal with all manner of quests.

Firestarters promises to mix Rollerdome, arena shooters and visual novels into a government-sanctioned bloodsport - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-21T21:42:39.000Z

This is probably the umpteenth time I've said I'm not someone who plays many shooters, but here I am saying it again, because an FPS has rocked up that has clocked my interest. It's called Firestarters, an arena shooter that's a bit like Quake, a bit like Rollerdome, and looks like good, bloody fun.