Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

Yes I know Christmas was a month ago but SantaCorps 4 perfectly captures Sega Dreamcast era Sonic so play it anyway - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T22:52:02.000Z

Sega have gotten just a little bit too good at making Sonic games. Not good as in 10/10 masterpieces, good as in competent, as in mostly jank free, and where there is jank it's the annoying, not very funny kind. I like it when the blue hedgehog is impossible to control in Sonic Adventure 2 actually! But look, when I go on to tell you about a game that captures that same unruly spirit of Sega's early 3D games, please ignore that Christmas was a month ago because SantaCorps 4 is a 3D platformer that really does have the messy, gloopy sauce.

2026-01-26 Emacs news - Sacha Chua

2026-01-26T22:20:00.000Z

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
- Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jan 28 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 29 0130 Asia/Singapore
- Emacs APAC: UPDATED Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/january-2026/ Sat Jan 31 0030 America/Vancouver - 0230 America/Chicago - 0330 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 0930 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
- Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #2 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/d6225b76-8f80-46c7-bc14-35d21b0c5ef0 Mon Feb 2 1900 CET
- EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/312922157/ Thu Feb 5 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto – Fri Feb 6 0000 Etc/GMT - 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0530 Asia/Kolkata - 0800 Asia/Singapore
- M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Feb 6 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Feb 7 0000 Asia/Singapore
Emacs Lisp:
Appearance:
- indent-bars is now @v1.0 (Reddit)
Navigation:
- Three important distinctions in Emacs: mini buffer and echo, mark and point, window and frame (04:36)
- You can now merge tabs in emacs (Reddit)
- scroll-around.el: Scroll the view by paragraph or line while keeping the cursor at the same screen position. (Reddit) see alternatives in the comments
- Avy-flash: replicating flash.nvim in Emacs (vibe-coded) (Reddit) - note discussion in comments; you can just use avy-flash.el instead of the full fork of avy
Dired:
- Why You Don’t Need a File Manager (If You Use Emacs) (13:47)
Writing:
- Developing yet another way to do research in Emacs - fool's errand? (13:34) - highlighting EPUBs, taking notes, organizing, doing syntopic reading
- Emacs tricks DYI: surround src blocks in markdown (07:06)
Org Mode:
- Berean Standard Bible in org mode (Reddit)
- Jack Baty: Blogging with org-mode and ox-hugo again
- How to Open Obsidian Links in Org Mode – Curtis McHale (YouTube 2:46, @curtismchale)
- Design Decisions: Building a Modern Technical Blog | Charlie Holland's Blog (Feature demo, Reddit) - org-mode and SvelteKit
- Org development:
Completion:
- Typing emojis with :shortcodes: in Emacs
Coding:
- Fast JSON path extraction via Tree-sitter (Reddit) - will be part of Emacs 31
- Tree-sitter vs Language Servers (Reddit)
Shells:
- Writing pipeline commands in Eshell
- Major mode for Nushell scripts, powered by treesitter (Reddit)
Web:
- Announcing Casual EWW (Reddit)
Mail, news, and chat:
- punchagan: Elfeed DB backup hooks
- [Package] sign.el: an Emacs interface for Signal via signal-cli JSON-RPC. (Reddit)
Doom Emacs:
- (Doom) Emacs Config Bits
Multimedia:
- Sacha Chua: Emacs and whisper.el: Trying out different speech-to-text backends and models
- Yay Emacs live-coding: tweaking my whisper.el setup (46:11)
AI:
Community:
- Emacs vs. vim Real World Analogy: Cargo Bike Vs. Folding Bike (@publicvoit@graz.social)
- Christian Tietze: Emacs Carnival 2026-01: “This Year, I’ll …”
  - This Year I'll… · Curious Musings
  - Emacs Carnival Jan 26: “This Year, I’ll de-obfuscate” | zimblog
Other:
- Another beautiful modeline: maple-modeline, and share some packages that I've written: maple-preview, -note, -translate, -iedit, -scratch, -diff, -minibuffer
- Emacs: easily set timers with TMR (14:33, Reddit)
- Emacs в 2026: Секретное оружие или старый хлам? |vim, vscode, lisp, org-mode|Podlodka Podcast #460 (01:43:00)
- Experimental Skia rendering backend as cairo alternative
- Unofficial Emacs Portable Binary v31.0.50 (Reddit) - Linux only
Emacs development:
New packages:
- advent-mode: Advent of Code mode (MELPA)
- denote-review: implements review process for denote notes (GNU ELPA)
- devcontainer: Support for devcontainer (MELPA)
- magit-git-toolbelt: A Magit interface for git-toolbelt (MELPA)
- mu4e-llm: AI-powered email assistance for mu4e (MELPA)
- org-roam-latte: Auto-highlight unlinked Org-roam references (MELPA)
- ox-reveal-layouts: Predefined layouts for ox-reveal (MELPA)
- signel: Signal client for Emacs via signal-cli JSON-RPC (MELPA)
- tengo-mode: Major mode for the Tengo programming language (MELPA)
- ultisnips-mode: Major mode for editing Ultisnips snippets (MELPA)
Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Gambonanza is definitely a chess roguelike deckbuilder in a post-Balatro world, but when it works, it works - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T21:32:36.000Z

It is inevitable that when a game like Balatro rocks up, is really good, and makes a gazillion dollars, that there will be the odd imitator here and there. Sincerity, flattery, yada, yada, yada, point is, it's all fine as long as you at least put enough of a twist in there to make it more of an "influenced by" over a "wholesale ripoff" kind of thing. I think Gambonanza, a roguelike deckbuilding chess game, fits into the former quite nicely.

Highguard devs say it was always the plan to "go dark" after its reveal, à la Apex Legends' launch - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T18:42:18.000Z

Good, bad, I don't bloody know yet the thing's only been about for five seconds, but we can certainly say one thing now: Highguard is out. Now we can sit and prepare ourselves for more inane and pointless discourse about yet another live service shooter that we've probably had several times before. Hooray! But before we get ahead of ourselves, a moment of reflection, courtesy of the devs behind Highguard itself, who have spoken out about all that silence following their Geoffies reveal.

I’m a Bodega Cat, and I Guess I’m in Charge Now? - McSweeney’s

2026-01-26T18:30:00.000Z

Dear Customers:

Some humans (I think? Hard to tell) in masks and vests showed up this morning and took Manny and Kumal away. As you may have noticed, those two were the only staff—despite this place being open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., truly lazy, shiftless drains on society, those fellas—but nobody turned around the sign or locked the door, so if you all want that pack of cigarettes you tell your kids you don’t smoke or a good-enough bagel with a schmear, you’re gonna have to deal with me.

The entirety of my scope of work here at the bodega is mouse control and napping, so please bear with me as I figure out the complexities of the point-of-sale system. As I understand it, the stickers on the items bear some relation to the buttons on the cash register, but I’m as fuzzy on the details as I am on my little tummy (which you MAY NOT TOUCH). If I happen to be snoozing when you get to the front, do not wake me. Sleep is important, even though Manny and Kumal never seemed to get any. And if they didn’t have time to sleep, I can’t imagine they had time to do the kind of crimes that Noem woman is using as a pretext for all the people-snatching, but what do I know? I’m just a cat. Also, as a cat, I will not be filing or paying any taxes, unlike the human workers of this establishment.

Stock levels may vary as I sort out how to place orders with our vendors. Manny and Kumal took meticulous notes on which products their customers liked best and took pains to make sure those items were kept in stock. I am a cat, so I simply do not give a shit. I have, however, emailed the Purina wholesaler to request several skids of salmon flavor, so if that’s your bag, you’re in luck.

By the way, do you have any idea what the margins are on any of this stuff you buy? How Manny and Kumal managed to make ends meet is beyond me, but I can tell you right now they sure as shit couldn’t afford an immigration lawyer.

Tobacco products seem to have an age requirement of twenty-one—I only recognize cat years, so I will need to see proof that the purchaser is over three human years of age. Some of the vapes come in fun flavors. Oh, are we not supposed to sell those? Shame your law enforcement seems tied up with other matters, like blinding protesters by shooting them in the face.

Listen, I am aware that this represents a huge disruption and inconvenience, especially to me. I shouldn’t have to point out that I can’t vote, despite my family having been in this country for at least 112 generations. Even when I can get through to my (your, really) representatives in Congress, all I get is: “Is this that meowing guy again? Jesus Christ” and the sound of a government-issued phone hitting the cradle. As a native-born American cat, I would like nothing more than to return to my little bed and leave the actual work to the Mannys and Kumals of the world. Maybe you all should have thought of that before you decided to vote in the goons intent on ripping out the spine of this country, just because it happens to be made of imported bones.

Speaking of bones, can one of you work the can opener before I turn into a bag of them? I can’t hunt AND work the till at the same time, guys. That kind of multitasking requires the work ethic of… well, you get it.

The free and open source Godot Engine 4.6 is out now with major upgrades - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-26T18:24:00.000Z

Game developers should take a look at the brand new Godot Engine 4.6 release, bringing a big refresh to the popular cross-platform open source game engine.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Arc Raider's Headwinds update asks whether extra XP is enough to go solo in a group lobby - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T18:08:13.000Z

Hear ye, hear ye! Embark have shared some more concrete details for Arc Raider's next main update, Headwinds, which is set to be downloaded onto your platform of choice tomorrow, January 7th. Namely, just what that new matchmaking option is, which is, as it seems, one that won't be for everyone.

Highguard, the new FPS from former Apex Legends and Titanfall devs, hits Steam after weeks of teasing silence - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T18:00:00.000Z

Created by former developers of Apex Legends and Titanfall, Highguard was the final game announced during December 2025’s Keighley Awards. It’s a free-to-play, guns & sorcery, PvP raid shooter in which magic cowboys in capes vie for control of an uncharted continent. It’s got temples, airships, rideable panthers, fireballs, frost giants, and enchanted siege engines on caterpillar tracks. It’s also out now on Steam. That was quick.

A judge has ruled that RuneScape gold pieces are real property, which is bad news for the ex-dev accused of stealing 705 billion of them - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T17:43:02.000Z

When you were making plant pots in RuneScape and selling them to other players, you might not have thought you were laying the groundwork for a UK legal precedent that would define in-game gold as intangible property covered by the Theft Act 1968, but, well, here we are.

Lord Justice Popplewell has ruled on appeal that RuneScape's gold pieces are legal property, which is important for the ex-Jagex developer accused of stealing 705 billion of them.

[$] Fedora and GPG 2.5 - LWN.net

2026-01-26T17:28:19.000Z

The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) project decided to break from the OpenPGP standard for email encryption in 2023, and instead adopted its own homegrown LibrePGP specification. The GPG 2.4 branch, the last one to adhere to OpenPGP, will be reaching the end of life in mid-2026. The Fedora project is currently having a discussion about how that affects the distribution, its users, and what to offer once 2.4 is no longer receiving updates.

Strategy game Bolt Action is a tabletop WW2 miniatures port with indirect fire, armour facings and overwatch - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T17:22:14.000Z

Today I became aware of Bolt Action, a historical strategy sim based on the World War II tabletop miniatures game from Warlord Games (founded by erstwhile Games Workshop staffers John Stallard and Paul Sawyer). It sees you fretting over questions of morale, line-of-sight and cover, while leading US, British or German armies across maps that range from beaches to churchyards. There’s multiplayer, too. Trailer ho!

Old School RuneScape's 2026 roadmap includes the finale to a questline that's legally old enough to drink - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T17:01:58.000Z

Against the overbearing weight of modernity, Old School RuneScape continues to complete a Sisyphean task of simply existing two and a half decades after it originally launched. It just celebrated that 25th anniversary at the start of the year in fact, and now during a Winter Summit a slew of updates coming to the MMO were shown off in a roadmap from developer Jagex.

Banjo-Kazooie gets an unofficial PC port thanks to modders, with handy technical tweaks and Steam Deck support - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T17:00:54.000Z

A group of modders wearing the finest reverse-engineering goggles has managed to port birdly and beary platformer Banjo-Kazooie to PC, with a bunch of extra bells and whistles to make sure it won't make for a disappointing dip back into your childhood or adulthood. Their creation's dubbed Banjo: Recompiled, and it dropped over the weekend.

Stenberg: The end of the curl bug-bounty program - LWN.net

2026-01-26T16:52:10.000Z

Curl creator Daniel Stenberg has written a blog post explaining why the project is ending its bug-bounty program, which started in April 2019:

The never-ending slop submissions take a serious mental toll to manage and sometimes also a long time to debunk. Time and energy that is completely wasted while also hampering our will to live.

I have also started to get the feeling that a lot of the security reporters submit reports with a bad faith attitude. These "helpers" try too hard to twist whatever they find into something horribly bad and a critical vulnerability, but they rarely actively contribute to actually improve curl. They can go to extreme efforts to argue and insist on their specific current finding, but not to write a fix or work with the team on improving curl long-term etc. I don't think we need more of that.

There are these three bad trends combined that makes us take this step: the mind-numbing AI slop, humans doing worse than ever and the apparent will to poke holes rather than to help.

Stenberg writes that he still expects "the best and our most valued security reporters" to continue informing the project when security vulnerabilities are discovered. The program will officially end on January 31, 2026.

Hytale being unfinished is fine, but I'd rather see nothing than its WIP signs - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T16:30:33.000Z

I like Hytale. I like how it plays smoother and weightier than Minecraft, while matching the explorative highs of creeping through an infested cave or stumbling upon some ancient, unplundered ruin. I like how it runs on the Steam Deck without trying to. And I like the pace at which it’s being updated: one substantial patch per week, at the current rate.

You could argue, fairly, that regular content injections are vital for an early access game that’s accessible as early as Hytale is. Likeable or not, its sense of purpose is currently driven entirely by the primate-brain desire to ascend through rare mineral tiers and upgrade workbenches, with the promised RPG-style adventure mode a distant prospect at best. I don’t mind waiting, or even playing, in the meantime – the most interesting thing about a game is rarely its state of completion. I just wish the unfinishedness wasn’t proclaimed quite so loudly, by an arsenal of cheerily ironic Work In Progress signs, inside Hytale itself.

Starting A Journal - Irreal

2026-01-26T15:55:58.000Z

A couple of weeks ago I read a lovely story in The New Yorker by Calvin Tompkins about starting a journal in his hundredth year. Tompkins was born the same year that The New Yorker was founded and, ironically, spent most of his working life writing for the magazine. Last year—his hundredth—he surprised himself by deciding to start a journal as a sort of countdown to his hundredth birthday. The story is mostly entries from the journal but I found them fascinating. Perhaps you will too. If nothing else, you’ll get a first hand glimpse of what old age really looks like. The TL;DR is that there’s good news and bad news.

In any event—although I am nowhere near my hundredth year—I was inspired to start my own journal. Of course, it was going to be written with Emacs but the question is how. There is the builtin journal app as well as some third party packages but I chose simplicity. I didn’t need anything special or complex with arcane functions so I just added an Org capture template to create a file+datetree file in Org mode. Here’s the whole thing:

("J" "Personal Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/org/personal-journal.org")
         "* %<%R: >%? \n%t" :empty-lines-before 1)

I have some startup options in the file itself to set visual-line-mode, use a variable pitch mode, and couple of other things: the same setup that I use for my blog posts. All this is simple and familiar. There’s nothing new for me to learn since it’s basically the same setup that I use everyday to write my Irreal posts.

The takeaway is that if you’d like to start a journal, it’s really easy. Just use a simple Org file with a corresponding capture template.

Play viral Tetris with Winnie the Pooh's horrible guts in this not very Disneyfied turn-based roguelite - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T15:12:13.000Z

Back in 2022, Winnie The Pooh entered the public domain in the USA, meaning that any denizen of that nation can publish work featuring the OG incarnation of A.A. Milne’s honey-supping woodland bear (the UK copyright expires in 2027). At some point in the future, once the newly founded Poohlike genre has matured, we can surely expect a renaissance of Winnie derivatives, ranging from erasure Pooh-ems through josei anime interpretations to Kaufman-ass Hundred Acre existentialism. Right now, though, it’s mostly about horror, because the logical thing to do when the lawyers finally abandon a beloved children’s character is break out the chainsaws.

The movie folk have already given us Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and its sequel, both apparently dreadful in a bad way. Now here comes Steven H. Videogames with Winnie's Hole, out in early access today. In this roguelite from Twice Different, the nectar-chugging teddy has become a rambling cosmic abomination, and your job is to mutate his insides using tetrominoes. Oh botherlyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Skilful hero-juggling can elevate Resident Evil Requiem, even when Leon kicks the tension in half - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T15:01:22.000Z

Resident Evil Requiem director Akifumi Nakanishi has said the imminent sequel is "almost equally split" between its two protagonists, stealthy newcomer Grace and returning mass zombie murderer Leon S. Kennedy. After playing a few hours at Capcom HQ, a chapter that apparently follows on immediately from the pure horror hag-dodging that Edwin endured, I’m hoping that’s an imperfect translation - Leon’s gun fu action brawls can mesh surprisingly well with Grace’s spook 'n' sneak sections, but those tension breakers seem best deployed sparingly.

So you think you can type the word 'pistol' over and over again without making a mistake? Typing Break will put your confidence to the test - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-26T14:23:00.000Z

As anyone who has edited me over the years will know, I am not a great typist. Or, ironically, as I originally spelled it: typoist. Additional letters slip in with every other keystroke, characters within words are all jumbled up, and the crime I'm most often guilty of is skipping out whole words entirely as I rush to get to the end of a sentence.

So, it was with trepidation that I installed the demo for Typing Break, a game where the only thing standing between you and the horde of enemies descending the screen is your ability to quickly and accurately type words like 'Pistol' and 'Machine gun'.

Security updates for Monday - LWN.net

2026-01-26T14:03:10.000Z

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gimp, glib2, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, net-snmp, pcs, and thunderbird), Debian (apache2, imagemagick, incus, inetutils, libuev, openjdk-17, php7.4, python3.9, shapelib, taglib, and zvbi), Fedora (mingw-glib2, mingw-harfbuzz, mingw-libsoup, mingw-openexr, pgadmin4, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, and wireshark), Gentoo (Asterisk, Commons-BeanUtils, GIMP, inetutils, and Vim, gVim), Mageia (kernel), Oracle (glib2, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, and libpng), Red Hat (java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, and kernel-rt), SUSE (azure-cli-core, bind, buildah, chromium, coredns, glib2, harfbuzz, kernel, kernel-firmware, libheif, libvirt, openCryptoki, openvswitch, podman, python, python-urllib3, rabbitmq-server, and vlang), and Ubuntu (cjson).