Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

Mama's Sleeping Angels is a Lethal Company-esque, dream-exploration, Y2K smorgasbord for the zillenialpha generations - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T22:54:29.000Z

Isn't it funny that we don't have a definitive reason as to why we dream? We have ideas, theories, like that they're the brain moving memories from short-term to long-term storage. But why the hell can they get so weird? And worse, scary. This feels like the central question at the heart of Mama's Sleeping Angels, an upcoming Lethal Company-esque procedurally generated dream-exploration game where you're having a sleepover with friends and must feed a goddess within her dream.

Big Hops, out today, is as delightful to play as it is to look at - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T21:29:06.000Z

It feels quite fitting that a game like Big Hops released today, the day after Awesome Games Done Quick wrapped up, because this thing feels like it has a guaranteed spot in Summer Games Done Quick already. You're a frog! Who hops around! What's not to love? It helps that the platformer feels so good in motion, too.

2026-01-12 Emacs news - Sacha Chua

2026-01-12T19:32:14.000Z

If you want to review packages before upgrading them, check out the new package.el feature for reviewing diffs (Reddit, Irreal).

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
- London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/312727757/ Tue Jan 13 1800 Europe/London
- OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Jan 14 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 15 0000 Asia/Singapore
- EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/312735622/ Sat Jan 17 1100 America/Los_Angeles
- M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Jan 21 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 22 0000 Asia/Singapore
- Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Jan 24 0030 America/Vancouver - 0230 America/Chicago - 0330 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 0930 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
Emacs configuration:
- package.el - Package diff/review feature has landed (Reddit, Irreal)
Emacs Lisp:
- Small experiment with a template library (Reddit)
- The Emacs Widget Library: A Critique and Case Study - Boris Buliga
- vui.el: Declarative, component-based UI library for Emacs (Reddit)
- New testing framework: e-unit.el
Appearance:
- Peek as you go (Reddit) - highlight symbol on double space
- [ANN] show-inactive-region now on MELPA (Reddit)
Navigation:
- James Dyer: A single function ripgrep alternative to rgrep
Dired:
- Chris Maiorana: The Emacs Way: Listing Directory Contents (Irreal)
- Create Directories in Emacs Dired (Tips) (01:26)
- New package dired-video-thumbnail on MELPA for image-dired style thumbnail viewing for video files (Reddit)
Writing:
- Mike Olson - Automatic Arrow Characters in Emacs (@mikeozen@mastodon.social)
- Marcin Borkowski: Making fill-paragraph more flexible
Org Mode:
- Keeping appointments from my Org agenda updated | Dave’s Blog (@davemq@fosstodon.org)
- Creating weekly diary-style timestamps in Org Mode | Dave’s Blog (@davemq@fosstodon.org)
- 200ok: Building Consistent Habits (Just in Time for New Year's Resolutions)
- Tip about starting a list with - 0:00:00 :: for automatic org-timer-item handling
- Emailing org-mode "TODO" Reminders with XProc
- [BLOG] #25 bbb:OrgMeetup on Wed, December 10, 19:00 UTC+3 - Ihor Radchenko (@yantar92@fosstodon.org)
- Org Mode requests: [RFC] Behaviour of ‘org-agenda-clock-goto’ with ‘repeated’ tasks
- Org development:
Completion:
- consult-ripfd: live finding + searching with an fd + rg consult mashup (Reddit)
Coding:
- Emacs minor mode for bacon background compiler code checker (@cehteh@social.tchncs.de)
- How to insert pairs without fancy packages in Emacs (03:49)
- Announcing Casual HTML & CSS (Irreal)
- Mike Olson: Announcing eglot-python-preset
- eglot-python-preset: Python LSP support with PEP-723 scripts for Emacs (@mikeozen)
- Open jive Friday night | Getting Python into Git (40:20)
- Chris Maiorana: Selective staging in Magit
- Tip about using magit-diff-visit-prefer-worktree
- I made a pre-commit companion for Magit (Reddit)
Shells:
- harald/terminal-frame: Dedicated terminal frame for Emacs' M-x shell - Codeberg.org (@HaraldKi@nrw.social)
Mail, news, and chat:
- James Endres Howell: Custom sorting of mu4e headers (Irreal, @jameshowell@fediscience.org)
- punchagan: An offline-friendly Elfeed web UI
Evil mode:
- I use Emacs' cursor model in evil-mode's normal state. (19:29)
Doom Emacs:
- Jack Baty: Dropping back to Doom Emacs
Fun:
- Download Anime From Nyaa from within Emacs (04:08)
AI:
- Fritz Grabo: How I Talk to Books and Source Code
- pi-coding-agent: AI-assisted coding in Emacs (HN)
Community:
- Christian Tietze: Emacs Carnival 2026-01: “This Year, I’ll …”
- My People of Emacs – Curtis McHale (@curtismchale@mastodon.social)
- Eric MacAdie: 2025-12 Austin Emacs Meetup
- What is your insanely hidden official shortcut that people can never find out?
Other:
- gvalson/mir.el: An incremental reading package for emacs. (@gvalia@merveilles.town)
- life-calendar.el – Your entire life as a grid of weeks (Reddit)
- Alvaro Ramirez: Bending Emacs - Episode 9: World times (Irreal, YouTube 06:32, Reddit)
- Listful Andrew: Restful #03 - history, ordinal dates
- Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: my ‘oxford-calendar’ package
- abaj8494/bytelocker.el: Buffer and Region Encryption Plugin for Emacs with 3 Cipher implementations (Reddit, HN)
- Running emacs daemon with style – Ahoi Blog (Irreal)
- How have I only just discovered detached.el??
- Using gtrash from Emacs · mkt3’s Notebook
- Slides from a university course on interactive programming environments (@elb@social.sdf.org)
- Complete Build: Emacs From Source, Reproducible Builds in Docker, WSL, and macOS (41:57)
- Emacs Build Dependencies: Everything You Need Installed First (18:26)
- Emacs AppImage Builder - Portable Emacs with Native Integration
- emacs-plus now offers pre-built binaries - native compilation included
- Bring your Emacs to Android (Reddit)
- android emacs 30.2 (Reddit)
- Emacs on Android as eBook reader and language learning tool
Emacs development:
- emacs-devel:
  - Re: master 68418691267: In Elisp manual warn about unpredictable changes of point (Bug#79927) - Richard Stallman - clarifying points
  - Re: Package Keywords Ontology - Juri Linkov - current package keyword frequency
  - Re: Alternative handling of constants in .eln files - Andrea Corallo - garbage collection tradeoffs
  - Re: mode-line untrusted content indicator - Stéphane Marks
  - Tail recursion (was: bug#78872: Byte compiler: warning message lacks line and column numbers) - Stefan Monnier - challenges
  - Re: elpa.git and nongnu.git have moved - Collin Funk (no changes needed for most users, this is mostly a dev thing)
  - Re: LLM-coauthored contributions - Eli Zaretskii - probably best not to take risks for now
- Update cursor display using Xterm escape sequences
- Bind 'apropos-user-option' to C-h u
- Allow 'package-isolate' to fetch missing packages
- Allow reviewing packages before installaion
- shadowfile.el uses eqhemeral buffer names now
- External Tramp methods can be used in multi-hops
New packages:
- consult-vulpea: Use Consult in tandem with Vulpea (MELPA)
- git-sync-mode: Automatically commit and sync local changes (MELPA)
- go-template-mode: Major mode for Go templates (MELPA)
- life-calendar: Display your life in weeks (MELPA)
- mock-fs: Virtual filesystem for Emacs Lisp tests (MELPA)
- pdffontetc: Display `pdffont' and other PDF information (MELPA)
- pi-coding-agent: Emacs frontend for pi coding agent (MELPA)
- show-inactive-region: Highlight the inactive region (MELPA)
- vulpea-journal: Daily note interface for vulpea (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 comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Here's a taste of what Arc Raiders would look like in first-person, though you're too late to try it yourself - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T18:46:00.000Z

There is a strange deliciousness in experiencing a game from a perspective that it does not otherwise allow. Sure, things don't always look right, there's just this opportunity to rethink how you view a particular world. Recently, it appears that someone playing Arc Raiders got to do just that, by switching it into a first-person shooting mode as opposed to its usual third-person camera, all thanks to an accident.

Restore mysterious cassette tapes from a missing, occultish musician in the very Her Story like Imprinted - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T18:00:52.000Z

What's the genre called for games that recreate a desktop PC interface? There's gotta be a name right, there's enough games to justify it, but PC game is kind of already taken as a term. In any case, while we ponder over that question, let's look at an upcoming addition to that genre, Imprinted, a horror game where you are tasked with restoring mysterious, damaged cassette tapes.

Sorry Ladies, the Foreskin Tactical Hoodie Is Only for Men - McSweeney’s

2026-01-12T18:00:00.000Z

The Foreskin Tactical Hoodie is the antithesis of all things feminine and female. It comes in black, brown, and olive green. It does not come in fuchsia, lilac, or ecru. It is perfect for outdoorsmen and army-man dress-up parties. It is not for doing stuff women normally do, like yoga, crying, or watching Heated Rivalry.

Yes, it has so many pockets that it is basically a wearable purse. But don’t get the wrong idea; it is only for men. A purse is obviously full of feminine items such as tissues, mascara, and loose change. You are only allowed to carry manly things like TP rolls, guyliner, and cold hard cash in the Foreskin Tactical Hoodie. Manly men don’t carry around change. That stuff is heavy. Manly men toss their change on the ground and walk away confidently while something explodes and heavy metal plays in the background.

Yes, it’s twice as soft as any other hoodie on the market. It’s great for snuggling. And, yes, technically, the fleece we use is the same kind they use for Hello Kitty plush dolls, My Little Pony plush dolls, and baby blankies. Not so fast, ladies. It may be soft, but the Foreskin Tactical Hoodie is fully synthetic, which means your pits will reek like a three-week-old Frito chili pie within minutes of putting it on.

While it’s sized to accommodate chunky dudes, and would otherwise be fine for pregnant women, women should be aware that the Foreskin Tactical Hoodie can cause spontaneous pregnancy—and pregnant women who wear one may become double-pregnant. That is a real scientific condition; we did not just make it up to scare you. Ask ChatGPT.

We do not use virile, jacked models in tight jeans to entice you to buy one of our sweatshirts and wear it while you fantasize about being held by a jacked guy with big hands and a well-groomed beard. We definitely do not put three jacked men with well-groomed beards in one shot to fuel fantasies about our models playfully tugging one another’s hair and erotically exploring one another’s bodies with their big hands as they slowly pull off their tight jeans. That wouldn’t be tactical.

While we’re on the subject, let’s go into what makes this hoodie so tactical, and, therefore, masculine. For civilians, “tactical” usually refers to something related to firearms. So yes, we are trying to imply that this hoodie is itself a firearm, and your man is a bullet ready to go off on the nearest hippie or teen wearing a regular hoodie.

The word “tactical” might suggest that our sweatshirt is appropriate for the armed forces, and you might have noticed that we also call it “military-grade.” The Foreskin Tactical Hoodie has not yet been approved for military use, and any servicemember who wears one on duty could be considered out of uniform. That said, we have heard that Secretary of War Hegseth owns two in each color.

In conclusion, if you aren’t standing at the pinnacle of manliness, if you can’t catch bullets in your teeth, and if you don’t want to smell like a dead bear, the Foreskin Tactical Hoodie is just not for you. Sorry, ladies.

Detectives detect detectively in the demo of moody noir sleuth sim Obsidian Moon - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T18:00:00.000Z

Lighting up my fifteenth cigarette of the hour and adjusting my fedora, I slipped the mysterious code into the box. A collection of numbers and letters designed to provide early access to the demo of a detective game. It was a hot tip from a public relations person on behalf of developers Lost Cabinet Games. That wasn’t suspicious. Well, assuming the missing furniture is metaphorical rather than literal.

You can eat rats and unicorns in lip-smacking autobattler Dunderbeck, and I absolutely refuse to play the demo - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T17:46:14.000Z

You cannot pet the dog in Dunderbeck, but you can assuredly eat the unicorn. Just drag its corpse over the puckering mouth on the righthand side. Alternatively, you can chuck the dead unicorn into the mincers on the left and combine the resulting horny horsemeat with other sources of... nutrition, such as rainbow-coloured turds and spoons. I do not know what foodstuffs might result. I refuse to play Dunderbeck’s demo. I watched 20 seconds of the trailer, then spent the next ten minutes brushing my teeth. Here you go.

[$] Asciinema: making movies at the command-line - LWN.net

2026-01-12T17:30:50.000Z

In open-source circles there are many situations, such as bug reports, demos, and tutorials, when one might want to provide a play-by-play of a session in one's terminal. The asciinema project provides a set of tools to do just that. Its tools let users record, edit, and share terminal sessions in a text-based format that has quite a few advantages compared to making and sharing videos of terminal sessions. For example, it is easy to use, offers the ability to search text from recorded sessions, and allows users to copy and paste directly from the recording.

Ah yes, a Palworld card game is on the way, can't think of any other creature collector that has one of those - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T16:53:13.000Z

Once again it appears that Pocketpair appears to be going after a bit of Pokemon's pie, this time of the card game variety. Where the latter's started life as a physical medium, the former's attempt at such a thing, literally just called Palworld Official Card Game, announced today, looks to be of the digital-only variety, though what there is to learn about it is a touch slim overall.

Peter Molyneux's final game Masters of Albion will release in April - "it's the culmination of my life’s work" - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T16:38:41.000Z

Peter Molyneux and 22cans will release their new god sim Masters of Albion on Wednesday 22nd April via Steam. They’ve also pumped out a new trailer, rich in accents, exploding barrels and stone circles. If it were a game from any other developer, I’d be modestly anticipating it. But it’s a Molyneux joint - his last game before retirement, allegedly - so instead, I’m looking at it with a mixture of sadness and suspicion.

GOG's new owner will stick to its revamped classic and zero-DRM guns, but does think lessons lie in Steam's overstuffed embrace - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T16:34:02.000Z

Just before the calendar ticked over to 2026, Witcher and Cyberpunk makers CD Projekt revealed that they'd sold off their PC storefront - GOG. In a deal worth 90.7 million Polish zloty (about £18.6 million / $25 million), original CD Projekt and GOG co-founder Michał Kiciński bought the storefront and has now offered some words about his vision for its future in a Steam-dominated market.

Hytale pre-orders have been so strong development is secured for two years - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-12T15:34:46.000Z

Hytale arrives in very Early Access tomorrow with Native Linux support, and the future of it is looking incredible bright thanks to strong pre-orders.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Adventure game The Drifter adds new localisations with support for fan translations - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-12T15:22:34.000Z

A truly excellent point and click adventure game The Drifter is now more easily playable thanks to some official translations, and support for fan additions.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

The Emacs OS: The Unix Way Vs. The Emacs Way - Irreal

2026-01-12T15:04:38.000Z

Chris Maiorana has decided to take the old joke about Emacs being an operating seriously. Or at least at face value. He has planned a series of posts where he compares the Unix way of doing things to the Emacs way.

The first post in the series compares directory listings. That’s a fundamental function for any operating system, of course, so it makes sense—if you’re comping operating systems—to see how they handle that task.

Maiorana’s answer is to look at the various outputs from the Unix ls command and compare them to the results from Dired. There’s not much to compare, of course, because the Dired listings are generated from the underlying ls command. The difference is how you handle options. In Unix this is done through command line options. In Emacs, you change the Dired listing after it’s first displayed with buffer specific commands as usual in Emacs.

The real difference is in the power that Dired provides. You can’t do anything that you couldn’t do in Unix but with Dired it’s all one command. You think of the listing as just another Emacs buffer that you operate on in the usual ways or perhaps bring bespoke commands to bear.

I don’t really believe in the Emacs as OS paradigm—although I sometimes pretend I do. A more accurate description is that those of us who live in Emacs tend to treat it as if it were a shell. With Emacs, there is seldom any need to drop into an actual shell to get things done and even if you do, Emacs can provide you with several including it own eshell.

I’ll be interested to see Maiorana’s subsequent posts on the subject. I’m interested in exploring the extent to which Emacs can be claimed to be an operating system.

Command your crew and roll the dice in the tactical roguelike DeckWrecking Pirates - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-12T14:57:58.000Z

DeckWrecking Pirates appears to have a fun blend of various features that fans of turn-based strategy games and deck-builders will no doubt appreciate.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Nightwater looks like a curious blend of secrets, exploration, crafting and automation - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-12T14:40:36.000Z

One to stick into your list to keep an eye on is Nightwater, an open world exploration game that mixes in crafting and automation in a strange world.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

The Division: Definitive Edition looks like it may be a thing, assuming this poster in Japan's the real deal - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-12T14:37:16.000Z

A poster advertising a definitive edition of Tom Clancy’s The Division appears to have been spotted by folks attending a Ubisoft-run eSports event in Japan. At least, that's assuming this isn't some elaborate ruse designed to draw in spies from other game studios, while only Jack Ryan can see what's truly going on.

Security updates for Monday - LWN.net

2026-01-12T14:14:57.000Z

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and sogo), Fedora (chromium, foomuuri, libpng, libsodium, mariadb10.11, musescore, nginx, python-pdfminer, python-urllib3, python3.12, seamonkey, wasmedge, and wget2), Mageia (curl, libpcap, sodium, wget2, and zlib), Slackware (lcms2), SUSE (chromedriver, chromium, noopenh264, coredns, curl, dcmtk, fontforge, gdk-pixbuf-loader-libheif, gimp, kernel, libheif, libpng16, libsoup-2_4-1, libvirt, mariadb, php8, poppler, python-filelock, python-tornado6, python311-aiohttp, qemu, sssd, and traefik), and Ubuntu (libheif, libtasn1-6, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-kvm, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, and php7.2, php7.4, php8.1, php8.3, php8.4).

European Commission gathering feedback on the important of open source - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-12T13:11:54.000Z

The European Commission recently launched a call for evidence on a newer initiative about the importance of open source, and their reliance on non-EU countries.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.