you ever think about the fact that there are people today who have lived their whole lives never knowing anything besides star fox 64 remakes

It's finally out! This watch face is my first time developing for the Pebble (or any embedded system for that matter), and went from concept to product in 12 days for the Pebble Spring 2026 Developer Contest. It's written entirely in the Zig programming language, which was a joy to work with except when the Pebble SDK gave me trouble. It features no AI code. All the bad code came straight from my own brain.

https://apps.repebble.com/ae80da4fd2d54efc9e907b11

I would appreciate it if y'all gave it a like on the Pebble app store! I don't actually own a Pebble Time 2, which is the watch I'm developing for, so every like increases the odds that I win a free watch. Then I'll have something to actually test on, which would be nice!

Anyways there's not really much else to say here. It's just an announcement post. If you're interested in the story behind it, I have "liveblogged" it on the rebble discord, although I don't think the story is super interesting. Mostly a series of ping ponging between "wow it works I'm a genius" and "wow this doesn't work I'm stupid".

i've been working on a pebble watch face for a bit and i wanted to share it cos i'm proud of it! i'm at the hardest part now, time zones, but once i finish that i'm kinda home free.

any thoughts? there's a lot of parts i want to change once it's finished and i can give myself permission to increase scope.

I don't know what sort of feeling this thumbnail is giving me, but I really need to unsubscribe from Scott the Woz

I wish I had a better process for doing these link roundups. I usually have to scrounge for my links in the moment instead of slowly building this throughout the week, and I don't leave my thoughts as I'm reading them, so I end up needing to reread the articles to share them. I don't know what I should do about this. My hotly anticipated^{[citation needed]} reblog feature might mean that the move is to share interesting posts as I find them, but I'll have to experiment.

For now, here's some links.

Thom Holwerda: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

I'm seething with rage towards Microsoft and its utter incompetence and maliciousness. Let me, for once, not mince words here: Windows 11 is a travesty, a loose collection of dark patterns and incompetence, run by people who have zero interest in lovingly crafting an operating system they can be proud of. Windows has become a vessel for subscriptions and ads, and cannot reasonably be considered anything other than a massive pile of user-hostile dark patterns designed to extract data, ad time, and subscription money from its users.

A quote I have heard from somewhere--I do not remember the source--is "While 2026 will not be the year of the Linux desktop, the 2020s will be the decade of the Linux desktop." Linux has slowly been getting more and more "okay" and Windows has become more and more dogshit. One day we can only hope that the world will reach a point where there is a viable alternative to being treated like total garbage available for most people.

Grayson Davis: Underwater Basket Weaving

"The bride is a graduate of Prairie Dog Tech, where she received her degree in underwater basket weaving. Her other pursuits of study were familiar bird calls, Egyptian folk dancing and men."
--1952 April Fools' Day article announcing "Chlorophyll I.S. Green Marries Ima Violet Cloud in April 1 Rites" (The Rock Island Argus, 4/1/1952)

Davis' new blog "I Might as Well Explain the Joke" is truly great. An all-timer blog worth following. Add it to your RSS feed!

Chris Person: I'm Tired Of These Useless Jackasses Making The Computer Expensive

I was planning on doing this as an Aftermath piece, but then I looked at the prices of spinning disk drives, which are now twice what I paid for them--just like SSDs, and just like RAM, just like GPUs before them.

I'm sharing this because, like the author, I love the computer but hate the environment around the computer.

Bruno Dias: Against 'Metroidbrania': a Landscape of Knowledge Games

I'd put it forth that the term doesn't just sound dorky, and it's not just hard to explain (given that first you have to explain what a metroidvania is -- itself a fraught bit of terminology). I'd say it's all but useless, too.

This is possibly one of my favorite blog posts of 2025 and I cannot believe I haven't shared it yet.

Clyde Mandelin: The Many Translations of the "Lost Woods"

If you recognize this name, it's because he translated Mother 3. He's got a whole
bunch of blog posts that talk about video game translation, an this one just so happened to be the most recent one.

Obsidian is good normal software, and it's wild to celebrate my 5 year anniversary with it. It has yet to get worse over time. I joined before there was a mobile app, sync, or anything like that, and I've since bought every single service they've offered when it came out. I'm still on the classic $5/month 50gb sync plan. It's pretty good! One day I'll write about how I use it but it's not really anything crazy.

I don't think there's much to say actually. I think this card wants be run as a 1 or 2-of in a decent number of non-bad publicity focused decks, and that means it's a pretty good card. Lots of money y'all. If you want more opinions on bad publicity, please read Veronica's piece on this card and Editorial Division.

Before I talk about Let Them Dream, I need to talk about 5/3s. The job of the 5/3 agenda is to win you the game in 3 agendas, and decks that run 5/3s usually want to score out with any combination of two 2-pointers and one 3-pointer. But the 5/3 has one major vice: they kinda suck. They're so much harder to score out than 4/2s (or 3/2s!), and their payoff usually isn't even worth the work! This is especially true because corps vastly prefer to score out 5/3s as the game-winning agenda, so any "on score" text is irrelevant. If the corp got to choose, they would dedicate the entire power budget of a 5/3 towards hurting the Runner, and none of it on helping the corp. This is incredibly obvious when you see what 5/3s corps run, and why they run them. For example, Send a Message and Next Big Thing give the corp tempo for having an agenda scored or stolen, while SDS Drone Deployment and Méliès City Luxury Line hurt the runner's tempo in the worst case and can deny a steal in the best case, but the best thing a 5/3 could do is to guarantee the runner needs to steal more agendas than you need to score. This is what Global Food Initiative did. It did so well at this job that it was used in 99% of competitive decks when it was put on the restricted list 2 years after its release.

Let Them Dream may have the same incredibly powerful effect as Global Food Initiative but, as a 4/2 that costs one neutral influence, it’s having to compete for deck slots with 3/2s that are easier to score and strong 4/2s that have a bigger impact on the board. Does this mean it’s bad actually? Hell no! Being worth only 1 point on steal is still too powerful. I can see it being used in maybe some slower glacier decks, and definitely in some decks that only run 1 and 2 point agendas (Thule), but I don’t see Let Them Dream being anywhere near as dominant as its predecessor.

Scoring PD is still back baybee! Ikawah Project has been a staple card in scoring PD for about as long as I can find decks of it. (Here's examples from 2021, 2023, and 2024. I have no idea what was going on in 2022.) The only card that's as much of a staple in these decks as Ikawah Project is Global Food Initiative (which might be relevant to my next card review). This might be bringing back enough old tools for scoring PD to make it a top deck in the Vantage Point meta. I know that I'm certainly gonna be playing it.