Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Tomás Grau de Pablos @tomgaar.bsky.social · 7h

Nuevo GUNDAM!!

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Mark Lemley @marklemley.bsky.social · 1d

Good news: fossil fuels have plateaued and solar is growing by leaps and bounds worldwide

apnews.com/article/clim...

Solar and wind power has grown faster than electricity demand this year, report says

A new analysis of solar and wind power shows its generation worldwide has outpaced electricity demand this year.

apnews.com

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Nick Capozzoli @nickcapozzoli.bsky.social · 12h

New blog post up. It's about a few things—chiefly, the impulse to jettison literary criticism as if it were ballast. www.arcadence.com/abundance-re...

Abundance Reigns!

The Reminder is a watchword: though it may ascribe a problem to us, the offenders are assuredly others.

www.arcadence.com

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Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 1d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Pop Arena @poparena.bsky.social · 11h

Today on Forgotten Comic Strips, a Simpsons Sunday strip produced by Bongo, the Simpsons comic books guys, that seems to have slipped through the cracks so much that not even the Simpsons wiki has a page on it.

Forgotten Comic Strips @forgottencomics.bsky.social · 11h

"The Simpsons" by Sherri L. Smith, Jeanette Bose and Jason Ho, 1998-2002
September 22nd, 2002 as seen in the Sacramento Bee

Sunday comic strip "The Simpsons," a tie-in to the animated show of the same name. Homer takes Lisa to a museum exhibit on neanderthals. While the museum guide details how ancient man gathered food, a hungry Homer spies a vending machine. When his food gets stuck, he starts to violently rattle the machine, reflecting the guide's description of neanderthal behavior. The vending machine falls on top of Homer, and the guide tells Lisa to leave him, "it's nature's way."

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Tomás Grau de Pablos @tomgaar.bsky.social · 11h

La sociedad dentro 1 año

Tomás Grau de Pablos @tomgaar.bsky.social · 11h

Esto es real para todo el mundo ahora. youtu.be/YIHOZL0kvJ0?...

The Group Chat Got Leaked

YouTube video by VHS Central

youtu.be

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404 Media @404media.co · 13h

BREAKING: A catastrophic breach has impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more.

🔗 www.404media.co/the-discord-...

The Discord Hack is Every Users’ Worst Nightmare

A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive informa...

www.404media.co

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Chris Kerr @kerrblimey.bsky.social · 18h

If you only read one story today, make it @nicolecarpenter.bsky.social's breakdown of the Saudi-backed EA buyout, which includes thoughts from multiple business analysts and experts who explain what the $55B deal could mean for EA workers, its video games, and the wider industry.

Essential reading.

Game Developer @gamedeveloper.bsky.social · 19h

'Gaming is the new oil:' How the EA buyout 'diverges from the traditional playbook'

Analysts explain how the high-risk leveraged buyout will impact Electronic Arts and the video game industry.

www.gamedeveloper.com

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Simon Parkin @simonparkin.bsky.social · 18h

In 2014 I wrote for @newyorker.com about @kurtjmac.bsky.social, a YouTuber who began walking in Minecraft and never stopped. His quest was to reach the Far Lands, a place at the limits of the algorithmic world, where the landscape breaks apart. On Saturday, after fourteen years, he arrived:

A Journey to the End of the World (of Minecraft)

www.newyorker.com

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Unseen Japan @unseenjapan.com · 16h

With about 400 seats, the Shinjuku Moulin Rouge venue hosted witty satire, lyrical plays, and dazzling dance performances. It also produced stars such as Ashita Matsuko, often described as Japan's first idol.

buff.ly/v76aRGx

Picture of Ashita Matsuko lying back on a seat and holding a rose

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Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · 1d

I am fascinated by how ubi has welded the aesthetics of politics in its games and marketing for decades, but always been profoundly cowardly about engaging with them. Political aspartame.

Stephen Totilo @stephentotilo.bsky.social · 1d

SCOOP: Last year, Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin's Creed game set during Reconstruction. Was to feature a Black Assassin who, among other things, fought the rise of the Klan

Sources: Leadership nixed it over concerns re: U.S. political climate, backlash to Yasuke

www.gamefile.news/p/scoop-ubis...

Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year

Company leadership deemed the project too controversial for the moment, sources tell Game File

www.gamefile.news

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Tomás Grau de Pablos @tomgaar.bsky.social · 1d

He apoyado el Verkami de @revistaloop.bsky.social y TU también deberías!

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Reposted by Tomás Grau de Pablos

julie muncy @julie.radiantarray.io · 1d

on the one hand, ubisoft are cowards, on the other hand, because ubisoft are cowards, i'm not sure i would trust them to handle content related to, uh, reconstruction

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Tomás Grau de Pablos @tomgaar.bsky.social · 1d

Si de algo nos sirve la noticia de Ubisoft es que no deberíamos confiar nunca en las empresas cuando fingen escuchar. Si en un momento parece que apuntan a algo bueno, es porque sienten que tienen algo que ganar. Ya está.

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melos han-tani @hantani.bsky.social · 1d

Finished this great cave story review / historical context of it amongst shareware, doujin, and modern indie: syslbnth.neocities.org/htxt/cave-st...

Which led to a 2013 post by @ellaguro.bsky.social on the game corrypt & the discourse around its "bad" graphics
ellaguro.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-...

From the corrypt post, quote:

It's hard not to see the magic in the game as some sort of allegory on human beings' never-ending thirst for more resources, and the irreparable damage it enacts on the environment. It suggests, especially taken with his other works like Vesper.5, that environments are delicate spaces that need to be accepted on their own terms in order to really be understood at a deeper level.

These greater themes seem to be absent in the little critical writing that does exist about his games they're not mentioned anywhere in the Wired article, nor in this detailed critical reading, which focuses solely on the mechanical aspects of his games. The strangeness and beauty of the environments become a marginalized backdrop to a game seen as only remarkable from a design perspective-something the game even seems to mock with its flat looking aesthetics and its big, square block pushing and its few mock-JRPG miniquests in the beginning.

From the cave story post, quote:

"What's more, as indie games improved dramatically in quality over the course of the ensuing decade, the technical skill floor lowered by the first wave of hits would get raised back up in the end. You could get away with pixel art and chiptune now, but it had to be the pixel art and chiptune of a professional. Tools would be released to help control the ballooning scope of new indie games-Unity, Unreal, GameMaker Studio, and the, like. [15] But somehow this would just move the goalposts further. When these were released, we didn't make Iji faster and more comfortably-we made Hollow Knight."

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Xalavier Nelson Jr. @writnelson.bsky.social · 1d

You would not believe how many stories like this have been popping up over the last ~5 years

Not just full games cancelled—entire characters and plot lines removed or changed, leaving less time for making the *rest of the game better*, to try avoiding a small and malicious contingent of voices.

Stephen Totilo @stephentotilo.bsky.social · 1d

SCOOP: Last year, Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin's Creed game set during Reconstruction. Was to feature a Black Assassin who, among other things, fought the rise of the Klan

Sources: Leadership nixed it over concerns re: U.S. political climate, backlash to Yasuke

www.gamefile.news/p/scoop-ubis...

Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year

Company leadership deemed the project too controversial for the moment, sources tell Game File

www.gamefile.news

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Reposted by Tomás Grau de Pablos

Mato @clydemandelin.bsky.social · 1d

From my book about #Undertale 's official English-to-Japanese translation

I'd like to expand on this for an article on my site, so if you have any examples of "imprinting" situations in fandoms, please let me know

Some quick examples include FF4, FF6, Trails in the Sky, what else?

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Weasel Hills C.C. (Hole 19) @wildweasel486.bsky.social · 2d

Some inappropriately creepy golf content - Sente Mini Golf (1986) has DIP switches that add photos of missing children to the attract mode (and to enable a "LOCATED" message per kid). These profiles were replaced with new ones in updated ROMs.

Modern operators seem to leave them on, a lot. 😨

A Reddit post from r/creepygaming by user SuperCamouflageShark - I saw these missing child reports on the attract mode of a Sente Mini-Golf arcade machine recently.

The photo is of a Sente Mini Golf machine, displaying black-and-white photographs of missing children: Tahj Allen Merriman, and Steven Phillip Curtis. Their profiles are filled out in red text.

Another photograph of a different Sente Mini Golf machine, displaying the same photos of missing children.

Sente Mini Golf running under MAME, with the DIP Switches menu showing. DIP switches 3, 4, and 5 configure whether the missing children are displayed in the attract mode, with switches 4 and 5 showing or hiding a "LOCATED" stamp over the respective kid's photo.

Screenshot of Sente Mini Golf running under MAME; this screen shows two different missing children: Malinda Marie Smith and April Rose Yates. For the sake of demonstration I have enabled the "LOCATED" flag on the kid on the right. (DISCLAIMER: I do not have any information on whether April was located or not. This is strictly a demonstration and is not intended as documentation of a real event.)

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Endless Mode @endlessmode.bsky.social · 1d

In the '90s Ken Griffey Jr. was as much of a Nintendo icon as Kirby, Link or Samus. As the Seattle Mariners play deep into the baseball playoffs, we look at the team's long history with Nintendo. www.endlessmode.com/article/nint...

Nintendo's Baseball History: Why Ken Griffey Jr. and the Seattle Mariners Should Be Honorary Smash Bros.

As the Seattle Mariners continue their playoff run, we look at the team's long relationship with Nintendo, and the video games it inspired.

www.endlessmode.com

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JAKE @guiltyjake.bsky.social · 1d

To everyone reading this right now.
I'm JAKE.
I'm the Japanese person who recently published this article and promoted it on Twitter (X).
note.com/guiltyjake/n...

This article introduces Fantasy Maiden Wars, an amazing game I absolutely love.

Everyone, please get to know the super great game: "Fantasy Maiden Wars"｜JAKE

Hello, world. I'm Zyake. I'm born and raised in Japan, and just your average video game nerd. First and foremost, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to you for opening this page. And if you can...

note.com

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Kurt @ Hardcore Gaming 101 @hg101.bsky.social · 2d

For anyone lamenting how some goon was able to get a publishing deal - put together your own book! Create a solid concept, do some planning, create a design, and pitch it! Most publishers don't have open pitch seasons. They want to see someone that can see a full project to completion.

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Chris Miller @iamcurious.bsky.social · 3d

WOW....👀👀👀

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Tomás Grau de Pablos @tomgaar.bsky.social · 2d

Este es uno de los mejores juegos que he jugado nunca. Os recomiendo encarecidamente que le echéis un ojo porque lo vale.

Kas @thestaticman.bsky.social · 2d

~GAME RELEASE~

Onto Maizilind Unto Infinity (OMUI) is OUT NOW!!! on Steam and Itch for F R E E!

It is a first-person narrative horror game about the Iranian revolution, nuclear war, and my Uncle Ramin's suicide.

Please share and leave a review on Steam if you are able to!!!

Onto Maizilind Unto Infinity Release Trailer

YouTube video by Kasrah Ghobadi

youtu.be

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🦇👻 Boo Li Khaw 👻🎃 @juleshortstuff.bsky.social · 3d

Been laughing all morning about this 28 min unskippable cutscene that Baby Steps traps players in after they try to skip 30 cutscenes. The fact the button presses get harder the more you skip and then the banter & how it's done is so funny. Flawless exectution of the bit. youtu.be/mQahQACsvPU?...

Baby steps - Secret cutscene found

YouTube video by Cuttyflame

youtu.be

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