2026 April Retrospective

I get the feeling that we got the hear the first gong that signals the beginning of the end of what I like to call the infinitely subsidized token era. Uh-oh! Ooh-rah!

What does this really mean in the long term; well, it remains to be seen, but in my opinion there’s a pretty high chance that only a handful of the so called frontier-labs will survive in the end.

Which ones? You might be tempted to ask. Well, two of them are ad-businesses, that subsidize their entire product lines already, so in theory they should be able to continue doing the same with tokens as well, pretty much indefinitely if necessary.

I am referring to none other than mighty Google, and Facebook of course!

Micro Cornucopia

Look at this absolutely splendid issue (No. 41) of Micro Cornucopia all the way back from May 1988.

Neural Networks: Modeling the human reasoning is the first step in creating a useful robot.

The more things change, the more they same. At any rate, we are not on LinkedIn over here, so that was more than enough yapping about AI for the time being.

Insidious: Out of the Further

I really thought that we might not get another entry in the Insidious franchise, and boy I am glad that I was dead wrong when it comes to this one.

This is going to be an absolute banger, I can feel it in my old wretched bones already.

GitHub Enshitification (Part Deux)

I was moaning about the enshitification of GitHub last month, and boy things have gotten a whole lot worse since then. I mean, we are now approaching some sort of a tipping point, where utter incompetence, and corporate brain-rot happen to be working in tandem.

The latest incident revealed a tiny little technical detail that made a lot of the previous ridiculousness make total and perfect sense. How so? Well, it was revealed that Elasticsearch is being leveraged behind the scenes, and that data was being re-indexed into it, which of course usually will take a while.

When I read all that, I was like: “Oh, so that’s why you can only look at the first 2000 issues!”, then I almost immediately followed up with: “Oh, that’s why you see the total count of issues or pull requests update, but the actual list takes a while before it’s updated!”.

Elasticsearch has been designed, well for search. Shocking, I know. Would could have guessed, right? And, it’s whole-fully unsuited for workloads where one needs to paginate a lot or needs the data to be fresh in close to real-time fashion.

In the end, there’s something good or fun to be had in everything, I guess.

Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition

The aforementioned spring DLC is upon us. It landed way sooner than I expected to be perfectly honest.

May your granaries never run out of food.

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

That is quite a mouthful, isn’t it? I mean it’s very typical Poncle in every sense of the word.

I feel like, many were wondering about whether Poncle will also turn out to be some sort of like a one-game-pony studio or not. This is a fairly common phenomenon among the indie-crowd, so the doubt was all justified as far as I am concerned.

However, I am happy to report that the game is super fun, and I am saying that as someone who doesn’t like turn-based and card-based anything at all. But, this bad-boi manages to trick my primitive monkey-brain somehow, and for that I must tip my hat.

What about the numbers? Over 800_000 units sold according to Gamalytic. Take that naysayers!

Game Pricing

The question of game pricing has become like some sort of a seasonal flu it appears to me; and seems to resurface with a fairly regular cadence in all circles, be it indie, AA or AAA.

In more recent times the number 14,99 has been elected as some sort of an upper limit for the celebrity-indie crowd, and as the entry-level lower limit for the AA club.

Now take a look at this beautifully preserved rendition of Cyparade, the creators of one of my all time favorite games from the early 2000s, called Ballance.

What do you notice? Our favorite number 14,99 (euro), in the great year of 2004 no less; which when adjusted for inflation, would turn out to be something in the range of 23,77 (euro) or thereabouts.

I hate being overly repetitious, but once again, I have to call out the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Enough said!

s&box

S&box has finally made it out the door this month.

Last time, I was talking about S&box though, I did mention how based on one of the updates it did seem like Erin Catto was cooking up a 3D physics engine in the spirit of Box2D.

This has been officially confirmed now by none other than the good man himself.

Music to my ears all the way through.

SameGame

I decided to dust off and show off yet another little thingamajig from my ancient forgotten archives. Keep finding these as I sift through them, and will likely share more as the memories of the olden days kick in more than usual these days.

This is not as bad as I remember it being, but it’s nothing to write home about either.

$ winedump samegame.exe | grep TimeDateStamp
  TimeDateStamp:                44F15220 (Sun Aug 27 11:04:48 2006)

Twenty years gone in an instant, huh? Now, it’s worth calling out that I have borrowed (ahem!) the sprites from the SameGame clone that used to ship with GNOME 2.

Look at this unedited mess. What would anyone do without a highly meretricious soup of globals mixed with a healthy dose of Hungarian notation.

void Render( HWND hWnd )
{
	RECT rc;

	HDC  hDC = GetDC( hWnd );
	GetClientRect( hWnd, &rc );

	//FillRect(g_hDCMem,&rc,(HBRUSH) GetStockObject( BLACK_BRUSH ) );

	tileboard_Render(g_hDCMem);

	BufferSwap( hDC, rc );

	ReleaseDC( hWnd, hDC );
}

But hey, I can always throw in the excuse that goes something like: “I was young!”. Right? Besides, I don’t even remember, why on earth did I build this.

Plus, by the looks of it I was using LCC and not MinGW as a compiler. No idea why!

# Project: Makefile Template for the LCC compiler
# Makefile Created by The Icebreaker

LCC      = d:/DevTools/lcc/bin/lcc.exe
LCCLNK   = d:/DevTools/lcc/bin/lcclnk.exe
LCCRC    = d:/DevTools/lcc/bin/lrc.exe
RES      = samegame.res
OBJ      = samegame.obj $(RES)
BIN      = samegame.exe
LNKFLAGS = -subsystem Windows  
RM       = rm -f

.PHONY: all all-before all-after clean clean-custom

all: all-before samegame.exe all-after

clean: clean-custom
	${RM} $(OBJ) $(BIN)

$(BIN): $(OBJ)
	$(LCCLNK) $(LNKFLAGS) $(OBJ)

samegame.obj: samegame.c samegame.h
	$(LCC) samegame.c 

samegame.res: samegame.rc 
	$(LCCRC) samegame.rc

The “Sackhoff” Show

At roughly four episodes a month, this is going to take a while.

Monthly “Layoffs Report”

The layoffs continue in full force, and at the time of me writing this the glorious number of 92_272 can be seen on Layoffs.fyi. That’s an increase of roughly 20_825 compared to last month’s report.

There goes the entire population of a small town. Poof gone, like Houdini.

Monthly “Amazon Book Review”

This is yet another book from my personal collection and by a fellow Romanian author, Vasile Lungu. I have a physical copy of the first edition (the one on the left in dark blue).

I never realized that this got an updated second edition, and that it was subsequently translated into English in 2005 or so; and even less so that it was available on Amazon for a while.

It’s out of stock now, which of course shouldn’t really surprise anybody.

Why did I buy this? Well, I used to lurk in the bookstores in the so called “IT&C” section, whenever I got a chance really. The selection of books was always lackluster, and there weren’t a great many copies available either, considering that this was and still is a relatively small town.

So, I liked to be early and enjoy the spoils. But on a more serious note, I saw that it had a fairly complete interrupt reference, plus a chapter or so about MMX, and those two were enough to make me buy it at the time.

Both of those subjects were totally obsolete by 2003, since people have moved on from DOS and MMX was overshadowed by SSE already by that time, but hey beggars can’t be choosers.

Monthly “Coup de cœur”

Are you ready for another brutal awesome-sauce-fest from the Mekka & Symposium 2000?

If the answer to that question is a resounding “fuck yes!”, then please awe a gander at this absolute unit of a demo called Nature Suxx by none other than Federation Against Nature.

Please enjoy the show, and don’t forget to try the fish!