Linked List: December 2025
Tuesday, 30 December 2025
- GTA and Thief series in The RPS 100: Reader Edition 2025 ✶
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Some more words from here, this time about the Grand Theft Auto (at number 38) and Thief (28) series over at Rock Paper Shotgun’s reader edition of the best 100 games of all time.
Sunday, 28 December 2025
- Year calendar on single sheet of paper ✶
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Here’s a live demo for 2026. There are several URL parameters, too.
Friday, 26 December 2025
- Beached things fall from the sky in Death Stranding ✶
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In my recent stream in the Sound Space series I noticed that Beached Things (BT’s) periodically fall back down from the sky, perhaps after being sent up from the nuclear explosions of oil, in Death Stranding.
The PC version of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach should be out in February, and I’m wondering if I should continue my playthrough of the first game, given its length, with so many other good games to play.
I lost an episode or two of my streams in my move from NYC, so I’d need to redo some of the beginning, or start it again and this time play on easy difficulty for a more action-adventure feel.
- Jagged Alliance 2 in The RPS 100: Reader Edition 2025 ✶
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JA2 and my little blurb about it made it into Rock Paper Shotgun readers’ top-100 games of all time at number 88. Yay!
Wednesday, 24 December 2025
- Making a live sky tracker for Elite: Dangerous ✶
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Maybe the most impressive Elite: Dangerous project I’ve found thus far, by Cmdr Lysander666 (Zell Ak’inyi):
This is part of what I call “downscaled play”, whereby the commander exists in the Elite world for depth rather than breadth. I personally live on a single moon - Hypi Bra EV-P d5-78 6 a (Nahla) - and have done for several months. I do this because I fell in love with its look and feel, and I use it as a ‘monastic cell’ to do other work from. It helps me focus, keeps me immersed, and I find it productive.
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OK, so what would happen if we just threw all the EDSM data INTO the tracker’s code and have Keplerian physics work the whole thing out for itself? Well, this would be fine IF Elite manifested perfect Keplerian physics, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. It simulates it. In such a case you would just be correcting the physics and the tracker code over and over again, relentlessly debugging and getting nowhere. It would be a black hole of broken JavaScript which you would have to endlessly ‘fix’.
So how do we fix it?
How did the ancient astronomers do it before Kepler? How did anyone? Regular observation. I use what I call the “Sumerian method” which is not specific to Sumer but I like the terminology. It’s record-keeping, observation and prediction refinement.
Always a moment of pure happiness when finding projects like this sky tracker for a remote moon in a simulated version of our galaxy.
Elite is an inspiring game, filling one with the urge to create things.
Tuesday, 23 December 2025
- MSFS 2024 wishlist for 2026 ✶
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This was posted over at Stormbirds:
Things I’d like to see in this video game flight simulation:
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Coop-enabled campaign. Something like Neofly that’s built-in and simple to jump in and play for a session or two together with friends.
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Are you an executive in a civilian flight simulator who worries about giving us damage modelling because you don’t want to upset synergies between plane makers and other “stakeholders”? Then at least give us paint! Paintball guns on airplanes with realistic splattering paint graphics and sounds, with points, for both air and ground targets, please.
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Tutorial showing simplest-possible editing of paint liveries, including for internal cockpit. Like we had in 2020.
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Wednesday, 17 December 2025
- What frequency really means ✶
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A pleasure to find that MyNoise’s Dr. Ir. Stéphane Pigeon is now making videos about how sound works.
Tuesday, 16 December 2025
- Border birds ✶
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Photographs of birds crossing borders captured with the help of open cameras and AI.
- West of Capital Knot City, Eastern Region ✶
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This was Sound Space 5, in Kojima’s Death Stranding.
Sunday, 14 December 2025
- Hand-drawn map of the original Jagged Alliance’s Metavira ✶
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By one of the original Jagged Alliance designers, Shaun Lyng.
Friday, 12 December 2025
- HTML tools ✶
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Useful HTML+JavaScript tools built by Simon Willison with the help of LLMs. These remind me I need to improve my own 7-minute workout tool, where voices won’t play on iOS mobile.
Thursday, 11 December 2025
- The order of a healthy civilization ✶
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I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are:
- Fashion/art
- Commerce
- Infrastructure
- Governance
- Culture
- Nature
In a durable society, each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above. “Every form of civilization is a wise equilibrium between firm substructure and soaring liberty,” wrote the historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.
Wednesday, 10 December 2025
- Size of life ✶
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Another beautiful project by Neal Agarwal, with illustrations by Julius Csotonyi, production by Liz Ryan, music and sound effects by Aleix Ramon, and cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga.
I love many of the descriptions, including the one for humans:
A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.
Tuesday, 9 December 2025
- Tessitura ✶
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Found this term while researching answers to the following:
Is someone’s natural speaking voice in a particular key? Might it be a minor or major key? Would this inform which mic would be best for it?
Monday, 8 December 2025
- Brian Boru’s harp ✶
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A ~500 year old medieval musical instrument that you may have seen on some logotypes around the world. On display in the long room at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
- Newbie rendezvous & first landing in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey ✶
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Helping a new player land on a moon in space.
Saturday, 6 December 2025
- There’s a training area in Arc Raiders ✶
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It’s called the Practice Range and appears after you have done a few runs, maybe 4 or 5.
Any gear you take in or find there and use is reset when you leave, so it’s a good place to practice using items without losing them (though in an extraction shooter, and any video game, really, why not USE the digital gear you have?).
There are training target “crash test dummy” dolls and drones, an environment traversal practice course, and a Raider hatch with a key next to it that can’t be opened.
Maybe a puzzle or easter egg somewhere?
Monday, 1 December 2025
- Soundscape by Horizon’s Glow ✶
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In Col 359 Sector DZ-M b9-2, Elite: Dangerous. Sound Space #3.