Linked List: February 2026
Thursday, 19 February 2026
- Deeper into the dark ✶
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A little piano synth improvisation before my Exanima avatar wakes next to a zombie, briefly, followed by more encounters with the undead and a physics puzzle.
- Just in time once again ✶
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Another Arma Reforger stream with a little live score music improvisation.
Wednesday, 18 February 2026
- Lets go, Texas ✶
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Stephen Colbert:
What is your heartfelt handout to people who want to use religion as a tool of political power?
Well, for fifty years the religious right, a political movement — that is a perfect description for it — they convince a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage. Two issues that aren’t mentioned in the bible, two issues that Jesus never talked about. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and every one of our fellow believers, how we’re going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved, by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church, nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people…applause…I’ve said before, don’t tell me what you believe, show me how you treat other people and I’ll tell you what you believe.
Saturday, 14 February 2026
- The international politics of Star Trek: The Next Generation ✶
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What a thirty-year-old TV show teaches about international relations, war, and peacemaking.
- The world of harmonics ✶
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I’m watching Stéphane Pigeon’s third video with guitar, synths, and a coffee at hand.
My favorite part of the video is when he “makes a mistake” and shows it, like enlightened people do.
Thursday, 12 February 2026
- Shared watch ✶
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A celebration to honor those brave enough to watch each other’s backs in the face of relentless adversity.
Arc Raiders stream #4 in Português & English.
Wednesday, 11 February 2026
- How to find your home ✶
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A review of Emanuela Anechoum’s Tangerinn by Amber Paulen:
It is interesting that these two Italian novels should come out to the Anglosphere within the same year. They are both deeply critical of the digital social landscape, the American image-making machine of popular culture that moves and devours quickly, but the more I think about it, the more this origin makes sense; despite its firm regional traditions, Italy has absorbed and adapted culturally over centuries. The exodus of young people from the south has lately altered the cultural landscape of the country yet again, weighing it down with the elderly. Italians seem perfectly poised to ask questions about who we are when we immigrate to where the opportunities are better and what “better” even means. For Omar’s generation coming from North Africa, southern Italy was included in the dream of Europe. For Mina’s, it’s a backwater to be traded for northern Europe’s cities.
- Buffed cyborgs ✶
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Hopped into a Helldivers 2 session with Artwo to see the new cybernetic foes yesterday. Streamed on YouTube as part of the intermittent, ongoing experiment.
Monday, 9 February 2026
- Short form video ✶
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I wrote the following over at Jank:
Regarding short form video, I chatted with a driver recently who told me about how tired his eyes were, looking at the phone so much during lulls on the job.
A few of my friends send me mostly short form videos, which I don’t watch.
As a part-time streamer I make them myself, encouraged by the interfaces of Twitch and Youtube to help the “channel grow.”
It’s all a bit depressing, and brings to mind a short book called The Medium is the Massage (Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, 1967) which I’m reading again to help make sense of things.
All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical
The wheel…is an extension of the foot.
the book is an extension of the eye…
clothing, an extension of the skin…
electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world.
When these ratios change, people change.
And so on.
A universal basic income would be nice.
Sunday, 1 February 2026
- Rugged men feasting on mushrooms ✶
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An Arma Reforger session featuring Artwo, Yootsvik, and custom kit from our imaginary sponsor of our Freedom Fighters campaign.
- Space type generator ✶
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Animated type generator. Lets you save static images, animated GIFs, and MP4s, depending on the ones you choose. Via jank.cool.
The example text is nice, too, like:
Deep down, nature is inherently peaceful, calm and beautiful. The universe as a whole is perfect. The chaos is on the surface.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed.
- Jank ✶
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New PC games website by Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell, and Graham Smith.
Jank is an independent arts and culture website about PC games. Whether a blockbuster or a hobby project, we want to celebrate any game that is bold, new and inventive. Even if that means that it’s a little janky.
We are supported entirely by generous readers via site memberships. No ads. No AI. No influence.
We publish news, reviews, interviews and analysis about video games, solely motivated by what we want to say and what our audience wants to read. We have no need to chase pageview traffic or to pander to marketing teams, platforms or search engines.
We believe that videogames are for everyone.
Check out their favorite games of the decade so far, to which I added the following:
Three additions from a space-head in need of more space:
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Elite: Dangerous Odyssey (2021) has excellent in-a-space-suit sound design, an infinite legs-to-ground scale ratio, and the promise of becoming a modern Frontier: Elite II.
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Flight of Nova (2022) is a sort of 3D Kerbal Space Program for patient cargo delivery sim drivers partial to good ambient music.
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Delta V: Rings of Saturn (2023) brings an open-worldish version of Asteroids to life, and has patch notes that never break character. I seem to read more about video games than play them currently, and now you’ve all made this problem worse by creating this site…(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
An LLM does not have thumbs to feel the drift of invisible friction in a platformer. It does not have ears to suffer clichéd dialogue, nor eyes to appreciate a cleverly reused asset. And no matter how many facsimiles of human sense organs it might adopt in code, it will not share the common, mundane, and sublime humanity that exists between you and I. You and I both shit. So when I write that playing Borderlands 4 is like having an attack of diarrhea, we are co-existing in a moment of embarrassing human frailty. Whether you agree with my fecal assessment or not, you must concede: an AI cannot join us in this toilet stall.
Good stuff.
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