ClassyHatter

You can play FBC: Firebreak for free this weekend, starting at 18:00 UTC time. That's about three hours from now. There will also be a Double XP Weekend at the same time.

All Remedy games on Steam are also now discounted by 60% to 90%. That includes all the other Remedy games except Alan Wake 2, which continues to be Epic Store exclusive.

https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/RemedyEntertainment

A new PC port of Super Mario 64, with native Linux version. It comes as an AppImage, and requires a ROM file of the original game.

Seems to work well. FPS is locked to 30 by default, but you can change that from the settings. It even supports ultrawide resolutions, with the possibility to change HUD aspect ratio to 16:9.

It also supports HD texture packs, such as this one: https://github.com/GhostlyDark/SM64-Reloaded-GS. Just decompress it in to the mods folder, and toggle between original and alternative textures with the Tab key.

Fallout Shelter (working title) is a new reality competition series based on the hit Amazon drama and computer game of the same name. The dwellers (contestants) live together in a top-secret vault, where they will compete in a series of games that tests the seven core attributes from the Fallout world. Strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck (S.P.E.C.I.A.L).

The series will not only test dwellers’ core attributes, but also their loyalty and alliances. It’s a game of power dynamics, popularity and social strategy which will ultimately result in a huge cash prize, but do you have what it takes to be the most S.P.E.C.I.A.L?.

I am sort of speechless, but for all the wrong reasons.

Former Trump administration official and wife of top Trump aide Stephen Miller, Katie Miller, posted Saturday on X (formerly Twitter) an image of Greenland covered in the U.S. flag with the text “SOON”.

A journey through 1980s sci-fi films, exploring the impact and relevance they had and still hold today, as told by the artist that made them.

This was quite enjoyable to watch. Plenty of interesting behind the scenes things about the making of the movies. There were also a few interesting movies that I have never even heard before.

There are 5 episodes, about 50 minutes each:

• The Pioneers
• Futuristic Effects
• Dystopia
• Welcome To The Machine
• Space-Time

A journey through 1980s sci-fi films, exploring the impact and relevance they had and still hold today, as told by the artist that made them.

There are 5 episodes, about 50 minutes each:

• The Pioneers
• Futuristic Effects
• Dystopia
• Welcome To The Machine
• Space-Time

Cory "Pluralistic" Doctorow, the coiner of the term "enshittification", wrote an article about the uselessness of the finance sector. He refers to an article by John Lanchester.

Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."

The other 97% of finance is gambling.

And here are a couple quotes from the Lanchester's article, For Every Winner a Loser. He used selling mangoes as an example in his article.

In his indispensable guide to the current condition of the financial industry, Other People’s Money, published in 2015, John Kay talks about the state of the UK banking sector, whose assets then were about £7 trillion, four times the aggregate income of everyone in the country. But the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are mainly obligations to other financial institutions. Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total.’

The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.

It being Christmas, here's Charles Dickens' classic, Christmas Carol, as ballet. Provided by ARTE.

A Christmas classic revisited in dance form at the Finnish National Opera: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It's the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a grumpy, miserly old man who, on Christmas Eve, is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. A magical tale popular with all ages, adapted into a ballet by an all-British artistic team including composer Sally Beamish and choreographer David Bintley.

In an IGN interview, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais said that "[they] want [SteamOS] to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC". Below is a transcript of the interview. I tried to clean it up to my best ability.

Just like Steam Deck paved the way for Steam OS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that Steam Machine will pave the way for Steam OS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market, and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware. We'll be working on expanding hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week, we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month, we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We're constantly adding support and improving performance. We want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there's still a ton of work to do there.

If the embedded video doesn't take you to the correct part of the video, the correct timestamp is 5:37.

EDIT: Here’s the written article of the video:
https://www.ign.com/articles/valves-next-gen-steam-machine-and-steam-controller-the-big-interview

Linus Tech Tips's first look of Steam Frame.

Jackify is a tool to install Wabbajack modlists on Linux and Steam Deck. Wabbajack is a Windows tool for installing modlists, but using it on Linux was painful. Jackify is an automated solution to downloading and installing Wabbajack modlists and configuring Proton prefixes for them. To download modlists, you need a Nexus Mods Premium subscription, which costs about 10 euros a month.

It's still in early phase, so some features are missing, but it seems to be actively developed. It supports the following games:

• Skyrim Special Edition
• Fallout 4
• Fallout New Vegas
• Oblivion
• Starfield
• Enderal
• Other Games (Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and more - Download and Install only for now)

To use it, you need the game installed on Steam. Then just launch Jackify, choose your game and a modlist for it, configure a couple fields, and finally hit the Installation button. After that, just wait while Jackify does everything for you. At the end, it creates a new Steam shortcut, and the game/modlist is ready to play.

I don't have Nexus Mods subscription, but I tested Jackify with the Nordic Souls files I had on my disk. Nordic Souls is a modlist for Skyrim, which consists of about 1500 mods. Jackify successfully did what it said on the tin. I had to change ENB to Community Shaders, as ENB didn't seem to work on my machine (it's a Windows app), but I prefer Community Shaders anyway. With that tweak, the game seems to be fully playable. I don't know how many hours I spent on my previous play through getting ModOrganizer2 and Wabbajack to work and install Nordic souls, and then fixing other problems like audio issues.

In another recent post, I wrote a guide for modding Skyrim on Linux, but it got lost in the comments. Part of it is Linux/Jackify specific, and part is general Skyrim specific information, that also applies to some other Bethesda games, like Fallout. Here's a copy-paste of it: