I watched the Putin interview so you don’t have to:

→ Eye on The Press: The Interview

What Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin says about the war in Ukraine, the US government and Putin himself

Last week, I wrote the following about the EU’s new regulation on “artificial intelligence”:

→ Eye on The Press: How Not to Pass a Law: The EU’s AI Act

Oh no, the Nazis are coming! I guess the way to stop them is to act very clueless, very quickly!

I’ve updated my Retro Achievements Page. I’ve got 26% of the achievements for Mystic Quest now.

I was watching Irene Aldana vs. Karol Rosa from UFC 296 the other night. Joe Rogan called it “probably the fight of [2023], period” and I think I agree. What a banger!

I have so much respect for both of these women. Absolutely amazing. Tough as human beings come.

“Spaceship Corridor”

Nikon Z fc, Nikkor Z 40 mm ƒ/2 (ISO 3200 • 1/125 s • ƒ/3.2)

I’ve gradually continued work on my tiny soulsborne roguelike hack & slash game Dark Embers. I’ve previously described the idea here. I now have a a basic game engine going with player animations, a particle system and a way to spawn and despawn game objects like campfires. I’ve also started to implement enemy spawning. Next up is basic pathfinding for the enemies and then collision detection, before I turn to animating the enemies and writing a basic combat AI for them.

I’ve added a separate page for my retro achievements to this site.

→ Achievements Page

I’ve recently bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, a small handheld that runs Linux and emulates several gaming consoles, including the Game Boy, NES, SNES and classic arcades. There’s great open source firmware for it, that I immediately put on mine. I bought this device primarily because it can run PICO-8 carts and thus allows me to test the game I am developing.

But, since the thing also plays Game Boy games — and magnificently so, being just the right form factor and shipping with all the fancy RetroArch video filters and such — I decided it was high time I replayed Final Fantasy Adventure (or Mystic Quest, as it is called here in Europe). Fun fact: That game motivated me to learn English back in school, as there was no German version. It’s probably the main reason I speak English at all.

Through all of this, I also discovered a very cool website that allows you to collect crowdsourced achievements for old games. It works perfectly with the Miyoo Mini, so here’s my first two achievements in Mystic Quest:

Fall to Earth (RA #28942)
"Escape from the Glaive Empire"

Damsel in Distress (RA #28943)
“Rescue the girl”

“We Choose to Go”

Nikon D7100, AF-D Nikkor 70-210 mm ƒ/4-5.6 (ISO 2000 • 1/800 s • ƒ/11)

So, this morning, I was playing the Jumpstart event for the Lord of the Rings set on MTG Arena. This is the deck that it gave me. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sauron’s Breakfast.

Yes. It plays as dumb as it sounds.

Sauron's Breakfast

Düsseldorf Noir

My writings about the Hopkins case have solicited quite a few reader comments. I felt it was necessary to address some of them:

→ Eye on The Press: A Note to Readers on the C.J. Hopkins Case

Misinterpreting the law, being outraged at prosecution and misunderstanding the criminal courts system

“Vertigo (Berlin Hbf)”

Nikon Z fc, Nikkor Z DX 16-50 mm ƒ/3.5-6.3 VR (ISO 5000 • 1/60 s • ƒ/3.5)

“Never Boring (Berlin Hbf)”

Nikon Z fc, Nikkor Z DX 16-50 mm ƒ/3.5-6.3 VR (ISO 4000 • 1/125 s • ƒ/4.0)

I went to Berlin yesterday to report on the C.J. Hopkins case. Turns out that, aside from The Epoch Times, I was the only journalist writing about the proceedings.

→ Eye on The Press: C.J. Hopkins Acquitted in Berlin

Court finds satirist’s use of a swastika to criticise anti-pandemic measures legally justified

Today I learned that the creator of PICO-8 is working on another fantasy video game console called Picotron that is releasing in March. Unlike PICO-8, which is an 8-bit fantasy console modelled after third generation video game consoles (like the NES), Picotron is a 16-bit console modelled after the fourth generation (like the SNES). It can run PICO-8 games and its Lua syntax is largely backwards compatible, but it has a lot more features like 64 colours, an 480 x 270 pixel (widescreen) display and – and this is pretty important – no size limit for cartridges. It also includes an operating system written in Lua that can be modified. And you can code your own apps for it. And all of this runs on the web!

→ Picotron FAQ

Although Picotron is conceptually similar to PICO-8 — an imaginary machine that you can make things for with built-in tools — it aims to be a more practical and flexible development environment. The two main differences are in specifications (larger display and cartridge capacity), and the way that built-in tools are implemented.

Unlike PICO-8 and Voxatron, all of the design tools in Picotron are written in Lua and are editable from inside the machine itself. Even things like the file browser, code editor and the terminal are implemented in userland. Custom tools can be created from scratch that run in fullscreen workspaces alongside the bundled editors. These additions and the subsequent shift in focus of the machine give Picotron the title of ‘Workstation’ rather than ‘Console’. Instead of ‘Plug in a keyboard to get a devkit!’ It feels more like: ‘Unplug the keyboard to get a console!'

Holy shit this is exciting!

I’ve been spending time in courtrooms again:

→ Eye on The Press: German Court, in a Really Short-Sighted Move, Basically Criminalises Software Debugging

A local district court in Germany has fined a programmer for analysing software for a client and then reporting a serious vulnerability

Something quite bizarre happened to me on Substack over the holidays. I’ve written a recap of the incident for Eye on The Press, which also includes what I inted to do about it:

→ Eye on The Press: C.J. Hopkins and the Swastika

How I got called a “fascist German creep” for defending tenets of the German constitution I don’t even like much

So I’ve been watching Taylor Sheridan on The Joe Rogan Experience and those guys say a lot of smart things on that episode. As is usual with Rogan, they also say some dumb shit. But the dumbest thing is something that I’ve heard a lot and it just baffles me.

What is it with Americans saying “our country is a republic, not a democracy”? And it’s always Americans saying this. Is it something about their school system where they’re just not educated about this stuff? Of course your country is a democracy. A republic is a way of running a government, usually a democratic one. Your whole nation was founded on the same ideal than the French Republic, in the same era of revolutional upheaval. And that idea was chiefly that a country should be run by its people instead of a king and a class of privileged individuals that pass on their privilege to their children. So a republic, in contrast to a monarchy, is a government by the people, for the people. And how do you decide who is in that government? Guess what? Democracy.

“Republic” and “democracy” aren’t mutually exclusive terms. On the contrary. One (republic) is a practical means of achieving an idea (democracy). They can theoretically exist without one another, and sometimes do. One example of this is the United Kingdom, which is a democratic state that isn’t a republic. If anything, the US republic is more democratic than the constitutional monarchy in Britain. You can also have a republic that isn’t democratic. The Italian fascist, for example, founded such a state when Mussolini was dismissed by the king.

All this should demonstrate that the terms certainly aren’t exclusive. And why would you think they are? Aside from studying history — the Roman Republic is a good start — you could just look these words up in a dictionary. People saying this just drives me nuts. Especially when they are from a country that has quite often invaded other countries on the pretext of enlightening them about democracy.