Month: September 2024

In the same way it’s satisfying to slowly transform a pile of dirty dishes into clean ones or a level full of living Doom enemies into dead ones, I remember getting a kind of enjoyment out of defragging the hard drive of my 486 in the late ’90s. The visualization was a big part of it, that Windows app depicting a hard drive slowly transforming from messy navy to a cleaned-up sky blue via segments that became red as they were picked up. But the sound was a pleasingly physical thing too, a chuntering reminder that all this digital data had a real-world presence.

If you too feel a weird tingle of nostalgia for the act of defragging a hard drive, though not the necessity of actually doing it, have I got good news for you. Engineer Dennis Morello has recreated the experience of defragging your C drive in Windows 98 and you can run it in your browser right now.

In a blog post explaining this delightfully quixotic act, Morello says, “One of the biggest challenges was implementing a defragmentation algorithm that felt authentic.” The custom algorithm he came up with randomly selects how many clusters to process at a time, and adjusts the speed based on which imaginary drive …

Longtime YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach has revealed that he is directing and starring in an adaptation of Iron Lung, last year’s breakout indie horror game from Dusk developer David Szymanski. Markiplier has uploaded a teaser trailer of the project to his YouTube channel.

Szymanski’s most famous creation, Dusk, is one of the tent pole entries of the recent retro shooter renaissance. 2022’s Iron Lung, meanwhile, shares a similar retro rendering aesthetic but goes for more of a “claustrophobic horror” vibe than a “sliding around at 60mph serving both barrels to cultists” one. You play as the sole crewmember of the titular Iron Lung, a windowless submarine under an ocean of blood. You have to navigate this alien seafloor with the help of various analogue instruments and a grainy, black and white camera mounted to the exterior of the sub while something stirs out there in the rusty depths.

Markiplier, meanwhile, uploaded a full let’s play of the game last year. If the fact that he’s making a movie out of the thing didn’t clue you in, the YouTuber loved it, declaring, “That was excellent, that was incredible; I really loved that experience” at the end of the playth…

NASA’s James Webb space telescope was launched in late 2021, and since summer 2022 the space agency’s boffins have been releasing the remarkable images of the universe it has taken. These are stunning pictures, the kind that make you realise what ants we all are and question humanity’s place in the universe, and one of the latest really makes you question things.

I mean, you’ve seen it already. That is a zoomed-in fragment from this image taken by the James Webb, and it’s a near-perfect cosmic rendering of a question mark. I’ve got a minor obsession with these images and have had a few framed, even my desktop background is one of them, but I’ve never seen anything that made me question my spirituality more.

We’ll get to the theorising about what this actually might be in a moment, but first: the bad jokes. The reason this hopped out at me wasn’t just the astonishing image itself, but the fact that I first saw it thanks to a Reddit thread where most folks’ instant reaction was to relate this cosmic occurrence to videogames.

RemarkableToast notes: “Looks like NASA has a quest to turn in.” OldJames47 reckons “it’s a 10 Billion Lightyear escort quest but the NPC mo…

The Stardew Valley 1.6.4 update is now live on PC and it is surprisingly beefy, including new content, balance changes, visual improvements, fixes, and gameplay tweaks.

The 1.6.4 update was announced on April 10 with virtually no detail, as is the Eric Barone way, except that it would include “a new fishing thing, and some new mining-related stuff” and was expected to be ready “sometime next week,” which of course is now this week.

The mine stuff includes 20 new “alternate” mine layouts and 20 new volcano mine layouts, which appear after you’ve met certain conditions, while the fishing thing is a “fish frenzy,” which I assume means something like a group of piranha going bonkers, minus any actual deboning of cows—this is Stardew Valley, after all.

There are also four new “fairy styles,” a new cutscene that will play after you’ve helped your new neighbors expand their family, space for eight additional non-fish items in fish tanks, and more options in the Raccoon Shop. The Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Turkish, and Korean translations of the game have undergone edits, and there are numerous fixes for mod makers and users.

One of the more i…

Space Marines in Warhammer: 40k are so legendary that even I, as someone who has not painted a single miniature, am aware of how terrifying they’re supposed to be. Just to be certain, however, here’s a list of facts about these genetically-modified walking tanks that I’m finding out today:

• They have two hearts, one of which can pump adrenaline and steroids.
• They’re eight to ten feet tall (they do not start out this way).
• They have a small, liver-like organ that clots wounds instantly.
• They can shut down half of their brain to sleep, letting them rip and tear for hundreds of hours.
• They have a special stomach that lets them eat basically anything. They also have a separate organ that lets them eat things to gain their memories.
• They have three lungs, because why not?

I’m actually having to stop myself, because this isn’t even a third of the absurd genetic modifications a Space Marine is outfitted with. This legendary allergy to dying makes them pretty dang hard to represent in a videogame, as per an interview with Yann François, brand and creative manager for Saber Interactive’s upcoming Space Marine 2 (the ful…