Nuclear Monster

  • Sergey Dvodnenko is a software developer living in a city in Ukraine that is under the control of occupying Russian forces. Dvodnenko is behind software cores for the MiSTer project with a focus on the Sega Saturn and he even recently released a core for Sega’s 32X during the occupation.

    His most recent update to Twitter talked about the occupation:

    Dvodnenko was later able to post last week to the MiSTer FPGA forums with an update on his status:

    Hi. I’m fine. The Russian occupiers have turned off our Internet and mobile communications. There is a slow Internet connection, but this one is not always available. Twitter and Facebook are blocked, so I’m writing here. I’m working on Saturn and other cores. Maybe not so fast, but I continue to work. Thank you all for support.

    Sergey Dvodnenko has a Patreon page where people can support his work directly and get updates like the video above when he’s able to upload them with his progress.

  • Last year I wrote about the prototype Josh ‘Cheeseness’ Bush’s created for Bonesweeper, a game that’s a little bit like the classic Minesweeper but looking for fossils instead of digging for mines. So you’ll hear a soft crunch instead of a game-ending boom when you make a small mistake in deducing which squares are safe to click. The prototype was promising and Cheese has been working on a more complete full game based on the Bonesweeper prototype, streaming the development on their Twitch channel and I recently played a very early version that is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, through Cheeseness’ Patreon.

    You can watch the video of Bonesweeper above but as it is very early in developing this new version, please note that you can expect crashes, incomplete or temporary placeholders, and other issues to be visible. If you’d like to try last year’s prototype, that is still available on itch.io.

  • Ian Kullgren writing at Bloomberg Law:

    Workers at an Apple Inc. store in Atlanta became the first in the U.S. to file for a union election Wednesday, setting up a battle between organized labor and a Silicon Valley titan.

    The proposed union includes 107 workers at an Apple store in Cumberland Mall in northwest Atlanta. The group filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board Wednesday after it had collected signed cards of support from 70% of eligible employees, said Derrick Bowles, a Cumberland Apple store worker and member of the organizing committee.

    This is fantastic news. The more the merrier.

  • Users of the Chess.com were surprised today to find out that their previously played games could be minted on a blockchain as part of an NFT grift. Chess.com has an announcement about the scam, and the only way to opt-out of having previously played games minted is buried at the end of a support document linked from the announcement (that’s an archive.org link, the live page is here). According to the support page, users are required to contact Chess.com support to opt-out or their opponents can mint their games as NFTs. When I tried to opt-out just now for my Chess.com account, the button to “Contact Us” did not work in the Safari web browser, I had to use Vivaldi.

    According to chess.com:

    Treasure Chess is a place for chess and crypto fans to turn their games into unique “Treasures” to collect, share, trade, and sell. You can mint any of the games you played on Chess.com into a Treasure, which will then exist as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) on the Polygon Network.

    Any of these things could happen without engaging in cryptocurrency or NFT scams by using a technology invented decades ago called a database. By using a database you can also back up the system and protect against the scams and fraud which happen every day with cryptocurrency and NFTs.

    The Chess.com support site says I’ll hear back in 1-2 business days about my request to opt-out of letting the games I played in the past become NFTs. I’ll be very surprised if they’re able to keep up with the volume of people opting out within that time frame. I didn’t play there much, but now I have no intention of ever playing a game using Chess.com again.

  • Teardown is a blocky destruct-em-up from Tuxedo Labs that was in early access for a long while and has just hit version 1.0 today. It’s a lot of fun and I’ll stream the campaign and sandbox mode a bit tonight to see what’s changed since I’ve last played Teardown.

    Teardown is $20 on Steam for Windows.