Tootfinder

I've a question about #PointAndClick games: why does the character seem to shrink & grow as they move around a room?
They look like they're shrinking or perhaps walking down stairs as they move towards the viewer. (The opposite of real life when things close to you seem big!)
It's not just this game, I've seen the same issue in lots of other games.
Is it because the character is staying the same size but the room is drawn with perspective?

The Glider Equation for Asymptotic Lenia
Hiroki Kojima, Ivan Yevenko, Takashi Ikegami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04167 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04167

"And quite an adventure the life of Margittai Neumann Janos Lajos was. A child prodigy, he published his first paper in mathematics before age 20. He was the indisputable champion of applied mathematics in the 20th century. His work yielded groundbreaking advances in theoretical mathematics, quantum mechanics, game theory, economics, fluid dynamics, artificial intelligence, electrodynamics, meteorology, and computing."

William Aspray
There was a moment in which Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and John von Neumann were all roaming the halls of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton at the same time. Let that information sink in. Humanity experiences such gatherings of brilliant minds in a remote location of the space-time continuum only every so often; maybe the ancient Greeks and the men of the Renaissance witnessed such periods in time, as did the IAS staff at the end of World War II. How much will we have to wait f…

I just beat #MinesweeperOnline in 144 seconds on Expert mode!
https://minesweeperonline.com
I mean, the bad news is that I wasted 144 seconds of my life. The good news is that it was only 1…

Microsoft has invited vibe working⁠. We did it everyone! We won capitalism!
https://www.theverge.com/news/787076/microsoft-office-agent-mode-office-agent-anthropic-models

Raiders’ Tre Tucker plays game of his life — crazy stats could make him fantasy waiver wire target https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/raiders-tre-tucker-plays-game-…

When it first came out, I played High on Life on the Xbox One. The game is even more fun with a mouse and a keyboard. Some people find annoying the incessantly goofy chatter of the characters in the game, and I don't blame them. Nonetheless, a good first-person shooter, if you don't mind dirtying your Knifey with some alien goo.
High on Life - First 50 Minutes on Linux

Wild looking game 'Time Flies' coming to PC & consoles later this month. You experience the life of a fly and can do all kinds of things.
The game's website is pretty cool: https://timeflies.buzz
And here's the trailer:

Time Flies – A game about our limited time in this world.
Coming July 31st to PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and computers. A game by Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz, produced by Playables.

Wanna Feel Old? The Vans #WarpedTour is 30...
What Other #PunkRock Tour Admits It's Age And Sets Up Its Own Museum?
Kevin Lyman's Tour That First Tried To Bring #Sublime To America Returns To The

For a moment last week, Donald Trump’s Justice Department appeared to throw a metaphorical life vest to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s public relations team.
As search and rescue operations continued, the Republican governor was under fire for suggesting that
survivors and the media were using the “word choice of losers”
when asking him who was to blame for the state’s handling of the flash flood that claimed at least 134 lives over the July 4 weekend.
Abbott also compared…

Texas Plays Cynical Racial Gerrymandering Game to Save House Majority for Trump
Trump’s Justice Department gave political cover for Gov. Greg Abbott to mingle gerrymandering with disaster relief.

iOS 26 review: Liquid Glass is aesthetically pleasing, many quality-of-life upgrades, call screening is a true game changer, but the Games app feels unfinished (Zachary McAuliffe/CNET)
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-sof

iOS 26 Review: A New Look I'll Be Happy With for the Next 12 Years
Liquid Glass makes for a fun user experience, but call screening is the real star of the show.

DOOMscroll — The Game
This is a real doom game like in real life. Scroll through monotonous until you lose and you still believe that is with depth. The acquisition of betting is how deep you sink monotonous ;-)
😈 https://gisnep.com/doomscroll/

DOOMscroll
Scroll to survive. How far can you DOOMscroll?

Currently testing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor with FSR 4 on Linux (thanks to Optiscaler oc). I must say I'm finally enjoying this and any other game I have tried so far to the fullest. There's just this nagging feeling of resentment that AMD doesn't seem to be in a hurry to do their own job and release officially FSR 4 for RDNA 3 on Windows and Linux, hence the turncoat hesitations. For what it's worth, I'd choose Linux over Windows any day.
Comments are from this vide…

Ashes or Breath: Exploring Moral Dilemmas of Life and Cultural Legacy through Mixed Reality Gaming
Black Sun, Ge Kacy Fu, Shichao Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13074 https://…

Ashes or Breath: Exploring Moral Dilemmas of Life and Cultural Legacy through Mixed Reality Gaming
Traditional approaches to teaching moral dilemmas often rely on abstract, disembodied scenarios that limit emotional engagement and reflective depth. To address this gap, we developed \textit{Ashes or Breath}, a Mixed Reality game delivered via head-mounted displays(MR-HMDs). This places players in an ethical crisis: they must save a living cat or a priceless cultural artifact during a museum fire. Designed through an iterative, values-centered process, the experience leverages embodied interac…

So I had this terrible idea a few years ago to write some infrastructure automation that provisions a new compute instance, sets up secrets storage, configures IAM roles, authorizes the new instance to be able to provision new instance and roles via infra-as-code automation, and then the new instance tears down the instance and roles that created it, before then creating its own new compute instance, etc
Like a self-propagating glider in Conway's Game of Life, except with cloud inf…

Brian Schottenheimer on first game as a head coach, areas to improve https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/brian-schottenheimer-on-first-game-as-a-head-coach-areas-to-improve

Vikings CB pulls off historic performance against Bengals with pick-six and fumble return TD ... in first half

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/vikings

TSMC's logo is pretty dope

Who Pays, Who Benefits? Producer-Insurer Games in Life-Saving Medicines
Delia Coculescu, Maximilian Janisch, Thomas Leh\'ericy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16125 https://

Who Pays, Who Benefits? Producer-Insurer Games in Life-Saving Medicines
Pharmaceutical markets for life-saving therapies combine monopoly power with insurance coverage. We build a tractable sequential game in which a patent-holder chooses the drug price, a profit-maximising insurer sets its premium, and a population of heterogeneous agents decide whether to insure and, conditional on diagnosis, whether to purchase treatment. Two sufficient statistics - subjective illness probability and reservation price - capture heterogeneity and nest risk-aversion and liquidity-…

I am thinking maybe I should call it even and frame this for keepsakes because my latest video of High on Life bombed so hard, the YouTube algorithm called in and asked me to never show up again. It's a complicated game with lots of coarse language and gruesome animated violence against aggressive, degenerate aliens from outer space. (Nah, no official objections from YouTube, but three of the six views are from me, while I am hitting thousands with other videos.)

Question for y'all #SystemicGames¹ folks who like multiplayer/#coop games:
How do you logistically manage actually having a co-op, multiplayer playthrough of a complex video-game in your life?
I've always struggled, hard, with satisfying my needs here; not only is it so hard to find people who 1. like complex games, 2. like multiplayer/social gaming, and 3. have time/s…

Game-Theoretic and Reinforcement Learning-Based Cluster Head Selection for Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network
Mehrshad Eskandarpour, Saba Pirahmadian, Parham Soltani, Hossein Soleimani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12707

Game-Theoretic and Reinforcement Learning-Based Cluster Head Selection for Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network
Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is critical to network lifetime and data delivery. However, the primary impediment to the durability and dependability of these sensor nodes is their short battery life. Currently, power-saving algorithms such as clustering and routing algorithms have improved energy efficiency in standard protocols. This paper proposes a clustering-based routing approach for creating an adaptive, energy-efficient mechanism. Our system employs a multi-step clustering st…

From Prompts to Reflection: Designing Reflective Play for GenAI Literacy
Qianou Ma, Megan Chai, Yike Tan, Jihun Choi, Jini Kim, Erik Harpstead, Geoff Kauffman, Tongshuang Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13679

From Prompts to Reflection: Designing Reflective Play for GenAI Literacy
The wide adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in everyday life highlights the need for greater literacy around its evolving capabilities, biases, and limitations. While many AI literacy efforts focus on children through game-based learning, few interventions support adults in developing a nuanced, reflective understanding of GenAI via playful exploration. To address the gap, we introduce ImaginAItion, a multiplayer party game inspired by Drawful and grounded in the reflective play framework to sur…

Brian Schottenheimer on first game as a head coach, areas to improve https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/brian-schottenheimer-on-first-game-as-a-head-coach-areas-to-improve

Evolutionary dynamics of memory-based strategies in repeated and structured social interactions
Ketian Sun, Qi Su, Long Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10820 https://

Evolutionary dynamics of memory-based strategies in repeated and structured social interactions
Human social life is shaped by repeated interactions, where past experiences guide future behavior. In evolutionary game theory, a key challenge is to identify strategies that harness such memory to succeed in repeated encounters. Decades of research have identified influential one-step memory strategies (such as Tit-for-Tat, Generous Tit-for-Tat, and Win-Stay Lose-Shift) that promote cooperation in iterated pairwise games. However, these strategies occupy only a small corner of the vast strate…

I kind of like this game, enough to wave my zombies-suck stance, mainly because it's an SF title and they really did their best with the visuals. The simplified combat system is a plus if you enjoy the occasional B-movie guilty pleasure. The traversal stutters are a fact of life with Unreal Engine 4, sadly.
The Callisto Protocol - FSR 4 - Linux - RX 7800 XT

The Bills are going to win the Super Bowl*, plus Alcaraz's reign https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6609558/2025/09/08/bills-ravens-comeback-week-1-the-pulse/

Life without Michael: Cowboys defense failure through 2 weeks after Micah Parsons trade https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/09/15/cowboys-pass-defense-without-micah-parsons/86168412007/…

The nicest quality of life I learned yesterday: put these lines into /etc/profile.d/fsr4.sh so you don't have to muck about with them in every game and launcher
export DXIL_SPIRV_CONFIG=wmma_rdna3_workaround
export PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1