Link round-up - 03/16/2026
I should probably just be making individual posts for these rather than trying to wait and gather enough links to make a round-up with (or stick to two or three at most maybe). Been sitting on some of these links for a month now. Gotta stop trying to make higher effort posts.
"token anxiety"; or, a slot machine by any other name
AI Agents are the new rage for tech workers and, as jae writes, they're just another form of gambling among the countless others currently taking over every aspect of society. It's grim out here, folks. We gotta destroy gambling (and all the AI bullshit too).
Cool little game I saw some folks talk about. If you like Picross, this is worth trying. Fun bonus is that it is actually playable on a real Game Boy!
You Need To Read -- Don't Regurgitate
You might have heard a story going around a while back about Windows 12, a reportedly "AI-focused OS" launching sometime this year with a new, even more strict hardware requirement. Well it turns out that story was bunk. It didn't stop everyone from freaking out about it on social media, though. Which leads to the point Plum writes about here: you need to actually read the fucking post.
It's a problem pretty much everyone is guilty of at one point or another (myself included). Plum's post is in response to Discord's age verification debacle and the surrounding misinformation that sprouted from it, but the core message feels apt for just about anything these days. It's very easy for false information to spread given the ways social media thrives on soundbites and excerpts removed from context. Gotta be vigilant to not partake in it ourselves.
Erica writes about the new Marathon game and why it's so repellent for her. It's a great piece that gets at the discomfort of the way some games (extraction shooters especially) explicitly seek to make people foster distrust in one another and how exclusionary it is for large swaths of the population.
Kris made a new game where you spend all of Elon Musk's money. Like You Are Jeff Bezos and You Are Generative AI before it, it's a good time. Also check out the rest of their works on Itch as well (The Prophet's Daughter is a good one).