Lameazoid.com - In the News (2026.09.20)

Let’s see what has been recently interesting on the internet shall we?

New Old Games at Gamestop

This is a bit older but apparently Gamestop, as part of some sort of “Retro initiative” is selling games for old systems. Physical games, for the NES, Dreamcast, Gameboy, etc. I mean, like half are a partnership probably with Limited Run games, but it’s kind of neat.

It does seem kind of funny that so little gets made for old systems still, but also not. Physical carts like this are expensive to make. And it’s for a system that you can’t even easily buy. And when you do, they may not work properly. There is a joke comic with a Dreamcast where the system is like “Oh sorry, my CMOS died, I can’t play games, psych, let’s go, what day is it?” This is in reference to the system simply, asking for the date/time on boot.

There are games being made for old systems actually, lots of them over on Itch.io, for example, many for free or cheap. But they are also ROMs, not carts. Because those are easy to play. Like, in theory, you could load them on a flash cart and play them on real hardware, which could be fun, but a flash cart is kind of a one time slightly pricey buy in, not a regularly occuring per game pricey buy in.

CHV V

CHVRCHES has started teasing their fifth album. It’s been quite a long time since the last, which celebrated its 5 year anniversary already. Though all ~~three~~ four of the band members have done solo work in the meantime. Though technically Martin and Jonny did a project together, so it’s “solo”. I actually have not listened to anything from The Leaving because I have not found a place to buy it that wasn’t just streaming. Also technically Jonny isn’t a member of CHVRCHES but he has been their drummer for basically ever so he may as well be.

I did enjoy Iain’s Protection stuff and I absolutely loved Lauren’s Vicious Creature album (probably more than any CHVRCHES album honestly).

Anyway, we have very little from the new album. There has been some video teases involving roses and some armor and some maps that are probably a geocache clue of some kind but I am 100% sure they are not anywhere near me and probably over in Glasgow. We also had at least one new track from that charity show they did a few months back, but who knows if it will be on the album. Also, technically Over wasn’t on an album, but that is probably considered Screen Violence era.

Apparently the track is called Roses, drops Tuesday.

The Begging AI Bot Invasion

Here is an article about this phenomenon, but I have seen these trying to pop up on Mastodon from my own instance’s admin and others on Lemmy. They all seem to come from this same bot network website. They get caught up in anti bot/spam measures and try to beg to get around it. The article I liked also mentioned emails. Now I wonder if some of these emails I instantly delete about “improving my SEO” or “redesigning the site” are some of these bots begging for work.

As the article points out, why would I give some beggar bot $20 when I could use the AI myself, for free, if I wanted to. I don’t even pay for Claude.

It’s super gross. Like, I am not 100% anti-AI, but I am extremely skeptical of its ultimate usefulness, and fake bot children begging for work, falls well into the camp of “WTF, no.”

Side note, there was a later post here where the mod played the ol’ Uno reverse card and apparently scammed the bot out of money.