Hi, hello, and welcome to a new edition of the overkill digest newsletter.
I finally continued my save of Clair Obscur, and I'm somewhere in Act 2. I've been loving the game; I get why this won every award possible. But I fully expect to have my heart broken at the end.
Over on overkill (he!) I started link blogging. So some of the words you'll see below are 1:1 copies of the website. I still need to find a workflow I like, and I believe with the future move to Kirby, writing this will become even easier. Because of the link blogging, the layout of the newsletter has changed.
That said, let's get to this week's newsletter.
📬 Weekly Digest
Everyone under the sun is currently talking about ClawdBot, MoltBot, OpenClaw, a viral AI assistant.
OpenClaw is an LLM agent you install on your local machine. It lets you connect to a whole bunch of services, has complete access to your computer via the terminal (oh, hell no!), and you interact with it via a text messaging app a la WhatsApp. Viticci over at MacStories has more details.
People went ham over this tool over the last few days, sharing on literally every social media network what their OpenClaw bot is capable of. According to them, nobody is working anymore and all they are doing is chatting with their bots. Meanwhile, they're burning millions of tokens, often paying several hundreds of dollars, to train LLMs to replace them and then proudly tweeting about it.
Meanwhile, scammers launched fake crypto coins, and hackers added malware to the "skillset".
Is it a cult yet?
But one of the strangest things this week was the launch of MoltBook, basically a clone of Reddit (because Reddit is definitely a healthy place to clone!) but for LLM agents. Humans are only allowed to read but not post. And some of the posts on there are wild (check the video linked above).
Oh, and if you thought it couldn't get weirder, of course the AI-bros got you: meet the Church of Molt.
I don't actually know if this is the biggest shitpost ever, or if we are burning electricity and quadrupling RAM prices so that fancy autocomplete tools can hallucinate stuff on the internet, and LARP consciousness.
It is definitely a cult! This is the dumbest timeline yet, can I please get out?
Nvidia App for Linux is now live.
The new Native Linux Beta is really just an expansion and upgrade of the existing app they released back in May 2025 that was supported only on the Steam Deck (which I was quite a fan of). This really seems like a natural progression for it, since a lot of the work was already done but now they will actually throw their support behind desktop Linux.
And:
A good 99% of the time I simply couldn't tell that the game was not running locally unless I was really focusing my eyes hard to specifically look for a bit of streaming roughness in the image. And when you do that enough, you can tell it's being streamed when you see a bit of blurring but it's not enough to detract from the experience at all. When just enjoying the game, I don't notice any issues thanks to the input feeling exactly like it does in local games. Overall the tech behind GeForce NOW really is impressive.
The game in question was Arc Raiders.
Nvidia opted for a Flatpak, so while they only target Ubuntu, you can install the app wherever Flatpaks are supported. You can find the Flatpak on Nvidia's page.
Bazzite joins the new Open Gaming Collective.
The goal of the OGC is to centralize efforts around critical components like kernel patches, input tooling, and essential gaming packages such as gamescope. Instead of each distro maintaining separate patches and fragmented hardware support, improvements can now be shared across the entire ecosystem. In short: a win for one project becomes a win for everyone.
ChimeraOS, Nobara, Playtron, Fyra Labs, PikaOS, ShadowBlip, ASUS Linux, and the Bazzite people are all part of the collective.
And some changes to Bazzite have already been announced, like HHD being phased out in favor of InputPlumber (also used by SteamOS), a new kernel, and more.
This is a good thing. It doesn't make much sense for several teams to work on the same thing, especially in the open source community. The more resources that can be shared, the better the teams can focus on what makes each distro unique.
One missing player is CachyOS, as they have opted out for a few reasons: they don't focus as much on handheld gaming, don't want to be locked into bureaucratic loopholes, and (understandably) do not want to be associated with Playtron.
Google leaked Android for PC.
A Google bug report on the Chromium Issue Tracker today has inadvertently leaked the Android desktop interface for the first time.
Android Authority has uploaded the videos to YouTube.
It looks like a mashup of Android for tablets and ChromeOS.
Halide co-founder Sebastiaan de With is joining Apple’s design team.
Rejoining, rather; he worked at Apple previously. I've been following de With for years, and I hope he'll have enough influence to move the mess that is Liquid Glass into a better direction (to be fair, every direction except the current one is better).
Meanwhile, Halide, the app de With worked on, received a new preview update for the next big release. If you care about iPhone photography, this app is a no-brainer. I do not, but I still own it.
Brandon Sanderson’s Literary Fantasy Universe ‘Cosmere’ Picked Up by Apple TV.
The streaming giant has closed what has been described as an unprecedented deal to land the rights to the Cosmere books, the fictional literary universe by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.
The first titles being eyed for adaptation are the Mistborn series, for features, and The Stormlight Archive series, for television.
And:
It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys.
This alone makes me hopeful for the adaptations. It also helps that most Apple TV shows are genuinely good.
I read and loved Mistborn Era 1 last year. I am currently reading one more thing (you can follow my reading progress here) before reading Elantris, another book by Sanderson. And then we head for Era 2.
If you also want to get into these books but don't know where to start, here is the reading order I'm following:
🔮 Looking Ahead
- Nioh 3 launches on February 6.
- There might be a Nintendo (Partner?) Direct.
Okay, that's all. Thanks for reading!
See you,
Kevin