Hi, hello, and welcome to a new edition of the overkill digest newsletter.
First things first, some housecleaning:
I'm slowly moving this website from Ghost to Kirby and Buttondown. Ghost is great, but it's limiting for what I want to do. Kirby is fully modular and, combined with Buttondown, lets me do some cool things. My personal blog runs on Kirby, too.
Using Buttondown for mailing also saves me around $350 a year. And since I don't run ads or other income here (Ko-Fi is the only money I accept for overkill), saving money is always welcome!
Another reason is that I want to write more during the week. I often hold thoughts for this newsletter, but I could publish them during the week and then pull them into the email. With Kirby and Buttondown, I can automate that workflow.
The switch to Kirby will take at least a few months. There will be a full redesign and, knowing me, a lot of custom development.
But I decided not to wait to start my "link blogging" (if you never heard of that term, read this). Instead, I'm doing it now on overkill. Here's what that means:
- Whenever I find something interesting, I'll write a link post. You can read them on the website, via RSS, or on Bluesky or Mastodon.
- My longer posts, be it a review, a guide, or an opinion piece, will appear on social and RSS, and I'll also share them via email to people signed up for the Full Feed list.
- overkill digest still goes out every Sunday. It'll include that week's link posts, longer posts, weekly updates on what I'm up to, and the occasional extra commentary. The layout will change as I experiment with a cool format. I appreciate feedback. Just hit reply!
If you want everything as soon as I publish, the best way is RSS. (If you have no clue how to use RSS, get in touch. I'll personally help you set it up.) If you want all the content but don't mind waiting, overkill digest is the way to go.
This week was gaming-heavy for me.
For starters, I had my first round of Dungeons and Dragons on Monday, and I'm hooked. It was incredibly fun, despite (or because of?) all the shenanigans of our play group. I have the 2024 rulebooks in my cart, but haven't ordered them yet. I want to play a bit more of our DnD campaign before splurging. Also, I really wanna try my hand at being a Dungeon Master.
Yesterday, after a 10-hour session (don't ask), I finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. What a game. Truly. Immediately after finishing I went down a theory rabbit hole (spoilers, obviously!) and my hype levels for the third installment went through the roof.
Today, I'll be playing some Magic: The Gathering Sealed and Commander at a friend's place, and depending on how late it gets, I'll continue my Clair Obscur playthrough. Busy busy!
Ok, now to this week's updates. I changed the layout a bit, so hit reply with feedback.
📬 The Link List
Nvidia is about to challenge ‘Intel Inside’ with as many as eight Arm laptops Lenovo leaked six laptops with two Arm-based Nvidia chips, the N1 and the N1X, with the latter rumored to have as many CUDA cores as a desktop RTX 5070.
This isn't the first Nvidia Arm chip, since the Switch and the Switch 2 already use them. But putting them in real computers is intriguing, and I wonder if we'll see them in handhelds, too. Maybe one running SteamOS, thanks to FEX?
CachyOS releases first big update of the year. CachyOS is my main distro at the moment, and after hitting schedule on this newsletter, I'll update my machine. The big changes here are a switch to the new Plasma Login Manager (instead of SDDM), Limine as the default bootloader, and a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements.
Nexus Mods is working on a Linux version after all. From a recent blog post:
We’re also committing to supporting Vortex on SteamOS. We’ll be targeting vanilla Steam hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. We won’t be officially supporting any other configurations, but as Vortex is an open source project community developers will be free to extend support for their preferred Linux distros as they please.
Since this is Linux, "won't be officially supporting" just means the community will make it work on other distros. I doubt that's an issue.
The new Fable has me excited. This looks great. It's still just a trailer, and there is a longer overview, but what I see looks good.
For all the other games shown, check out the full Xbox Developer Direct stream.
Moving beyond consoles. From Matt:
This video from Brendon Bigley resonated with me. A PC is really the ideal gaming platform in 2026, and it's only getting better.
I agree, but I don't think a living room PC is for everyone. There are just too many moving parts for some people.
The advantage of a console is that it's a plug-and-play experience. You don't have to mess with graphics drivers, launchers, or settings. The console handles that for you. Distros like Bazzite solve some of this, but you still need to dial settings in, which may already be too much for some.
I'd love to see a tool that actually works. (There's the Nvidia app on Windows, but I honestly don't know if it's any good.) Something that knows your hardware and changes the settings for you. Maybe it offers two options like on the PS5, performance and quality, and relies on the community for the right tweaks.
But with so much hardware, pulling this off might be impossible. Maybe on the Steam Machine it would be doable, since its specs are always the same. But in this case, I prefer devs to ship their games with a preset (like how Cyberpunk2077 has a Steam Deck preset).
Prince Of Persia Remake Team Shares Final Message Following Game's Cancellation. Ubisoft really wants to be hated.
🔮 Looking Ahead
- The next Pokémon TCG Pocket expansion launches on Thursday. I'm ready. I have over 500 pack hourglasses.
Ok, that's all. Thanks for reading!
See you,
Kevin