Nighthawks, the long-in-development vampire RPG due to be released later this month, is the latest game to run afoul of Steam's increasingly stringent rules regarding adult content. According to publisher Wadjet Eye Games, the game has been labelled 'Adults Only'—causing it to be removed from Steam search and outright delisted in certain countries like Germany—despite claims from both developer and publisher that the RPG's depictions of sex and nudity are very mild.

"We are aware that Steam has classified Nighthawks as an adult game and has excluded it from searches," Wadjet Eye boss Dave Gilbert wrote on Bluesky. "We are working on it. Valve is under the impression that this game is way sexier than it actually is." Gilbert further commented that "Valve is basically treating Nighthawks like a porn game!" in responding to a reply to his initial post.

A game being labelled Adults Only can affect its visibility in several ways. Adults Only games will not appear in Steam searches by default, requiring users to log in, verify their age (which requires the use of a credit card in some countries) and adjust their preferred content settings before they become visible. In addition, the label can cause games to be delisted outright in certain countries.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/U1zEK

Remembering my aunts and uncles from my childhood, a lot of the older people today don't seem to have as much energy -- I come from the US.

I've noticed people can be erratic and easily agitated now. Almost everyone I know in their 40s and 50s is angry all the time. Heavy drinking. Not able to process new information very well.

My uncle had a kid at 50 and played with her non-stop. I don't know anyone capable of that now.

Am I the only one seeing this?

"As the principal tissue for insulin-stimulated glucose disposal, skeletal muscle is a primary driver of whole-body glycemic control. Skeletal muscle also uniquely responds to muscle contraction or exercise with increased sensitivity to subsequent insulin stimulation. Insulin’s dominating control of glucose metabolism is orchestrated by complex and highly regulated signaling cascades that elicit diverse and unique effects on skeletal muscle."

/unjerk

Yes this is what my sense of humor is like. A series of cocaine induced fever dream esque shenanigans/mild inconveniences.

Anyway the ceiling fan thing came from me watching "prank" videos years ago were some insufferable dudebro poured glitter ontop of the blades of his girlfriend's ceiling fan.

Massive asshole move, but when you're twelve that's like peak comedy.

The number of young people living with debilitating and incurable bowel conditions worldwide is growing, but researchers now hope a one-of-a-kind microscope will help them understand such diseases and find new treatments.

According to the British Society of Gastroenterology, more than half a million people in the UK are living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis the two main forms.

While such conditions can develop at any age, experts say they are most often diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 40, blighting lives at a crucial time for education, work and relationships.

Now a new piece of kit could bring fresh hope to those affected by IBD.

“What this microscope technology and what the science we do in the lab can bring is really to understand the mechanism [of IBD] better,” said Dr Karina Pombo-Garcia, a group leader at the Rosalind Franklin Institute at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, where the microscope is housed.

“With IBD, and with other many diseases that we collaborate with other groups to study, there [are] some treatments, but maybe those treatments still are not maybe the best or the most targeted that we can do because we … fundamentally don’t understand the disease fully.”

...

While tech oligarchs grandstand about the existential danger AI superintelligence poses to humanity, former Environmental Protection Agency officials say we should be worried about a more immediate threat to our health: the data centers that power those AI models.

The former EPA researchers, now working with the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, are warning in a new report that since January 2025, Donald Trump’s EPA has embarked on a systematic weakening of pollution safeguards, permitting processes, inspection norms, and other guardrails—at least 30 different actions—that could increase the health risks associated with the data center boom.

There are currently about 3,000 data centers in the United States, and more than 1,500 new centers are in the planning stages. But as developers build out this vast, energy-hungry infrastructure, the country is losing the government regulatory safeguards that are needed to ensure that expansion is done safely, the ex–EPA officials say.

Earlier this week, Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers detailed some alarming findings about how LG’s TVs are logging and uploading data on its users. Now the company is pushing back against those allegations, saying that “Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work.”

LG released a statement in which it claims that its “TVs do not continuously record or transmit users’ conversations,” and that wake-word detection is all processed locally. However, the word “continuously” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as Gamers Nexus demonstrated an LG TV keeping extensive logs of ambient conversations long after one would assume its AI assistant had stopped listening.

Coincidentally, many people who want a holy war are morons on oxy. But that's neither here nor there!

Hardest part?

Unlocking the bootloader. Because it's Xiaomi. I have screenshots from the whole process, but that's more of a thing for "mildly infuriating" community.
Fun fact: Xiaomi doesn't even allow installing APKs via ADB without Mi account...

Why is it running plasma-desktop?

It's the first UI I tried. I've used it with a touchscreen before, and it worked well.
I've also tried installing both plasma-mobile and plasma-desktop, but the configurations seem to clash.
Also, when I use Android I always increase DP in developer settings to >600 which switches some UI elements to tablet mode. I prefer more things on the screen.

plasma-mobile vs plasma-desktop

Apples and oranges, yes, but I'll compare them. I am allergic to apples, but not oranges. Wait, that's not what I was talking about...

Nice things in plasma-desktop

• Sleep works (dmesg reports s2idle).
• More powerful UI (proper desktop).

Nice things in plasma-mobile

• Extra buttons in Konsole (tab, arrows, ctrl).
• Screen can be locked and turned off.
• Existing buttons on phone are automatically mapped to navigation in Plasma.

Bad things about plasma-desktop

• Even if I set power button to "Turn of screen", it immediately turns back on.
• Awful CLI experience without needed buttons.
• Pressing back and home buttons causes awful noise on headphone output.

Bad things about plasma-mobile

• Sleep isn't available as power option. systemctl suspend seems to properly put it into sleep based on kernel logs, but pressing button first time won't do anything, while causing a reboot when pressed the second time.
• While phone's buttons are mapped, I didn't find a setting to hide on-screen buttons, so you just get each button twice.

Running without modifying anything (aside from bootloader unlocking)

I didn't yet want to modify anything on the device, so I just flashed PostmarketOS to SD card.
The device is then booted through a computer using fastboot boot with lk2nd bootloader image.

Miscellaneous

This section is just about me being dumb.

I have no idea about what's going on during the boot process.
There's 49 partitions on the internal storage, I don't know what they're all used for, nor how data is loaded from them.

Device        Start       End  Size Attrs   Name
 1           131072    303103   84M GUID:60 modem
 2           393216    393217    1K         fsc
 3           393218    393233    8K         ssd
 4           393234    394257  512K         sbl1
 5           394258    395281  512K         sbl1bak
 6           395282    396305  512K         rpm
 7           396306    397329  512K         rpmbak
 8           397330    401425    2M         tz
 9           401426    405521    2M         tzbak
 10          405522    406033  256K         devcfg
 11          406034    406545  256K         devcfgbak
 12          406546    439313   16M         dsp
 13          439314    442385  1.5M         modemst1
 14          442386    445457  1.5M         modemst2
 15          524288    524351   32K GUID:60 DDR
 16          524352    527423  1.5M GUID:60 fsg
 17          527424    527455   16K GUID:60 sec
 18          655360    677887   11M         splash
 19          786432    788479    1M GUID:60 aboot
 20          788480    790527    1M GUID:60 abootbak
 21          790528    921599   64M GUID:60 boot
 22          921600   1052671   64M GUID:60 recovery
 23         1052672   1054719    1M GUID:60 devinfo
 24         1054720   7346175    3G GUID:60 system
 25         7471104   7995391  256M         cache
 26         7995392   8060927   32M         persist
 27         8060928   8062975    1M         misc
 28         8062976   8063999  512K         keystore
 29         8064000   8064063   32K         config
 30         8064064   8588351  256M         oem
 31         8650752   8650815   32K GUID:60 limits
 32         8781824   8782847  512K         mota
 33         8782848   8784895    1M         dip
 34         8784896   8850431   32M         mdtp
 35         8850432   8851455  512K         syscfg
 36         8851456   8859647    4M         mcfg
 37         8912896   8913151  128K GUID:60 lksecapp
 38         8913152   8913407  128K GUID:60 lksecappbak
 39         8913408   8913919  256K GUID:60 cmnlib
 40         8913920   8914431  256K GUID:60 cmnlibbak
 41         8914432   8914943  256K GUID:60 cmnlib64
 42         8914944   8915455  256K GUID:60 cmnlib64bak
 43         8915456   8915967  256K GUID:60 keymaster
 44         8915968   8916479  256K GUID:60 keymasterbak
 45         9043968   9044479  256K         apdp
 46         9044480   9044991  256K         msadp
 47         9044992   9045007    8K         dpo
 48         9045008  10748943  832M         cust
 49        10748944 122142686 53.1G         userdata

If I collected info correctly, BootROM loads whatever SBL is, which then loads whatever ABOOT is (which probably includes fastboot), which then decides what to load next (recovery, boot).

But how?
Does it look at the partition table for the names/UUID, or does it look for disk offsets? (There are suspicious holes between partitions.)
If the former, I could re-partition it.
If the latter, I'd be fucked.

Anyway, when it comes to backups, I first erased cache and userdata (fastboot erase), booted TWRP, and cat the internal storage over ADB shell, storing it as a sparse file. It takes up just 3.3GiB.
I also checksummed the storage and image file for verification.

I also tried to extract the stock recovery into Android boot image without extra data after it.
I don't know how to determine the real size, so I used unpack_bootimg and mkbootimg to get the original image, rather than whole partition.
The checksum of re-created boot image was different to original truncated partition image, but upon closer inspection with xxd and diff, this was just a difference in header:

00000010: 68c2 4f00 0000 0081 0000 0000 0000 f080  h.O....... | 00000010: 68c2 4f00 0000 0081 0000 0000 0000 0000  h.O.......

But I found it might indeed be a good idea to just keep a full image backup. After a bunch of NULLs, there's more data.
file doesn't recognize it, but running strings on it reveals readable text:

California1
San Narciso1
Yoyodyne, Inc.1
Yoyodyne Mobility1
Yoyodyne1#0!
yoyodyne@example.com0

Indeed, it seems this is a certificate: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/sign_builds#signatures-sideloading

Anyway, I am once again getting reminded it might be good to learn assembly (ARM in this case). The content of sbl1 and aboot seems to be an ELF, so I might be able to pop it into Ghdira, and try to figure out what it's doing.
Maybe. I don't know, I have the most stupid of ideas usually.