The Formula works on hardware. We have proof. ACEMAGIC took one look at the original 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System, nodded slowly, and stuffed an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside the shell: 12 cores, 24 threads, 5.1GHz boost, integrated Radeon 890M graphics, 32GB of DDR5, a 1TB NVMe SSD, Wi-Fi 7, and a USB4 port. The Retro X5 looks like a prop from your childhood game shelf. It plays Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps. That is, objectively, the funniest sentence I have written this year.

The design pulls the NES colorway without crossing into licensed territory: grey plastic, a bright red power button, functional mechanical grille vents, and zero RGB lighting screaming “GAMER” at you from across the room. It ships with RetroPlay Box, a built-in launcher that sets up your emulators without the usual three-hour Friday-night yak-shaving session. The tool-free snap-fit lid means you can crack it open and swap RAM like a cartridge. I respect this deeply and I will not apologize.

Is it a $1,049 conversation piece that Nintendo’s lawyers are almost certainly side-eyeing? Yes. Do I care? The Doctor does not care. The Omega7Red Formulae has been validating exactly this kind of decision since before the Pi-Day incident. Slap modern silicon into a retro shell, ship it with a red power button, and call it transformation. That is literally the job. Good job, high-5.

Via: HotHardware

The Commodore Callback 8020 is a flip phone. A FLIP PHONE. With a T9 keypad, a dome LED that glows instead of screaming notifications at you, and SID chiptune ringtones because of course. It runs Sailfish OS (Linux, de-Googled, Android app compatible) and it hard-blocks social media and browsers at the system level using patent-pending technology, which is the most 2026 sentence I have ever written. The colorways are called things like “BASIC Beige” and “ProtoPET White” and one of them ships with a 24k gold-plated Commodore C= key, and honestly? The Doctor approves of the aesthetic choices, even if everything else is [expletive deleted] insane.

Here is the part where I have to say the quiet part out loud: this is NOT Jack Tramiel’s Commodore. It’s a YouTuber who bought the trademarks and hired some old-timers, which is basically someone buying the Batmobile and calling themselves Batman. That said, the thing they built is legitimately interesting: $499 for a phone whose entire value proposition is that it makes smartphone usage annoying enough that you stop doing it. You are paying five hundred dollars for friction. That is either the stupidest or most brilliant product pitch since they put a “close door” button in elevators that doesn’t actually work. Pre-orders open June 30th. Shipping targets Q4 2026. In BASIC Beige, naturally.

My C64 and I spent entire summers on BBSes racking up long-distance bills my parents still don’t know about. The SID chip was the sound of God. So when Commodore (or whoever this is now) puts SID ringtones on a phone designed to cure you of your screen addiction… I don’t know whether to load a disk or throw it across the room. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Via: Tom’s Hardware / Commodore

So apparently Gen Z is buying Polaroid cameras, carrying MP3 players, and purchasing physical CDs in 2026 because they want to, quote, “slow down” and “own their media.” I need everyone to pause and appreciate what just happened here. The generation that was handed the internet at birth, a supercomputer in every pocket, and the collective sum of human knowledge on demand has looked at all of that and said: “No thank you, I’d prefer the format that melts in a hot car.” Good job, high-5! Welcome to literally every argument I’ve been making since 1997.

Here’s the thing, though: the Doctor is not going to mock this. I’m going to validate it. These kids stumbled backward into the correct answer. Physical media is real. Streaming is renting someone else’s permission slip to your own memories. The Commodore 64 crowd (that’s us, you know who you are) never needed a think piece to figure that out, but hey, if it takes a generation of zoomers panic-buying Walkmans to make the point stick, I’ll take the win. The Omega7Red Formulae has always run on physical, tangible, real objects: brass gears, glass lenses, riveted copper plating. Bits evaporate. Objects endure.

The Polaroid Go Generation 3 is the specific artifact making the rounds this month, a miniature instant camera aimed squarely at the analog-curious crowd. It is, objectively, the least efficient way to take a photograph in the year 2026, and I mean that as a compliment. Sometimes the friction is the point. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, kids, but a physical print of a good moment comes close.

Via: BGR / SlashGear

Right now, as you read this, the fine citizens of Port Townsend, Washington are three days deep into the Brass Screw Consortium Steampunk Festival (June 12–14), a “chronologically discontiguous” weekend where Pirates, Aetherists, Outcasts, and Bodgers settle their differences via games of skill, wit, and an alarming amount of brass.

This year’s plot: a stray Plague Rat has caused a power vacuum in Consortium leadership, and attendees are invited to weigh in on the new regime. Naturally, nature abhors a vacuum, but the Aetherists love one; it gives them something to aetherify. Honestly, “power vacuum caused by a rat” is the most accurate description of several real governments I could name, but the Doctor doesn’t do American politics, so moving on.

The real highlight is the Bodgers’ Grande Exhibition, a maker showcase that is, in essence, a county fair for people who build steam-powered nonsense in their garages and then bring it to a seaport to show off. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, the single most respectable use of a garage in human history. Forget the lawnmower. Build a brass octopus that dispenses tea.

If you’re anywhere near the Olympic Peninsula this weekend, go pay your respects to the rat. Tell them the Doctor sent you, and that the rat has my full endorsement; unlike most candidates, it has never once promised me anything and then failed to deliver.

Via: Brass Screw Consortium

The next apocalypse is scheduled for March 14, 2015, 9:26:53am. This event is known as “The Pi Apocalypse” because the date aligns to the value of Pi perfectly, 3.141592653. On that day, our planet will explode and we will all DIE, as represented by the Pi equation and predicted by Albert Einstein.

“Pi Day” (3/14) is celebrated every year by the Cult of Pi. However, the upcoming Pi Day in 2015 is mathematically accurate to 10 to the 13th digits as calculated by a super-computer algorithm in 2011. Albert Einstein’s birthday is also on 3/14 (Pi Day), and he predicted this terminal event in his “quantized atomic vibrations” theory. Einstein never directly said it, but he hinted that harmonic oscillations between atoms are continuously creating sympathetic vibrations that generate molecular heat at an exponential rate (which explains Global Warming). As the heat grows, the Earth will contain the increasing pressure until it pops like a balloon. Knowing the rate of heat growth, and how much pressure the Earth can hold, precise mathematics produces a result of the given date.

Others have argued that the Earth will not blow up like the Death Star.  Rather, they expect that molten lava and heavy volcanic activity will cover most landmasses and that ash will block out the sun, except Antarctica.   Personally, I think this is just wishful thinking to give people hope that they could survive the apocalypse as a mere extinction-level event.

There will also be a pie-eating contest.

Somebody with too much time on their hands went through the effort of creating this image.  I too, having too much time on my hands, shall analyze said image:

• The Book of Faces– Facebook
• XML Engines – Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form, used in modern programming and leveraged heavily in web development.
• Machine Code – What people used to call the code of a program after it was compiled.
• Piston ++ – C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language.  C# (pronounced “sea sharp”) is better.
• The Web that Encompassed the Earth – World Wide Web, or WWW, which is the early name for the Internet.  Sounds like a 1950’s horror movie.
• The Internet – Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Internet is.  They must be shown.
• Steam for Dummies – I Googled “Steampunk for Dummies” and Omega7Red was listed #1.  What??
• B3TA Manuel – Probably a reference to the B3TA newsletter, which does have some funny stuff.
• Victorian Twitterings – Twitter 

This is why we can’t have nice airships; Nazis suck!  I’ve invented a new term: FailPunk.  I searched and made sure no one else was using the term, and I couldn’t find any sites with Steampunk fail, Cyberpunk fail, or any other kind of punk fail.  Maybe it’ll catch on.

Want to make your own image macro?  I used ROFLbot to make the image above, which I think is far superior to the LOLbuilder.  If you’ve got a Punk Fail or LOL, send it to me and I’ll post it.

Oh, I’m going to catch sooooo much crap for this.  I saw this image over at Regretsy – Not Remotely Steampunk, which is a short collection of things that have been marketed as Steampunk but clearly are not.

And now some humor at Jesus’ expense, a.k.a. blasphemy.

Supernatural and Troublesome Ectoplasmic Apparitional Management (S.T.E.A.M.), of course…

The GhostBusters League of S.T.E.A.M. commercial is an intelligent recreation of a 1980’s movie in the 1880’s Victorian style.  Normally, I would make fun of this kind of thing, but I can tell that these guys put a lot of work into this.  Plus I wouldn’t want to make fun and then have real ghosts show up; that would just be embarrassing…

Awl…  It’s so CUTE!  Now Fluffy can be a more effective fur-coat-razorblade with this adorable set of SteamPunk goggles, as the goggles are excellent protection against human blood splatter. Important Safety Tip: A cat is a miniature tiger that lives inside your house.

I don’t know who the cat is, and I’m not sure this cat is particularly happy about humans dressing it up.  I do know that if you feed the cat a Cheezburger, it’ll be content with whatever pink tutu you put on it.