sethmlarson.dev

Sony announced that all games from 2028 and onwards would be digital-only. It seems likely that Xbox will follow and that Nintendo will continue making “physical” releases for first-party games during the Switch 2 generation. In the all-digital gaming future, every game platform will be subject to the same problems and constraints as media streaming services like Netflix and Spotify. We can see hints of how this will affect future games and creative freedom in the medium by looking at re-releases of older games, in particular: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Pikmin 2. --- The core problem is that digital games are licenses, which forces an ongoing relationship between you and the owner of the media. And because there’s an ongoing relationship with you, any ongoing licensing relationships that the media owner has also affect you and your games. If a license for any media that is part of the game expires or is affected, then the developer must take action to remediate the “issue” in the game. This is already commonplace for games that feature music, such as Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but maybe players find this more “expected” because these games are essentially a music streaming service in themselves. But what about games that aren’t like this on the surface? Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for Genesis (1994), GameCube (2002), and Switch (2022) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was originally published in 1994, and beyond the game being great to play, the soundtrack is really something special. I have fond memories of dancing to the end credits music on my parents’ bed with my brother as a kid after beating the game. Unfortunately, this track and many others in the game would not survive our all-digital future. Michael Jackson’s alleged uncredited involvement with Sonic 3 has meant that all re-releases of Sonic 3 since 2009 have not included the entire original soundtrack. If this game were released only digitally today, it can be assumed that these tracks would be pulled from the game, just as is done for Rock Band and Guitar Hero when licensing terms expire or there are legal issues. Pikmin 2 for GameCube (JP, NA, PAL, 2004) and Switch (2023) Pikmin 2 was published in 2004, and the main objective is collecting “treasure” from an alien planet in the form of food, toys, and, most surprisingly, items featuring real-life brands like Duracell, Dr. Pepper, Yoo-Hoo, and Snapple. This artistic decision and the work to license and include these brands were a substantial part of the surprise and delight while playing the game. However, you can see that these licensing terms eventually run out, too: in all re-releases of Pikmin 2 from 2023 onwards, the real-life brands are replaced with generic fictional brands. It’s not clear to me whether licensing agreements with so many brands would be undertaken in the future if work would have to be done to create fictional models and textures anyway once the license terms expire. If it wasn’t clear from this post, I’m not excited for an all-digital future of games. An all-digital future for games means the medium will be further constrained creatively, in addition to the negative impacts on ownership and preservation. Read-only physical media does more for gaming than being something to collect and own: developers can make choices that they won’t have to walk back in 20 years, and players can continue to enjoy games as the developers intended long after licensing terms expire. --- Thanks for reading ♥ I would love to hear your thoughts! Contact me via Mastodon, Bluesky, or email. Browse the blog archive. Check out my blogroll. ---

Hey, did you miss me? I've only published two blog posts in the past two months because I was busy writing 10+ blog posts detailing the Python Language Summit in 2026. If you are interested in the Python programming languages' technical direction (or you just really miss my writing) go over to the Python Insider and read those write-ups. I've been the blogger for the Python Language Summit for the past three years (2024, 2025, 2026). Before me, Alex Waygood was the blogger (2022, 2023), and he gave me guidance on what to expect from the Python Language Summit. Below is a mix of Alex's and my own guidance on what to expect as the Python Language Summit blogger. ## What do you need to know as blogger? It is useful to have some knowledge about the Python development process, ongoing concerns for the project, governance, and some history about "how we got to this moment" to be able to write about the Python Language Summit. You can prepare in-depth by looking at the topics that will be spoken about and reading the past few years of Python Language Summit blog posts, are there returning faces or themes? What have those people been up to in the meantime? What topics do you know less about: research those ahead of time so once the jargon starts flying (because it will) that you're able to keep up. For example, I don't know much about Python's type annotations, but without fail there is a talk about this topic each year. I usually do the most research about this topic in particular to prepare. ## Travel You'll need to actually attend physically to cover the event. Figure out which conference the summit is colocated with (either PyCon US or EuroPython). If possible, I recommend if you are traveling into a drastically different timezone to arrive a few days early to give your body time to adjust. Taking technical notes during active discussions while you are extremely jet-lagged is not fun (ask me how I know). The event itself is long (9:00AM to 5:30PM with breaks for coffee and lunch) and exclusively intense technical discussion. Come well-rested and drink plenty of water and caffeinated beverages. ## People The Python Language Summit is an in-person event and primarily compromised of attendees that are Python core team members or maintainers of alternate Python implementations or distributions. The past three years have seen between 45-50 attendees in the event. Prior to 2024, I had never attended the Python Language Summit and only knew a few dozen of the hundreds of members from Python core team. Being able to put faces and voices to names is a challenge. Request the full list of attendees from the summit chairs before you attend, try to learn everyone on the list that you don't recognize beforehand. On the day of the event, watch as people filter into the event before (and sometimes, during). Make a point to meet everyone and get names, talk for a bit, and make an association between their face, voice, and name. I like to draw out a "layout of the room", too, with reminders of people that I've just met and where they are sitting. Usually the summit chairs ask for a round of introductions from everyone before starting the event, you can request that they do this to be sure. It also helps to sit next to a summit chair, I've had to ask Hugo van Kemenade "who is speaking right now" a few times when it's difficult to know who has the microphone actively. ## Recording and note-taking The event is not video-recorded or audio-recorded (by default), so you won't be able to rely on anything that the event itself provides. Instead, you'll have to make a record of the event yourself and use that to recollect everything that happened and was said throughout the day. I personally use "Voice Memos" from my phone to record the audio of the room and delete the recordings after they are no longer needed. The audio quality is so bad usually that you can't use automatic transcription software, instead you'll need to transcribe what everyone says by hand from the recording. I also take extensive notes throughout the event. The important aspects to capture in your written notes is everything that wouldn't come across in a voice recording, like how does the energy of the room and conversations feel. Are people making faces, discussing amongst themselves, laughing and smiling? Note down all those moments, they give the write-ups life beyond a textual representation of what was said. You'll also want to talk to people about the actual talks, ask them what a given topic has them thinking about, you can do this after the talks are over, too! You'll sometimes get a key insight or unearth a storyline or angle that you never would have known about from the talk itself: and then can clue-in the readers! The attendees will tend to take some light notes in HackMD, but you should not rely on these notes for your purposes, they are not enough to be able to recreate the story and all the Q&A. You should rely on the summit chairs and other attendees to take photos. There will be an album shared with everyone after the photos have be collected which you can pull from. ## Slides Ask the summit chairs to remind speakers to get slides. Follow-up with speakers a few days after the conference is over if you don't get them sent to you (and don't stop asking until you get them!) These slides are really useful for providing images in your write-ups. Especially code examples, which can be difficult to write down in real-time. ## Writing Alright, the language summit is over and now comes the hard part. Actually writing the blog posts! There are 10 talks and ~5 lightning talks. My rule of thumb is ~1000 words for each of the full-length talks and maybe ~300-500 words for each of the lightning talks. So you're looking at ~12,000 words total across the whole event. I highly recommend getting as big a jump on the writing as soon as you can. Whether that's in the evenings of the conference itself or on the train/flight home. Use the energy you get from attending a community conference to carry you through! This was where I went wrong this year: I didn't prioritize finishing the writing as soon as I returned home, and that meant the blogs were two months after the event instead of only one month. Learn from me: finish your writing right away! ## Publishing After you're done with the drafts and are happy with the results, hand them over to the Language Summit chairs for proofreading. I recommend being specific about what kind of review you want at this stage: focus on fact-checking and finding typos, grammar, etc. After this review is complete, stage the blog posts on the Python Insider blog along with images. In 2026, I also published a landing page on the PSF blog. --- Thanks for reading ♥ I would love to hear your thoughts! Contact me via Mastodon, Bluesky, or email. Browse the blog archive. Check out my blogroll. ---

This blog post was inspired by discovering that Pokémon Box: Ruby & Sapphire, a legendarily rare and expensive GameCube game in the United States (>$2,500 USD), could be purchased complete-in-box (CIB) in Japan for $50 USD. That's a savings of $2450, or ~98% of the US price. This is a somewhat extreme example: in the US market Pokémon Box was only sold online and at a single store: the Pokémon Center in New York City. This big price difference between regions got me thinking: what other games are cheaper in other regions and by how much? Please note that the below data was taken from Pricecharting on August 30th, 2026. Shipping costs aren't included in the price, shipping from Japan to the US is typically $15-$20 USD on eBay, but many games are already imported to the US. | Game | | Diff. | Price (US) | Price (PAL) | Price (JP) | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----- | ------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Pokémon Box | CIB | -$2348 | $2400 | $204 | $52 | | | Loose | -$1553 | $1574 | $137 | $21 | | Cubivore | CIB | -$612 | $640 | — | $28 | | | Loose | -$318 | $341 | — | $23 | | Gotcha Force | CIB | -$405 | $474 | $137 | $69 | | | Loose | -$204 | $249 | $121 | $45 | | Resident Evil: Code Veronica X | CIB | -$239 | $299 | $80 | $60 | | | Loose | -$151 | $213 | $62 | — | | Chibi Robo | CIB | -$189 | $210 | $223 | $34 | | | Loose | -$136 | $144 | $161 | $25 | | Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness | CIB | -$170 | $209 | $232 | $62 | | | Loose | -$129 | $150 | $183 | $54 | | Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance | CIB | -$166 | $214 | $187 | $48 | | | Loose | -$101 | $145 | $145 | $44 | | Resident Evil 2 | CIB | -$90 | $161 | $78 | $71 | | | Loose | -$77 | $106 | $29 | $44 | | Pokémon Colosseum | CIB | -$98 | $142 | $64 | $44 | | | Loose | -$83 | $109 | $49 | $26 | | Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess | CIB | -$108 | $196 | $115 | $88 | | | Loose | -$66 | $146 | $107 | $80 | | Resident Evil 3: Nemesis | CIB | -$97 | $156 | $59 | $74 | | | Loose | -$52 | $99 | $47 | $69 | | Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures | CIB | -$92 | $77 | $130 | $38 | | | Loose | -$58 | $56 | $79 | $21 | | Eternal Darkness | CIB | -$82 | $114 | $32 | $34 | | | Loose | -$60 | $85 | $25 | $33 | | Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg | CIB | -$66 | $89 | $23 | $34 | | | Loose | -$55 | $65 | $10 | $34 | | Wario World | CIB | -$55 | $80 | $60 | $25 | | | Loose | -$44 | $62 | $45 | $18 | Even more excitingly, there is a mod patch for Pokémon Box enabling the Japanese version to communicate and trade Pokémon between US, JP, and PAL Game Boy Advance games. This means if you wanted to use Pokémon Box functionality you could buy a Japanese copy for $50, patch the software, and use the software as if it were from any region. This fact carries beyond GameCube games, as you'd imagine. Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap is $90 for a loose US copy and only $40 for a Japanese copy. Surprisingly it's not always the case that the US release is cheaper than the Japanese release. For example, the Sonic Gems Collection for GameCube costs $55 CIB for a US release compared to $180 CIB for JP. I suspect this is because the soundtrack for Sonic CD is different for each region, JP Sonic Gems Collection carrying the far-superior and sought after JP Sonic CD soundtrack. The US Sonic CD soundtrack was included in the US and PAL Sonic Gems Collection releases. The Japanese Sonic CD soundtrack was released for the first time outside Japan in Sonic Origins. ## Why shouldn't you buy other regions' games? The primary reason is if you don't speak the language. Many PAL GameCube titles include English as one of the many supported languages, but this can't be said for NTSC-J. Most Japanese titles are exclusively in Japanese, and I don't speak the language. For some games this is fine, not knowing Japanese won't hamper games that aren't text-heavy, but RPGs or story-based adventures will impact the fun-factor. There are some modifications you can apply to translate the Japanese text back into English. Many consoles are region-locked, and thus require either purchasing a matching region console, modifying a console to support all regions, or dumping ROMs and using emulators (usually with a dedicated device or console modification). So you can't use any region's software without at least some extra work or hardware. The Nintendo GameCube has three main regions: NTSC-J (Japan), NTSC-M (Americas), and PAL (and maybe NTSC-K (Korea)? I cannot tell if this is actually its own region). I've gone the way of modifying my GameCube hardware with a solderless mod-chip called the FlippyDrive, but other open source options for a similar device are now available. This modification allows running any regions games on any region hardware. If you are using unmodified hardware you may run into issues with frame rate if you're mixing software and hardware from an NTSC region (US, JP, KR) and the PAL region. I am not super knowledgeable in this area, look around for solutions to this issue before buying. --- Thanks for reading ♥ I would love to hear your thoughts! Contact me via Mastodon, Bluesky, or email. Browse the blog archive. Check out my blogroll. ---

I delivered this talk at EuroPython 2026, I'll update this blog post once the recording is available on EuroPython's YouTube channel. Below are the slides and full list of links and resources included. This talk is a continuation of a talk I gave a year ago: “Security Work isn’t Special” as the keynote for OpenSSF Community Day NA where I lamented on how security work didn't match other Open Source contribution models like documentation, community, or code contributions. > My work as the Security Developer-in-Residence at the Python Software Foundation is sponsored > by Alpha-Omega. Thanks to Alpha-Omega for supporting > security in the Python ecosystem. ## Links and Resources - Slides - Python Software Foundation Blog - Python Insider Blog - Security Work isn’t Special - Security Line Goes Up by Hugo van Kemenade - Vulnerability Reports are not special anymore by Filippo Valsorda - LLM generated vulnerabilities by Linus Torvalds - Python Security Policy and Threat Model - Python Security Response Team - PEP 811 - Defining Python Security Response Team membership and responsibilities --- Thanks for reading ♥ I would love to hear your thoughts! Contact me via Mastodon, Bluesky, or email. Browse the blog archive. Check out my blogroll. ---