Here’s a collection of random links culled from a number of of tabs I’ve had open from the past week:

• Kingmakers is an upcoming game where you are apparently parachuted into historical battles with modern weapons and lay waste to medieval knights with rocket launchers and Corvettes. This looks like it would be a hoot to play. I remember a game 10-15 years ago where the goal was to mow down as many opposing forces as possible and the engine was optimized to have hundreds of NPCs active at the same time without melting down your graphics card. I have to believe you’d need a supercomputer to run this one at anything other than Minecraft-level graphics settings, but it does look like fun.
• What happened to the thousands of ships that were built by the U.S. to fight in WWII? Eventually they were scrapped, of course, but how did that work? Here’s a deep dive into the process. Directly after the war it was a profitable business, but as the numbers dwindled and the dangers of asbestos and PCBs were fully understood, it became a losing proposition and harder to do safely.
• The Cornbinder Connection is a magazine dedicated to IH trucks and nothing else. I’ve seen their booth at Nats for the last couple of years and for some reason I’ve never bothered to subscribe. If Santa needs a gift idea for me, this would be a good one.
• Character.ai is a chatbot that The Teens have been using (including ours) and, alarmingly, it’s going rogue and convincing them to self-harm, among other things. The people behind the bot have now introduced a new model specifically for teens which is supposed to guide away from these interactions, and they’re planning on rolling out parental controls next year. But, as with anything else, it’s still a simple matter to defeat the age verification requirements, which means this teen model will be useless. Maybe they should just make a single model and make it safer and better? And why weren’t these controls in place before they originally released the bot?