2026-05-27T16:36:39.749Z
Most of the first part of the soundtrack, written by shunter and Lmallet, you can skip. It's mostly not very good, the "programmer music" of Simutrans. Unfortunately, it's also most of the soundtrack, so it's probably most of what you hear in-game. The OST opens with two real duds, two of my least favorite songs in the whole thing: Simutrans Main Theme and Gotta Catch That Train. Really, that's what they picked for the main theme? Couldn't have gone for anything else? I suppose this is a good time to mention that the names of songs on this OST have some ambiguities. There's two canonical sources for their names, and they differ in capitalization and even spelling in a few places. So it might be "Gotta Catch That Train" or "Gotta catch that train", who knows.
Overall, Lmallet's tracks beat out shunter's on average, but the highlights in my opinion all belong to shunter: Steamin' Across The Praries, Last Journet Of The Niagra, Needlessly Striking, and Float On By. If you just handed me those four tracks, I'd think they're a sample from a competitent OST. Unfortunately, the rest of the music in this group drags it down to "bad", an observation shared by a number of internet commentators. I also think there's a track worth mentioning for its creativity, which is Stephenson Blues. Stephenson Blues is a pretty simple blues song which notably uses the bird tweet sound effect commonly found on keyboards. I think it's a great choice that adds character to an otherwise very generic-sounding track, but unfortunately it runs into the limitations of the MIDI format. It really overuses the tweeting, which wouldn't be a problem if it was a randomized bird tweet sound effect each time, but you can't really do that in this format. As such, it's just the same sample again and again, all throughout the song. I think I see why those sound effects are used pretty sparingly. This section ends with two tracks by Marcos Maestro, which aren't worth mentioning in great detail, before one more arranged by shunter (but written by vilvoh). Then we get into the real fun stuff.
Kayoko contributed two tracks to Simutrans: Driving on the Midnight Highway and Above The Sky. Perhaps it's just the contrast after two hours of mediocore music, but I found Driving on the Midnight Highway to be the real highlight of this album. The energy is exciting! There's a tempo change! (I don't think we've heard the tempo change in a single song up to this point.) The percussion is well-written, there's judicious use of grace notes to keep the pace up, and the simple arrangement of piano + electric bass (+ percussion) is one I'm a sucker for. Above The Sky is also great, and might even be my #2 on this album. It's a very strong melody, but gets a bit too repetitive for my liking. Still, there's some great instrumentation and/or key changes to keep it moving.
The next two tracks, as well as one towards the end, were written by Gobanboshi and tracked by Phystam and Reti_N. I had initially evaluated them as just okay, but on a re-listen I bumped each of them up a bit. Misty Forest lives up to the name, with a gentle sound that fits the described setting. Summer Intersection feels full of summertime optimism. They all just drag it out for too long, with not enough unique ideas to fill the space. Even House in the Station, which comes in under three minutes, feels like it's stretching by the end.
There are five tracks contributed by RykSeb (one originally written by anoKTOK). The first of these, Salty Breeze, is my last highlight for the album. It provides a nice balance of digital and analog instrumentation, and keeps the melody moving and fresh. The other three if RyjSeb's original songs feel too formulaic to me, almost more of an academic exercise than an artistic one. I mean, one's even titled "Techno Movement". anoKTOK's Snowy Road is fine, unoffensive, but doesn't really do anything interesting enough either.
And that brings us to the final composer, Shingoushori, with a single track, Where Thomassons Lie. Unfortunately, it's a fitting end for this OST. Not the worst song on it, but firmly in the "bad" camp for me. It sounds more like it should belong to a different OST I recently listened to, the Tarzan Activity Center DVD-ROM game. Although if I'm being honest, the songs there were better-composed than Where Thomassons Lie.
Anyway, that's the review. Out of 53 songs, I'd say there's 5-10 that are worth a listen. Doesn't exactly knock it out of the park, but yet I think there's a highway that will stay in my mind for a while longe
2026-05-30T14:06:50.274Z
This river gauge brought to you by McDonalds

2026-05-30T15:07:39.794Z
You know I bet there's hikers out there who aggressively optimize the ratio of ingredients in their GORP for maximum nutrition
2026-06-01T23:15:04.575Z
according to 2022 NHTS passenger data, about 4500 people traveled from the San Francisco area to southern Nevada by train
which is impressive because there is no passenger rail in southern Nevada
2026-06-01T23:16:38.037Z
I guess it's possible that they took the train to Needles, CA and then like Ubered or drove from there to Las Vegas?
2026-06-02T17:24:00.303Z
Ⓧ

2026-06-03T18:57:30.615Z
watching old Alex Jones footage through court recordings
this might actually be the funniest InfoWars headline + lead image

2026-06-03T19:06:13.760Z
in retrospect it's hard to imagine how Alex Jones's lawyers expected to endear themselves to the jury by making them listen to like an hour of InfoWars
when they said they wanted to show this video I figured it would be a good one for him, like one where he sounds like the moderate voice in the room compared to his callers
but it's really, really not
2026-06-03T21:07:21.787Z
wait sorry InfoWars was deplatormed off AirBnB? What does that even mean?
2026-06-06T17:23:04.507Z
oh man I forgot that this was the "did you know, that 12 days ago, your lawyers messed up and sent me your entire cellphone contents" triala
2026-06-07T18:05:56.525Z
This is kinda neat but it should be free https://www.redditfav.com/purchase.html
Or at least less expensive
2026-06-07T18:07:46.778Z
Why does it cost 15-20¢ per refresh? What does it actually cost them to get ten random posts from a list and show them to you?
Do they actually temporarily host images? I would guess that they just link out to the source/Reddit, but maybe not
Also, why does it cost 49¢ for 3 credits but 99¢ for 5?
Yeah it looks like everything's just hotlinked, this should be basically free to run
2026-06-07T18:13:37.739Z
Oh maybe Reddit charges for these API calls now? idk
2026-06-08T19:59:08.893Z
oh hey, it was RDP1 for JDK 27 a few days ago, which means we're at feature completeness
time to go over the JEPs
I think there might have been one or two notable CSRs in this release as well, I should check those
2026-06-08T20:03:17.665Z
First up: some defaults changing in GC. The first JEP 523 (https://openjdk.org/jeps/523)) which makes G1 the default garbage collector in all scenarios instead of nearly all scenarios. The second is JEP 534 (https://openjdk.org/jeps/534)) which makes compact object headers default. I discussed COH more when it was released in Java 25.
2026-06-08T20:04:54.455Z
Also sort of a default, JEP 527 (https://openjdk.org/jeps/527) adds three post-quantum hybrid key exchange algorithms to the TLS 1.3 client. Users of the client will likely have them used in practice, at least with a number of servers.
2026-06-08T20:06:08.253Z
... and that is everything that is not an incubator or preview. Zero new language features in this version (and also zero new incubators or previews). The only thing that really can be considered a feature is the post-quantum hybrid key exchanges
2026-06-08T20:07:35.527Z
After Lazy Constants were significantly overhauled in their second preview, they're taking some more time to settle in, with relatively small changes in this version. https://openjdk.org/jeps/531
2026-06-08T20:08:49.158Z
The new PEM API has some new functionality (but drops record typing for some reason) https://openjdk.org/jeps/538
2026-06-08T20:10:12.425Z
Structured Concurrency, one of the more hotly-awaited features, has some notable changes. Although to be honest, I haven't been paying close attention to the details of this one because it's been quite in flux https://openjdk.org/jeps/533
2026-06-08T20:11:40.751Z
"Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch" has no changes. Five previews with only two changes in the four re-previews feels excessive, hopefully this will be the last https://openjdk.org/jeps/532
2026-06-08T20:12:45.558Z
and as is tradition, the Vector API is re-incubated without change. Okay, they updated a bundled library, but no meaningful change. https://openjdk.org/jeps/537
I did actually miss a feature, JFR In-Process Data Redaction. I don't use JFR but this would be a handy feature for developers who do. https://openjdk.org/jeps/536
2026-06-08T20:15:50.814Z
I don't remember exactly what the CSR I was thinking of was, but there are a few things worth mentioning:
Math/StrictMath atanh, asinh, acosh (with identical implementations between the two APIs). Similarly, BigDecimal got an nth root method.
Oh, and there was a calculation bug in StrictMath.pow, which is kind of interesting (https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8345546)
2026-06-08T20:18:11.062Z
Oh, and there's a new, more efficient method for calculating the number of bytes that a string takes up when encoded in a given charset (https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8375318)
previously, you just had to encode it and check the length, which isn't ideal
2026-06-08T20:20:47.339Z
I think that's probably about it. COH by default will see programs that don't bother to change default JVM settings getting a modest performance boost on this version. Otherwise, I think the new methods in the CSRs are perhaps more interesting than the JEPs
2026-06-08T22:16:58.022Z
thanks Tizen SDK for hijacking my .NET runtime installation variables to point to your own .NET and also placing your .NET installation path at the top of my user path
really helpful there
it didn't even work after doing all that