WTF Happened March 2025
This is the third month of WTF Happened 2025 Edition! I posted the February recap a whole month late, so I apologize for that. I'm continuing that trend with a month late recap of March 2025. However, even if it's late, this was always going to be a retrospective, and retrospectives are always late, never early!
March 2025 was a very sad time, and covering everything is very unrealistic, but I'll just highlight a few bad things and then focus mostly on good and even great things which happened within and around the month.
On March 4th, U.S. Representative of Texas Al Green was shoo'd away from the court at the order of Louisiana Republican rep. Mike Johnson (WashPost) for basically yelling at Trump very loudly and angrily as Trump entered the meeting mocking democrats and praising his DOGE nonsense. Green was later given another word toward the speaker at an empty room, where he'd condemn the cover-up of the recent classified information leak involving the Signal chat platform, which to me is definitely a war crime. This seemed to fall on deaf ears like everything else. Green would then continue to be involved in a "Know Your Rights" town hall meeting on March 29th to help educate people about how to protect themselves from immigration enforcement agencies, particularly ICE, which had become quite obnoxious to say the least in the States recently. I appreciate his perseverance toward providing the average citizen of the United States with greater protection in various ways. I would be proud to have him as my representative.
Early March was when deportation efforts really started to get noticed, I think. I mean, I wasn't blind, but I didn't know how much was going on under our noses until late February, and I'm well read and keep up with world news as much as possible. On March 10th, Trump bragged about a fresh incident where a student was deported for openly but peacefully protesting the Israel-Hamas war. (NPR) This wasn't the first major red flag of this second term of Trumpification, and these kinds of things kept happening. Another example, a Tufts University student was abducted by a bunch of people in black clothing, some of whom wielded badges. (Reuters) I was pretty freaked out by it, but I noticed a pattern: most of these abductions and deportations were targeting international students. The United States of America is supposed to be land of the free, where we're supposed to have a right to peaceful protest... but it seems we're now land of the free-unless-we-oppose-the-status-quo, where we can't say anything negative ever unless we're born citizens... and even then? I hate to test that, but that's what this administration wants: fear. They're scaring people into silence.
Canada
boo'd the Unites States national anthem at a hockey game! You know how
badly you have to fuck up to get Canada pissed enough to boo at your
anthem? I was proud of them. I was not in the slightest bit offended. It
was awesome! Trudeau announced his support of the reaction and
basically said Canada would continue boo'ing for the foreseeable future.
I get it. I would, too.
On a related note, Canada started a nationwide boycott of U.S. goods and U.S. travel. Charlie Magus warned all Canadians not to travel to the States during a powerful speech mentioning that Canada is a country of law and democracy and that they should keep their boycott going as long as possible. This was partly due to Trump commenting on Canada becoming the 51st state of U.S., but it was also spurred on by the tariff nonsense. This boycott actually got a lot of support.
Starlink was reportedly taking advantage of rule changes to some grants to fund expansion to rural areas across the United States. (CNN on BSky) I assume this wouldn't happen under other leadership, because it helps solidify a monopolistic hold over America's communications network. I personally wouldn't buy that service no matter how cheap and accessible it gets. I rather use an old AOL CD and listen to the ancient dial-up connection spell every single day. Syrsly, you're showing your age, move on....
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, expressed
disappointment in how Elon Musk and Donald Trump were handling spending
cuts in the U.S. federal government. Wozniak used the analogy of a
sledgehammer being used instead of a scalpel. He also equated Trump and
Elon both to bullies. (Gizmodo)
This is really good news in a way, sure, but I look at it as bad news
because The Woz can't do shit about it, and his complaining is months
too late. He should have been more vocal before and during the election.
We all knew what was going to happen if Trump got voted into office
again, didn't we?! 
In related news, a teacher in Idaho was given an ultimatum to remove her "EVERYONE is welcome!" sign from her classroom by the end of the year or face some kind of vague threat. (Chris Hayes) I don't think this is big news at all, but it's just too ridiculous and ugly to ignore. Educators deserve more respect.
China placed relatiatory tariffs on U.S. sourced farm goods. (Financial Times)
The thing is, I'm not at all mad at China for doing this. They're just
doing what Trump's administration asked them to do by adding their own
tariffs in the States. Tariffs are stupid. Trump are stupid - is stupid.
Dammit.
There was a U.S. national security incident as well. Pete Hegseth invited a journalist to a classified chat group on Signal and shared military plans with him. (CNN) The Onion had some good stingers about it, too. This wouldn't be the last time this happens, either. You can actually see some disturbing chat data leaked online if you just look for it.
Perhaps the most covered event this month was Kristi Noem's visit to El Salvador, where she did a photo-op in front of a bunch of prisoners to threaten immigrants that this imprisonment was what waits for them if they try to enter 'America' 'illegally'. As we all know, 'legal' is a word Trump's administration laughs at, so this kind of speech felt very ironic. On top of that, this bitch showed absolutely no compassion for the prisoners and a lot of these prisoners were treated worse than lifestock. (Independent) Many of the prisoners were shirtless to show their tattoos as if that was a sign they were all gang members.
What else... oh, yeah, there was some old ND senator who plead guilty to having sex with minors and also pretended to be a kid himself to lure them in. (NYDaily and AP) This guy was a Republican representative, guys. Nuff said.
Let's cap the bad stuff off with a bittersweet story: James Harrison, a man in Australia with unique antibodies, gave plasma 1100 times over the course of his life and saved an estimated 2.2M babies thanks to his "anti-D" antibody donations. He died on February 17th, 2025, but what a heroic legacy! (The Guardian) if more people were as giving and caring as that man, perhaps we would be able to lift ourselves up to the stars without SpaceX taking all the credit.
Web browser news!
In browser news, Firefox came out with in-browser AI integration as well as an updated sidebar to support the new AI features. I'd chalk this up to Mozilla not knowing what to do with their browser to garner attention from the average user. They felt that AI integration might turn some eyes? Firefox also received an update to the Clear browsing data and cookies dialog, now allowing clearing saved form info separately from browsing history. There were some other additions this month, but you can just check the Firefox release notes yourself for the rest.
You may notice I don't mention Google Chrome's updates often in my news. There's good reason for that: It's boring. Have you been to their release notes? Not only are their release notes hard to navigate but they rarely have anything interesting going on. They also don't present their update text in a fashionable way; Google seems to use the same boring text layout on release notes as they use for their often outdated documentation for their various services.
Now, I realize there are other browsers out there, but I don't use any other browser as much as these two mainstream ones. Some of my current favorite browsers, however, include Brave, Opera GX, Waterfox, and Vivaldi. I really like the 90s AOL-like vibe of Opera GX with all the sound effects and big clipart style visuals, and it's surprisingly more performant than vanilla Chrome!
I'm always open to suggestions and
recommendations, of course, but my daily driver is still currently
Mozilla Firefox because I like how that browser handles tabs and
bookmarks and the inspector tools. I used to choose Firefox over
everything else for the extensions and built-in RSS reader, but its
extension ecosystem hasn't been great in a few years now, and they
discontinued the RSS reader functionality almost 6 years ago. Firefox
has Reader Mode now, but that's not quite the same thing. Oh, and I
prefer the page renderer used by Firefox, called Gecko. That said, I'm a
web developer, so I use all the popular browsers for testing, including
old versions of IE. 
Social media news!
Bluesky reached over 33.8M users this month! (BlueCrawler) They also added the ability to upload up to 3-minute-long videos! (Paul Frazee)
I only saw 1 minute and 50 seconds in the post I just referenced, but I
since then witnessed some videos with 3 minutes 2 seconds. Two whole
extra seconds, baby! 
Oh, and I saw Barack Obama joined Bluesky. (BSky post) I welcomed him onto the platform along with several hundred others within minutes of his first post. It may seem trivial, but every time a celebrity joins Bluesky and uses it regularly, that takes one more reason off the table for someone to be visiting other social platforms like X or Facebook, and it means more people join the growing BSky community, which is a good thing!
Some people say Bluesky is
censored and that's why they don't want to join it, and to an extent,
they're right, but the tech Bluesky is built on, AtProto, is very
freedom-focused, and most of the censoring on that protocol is
user-controlled. Things you do on Bluesky can be accessed via another
AtProto app/website with less restrictions and less moderation than
Bluesky. That said, I've seen less censorship on the Bluesky website
than I've seen on any other social platform other than maybe the Linus
Tech Tips forums, that place is so rowdy! 
For the most part, the things you don't see on Bluesky are due to TOS
rule breakers and spammers and the things you don't want to see which
you self-censored or by people who blocked you. Of course, there are a
ton of trolls trying to bother people on all platforms, but the
moderation tools on Bluesky are pretty awesome, and reporting people to
your block list or labeler is pretty easy. You can read up on some of
this stuff via a fairly informative TechCrunch
article, which goes as far as to link to several alternative apps/sites
as well as explain what kinds of censorship are happening and why.
Entertainment & The Arts!
An easter egg was uncovered in The Phantom Menace! It's just an embossed face above a hall, though. (James Witbrook)
Honda, in February, announced plans to create a motorcycle that looks like a pokemon called Koraidon. (Tokyo Weekender)
Yes, the pokemon has a 'build' that makes it a motorcycle. Pokemon
keeps getting weirder and weirder. This particular pokemon is a
legendary rank pokemon from Pokemon Scarlet.
March 6th is the anniversary of Michelangelo, you know, the giant turtle - what's that? It's not the turtle? It was some old painter guy? Okay.... Read a brief bio about the man here.
Daredevil: Born Again aired on Disney+ starting March 4th. We also got The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 (March 9, Max), Adolescence (Netflix), and Good American Family (Hulu) among many other decent-looking shows I honestly didn't find time to watch since I was deep into Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and random YouTube videos. Conan O'Brien hosted the 97th Annual Academy Awards (March 2, ABC), which I also didn't watch... but Conan is cool. - What's that? Different Conan? Not the barbarian?
Something weird?
I'm not sure exactly when this movie trailer came out or if the actual movie is a real thing I'll watch someday, but a trailer for Baby Invasion by Harmony Korine was released around the end of march, and it's the most intense AI slop I've ever seen.
Gaming news!
Nintendo Museum released some keychains with console start-up noises in them. (Nintendeal) I want the Xbox one. /s
The biggest game release highlights for me in March were Fragpunk and Split Fiction. There were some other cool releases which mostly snuck past me but I would later pay them some attention, like Inayah: Life after Gods. Killing Floor 3 was supposed to come out March 25th but got delayed significantly. Oh, and there was Assassin's Creed: Shadows, but I really don't have an interest in that franchise any more due to the story not really going anywhere.
Fragpunk is a free-to-play competitive shooter I downloaded at release but never really found time to play. It still looks promising, but I'm very hesitant to get into F2P games which are online-enabled because of the costs involved in running game servers. I hate to have in-game real world money transactions. Still, I think I might enjoy this one. Gonna try it.
I bought Split Fiction to play it with my wife... sometime. It looked cool. I can't say much else about it, though, until I actually play it.
There was a beta update for Postal 4 that finally added the coop feature that was teased for a while. (Steam announcement)
We also got a new porn game on Steam that brought with it tons of controversy. On March 22nd, No Mercy released on Steam with depictions of rape and incest. It was removed from the store on April 10th with an announcement post explaining why. I don't think the game should be removed unless you also take down all other porn games and even all violent games, but the publisher decided on taking the game down themselves, so that was their decision. Public opinion is often very wrong, and I think this is an instance of that. I'm not glorifying the acts depicted in this application, but I also don't think depictions of any activity should be censored from consenting adults... and yes, i know how ironic that sounds when the game seems to be glorifying non-consent.
Formerly bankrupt publisher Acclaim, famous for its 90s licensed titles like NBA Jam and Alien 3, is being rebooted but not by any of its former staff, just some Activision employees (VGChronicle), which makes this kind of a nothing burger to me. However, it is nice to see company names like Acclaim don't stay gone forever if the name holds enough clout or at least sounds really cool.
I also missed this last month, but TF2 has become open source! (Jack Goodall) The modding community is going to explode after this... assuming people still care enough about playing the game to mod it. I suspect a native VR port could be well on the way especially considering the game already had an almost functional VR render mode as far back as early days Vive.
Virtual reality news!
Meta Quest 3/3S v76 PTC update allowed users to use their Meta avatar for a virtual webcam. (UploadVR)
There were a few good VR game releases in March, including but not limited to Under A Desert Sun, Table Party, Electrician Simulator VR, and Quest exclusives Mythic Realms and Path Of Fury. Under A Desert Sun has been in early access hell for a few years, but I'm happy to report it has exited early access as of March 10th... and has a good feedback rating. I'll be revisiting it soon and will likely give it a video review. The only video review I've posted up to this point was for a rather disappointing title.
Table Party looked promising at first glance, but the more I dug into it, the more I doubted it was worth its full price of $25, especially for people who play alone. However, it's a very charming-looking title, so maybe give it a look yourself.
Path of Fury is only its first episode in who knows how many episodes, and it's rather pricey for a first episode at $10. No info has been provided about future episodes yet. That said, it looks like a fun fighting game in the style of a PS2 cyberpunk Tokyo. I would have been all over this a few years ago if it released for SteamVR and had Liv support and all that jazz. It has a nice retro VHS tape vibe to it that appeals to my age group, people who grew up in the 80s/90s. God, I'm ancient.
Speaking of ancient, I have been following StellarPlans on BSky for a while, and it turns out this game released almost a whole year ago without me knowing it was out. I thought it was still in development, but it's been on SteamVR since last July! I'll have to check that game out soon. The Quest version of the game released in March 2025. I will be grabbing the SteamVR version. Should be a fun game to get into after vacation this year.
We got wind of a new Virtuix Omni One app titled "TREKS". (UploadVR) It seems to be a walking simulator on steroids... but also on a giant platform called the Virtuix Omni One. If I had that hardware, I'd probably be very interested in this tourism app.
If you don't have a giant VR treadmill, you may find some gossip about Meta more interesting. According to MIXED on BSky, there was a leak in Meta's documentation about their upcoming Passthrough API. I really wish this API was available on day one of the Quest 3, because I really wanted the Quest 3 to be a 3D scanning powerhouse. Oh well.
Some recent Quest 3 apps I bought which may be of interest to some of you are Mythic Realms and EarthQuest. EarthQuest is basically a lesser quality Google Earth with multiplayer which came out in 2023 but recently got a sale. I have tried what feels like millions of apps which claimed or seemed to claim Google Earth status on Quest devices, but EarthQuest was the first one I ever tried that actually came really close. If you tried it in 2023, it was likely not a great experience, but the app has been updated a lot since then and is worth another look. It still has a ton of problems (particularly wasteful with the Quest 3 device storage), but I like it. If you don't mind a board game aesthetic and weird controls and a harder time avoiding other users online, Wooorld is the best alternative I'm aware of. Wooorld is free to get off the Meta store but has in-game purchases. There's also Wander. which I really haven't used much but have owned for years. Perhaps I should create an article/video about all these apps? Let me know if you're interested.
Pimax Crystal Super pre-orders were announced toward the end of March to begin shipping on April 7th. If you're interested in a new VR headset and don't mind it being tethered, you could consider the Crystal Super, but be aware it comes with a hefty price tag and is missing some features you may take for granted on other headsets. It's also not tiny like the BigScreen Beyond 2.
PSVR2 also got some much needed updates this month. (MIXED) Among the fixes in this update was a fix for the controller audio issue that annoyed my friends and I greatly. I didn't try this update, mind you, so let me know if it worked for you.
Game dev news!
I
try to spread knowledge about anything new in the scene, and often,
this comes down to what I'm most familiar with, which is still Unity
game engine and its asset store.
There was an extremely promising asset added to the Unity Asset Store on March 4th which was taken down just weeks later. It was called Seamless Virtual Geometry and was an attempt to replicate a free feature of Unreal Engine 5: Nanite. For those who aren't in the know, Nanite was a big deal and basically made UE5 the go-to for highly detailed scenes with tons of geometry and large map sizes. The Unity asset was not yet ready for prime time, as seen in this video by UnityCoder. While this particular Unity asset may have gone bye-bye, there's another more promising alternative in the works titled Hi-Res Vision which works with any game engine according to this 80lv article.
Unfortunately, the direction Unity's going in is not as promising as the directions of Unreal Engine and Godot. I've been enjoying the Fab store's existence and noticed it supports Unity assets now. However, I can't help but wonder if/when Fab will support assets for Godot and other game engines. Hell, I'd even like to see paid-for RPG Maker assets on there. I just want more ways to supe up Godot to rival the big boys, but I like the idea of giving other engines the same treatment.
Dev & art app news!
You guys know I built my own website, right? It's hosted by a parent company I'm a part of, but I built the site from scratch in a text editor called Atom Editor. Atom went bye-bye some time ago, and its direct successor was Pulsar Edit. Pulsar Edit had its v1.126 release this month which added support for folded arrays in its PHP parser. (me)
GIMP 3.0 has finally released! (release notes) It has been in development since 5 years ago. I recall really liking GIMP back in '97. Showing my age again! Ugh!
Praise the sun! Summer is coming. 
Today's mood brought to you by the band named Acrobatics. Here's their Bandcamp album page. DGAF indeed!