Doomscrolling by Train

Doomscrolling is nowadays a way of life. Sometimes life happens on trains, especially in Germany.

DOOM Runs on What?!

Incorrigible readers of this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads are, no doubt regrettably, aware of our occasional pieces on the first-person shooter computer game DOOM running on hardware that seems… inadvisable. It’s been made to run on pregnancy tests, in PDF files ^[1], in the statistical analysis language R ^[2], and to self-distribute for installation by the internet Domain Name System. ^[3]

Via writer Charlie Stross comes news from the FV Transrapid service in Germany that, against all reason, they have gotten DOOM running on the cockpit monitor of their trains, as shown here.

The safety implications mean this is is on a whole new plane of inadvisability. I mean, it’s hilarious as a joke, of course. Just… adjacent to some really bad ideas around monkeying with the software of in-service trains.

One hopes that sensible German train engineers know better than to do this on an in-service train, especially while in motion. I can’t quite tell, but the view outside in the photo does not quite reassure me in that regard.

As Stross put it:

“Suddenly I have a feeling I know the real cause of the Transrapid 08 train crash at Lathen in 2006.”

The Weekend Conclusion

We cannot escape DOOM, as it is apparently found everywhere.

I just hope we can — somehow — escape the other sort of fascist doom, also now found everywhere.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

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Notes & References

1: Weekend Editor, “DOOM Runs On… What?!”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2026-Jul-30. ↩

2: Weekend Editor, “DOOM Runs in… R?!”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2026-Jul-15. ↩

3: Weekend Editor, “More DOOM Madness”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2026-Apr-06. ↩