TwinIon

I finished Black Mesa and I really enjoyed it. Despite having finished it, I still don't know how much they redesigned the game. There are so many things in there that I recognize from Half Life, but they might be from Half Life 2 and brought back to Black Mesa. I know the physics stuff is for sure back ported, but there are other bits and pieces that get confused in my memory. Xen is pretty fun now, and by far the best looking part of the game. For anyone interested in revisiting Half Life or trying it for the first time, I highly recommend it. I've also started replaying Half Life 2 and that's an odd jump to make. In many ways it's visually a step backwards. Lighting, texture effects, particle effects, geometry, in Black Mesa are all ahead of HL2 in noticeable ways, but in things like facial animations HL2 easily wins out. Again, I'm encountering things in HL2 that were in Black Mesa, but actually introduced here, so it's a very confusing nostalgia. I just finished Ravenholm and it still got me a couple times. I'd forgotten about the new enemy types and I actually lost hold of my mouse at one scare where they're first introduced. I also definitely played it the exact same way I did the first time around, doggedly keeping a saw blade with me at all times. One thing playing these games that I miss the most in modern games is quick save / quick load. How did we ever let that stop being a required feature? It's brilliant that I can save while running down a hallway without it interrupting me, and it works at any point in the entire game. Reloading a quick save takes all of a couple seconds. It completely removes pretty much any frustration I might have had with some points in the game. There are platforming sections and jumping puzzles where one wrong move is death. If these sections existed in a game with a normal checkpoint save system and long load times, I guarantee I don't finish the game as quickly, if at all. Put this kind of quicksave / quickload in Jedi Fallen Order, and I guarantee I've finished it by now. I know of all things that made these games revelatory or revolutionary at the time, the save system is not among them, but going back to play an old game it might be the single biggest difference maker in allowing me to approach the game on my own terms and prevent it from ever wasting my time.

So my company just had a managers meeting and the decision was essentially to prevent working from home as much as possible. My company has a long history of complete mistrust of employees. The prevailing sentiment from the top is basically "if we don't see them at their desk, how do we know they're working?" It's so odd to me. Presumably everyone has a job because they do something, right? And presumably if that work wasn't done, it would be noticed, yeah? This isn't a giant company. In this particular office there are ~40 people. Most of them work in very small teams. It wouldn't take long to notice someone completely slacking. A shocking amount of our work revolves around actual paper files, so I understand it wouldn't be very easy for us to move to a 100% remote work force starting Monday, but that's not what I was expecting. I was expecting a more lenient or flexible work from home policy. Maybe some discussion about how we can accommodate that and what steps need to be taken, etc. Instead the meeting was basically to say "it will be business as usual, but with more hand sanitizer." If this meeting happened last Friday, nothing would have surprised me, but having it today, after a national emergency was declared, schools in our county just got canceled, and everything else going on, just seemed completely oblivious to reality. It doesn't really even affect me, since I can mostly work from home whenever I want anyways. I'm still going to work under the assumption that most of the company will be working from home in relatively little time.

Pathetic.

There's always a tweet

So, I have a question for everyone here: What do you tell the family in your life that is 65+? Especially those that are 80+? I’ve got a few grand parents / great uncles or whatever that are clearly in the group that are most at risk. One the one hand, I feel like their limited activity is what is keeping them alive. On the other hand, I feel like I should tell them not to go to their weekly pottery class or whatever. Any advice for dealing with the older folks in your life?

Whiplash - 5/5 - It’s a very solid 4/5 the whole way through, but man does that ending bump it up a notch, even when you know it’s coming. It’s an astonishing work from a first time filmmaker. La La Land - 5/5 - Yes, this movie should have won Best Picture. Yes, I’m white; why do you ask? Fine, best is arguable, but man, is it re-watchable, at least as long as you’re comfortable with it’s primary colored vibe. I have a thing for simple piano theme songs. Yes, most of the movies I’ve rewatched lately have been 5/5, but I’ve just been in a mood to rewatch things I know I love. For some reason a global pandemic is the perfect opportunity to discover new things, but all I want to do is enjoy something I know I’ll enjoy. Sue me.

So the FIA (motorsport governing body) is quickly becoming a model of what you shouldn't do. Mclaren pulled out of the Formula 1 race after a team member got Covid 19, but there hasn't been an official cancellation yet. It seems that the team principles had a meeting last night and decided the main race isn't going to happen, but they're still holding the rest of the event! That means you could still have hundreds of thousands of people gathering together, which seems like the only thing you really need to prevent. It's like the opposite of having sporting events without the fans. You could have all the fans from all over the world, coming together just to spread the virus. Twitter seems to think that some of the drivers (from teams that haven't officially pulled out) have already gone home, but it seems some teams are still getting ready to do their practice session today. The gates were set to open 20 minutes ago, but it's unclear if they're going to let people in. It's the ultimate act of indecision.

I played through the first 4 chapters (just encountered the first batch of Marines) and it's a bit of a trip. It's odd because there's a nostalgia there that is so vague. Black Mesa really is a great way to revisit the original game. Sure is odd to be playing this on a 43" 4K monitor. I can't remember what monitor I had when I first played Half Life, but it was probably something like a 15" CRT at 1024x768. Playing Half Life is a little bit like watching a classic movie. It's a bit rough at times, but the thing it's doing has been so often repeated that it's almost timeless. It doesn't feel unique anymore, but even if you don't remember much, it still feels familiar. One particular observation is that the first few Marines are a lot harder than all the baddies I've been shooting in The Division 2. It's almost as if they don't want to get shot. It makes me think that there's probably a good reason that enemy AI hasn't been a real focus for the last 20 years. It wouldn't exactly take all 16 CPU cores I've now got to run something smart enough that it's no longer fun.

Mclaren already pulled out of the Australian GP. Conflicting reports now on if it's been canceled or not. The first session is supposed to start in hours, so it seems like they need to make a call sooner rather than later.

Anyone else find the advice to not touch your face kind of annoying? Maybe I just have no self control, but I'm finding it nearly impossible to not touch my face absentmindedly. Maybe I've reduced how much it happens by 10%, but even that might be generous. Are most people able to reduce touching their face to any meaningful degree?

My theory is that it's all about Trump. Turnout is up because of Trump. People are picking Biden because they think he has the best chance against Trump. Policy matters to many people, but overwhelmingly it's less about M4A or liking Bernie and more about a perception of the general election. Also, that is a horribly formatted and colored chart. Whoever put that together should be sent to some remedial excel course ASAP.

I'd be interested in seeing a further data driven analysis of the whole Bernie Bro thing. I can say that it's something that I've personally see come up quite a lot, so it's hard for me to discount entirely. Maybe it is simply a function of there simply being a lot more Bernie folks on Twitter and Reddit, or maybe it's just where I go on the internet. I think it would be worth investigating where negativity gets directed, as I feel like Bernie supporters are more prone to attacking Democrats. Maybe it's that they're disproportionately active, so their comments tend to be at the top and therefore more visible. I do question the ability of sentiment analysis to really capture online communication when it might be a matter of snake emojis, dismissive gifs, or bad memes, but I would still have suspected it would pick up some difference. I'm open to the idea that the whole Bernie Bro thing is imaginary, but at the same time it's hard to discount my own experiences.

I find it difficult to assess what effect Bernie staying in will really have on a Trump / Biden general. In the past, I think you could plausibly say that opponents would watch a Bernie/Biden debate and pull talking points about policy, but it's kind of hard to imagine that happening here. No matter what, Trump will lie about Biden's positions and he'll lie about his own. He'll say that Biden will raise taxes, tank the economy, ban cows, cars, and guns, let immigrants kill your family, that Biden personally directed the Ukraine to meddle in our elections, and that Biden will personally fire every American from their jobs. Trump will say he'll cut middle class taxes, while primarily cutting them for the wealthy, that he'll preserve healthcare protections while attacking them both in court and legislatively, that he alone can strike new trade deals, while failing repeatedly to do so, that he cares so much about the planet, while gutting environmental protections, and that Mexico will pay for the fracking wall. When Bernie's attacks on Biden will be focused on the viability of Medicare for All vs an extended ACA or a Green New Deal vs a more limited approach to climate change, it's hard to imagine those kinds of policy squabbles actually changing Trump's narratives when they're not based in reality.

Doh. I just saw this article on Polygon from this morning and figured it was new. Serves me for posting without reading.

There is now a Steam page, but I think all the video and images say they were captured on a Playstation.

We finally canceled cable just a couple months ago. A family member signed up for YouTube TV, and you can have multiple people with their own accounts in a family to share it with, so we've been using that and are mostly happy. Only issues have been a lack of AMC and whatever channel Ru Paul airs on.

Set in 1977, Hunters presents us with a world where a number of Nazis have been hiding in the US, working their way into positions of power for some evil purpose, and the eclectic group that is hunting them. The cast is lead by noted Jewish actor Al Pacino, but features a number of memorable faces, if not necessarily big names. The show itself brings a very Tarantino-esque vibe, complete with over the top violence, revisionist history, and needle drops. Unlike Tarantino, I haven't found that Hunters navigates it's wildly shifting tone very well. It can go from oddly exuberant, fourth wall breaking sequences to somber holocaust remembrances multiple times in the span of minutes. I've been enjoying it enough to keep with it through three episodes, but I can't say it's my favorite thing on TV right now. Anyone else watching Hunters?

Apple is not liable for what you upload to iCloud. All that content falls under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. There are exceptions for specific illegal stuff and for intellectual property claims, but in general providers are not liable for user created content on their platforms.

I still don't have a lot of hope that this will mean that many first party Sony games will come to the PC, but I'd like to see that become the case. I think this is mostly a sign of how Sony is increasingly seeing the PC as a different market than the consoles. Certainly Microsoft hasn't been too afraid of cannibalizing console sales with PC releases.

These games were great for couch multiplayer on tiny TVs. I'm not sure what I'd even want out of a modern one.

I do think it's possible for a person to be a better candidate for the general than for the primaries, but I don't think it's really possible to prove it. As we saw with Warren, so many people wouldn't vote for her not because they didn't like her, but because they thought someone else had a better chance of winning in the general. I think that's a huge part of Biden's support. If you remove that calculus, and you just have two candidates, I think a bunch of people suddenly become much more viable. I think Klobuchar would be a better candidate in the general than she was in the primaries. I could see the same being true for Booker. I think a lot changes when that goes away. I personally don't think Bernie would be a better general election candidate. His platform, so much more than Biden's, is targeted at the most progressive voters. If his message doesn't resonate sufficiently with Democrats, I don't see why he'd have better luck with the entire population. With Warren out, I'll happily vote for him, but I haven't seen a lot of proof that his campaign can rile up a wider base of support.

Another question for the more experienced: I just got to 30 and finished the Capital mission. It seems I've now reset the map and entered the endgame (at least what was the endgame before the expansion). Does the actual gameplay change much at all at this point? If I keep playing will the missions and tasks feel new, or is it pretty much the same as the leveling experience? I feel like I got my $3 worth, and I could keep going, but if it's just more of the same, I think I'll move on.

At this point something vague must have come true. They must have said something impossible to get wrong over a long enough time line like the "markets will go down." I haven't read much on Q in a long time, but I feel like many of the predictions were impossible to verify. The big ones that would be verifiable like mass rioting seem not to dissuade anyone.

I'm so looking forward to Alyx. It's connection to the Half-Life mythos isn't so important to me as much as it simply being a AAA VR game.

You're buying a licence to play these games and they can put whatever onerous terms and conditions they want on there. It probably says somewhere in there that you shouldn't play your steam game on your friends computer, and the article in the OP specifically mentions that Blizzard's says you're not allowed to use cloud computing. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that they have the right to prevent you from using a service like GFN.