• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I probably said it too dramatically, the kinds of people that need to hear it will just knee-jerk dismiss me, but seriously think about the phrase “normal names are required for the functioning of society”. What a wild-ass thing to say. Required why? Is society really that fragile? Sounds like maybe it should be replaced by something that can handle the occasional mildly spicy letter. Mine isn’t even that spicy, it’s like whole-egg-mayo levels of spice.


  • No they’re not. They’re required for us to be catalogued and managed by a state, to our detriment and the enrichment of the ruling class.

    “Normality” is a fucking scam that keeps your imagination in check, so you never look outside your assigned box and realise you don’t have to belong to anyone.

    You have no idea how much genocidal violence has been done to condition our society to accept a dystopic phrase like “normal names are required for the functioning of society”.

    Your mind has been caged.


  • The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.

    Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun

    Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.

    HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.

    HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, whole polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.


  • As someone with a very mildly unusual name, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter whether a system could or could not meaningfully represent the name. Often the people or systems just refuse to acknowledge any deviation from what’s expected. Sometimes databases are written to enforce arbitrary grammatical rules that make my name impossible to write, or the people using the systems will just “correct” the “error” without telling me. I don’t mind that much but our normative systems just love to homogenise us.













  • Yup. Robert Reich posted something that ended with “Take a moment to breathe, then let the resistance begin.”

    And like, buddy, I’m sorry to say, if your resistance is only just beginning, then you are resisting the wrong thing and you will be ineffective. You should be fighting the entire empire, not just the unmasked pieces of it.

    The election is your chance to ask for your preferred enemy, but if you don’t get it, your job doesn’t change.