On the one hand, I’m not sure how else it’s supposed to go. On the other, I’m sure MAGA would love violence to break out; it’ll make it way easier to convince military leaders to fall in line when deployed on American soil.
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023
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181·2 days agoHow does the President have such wide control over government spending when that’s supposed to be Congress’s constitutional responsibility?
Because it’s on Congress to push back when another branch oversteps its power, and more than half of it is actively cheering on the destruction of our society. I can’t speak to whether we’ll have free and fair midterms, but if we do, electing leftists to congress would be vital to stymieing the damage quickly.
But, yeah, who knows. That’ll take at least 2 years. MAGA has already done incalculable damage, and it’s been 2 weeks.
Other people have used the words you wrote in other contexts before, therefore you stole their words.
Oh God, so did I! I’m doing it right now! I’m going to jail!
1·7 days agoWhoops sorry, tried to post a magnet link but it didn’t work for some reason. Too long maybe? Anyway you can grab the torrent file from moddb here
deleted by creator
3·7 days agoGod damn it I can’t believe they ended lower decks by giving Rutherford his eye back for no reason instead of him and tendi finally opening up to each other
7·8 days agoI don’t lnow how removing the legal way of getting into the US will result in less people entering illegally
Of course you’re right; it’s not meant to. More illegal immigrants means more scared, easily exploitable people who will never reach out for help out of fear of deportation. To Republicans, that means cheap labor.
Unfortunately what it’s actually going to mean is the rise of a North American cartel. Gangs draw strength from acting as defacto enforcement when the state becomes unreliable. Republicans think they can suppress or control gangs to a sufficient degree that they’ll still be able to profit… or maybe they haven’t thought this through at all. I guess we’ll see.
It’s a completely different film, far more action-oriented
Terminator 2 is tonally almost completely different from 1. 1’s soul is much more a horror movie, complete with a damsel in distress and a heavily uncanny villain. 2 had every chance to lean into that sense of unease, but really doesn’t explore that uncomfortable emotion despite the T-1000 being much more threatening on paper.
1·9 days agoHappy to report I was wrong. They released it as a torrent; I’m downloading it now
The same could be said about terminator 2
Maya’s blade in the webcomic kill six billion demons is this, but played straight
9·11 days agoIt’s not specifically about learning French, but if you’re interested in browsing some French posts the most active instance is jlai.lu
Minor correction, most of them seem to think that voting at all is the issue. Can’t imagine why they work so hard to depress voter turnout on left-leaning social media
If you’re willing to deal with ancient, low end tech, you can spend way less than $1000. I’ve been asking friends and family to give me their e-junk for over a decade, and while I do wind up taking a lot of it to an actual recycler, I have several busted up machines that together can do everything I need. Plus they give me some redundancy when I inevitably mess one of them up by accident.
It’s kinda like using docker, but way less energy efficient! The amount I would be spending on subscriptions is a lot more than the bump to my power bill, though.
My bet is before release. Shoulda just made it available instead of announcing it.
I feel that excuse only goes so far. It’s funny; the original Half Life was my first PC shooter experience, and Alyx was my first VR experience, but HL1 manages to be engaging for me even now while Alyx already feels stale. Like, I get the decision to dumb the movement way down for VR first timers who might get motion sick, but it goes way too far and offers vanishingly few options for people who might want more immersive physics. Or, like, a sprint button. Apparently I have naturally strong VR legs, but jeez, it bothered me even on my first time with a headset
Other things should still have had more room to expand as the game runs on, too. There’s so little weapon variety and even among what it does have, the SMG and pistol fill almost the same niche. Apparently they made the AI painfully bad on purpose, but why couldn’t they have saved a more engaging combat experience for the endgame or higher difficulties? And the constant orb puzzles they used to replace the traditional physics based ones get incredibly repetitive, especially when replaying the game.
It fails to iterate on the mechanics it introduces in meaningful ways, instead choosing to introduce new things that are entirely self contained (i.e., the Jeff sequence and the final level’s vortigaunt blasts). Like, Jeff was super memorable, but part of the reason for that is he breaks up some seriously repetitive gameplay, and nothing about that level is ever relevant again.
Plus I have other gripes about sound design, physics (especially for heavy objects), even the way fall damage is handled. And the way it retcons Ep2 feels cheap to me. Idk. The game was ultimately fun, but flawed far beyond what I think can be said of the earlier games. Obviously I’m biased, but I wound up having more fun with HL2VR than Alyx.
People say Breen is sympathetic?
Ohhmygoodness I must have argued about this on the old site at least 5 different times. People really like the idea he was doing the best he could to buy time in a world where he genuinely believed fighting the Combine was impossible. I guess they were really starving for a sympathetic villain? But yeah his actions don’t leave any room for sympathy, let alone his speeches and the dialogue between him and Vance. If anything the evidence points to him working with G-Man to cause the Black Mesa incident on purpose.
The only part of 2 that hit that high for me was the underside of the bridge
True, HL2 really deemphasized platforming as something necessary to win. I’ve always figured Valve tries to make games they want to play, and they fell out of love first with platformers, then with shooters. That’s why there’s been no HL3: they’re into MOBAs now. I put together an almost entirely new PC and I’m still out here playing TF2 when I get the itch to shoot stuff; Deadlock really isn’t my jam. Honestly at this point I figure even if we do get a HL3, it will have been taken in a direction I’m not really interested in.
Yeah it feels like BM picked 3 because that’s what HL2 did, but to be fair there needed to be fewer than 10 because each individual grenade was way more powerful than in the original. At least HL2 didn’t go as far in reducing weapon variety as HLA!
Also I edited in some actual hot takes into my original post.
Yeah okbh was a meme comm and I guess its mods were equally unserious. Not like I got banned for making a non-meme post, mine was the only viewpoint in that thread that got deleted so I guess they just didn’t like what I was saying lol
Uhh yes. Oh boy, an invitation to ramble!
Tap for spoiler
Personally, while I don’t hate either of the Gearbox games, I don’t think they deserve to be on the same pedestal as the Valve games, either. BS is so short and does so little worldbuilding that it’s like one step up from Lost Coast in terms of replayability. I’ve only felt the need to replay it once, and that was like a decade after my first run (I run through the mainline HL games almost every year). And it’s a huge stretch for OF to be considered canon. While it definitely goes further than BS in trying to impart interesting details, mostly it seems to recycle beats from the original game, and the parts it adds on don’t have a consistent tone. I also strongly dislike how the game tries to whitewash the military. Plus it doesn’t seem like Valve was a fan either; in HL2, the way Mossman describes teleportation working for either the humans or the Combine doesn’t fit with the existence of Race X, the headcrab life cycle is completely retconned, and not one element of that game has ever resurfaced, not a single easter egg among all the Xen fauna throughout HLA. Maybe the Xen grenades could be a reference to the OF alien grenade launcher if you really want to push it? I mean Laidlaw has even said he didn’t consider the Gearbox games when writing HL2.
As for HL1 vs HL2… I dunno, they’re very different games. HL2 obviously wins in terms of narrative storytelling, but I totally see the argument when people say that HL1’s gameplay is more fun. On the other hand, I also think HL2’s more restrained weapon design came about because Valve was being more careful about crafting enemy encounters. Like in HL1 you get weapons like the Tau cannon which are super cool but Valve don’t seem to have thought the ammo placement through very well. It’s so rare that you get used to not using it unless all your other guns are out of ammo, which is also rare, even on hard mode. The Black Mesa fan project did a much better job of showcasing those lategame weapons (at least, unless you’re a fan of Tau jumping).
Edit, actual hot takes: HLA was extremely average, even among VR games; the only standout it has is looking pretty. The boat and car in HL2 aren’t bad. More lukewarm but Breen as a character is a fully selfish, evil prick and only uses “saving humanity” to justify himself to others, he doesn’t believe it at all.
Ah jeez I’m gonna stop. Feel no obligation to read any of that. But yeah I used to post about all kinds of half life stuff. Once I wound up permabanned from okbuddyhalflife when I argued that valve popularized lootboxes and gaben was not a good billionaire
Idk why I keep seeing comments like this, as though blame is a limited resource. For sure blame Republicans for actually being fascists, obviously, but Democrats deserve it too. This endgame has been visible since at least the 90s, and was impossible to miss by the time of the Tea Party. Over a decade of trying to compromise with unmistakeable fascists is inexcusable. Democrats repeatedly run a campaign playbook that both loses elections and shifts our political norms rightward over and over. Even now I see no signs that the party is interested in change. Fuck em.