Yes, thank you. Not invented for a film, but the film is where the fascists took it from.

Thank you

See the “Roman salute”. Not actually Roman, but instead invented for a film about Romans. Italian fascists liked it and adopted it. Then the Nazis liked it and adopted it from the Italian fascists.

It doesn’t matter that it’s not actually Roman, it’s still something that the fascists can do in order to pretend to be Roman.

Inspector Gadget, too.

Easily the best terminator property after the first two. I mean that’s not a high bar, but i mean it should be held in the same esteem as they are.

How is it with nVidia?

One thing that GIMP was always far superior on was cutting people out from single-colour backgrounds. All kinds of hassle on any other tool, with even the simplest workflow needing a tonne of refining and touching up. With GIMP, you just select the colour & hit “color to alpha”. Done. It even gets all the tricky hair semi-transparencies.

I forget who it was, but a public figure once said that birthdays are horrible because it allows people you thought you were close to to demonstrate how little they really know you

Scientists from Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry found that children diagnosed as autistic earlier in life (typically before six years old) were more likely to show behavioural difficulties from early childhood, such as problems with social interaction.

However, those diagnosed with autism later on in life (in late childhood or beyond) were more likely to experience social and behavioural difficulties during adolescence.

I assume that the paper itself frames this a little differently, because what this is saying is trust there’s a correlation between when traits become noticeable and when people get a diagnosis. Which is what you’d expect. You don’t tend to diagnose people who don’t exhibit the traits required for diagnosis.

I didn’t stop and verify, but I’ve literally just seen a post on here which says that Israel has violated the ceasefire 3 days running at this point.

There was a story a couple of years ago about corporations trying to get people to work unpaid hours while working from home. The logic, such as it was, went like this: if you live an hour’s commute away from work and you work an 8-hour day, then you’re actually spending 10 hours of your day dedicated to work because the travel time isn’t time you get to do whatever you want in. Therefore, since you’re used to work taking up 10 hours of your time, you should also spend 10 hours working while working from home.

It’s astonishing, really.

Yeah, we can basically just put every speedrunner of every game into this topic. “Man, I love this game so much. Let’s see if I can break it so I can 100% it in under a minute!”/“This is the best shooter ever made! Let’s see if I can complete it without hurting anybody!”

There seems to be one or two Sims channels on YouTube where the people running the channel have little or no interest in playing the game and instead just build and furnish houses/shops.

Not me, but there’s a great example of this in chess.

There’s an opening called the Bongcloud. You move the pawn in front of your king out for your first move, and then for your second move you move your king up a square. It’s memed as being the strongest opening possible, but it’s actually almost the worst 2 opening moves you can possibly make. Because modern chess does have a large online component and the current best players are young and like memes, it has been played in tournaments, which means that if you play it in an up to date chess programme the programme will name it as the Bongcloud.

A lot of people seem to think that it’s called the Bongcloud because you’d have to be stoned to play it. But almost all chess openings are named after one of three things: a person, a place, or an animal. In this case, the Bongcloud is named after a person - Lenny Bongcloud.

Lenny Bongcloud is a now-inactive user of chess.com. He would always open with the moves described above. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, Lenny wasn’t playing the same game as his opponents. They were trying to checkmate him. He was trying to walk his king to the opposite side of the board as quickly as possible. If he gets checkmated, he loses. If he gets his king to the other side of the board he counts it as a victory and resigns.

So, yeah. One of the oldest known games in the world has an opening the “official” name of which comes from a jokey alias adopted by someone who was deliberately playing the game wrong.

Sure, I’m just arguing against the framing of this as “he got this super-graphics-intense programme to run on a PC which would have been considered a relic at the time”, when actually he ran significantly downgraded graphics on a PC which would have been 2 years old at the time.

I haven’t seen that in ages. The main thing I remember being wowed at was her hair.

Brave probably still wears that crown now, though.

The article says it’s a 2002 laptop and says it would have been “significantly out of date” when Half-Life 2 launched. Half-Life 2 launched in 2004. So that’s 2 years. He’s also reduced the resolution to 512x512 - less than half the original resolution - and hasn’t recreated several of the lighting effects.

I don’t know what unoptimised games this is supposed to be a middle finger to specifically, but it strikes me that it wouldn’t be considered particularly out of the ordinary to find a modern game that could run on a 2023 machine at less than half resolution and with significantly reduced lighting effects.

There are two types of people in the world:

1. Those who divide the world into two types of people
2. Those who do not divide the world into two types of people

If you do check it out, then I’ve got two recommendations. The first is as I’ve already said - try to know as little as possible going in. Progression is the aquisition of knowledge, so the more you know going in, the more cool discoveries you’re not allowing yourself to have organically.

The second is to not treat it as a game. Every person I’ve seen not like the game has treated it as a game with quests and having to finish an area before progressing to the next, etc. etc.

Instead be the character, and be in the world they’re in. If you see something and think “oh, that looks interesting”…go and look at the interesting thing. If you see something and think “oh, does that mean…” …go and find out if it does mean. And if you get distracted by something shiny along the way, get distracted by the shiny thing.

Lots of games sell themselves as being open world. This game really is, one necessary trigger right at the start aside. It’s my most-watched YouTube let’s play because every single person who plays it has a very, very different path through it. The first thing one player does might be something that another player does right before the end. And it’s so well-written that both are equally rewarding and make the player feel like they’ve discovered things in the “right” order.

And that is a big part of what gives it its power. It’d honestly make a good film, book, or TV series. But none of them would be as good as the game, because here you’re not being told the story, you’re discovering it for yourself, and in a way that nobody else quite has.

I’m very evangelical for this game (can you tell?), but that’s because it really is an experience. There’s a review quote used in one of the trailers which calls it a “once-in-a-generation game”. I really, strongly, believe that to be true. There’s nothing else quite like it, and I want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to experience it, because - more than anything else I’ve ever played - you really can only play it for the first time once.

If we’re specifically doing recent games, then Outer Wilds really is a once-in-a-lifetime gaming experience. Which, if you’ve not played it, you really want to play with as few spoilers as possible. It’s genuinely one of the most profoundly moving experiences I’ve had while consuming any media.