dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

There’s also a small chance it’s a lame train of inside jokes, or a string of Monty Python quotes you’ve seen a thousand times before.

I’ll start:

“This. Is an *Ex-*parrot!”

You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.

Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.

This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.

Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.

I like this one:

Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.

It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.

“All” digital tech?

I don’t think most people realize that any powertrain new enough to even have fuel injection is going to be a “computer vehicle” in some capacity. How are you with carburetors?

Windows 98 SE, maybe. We didn’t gain much traction there until about Win2k or XP.

Windows 98 in its original flavor didn’t even support USB mass storage devices out of the box without drivers. Hands up everyone who remembers having to carry around one of those tiny driver CDs that came in the box with every single Sandisk Cruzer for a couple of years? Yeah? How quickly we forget.

As already thoroughly explored in the apparent documentary “99 Red Balloons,” in 1984.

For fuck’s sake.

In terms of Windows 11? You can move the start button back to the lower left corner in the settings, but you can’t stick the taskbar itself to the sides or top of your monitor nor resize it like you could do in previous versions. Even Windows 95 supported all of the above.

The functionality is still there, mind you, and you can do it via registry hacks or third party tools. Microsoft just saw fit to remove the option for the user to do it themselves for some inexplicable reason.

I’ll bet I can make your left eye twitch.

Are you ready?

A “large” amount of information.

Bitch, my computer has 128 gigabytes of RAM. It’s a tiny god. The fact that I have as many as 100 cells copied to the clipboard (which is the threshold that triggers this stupid message, if you’ve ever wondered) is not even a rounding error. I’m sure this was marginally important in 1982 or whenever this was first coded into Excel, but today my computer could lose an entire megabyte of memory or maybe even ten down between the couch cushions and neither of us would notice.

There is still no setting to disable this dumbshit message.

Regarding She-who-must-not-be-named, somebody already kinda tried it, it didn’t work because the fomrer was already in possession of large sums of money by that time (and the challenge was kind of spurious anyway) and then everyone forgot about it.

I imagine I’d make a not totally incompetent blacksmith, or some other equivalent allied trade. In fact, I’d probably have a better chance at that 300 or so years ago than now.

Yes, I do already have my own anvil. Jury’s out on whether or not I feel like lugging it with me, though. The fucker is heavy.

Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.

I do too, but I’d highly doubt it will. It’s well known that Meta sells every headset at a loss and funds the expenditure via revenue from their gargantuan advertising and spy network, specifically to squeeze out competitors and make it harder to enter the VR market as a newcomer. Zuck Zuck still thinks all the prime real estate in the metaverse is going to be his, because he only read the first half of Snow Crash.

Gabe is a rich man and I assume he and his company could take this approach as well if they wanted to, at least temporarily. But based on their pricing for their past hardware (particularly the Steam Deck), I predict they won’t.

Insufficient pedantry detected.

The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably ought to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.

Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.

It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.

The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.

A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)

FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.

That was never actually an official statement. It was an offhand comment by some staffer that didn’t carry any legal weight nor accurately describe the internal trajectory for Windows in any way. As much as we like to poke fun at it regardless.

It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.

It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.

I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.

I’d happily put an orange Gabecube right next to it.

As opposed to what, buying a viable phone from those other guys?

What other guys?

At minimum a stampede of people moving to iPhones should theoretically cause Google to shit enough of a brick (providing capitalism actually works as advertised, and for the record I am trying like hell to keep a straight face as I type this) to correct their behavior in an attempt to win some of those users back.

Because at the end of the day most consumers are consumers, not nerds, and if neither platform is going to allow you control over your device and they’re both privacy nightmares you’re not much worse off with an iDevice if you plan on owning a smartphone in the first place.

What we really need is a viable third option. Hopefully an inherently non-shitty one. The barrier to market entry seems pretty high, though.