LexiMax

I would posit that Foster was actually based on the trope of a jilted government worker "Going Postal" which was very much in the public consciousness at the time. And in my personal opinion, he's also very much coded as an abusive ex, someone who is so focused on what he wants and what he's entitled to the point where he wakes up one day and says "You know what, I'm just going to ignore that restraining order" while leaving a path of destruction in his wake. You might empathize with his inability to cope with modern life in some way, but you weren't supposed to root for him. I see his estranged wife as being incredibly fortunate to have separated from him when she did, as based on the actions we see Foster take during the movie she dodged a bullet, both metaphorically and literally.

This is another good one. All of the heroes in Watchmen are seriously flawed individuals. Rorschach was modeled on Batman, but portrayed as how someone with Batman's mentality would turn out in real life, not a billionaire playboy driven by his loss, but a down on his luck misanthrope whose lust for vigilantism comes at the cost of his humanity. He wanders the streets hating society, leeching off of his "friends", and not caring if he lives or dies. It's really unfortunate that the movie dialed down on the misanthropy, because he was never intended to be aspirational, but instead a self-righteous and doomed sociopath. In the comics, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre don't even mourn him when he dies, preferring to mutually comfort each other over their shared trauma.

I've seen that sort of analysis of Foster before in casting him as the anti-hero, and they all hit one very specific roadblock - the fact that Foster's mission from minute one is to stalk his ex-wife. It also doesn't foot with the ending, where it's demonstrated through the video flashback that he wasn't a goodie two shoes who had one bad day, but had anger issues going back years. The actual take-away from the movie is what the cop tells Foster - the world is full of bullshit, but that's not an excuse to start a rampage. You can argue over how widely applicable that advice is, but it's almost certainly true for a man like Foster - someone with a long career in a lucrative industry who had only been out of work for a month. He could have gone to therapy to work on his anger and found another job - maybe using that time that he spent trying to keep up the charade with his mother.

I feel like "Dead Internet" a lot more believable these days, and it comes down to economic incentives. Older sites used to use third-party advertising platforms. These third parties made an active effort to clamp down on inauthentic engagement with their advertising. If a site owner is getting a bot to repeatedly click on an ad, or even encouraging their users to click on ads as a precondition of using a site, that increases the amount they have to pay the site owners, as well as opening themselves up to complaints from advertisers who find out that their ad spend is being wasted. Modern social media got rid of that barrier - now the same site that generates and tracks engagement also sells advertising. Because inauthentic engagement doesn't cost them money from site owners, the only people who have to be convinced are the end users themselves and the advertisers. I'm not going to go so far as to accuse any specific social media company of knowingly defrauding their advertisers by giving them analytics they know are 50% bot interactions through their own complicity. However, I do find it curious how my GMail inbox that I've had since the early 2000's and has been in more leaks than I can count is mostly free of unsolicited spam, while the comments section of most social media sites is absolutely rotten with low effort garbage written by month-old accounts with an avatar you can find on a stock photo site. Somehow, I don't think it's just the scale of social media that's the problem.

Linux is perfectly fine, thanks to the ability of projects like WINE and Proton to run Win32 games natively in most cases. The real issue is with the GNU/Linux POSIX-flavored desktop ecosystem. It is not a very accommodating platform to target unless you either cede control of distributing your software to the distros themselves or cordon your app off from the rest of the system using some form of container.

Wine and Proton aren't emulators, they expose a stable Win32 ABI on Linux that games and other applications can use to run natively on Linux.

They don't care about Desktop GNU/Linux either, because it does a good-enough job of tripping over its own shoelaces without Microsoft having to lift a finger.

It sounds like a good deal until you look at the things that 0patch has actually patched for their previous releases - the list is not very long, and they charge $26 per seat for year. I would just suck it up and update to Windows 11. People always complain about updates to Windows, and you're likely to find just as many things to like about the update as annoy you. Besides, in many ways 11 is just 10 with a new coat of paint, with similar compatibility expectations, to the point where they didn't even bother to bump the internal version number past 10.0.

I have a soft spot for Inferno, and most of that has to do with the fact that Inferno actually feels like Hell most of the time, as opposed to Doom 2 whose browner and greyer takes on the setting fell flat for me. The levels I truly don't care for are E5, E7 and E8. E3M5 annoys me as a missed opportunity. The level does approximate a cathedral in the center, but the level feels half-finished and the navigation puzzle contained therein is way too easy to figure out. E3M7 is ruined by the damaging floors. Get rid of them, or add a few more islands of safety, and I think it would be much more enjoyable. My annoyance at E3M8 has to do with how bad the Spider Mastermind is as a final boss. It looks cool, but the gameplay design of the monster itself leaves much to be desired.

There is a curator I like to follow on Steam that tracks Actual Roguelikes that you can get on Steam.

Latest version: 10.5.0 (May 5, 2024) Release Post Website: https://odamex.net/ Download: Github Discord: https://discord.gg/aMUzcZE Odamex is a portable source port with a focus on client/server multiplayer of classic Doom, Boom, MBF and early ZDoom content. Odamex's interface resembles its old-school ZDoom roots, but the port is close enough to Vanilla to run many (but not all) Doom 1.9 demos, including the demo reel. At the same time, the port supports many modern amenities like a truecolor software renderer, uncapped framerates, on-the-fly WAD loading, slopes and other ZDoom mapping features, and of course online client/server multiplayer with up to 255 simultaneous players. You can find more information about the latest version of Odamex (10.5.0) in the release post linked above. What follows in the spoiler is the original post containing the patch notes for Odamex 0.9.0.

Odamex 10.5.0 has been released. Download it from Github or Sourceforge! This is a minor release with mostly quality of life fixes. The client has seen a number of useful updates. One of the more notable additions in 10.5.0, @loopfz improved the in-game wad downloader so that it can now download files with mixed case file names. That means server admins no longer have to host wads that are either all upper case or lower case. This will be incredibly useful for server admins looking to host servers with many wads. @ceski has improved controller support by improving analog stick deadzones, as well as flushing unused game controller events. @chewi has improved our general codebase by correcting some aliasing errors in multiple areas of the code, along with other general code fixes. @matoro has also helped update our CMake configuration. Also, a shout out to @bcahue for improving our demo testing suite, which helps us continue to strive toward full vanilla Doom compatibility. For a full list of changes and contributors, check out the list below: Added When a player becomes a spectator, display the number of kills & deaths they had in a message. Added Freedoom 0.13.0 support to the IWAD Loader. Thanks @GeorgePieVG! Added par times for Chex Quest. Thanks @Acts19quiz! Changed g_coopthingfilter is now g_thingfilter. This variable can be used to: 1) remove weapons flagged for cooperative; 2) remove all things flagged for cooperative; or 3) remove all things that can be picked up. Thanks @loopfz! Improvement to game controller support, via improved deadzones and flushing unused game controller events. Thanks @ceski-1! Updated the network connection error graphic to include text indicating there is a network issue. Improvements to SIMD flags in our CMake configuration. Thanks @matoro! Fixed The in-game wad downloader can now locate wad files with mixed case file names. Thanks @loopfz! MBF21 instakill sector no longer kills players in IDDQD mode. Thanks @Sbzro12345! Corrected aliasing errors in multiple areas of the code, along with other general code improvements. Thanks @chewi! Improved vanilla demo testing and accuracy over last release. Backed out changes to conveyor handling introduced in 10.4.0. These changes fixed thing behavior on conveyors, but caused some monsters to no longer spawn in-game. Fixed compiling on Mac OSX where internal system libraries for LIBPNG and ZLIB were being called. Fixed a crash when changing wads with different HORDEDEFs. Thanks @LexiMax!

From the reporting I've seen, the authors of Yuzu flew WAY too close to the sun. If the lawsuit had proceeded, the discovery process would have allowed Nintendo to peek behind the curtain at all of their private conversations. I suspect the Yuzu authors figured that such a process would have painted them in an incredibly poor light and would have broken any illusion about not supporting or financially benefiting from piracy, so they took the prudent way out. That said, there is evidence that Nintendo wants to open the door to being able to put emulators out of business. One critical and sometimes-overlooked part of the settlement is thus (source): Even if this wish isn't granted, I think it's pretty clear that Nintendo is specifically seeking out court precedent that any piece of software that relies on DRM circumvention by their users is inherently illegal. This precedent would kill Switch emulation dead by opening any Switch emulator developer to liability - not only now, but in the foreseeable future, since there would be technically no legal way to dump the keys from your Switch to make an emulator work in the first place.

Not from the actual game, but this Rhythm Heaven remix of Girl Hell 1999 is a bop

Samus Aran. Easily.

A game gets bonus points from me if it uses the term "clip" instead of "magazine."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_Eternal I think you vastly underestimate the number of gamers who do not own PC's and whose only engagement with MyHouse was to watch a YouTuber play through the level.

This is what classic Doom is for anybody who doesn't have an account on Doomworld. https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/doom-1993-switch/ https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/doom-1993/9PLZPHBNHTMF https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP1003-CUSA15594_00-DOOM199300000000 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2280/DOOM_1993/ For this crowd, Doom mods are the sorts of things you can easily download and play on these ports. Think Sigil and BTSX, not Brutal Doom.

I could not function on Windows 7. It's not a supported configuration from at least one of the NDA'ed SDK's I use. Visual Studio 2022, the first native 64-bit version of Visual Studio, has dropped support for Windows 7. I think Visual Studio 2019 still works, but you can't use Address Sanitizer on Windows 7, which I consider critical to my development workflow. Firefox is either going to drop support or has already dropped support. Modern versions of Python don't run on Windows 7, and you can pry the improved typing support in later versions from my cold, dead hands. Windows Terminal, a tool I consider indispensable as a heavy command prompt user, requires Windows 10. Not only that, but it can replace the default Conhost systemwide on Windows 11 without any nasty form of DLL injection. Windows Subsystem for Linux, by far the easiest way to run Linux on Windows, requires Windows 10. Upgrading to Windows 11 gets you native GUI support too.

This is kind of funny, but in a sad way. If you're going to write your own awards - it helps if you actually WRITE your own awards.

GTA 5's writing had been going on for literal decades in other forms of media. Irony and cynicism were very common in the zeitgeist at the time, and still are today. The problem with leaning too hard into that style of writing like GTA5 did is that it doesn't really have anything to say. It just satirizes and deconstructs things into oblivion, and then shrugs in the wreckage of its destruction, as if it was some inevitable part of the human condition. David Foster Wallace called that style of writing corrosive to the soul, and I agree with him. Why does everything have to suck all the time? What's wrong with a teachable moment or a light at the end of the tunnel or a real human emotion every so often?

As was CJ from GTA: San Andreas. And the playable cast of both Red Dead games. I don't remember Tommy Vercetti or the voiceless protagonist from GTA3 having enough character depth to register either positively or negatively - they felt like player self-inserts. GTA5 on the other hand had by far the most unlikable protagonists in a Rockstar game I can remember, and the entire game was full of such poisonous, nihilistic irony that it was tough to find anybody to root for.

WASD for moving around, E for use. Number keys 1-5 are weapons, Q and R are the Plasma and BFG. Left mouse is fire, right mouse is strafe on.

I've heard it put another way - it's really difficult to reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. People don't become Nazis because there's any basis to the ideology. They do it because they're sociopaths, opportunists, or at the very least have unjustified grievances towards others. You don't fight that with reasoned debate, you fight it by upending the source of their underlying grievances or just straight up ostracism.

I always thought that the frontpage was a good feature. Besides /newstuff, it was nice to be able to follow major releases and breakthroughs in speed-running all in one spot.