Incompetence would be so much better than what’s coming.

This should run on your computer.

I’ve been calling out this douchebag since his name first appeared on /r/BasicIncome, and my distaste has been vindicated over and over.

You can abuse the shit out of a PC speaker, even at 4.77 MHz.

OP has an essay due.

Oh, so you’re against the lesser evil because you just want more evil.

How are you not blocked by everyone? Here, I’ll help.

“Voting for Harris won’t change this foreign atrocity!”

Foreign atrocity remains unchanged, but now you’ve got domestic atrocities.

“See! I’m helping!”

• Wet bastard (hated)

• Dry bastard (adored)

Okay great, so the problem was unavoidable, in this decision. It made no difference. Why the fuck should we have that problem, and also outright fascism?

Will this result make that better?

No, seriously. If that’s the biggest issue, to the exclusion of all others - does this event make it better, or worse?

Do early voting next time!

And vote so there is a next time.

Optical countershading!

For stealth.

… BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

Half-Life as a live-action film, in continuous first-person.

The game is deliberately cinematic to begin with. You’d cut down a brisk run-through to maybe an hour of set-pieces and combat, then build out the “dialog.” In quotations because I would make Gordon canonically mute. It’d become thematic.

Gordon took the hazard course qualifications that secretly exist to staff the extraterrestial excursion team, but they’re not quite desperate enough to risk having an astronaut who can’t use the radio, so he’s stuck on Earth pushing rocks. Without a helmet, because the excursion team keeps losing equipment, what with getting attacked by aliens. The aliens think the guys in orange suits are a distinct subspecies… which keeps kidnapping their kind.

Vortigaunts in particular would be seen maybe trying communicate with scientists in labcoats (a subspecies marked by their ridiculous ties) only to spot Gordon and freak out. They all hate the POV character on-sight. If they’re on-camera, they’re gonna start waving their hands to cast deadly lightning. They’d even try to communicate with the bug-eyed subspecies in splotchy green outfits, only to get shredded by submachinegun fire. The military wears those dehumanizing masks (and speaks over radio comms you can hear) because all they were told is “secret experiments, actual zombies, existential threat.” They saw one distended human with a jaw for his ribcage and the strength to slap a dude in half, and they didn’t ask any further questions.

This all comes together in Interloper. Gordon sees the biological factory where these creatures are enslaved to manufacture more of themselves. The ones inside know nothing about Earth. They prance up, curious and burbling incoherently, pawing all over Gordon’s bright orange carapace. He sticks a gun in their faces and they consider the object fascinating. But when he puts it away and tries communicating in sign language, they scatter, and a few start waving their hands to zap him. Gordon Freeman was chosen for this event because he is physically incapable of any outcome but one.

At that point, use AI as a filter. It’d be the perfect setting for some mild gloop.

If you forget the second step, well, that’s what sweet potatoes are.

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is a fucking crime.

Awful.systems banned me immediately and permanently for one (1) detailed but televisable comment going ‘oh great, this again.’ Some places just want a megaphone to enforce their circlejerk.

I can recommend a big stupid project where it’s not a big deal if you fail.

Until recently, for me that would’ve meant “run Windows programs on Android,” mashing together Wine and e.g. Unicorn Engine… but now there’s like six different “userland emulators” vying for preference. FEX-emu, Box86, others with even sillier names.

I did manage a bespoke 8-bit FPS. That only took about two months. And then I’ve been idly tweaking it over the last two years. Splitscreen multiplayer, as a joke, was maybe not the best idea.

What’d take both time and space is some extremely low-end VR. I am convinced that Quest-ish headsets could cost, like, fifty bucks. The big players keep iterating clever hacks from a decade ago. Solving those problem, instead of avoiding those problems. Light should be collimated by default, which means a point source, which is any single LED. Rendering has to be detached from software performance, which means projecting the nearby world to e.g. floating dots instead of directly making a flat image. Inside-out tracking is at least the right idea, but it doesn’t have to be especially good in order to ground an inertial estimate.