dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

I can think of a couple of good candidates for a telefrag, or a very unexpected high speed kick to the nuts.

Nobody breaking into inhabited houses is going to show up holding a feather duster.

If an intruder knows he is intruding and he doesn’t leg it as soon as he realizes someone is in the house, it is a very reasonable assumption to make that he has also got some kind of weapon.

It’s not the taking the things that’s the issue, it’s that the method of taking the things inherently comes with the either implicit or explicit threat of bodily harm or violence in order for the criminal to get what he wants. Nobody’s going to break into your house for your stuff, or leap out of a dark alley and demand your wallet, and when you tell them “no” just shrug and walk away. They’re going to shove a gun in your face or try to beat you up.

If you show up with the intent of employing force, you absolutely should not be surprised if people employ force against you in turn.

That, and if you want to stick it to The Man there are much more suitable targets than victimizing individual people who just as likely have it as tough as you do. Go knock over a Walmart or something. For fuck’s sake.

Is that apostrophe there to boost engagement via griping about it in the comments?

You can always buy another one with just one afternoon’s worth of mind-numbing Robigo passenger runs.

That reminds me, my carrier is probably in a ton of debt.

…Meh. I’m pretty sure I can’t be bothered.

You really nailed it mentioning the scale of the world.

If you’d like a particularly egregious example, try playing Elite: Dangerous in VR. E:D’s universe makes no sense when it’s viewed in real scale, because the designers obviously made everything to look right on your flat screen with a 90 degree FOV or whatever, and didn’t think about the implications. And the same models and UI are used in VR as they are in flatland.

Like, Elite’s classic radar thingy. It’s hovering right over your console and about the size of a dinner plate, right?

Well, no… It’s actually the size of a kiddie pool and it’s six or eight feet forward of your chair. You can walk around the cockpits in the various ships at least to a limited degree, and even those in what are supposed to be compact and nimble single seat fighter craft are inexplicably cathedral-like. The cockpit canopy glass in an Asp Explorer is like 18 feet tall.

I came here with the intent of saying the same thing.

Maybe putting “immersion” and “VR” in the same paragraph is a cheap shot. But Alyx is the first and possibly only VR title that, in my opinion, actually manages to nail all the aspects of real world presence to the extent that it actually does feel at times that you are standing in a genuine place. It’s not just the visual design and fidelity of the world and the models in it, but all the little details and aspects added together that make HL:Alyx feel right, and when you go back to other VR titles afterwards you suddenly realize how they’ve been getting it so wrong all this time. Even other games that have “realistic” rather than cartoony graphics.

It’s things like the scale of the world, which feels genuine. A lot of VR games seem to scale their world slightly too large, and as a result there are lots of familiar objects in them that seem uncannily wrong until you figure out that their scale is off. All the doorframes are just too big, so you don’t feel like you’re getting stuck in them. But you’ve walked through a million doorframes in your life and they feel wrong. And the desk tops are nearly at chest height, so you don’t have to bend over to look at their contents. But you’ve sat at a desk a thousand times in your life so that feels wrong, too. Etc., etc.

Alyx doesn’t do this. Everything is life scale. This means that, yes, you probably will have to get down on your knees or grovel around on the ground to search the lower drawers in that desk or turn over all the boxes on the floor looking for ammo and resin. All the window frames are at realistic, rather than convenient, heights. So you might have to get down very low to avoid incoming fire below that windowsill. Or stand on your tiptoes to reach a top shelf.

Sometimes it’s just as simple as being able to look down and see yourself. Or see Alyx, anyway. So many VR games present you, the player, as just a floating pair of hands. Alyx doesn’t. As a matter of fact, the developers even experimented in the beginning with fully modeling Alyx from the perspective of the player, i.e. giving her not only hands but also arms and elbows. They gave up because the experience was visually disconcerting.

Then there’s things like the gunplay and manipulation of healing syringes and so forth. This is another aspect where a lot of “realistic” games fall down, by trying too hard to mimic real life firearms and tools which inevitably winds up shoehorning the controls onto the available buttons in a way that winds up feeling unnatural. But all the guns in Alyx are Half Life sci-fi guns, so Valve could make them work however they wanted to. So they seem real despite being pure fantasy, and operate in an intuitive manner that matches the controllers very well and feels right. The only thing I don’t like is the squeeze-to-arm grenades. I get it, but I think a ring-pull mechanic would have been a bit more intuitive as well as potentially allowing players to put the pin back in… (Perhaps, if you can’t put away the gun in your main hand in a hurry, an available gesture should have been pulling the ring out with your teeth.)

It’s also packed with incredible setpieces. I can’t list them all, but one that absolutely will stick with you is watching a 1:1 scale freight train careening at high speed with the wheels screaming mere feet away from your face, and crashing into a wall.

And despite being so immersive, Alyx is not an immersive sim. It’s thoroughly linear, and your interactions with most objects do boil down to shooting them, poking them, yanking a lever on them, slotting a key item into them, or throwing stuff at them. And every interactable for the most part only has one way for you to interact with it. Yet even despite this, emergent gameplay… well, emerges. I read a story online (and you probably did, too) about one player who absolutely could not stand leaving grenades and stims and grub jars lying around that they couldn’t use just then thanks to the limited inventory space. So they found a crate and dumped all their extra items in it and carried the crate around with them everywhere, throughout the entire campaign. And the game lets you do this. Even bringing your junk with you across loading zones. It is an incredible benefit to immersion if you can logically think of a thing and then find out that you are able to do that thing, even if it’s not an explicit game mechanic that was explained to you in a tutorial.

It’s unfortunate the barrier to entry to even be able to play this is so high, because it’s a damn shame a lot more people haven’t played it. Sure, you can watch a playthrough on Youtube or whatever but that absolutely does not do it justice. You have to be there.

Why does the “party of small government” think marriage and divorce are any part of the government’s business in the first place?

Oh. Right.

That looks like a ludicrously bad shop job. Also, Whirlpool appliance boxes are not printed in color like that.

And for anyone wondering, practically all of Whirlpool (and all the other “American” brands) refrigerators are made in Mexico. Just saying.

Even now cities cover a tiny fraction of the surface, and they’re already full of squirrels, rats, and pigeons.

I’ve been around long enough that I watched the original Gecko45 saga unfold in real-time.

Ever since, I have shamelessly lifted, oft employed, and slightly modified the general crux of the conversation, which is thus: "If plan B is to withstand getting shot with a .338 Lapua, maybe you should reevaluate what plan A was."

94% of Bosch is owned by the Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH, which is a charitable organization. They take a significant fraction, nearly half, of the profits not reinvested back into the company or distributed to founding family members and use the money for philanthropic purposes. And for the record, the portion distributed to heirs is comparatively tiny, like a quarter of a percent overall.

Most of the profits are indeed reinvested back into the company, but for the purposes of R&D and keeping the lights on, not appeasing shareholders.

Also Bosch, technically, in a weird and roundabout way.

…This is just normal basic business economics.

Your retail price is not predicated on what you paid to produce or obtain the product, it’s based on what you expect to have to pay to produce or procure the next one.

And watch the inevitable national scale strikes and protests bring the supply chain to a halt.

This is the part that is unlikely to happen. If past experience is any judge, the GOP’s propaganda machine will successfully shift the blame yet again, and morons will wholeheartedly believe that the solution to our problems is that the fuckheads aren’t being authoritarian enough, and we need to crack down harder on [insert bogeyman here].

2.) Consumer apathy. By which I mean consumers not giving a shit and consistently buying the cheapest garbage possible without regard for the long term cost.

This has some validity, but it is not as simple as just saying, “American consumers are stupid” and having done with it.

Quite a few shoppers, possibly even the majority, are living paycheck-to-paycheck and cannot afford anything other than whatever the cheapest thing on the shelf is. They are barred from making sound long-term purchasing decisions because they don’t bring in enough income to afford the superior product, even if they wanted to. It’s a case of, buy what they can afford regardless of low quality, or nothing. This is the real life version of the Vimes’ Boots Economic Theory.

I will also point out that a huge portion of spending by individual Americans is on perishable commodity goods with largely inelastic demand, the purchasing of which cannot be put off. In plain English, that’s food and fuel. I will also point out that these are two categories that are to many decimal places absolutely not tied to Chinese importation in any way whatsoever (in fact, the vast majority of food sold in America is grown and packed in America, and when you take prepared foods into account that number rises to near as makes no difference to 100%) so we automatically know that any supposed “tariff” increases on these products are in reality just a bullshit profit grab by retailers and/or Kraft-Heinz or Nabisco or whoever the fuck.

And immigrants, “wokeism,” and Obama, Joe Biden.

Yeah, well, this dickbird is already in and our chances of ever being able to legitimately get rid of him are, alas, extremely remote.

So this is only a problem in his own petty little smooth brain. And yet.

Speaking as a hoarder collector of many strange things, I still can’t comprehend the appeal of Funko Pops. Even if you’re super into whatever franchise the model in question is from, surely there is a better way to express it than by way of deformed simulacra with dead, soulless eyes. Just saying.