QuaketallicA

I love the flashy colors and lighting, and the music is simply AMAZING. Seriously soooo good. Map 03's track could've been a hit Billy Idol song, and Map 04's would've been right at home in a Contra game. This wad is just pure fun. :D I couldn't get past the Lady Eye stage without using cheats. Gets very slaughter mappy the deeper you go into the wad.

Well there's nothing really to weigh. id are kind enough to give us both versions now for anybody who has one or the other.

Both are good. I prefer original Doom 3 for the darker lighting and having to swap between flashlight and guns. Those who complained about that when it first came out entirely missed the point that the choice was not about being unrealistic, but done intentionally for setting the mood. I've also played BFG edition though, and it is also nice to play through the levels with somewhat improved visibility. They're just alternative ways that each have their own benefits. BFG edition also comes with a new Doom 3 episode and a new Doom II episode, both of which are high quality.

In Doom 1 I pretty much know all of the secrets, and Doom II I probably know like 99% of them so getting them or not is merely a matter of whether I care to. If it's Wolfenstein, then no there's no way I'm getting all secrets. Probably about 40-50% of secrets. If it's a custom Doom wad, then I'll try to go for as many secrets as I can find, but if there's one or two stragglers impossible to find, I'll just move on to the next level. Secret % is the only one I really care about. You're going to get almost all kills just by beating the level, and if there's 1 or 2 missed they're probably in the secret areas anyway. I don't care about 100% items. (That said I can and have at some point done 100% all items in the vanilla game. It's just a matter of whether I care to go and pick up every last health bonus etc.)

Playing Xen for the first time some years back, the abstract art style reminded me of playing Ocarina of Time as a kid. Of course the graphics are of the same era, but there's something to be said about the more hallucinogenic vibes of the original alien world that are imo more fitting. The Black Mesa Xen, from what I've seen, is more like the worlds in Halo, which I think is a little more friendly than the hostile world Valve was going for.

I didn't really check out the new update nor do I care to. I'm just glad they made it optional and let me stick to the previous build, for now. I just hope they don't eventually "phase out" that version and then you're stuck with the new update. I know old school fans might be used to the original look, but I am used to Half-Life the way it was pre-25th Anniversary, and I like it that way.

I would categorically disagree with your assessment of the President. I always found his speeches to be quite authoritative in nature, and speaking the common sense that was and remains so desperately needed, but remains so rare. That the public is less enthused with him says more about the endemic danger presented by lying news organizations, tribalism, and social media bubbles. Trump's entire appeal is not based around charisma. It is based around telling blatant and obvious lies, which as is famously remarked, get half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, and he simply repeats the lies often enough that any proportion of the population believe him no matter how brazenly absurd they are. It's like advertisements. Show them to enough people, and even the tiny 1% that are moved to purchase will still be hundreds of thousands of new consumers. Only the buyers in this case are voters. According to Pew, in 2020 and 2021, roughly half of Americans say they get their news from social media. Roughly 7 in 10 have said they have ever gotten news from social media. Put aside how Fox News was found legally liable for damages based on lies they made regarding voter fraud in the 2020 election. Just think about how completely biased, misleading, unfactual, and hyper-partisan "news" on social media is. So anywhere between half the country and and a majority are getting their news from social media rather than at least professional journalists. Don't you think that might have some influence on why the polling numbers are so low? Furthermore, I think Biden's greatest enemy is probably the economy, which in peacetime is typically voters' greatest motivating factor. As someone with a degree in economics, it was crystal clear to me that emergency procedures that were necessary during the Pandemic--injecting money in to keep people from going broke while they couldn't work, and the Fed lowering rates--would inevitably lead to much inflation. Inflation was the cost, the necessary evil. It was compounded by the Ukraine war with the loss of access to Russian oil. However, even with the Fed having raised rates since then--I believe the Federal Funds Rate currently sits at 5.3%--inflation persists, at the pump and in grocery outlets. So I would argue persistently high prices have also factored into a negative perception of the administration's handling of the economy, even though in my opinion Biden and Jerome Powell have made the right moves.

I know this might have been forgotten after 2015, but politics actually isn't supposed to be a reality tv show or a circus. The President should be judged by his actions; how he governs. Not whether he can get tv ratings or how interesting he is to listen to. If politicians did their job right, they should be as boring to watch as C-SPAN. Election battlegrounds are fought on issues of policy and belief, but realistically, the President himself is quite limited in how much he can affect policy changes. Outside of executive action/orders, legislation is the domain of Congress, not the President. What the President is truly judged by is how he responds to the inevitable crises that will arise during his tenure. Bush Jr. campaigned on education reform but his administration is defined by foreign wars. Obama's legacy is in good part his child, the ACA, but perhaps moreso guiding the economy out of the Great Recession, and later on, combating ISIS. When it came to the pandemic, Biden's administration actually followed the science, bought the vaccines before any other nation, and managed an efficient distribution to all Americans to get the pandemic over and the economy back asap. When war broke out in Ukraine, he has been a leading force in financially and militarily supporting Ukraine without escalating the conflict or dragging NATO into a WW3 with Russia. (That might seem like a no-brainer, but many politicians in Congress, mostly Republicans, are actually against continuing to aid Ukraine now. Tucker Carlson even questioned whether Putin was in the wrong.) And Biden is right to support Israel, although I would like a little more concern for civilian casualties and bystanders in Gaza. Israel needs a measured response in the region, with a well-thought out long term agenda, not merely vengeance on Hamas. They should learn from our mistakes after 9/11, and we could condition our aid on these factors.

Democrats are "center right"? Lol, they've taken a sharp turn farther to the left in recent years, and in retaliation, the populist, MAGA wing has hijacked the Republican party. What we need are more centrists to anchor American politics in normalcy and get the more radical, extremist wings of both the parties in check. I don't know where this ludicrous image of Biden as "senile" keeps coming from. Perhaps because Biden spends more time actually getting work done than fighting trolls on Twitter. American elections very often come down to a lesser of two evils. But in 2020, it wasn't just that Trump was scandal-ridden, had a track record of incompetence and lies during the pandemic, was twice impeached and deserved to be removed but got bailed out by McConnel and GOP cronies; such that literally anybody else would've been preferable. Joe Biden actually was demonstrably the most qualified man in America for the position, and I say that as an independent. Has he fucked up since getting in office? Sure, he's not perfect. Yet nobody, not even Republicans, will criticize the easy target that was his disastrous decision to leave Afghanistan, or even the royally botched execution of that inherently flawed policy. Instead, the biggest complaint of Biden...is ageism? That he's old? For real? (Yes, because Trump is such a young guy by comparison). Every time this asinine, ageist complaint is raised, I'm reminded of another man who was one of our country's greatest presidents, and who at the time, was the oldest POTUS in history. Another man whose record, while revered, was also far from perfect and had blemishes.

Isn't that like, all of them? That's all I ever see from today's average youtuber. Hell, that's all I see from every website that appears in search engines. I recently discovered a channel called BriTANick which reminded me, with a sliver of nostalgia (though that word is overused as hell), just what internet videos and original Youtube used to be about. Videos that were funny skits, each just a few minutes long (as opposed to today's half hour or hour-long videos that drag on forever wasting your time filibustering about nothing). And I felt like I watched something that was actually good. Reminds me of Smosh or College Humor around 2009-2012. Clearly these guys had a background in film/theater because they were quite talented. Indeed, somebody at Hollywood must have felt likewise, since they've apparently written on SNL and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They even got Nathan Fillion of Firefly & Castle to cameo in one of their skits. I found it remarkable that such a channel should be found at all, because what was once expected and commonplace is now a rare gem in the ocean of banality.

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There's nothing wrong with a healthy skepticism. That's why it's important to better trust the peer-reviewed articles (though those are not always infallible either), rather than academic papers that have not faced the scrutiny of others in their field.

Am I living in the past, or are you living in the future? Between the global pandemic, the rise of scarily good a.i. language models, and self-driving cars already being out on our streets--not to mention China's orwellian social credit system, I think it's safe to say the sci-fi future is here, both the impressive, technological marvel one, and the terrifyingly dystopian one.

I can understand wanting to ditch support for old games that don't sell, and are dirt cheap when they do anyway, but yeah pulling them from stores was a terrible move. I'm glad I bought them before that happened. I have all the UT's and Unreal 1 and 2 on Steam. It's quite sad that this is the present culture. Classic FPS games get the shaft, while micro-transaction marketplace: the game, is now the face of the company and industry.

The Bible would be a chief example of this. On an tangential note, I discovered the following while reading one of Dawkins' books (not one of his on religion, but evolution rather). Apparently, the famous miracle of the virgin birth of Jesus from Mary was itself likely an error in translation. Apparently, the original Hebrew word used for virgin did not itself imply virginity, just that she was a young maiden. But the later Greek translations used a similar word with a slightly different connotation that did imply virginity. That meaning then got carried on to the English translations, like a game of chinese whispers. Read more on it here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2016/12/07/debunking-nativity-mistranslation-virgin/