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.

Yeah, that guy’s not joking.

It’s not some kayfabe act. He is sincere in all of that posturing assholery.

Block and move on.

The flavor’s alright, but the texture is awful.

I’ve seen that flavor profile referred to as “squirrel gravy.”

Germany has brands of bottled curry sauce that are great on white rice.

I’ve never seen them in the US… but mayonnaise and curry powder is close enough.

Ranch noodles, though, I’ve served to guests all the time. It is exactly what it sounds like. You squirt ranch dressing all over fresh elbow / corkscrew pasta, and ideally cool overnight. It’s two-ingredient pasta salad. Ranch is buttermilk, garlic, dill, and a bunch of other spices. Great as a side. Add pepper.

Corned beef hash right out of the can is alarmingly close to dog food.

And better than it has any right to be.

Yeah, chips.

The FOSS story, yes. But the code is out there. Even the stuff they weren’t supposed to share.

Can you name any userbase more ready to pirate the shit out of a third-party fork? Maybe the people still using Media Player Classic.

Bill McKibben’s Enough is on my shelf purely so I can flip through it and get mad. A dense little paperback on how technology and progress should just stop. Not even return-with-a-v to some imagined utopia, like Ted Koweveritspelled. Straight-up ‘change might be bad, so let stop right here, the moment this book is published.’ Pushed with such flimsy arguments that my copy is about half post-it notes, by weight, from the month I read it for a philosophy class. They stop halfway. I just didn’t consider rebuttal necessary past a certain point. You don’t have to eat the whole turd to know it’s not a crabcake.

That said, we watched the black and white adaptation of The Fountainhead mid-semester, and it kinda works. Big surprise that the woman who hired an editor purely to check for typos had a more cogent opinion about authorship than she did about economics or human interaction. Probably helps that the movie’s over in two hours. Definitely helps that Gary Cooper can get it.

It’s the cliche answer for good reason. I think I appreciated it better than most people who hate it, and I still barely finished it for class. All the clumsy symbolism and retro-futuristic sci-fi schlock was right up my alley. The premise about rich terrorists absconding with all of the fucking money… not so much. The whole third act is just Ayn Rand’s vengeance fantasy about killing everyone who ever failed to agree with her hard enough. I was skimming through by that point, and still had to double-take and re-read where her derision toward “looters” included farmers.

My final paper roundly calling it a bloated screed by a mediocre author largely criticized it on its own terms and still turned vicious. John Galt is is among the worst monsters in literature because he wouldn’t feel satisfied having his name carved into the face of the moon in recognition of everything solved with his infinite energy glitch. Any mere worker acting as Rand insisted they should died in the apocalypse her tradwife-cosplaying nobility deliberately caused. It is a bad story about bad people told badly by a bad person, and the worst part is that it’s so fucking boring.

France, I think.

Not even Labyrinth is that horny.

Endingtron 3000 --> Startingtron 4000.

“Where’s the Popular People’s ZA/UM?”

“He’s over there.”

Homestuck still haunts the internet.

The browser should not be aiding it, regardless of how nice it acts. The most important extensions - by a fucking mile - are ad-blockers. They represent a crystal clear separation of websites delivering data versus what the user chooses to do with it. All threats to that distinction are a foot in the door for losing control of how your computer does what you want.

Quite frankly Mozilla’s been an obstacle to Firefox for many years. I don’t trust them and I don’t like them. This is yet another desperate pivot that squanders some of their vanishing goodwill and market share.

Burn the phoenix again.

Yeah, Bleem won that lawsuit. And the next lawsuit. And the next.

And then they ran out of money.