dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Pompoko, sometimes subtitled “The Raccoon War.”

    That scene is among the least zany things that happen in it. You should check it out; it is absolutely worth a watch. Especially if you’re into Japanese mythology and yōkai. So in that vein, I’m going to throw down some nerd trivia, now.

    Yes, those raccoons (tanuki, actually) were attacking people with their balls. This is consistent with Japanese folklore.

    The tanuki are Japanese racoon dogs, are traditionally tricksters, and are said to have shapeshifting powers. Mario’s raccoon and “tanooki” suit (arguably misspelled in the English translation) is based on this:

    This includes the ability to turn into a statue…

    …which is something that the tanuki also do in the movie, or attempt to do, with varying success:

    Note also how they use their, er, sacks to glide. Does that remind you of anything?

    You’ll never look at him the same way ever again.


  • I figure “half Vulcan” is a qualification, just one peg below “Vulcan.”

    Given that the Vulcans are, to the very last one, completely logical beings tantamount to walking computers. I don’t think any of them would object to being called such. No Vulcan worth his insignia is going to make a snap decision based on emotion, nor on bad facts or flawed reasoning. This is basically saying, if even a Vulcan thinks this shit is whack, it is indeed whack. “Look man, every single damn T is crossed in this thing. We even had a Vulcan sign off on it and everything. He checked all the math. Twice. In four seconds.”


  • Emulators are the answer. Collecting is becoming completely divorced from playing, and for some platforms it’s not a matter of becoming – it already is.

    I have a pretty sizable retro game collection myself, both consoles and games to play on them, but I take it as a point of pride that everything I have is playable and sometimes I do play it. Nothing I own is just there to hang on the wall. Some of it is theoretically valuable, although I certainly don’t have anything sealed or graded, nor do I want to.

    I think there is a particular kind of value in something that can actually be used. I feel the same about some of the other crap I collect, in particular pens and knives.






  • The new port is not perfectly fine if it randomly crashes to desktop all the time.

    Oh, and I also forgot to mention that several of the achievements are still bugged and don’t pop, which has been a known issue since release and still hasn’t been fixed. So yeah. Bethesda is gonna do Bethesda stuff.

    You can still have a “vanilla” experience using other source ports. That’s what, e.g. Chocolate Doom is for. Except it may stay running on your PC for more than eleven consecutive minutes at a time. So if that’s what turns your crank, go for it. You’re right – not everything needs to be GZDoom and Brutal. But other options definitely exist, and I recommend any of them over what was shoveled out officially. You can even have a pretty durn vanilla experience in GZDoom if you want to, while still retaining much broader support for mods than the official release. Me personally, I can’t do mouse control with no vertical look. It made me seasick in the 90’s, and it still does now. That’s a deal breaker. I was a keyboard-only player in the DOS era.

    I will also add that if you are going to play the new Sigil expansions or Legacy of Rust, they’re virtually impossible on Ultra Violence and Nightmare without mouselook. These maps were clearly designed with a modern source port including mouse aim in mind, and this was apparently shitcanned later in development for some unfathomable reason. Like, why even leave the crosshair there, then?

    spoiler

    Like, the shoot-the-switch secret on Legacy of Rust MAP10? Forget it. Yeah, you can hit it like 3% of the time if you ride the elevator up and down and pick at it with the pistol until you get it. I’m quite certain it was intended to be shot from either of the windows left and right of the elevator, the leftmost one lining up with it perfectly, and the elevator thing is only just in case someone is playing in some kind of purist mode.


  • I will also add to this that there is absolutely no reason to buy the “new” re-release of Doom and Doom 2 that’s out on Steam now except to rip the IWADS out of it to put in a source port – any other source port – rather than the garbage it comes with. And only do so if you want the new Legacy of Rust episodes. Everything else is, er, readily available online. And has been for decades.

    The new NEX based engine these run on now is maddeningly inferior to basically every open source Doom engine port currently available. In addition to not supporting vertical mouse look at all, “for authenticity,” (but by default it slaps a crosshair on your screen, which the original didn’t have…) it also looks like garbage on modern displays and crashes constantly which is something that baffles me. Running Doom ought to be a solved problem by now in 2024, but this fucker crashes on me more now than it did on my 486 back in 1994. It’s buggier than a trailer park mattress in a swamp.

    I recommend GZDoom, personally. You can add Brutal Doom to make the gameplay experience significantly more bombastic as well, if that sort of thing appeals to you.


  • Well, as others have noted I think “cozy” is probably a loaded term in this context. However, I will throw these recommendations into the ring also: The first couple of Serious Sam games, and also Painkiller. Both of them are firmly in the “murdering tons of dudes” genre, and are significantly less tactical than the likes of Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Battlefield.

    That is to say, not at all.

    There is none of that sucking your thumb to regenerate health, popping out from the chest-high walls inexplicably strewn everywhere taking potshots with your gun like a hillbilly jack-in-the-box. Rather, their gameplay loop involves herding and managing a massive horde of enemies, prioritizing your targets, and keeping yourself moving. Like a sheep dog with a chaingun.

    People try to call the original Doom games a horde shooter. They really aren’t. These two, however, definitely are.