Cool, I’m glad to see UI that makes tech look fun and hopeful again instead of barebones corporate-flat, spartan rectangles.

“Oo look, they come in muted pastels and you can round the corners!”

Pfftftfttft…

I feel the same way! I think a lot of hate for Vista was just instability and high system usage.

I feel like things have definitely come a long way, where my KDE machines can have pretty glassy UI without crunching the whole system.

I also really liked ME before XP, where there was a heavy emphasis on personalizing and theming.

flat boring look of today is very bleak and dystopian looking imo.

100%. It feels very corporate and like any artistic touch was forcibly extracted from it because trends say that aesthetic hurts readability or something. Blegh.

It’s like the UI equivalent to that “Memphis techbro” art style with the freakish flat purple people with wonky arms and tiny heads.

(which will probably happen, since everything in tech is everyone copying everyone else Apple no matter how good or bad their ideas are at the time.)

FTFY although I wish it wasn’t so. ._. Lol

“We’re… Getting things ready for you…”

Everything is cyclical.

Be me still waiting for that cozy skeumorphism and UI with depth to come back. =/

Excellent point.

Furthermore, especially in the U.S, ballistic tactical eyewear is readily available at a ton of surpluses. Civilians have access to protective equipment that they should be taking advantage of.

Paintballers and airsofters wear them all the time because the extra price for real-world protection (edit: as in tactical vs. ‘recreational gear’) is worthwhile when it comes to your vision and freakishly chaotic ballistics.

Protests are a form of combat. Come dressed for the occasion.

Well, they didn’t drop a bunch of leaflets threatening residents to evacuate a chunk of L.A before firebombing hospitals and schools and doing target practice on ambulances yet…

But that could be where it’s heading if we don’t put a stop to it yesterday.

I actually felt like the Elder Scrolls games handled this elegantly. The interactable doors could be wonky but also strategic, but for cell changing doors, on today’s hardware you barely even notice the loading screen.

It felt like it kept each area of the game nice and concise, but also it still felt so connected! Especially with how characters could follow you between cell changes after Morrowind. (SURPRISE, pants-ruining Oblivion guard jumpscare!)

[Early Resident Evil Titles have entered the chat]

A browser based Doom or Quake engine world sim to run around playing with others sounds like such an awesome concept. I’d love that!! And in the 90"s no less. That would’ve been crazy impressive.

Microsoft and MMOs, man. I remember they were gonna make a really neat online fantasy one for the Xbox and canned it, too.

That’s such a wild story. Thanks for sharing that with us! I wish they wouldn’t have cold shouldered you like that…

Here’s how I was imagining that went down the whole time I was reading it lmao. Just for you.

“Cat? Dog? Pig? LOAF OF BREAD. SYSTEM ERROR!”

https://youtu.be/LaK_8-3pWKk

As for cheap AKs or Garands, I haven’t seen any of those since before Obama’s first term.

Dang it, you got me there. Long time since I’ve been gun shopping and it already was an expensive and time consuming hobby then! 100% of the ones I foolishly lost in a tragic boating accident so long ago were inherited.

Everything, like everything I guess, is ridiculous now. Ammo is inflated but at least it’s way better than it was in 2020-ish.

Kel Tec’s offerings I’m guessing they’re like Hi Point?

Ah, good catch about the carbines. That’s pretty popular these days! KelTec is a bit nicer. Mostly polymer, really interesting designs, but I’m not sure about their longevity reputation. They don’t just make “Another AR-15…but slightly different!” over and over, so I think they’re neat in that regard.

Sheesh! Also not cheap though! You’re right. Anybody needs a rifle’s gotta set aside a couple grand. Even used, unless they get lucky.

Yeah. Everything is all kinda crazy.

The usual suspects hoarded all the arms and then went down rabbit holes towards becoming mall-ninja LARPing lackies for a fascist regime. The wealth inequality chasm widened, and most non-conservatives were busy convincing themselves guns were scary and unnecessary instead of taking responsibility and educating themselves and their communities.

Whelp…

… There’s always 3D printing lol. XD

I sincerely and truthfully hope as a nation we can do a complete heel turn without having to gravely consider protecting ourselves in this manner, though.

I think if self defense weren’t so one-sided, we might be seeing more of a reflection of the old adage: “An armed society is a polite society.”

Haha that does sound slightly familiar! Like Mario Kart’s Lakatu on steroids. 😂

Lol okay solved! Colliding with an opening door just yeets an NPC (safely) out of the way.

Haha there needs to be a “monkey’s paw” community but around what new bugs pop up when someone proposes a fix for a mechanic.

New bug report: Essential NPC unable to be interacted with because they walk toward the door to greet the player and get clipped through the opposite wall at high speed.

Sometimes they fall through the map and the game crashes when they reach -9999 meters, other times they die intersecting the wall and it soft locks the main quest.

Fun story rq: Deus Ex: Human Revolution had the most bizarre bug where, if you talked to a gang before getting the quest to go clear them out, on the second visit one of them would just spawn… like…on the moon, apparently? (A ridiculous distance upwards, not even visible except by objective marker) Made the quest unbeatable until they patched it hahaha.

They might when folk gotta brick tho. :P

Now we need to decide in the case of collisions if:

• Doors violently push anyone out of the way, possibly “crushing” them into walls or
• Force themselves back closed, turning any random NPC / obstacle on the other side into an unbeatable lock or
• Just trap an unfortunate NPC in a corner on the other side, or
• If they use the physics system to swing open, in which case they’ll look smooth but possibly bonk the player/actor going through them a few times and could potentially (and comically) insta-kill them if physics is feeling grumpy.

The frustratingly comedic unintended results of any choice makes for great organic marketing though.

Gamedev is magical.

Aside: Know what did this really well though? Resident Evil games after RE:4.

The ability to “slowly quietly open”, and then at any time decide to violently action-hero kick it open to send a zombie on the other side flying, was genius.

deleted by creator

After it killed the links to huge swaths of internet pictures? Good question…

Now it’s IMGUR’s turn to break all the links lol.

I understand the struggle. I do. I still have an “Under construction” page on the domain I bought like a decade ago because I want a decent artist portfolio site and Wordpress is not the super easy dream they all claimed so I’ve nuked it like a dozen times. (And tried Grav, and Hugo, and…)

But seriously WHY do so many great artists like, even ones who could afford hosting a dedicated page, ONLY have an Instagram?! (And now a TikTok ugh). One AI-decided account ban or rebrand or algorithm change or whatever and their entire portfolio and audience are just gone.

It’s really sad that there aren’t more non-developer targeted FOSS projects for just getting a halfway decent page going. All those sites like Wix or Square charge a ridiculous amount and still give you a bloated mess that doesn’t function unless people allow tons of chonky JavaScript.

/rant lol…

This sounds amazing. Although I feel like they’d just pull the cruise ship thing and register their “business” elsewhere.

But hey it’d be a great step! Remember when everyone was SO hopeful for the “National Do Not Call Registry”? Hahahaha…

you can’t “leak” an RSS address so when you subscribe to something you won’t be added to spam without you knowing

Ah, so now we definitely know why it was quietly swept under the rug!

Thank goodness we have the amazing future now:

ALLOW THIS WEB PAGE TO SEND YOU NOTIFICATIONS!!???

–Every stupid webpage ever

Unrestricted, glorious, arbitrary code at the accidental flick of an “allow” button. Normies everywhere getting inundated with random loud full-page video ads from chrome notifications that recursively cascade-subscribed them to a million other chrome notifications.