As is my usual habit with everything in life where I research like crazy, I've been digging into the pasts of the latest batch of nationally-known Democrats. The most interesting one I've found by far is Pete Buttigieg, who is as close to a "twin study" as you'll find to me-- to the point where the similarities are kind of creepy:

• Born in the midwest, three months and two days apart (he's the younger).


• Both started reading at a very young age.


• Super serious, shy, intense children; gained reputations as the smartest in their respective elementary schools. We even look sort of similar as kids, see below comparison photos. He's a little older than me there, but it's the closest age match I could find.


• Both got picked on a lot by the other kids. Often friends with the teachers moreso than classmates.


• Only children. Technically I got a brother when I was eleven, but any birth order expert will tell you that psychologically, that kind of age gap is the same as being an only child, with such relationships taking on instead an "uncle and nephew" familial role.


• Went to essentially all-white, upper-middle class private elementary schools. My case was Catholic all the way through; his was Montessori, then Catholic.


• Excelled at piano at a very young age-- albeit he kept with it, whereas my teacher moved out of state, and I never signed up for lessons again.


• Favorite show was "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Played football and soccer religiously with friends.


• "Valedictorians" in 8th grade; my school didn't have that title technically, but I was top of my class by a wide margin. I also was granted a significant four-year scholarship to high school in recognition of my achievements.


• Presidents of student councils.


• Gave speeches as 8th graders to room full of adults; acted and spoke like 30-somethings at that age.

But then starting around ninth grade, we split in diametrically opposite directions: he became a huge "Kool-Aid" drinker-- an advocate for authoritarianism-- and continued his academic achievement. As an adult, he's a text-book "social justice warrior" Democrat-- a grown-up "goodie two-shoes".

Whereas and in total contrast, I became highly anti-authoritarian in high school, and wound up in the bottom quarter "burnout" segment of my high school class-- choosing to devote my intellectual pursuits to things other than school, which I found to be a pointless and tiresome nuisance. As an adult, I'm a Rothbardian-styled anarcho-capitalist-- a grown up contrarian thinker.

Here are just a few things which were different for us, and which could account for the divergence:

• From the article: "Buttigieg was the only child of college professors growing up in a bubble of academia in the Rust Belt." By contrast, I grew up in a Conservative, Free Market-oriented household, in a blue collar neighborhood.


• Regarding his father: "...garnering attention for his scholarship in critical theory and civil society..." You just can't make this stuff up: his dad was quite literally an American contemporary "Herbert Marcuse". Could getting "Frankfurt School" values in your ear all your childhood influence your sexual orientation later on? Perhaps.


• When teachers or parents would compliment me, they'd say "some day Mike, you'll make a great businessman." As an adult, I've had a long and successful career in a Fortune 500 company. When teachers or parents would compliment Peter, they'd say "some day Peter, you'll make a great politician." The specifics of reinforcements like this materially matter to children like him or me.


• There could be a genetic component in play as well; both my mother and father's families have strong anti-authoritarian streaks-- for instance, my maternal great grandparents were "moonshiners" during Prohibition.


• Another key difference is that my family started going through really bad times around when I was starting the tenth grade, causing serious disruptions to the stability of my home life. It's possible that those experiences were what tripped the anti-authoritarian tendencies in my DNA, and also caused my grades to suffer.


• You can split intellectuals into two types: those concerned primary with the outside world, where their inner world fulfillment is secondary-- and those who are the opposite. He is clearly the "outer world" kind, so the praise of good grades and the acquisition of power is satisfying-- and I am strongly the "inner world" type, hence why a "dark closet programmer, just leave me alone" career and society is appealing.

As a partial aside, Bernie Sanders of all people proved a huge inspiration for Peter's having entered the political arena; in fact, Peter wrote a high school essay describing Bernie as "principled."

Communism is on the extreme end of "the ends justify the means" spectrum; if we have to crack a few eggs to make the utopian omelet, then I guess that's that! Whereas a principled attitude would be, "no! those eggs are people! and killing people or stealing from them is wrong, no matter what the end goal." That's why Marxist-styled Leftists are always morally relativistic post-modernists, and Libertarians are always moral absolutist "natural law" types.

Thus, describing Bernie as "principled" seems completely wrong to me; he's a relativist, as did Peter become unfortunately. And that's the biggest divergence of all between us.

Watching this has only reinforced my view that we need to wind down the texture-mapped polygon era: that approach is just too expensive in terms of requiring further and prohibitive die shrinks, and also in terms of asset creation project budgets. It's had forty years and probably trillions of dollars of R and D in total aggregate, and it still hasn't produced photo-realism. From here, there are just too many hard constraints-- some of it in technology, some of it financial-- for it to move much further down the "diminishing returns" wedge.

It's like in software development: when I hit a problem that's requiring me to write tons of or messy code, almost universally I'm trying to solve the problem inherently in the wrong way; almost always after I step back and re-think the big picture, I find a different and sometimes even trivial way to solve the same problem.

The video above shows us an alternative that is definitely worth exploring futher. Someone should make a dedicated video game system implementing that notion: point cloud indexing system in hardware. As someone who specializes in Elasticsearch at work, I understand the power of these kinds of systems: in Lucene, you can have billions of points indexed, and search or aggregate them in scant milliseconds. If you implemented a special chipset to do this in hardware, I don't see why you couldn't cull these billions of data points hundreds of "frames" per second.

Put another way, nothing you see in that "Holoverse" is using triangle-based geometry at all. And graphically even at this "Magnavox Odyssey" stage, it looks almost as good as the very best PlayStation 4 games, even when scaled up to room size! For the home market, the first implementations will look like this: a table you walk around. Apparently in 2018, the tables could be sold profitably for just under 50k USD-- here is hoping various dynamics come into play to drop that price rapidly.

I also can't write a post about this without commenting on how stupid people are too: it's like when people put on "VR" headsets and are trying to grab things... eek gads. With this, people are afraid to "jump" down the "hole", and the guide has to actually explain to them that it's not real... pretty cringey.

I only had time for the first forty minutes of this, but what I heard was a fun conversation, even if Molyneux was being a jerk and kept interrupting his opponent.

His opponent was postulating that the Industrial Revolution "just happened" due to "hard work" in the factories. Whereas, and from my studying of history, my take coincides with the aforementioned Molyneux's: people always "worked hard"-- the variable which changed, and what created the fertilized soil for the Industrial Revolution growth spurt in human wealth, was the proliferation of the Western values of liberisation.

In Ancient Rome or Greece, much less aboriginal cultures and the like, geniuses were saw as threats to power, and exiled or executed. In a post-Enlightenment society by contrast, which largely values free speech, equality before the law, private property, economic liberlization, and the non-aggression principle-- like those in 18th century Great Britain and America-- for practically the first time ever geniuses were left to their own devices: to invent, to lead, and to create the opportunities for others to ride the genius coat tails to their own wealth.

In other words, the Industrial Revolution was not random or "the cure", but was rather a side effect of post-Enlightenment values finally reaching critical mass. The values were the cure. It follows then that the value set of Molyneux's opponent-- Communism-- would finish off the gradual "undoing" of the circumstances which led to the wealth in the first place.

I flipped my whole GNU/Linux user interface to Mexican Spanish, to help me learn the language. It's very bizarre to have to translate menus in my head as I click on them.

Why do millenial video gamers always say "what a great time to be alive!" when they see something they like? Not only is it a strange expression, but it's almost like they all got the memo or something, to use it so frequently and predictably.

I finished "Skatey-Cat" over the weekend for the upcoming "Fuze Player"; check out some of its new content here. I'm curious to see how many actual submissions they will get beyond mine: it seems like everyone on the forum is constantly starting new projects, getting five percent in, then starting something else; I'm the only one who has actually completed an end-to-end product of any complexity so far as I've seen.

My next Fuze project will be a pseudo-3d maze game, similar to Ed Logg's "Xybots". I already have the code to handle parsing the internal level structure, and also the code to draw to the appropriate parts of the buffer. The trickiest part will be animating the transitions, plus actually drawing perspective-correct tile sprites, given my crappy artistic skills.

I've been in an even bigger funk than usual with relations to the hobby-- I really need to find something else to do with my time. I can picture with my mind's eye what it would be like to have a modern-day equivalent of the "Atari Lynx": it would be expensive, run hot and have lousy battery life, but would basically have photo-realistic "Road Rash 3DO"-style graphics but with 2020 technology behind it, and ray traced lighting. Why can't companies do something crazy, off-the-wall ambitious like that anymore? It would really put the fun back into the hobby.

Instead and out of boredom, I've been playing "Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate" on Nintendo's crappy underpowered Switch-- a game which even recycles assets from the original 2004 PlayStation 2 title... I haven't even been enjoying old games, because I want something new and novel, not just re-experiencing what used to be new and novel. In any event, it's tough to change gears and do something totally new, when I've been playing video games as my number one hobby consecutively since 1984 or so.

About a year ago I mostly gave up reading game news outlets. Previous to that, I'd been reading paper game magazines since 1988, and online sites since 1995-- so it was quite a streak while it lasted. The reason I stopped was this: all you get today is complete and absolute uniformity of opinion, extraordinarily low-quality writing, and tons of political nonsense.

It got so bad that I started locating pictures of the writers, and without fail the men were all visibly at critically low T levels, while the women were pink-haired, tatted up, and had nose rings. Even the paper magazine "Game Informer", which I'd been reading since the late 80s when they had those colorful cover borders, started running articles about "gun control" and so forth.

I work from home on a permanent basis-- but once in awhile I need to go to the office for some meeting or another. To me, the most striking thing about my employer's office complex is how it has inward-facing propaganda-- this, in contrast to outward-facing propaganda, such as advertising. I wonder how common this is with large corporations?

I've written before about how the walls have creepy, pseudo-subliminal messaging on them, like "we care about our employees". But after not having been in for some months, the gyno-centricity was what stood out to me the most.

The first thing I saw when I arrived was a blood bank van parked outside the employee entrance. Not only was it painted bright pink, but it had "This vehicle contains HOPE" printed in giant boldface. The next thing I noticed was that the company had put large cardboard stand-ups, with the silhouette of a woman running, "advertising" the "corporate strategy du jour" to its own employees. Everywhere I turned, I saw one of these-- there must be two or three dozen of them on the campus.

Of course, I picked up on the fact very early in my career that these trendy "buzzword bingo" corporate strategies come and go about every six months, and that it is absolutely pointless to even bother remembering what they are-- so I haven't a clue what a running woman has to do with anything.

But rather, the point I'm illustrating is how the messaging I get bombarded with in my rare workplace forays is carefully crafted to manipulate people's emotions, versus using fact and logic. And seeing as how I'm almost totally impervious to emotional ploys, I pick up on the objective facts of the manipulations, like which kinds of fonts or colors are used, how things are arranged, and so forth.

I haven't been writing much about sports since the posts really don't age well-- but I'll make an exception today: even from a neutral standpoint, if I had to pick which of the three between Juve, Inter or Lazio look the most likely to be consistent throughout the remainder if the season, I'd pick Lazio. A third Scudetto is a legitimate possibility.

The other hilarious part about this match was watching Inter bring on guys like Eriksen off the bench and still not be as good as us: heck, they brought Victor Moses and Alexi Sanchez on as almost afterthoughts, like fifth and sixth attacking choices! I don't know how the two payrolls stack against each other, but I bet Inter's is quite literally four or five times Lazio's.

The cameras kept showing some Chinese guy-- owner? I've no clue, and don't much care-- and he had this enormous, Millenial-style pouty face, like the new toy his daddy had bought him with fresh "Bank of China" Monopoly money had just broken down. I wonder what the expression on his face was when Sergej sombrero'd the aforementioned Eriksen three times in about forty seconds? Hah!

I remember when it was a big deal that wifey and I met via the internet back in 2000-- specifically on ICQ, when she was scouring profiles and pseudo-randomly sent me a message; people were amazed to hear the story! Now meeting "online" is the most common method!

I've never understood the bar thing-- why would you look for a life partner and mother for your future children at a den of drinking and smoking? We're going here for a work outing soon-- do the women shown in the pictures look like reliable child-rearing material?

In other news, the Fuze guys have announced that they are releasing a gratis, player-only application on Switch, and will accept only the best game submissions for inclusion with it. Last night, I sorted out my "Skatey-Cat" backlog and estimated the tasks-- I think I can just barely make it by their end-of-day March 2 deadline, if I really cram.

There are 50 million Switch units sold-- if only a small portion of them download the player app, that means hundreds of thousands of people might be playing "Skatey-Cat"! And judging by the "game jams" so far, my aforementioned title would probably be one of the best ones to ship with the player.

I thought this would be interesting, but both of them were terrible.

For his part, Molyneux got hung up on the pretty basic concept that the idea of a thing is different than a specific, physical manifestation of that thing-- as in, there is the notion of a "ball", and then there is that literal ball sitting right on the floor right across the room. Hurr.

For this Dyer fellow, he sounded sort of like a crazy hippie. In the end, Molyneux totally ceded the floor: "Walk the audience through your proof of God." Dyer's response went something like, "There is this other universe of abstract things. Boom, God!" Not the best syllogism I've ever heard, that's for sure.

It's a shame, because I thought this was a good chance for someone to clear up my confusion related to the ancient "materialism versus idealism" debate. I guess that will need to wait for another day.

I did watch another video recently which was good though: this is Thomas Sowell, someone about whom I've heard a lot, but also about whom I have never gone out of my way to look up. He is the real deal, as it turns out.

I just got a tip on the forum that the FUZE Arena guys covered "Skatey-Cat", and sure enough!

It was fantastic to hear that they recognized and appreciated that I was doing chip music for the soundtrack-- it was one of my technical innovations, even if the code was partly lifted from their tutorial, which I'd used as a starting point.

They also enjoyed the innovative control scheme, and said that the game had "so much character" overall, which is something I really wanted to emphasize, since personality is so lacking in modern games in general. Additionally, they praised the fact that my kids contributed much of the art work.

My next task with that project is to do some refactoring. After that, I want to add a third-person pseudo-3d shop sequence every few stages similar to my "game jam" entry, which will bridge the transition between "worlds". Once that's done, it'll be time to create snow-themed art and music for "world two".

I saw the below comment on a news article today, and thought it was a fascinating long-scope, bird's eye view of this subset of American history. With a little editing and footnotes, it wouldn't be out of place in a history text book one hundred years from now.

Many early American figures such as Abraham Lincoln foresaw this problem, and preferred to offer blacks a path back to Africa, or elsewhere such as the Caribbean, in lieu of full-scale integration.

I think they were on to something, and it's why I often write on this blog about secession: many times splitting paths is the best, most peaceful route which will make everyone the happiest.

This was surreal to watch: Leftists having an actual argument about ideas! Ninety nine percent of the time they are about pejoratives, ad hominems, misleading non-sequitors, and raw emotional appeals, to the point where engaging in discussion with them is pointless. Of course, it also is possible that the only reason Chris Matthews suddenly decided to tell the truth about his thoughts regarding Socialism is because he has an ulterior motive in wanting to push Bloomberg or Biden.

There's a lot of debate and bragging going on with regards to how powerful-or-not the incoming video game systems will be. To me, it's a purely academic question because it's not like video card technology on the PC side will stand still: next year, I'm sure Nvidia will have an "RTX 3000" line, with second generation "RT" cores which are twice as fast, and twenty-plus teraflops of floating point horsepower at the top-end.

Eight-odd months into the eight-odd year lives of these new systems, and we'll be back to the exact situation we're in right now: the IBM PC platform will be vastly more powerful than the video game systems, and those who can simply defer gratification and save up just that little bit of extra money-- even to a minimum wage worker, accumulating another three or four hundred dollars means skipping the beer, weed, and fast food for a few months-- will be much better served just assembling a computer.

The other benefit to a computer is that once you're on "the PC track", you can just keep dropping new video cards in it over the years, while leaving everything else alone. This is especially true if you're smart, and buy into a new CPU platform right when one is released. Duncan is still rocking my original Ryzen 1600 chip, which I handed down to him when I moved up to a brand-new 3700x; paired with the RTX 2060 he got for Christmas, and it's a formidable ray tracing-capable gaming system for not that much money. Because I bought the 1600 on launch week, it's had years' worth of legs.

I'm going to buy the next edition of "Madden" right away, and start a potential tradition of building a franchise with the worst team of the prior season. I did just such a project a couple of years ago with San Francisco, and with my usual pain-staking, spreadsheet-based analytical approach to playing video games, turned them into three-time consecutive Super Bowl champions. For this time around, I've already started breaking down and analyzing the current Cincinnati Bengals roster.

My strategy is always to ruthlessly cut and trade players near-or-over thirty, then use that cap room and draft capital to make major youth movements-- if even a small percentage of the young players "turn out", I have a wonderful backbone of a squad.

As part of that analysis, I've been watching highlights of Joe Burrow, who almost certainly will supplant Andy Dalton in this upcoming Bengals season. He's an interesting college quarterback, in that he has NFL-caliber ball placement, consistently throwing over the near shoulder, back shoulder, up high, down low, and so forth. And while he's no Lamar Jackson, he can also sense pressure and move around a lot in the pocket. I also see that he has good deep ball accuracy.

However, the real star I'm seeing from these clips is his receiver partner, Ja'Marr Chase, who at age nineteen is already making contested catches look like second nature. An interesting thing will be seeing who owes more what: once seperated (with the receiver remaining in college, and the quarterback shifting to the NFL), will we find that Chase was "made" by Burrow-- or will we see Burrow struggle, absent a Chase-style receiver with Bengals? Or, will they both eventually turn out to be prolific professionals, and their relationship will prove to have been purely symbiotic?

In other news, this is undoubtedly coming to America, if not at least vicariously. Or is it? I keep hearing city slickers tell me that "eletric cars are 'inevitable'"-- yet from my experience at the bug-out house, there is absolutely zero possibility of electric cars being even remotely feasible in the country's vast, low population-density rural areas. Remember: America is a huge country, with oceans of wide open space between the major population zones-- it's not England, or France.

For example, my family up North runs a paving business, and drives hundreds upon hundreds of miles per day just to get to and from work sites: there is no time to "recharge" an electric vehicle-- instead, the business uses diesel pick-up trucks, which can be refilled at any gas station, near-instantaneously. Even for rural people who don't run businesses like that, just a mere trip into town would absolutely stretch an electric car's range to the max. And that's not even getting into cultural considerations-- no one I know at the bug out house would touch an electric car with a twenty foot barge pole, even if they were practically possible to use.

Finally, it's possible that "the coronavirus" has staggering counts so far. Of course, this is exactly the kind of actual journalistic reporting which the Democrats and their tech friends want to ban as "fake" or "manipulated" news, when all it's doing is publishing straight facts: multiple times now, Tencent has published numbers, then quickly taken them down. Reporting on that is called "journalism". And yet, it's this very outlet-- "Zero Hedge"-- which has been locked on "the Twatter."

I went to a private, Catholic elementary school for nine years-- K-12-- from the late-1980s to the mid-1990s. The school is still in business (thriving, seemingly), and has a web site. If you click on the "Staff" page for the parish, you get a large color picture of the principal-- my kindergarten teacher from 1987, incidentally-- along with her full professional contact information. If I were to post her picture and name on my blog, and say "here is the principal of school XYZ", that is not "doxxing". The word "doxxing" means "to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone)...". If I were to post her picture, along with her home street address and personal cellphone number which I'd dug up by cracking her computer, that would be "doxxing".

Fast forward then to a pair of "the Twatter" account lockings: first "Zero Hedge", and now James O'Keefe. In the former case, "Zero Hedge" posted a link to the "about" page of the clinic which may have created "the coronavirus", which contained the public information of the institution's lead scientist-- so, identical to me linking to the 100% public-facing "about" page of my old school. Same thing in the second instance: James O'Keefe published the names of the two men his team caught in undercover interviews, both of which are on Sanders-related campaign web sites. Neither of those cases are "doxxing", any more than Eric Ciaramella has a right to have no one on planet Earth say his name.

The fact that "the Twatter" is now locking accounts for posting public facts, and in a totally one-sided manner to boot-- just read the above-linked article for lots of double standard examples-- shows how desperate they are to control the narrative, Soviet Union-style. Pretty soon they'll have algorithms "Photoshopping" people out of photographs. And all of this because the moderators at these companies get angry: trust me, I've worked with people like that before-- "I get so f'ing mad at stuff like this!" Then you hand them a button allowing them to lock people's accounts with a mouse click, and...

I've been on the receiving end of tirades like this several times before. They're astonishing not only by how unhinged they are, but from the vantage point that the various authors were willing to pour so much energy and time into them, at the opportunity cost of all of the other things they could have been doing with their lives. Mind boggling.

Watching the Super Bowl really drove into focus for me just how corporation-dictated our lives are on a day-to-day basis. From the league itself, to the team-specific promotions, to the stadium design, to the brands of shoes and hats people were mandated to wear on the sidelines, to the deluge of commercials non-stop hammering social re-programming on a mass scale, to the very specific verbiage and language the punditry was allowed to use, to the television I was watching it on via the video card in my PC rendering it, to the clothes I was wearing, to the McDonalds I was eating-- every last aspect, a "Fahrenheit 451"-esque "experience", carefully curated by nothing but multi-billion dollar companies and board-room execs.

I don't fear corporations like I do governments: if I don't like a given company, at the end of the day I can simply choose to not buy their products or services, and there's not a darned thing they can do about it. But from an optional, entertainment perspective, they are impossible to side-step, as they've corporate-mergered into oblivion, and a tiny number of them have pretty much taken absolutely everything over. Take video games: look at this list of the "biggest games coming in 2020", and how crazy-conservative (compared to "triple-A" games from older platforms) they are aesthetically and mechanically-- then cross-reference the publisher revenue via Wikipedia, for each game. See the connection?

The biggest reason why these gigantic corporations exist is because they get billions of dollar's worth of protections ("corporate personhood"), first-access to newly-created Fed bucks at virtually zero percent interest, and even outright cash subsidies, where the CEOs actively compete with each other to see who can get more "crony capitalist" tax money. This kind of public-private "cooperation" as an economic system actually has a name: it's called "Fascism". And it's the system the United States employs, to an extreme degree.

Back to the DNC Iowa debacle and undoubted corruption, take a look at the picture of the two men in charge of the company: they both have weak jaw lines, unpronounced cheek bones, weak brow lines, plus soft, pale, woman-like skin-- especially in the case of the guy on the left. Notice their attraction to flannel and dorky hipster glasses. I'm guessing they have roughly equivalent "T" levels to the woman in the middle, which is probably a big reason why they are attracted to Leftism.

I found some aspects of this guy's story to be pretty relatable: weird acting ostracized kid with zero access to girls while hormones were raging; hooked on sugar and porn at a pretty young age; ballooned up to nearly three hundred pounds; had a traumatic "along for the ride" run-in with authorities before the age of twenty, spent years in retrospect looking up "how the heck was that even legal?" Had to manually learn how to understand body language by reading about it; and so forth.

In other news, here is yet another one of those surreal instances where it's obvious someone behind the strings sent out a memo, and all of the Democrat operatives got it. This time, it's "Trump is a monarch". For being so coordinated and corrupt, it's amazing how incompetent the Democrats are; when someone lies and cheats and still can't win, that's pretty pathetic. And speaking of coordinated and corrupt, could their "quality control" be any more transparent? Obviously, cuckoo clock Breadline Bernie won the caucus voting while Creepy Joe did terribly, and the DNC office is trying to "fix", or at least find a way to spin, the outcome.

On a totally unrelated note, Duncan came up to me yesterday: "hey papa, I think there is a way to do faster-than-light travel: create a ship with specially-shaped rings around it, which would fold space time one way on top of the ship, then another way along the bottom-- this would create a space-time 'wedge' through which the ship would travel." I don't know if he came up with this on his own or read about it online, but either way I wouldn't be surprised if an adult Duncan really did invent a warp drive.

Regarding the Super Bowl, I was surprised that Kansas City won. Even after watching them lose, I still think San Francisco were the better team: rather, I think their coaches blew the gameplan-- the sensation I got was that they didn't even really try to impose themselves like they had all season. It almost reminded me of watching Vikings, and how their coaches tend to choke in big games. At least I really like Mahomes, and it's amazing to see him win probably his first-of-multiple Super Bowl MVP awards by age twenty four. If there is one player I can tell is destined for Canton, it's Mahomes.

Finally, here you can see just how easy it is to fool an "autonomously driving" car: a twenty dollar print-out from Kinkos cleverly taped up just in the right spot would quite literally cause a Tesla to veer directly into head-on traffic-- it's that trivial, and it's exactly what I wrote about here. The reason you can find dozens of stories of Teslas crashing or running over pedestrians is simply because of how easily these systems are tricked, as they are being "beta tested" on real live people. And it's not just this one flaw, and it's also not like they can necessarily be resolved, as even the article states: "One reason [for no patch fix] is that there is no way software could detect the difference between a road sign projected on a tree's leaves, and a legitimate road sign..."

Almost universally there is a big disconnect between what's true, and what's popular-- for example, on "Reddit" the most accurate comments are very nearly always the gray, hidden, downvoted ones at the bottom of a given page, to the point where that's the first place I look when I open a thread on that site.

Even with that trend, I can't think of too many bigger examples of this phenomenon than meathead Joe Rogan. For a guy who serves as some kind of "king maker", his positions are completely nonsensical, and he is incapable of even basic logical deduction-- he's a classic "rampant emotionalism clouding judgement" case. His latest one is apparently an endorsement of Comrade Breadline Bernie. Hah!

Out or morbid curiosity, I've been watching "RetroManCave" Neil's "BBC Micro" mini-series on YouTube, and it's been just as creepy as I thought it'd be: old pictures of uniformed kids and their "educators" crowded around the little beige essentially State-manufactured and standardized boxes, like a bunch of school children from old Soviet Union photographs.

The funniest part is the reverence given to it by people like Neil, claiming categorically how big of a "success" it was. The evidence? Nostalgia and meaningless anecdotes. It's a classic case of Bastiat's "seen versus the unseen". Not to mention, this same class of people constantly harp on about "crony capitalism"-- can you find a better example than this?

And on that note, in virtually every other country-- meaning, where it wasn't 50% subsidized like it was in England-- where Acorn tried to sell this computer, it was a colossal failure, to the point where it basically drove Acorn into bankruptcy; they wound up getting acquired in the 90s. I've noticed that the fact the machine was not even remotely competitive in actual free markets does not give the proponents of this program pause.

Another interesting side note: one of Acorn's very early figures, Roger Wilson, suddenly woke up one day and decided he wanted to be called "Sophie". Ok, fair enough. But then he started getting named to "top NN most successful female computer scientist" lists! How is that fair to the actual women who got bumped off those lists in lieu of Roger? It's no different then men beating the snot out of women, in women's sports. Biologically, men have significantly more muscle mass than women, and way more of them have genius-level IQs-- so the comparison is apt.

And on that note, Neil ends the third part of his series by blathering on about the so-called "gender gap". Why is it I never hear about the crisis of 90% of interior decorators or nurses being women? "Oh my god, we need to close the gender gap in interior decorating by getting more men in!", said no one, ever. Or at my employer: 75% of marketing is women, and all management says is that they want to hire more women. That's how you know it has nothing to do with "equality", and everything to do with Cultural Marxism and sexism.

All of that said, I do think from a personal standpoint that I would have loved the BBC Micro as a child-- so I can at least understand why people like Neil have nostalgia for it, even as they lack the self-awareness to know that they are purely ex post-facto rationalizing their emotions with pretend reasoning. That colorful, low-resolution program with the house, which tied into the corny TV drama show, would have really captured my imagination as a seven or eight year-old.

Here are the final results of the first-ever Fuze "game jam" I mentioned a few posts ago! The first game on the list is mine. For some reason my BitChute video is still "processing", so here is my entry on Twitter instead, where I have a throw-away "upload junk from my Switch" account. "MikeDX" from the forum also did a live feed, which you can see here.

The most impressive entry was the texture-mapped cube game; the cubes were just created using a built-in Fuze Basic command, but it was seriously hardcore math to get the textures drawn in a perspective-correct manner. That fellow has a major "pure math" background from the looks of it.

I think mine was an easy second place from a purely technical standpoint-- it's the first time I've ever seen someone do pseudo-3d on Fuze, so I was really breaking new ground there; that engine could easily be made to render 3d dungeons ala "Xybots", or something even better.

Unfortunately, I don't think the streamer had the technical chops to really comprehend what was good or bad from an engine perspective-- even in the case of the cube game, he liked it because it had catchy music, which was just a canned song from the built-in Fuze assets, and took one line of code to put in! Likewise with mine, I think he completely missed the point, and didn't appreciate what it was doing "under the hood".

Anyway, he seems like a really nice guy, and he's even published some of his own games in Fuze-- so perhaps he was just "dumbing things down" a bit for stream purposes. And all-in-all I had fun working on it, even if it did get a little hairy towards the end, trying to meet the deadline!

From a business standpoint, this was a good move by Fils-Aimé, simply because significant swathes of the "millenial" generation are developmentally-retarded at an eight year-old level-- so keeping Nintendo as "kid"-focused has worked out really well.

From my perspective, I think a modernized Nintendo logo would have looked really cool, as would Nintendo focusing on more mature, professional, adult-like games and products-- imagine the Switch looking more like the PSP, or Nintendo applying their game design principles to dark, first-person shooters?

That said, it's been a nice product for someone like me with his own young kids in the house-- we've had a blast making goofy Fuze games, for instance.

I just wrapped up my entry for the first-ever Fuze "Game Jam"! What a marathon: the code got progressively more messy as I raced to get it done. It could definitely use several rounds of refactoring. Still, I'm proud of the fact that I wrote the entire thing in one day.

As for the concept, I was inspired by my recent obsession with "Xybots" to make my own sprite-based faux-3d engine. The current form takes place on floating platforms, but I could just as easily modify it to take place in a dungeon, with walls, ceilings, and floors, with transition animations.

As much a I like and respect Julian Assange, and positively abhor how he's been (predictably) treated, I think this might actually be correct.

The Bill of Rights was drafted to grant protections, from the new Federal State apparatus, to her citizens. That was the whole point! The states said, "no way in hell we're ratifying this new constitution if we can't speak freely, can't practice religion, can't keep and bear arms to regulate its newly-proposed militia", and so on. The intention wasn't to grant protections to foreigners living in Zimbabwe or Egypt.

To put it another way, granting those protections to non-citizens just doesn't make sense given the historical context of why that document exists in the first place. I mean, is some guy living in sub-saharan Africa guaranteed free speech by the Federal government? Obviously not.

Of course, that does open an interesting can of worms: if someone is in the United States on an H1B Visa, can the Federal State complex lock them in prison if they criticize said State? Well, I suppose it can! But I think the "check and balance" there would be the probably violent reaction from the American people.

A guy quoted in the article in turn quotes Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence: "we all have God-given rights, citizens or not!" But while that's true, it's a total non-sequitur, as I described above: those aren't even the same document! If I wrote in a letter to someone that I don't think I'm morally obligated to pay my debts, but then took out a mortgage, the terms of the mortgage are in the mortgage, not in the letter I wrote my pal.

I'd be genuinely interested to hear someone like Tom Woods clarify this, it's a question I haven't really thought about before. If I'm wrong, then where?

Here is a guy in the comments who thinks the same thing, bold emphasis is mine:



If I hear a clarification which explains if and where I'm wrong, I'll do a follow-up post.

My favorite part of these Pro Bowl events are the hilariously intentional bull shit interviews the players give. Like Davante Adams: "Uh, well, we had to deal with some adverse weather, which is unfortunate..." The interviewer does a great job setting the players up, with her tongue-in-cheek use of sports cliches and faux-dramatic tone.

My boss at work is a big car guy like me, and we had a little debate yesterday about electric cars. At the end of it, I was like "give me a reason to care." All of the energy around these things is, "how many billions of more investment do they need before they're even on basic parity with internal combustion cars"-- what's the point? "Hey look, I invented this loaf of bread that's 25% more expensive and 25% less bread", and expecting me to be excited for it. Even if it was the same, what's the point? Electric cars are a hammer in search of a nail.

That said, he did get me on one point: if you're shopping for a BMW, why not buy a Tesla Model 3, which is actually cheaper and has roughly equal performance overall to something like a 3-Series? But to me, that's more of an indictment of how expensive BMWs are than how "practical" electric cars are: it's more like, "your cars are so overpriced that an electric car is cheaper? Hah, you blew it big time!"

Speaking of car prices, the median price of a new car is now $36k! Considering the median wage earner in America makes $32k per year, how the heck are they supposed to even afford an automobile these days? That's why the average age of cars on the road is over 12 years now. By the time the car makers are done satisfying the regulatory goons in the State, and bolting on all of those obnoxious "lane keep 'assist'" BS, it's no wonder only rich people can afford a car.

To put it into perspective, in 1985 the median car price was $15k-- after adjusted for inflation! He showed me a render of what is apparently the new Z (sounds like it actually might be real this time), which apparently will be a twin-turbo V6 with a manual transmission option-- but you just know the thing is going to be well North of $40k: way out of my price range! To me, $40k is entering exotic car territory, no way I could justify that kind of money on a Nissan that's not called "GT-R".

Remember: Nissan killed the 300ZX because the twin turbo made it too expensive-- but this time, the CAFE mandates mean they aren't allowed to learn from that lesson.

Given all of this, I bet when the next recession hits around 2021, half of the car industry literally just goes bankrupt.

My mom got the kids and I pairs of ice skates for Christmas, but it's been so cold that we haven't had a chance to try them-- until this afternoon, when we headed up to the park near our house, where the city maintains a plowed, decent-sized ice area.

Turns out, ice skating is almost exactly the same as rollerblading-- it took me about thirty seconds to feel comfortable. In fact, I'd say ice skating is a bit easier: any pressure causes immediate turning, so it's easier to change direction; and stopping is quicker, because the blades dig into the ice.

That said, Henrietta and I did both take rather hilarious "heels-in-the-air" flying falls when we got too cocky. And Duncan was struggling to stay upright, so I had to spend a lot of time pulling him along-- whereas he took to inline skates much more quickly at an indoor roller rink just a few weeks ago.

We're going to an actual indoor ice skating facility this weekend with my mom. It'll be fun to try these skates on perfectly flat, high quality ice!

My employer invited a speaker today for a big, whole-company meeting. I'd link straight to the speaker's web site, but as always I have to be very careful to not risk accidentally identifying my employer.

In any event, the speaker had a weak chin, a small feminine nose, no discernible adam's apple, a thin lispy voice, "chin-thrust" female mannerism while speaking, and big thick-rimmed black glasses.

I went to his Twitter feed, and sure enough he was a walking cliche, promoting lots of common Leftist strawmen bashing and crazy conspiracy theory myths, such as "vaccines are universally great" (video with some creepy dancing woman), the "anthropogenic climate change" nonsense, and female "wage gap" model, among others. It's amazing how predictably low "T" levels impact a man's political views to become feminized.

In any event, one of the things this fellow "re-tweeted" was how to convince a "climate denier" (blasphemer!):

1. Reframe solutions as upholding the stability/longevity of the current social system.
2. Reframe solutions in terms of maintaining Earth's purity.
3. Highlight the overwhelming scientific consensus on global heating to promote the perception that climate change acceptance is the norm.
4. Give people a chance to affirm their personal values prior to the conversation.

Translated:

1. Tell the racist that nothing will change with their white hegemonic society (strawman).
2. Manipulate their emotions; Conservatives value "sanctity" / "purity" (Jonathan Heidt, "The Righteous Mind").
3. Commit the "lots of people believe XYZ so XYZ must be true" fallacy. Deliberately mis-represent the infamous "consensus study" by cleverly saying "global heating" versus "global heating caused directly by man" (anthropogenic). It also says "perception", not "fact". In general, this point was carefully word-smithed to produce an effect, while providing plausible deniability (it's not technically lying!).
4. Let the blasphemer rant first so as to expend their emotional energy up front, leaving them more receptive to propaganda later. Very manipulative.

What's not among the bullets? "Produce evidence supporting the theory".

Wifey also laughed at the second point: "why would I think a planet once covered in molten lava was 'pure'?" My response: "I didn't say the above strategy would be effective for the Lefties-- I'm just explaining what the strategy is!"

This might be the first time in human history where a mob marches on the elite for the cause of giving the elite more power!

It reminds me of that Breadline Bernie organizer caught on camera calling himself an "anarcho-Communist", while simultaneously saying he wanted to throw Republicans into gulags. Because nothing says "anarcho" like State-institutionalized forced labor camps!

Watching the Left try to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of their old "for the little guy" sensibilities with their modern day inclination for totalitarian Fascism is hilarious.

I thought this article was entertaining. I do the opposite of all of the annoying things listed therein: I signal exactly twice and assertively slide into place as I'm signalling whenever I change lanes; I pick a spot and just park; and driving in the snow late last evening with no one around, I was drifting my wife's WRX around every corner in my side-streeted neighborhood.

The banks throw obscene amounts of money around to each other like it's confetti during a parade; aggregate it, and you get those "income inequality" charts.

First, consider how much money a billion dollars is. The banks, starting with the central banks, routinely conjure up and distribute hundreds of billions, sometimes on a monthly basis-- think "QE".

Second, this money isn't helicoptered to the average Joe-- rather, it's directly deposited into the accounts of their already-billionaire pals. For example, read this article, specifically the following (bold emphasis is mine):

I finally have an alpha version of my first-ever Fuze game out the door. Check out my forum post here. The video is also shared on this site's BitChute channel. Whew!

I've been on such a "Xybots" Lynx kick that I decided to look up Ed Logg on YouTube. Sure enough, here he is talking "Gauntlet" in 2012. I'm only ten minutes in, and it's already a great presentation.

One thing which jumped out at me-- I'm paraphrasing: "It was really tough on arcade games at that time, because the hardware kept getting more and more expensive, yet there was huge resistance to fifty cents per play. Hmmm, we wondered how to solve that."

Sound familiar? History really does repeat itself. The solution:

"And then came 'Gauntlet'... because it was four player, I could get a whopping dollar out of the machine for just a few minutes of play." The industry today has gone with "microtransactions" and "games as a service", in an attempt to solve the identical problem. But I wonder if there is some other, parallel solution to what Ed Logg came up with during his day?

My brother has been studying idealism, and one of the concepts he's derived is that of the "value", which is an aspiration, a goal, or a desire which fulfills some want. For example, a want might be hunger, a value might be to eat, and the making of a sandwich would be a fulfillment of that value.

One of the things he and I recently explored in conversation involved the identification of the absolute, for a given value. For example, "body building" might be a value, and one could identify the exact, absolute attributes which would define the theoretically perfect body build: maybe it would be a combination of the perfect, sculpted shape for each muscle group, combined with the attitudes and mentality of the body builder.

The extent to which a person fulfills their potential as an individual human being is the extent towards which they get as close as possible towards chosen values. It doesn't make sense for someone who is crippled and in a wheel chair to pursue the value of body building, because not only do they have no chance of coming close to the ideal, but it has the opportunity cost of taking them away from other values, in which they perhaps could approach the absolute.

It reminds me of a "Strengths Finder" book and corresponding test they handed out at work. The concept is to identify your natural strengths and develop those, versus wasting time on things you'll never be very good at. The test told me to focus on excelling and maximizing my potential in analytics and intellectualism, instead of obsessing over and wasting time and money on dancing, for instance-- which made and makes sense considering my figurative "two left feet".

This relates to video games, and how to evaluate them properly.

Movies are excellent at telling short stories in a dramatic way, using moving imagery. Paintings are excellent at putting immense amounts of thought-provoking concepts into dense, still imagery. Novels are excellent at telling long stories, which require a lot of discourse to fully develop characters and ideas. Each of those media are well suited to pursuing their respective absolute forms.

Video games, by contrast, are a hopelessly watered down amalgamation of all of the above. Logically, they can never approach the absolute movie standard without actually becoming a movie; they can never approach the standard of a painting without becoming one; and, likewise, they can never achieve the depth of character of a novel, without becoming a novel.

Thus, it makes no sense for a video game creator to try to make a game like a movie, a painting, or a novel. It would be like me spending my entire two left-footed existence painfully and hopelessly trying to become a terrible professional dancer, versus an excellent professional software developer. The video game maker is wasting his time; if he wants to make a film, then go make a film!

The absolute in video games comes from the four-pronged combination of elements which conspire to make the medium unique. These prongs are: logically nuanced gameplay (think "Chess"), inspiring and evocative art work, catchy and memorable computer-generated music, and the pushing of the target hardware to its absolute limit.

The extent towards which a game pursues the ultimate in this four-pronged value is the extent towards which it is objectively a good game. And the extent which it deviates by trying to hopelessly impersonate some other medium is the extent to which it destroys itself by lost opportunity cost.

"Liberalism" has always meant "tending towards freedom". For example, a "liberalization" of an economy means things like free trade and laissez-faire markets; politically, it means things like universal suffrage; and socially, it means the loosening up of social norms and mores.

Radical forces which push for a change from the status quo towards more freedom are thus and traditionally called "liberals". These groups are counter-balanced by "conservatives"-- people who want to keep the existing, rigid social, political, and economic order in place.

Let's look at a concrete example. In my readings of Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, the Decembrists are referred to as "liberals". Their primary causes included the granting of freedom to the serfs, and the drafting of a government constitution to place limitations on that institution-- so, more freedom.

By contrast, their opponents-- "the conservatives"-- saw dangers in the sudden elimination of serfdom, and a tossing out of the existing social and political traditions, which had developed over many centuries-- so, less freedom.

Fast forward to America today, and people still call contemporary leftists "liberals"-- but they're not; they are conservatives.

Modern Democrats want to implement a State-enforced theocracy, with the abolition of free speech, and the Cultural Marxist hierarchy codified into law, to go along with the gradual abolition of private property. You're either with them, or are a blasphemer-- for example, a "climate denier". Many of them even worship their heroes: my kid's old school, which had management consisting completely of social justice warriors, had a Kim-style portrait of Obama high up, over the door.

The trend is unmistakably towards "less freedom", with a pronounced emphasis on an unbending, almost Muslim-theocracy like social hierarchy-- with swift, unrelenting, and brutal punishment for those who step out of order.

Whereas and by contrast, today's Republicans are the actual "liberals", as the party has a strong libertarian streak in it as compared to decades past. While they are "playing ball" with Trump regarding things like his tariffs in the interest of being unified, at the state level they are fighting tooth-and-nail for gun ownership and a general decentralization of power-- more freedom.

I've written about the state of the NFL rule book many times before so I don't want to beat a dead horse-- but this article is too much.

For years or even decades, the NFL has operated in a mode of knee-jerk hyper-reactionism, making major, sweeping rule changes in an attempt to keep everyone happy, or to address what were nothing more than ephemeral fads.

A few players get hurt on kickoffs? Let's eliminate the entire play by moving the kickoff line forward, so every single one goes out the endzone! In video game design, that's called "broken"-- what's the purpose of even having that kickoff mechanic?

NFL activists think there are "too many blown calls"? How about we start stopping the game every time a coach gets mad, so the referee can examine fifty seven replay angles to identify if a player's nose hair touches the ground.

SJWs and leftists who don't even watch the game suddenly-- after almost one hundred years of the sport-- yell about how "unsafe" it is? Rather than sticking with tradition, NFL introduces fifty bazillion new rules related to blocking, tackling, and so forth.

New Orleans fans act like two year olds, responding to a missed pass interference call? Let's start a precedent where refereeing decisions can be "reviewed" too! So next year, will someone lose a game on a holding call, or an intentional grounding call, or a block in the back? You see where this is heading!

There are so many rules now that players can't even execute a play without breaking at least one of them-- and referees can't possibly keep up with enforcing them all, leading to all of the "mistakes" the article laments. The article says that the refereeing department is so big that it's now over 400 people!

What got us here: way too many rules, way too much bloat. Solution? Simplify the rules, which will allow for a reduction in the refereeing department head count, and make ref jobs easier; eliminate the "review" system to reduce scrutiny, it was a bad idea from day one; shift values to tradition and continuity, not hyper-reactionism.

What the article proposes? Hiring more people for the refereeing department, and doing a re-org! Nothing like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Hah, hilarious: one branch of the State is using drones, probably to look for a stolen nuclear warhead, and another branch of the same State apparatus is using these "mysterious" drones to push more regulations on the public.

In other news, I saw that Sony's new slogan is something like "when everyone plays, everybody wins!" Well, maybe that's true for their shareholders, but any time there is a system shift, there are winners and losers. For me, the more people who have entered the hobby, the less I like the games which are produced.

Which leads me to the fact that I just can't get excited for these new video game systems. I've had my "RTX" video card for sixteen months and the only game I've played with ray tracing that was any good was 1997's "Quake 2", for Pete's sake. The new consoles are just as boring: board room and focus group-approved toasters which can make the same dudebro military shooters and walking sim toast in three minutes instead of five.

On a positive note, I finally bought myself an Atari Lynx, after thirty years of wanting one. It's having some kind of LCD issue, but once that's resolved I'll do a thorough blog post, with pictures.

A couple of things: our Dear Iranian General was apparently in Baghdad negotiating peace with the Saudis-- not masterminding some plot to obliterate the United States. That explains why he was traveling out in the open, not making any effort to conceal his identity, drive around in an armored car, and so forth. He was sixty two years old, and had been around forever: what catalyst prompted his sudden assassination?

Photos of Epstein's cell were released. The top bunk was filled with his meds-- couldn't he overdose on those??-- which means he couldn't have rolled off the top bunk, like I'd speculated. The floor was filled with about fifty six bed sheets-- why would he have been given so much bedding?? There was an electrical cord in the cell-- why?? The guards were fifteen feet away, and security footage shows they never checked on him-- I thought the security cameras weren't working?? Also notice they didn't release a photo of the cell with the body still in it, which would have illustrated the physics supposedly involved.

Pretty much every current-day even smells to high heaven. There is a lot going on behind the scenes which we don't know, and I think it goes to the absolute top of this country's political power structure. And don't forget the "missing nuke" thing I wrote about in my previous post!

There's no smoking gun, but there's enough circumstantial evidence to put together a picture.

The most interesting part: are the sudden Iranian assassinations related?

I've been wanting one for, oh, about a thirty years-- and I've finally bit the bullet: a brand new "Lynx II", in box with all paperwork, along with an AC adapter, official carrying case, and copy of "Joust".

One of the fun parts with this system will be collecting everything "complete-in-box": indeed, such is the case for the adapter, case, and game I've already bought. Heck, the copy of "Joust" is still shrink-wrapped!

Once everything comes in, I'll do a full blog post with my impressions. I'll also set it alongside my Game Gear for a screen comparison.

Hah, I didn't even know this was a thing. Where are all of those protestors who forced Ford to shitcan the front wheel drive Mustang back in the early 90s? The "Probe" was an abomination for sure, but this E Mach thing is ten times worse!

I noticed that the Wikipedia article doesn't list the curb weight. I wonder why? I ran a search, and I'm seeing the all-wheel drive variant listed at 5000 lbs! Have fun plowing off the road in this thing-- understeer city, baby.

It'll be a magnified version of way back when Top Gear drove the original Lotus Elise against its bastardized electric cousin, the Tesla Roadster-- turns out strapping hundreds of pounds of batteries to a car ruins it. Imagine that!

On top of that, it's $45k, and only does 0-60 in seven seconds. If you want the 0-60 in six seconds version, it's a $60k car. My present-day $8700 350z does it in 5.5 seconds, and at 3300 lbs it can also carve clover leafs at 70 mph-- and feel good doing it, because the weight distribution is exactly 50/50 under load. It also sounds amazing, and looks gorgeous. And it's also a six speed manual transmission!

Comparing this E Crap to its V8-powered brother then, apples-to-apples: the Ford Mustang GT does 0-60 in in 4.3 seconds. I just priced one on Ford's web site, and it's only $36k brand new. Plus, it can be had with a manual transmission! And it can be "recharged" to 100% in two minutes at any gas station. Curb weight? 3700 lbs.

My appreciation of "Vee's" commentary has been growing over time-- he hits the hammer on the head more often than not. Here he is discussing how blacks and Muslims attacking Jews in New York City is short-circuiting Leftists brains, because it doesn't fit cleanly into their "Oppression Olympics" chart.

Incidentally, that's a good chart. I mildly disagree with some of the ordering-- "trans" people are on top, with women second, blacks third, while Asians are way down (think of how universities openly discriminate against them, as the chart even acknowledges)-- but the notion is spot-on.

The quote from that woman he shows is particularly hilarious. She finds the issue "massively complicated"-- cognitive dissonance says "hello"-- then reverts back to her NPC programming because she's feeling uncomfortable: "We need to re-unite against the common enemy, which is evil whitey!"

With the apparent pity party pseudo-retirement of John Xenakis, James Howard Kunstler has emerged in my view as the voice with the "most likely to occur" predictions. Here are his for 2020.

Not a lot to disagree with, it all seems pretty plausible to me. But a civil war in Mexico? I was planning to go there next year!

Even by modern game journalism or IGN standards, the opening two paragraphs here are some of the cringiest prose I've ever read. Note to author: you're a grown adult!

Not to mention everything mentioned therein was not only hopelessly derivative and riffing off of decades old themes and material, but was obnoxiously woke as hell. "Goody, new 'Star Wars' movies!"

I will say that I did have a physiological reaction to "Breath of the Wild", so there is that-- I think I started snoring after it put me to sleep!

Eric Peters frequently says that the pinnacle of car design was from the late 90s to the late 20-noughts, and I totally agree with that. Here, he points out how the still-sells-like-hotcakes Chrysler rear-wheel drive designs are over a decade old, and will soon be killed off permanently without ever having gotten successors.

While I've never been a big fan of American muscle and pony cars, my equivalent is the Nissan 370z. When it came out in 2009, I thought to myself, "and progress dictates that the next one will be a V8, perhaps a 'Nissan 420z'!", as I gleefully rubbed my hands together.

Here I am over a decade later, and not only has such a car not emerged, but quite literally never will. History will document that the 370z was the pinnacle of the affordable sports car: the end of the road, for all time.

The same goes for wifey's car: the next WRX will probably be a Tesla for all intents and purposes; electric motors, OTA software updates, and an automatic transmission. Not to mention, new Subarus have inward-facing cameras that spy on the car's own driver!

The Switch has been getting so many collections and ports that I've been trying to see how much of my top games of all time list I can play on it. Below is a list of the original game, the new version, and its "how much do I like it by comparison" score.

All of the scores suffer at least one rank due to one or both of inadequate CRT filters and the Switch's infamous input latency problems. Aside from those issues, there are also subjective factors such as how well the Switch's various controllers "feel".

In a nutshell, the Genesis is very well supported via the "Sega Genesis Classics" collection, but the 3DO and Saturn have no representation at all. Maybe I'll revisit this post at some future date as the platform's library continues to expand.

1. Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis) - Via "Sega Genesis Classics"(B+)
2. Super Street Fighter II Turbo (3DO) - "Super" via Capcom Collection (B)
3. Star Control II (3DO) - Nothing (F)
4. Guardian War (Saturn) - Nothing (F)
5. Dragon Force (Saturn) - Nothing (F)
6. Ys Book I & II (PC Engine) - Nothing (F)
7. Gex (3DO) - Nothing (F)
8. Phantasy Star II (Genesis) - Via "Sega Genesis Classics" (B+)
9. Toejam & Earl (Genesis) - Via "Sega Genesis Classics" (B+)
10. Streets of Rage 2 (Genesis) - Via "Sega Genesis Classics" (B+)
11. Sword of Vermillion (Genesis) - Via "Sega Genesis Classics" (B+)
12. Road Rash (3DO) - Nothing (F)
13. Minecraft (PC) - Minecraft (A)
14. One Must Fall: 2097 (PC) - Nothing (F)
15. Wolfenstein 3d - Nothing (F)
16. Doom (PC) - Doom (A-)
17. Shinobi III (Genesis) - Via "Sega Genesis Classics" (B+)
18. Samurai Shodown (3DO) - Via "ACA Neo Geo" release (A-)
19. Garo Densetsu Special - Via "ACA Neo Geo" release (B+)
20. Megazeux (PC) - Nothing (F)
21. Shining the Holy Ark - Nothing (F)
22. Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Saturn) - Via Capcom Collection (B+)
23. Ape Escape (PSX) - Nothing (F)
24. Lucienne's Quest (3DO) - Nothing (F)
25. AD&D Slayer (3DO) - Nothing (F)

It's also worth noting that the Switch has a growing-- albeit still pretty limited-- list of games which I think stand up to the classics:

• Chess Ultra - High production values and selectable piece sets, like the old "Chessmaster" DOS games
• Civilization VI - As good as any game in the series. Tons of mechanics via the DLC too
• Fuze - Stands right up in the GCS pantheon with STOS or Megazeux
• Sonic Mania - Probably superior drop-in replacement for "Sonic 3 & Knuckles"
• Virtua Racing - It's technically a port but feels like a whole new game in 16:9, 1080p, and with unlimited draw distance

Woke up this morning to a non-functional "s" key on my Chinese knock-off blue switch mechanical keyboard.

Completely disassembled it down to the PCB, scrubbed everything down, soaked the keys for an hour, verified the mechanical functionality of the "s" switch, went and plugged just the PCB and switches into my PC merely to test while waiting for the rest of it to dry, and... "s" switch still not triggering an "s" in my text editor.

Bloody hell.

It then dawned on me to inspect the USB connector itself. Lo and behold it looked like a dirty Mega Drive cartridge. Flattened a "Q-Tip" with a pair of pliers, dipped it in some rubbing alcohol, cleaned the USB contacts, plugged it back into my PC, and... viola, "s" works. Went through all of that other cleaning and disassembly for nothing!

At least the keyboard looks absolutely brand new, all put together again. I think some water may have dripped onto the board because I'm getting some occasional shorting-- but it'll dry out.

In other news, this is absolutely child abuse. And people ask me why I would fake the deaths of my children and move into the wilderness before I'd sent them to an actual school.

People tend to think "men" when they read "pedophile", but this black woman with the "Coors Lite"-commercial hair-do and her grossly obese nose-ringed contemporary getting their jollies in front of a room of the most vulnerable people in society is disgusting. They should be arrested and locked up.

In yet other news, here is another affirmation of Eric Peters's anti-electric car perspectives: when rubber meets the road and something absolutely has to get done-- police work, in this case-- electric cars simply aren't good enough. They aren't feasible for the cops, or for the ordinary person either.

Finally, isn't it interesting how all of the terrible ideas, like so-called "hate speech" rules, are being tried in universities first, before they get unleashed on the populace as a whole? I'm sure this kind of tracking is coming to American cities, on a large scale, sooner rather than later.

I haven't seen and wouldn't even conceive of going to see the film, but I still found this synopsis of the latest "Star Wars" movie to be hilarious; sounds like some incredible writing!

Having never played the series before, I got the latest one bundled with Duncan's new video card. I started the single player mode last night, and it's about the dumbest thing I've ever played.

First, I can't believe this is still a thing-- yet here we are.

Second, every single lead character so far is a strong powerful womyn bossing around square jawed cis-gendered white males-- then in the one scene where they needed one of the strong womyn to get bossed, they went further up the victimhood credit totem pole and used a black strong womyn.

Third, the antagonist is Russia-- Wolf Blitzer would be pleased. I read ahead, and apparently the game references the (faked) Douma chemical attacks as if they actually really happened... so on top of being woke, it's official State propaganda too.

Fourth, the game was 150 gigabytes to download-- and then when I launched the game and signed my soul away to a 28 page EULA, the game itself had to download a bunch of additional data. Give me a break.

Fifth and to ice it, the graphics are rubbish. "Digital Foundry" gushed over this game's technology, and I'm just not seeing it-- "Shenmue III" was a much better looking game.

I'll jump into the multiplayer to see if it's any good, but right now this is looking like a dismal game.

Here is Peter Schiff explaining the "repo" market in just a minute or two.

Regarding his questions as to why Republicans are so behind Trump, in spite of The Donald in substance being a Democrat-- the latter being a point I've mentioned many times on this blog: all eyes are on the culture war-oriented power struggle. Those concerns, right now, top the economic issues.

Even I "support" Trump, despite being diametrically opposed to him on fiscal and monetary policy, for the sole reason that he's the only person standing between the average Joe and the Cultural Marxist neo-Communist nutjobs who will turn this country into Venezuela if they obtain full power.

In other news, you know how Eric Peters is always saying that the true purpose behind electric cars is to limit people's mobility, and how once those electric cars serve their short-run purpose, some excuse will be made up as to why even those aren't good enough? Here you go, Eric! From the article, bold emphasis is mine:



I love the euphmestic language: "help people walk and cycle". Like they need Ed Miliband's or Occasional Cortex's "help" balancing on their "Diamondback" or pushing the pedals, hah! What that language means translated is, being forced to "walk and cycle" with a bayonet shoved into the lower part of the back.

Also don't forget: England is the country with well North of six hundred thousand State-run cameras, already monitoring the public's every move. Eliminating cars is a natural evolution.

Remember: any "freedom" you perceive in a Statist society is fake. Rather, it's the State "tax farm" constantly adjusting the minimal cattle rope length to maximize the State's own tax "revenue".

Letting people pick their own jobs is more productive and so more taxes-- so they let you do it. Letting people drive a car is more productive, so they let you do it. But tomorrow, they may decide that it is more productive to disallow those things, and so they will put a stop to it. In other words, they don't allow or disallow things because they think you have "rights".

This is a really cool insider's-style article about all of the logistics and equipment work NFL teams go through just to prepare for each single game. What a production! I also thought the security-related details were interesting: the Detroit Lions monitor their shoulder pads better than the State monitored Epstein's cell.

In other news, Al Green has said that if Trump isn't removed from office this time, they'll just keep impeaching him over and over. Now Adam Schiff predictably says Mike Pence is next. If Trump gets removed from office (remember: with zero evidence), it will be the end of the executive branch forever, because the legislative branches will just keep removing the opposing party's guy.

I had a lot of fun reading this-- hearing people's computing stories from those days is one of my favorite things. By comparison, I got my start way later. Major props to the people who went before me.

In my life time, Vikings have been blessed with a constant stream of superb running backs, from Darrin Nelson to Herschel Walker to Robert Smith to Michael Bennett to Adrian Peterson, and to Dalvin Cook today. They've even always had good reserve backs-- who can forget guys like Leroy Hoard, or today's Alexander Mattison?

The same has been true of wide receivers, from Ahmad Rashad to Anthony Carter to all of the amazing Cris Carter-Jake Reed years, then the Cris Carter-Randy Moss years, to Sidney Rice to Percy Harvin to Adam Theilen and Stefon Diggs. They also have a history of hall of fame linemen, and a whole host of superb defensive backs, linebackers, and even tight ends.

Indeed, in the Super Bowl era, Vikings have the sixth best win-loss record in the history of the NFL. You don't accomplish that without having some great players.

But at quarterback? It's another story.

Hah, my 350z has a higher top speed than Porsche's new electric car-- 167 mph for my car (with the 155 mph limit disabled via an ECU flash) versus 160 mph for the Porsche. The Porsche costs $185,000, whereas my car is worth $8700 in cash according to Kelley Blue Book. 21 times the cost gets you a slower car!

That, and my car is five times better looking and one thousand times better sounding. And I can take it from 0% "charge" to 100% in about two minutes flat, at gas stations which are about every block. But who's judging.

In other news, I almost fell out of my chair with this one: if you want to totally corner and baffle a contemporary Leftist, just ask them "what is a woman". Hilarious! If your ideology is sent into a total tail spin by someone asking you what color the sky is, then maybe you've got some thunkin' to do.

It's interesting to see people "catching up" to me: "where are all of the mind blowing experiences which couldn't have been done on earlier hardware?"

The only example I can even think of is the new "Microsoft Flight Simulator", where the game has the entire world modelled, thanks to "Bing Maps"-- not only did we not have "Bing Maps" in the 80s or 90s, but the processing power to parse that data just wasn't there. This is the kind of thing the hobby needs a lot more of.

Unfortunately, I don't see it happening.

There is a dichotomous split right now between "triple-A" and everyone else. To make a polished game which pushes today's hardware even just in the graphical sense costs hundreds of millions of dollars. With that kind of budget, the only game that can realistically be made is the kind of mass-market, Hollywood-movie style walking simulator-- because those sell!

In triple-A, the budgets are too big, and so they can't innovate.

Then there are the non-triple-A people: the bedroom pixel art "indie" hipsters, and the mid-range guys, like Yu Suzuki with "Shenmue III", or the people behind "The Outer Worlds", or the guys who made "MechWarrior 5". And in those cases, the budgets aren't big enough to push new boundaries! By the time they've created their crazy high resolution models and textures, and put together all of the levels in "UnrealEd" or "Unity", their entire ten or twenty million dollar budget is gone.

In non-triple-A, the budgets are too small, and so they can't innovate.

"But like Goldilocks, couldn't a game come along with just the right budget?" I don't think so, because of the way games are intrinsically financed; "Kickstarter" is only going to get you to the "mid-range" at best-- then as soon as you move to "corporate board room", publicly-traded company territory, you've burst into "triple-A" territory.

In other words, this "split" happened naturally and organically due to physical realities-- not randomly. And I don't see at the moment how those "physical realities" are not basic constants, versus things which will change over time.

If this were a video game, I'd say that Lamar Jackson has "solved" gridiron: he's broken the game! The run-pass option with him involved is basically unstoppable.

The only success I've seen against that offense is to bring constant pressure from linebackers, and have the linemen all play a "contain" game. In those situations when it's executed properly, Lamar will dance around a little, run to one side, then the other, then go down.

Of course, the problem is that he's also an adept passer even under extreme duress. But the above scheme at least gives you a chance.

First we had the "DirectX Box", and that was an ok moniker. Then we had the "Xbox 360", which was kind of a cool name. This was followed by the dreadful and confusing "Xbox One". But now, the best title of the bunch: the "Xbox Series X"! I even like the looks of it.

Trouble is, with "Play Anywhere" and "Unified Windows Platform", I'm not sure why someone wouldn't just save up a few extra bucks and build a gaming PC, which can be used for purposes other than just games. On the flip side, if the backwards compatibility is good, it will be the "ultimate" hardware rendition of that entire platform's history.

From the same event, not a single game here which looks interesting, other than perhaps the new "Dark Alliance" title-- not a lot of risk taking to say the least, and the "this would be cool to a twelve year old" Hollywood movie-style trailers don't help.

Someone really needs to make a brand new series of "Peter Schiff was right" videos, because every day his predictions are becoming more and more prescient-- again! Take this insanity: it's so crazy that Schiff low-balled his own guesses!

Even I'd given up on Peter for a period: "maybe he really is just a broken clock". But boy has he proven me wrong!

Not quite what I'd been hoping for.

The positives: They absolutely nailed the combat physics and the sim-heavy control scheme, while the flexibility in loadouts runs so contrary to modern day "water it down" sensibilities that it made me smile. I also appreciate what they're trying to do in making the campaign open-ended: as in 90s games like "X-COM: UFO Defense", you can totally screw yourself in "MechWarrior 5", which I love. The game seems like it's built with "infinite replayability" and starting over in mind.

The negatives: No "RTX" features yet. Beyond that, the game is a total mess graphically: dithered and banded lighting, totally messed up "level of detail" functionality, and the worst temporal anti-aliasing I've ever seen. Thankfully, people on Reddit have been hacking the .ini file to good effect. The "game around the game" also feels only half-finished: the campaign has some bizarre balancing, there is a huge hangar to walk around in but nothing in it, and so forth.

All-in-all, it kind of feels like an "early access" game in its first release. I know they are selling it for 50 USD and not the usual triple-A 60, but still...

This is one of those games that's going to get a lot better with patches; it'll be a totally different game in six months.

I was wondering why so many games have recently had the "Epic Games Store Exclusive" label on them-- including "Shenmue III", which I'm part-way through, and "MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries", which I'll start tomorrow. So I took a look at their "about" page, and the math is pretty clear.

If you use Unreal Engine for your game and publish on Steam, you lose thirty percent to Valve, and another five percent to license the engine. Publish on their store, and you only pay twelve percent, while you get the engine for free. Their FAQ also says that they offer some form of financial support both for development and marketing, if you exclusively publish with them.

Not counting tax confiscation and the usual fixed and variable costs of doing business, if you sell one hundred thousand copies of a game for fifty dollars a piece, publishing on Epic's store instead of Steam nets you an additional 1.15 million USD in profit. And that's not even counting their marketing muscle.

I don't even know what it is, but why don't they make cars which look like this anymore? What a beaut! It's like a five times better looking version of wifey's car.

They are still making the computer equivalents though! I'd love to pre-order one of these, but I've no clue if they'll ship it to the 'States.

This was one of the most satisfying things I've read in some time-- good for him!

I followed the trial extensively when it was going on, and based on the evidence presented couldn't even comprehend how it got to a trial in the first place. Now I know!

On this very topic, I once got into a big debate with an instructor for-- of all things!-- a "conceal and carry" permit class, for which I very nearly walked out because he was abusing his captive audience to spew racial nonsense, almost like a college professor. I had an entire room of people against me-- and they were all wrong. Never place stock in majority opinions just because they are majority.

This is also why I laugh at idiots like those "BLM" morons or Colin Kaeperdick-- their whole world view was built around this sham, along with the make-believe Michael Brown "Hands up don't shoot" story.

In my fifteen-odd years of following Lazio, I've seen many huge matches, including precious hardware-clutching cup triumphs such as the "Lulic Derby" of several years ago. But I think today's win over Juventus was the best Lazio performance I've ever seen.

When Radu got sucked forward into midfield and Ronaldo tapped in at the far post, the Lazio team of even just six months ago would have collapsed. Instead, they came from behind to beat the eight-times defending champions.

But what made it so impressive wasn't solely the result-- indeed, we beat them in the league just a few years ago thanks to Jordan Lukaku's left leg-- but the fact that we smashed them.

By the end of the game, it was Juventus who had collapsed-- heads-down, kicking at the dirt, and shouting recriminations at each other: indeed, Bonucci and Cuadrado were nearly at fisticuffs when the latter was deservedly sent off for being the last man on a desperate lunge to stop a Lazio counter-- one of countless times we completely undid them at the back.

Even an uncharacteristically poor Ciro Immobile penalty, double-saved by the-only-reason-it-wasn't-a-route Szczesny in goal, wasn't enough to stop the Lazio steamroller. By the time late-substitute Caicedo put the final sucker punch into the Old Lady's soft underbelly, I wasn't even surprised based on how the game had gone to that point.

Losing-my-voice-excited, yes. Surprised, no.

So now Lazio sit with the second best attack, and joint second-best defense in Serie A, with a table-topping +21 goal difference-- and only five points off Inter in first place. Third Scudetto in sight? I doubt it; Mauro Zarate and Hernanes, on different seasons, have seen us to these heights at this time of the year, only for us to not be able to keep up the pace down the stretch. This organization just doesn't have the financial resources to provide the depth needed to win the league.

But the most important thing: this team, which I recently called my least favorite of the Lotito era due to their ridiculous levels of mental fragility? They've grown right before my eyes, and proven me dead wrong.

I don't know if this is the first time, but seeing Eric Peters picked up by Zero Hedge is kind of neat.

And this article's last paragraph made me laugh. He didn't even mention games either: in that community, PCs-- and I'm talking mid-or-full tower chassis setups, like from the 90s-- are ubiquitous.

Gaming PCs are fun to build, have phenomenal performance, are easy to maintain plus keep clean, and adjusted for inflation are cheaper to build than they've ever been.

For someone like me, the computing formula was perfected back with the 386SX I built with my dad in the very late 1980s-- everything else, iPad especially, was a gargantuan step backwards in almost every regard: slower, more cumbersome to use, and missing 95% of the software functionality.

Paul Joseph Watson doesn't post videos as often as some of his contemporaries, but they're real quality when he does.

Regarding the first one, regular readers will recall me writing many times over the past several years about just how stagnant modern culture is; whether it's television, music, cinema, or video games, the same concepts are rehashed endlessly. About the "arrested emotional development" concerns, just peruse IGN and look at the bio pictures and Twitter feeds of their staff-- or check out the fact that the average player of the "Pokemon" video games is now over thirty.

I've seen the "70% of adults celebrating Halloween" thing first-hand, with grown adults entering and leaving various houses in my neighborhood on that day, dressed as fairies and tigers. Just like treating animals like humans, I think that's as much a manifestation of not having children as anything else.

As for the second video, wifey and I were just talking about how difficult it is to have basic, rational conversations with most people today: not only do they adopt bizarre opinions which are clearly manifestations of their retarded emotional development, but those views are unshakeable, no matter how fact-driven or logical you try to be in conversations with them. Then they try to ex post facto wrap their views in pseudo-intellectualism, to make themselves feel validated.

This "Laura" person with the rainbow flag is a perfect case in point: "Well, why did they need to shoot him?" Gee, I don't know, maybe it was because he was running around knifing people with a bomb vest strapped to his torso? Then comes the aforementioned faux and pseudo-intellectualism: "I don't like State-sponsored violence." How enlightened sounding of you!

When people have their projection pointed out to them, they often get angry and defensive. Case in point. After all, she and her colleagues have spent the past several years bashing that "Republicans are hateful deplorables" straw man. At some point, you become the thing you claim to abhor.

In other news, I laughed at this: why is it wrong to point out that someone has blue eyes, blond hair, or dark skin? Hah! It's a good point too: anyone who has watched Lamar Jackson-- the most exciting player I've seen in the NFL in ages-- execute the "RPO" will see that the ball is pretty camouflaged; both he and Mark Ingram have similarly-toned arms. One of the comments points out that MLB pitchers are not allowed to wear white gloves-- same principle.

And how in the world does this guy get anywhere near major film franchises? He single-handedly destroyed my once-beloved "Star Trek", which I consider to be a totally dead franchise, I've heard from fans that he's demolished "Star Wars", and now he's shoe-horning "wokeness" into his films to appease SJWs.

Processed foods combined with the rise of hedonistic, post-modernistic cultural values means that people gorge themselves with food to absurd points of obesity.

Overbearing parenting raised an entire generation of "snowflakes", who can't cope like adults with differing opinions, or basic stressors and sources of anxiety.

Women are hardcoded to compete with other women for men's resources, in a race to beat their child-bearing biological clocks before they lose their looks and, thus, their sexual market value. That's why, once women were allowed to vote, the State became a trillions-dollar wealth transfer apparatus from men to women: men are net positive on taxes, women are net negative.

But now on top of that biological drive to compete with other women for free stuff from men, the women are obese snowflakes: the simple sight of a fit, active, and healthy woman who genuinely likes her body and enjoys showing it off is a cause of child-like temper tantrums and meltdowns.

This morphed into the normalization of obesity: there are merely "different body sizes", and you can be "healthy at any size!" For the record, the number of serious and even fatal health issues that come from obesity is staggering. It also led to one of the boring contemporary ad hominems: showing fit women is sexism!

Except: notice how this article was written by man. What's wrong with him? A healthy man should like this kind of advertisement.

Well, men are hardcoded to have the urge to "white knight" for women. His obese feminist "Tumblr" friends are upset? Brrr brrr baaah! Here comes the author, Sir Virtue Signal, riding in to the rescue!

Also, even when normalized by age, testosterone levels in men are down forty percent since 1980, and are continuing to drop by one percent per year. This has led to not just increased gender dysphoria among males, but also them blathering on about "sexism", like the Millennial women.

I just realized I haven't been writing here much! It reminds me of that John Cleese quote, where he said you have about ten years of peak creativity, then you start to run out of new things. I've been "blogging" since 1996-- I don't have much to say that I haven't already said.

Almost everyone at my workplace is full-on Leftist, so they cheerlead Google censoring "misinformation"-- meanwhile, I found out today that a search engine "algorithm change" crushed the company's "organic" results-- which is a direct side effect of Google continuing their ramped up efforts to meddle in the 2020 election cycle. Hoisted on their own petards, for sure!

Most people today are incapable of critical thinking; they make assumptions that the kind of totally closed source, proprietary web site which Richard Stallman has been warning about for decades, like Google, is some kind of reliable and indifferent "infrastructure". But I could have told them aeons ago that building an entire business model based on a web site which the owner can arbitrarily change or even take down on a total whim is a supremely short-sighted idea-- and here we are.

In other news, my friend from Mexico stayed with us as planned for the latter half of last week. I hadn't had that much fun hanging out with a friend since high school-- so we're talking over twenty years! Beyond him being such a great person specifically, it also reinforced my view of Americans as assholes: I almost always get along better with foreigners, especially ones from Latin America or India.

Duncan and I are going to dive into some serious Spanish learning next year. It's nice having a native-speaking friend I can just chat with at any time to practice, I think it'll really speed up my learning curve!

You know how both the so-called "Green New Deal" and the UN's "2030 Agenda" are roughly ten percent weather-related, and ninety percent "social justice goals"-focused? That's how you know right off that stuff like Leftists trying to ban "Thanksgiving" because of "the climate" has nothing to do with "the climate" at all: it's social engineering, pure and simple, with the "climate change" thing serving as the mere pretense.

And speaking of Thanksgiving, can't wait to carve into the giant turkey with Mrs. Sniper's family and the kids today! Our relatives up North used our coop to grow several turkeys for "4H" this year-- albeit we're not eating one of those, they are on other people's dinner tables.

We're also having a long-time great friend from Mexico up visiting for the first time, and he'll be staying with us for a few days. Being a fellow lover of food, he made sure to come on Thanksgiving day.

Went shooting yesterday and along with my .357 magnum, handled a rifle and shotgun for the first time each.

The shotgun was a twelve-gauge pump action, and I have never felt such power in my life. It was like firing a cannon off of my shoulder! It was blasting enormous holes right through the target, to the point where the paper essentially disintegrated in short order. Incredible!

The rifle was a laser-sighted AR-15. With zero practice I was immediately "headshotting" the target practically through the same bullet hole, over and over, from 40+ yards away. Now I understand why the military uses them: you could hand one to a child for Pete's sake-- they are dummy proof and so easy to handle!

All of this really broadened my understanding of guns in general. I really want to get one of those AR-15s, or some similar kind of rifle.

Turn on your ad blocker so as to not inadvertently give these IGN creatures any ad revenue, then check out this intro for "MechWarrior 5".

The propaganda is funny: "humanity expanded into space thanks to the wise government"-- but then, "greed!" took over, and "mercenary battlefields" sprawled up, leading to "chaos". Hah! Not to mention, the background music and even the narrator are totally "focus group-tested" to not offend the aesthetic sensibilities of the Dudebros, Chads, and Cucks. Safe and boring!

Compare it to the "MechWarrior 2" intro and cinematics, which are memorable, have cool music, and are basically apolitical. There's a "story", but they don't browbeat you with it, and instead focus on the cool mech technology.

Hopefully the game itself will wind up being good though; these pre-rendered video game cinematics are all outsourced to third party sweat shops by the actual development teams anyway. The title has a fantastic ray-tracing implementation, which I'm really looking forward to experiencing.

Hah, Communist Manifesto much? At first I thought this was a parody!

Of course, it's-- and only-- the "25-34 year old demographic" which supports it: not the generations before them, and not even the one after. I guess the "millenials" thing exists in England as well, lucky them. It's going to be a scary world when that lot is in their 50s and 60s, and running major institutions.

But for now, it'll be Corbyn down in flames.

Out of the blue, Duncan walked up to me the other day and said, "Papa, look! A wormhole!"

The stuff you can find on YouTube... what I wouldn't give to have been here! It's incredible to me that someone with a camcorder has preserved this footage digitally.

I've always maintained that I was born exactly ten years too late. I looked up the exact date of that event, and it was in July-- so I was only four years old at the time. Fourteen, and we're talking: I probably could have talked my metal head uncle into going and taking me with, provided his age was adjusted with mine.

I also totally missed the microcomputer era of the late-70s and early-80s. I did use my grandfather's various PC XTs and ATs in the 80s, plus my dad and I built a 386SX kit in 1989, so there was that. But I missed the "Speccy / C64"-style computers almost completely, until I bought an Atari ST just a couple of years ago.

On the flip-side, I was one of probably the first thousand people, or even less, to ever play a first-person shooter over the actual internet-- so, excluding "Doom" or "Duke3d" dial-up pools. I was playing "QTest" like an hour after it popped up on their FTP server. To think if you made a chronological list of people to land a "frag" online, my name would be there right at the top of hundreds of millions of individuals is pretty sweet.

I also surfed the web with the original Windows port of "Mosaic", back when that was the web browser-- as in, the only one. So I've been around the internet pretty much since the very beginning. And I also taught myself HTML shortly thereafter, so I was a first-generation "script kiddie".

In terms of raw computational power, the Xbox 360 splits the difference between the Switch docked and undocked. Take a look at this "Halo Reach" 360 footage-- from the quality of the assets and textures to the overall resolution, it looks exactly like a Switch game.

I saw an advert today on television where global regime change, banker and corpotocracy cartel establishment progagandist shill Steven Colbert apparently visited New Zealand's (female...) Prime Minister: "Can I come live here??", he asks with a smirk. Hah hah, funny comedian that guy!

Meanwhile peaceful parenting, pacifist non-aggression principle "treat everyone as an individual" Steven Molyneux visited that same country earlier this year; he had his venue shut down due to bomb threats, with a mob of violent Leftist agitators trying to flip over and start fire to a bus of innocent people who had come to hear him speak.

There couldn't be a stronger case for secession than this contrast: pack your bags, Colbert.

Interesting hypothesis here, which says that Trump does things indirectly-- like taking a pill for its side effects only.

For example: ending the Middle East wars proved impossible directly-- so instead, just declare on Twitter that the oil reserves are all secured. Hah!

Not very many people know that the current "climate change" alarmism is rooted in the same kind of eugenics programs the German Nazi party employed during the World War II period.

Think that's far-fetched? Hearken back to my post earlier this year about the UN's "2030 Agenda". It's all right out in the open.

In the wake of the Stallman-related drama, there is yet more "cancel culture" SJW Linux-infestation occurring, this time regarding a guy who offered to sit down and have a coffee chat with someone who was upset with him for asking people to be calm.

Not kidding.

In response to his proposing an adult conversation, the person-- someone named "Kim Crayton"-- became completely unhinged, repeatedly telling him to go fuck himself.

I looked up this charming lady's Twitter feed, and she's quite literally a Marxist/Communist political agitator masquerading as some kind of techie. Her self-described job title is "CEO"-- "Chief Encouragement Officer" (lol)-- and she gives speeches on "Underrepresented and Marginalized in Tech". Oh boy.

I also found her Github page, and she's made zero commits in the entirety of 2019. Her repos are along the lines of "I did five minutes of a Coursera class on JavaScript five years ago." Basically all she does is go to conferences and give talks about "issues of diversity and inclusion in technology as a Community Engineer." That's like calling a garbage man a "sanitation engineer."

Less than 1% of programmers are black, and only 17% of programmers are women. Based on her toddler behavior and those statistics, I immediately assumed she was a total phony and rabble-rouser. But, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and did my digging... only to find I was correct. My intuition is usually spot-on, and so it proved again.

I wrote previously about the so-called "codes of conduct" at tech conferences these days, and here is a perfect example of someone losing their conference credentials and professional reputation for no good reason, while the nutjob issuing the F-bomb tirades is A-OK.

It's also yet another example of my "invasion of the hobby snatchers" post, where someone who isn't even interested in the area has infiltrated their way in for the express purpose of "social engineering" the group in accordance with their world view, from the inside-out.

It's easy-- and justified!-- to complain about "implied consent" to having your blood drawn, just because you obtained a driver's license. But what about "implied consent" to taxation, because you're breathing?

The reality is, no one "consents" to these things-- they just take the path of least resistance, and go along with it, which is better than getting shot.

Maybe cracking someone with a helmet is too far, but I enjoyed watching this-- it was like a hockey match! Gridiron needs more fights. They're all practically wearing full-on body armor anyway.

The pearl clutching from some of the players is kind of ridiculous. At least the announcers seemed to get into it: notice how they were local commentators. Everything is better local.

Couldn't agree more with this. My father-in-law recently bought a current-generation Ford F-150, and its bed is smaller than that of the 2002 Ford Ranger he was replacing-- as is the engine, incidentally, which went from a V6 to a 4-cylinder.

Instead of being practical at doing what trucks do well, it has a huge cabin, where the passengers are sitting what feels like feet away from one another-- pointless waste of sheet metal, especially when it carves into the bed so much.

In other news, not only can Google have your fingerprint, your pulse, blood pressure, every single conversation you've ever had with anyone over the internet, cameras and microphones in your house always recording away, and just about everything else, they can now be your bank.

And people complain about Comcast.

I watch a lot of evil American cop videos, and they are legion-- but this one is so incredible, it's straight out of "Idiocracy"!

"You are being detained." "Why?" "Because you're eating a sandwich." "What??" "That's against the law. Are you resisting arrest?" "No, I'm just eating!"

Excellent interview here by Tom Woods, talking about Epstein.

I mentioned the dreaded "J word" here, and I simply have to bring it up again after listening to this interview: other than J. Edgar Hoover, every single person the guest mentioned throughout the entire video had names like "Cohen" and "Rothstein" and "Rosenthal", and involved the CIA and "Israeli Intelligence" teaming up with the mafia.

Which leads me to the next topic which has been on my mind.

When you ask a Conservative, "give me an example of a government controlling an entire landmass under a grip of total evil", they reply with real world examples: Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, East Germany, Mao's China, North Korea, and on and on the list goes. The above Epstein-related discourse is a prime example of just such real-life government corruption.

When you ask a Liberal, "give me an example of a corporation controlling an entire landmass under a grip of total evil", they write works of fiction, where they suspend the laws of human nature and social organization and contrive bizarro hypothetical fantasy scenarios, providing no plausible explanation to how this fictitious state of affairs even emerged in the first place.

The reason I bring this up now is that I've been trying to enjoy "The Outer Worlds", for which I posted my review yesterday-- and it's been uphill sledding. I found a picture of some of the development team, and let's just say there is more than enough blubber and red hair dye to go around. It's a great example of my "Invasion of the Hobby Snatchers" post, incidentally.

Nominally, "The Outer Worlds" is the exact kind of game I like best: a Western CRPG with stealth elements and fun dungeon crawling. But when the game's entire world and story continually plays out like an anti-West North Korean propaganda film... well, let's just say it's a lot to overlook. If any title needed a "new coat of paint" or a re-theming on top of its core design, it's this one.

Lots of people complain about "microtransactions" in games, but what they hardly ever seem to realize is that those are a hedging strategy against inflation.

The MSRP of games hasn't risen in over a decade. Meanwhile, the cost of putting together a government-compliant development team, complete with health care and following all labor plus hiring laws, has greatly increased.

I remember Peter Schiff saying some years ago, "the end goal of markets isn't to have competition-- it's to have low prices and high quality." I thought of that quote when I read this article.

At the bug-out house, Walmart has been an amazing addition to the community there; they have stuff that no other store has, and for cheap-- not to mention, you can order extra obscure items and have them shipped right to the store.

Essentially everyone does their shopping there, because it's a great store, which led to it being "the only game in town". The person who wrote the article has the cause-and-effect totally backwards! And it will only maintain that "dominance" so long as it continues doing what it has been.

Read this 2017 post of mine, then head to this ESPN piece. See the connection?

To add to the hyper-reaction emotions-based rule making examples in my post is the more recent instance of New Orleans fans practically rioting because of one bad call in the playoffs, which led to-- you guessed it-- more rules and stoppages!

The solution is to pare back the rule book to the absolute minimum, and just let the athletes play. Then don't act like a two year old throwing toys out of the pram when your team loses.

Instead, the "solution" will be to add more rules, to countermand the flaws in the previous rules. The article says that the "refereeing bureaucracy" will "expand".

There are also lots of funny quotes in the article: the replay system is "highly cultivated" was one in particular. Also, a statement that these issues happen "in every sport"-- in football, controversy exploded only after the sport took the "replay" aspect from the NFL!

There are honest people working at the news networks: what this anchor wouldn't have given to have had her "blow the top off" report aired! She should leave and get a job for an alternative news platform, where she can simply tell the truth.

Jews have a bad reputation for a reason. Epstein? Jewish. Dershowitz, Epstein's attorney who pressured the network into canning the report? Jewish. Goldston, the President of ABC news who surely played a central role in canning said report? Jewish.

In other news and for those who have read "Anna Karenina", remember the passage late on where Levin has to cut a check for liveries, and reflects how that one cost was something like eight peasant's productivity for an entire year? Then the next check he cuts "goes down easier", by the third time he doesn't even think about it? And then... he winds up in debt, with an empty bank account.

As I read it, that discourse reminded me of the national debt: a life-time six-figure earner like me pays about a million Fed bucks in taxes over his entire life. Meanwhile, the State will enact some program which is 46 billion Fed bucks per year! But no one even questions it-- it's Levin, writing his sixth and seventh totally unsustainable checks.

I'd be curious to see what the government would actually be if it were backed only by real productivity, and not magic unicorn fairy dust monopoly board game money-- there'd be nothing left after the hacksaw job! It'd be glorious.

Interesting hypothesis here; it does seem probable that there is an ulterior explanation, in part or in full, for California moving back to the 18th century. It's easier to blame "fire" than a systemic design limitation of wind turbines.

You can tell just by looking at him that he's either a smarmy Communist, or your average Minnesota United supporter.

One thing is certain: it's the face of a person who would crack someone with a blunt object from behind. Have fun in prison! About time there are repercussions for these "Antifa" morons.

I just read someone defend copyright with, "is piracy depriving someone of their property, or is it depriving a seller of their power?"

It's the former; if someone puts their Honda Accord on sale, and then I also put mine on sale, I'm "depriving them of their power" by lowering the resale value of their car. Clearly, me deciding to sell my Honda Accord is not piracy.

Nearly a year ago I wrote in disbelief about the use of these so-called "self-driving" cars. Turns out, Steve Wozniak agrees with me, even citing some of the exact same apprehensions and facts.

In other news, Epstein did not commit suicide, but was murdered. Anyone with half a brain already knew that, but now it's confirmed via evidence. Add this to Schiff's no-evidence secret back room "impeachment investigation", and it's obvious some seismic stuff is underfoot.

Who would have known that the bizarro model of sending children on to stinking dirty multi-ton diesel buses at six thirty in the morning where they can be mass-indoctrinated in concrete prison-style complexes is not conducive to kids actually learning things.

But, mommy and daddy need to have their four thousand square foot mansion in the suburbs; no time for one of them to stay home and raise the kids. Or in the case of black kids, seventy two percent of them grow up without fathers, which carries over to their behavior and ability to focus in school.

And why the focus on raising scores of the least book smart kids? A better strategy would be to steer them towards the trades; they can make six-figure income doing that, and not be shoe-horned into things they'll be bad at and get frustrated with. Meanwhile in school, emphasize making the highest achievers as brilliant as possible-- "a rising tide..."

My local, regular grocery store has been virtue signaling for the past couple of years, first installing general-purpose, vertical windmill-powered electric car-charging slots-- in the spots very closest to the store entrance incidentally; sorry disabled people-- followed more recently by an entire row of Tesla-specific chargers.

The store's customer base is at least fifty percent EBT-card toting, inner city blacks-- while every time I see a Musk-Mobile depart from a charger, it's some upper-class looking white yuppie, or an Indian doctor. I doubt they even go into the actual store.

In any event, I actively avoid that area as I drive into or out of the parking lot; there are dozens of videos of Teslas spontaneously catching fire, speeding up and smashing into parked cars, or actually running over pedestrians. I don't feel safe around those things, and neither should you. Check this out!

But, Tesla are given a free pass, because they serve a useful "social conditioning" purpose, favorable to the globalist's ability to retain power and control-- sort of like the advertising I mentioned here.

Random dungeon generators, MML parsers which produce better-than-Famicom chip music, fancy font libraries, polygonal terrain generators, and just about everything else imaginable. And this is with what's essentially a primitive, "early access" version of the product.

The best part is that unlike something akin to "Dreams", or making weird stuff with redstone in "Minecraft", Fuze is totally code-based-- which means the things made in it are maintainable, extensible, and easily shareable.

The hardcore Minnesota United fans are a rowdy pack of collectivistic Leninist-Marxist sexual hedonists, with their Antifa masks, militant rainbow banners, and "punch a Republican" "Iron Front" flags. Meanwhile, the hardcore Lazio supporters are a rowdy pack of collectivistic Mussolini and Nazi-sympathisers, who march down the city streets of competing clubs giving the "Roman salute".

Fun lots, they are.

During Vikings games, eleven minutes of action gets you subjected to thirty five minutes' worth of seventy-odd commercials, conditioning the public to the globalist banker agenda of third-world immigration, Afro-centric black culture worship, emasculated white males, interracial marriage, and enough overall cultural degeneracy to make the denizens of Sodom or Gomorrah blush.

Good stuff.

Makes a man think there are better things to do than watch sports.

Last night and on a whim, I decided to play the original "Street Fighter II" for the first time, and was unexpectedly greeted by this art when I'd beaten it. I haven't laughed that hard in absolutely ages; it's "Zodiac Killer Ken and his inflatable blow-up doll"!

I've always thought that some of the pre-Super SFII artwork is shocking-- just take a look at Blanka's losing character portrait. But this is so bad that I can scarcely believe the game shipped with it. It's almost like it was an eleventh-hour prank pulled by one of the developers!

You can tell they didn't know what to do with Bison yet: his character portrait looks like the Jenkins devil!

One of the things I liked and wish they'd stuck with was the palm tree in the foreground of Sagat's stage. I get that it's a little wide and obstructs the view a bit too much, but it really adds some much-needed sense of depth to the board. I also prefer the colorization of Vega's stage-- the lights beneath the stage really pop with the yellow theming.

One funny part is that you can tell the engine wasn't quite done yet. Ryu walked up to me and combo'd quite literally eight crouching short kicks into a dizzy!

Unrelated bonus joke: why do sumo wrestlers shave their legs? Answer: so they don't get confused with feminists.

Someone asked recently, "what's the future viability of Fuze on Switch?" Which got me thinking, "what's the future viability of the Switch in general?"

Right now, it's not too difficult to just add dynamic resolution scaling and lower resolution textures to a game designed for the 1.3 teraflops PlayStation 4, and get it running on the 380-or-so gigaflops Switch, at 30 fps. But I can't fathom approximating even today's "Metro Exodus" as it runs on my RTX 2080, on Switch-- much less actual "next generation" games, which will be targeting hardware ray tracing and 12 teraflops as a minimum target.

Compounding the problem is the presence of the Switch Lite, which-- being handheld-only-- is limited to about 150 gigaflops. That's a gap of 80 times in terms of power, between the minimum PlayStation 5 and Switch baselines! There's no amount of resolution scaling which will bridge that chasm-- not to mention the Switch will no longer support the same minimum hardware features as its competitors, as it does presently.

The Switch's installed base is already huge, so I don't think it's going to become a third-party wasteland like the Wii U was. But I think the library will shift to lower-budget mid-tier games made specifically for the platform, versus it continuing to get ports of actual mainstream titles. I could see this result in a flattening out of sales growth, because the value of the Switch as providing mainstream experiences will be seriously compromised.

Of course, we don't know what the rumored "Switch Pro" will be.

My current theory is that it will be a TV-only version of the hardware, but with tech specs intended to catch it up to current platforms by providing a solid 1080p experience, with much less dynamic resolution stuff going on-- not be some kind of PlayStation 5 competitor. On that note, I'm skeptical they can even really go PlayStation 4 Pro-levels (4.2 teraflops), because it'll be difficult for the Switch Lite to run those same games with an even close to equivalent experience.

I'd been thinking that Nintendo could incrementally add cores and increase clocks to gradually and smoothly shuffle people along to newer Switch hardware. After all, that's one of the beautiful things about having gone with ARM.

But the more I think about it, and with the complete strategy divergence of the Switch Lite, the more I think they will need to make a complete "break" via a "Switch 2", which would drastically update the handheld baseline as well as the on-TV format. In other words, the dock-less "Switch Lite" may buy them some temporary sales and praise, but could wind up being a real messy "ball-and-chain" scenario for them down the road.

I mentioned to someone in passing today that I like to eat meat. He replied with, "Well we can't have twelve billion people carving up cows, but once in awhile it's ok."

For someone who can't even get the number of people on Earth correct, I highly doubt this sanctimonious jackass has any even remote freaking clue how to back his assertion with actual math. But nonetheless, he deems that I still need his permission to eat a cheeseburger, in my own home.

Well guess what, retard: I buy my beef in cash, from friends, who feed their cows with hay mowed from their own fields. Oh, and did I mention that we're all heavily armed? Have fun trying to stop us, and the millions like us.

Making great progress on my "Fuze" game; I don't want to give away what it is yet, but I started by writing the engine without any graphics, instrumented instead with prints of all of the key variables. I tweaked the heck out of its parameters, even adding "joy-con" rumble support to the movements.

Once I got all of that working, I drew the player sprite frames. Then tonight, I wired the player animation and frame rendering to the underlying engine, which was already written. That kind of disconnected, "walk before you run" approach really helped me break the larger problem into smaller, more manageable ones.

My next step is designing stage tiles, creating an actual level out of them, then getting the stage and collision detection working around the now totally functional player. After that, it will be designing an actual game using what will have essentially been a tech demo to that point.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: I wrote my own music-playing code, adapted from one of the built-in tutorials, and programmed four songs into my project, which I composed using this cool online sequencer. Some other people in the community are working on full-blown MML parsers, so I may swap to one of their "libraries" at some point. Kind of reminds me of the Genesis "sound driver" days!

Charles Hugh Smith is really on to something here; if modern-day society was purposefully designed, it couldn't be made to breed less happiness.

Take my job: I make existing, perfectly-functional computer systems .0001% better, increasing shareholder returns by an immeasurably small fraction of a fraction of a percent. Talk about fulfilling! What's bizarre is that I get paid good money to do it-- so good, that it's tough to stop, especially with the cost of living these days!

It's what Charles Hugh Smith calls "the landfill economy". The fact that I make more than 100k USD in what I do shows how far into diminishing returns territory the current system is.

In a way, this festering disconnect was already starting in the 19th century, at least for a certain class-- remember that poignant passage from "Anna Karenina", where Levin is working with the scythe, with the peasants? Now it's on steroids: everyone is Levin.

My mom had a parallel story from today; she was in Mexico a few years ago, and she saw all of the "peasants" walking back in a huge group from fourteen hour jobs in the "hospitality" business. She'd never seen such an authentically happy group! Meanwhile, the wealthy tourists were stressed out and grumpy.

We had an IT conference recently in a musty, almost horse-smelling building. I was so relaxed! Meanwhile, people around me were complaining about "the smell".