Jiggling TBD.

Don’t use inline code / code blocks formatting for text. There’s no line breaks and the syntax highlighting is nonsense.

“Oh come on, why the fuck, there’s no possible reason this code should-- wrong variable.”

I have too many comments reading “… how did this ever work?”

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

You can abuse the shit out of a PC speaker, even at 4.77 MHz.

Downvotes on the comment suggest I already have.

I really adore the game-developing parts of Nintendo. I even admire their history of promoting creative randos. But their legal department is a threat to entire concepts on the internet and in general computing, so the whole company can go fuck a rake.

Never give Nintendo money.

OP has an essay due.

No, fuck that business model.

Oh, so you’re against the lesser evil because you just want more evil.

How are you not blocked by everyone? Here, I’ll help.

“Voting for Harris won’t change this foreign atrocity!”

Foreign atrocity remains unchanged, but now you’ve got domestic atrocities.

“See! I’m helping!”

• Wet bastard (hated)

• Dry bastard (adored)

Okay great, so the problem was unavoidable, in this decision. It made no difference. Why the fuck should we have that problem, and also outright fascism?

Will this result make that better?

No, seriously. If that’s the biggest issue, to the exclusion of all others - does this event make it better, or worse?

Other chip companies abound, they just cannot make x86. That’s been a duopoly for nearly thirty years. VIA was an asterisk on that until they got bought by some Chinese company. Cyrix tried faking their way around it via what we’d now call microcode, and it went poorly.

x86 would become like ARM… which admittedly could be devastating toward RISC-V.

Cram them under AMD and make it not-a-monopoly by ending all x86 patents.

Almost certainly. Current hardware is still for ultranerds ready to recompile everything from source each time Youtube updates. The very near future will see cheapo consumer hardware featuring all the fixes those people figured out. Applications will creep upward after that - like any disruptive technology.

But it’s already real enough that the latest Raspberry Pi has two RISC-V cores, just because it can.

Half-Life as a live-action film, in continuous first-person.

The game is deliberately cinematic to begin with. You’d cut down a brisk run-through to maybe an hour of set-pieces and combat, then build out the “dialog.” In quotations because I would make Gordon canonically mute. It’d become thematic.

Gordon took the hazard course qualifications that secretly exist to staff the extraterrestial excursion team, but they’re not quite desperate enough to risk having an astronaut who can’t use the radio, so he’s stuck on Earth pushing rocks. Without a helmet, because the excursion team keeps losing equipment, what with getting attacked by aliens. The aliens think the guys in orange suits are a distinct subspecies… which keeps kidnapping their kind.

Vortigaunts in particular would be seen maybe trying communicate with scientists in labcoats (a subspecies marked by their ridiculous ties) only to spot Gordon and freak out. They all hate the POV character on-sight. If they’re on-camera, they’re gonna start waving their hands to cast deadly lightning. They’d even try to communicate with the bug-eyed subspecies in splotchy green outfits, only to get shredded by submachinegun fire. The military wears those dehumanizing masks (and speaks over radio comms you can hear) because all they were told is “secret experiments, actual zombies, existential threat.” They saw one distended human with a jaw for his ribcage and the strength to slap a dude in half, and they didn’t ask any further questions.

This all comes together in Interloper. Gordon sees the biological factory where these creatures are enslaved to manufacture more of themselves. The ones inside know nothing about Earth. They prance up, curious and burbling incoherently, pawing all over Gordon’s bright orange carapace. He sticks a gun in their faces and they consider the object fascinating. But when he puts it away and tries communicating in sign language, they scatter, and a few start waving their hands to zap him. Gordon Freeman was chosen for this event because he is physically incapable of any outcome but one.

Sometimes an engineer has an idea and gets offended that it doesn’t exist.

We’re like wizards. The miracles you want are practical, mundane, boring. The miracles we want are whimsical bullshit. Guess which ones get done sooner.