Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
I find it immensely hilarious that out of all the crazy shit in FF6 like suplexing the train that takes people to the afterlife, abducting a feral kid from the Veldt, plots with mind control tiaras, Moogle genocide, Kefka poisoning an entire castle full of people, and a globe-trotting homocidal octopus, it was the Three Dream Stooges that were the last straw for your friend.
…That game actually comes off sounding really weird if you try to describe it in a single paragraph.
Somehow her navel is visible through the tube dress as well. Perhaps it just made out of Saran Wrap.
I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.
He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.
If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…
You should check out an original Famicom, then. Not only are the controller cables only about two feet long, but they’re also permanently affixed to the console. Well, unless you’re willing to dismantle it, anyway.
It seems Nintendo expected gamers to keep the console in front of them and connected to the TV via a cable running across the floor, rather than our now familiar methodology of keeping the console under or next to the TV and only bringing the controller(s) with you. The limited amount of space in Japanese households may have also had something to do with it.
Anyway, if you’re a modern western gamer nowadays it’s annoying as hell. Big N made the right choice when they brought the system to the US in not only making the controller cables significantly longer, but also unpluggable.
Your yearly reminder that the original Paddington Bear stuffed toy was designed and made by Shirley Clarkson and given to her son: Jeremy Clarkson.
Yes, that Jeremy Clarkson. You know, the “Speed and Power!” guy.
(Although this was not the origin of the character himself. Michael Bond bought a generic toy bear from a toy shop and named it after nearby Paddington station. He wrote some stories using the bear as a character, and then they got published, and then he probably got very rich.)
Maybe in full HD we’ll be able to determine definitively if anyone in Ivalice actually has a nose.
No one is “saving” him. The Coast Guard has repeatedly and unilaterally decided to hassle this guy every time he puts to sea over red tape and other trivial shit. The word you’re searching for is actually “harassing.” He did not ask to be rescued and never indicated he was in distress.
I will recite Hofstadter’s Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Adding more manpower to a project is also always a case of diminishing returns, but I don’t have the formula offhand.
“There’s never the budget to do it right, but there’s always budget to do it twice.”
You need one of these:
How is bird so smol, but also so tall.
Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.
The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.
They actually raised that bridge – or rather, lowered the underpass at what was surely great expense – and even at its new taller height of 12’4" it’s still not enough to help stupid people.
Correct answer.
Incidentally, but not at all coincidentally, this is precisely why Target stores always have those red concrete spheres in front of the doors. Which are typically nearly exactly the same height and thus have the same potential amount of visibility/invisibility below a driver’s sightline as this rock. It’s to prevent morons from crashing their vehicles through the doors.
The rock(s) pictured are not even in the parking lot like this Wal Mart pole. If you leave the road, it is reasonable to expect that you will encounter obstacles.
I have one of each…
This guy… he’s un-fuckin-believable.
See, this is exactly my point in my other comment above. I could do this in about five seconds with Corel PhotoPaint.
Export to a flat format (.jpeg, .png, .gif, whatever) and your output will be flattened. You don’t need to think about layers or merging or layers being bigger than the canvas or not. There is no, “Be careful not to XYZ.” What you see in the preview is what the output will look like. Period. You can even apply your monitor’s color calibration to it or the color profile of any other output device (printer, a different monitor, etc.) on the fly if you are a big enough nerd.
You can do this in an even simpler dumber way in CorelDRAW!
That’s… literally it. You don’t have to crop, you don’t have to trim, or layer, or anything. You can specify the dimensions of the output file in the export window before you hit save if you want it to be different than the original. Your arrangement doesn’t even have to be rectangular and it will still work.
“And if I do give you a solution, we’ll be sure not to share it with anyone else.”
No, GIMP does suck.
It has the same problem as most FOSS packages that are too wide in breadth and have multiple contributors with their own hobby horses pulling in all different directions, and to this day does not actually provide a feature-complete whole, nor an interface that actually makes sense. And it’s not a matter of the workflow just being different – it categorically fails to replicate functionality that is core to its commercial competitors. Numerous other “big” productivity packages have the same problem including FreeCAD (boy does it ever), LibreOffice, etc. I say this as a staunch supporter of FreeCAD, by the way. It’s the only CAD software I use even though it’s a pain in my ass.
The shining exception to this I see is Inkscape, but it is still significantly less powerful than even early versions of CorelDraw.
For 2D graphics work these days, I hold my nose and just use Corel. I use it for work. Like, actual commercial work. That I get paid for. It is at least a lesser evil than doing business with Adobe.
And if you want to stick it to the man, it is easily pirated.
German censorship laws are both kind of weird and very strict. Thus, the versions of the various Wolfenstein games released in Germany have a lot of changes, starting with of course removing all reference to Nazi imagery. It at times baffling, and at other times highly amusing. So you’re right, in the Wolfenstein games you fight various Nazi like guys who are never actually depicted specifically as Nazis. You can’t say Nazi. You can’t even depict Nazis in a clearly unfavorable light, cast unambiguously as evil people getting slaughtered left, right, and center. There are no Nazis in Germany. There were never any Nazis in Germany…
All the swastikas and SS logos are replaced with other emblems like eagles or black triangles or similar. Blood is reduced or removed. IIRC in the original Wolf3D the dogs were replaced with giant rats. And, most hilarious of all, the portraits of Hitler on the walls in the first are still clearly Hitler, but his mustache has been removed so now he’s just “some guy.” Same with his in game sprite. This change made it to the SNES version, too. His organization gets some generic name like “The Order,” or “The Wolves,” or whatever. Notwithstanding that the original game was just outright banned in Germany for like 30 years.
Violence against humans is frowned upon or outright prohibited depending on the era in question, so enemies may have ham-fisted changes made to make them actually “robots,” by either bleeding oil or sparks or something.
For a deep dive into this sort of thing, check out the GermanPeter channel on Youtube which has a series of videos detailing all the censorship and other changes made to the Wolfenstein series, Doom, Quake, Half Life, and a other popular games.