I was at a red-light once and a homeless guy came up and started doing the “window washing” thing. I legit had no cash on me and tried to shoo him off ineffectually. Suddenly, he gets this scared look and runs off. I look over, and the driver next to me has pulled a pistol and is yelling at the homeless man. The pistol guy then gives me a knowing head nod, the light changed, and I took the first turn I could to take any other route to work.

This guy was waving his gun all around too, pointed it towards me several times while motioning with it for the homeless guy to leave. I own guns, I’m not uncomfortable around them, but it takes a special kind of insane to pull a gun in those circumstances, to settle a minor annoyance.

Also like, I can’t fathom the mind of a person who sees threats with a gun as a general solution to problems. So you’re annoyed about a guy begging for money, you know what’s even more inconvenient? Being fucking homeless and having lunatics threaten you with death in the middle of the street!

America is an asylum without walls.

I think this probably applies…

So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.

In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc…) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).

There are still updates regularly released for it too!

I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.

Remember when Humble Bundle was actually a charity and not just a charity-themed storefront owned by IGN?

Well, technically owned by IGN, a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis, formerly J2 Global, formerly Ziff-Davis.

I’m sure firing what was left of the employees with any commitment to the concept of HB and folding the brand under the rest of your e-commerce verticle will have no further adverse effects on the quality or usability of HB as a service.

I’ve gotten back into tinkering on a little Rust game project, it has about a dozen dependencies on various math and gamedev libraries. When I go to build (just like with npm in my JavaScript projects) cargo needs to download and build just over 200 projects. 3 of them build and run “install scripts” which are just also rust programs. I know this because my anti-virus flagged each of them and I had to allow them through so my little roguelike would build.

Like, what are we even suppose to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.”

I don’t want to go back to the days of hand chisling every routine into bare silicon by hand, but i feel l like there must be a better system we just haven’t devised yet.