Forum posts

I've seen this error in many Source maps (including my own). I believe it's a rendering bug, and I haven't figured out a non-kludge way to get around it.

Finally, that makes sense. Thanks everyone.

I remember some of my breakups. One was particularly hard because I knew she cared for me a great deal. However, I just didn't like her romantically, despite my best effort at trying.

It was a pathetic way to break up with her, but I wrote her a letter, and handed it to her after our last date. This way, I figure I save her the embarassment if she needed to cry out loud. But mostly, I was just too chicken to do it in person. I didn't want to see her cry.

Another girl was hard too, but she just wouldn't let go. Even after I broke up with her in person, she wuold come back over and over, dropping by my apartment unannounced. Technically, I had two stalkers in my life, and she was one of them. The other one was far more traumatic for me. It was a nurse I dated back in residency.

Who said geeks can't get the girls?

I don't think he'll ever come back to TWHL anymore, at least not for twenty years.

Some people are just not emotionally ready for mapping, which can be very taxing at times.

The mappers who made de_corse and de_gambaru spent over a year in making their maps.

Do you know of any Pixar film that was made in less a year? I think it took them over seven years to make "The Incredibles".

And we all know how long it took Valve to come up with Half-Life 2, which is an undeniable masterpiece.

So why would hintbrushes affect NPC's? It's not as if the engine renders the scene for each NPC also. That's why I don't understand the update message.

Hintbrushes only affect the player's vantage point, because it simplies rendering. It shouldn't have anything to do with NPC's.

God IS in your apartment, satchmo. He's behind the couch.

Darn! No wonder I can't find Him. I never clean back there.

And the Bible was written by hundreds of people, over hundreds of years. Even the lowly scribes who copied the Bible frequently modify the content as they saw fit.

The bottom line is, the Bible was written by men (I am sure the religious majoritty did not allow the weaker gender to intervene in such important matter). In fact, many religious scholars agree that Jesus was probably a married man.

Did anyone notice the Half-Life 2 fix in the last Steam update (on April 19th)? Does anyone know what it means?

"Fixed bug where NPCs would ignore hintbrushes that should block line of sight"

I am just curious.

Oh, he's eleven.

Give him twenty years. He'll become a mapper yet.

Don't forget to come back to TWHL when you're mapping for HL9.

I'd invite Him over for tea if he comes to my apartment.

Okay, then I'll ejaculate on the keyboard after I poop on it.

Ahh, I attribute my ignorance to my ESL background.

See how nice Ant is? He gave you guidance even when you behave badly.

We shall crown Ant "Saint Ant" from now on.

I can understand Russian better than I can understand jaardsi's posts.

Meh, once is enough.

Thread is getting old.

I can always pwn yall by bringing my keyboard to the bathroom and shit directly on it.

Take that!

Sometimes we need the lighter stuff in life to make life less serious.

I am facing a lot of stress at work right now, and I hardly slept last night. If you're curious, you can read my blog.

But I need the light-hearted threads to keep my sanity. It's my temporary escape from the real world.

I have posted my share of articles depicting the ugliness in this world, but this one proves that there is still a glimmer of hope in humanity. Enough of the bickering already (even though controversy can be fun sometimes), so much negativity can really weigh you down.

I know it's a long article, but it brought tears to my eyes. It's worth the read.

---

From Russia With Glove
Bill Plaschke

April 21, 2006

For the first 10 years of her life, she didn't know she had a first name.

Now, baseball has given her several.

"Let's go, Tash!" ? "Get 'em Nat!" ? "All yours, Pony Tail!"

"They call me lots of things," Natasha Smith said. "I never get tired of hearing any of them."

For the first 10 years of her life, she didn't experience a loving touch.

Now, baseball surrounds her with dozens.

Her teammates smack her glove. She punches their arms. They grab her shoulders. She slaps high fives.

"I used to feel unwanted," she said. "But people like me now."

For the first 10 years of her life, living in a children's home in the Russian woods, she was an orphan.

Today, on the Calvary Baptist high school boys baseball team, Natasha Smith is a shortstop.

Her adoptive parents hold the camera in the stands. Her date for the La Verne school's graduation banquet sits next to her on the bench. MaggieMoo's will be open for a strawberry-banana shake after a victory.

Simple things, but wondrous things, for a girl who grew up without celebrating her birthday because she didn't understand the concept of birthdays.

"I thought kids never grew up," she said.

She didn't even understand the idea of parents until she had them.

"I thought all the kids lived together forever," she said.

When missionaries Carol and Harry Smith brought her to La Verne a decade ago, just before she turned 10, she didn't speak a word of English. And when she did, she had difficulty understanding because of long-untreated dyslexia.

"I was always the dumbest," she said. "In Russia, in America, everywhere, I was the dumbest."

But then she discovered the daily miracle that American adolescents have understood forever.

It is the one place in their life that does not judge. It is high school sports.

The playing field does not care where you are from, as long as you keep showing up. It does not care who you are, as long as you bring it all with you.

Running around her giant orphanage made her physically strong. Hiding from daily beatings made her mentally tough.

Her mother took her to a church league soccer practice shortly after her arrival here, and suddenly she found a language she understood.

Said Smith: "In sports, I was even with everyone. In sports, they did not laugh."

Kids never grow up? Oh, but they do, and this spring, at age 19, Natasha Smith's days are filled with balloons and frosting and light.

She is not only one of the only serious female baseball players in Southern California, she is possibly the best pure player at her 35-person high school, which is not large enough to field a girls softball team.

Folks stare at the pig tails sticking out from under her blue cap, but nobody notices anything else.

The playing field only cares, can you hit? Smith does, driving in 10 runs in her first 18 at-bats.

Can you catch? Smith does, having committed errors in only three of nine games.

Can you run? Smith had 15 stolen bases in her first 15 tries.

Can you ? go out on a date with the opposing pitcher?

OK, in Smith's case, the playing field occasionally cares about something else.

"Our guys are really impressed with her as an athlete, but I hear them talking, they also think she's really cute," said David Bowman, father of an opposing Highland Hall player, Matt. "You can see them hanging out longer after the game because they want to meet her."

In one recent victory, against the California School for the Deaf, Smith stole home with the eventual game-winning run, then recorded the final out as the winning pitcher.

Afterward, surrounded by congratulating teammates, heading for the ice cream parlor with her parents, Smith had one of those thoughts that often fills her eyes with tears.

No crying in baseball? Not here.

"Sometimes during the day I just stop and cry, thinking about how lucky I am to have been chosen by these wonderful people," she said in her perfect Russian-accented English. "Chosen for this wonderful life."

Fourth inning, runner on first, one out, Highland Hall pitcher struggling, up stepped Natasha Smith.

And here came the familiar cheer.

"You're not gonna let her get a hit off you, are you?" shouted a dad to the pitcher.

At some point in every game, she hears it. And at some point in every game, after she makes a good play, it stops.

This time, it stopped with a thwack. A fastball sailed into her left forearm.

She turned, winced, then dropped the bat and trotted down to first base with one noticeably absent motion.

She never touched the arm.

"It hurt a little, but I don't show it, I never show it," she said. "You have to get used to the hurt."

She learned this after she was abandoned by her parents as an infant in St. Petersburg, Russia.

She spent the next decade in orphanages where she was called only by her last name ? Salieleva ? and called only to work or eat.

"If you complained, you were hit, so I eventually learned to stop complaining," she said.

She rarely experienced a warm hug, never felt a good-night kiss, never heard a lullaby.

What she did hear were the commands to wash the floors or haul the trash, followed by slaps if the jobs were not done properly.

"They did not care about you there," she said. "I never knew love."

When Harry and Carol Smith decided to add two children to their childless marriage, they worked through a local agency, picking Natasha out of a video.

"She didn't have the proper paperwork, so the agency tried to talk us into somebody else, somebody easier, but she had this certain presence, I can't explain it, we just had to have her," Carol said.

It took a year longer, and when they finally arrived to pick her up, her hair had been shoddily cut because of lice, and her body was still aching from a beating.

"I remember my mother put me on her lap, I had never before sat in anybody's lap, it was the happiest day of my life," Smith recalled.

She had never driven in a car, so she vomited throughout their drive to nearby St. Petersburg.

She had never seen a clock, so she had no understanding of something as simple as bedtime.

She had been scared during long nights in orphanage, so she refused to sleep in the dark.

And when it came time to give her new parents a kiss?

"She didn't even know how to kiss," Carol said. "It was more like a bite."

On her adoption application, Natasha had written that her favorite things in the world were kukla, the Russian word for dolls.

So her parents showered her with dolls, leading to one of the first revelations about their daughter.

"I told them, I only put kukla on the application because I was told that would make it easier for me to get adopted," Smith said. "I told them, 'I hate kukla.' "

No, she loved sports, even those she didn't understand, like baseball, which she only began playing on a dare.

"My freshman year, my friends asked me to play, but I was afraid of the ball," she said. "When I finally decided to try it, I run to the wrong base."

But try it she did, because the field, any field, was the one place she felt comfortable.

"Sports was the one place in life where she felt on equal footing with everyone else," said Harry, who is now a mechanical engineer. "It was the one place she felt she could compete."

In this, her senior year, she was a basketball all-star, but it is in baseball where she makes her biggest impact.

"When I first saw her, I had no idea she would become such a good player," said her coach, Lincoln Dial, who is also the Calvary Baptist pastor. "We play sports for the right reasons here, but we also want to win. We play her because she can help us win."

And she never ceases to amaze, such as the time she singled and stole second and briefly took off her helmet and the opposing shortstop shouted, "Hey, look! It's a chick!"

Or the time a hard-throwing pitcher threw her only lobs, which she angrily swatted away.

Then there are the opposing players who compliment her during the postgame handshake, then quietly ask her teammates for her phone number

"We tell them to back off," said Robert Little, a junior third baseman. "She's one of us."

She's one of us.

And here, Natasha Smith once thought she would never be part of anybody.

After a recent Calvary Baptist practice in which she laughed and slugged and sprinted and answered to eight different nicknames, all of them meaning "teammate," Smith told a story.

"I remember once, when I was little, they took us to the beach, and I looked up and saw an airplane, and I wished I could fly in an airplane," she said. "I didn't know there were other countries, I didn't know where I would fly, I just wanted to fly."

She smiled.

"I think, now, I fly."

Umm Who is ben, just kidding.

Ben has been involved in every war since the beginning of mankind. He's this big guy with hairy testicles, but he's a homosexual, like the legendary Achilles.

I hate it when Hollywood had to "mainstream" a character's historical background so that they don't offend the Christian audience in movies (like "Troy"). Brad Pitt's character is suppose to be gay, yet they made him in love with his cousin, and gratuituously filmed him sleeping with two lovely and completely nude girls.

Twisting history so that it's more palatable to the majority? That's twisted.

TigerStar, if that's the attitude you have when you're requesting assistance from us, you shouldn't bother.

In fact, I am asking everyone at TWHL not to help you until you've changed your attitude.

For me, the greateset importance in life is to make myself happy and make others around me happy as well.

The meaning of life is simple. Happiness all around shall be our goal. How to achieve that is tricky and error-prone.

I love TWHL, because it makes me happy.

That's the problem with religion. It's up to the people to interpret the Bible (and write the Bible in the first place). The pure religious concepts themselves are good, but after they've been interpreted by fallable human beings, the result is anything but pure or good.

Since God himself cannot intervene on a daily basis and direct human behavior (even thought he's supposedly omnipotent, he just chooses not to intervene), the humans just fuck around with religion and mess it up constantly.

Is there a solution? Not really. Humans are inherently fallable and stupid, as demonstrated by my "Dunce American" thread. So is religion ever going to be practice the way it's meant to be practiced? Never.

Dying early is the loss of the chance to tell one more person, in the hope he/she may come to a relationship with god.

...and that's the only reason why Christians feel sad when their loved ones die early? Please don't kid me.

Organized religion threatened to burn Galileo at the stake unless he publically proclaim that the Sun revolves around the Earth instead of the other way around. He hated doing it, but he had to to save his life.

If truly God does NOT exist, then it would be necessary for humanity to invent one. Because there are many circumstances in our lives that are too painful to tolerate alone. We feel powerless frequently, and there are still many things that we have no control over.

So at those trying times, spiritual support can be extremely valuable and important. Sometimes I envy those who truly belive, because they have something that I don't have. They have this additional pillar that I will not be able to lean on.

But for the life of me, I can never believe something that is so intangible and so abstract. And through many facets of religion, it has been abused beyond recognition. Organized religion has become a political machine, where a power and financial struggle is at the core of the organization instead of the original pure intention of the founder.

It's unfortunate that religion has been tainted and transformed into something so ugly.

Then can someone explain to me why dying early is a bad thing for Christians? I just don't comprehend. Pardon my ignorance.

No person should be condemed. NO MATTER WHAT!

And I am not condeming anyone. I am just wishing that they were in a better place.

Isn't heaven a lot better than Earth? Wouldn't it be better to get there sooner rather than later?

I treasure every single minute on Earth, because it's all I got. I value everything around me, because they're precious. My time is short, but I'll enjoy every second of it. I'll be very sad when it's time to leave.

I never said I hate Christians. Some of my best friends are Christians.

But I just don't understand why any Christians should feel sad when their family members of friends die. They're in a better place, isn't it?

Whereas when I die, I rot and become food for the bacteria.

Damn! Who's that guy? He's so ugly, I almost threw up my lunch.

im having a heart attack, dont need science to help me, God will fix me...

Isn't it better to die anyway? Christians get to go to heaven, so all of them are better off dead.

Oh yeah. I "park" my keyboard and mouse at specific locations on my desk. The angle and the position is measured precisely.

However, when I am actively using my computer, they get re-adjusted so that the angle and the position are most conducive to an ergonomic utility.

I like them "parked" when the computer is not in use because I like the central desk space avaialbe for other tasks.

I know my compuslions can be sickening sometimes, but they also allowed me to study longer than anyone else. It has its pros and cons.

There are many religious followers (i.e. fundamentalist Christians) who believed that dinosaurs walked side by side with humans (because the Bible says the Earth is just a few thousands years, instead of millions). They refuse to believe in evolution, and they dont' want it to be taught in schools either.

I'd say let them be. In fact, don't even bother teaching them biology. Heck, let's scrap the entire science and math curriculum for anyone religious completely. They should just read the Bible, and don't even go to school. Sunday school and a Bible study should suffice their entire educational experience.

Praise the Lord!

Mean while, I'll send my children to universities and have them learn about molecular evolution. They will become scientists and get fully educated on the rigors of science.

Having lots of ignorant people in this world is essential. Otherwise, who will do those menial low-paying jobs? We need janitors and waitors. Otherwise, who will my kids order around when they need something cleaned?

I imagine the castle to be bigger.

How long are your arms by the way?

My arms? I never measured them. I don't measure them because I don't plan to re-arrange them.

For everything else that I can arrange, I measure and re-adjust. Sometimes I drive my wife crazy, but she knew what she was getting into when she married me.

Our apartment is impeccable...except her desk.

Anyone who has ever built his own machine knows what all the components look like. You also learn when you upgrade too.

I started learning back in the 80's, when I was in high school. I've built two computers for myself already, and I've upgraded countless (for friends and family members).

Now I don't even want to remove my keys to look what's underneath. That's just nasty.

Ignorance is bliss.

Compressed air is over-rated.

The typical household vacuum cleaner works like a charm.

A lifestyle implies complete freedom of choice. The homosexual lifestyle has inherent limitations and risks. There are crazies out there to kill them.

You're implying a similar scenario that they willingly choose such lifestyle, which could be life-threatening.

It's as if they walked into a restaurant, and the waiter hands them a menu. They pick "Let's see...is the special brain hemorrhage and being hacked to pieces?"

Waitor: "Yes indeed"

Gay: "What about not being able to marry?"

Waitor: "That's the chef's specialty".

Gay: "Then that's what I'll have."

Waitor: "Anything on the dessert list?"

Gay: "...yeah, I think I'll have the being castrated by religious gay bashers with my main course."

I see a doctor everyday.

Dinosaurs raped Romans until they became Christians.

Uhh...no.

Don't tell me you can't identify graphics card visually anymore!

Due to the fact that I am an obsessive-compulsive sicko, my keyboard is quite clean. I always wash my hands for a full minute before touching the keyboard or the mouse. But on top of that, I still clean my keyboard and mouse buttons with moist Q-tips once a week. I vacuum between the keys about once a month.

This is how my desk looks:

Notice the items on the desk? They are spaced exactly equidistance from one another, measured with a ruler.

Some people just can't stop growing though. They keep on growing into their fifties, until they're about 500 lb (226.79619 kg). Then they die from a massive heart attack.

Geeks, by definition, are not good at raping anything.

We can map, however, like there is no tomorrow.

And we can identify any graphics card in less than one nanosecond.

Most gun owners' victim end up being themselves or their family members.

A cop shot himself last month in LA accidentally. He died of his wound.

We're all hopeless geeks.

We should have a geek-pride week and a parade.

That's why it's so much healthier to play Counter-Strike than buying those real guns.

This way, we can all legally shoot guns and collect guns without worrying about accidentally shooting our loved ones or ourselves.

Mormons? They just wear funny hats and have sex with their daughters.

But he uses the AK for hunting. And if those damn deer wear body kevlar, he still has the armour-piercing bullets for them.

Did God masturbate very hard to create himself?

Oh wait! How can he masturbate before he exists? Pretty darn difficult when you don't have a hand or a penis.