I'm not playing the Core.

This is a pretty sizable club you've joined

I lol'd at this way too much

I really enjoy this brief. Top marks, briefman

You'll never keep me and my kind oppressed, Jessie. Cheese haters unite!

Food: Whatever my mom cooks

One of my colleagues is from Chennai and he and his wife make the most incredible food. I don't know if that's south-India enough, but if your mom's cooking is similar, I'm very jealous

Everyone deserves the basic necessities and opportunities of life, and the world could easily provide it if it was inclined to. We won't get there by not caring.

Love this.

We're gonna have a fight about the mushrooms, though

You'd have to be pretty fuckin' bored to bother filling this daft shit out, Urby.

About You

Name: Archie
Age: 28
Hometown: Glasgow, Scotland
Relationships: Serial monogamist. Rubbish at being single. Currently living with my long-term smoosh Anna.
Occupation: Head of Post-Production at a sports media agency.
Current goal(s): I want to write a book but have neither the skill nor the motivation to sit down and do it. Long term I want to establish my own Post-Production House.
Politics: Healthcare, education and inclusivity. I'm a weeping liberal in the current climate. Supporter of Scottish independence, but out of wanting to distance myself from Westminster rather than any misplaced nationalism.
Religion: Supporter of belief, so long as it's not at the expense of evidence or sense. I much prefer people who seek the answer, rather than those arrogant enough to think they know the answer already.

Favourite Things

Food: A big sexy curry. Usually lean Indian, but Thai and Japanese curries are also legit.
Hot drink: Coffee as black as my soul.
Cold drink: Water. Never been one for fizzy drinks.
Snacks: Cherry tomatoes. My time living in France got me into tomatoes and black coffee in a big way.
Movies: Massive movie nerd. Top 5 changes constantly, but usually includes Birdman, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, In Bruges and The Big Lebowski.
Videogames: I used to be a big ol' FPS gamer, but I tend to only play management and strategy games solo (Two Point Hospital and Motorsport Manager are current squeezes) and I really only ever play Divinity 2 online with Urby. Oh I also have a racing wheel and play F12019 a lot. Anna and I play a lot of Mariokart and Smash on the Switch. I just got her Animal Crossing and she's pretty hooked.
Music: Very varied. A lot of rock, a lot of soundtracks and a lot of experimental and melodic hip-hop. Childish Gambino, Logic and Don Broco get a lot of play time at the moment.
Other: Big into F1. Like, majorly. I'm that nerd who watches all the practice sessions as well. I also go to a hell of a lot of live rugby, including the entirety of the most recent World Cup in Tokyo.

Disliked/Hated Things

Food: Cheese. Fuck you, cheese.
Hot drink: Yet to meet a hot drink I dislike. Maybe like an Earl Grey.
Cold drink: Tequila. Dreadful stuff.
Snacks: Liquorice or aniseed sweets. See Urby's answer.
Movies: Movies I have to literally switch my brain off for annoy me. I've only ever walked out of the cinema once, during Transformers 2. Woeful drivel.
Videogames: I used to adore Counter-Strike, but now I can't understand how anyone plays it when it's just AWP-strike 24/7 after round 2.
Music: Easy answer. Calvin Harris, Dua Lipa - One Kiss is the worst song ever to chart. Objectively. I believe it got radio time as a cruel vault-tech style experiment on a global scale.
Other: I don't like people who can't go without looking at their phone for more than 20 minutes.

If I had it on for all of the parts of my life I could remember, it might look like this.

How ridiculously great is Mauritius?

I think we need to get Urby to step outside

Since Covid-19 has absolutely buggered all of my travel for the upcoming months, I thought it was a good time to reflect on some of my favourite trips over the years.
If you don't know, anyone with a location-enabled phone probably has a storied location history stored on Google maps. Every time your phone makes a handshake with a location, Google logs it. Terrifying privacy implications aside, it does create a very cool, very accurate timeline of your travel.

So post your timelines and let us know what your highlights have been, and where you're looking to visit next!

Mine is fairly accurate from around 2012 onwards. Sadly lacks my trips to the north of Scotland and Ireland as a kid.
I feel like over the last few years I've done a huge amount of travel, and yet looking at this there is still so much world still to see.Biggest highlight for me has probably been my two months in Tokyo. What an incredibly warm and welcoming people the Japanese are.
Also absolutely adored my recent trip to Sydney. It felt a lot like my home of Glasgow, albeit with a lot more sun.

Next on the list for me is a toss-up between Thailand, New Zealand and South Africa. I've got a great friend in Johannesburg who keeps inviting me to crash on their couch, Thailand is mainly because I love the cuisine and NZL is because every Kiwi I meet is a bloody legend.
Also definitely need to hit up Argentina some time soon.

I feel like I blinked and suddenly everyone was amazing at mapping. Looks fantastic, Koe. Absolutely captures the Black Mesa aesthetic

You're all high. It's clearly an Admermobile

The scale of this project is inspiring, abbadon

It's super low-poly - any reason you can't just recreate it with brushwork and use a texture-light to represent the bulb and glass?

You can also add an env_sprite for an added flare glow.

If you need to use the model, you'll need to create an illuminated version of the material and light the entire model.

Nice one, Pebs

Jessie can you just get off your anti-VR high horse for once

after getting accidentally, if not violently successfully murdered by Eichra

Look, I apologised.

Payday on the 26th and I'll pick this up. Goddamn you, Nintendo, and your first-party prices.
dropped £60 on Smash Bros and I've probably only put two hours into it.

... The cause was already found, Stojke

No frickin waaay! I love Evil Genius so much

Adjust sun angle, reduce bounces.

Who are you people? Get off my lawn, ya darned kids!

I don't have much interest in playing Minecraft anymore, but I'd love to see screenshots of the world. How's it going?

It's really, really good.

Eichra the Mighty Ba is awful fighty, though

From the POV of someone using After Effects every day for work, I'll just echo what everyone else has said. No hope on that system.

I just ordered a few of the new Alienware M15s for my office, though, and so far they seem pretty good other than the screens being pretty tiny at 15.6".
Certainly no match for a desktop, but that's obviously not always an option. There are options with lower amounts of RAM, but realistically 16GB is pretty much the minimum spec for AE.
8th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-8750H
Windows 10 Home 64bit
16GB, 2x8GB, DDR4, 2666MHz
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1070 Max-Q design with 8GB GDDR5

I got them to replace our current fleet of Macbook Pros which are fucking useless. The previous generation were pretty good, but these new ones are just shocking. Somehow they're slower than their previous iteration - literally can't even play a 1920x1080 ProRes 422 without dropping frames. That's a native Apple format. Unreal.

This is your friendly neighbourhood reminder that the server still exists

Striker said:That... looks cozy-er than my place. This is a shitty picture to sell yourself as an office worker.

Not sure I understand

Finally got my own office at work, so I've made some homely touches!

I'm so distant to the gaming marketplace at the moment. I've lost all passion for it.
I'm enjoying the hell out of Breath of the Wild and Mario was pretty good, but other than that the only thing I really have any desire to play is PUBG and I just don't have the time available to commit to it. The Switch works because I can play it on my commute.

I just want more Breath of the Wild.

Can't get enough of this shit

But where is the shoutbox?

It's been too long since I've done this to give you the exact values, but this is to do with the bitrate and frequency of your .wav files.

Iirc it's around 12500Hz and 8-bit.

For all the world building that BM:I did, Anomalous Materials has to win for its brilliant scripting.
Imagine how much less impactful Unforeseen Consequences would have been if you weren't travelling back through areas you'd already visited pre-disaster.

It will lose against Unforeseen Consequences, but Anomalous Materials wins this round.

This is really difficult. Certainly nobody's favourite two chapters... I think Residue Processing is a little more fun, but barely.

It has a bit of humour to it, at least.

Anomalous Materials. Without a doubt.
Following on from the brilliant Black Mesa Inbound, chapter 2 continues to make Black Mesa feel like a living, breathing place.
Lambda Core kinda bores me.

Xcom and Xcom 2 are goddamn masterpieces. Permadeath gives everything such weight. I actually stopped playing Xcom 2 for weeks because I knew I'd fucked up and wouldn't be able to save one of my OG characters.

Will definitely pick up Into the Breach on your recommendation

Amazing, Victor.

The little jump at the end

Understood, the confusion arises because nothing in your screenshot is torturing the engine

Welcome to TWHL, Mini-satchmo! Your dad is one of the coolest people I've ever had the pleasure of speaking to. Glad to hear you're kicking his butt at games

I've downloaded petabytes of atrocious and shameful pornography from the dodgiest websites in existence* over the past couple of years with Vivaldi and I've still never had scammers steal my credits. It uses Chrome's backend and the frontend is very, very power-user-friendly.

*Exaggeration unit is in full effect

I'm quite surprised that nobody mentioned Opera

Vivaldi is the new version of Opera by its original co-founder. He wasn't happy with how bloated Opera had become, as well as how they were turning their back on the community and decided to start again with community focus at the forefront of every decision. I used to use Opera and the transition to Vivaldi has been wonderful.

Exactly. The interface was what was so fucked about 8. They tried to bridge tablet and pc and just got both wrong.

Just because we love a game made in '98 doesn't mean we should keep our hardware at that level for posterity's sake.

The simple fact is you need a modern OS to take advantage of modern hardware. Win10 is exactly what we asked for after the disaster that was Win8: Win7, but with a couple of excellent new features. It's very comfortable, very stable (in my experience, anyway) and behaves perfectly and consistently across all 3 of my massively varied systems (A budget laptop, a high-end gaming PC at home and a ridicu-powerful workstation at work).

The privacy shit is a real problem, but that's more of a societal whole than just Microsoft being wanks. User data is the commodity of the 21st century and one OS is not going to change that.

I'm not fanboying and blindly defending; it's not perfect, but it's far, far from retarded, and a better option today than Win7. Certainly than XP.

"Never seen that behaviour before, i think your OS must have gotten corrupted somehow."

"READ BEFORE U POST."

This is not normal Win10 behaviour.

Oh neat, no I haven't!

Microsoft Edge sucks.

I wouldn't recommend it over Vivaldi or Chrome, but actually it's pretty good. Considerably better than modern Firefox in terms of speed, comfort of use and resource-usage.
Took them far too long to retire IE, but they've done a good job.

But seriously, just get Vivaldi

Never had any problems with this except when software isn't run as admin and can't write to the system drive which is an irritation, but at least comes from a place of vague sense.
Sounds like you've got a corruption somewhere for that behaviour.

Haha, I know. It's a big office, though, and things tend to grow legs and go missing if you don't absolutely lay claim to them.

Ok

Cd5ssmffan, that is the worst thing I've ever seen

I've not got a personal PC since I moved to London (It's still up in Glasgow), so I'll just post my work setup. It's pretty good for gaming as well