Review everything! [2nd edition] Created 3 years ago2020-11-15 18:43:58 UTC by Striker

This thread comes to life thanks to inspiration from the one that was created 8 years ago, it in turn being inspired by some journal of Captain Terror.

UrbaNebula said:This is somewhat inspired by Captain Terrors journal. Basically, you name an object, person, animal whatever. It can be as precise as naming an item "pea" or you could cover a range of items "vegetables"

The next person then has to post what they think of that particular thing, giving it a wee review or summary, before naming their own item, person, animal, whatever. Pretty simple.

Example:

Quince
I don't regard this as my favorite fruit, but it occupies a kind of niche in my taste. Its pulp is usually too hard when raw, but if correctly picked it can offer a really interesting show to your tasting buds. One of the last fruits of the autumn season, you can pick this up up late October to early November when, at last, it will be of a brilliant yellow color. I'd say I eat at most 2-3 quinces/year.
It's probably more well known from its derivative products, such as jam/marmalade made from it. Its flavor is quite intense, so when making an apple pie you can throw a little bit of quince marmalade to boost its flavour.

Coffee

Coffee
This stuff gets me through the day, though I must confess I am certainly not a coffee connoisseur. I'm easily pleased with various brands of instant coffee and always take lots of milk and two sugars. Sacrilege according to the world's coffee snobs I'm sure. I drink it morning, noon and night which often results in mockery from my internet buddies, but you know what? If a cup of coffee in the evening means I'm going to lose sleep, I'll just make a slightly stronger one in the morning. Haha!

Toast

Toast
Toast is a type of food that I often see as a last resort, something only to be eaten when I'm too tired to cook a proper meal. Yet that is largely due to the simplicity of preparation, surely something so quick and easy to prepare can't be a good food to eat?
It's is one of those foods that probably isn't anyone's favourite, but nobody disliked it either. It's not my favourite, but with the right kind of bread and the right stuff on it it can be pretty damn good. My current go-to toast type is thus; get some cheese bread. I don't know if it's a common type of bread but you can get it in a lot of bakeries around these parts, basically bread with chunks of cheese speckled throughout. Cut some slices off, and then toast them. Apply some good quality butter, and then some vegemite. Enjoy.
Shit's magnificent.

Whisky

Whisky
Never tried it. What's a whisky? What? I don't have a whisky stash in my office. I certainly never drink it at work. WHO SENT YOU?

(bonus points for spelling it the correct, Scottish way, TJB )

Formula 1

Formula 1
In this sport, people drive dozens of laps around the same track in expensive, fast cars. But not too fast because of a bunch of limits that keep changing? The best car usually wins I think. I'm not into sports: if I must watch something I choose ice hockey or one of those funny sports like tractor pulling or competitive rock paper scissors. Sorry. Bad reviewer.

Marmite/vegemite

Marmite/vegemite

Ah yes, the food that powers us Australians. Don't be fooled, don't apply too thick like mayo and she's all good mate. In fact, each Australian can converse a jar of vegemite over the course of a year if they use correctly and going to Woolies to buy a jar annually is a right of passage.
Anyone who applies vegemite to the same consistency of jam is either a psychopath or someone pretending to be Australian. Be wary of the latter, this individual will usually wear a cork hat and say "G'day Mate!" all the time, as a way to try and blend in.
Marmite is null and void when Vegemite is present.

The Year 2006

The Year 2006

I couldn't tell you what was going on in the world, but 2006 was the year I turned 20 and I left home and started living with my girlfriend. We lived in a flat with no phone line, so I "left" TWHL for about a month. Then we moved to a new place because the flat was dreadful and genuinely nearly put my girlfriend in the hospital. Got a phone line, set up broadband and boom, back online.

I moved from checkouts to administration at the supermarket where I worked, then moved to the bakery because admin was over-staffed, then moved back to admin when somebody left.

I was also working on Kinetix (a doomed Half-Life mod) and was 1.5 years into my TWHL membership. Looking back on my posts though, it was mostly cringe.

TWHL

TWHL

It's a community dedicated mostly to Half-Life modding but they also tend to mod other Valve games (Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead...). This community is full of talented and nice people that is always willing to give a hand to those who need it, they are really passionate for the work they do and show a lot of love for the games they like. I myself highly recommend to join this community if you are looking for help and useful tips so you can start modding yourself!

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2
Funny game with funny characters, silly hats and one of the most wholesome (and dumb) characters in all GMod and SFM films (Heavy).
I played it when I was 7 or so, and that's the game where I used a microphone for the first time. My very FIRST efforts at socialising were there. Everyone thought I was German for some reason, probably due to my accent back then. But everyone here knows I'm Bosnian.

I think TF2 is partially responsible for the start of my mapping journey as well, as it's the first Source game I tried mapping for. Soon after, though, I moved to CS 1.6 mapping and stayed there for a good while. :^)

Err... looking back at it today, I got no interest in it and it's definitely not like it used to be. Mann vs. Machine was cool tho'.

QuArK (the map editor, not physical quarks)

QuArK
Looks intimidating. It wouldn't surprise me if nobody else here has tried it, so I will be so bold as to change the topic without a review to prevent the thread from dying:

Quark (dairy product) or cottage cheese

Cottage cheese

Cottage cheese is such a versatile ingredient. I sometimes keep a can in my fridge and when I feel the need of a slightly sweet snack, I combine it with some canned blueberries (although I also like canned blueberries in combination with goat yogurt).
You can also make some really delicious cake with it, or sweet cheese pie with pastry sheets.
I wonder how other people eat this.

Asphalt

Asphalt
Asphalt is not a versatile ingredient. The can I've kept in my fridge has sat there unused for at least a year, no matter how sweet a snack I feel like. Neither adding it into a cake nor putting it between pastry sheets improves the flavour by any measurable amount.
I suppose it might be useful for paving roads or something, it would certainly make more sense than eating it. If you were going to do something like that then it could actually be a useful thing to have around, provided you actually got around to repairing the road surface when it needs repair and don't just leave it to develop potholes.
cough cough local government cough

Discord

Discord
The social platform that suits folks like me the most. My parents ain't there, my classmates ain't there, none of my IRL friends (which I don't have) are there, just my Internet buddies. Turning on its light theme will give your eyes the equivalent of Chernobyl 2.0, but at least there's a way for custom themes, if you're willing to take the risk of getting your account into trouble.

I like how I can share my screen, voice chat and do stuff like that. Tis a pretty flexible lil thing. TWHL has a Discord server too, but everyone knows this by now, lol.

Sometimes it can be unreliable with messages not sending themselves, and at other times there are server outages, and my God, any new feature they add nowadays just seems like a blatant attempt at ripping off Guilded. At least, that's what my friends say. Discord's latest 'reply' feature is cool but it seems like it adds a lot of noise, making chats harder to moderate.

But overall, I'd always, and I mean ALWAYS, use Discord instead of Skype, Viber, Facebook Messenger and whatever other stuff I've used in the past. God bless them.

Hamburgers

Hamburgers

We have suffered more than you can know [at the hands of American imperialism]. But I don't see hamburgers as an accomplice. A single dish providing a balanced helping of nature's blessings: meat, grain and vegetable. How could anyone hate such a magnificent thing? (Code Talker, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain)

The hamburger is an American symbol. It is an icon of our victory over hunger. Every element of the humble hamburger is derived deeply from our American culture. The bread is the grain we carried from our English ancestors. The primary motivator that led cowboys to seek freedom in the Wild West was the growing beef industry.

It is the signature dish of the average fast food startup; fast food, which, as a concept, can be single-handedly thanked for both saving us from starvation, but also bringing us into a new age of poor health. (I suppose the tree whose branches reach heaven has roots which reach Hell.)

That being said, I don't particularly like traditional hamburgers. I'm the kind of asshole who will take the meat off the bun and eat it with ketchup. I used to eat a lot of Wendy's doublestacks this way. But as far as health is concerned, poultry is much better for you in the long run.

Gorillas

Gorillas

Über-Special training only the most elite Navy Seals get. Acceptance into the Gorilla Warfare Training program only takes place if the participant has achieved Enormous fake achievements, and has proven oneself on many fake secret missions. Upon arrival, the participant must fight the local hierarchy of Gorillas, all the way to the silver-back. Each tier progressively gets more oil poured on the combatant gorilla, as to make it harder.

bold text

bold text

I love bold text, I mostly use it for simple headings more than anything else, when I don't want to mess about with larger font sizes and underlines and such. Just a simple heading to start a new thought. There's only one thing better in my opinion, and that's bold in all caps.

Cyberpunk 2077 (and the hype build up that it can never possibly live up to)

Cyberpunk 2077 (and the hype build up that it can never possibly live up to)
In a very recent podcast with a Bosnian gaming news portal, I joked that CP2077 won't be GOTY 2020, but it will be GOTY 2030. The host laughed out loud and so did I.

But honestly, it's one of the rare modern games that catches my eye. You all know I hate modern games, the AAA game industry and such. Alongside HL: Alyx and some others, this is quite an exception.

I've watched some minutes of gameplay, and in some way, in CP2077 I see what I saw in the first Deus Ex and the first Far Cry. A pretty darn cool combination of shooting and open-world. And it's still its own thing. Deus Ex didn't have vehicles but Far Cry did. Far Cry didn't have character upgrades, but Deus Ex did. This, to me, looks like a beautiful amalgamation of Far Cry, Deus Ex and GTA: San Andreas in some ways. And those are all games I love.

Now, granted, CP2077 is primarily an RPG game with FPS elements, so the shooting mechanics may feel a little clunky. But then again, Deus Ex was also like this.

Something that does make me worried is its super-duper hype that, dare I say, might be as high as HL3's if Valve ever announced it. People are gonna trash the game A LOT on its release. I don't quite know what else to say on the matter. The death threats to CD Projekt Red's employees were such a disgusting thing, and the development cycle of the game itself doesn't help. The developers can't wait to get back to their families. I'm guessing some of them stopped caring what anybody will think of the finished game.

But. To end this review, I got two words. Keanu Reeves. It's super cool that they got a movie actor into the game, which is pretty hard to do. From the actor's side, it involves a lot longer commitment time (year or two for big games) than in movies (2 to 5 months on average, IIRC). Oh yeah, speaking of reviews & Keanu...

Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves is a person that works as an actor that has appeared in films like Speed ("Im gonna speed it up! Jump the tracks!") and, apparently, the SpongeBob Movie (thanks wikipedia!).

Things to know about Keanu Reeves:

• Is a person
• Is a master of the hover hand
• Plays in a band
• Did not appear in the sequel to Speed

King Henry VIII 6 marriages

King Henry VIII 6 marriages

That's a lot of marriages. It's been a long since I learned about Henry VIII and his bat shit crazy methods of trying (and failing) to produce a male heir. Then he got fat and died. It'd be funny if it weren't so horrifying.

Apple (the company)

Apple (the company)

I have touched very few Apple devices. Once in a school a classroom was populated with certain Apple desktop computers and I think the keyboard and mice were Apple too. The mice had these tiny balls which I thought were for scrolling but they seemed to be impossible to use, either they were clogged or just plain bad design. I also witnessed a rather recent iPhone, it seemed very difficult to set up after you buy it and it didn't seem very intuitive with just a single physical button. I know once on a certain Apple presentation with Steve Jobs, John Carmack displayed his Doom 3 technologies and I've read Steve asked John to remove all the scary stuff from the video. I find it kind of funny, Apple is all pretty and white while Doom 3 is the complete opposite, dark and scary.

off-grid vertices in HL1 mapping

off-grid vertices in HL1 mapping

In my early years I would have frowned upon this, but now I wonder: what's the problem? Why shouldn't we be able to make tiny brushwork details? The reason why Hammer snaps them back is probably technical - either to make things easier for the compile tools, or so they can produce more optimal results, or to reduce problems caused by numeric (im)precision. Which reminds me of the 'Leak-o-matic' (I mean 'carve') tool. Carve with a cylinder and you'll get plenty of off-grid vertices, and multiple leaks as a bonus. But you'd probably get those leaks even without snapping. So remember kids: carve with care, and keep your vertices on the grid!

linerider (the game)

linerider (the game)

A silly little web game that I had all but forgotten about until reading the title... I just played with it for about 15 minutes. Silly and fun.

The 12 year development Hell mod that is The Core

The 12 year development Hell mod that is The Core

I just checked the moddb page of this mod. I have never heard of this mod until now. Looks good.

Windows XP

Windows XP
The operating system of my childhood. After installing Service Pack 3, it just works.
Everything works. Period. One of the PCs in my house still have it - that one's not connected to the Internet.

It's probably historically the best Windows OS after Windows 7. The epic orchestral thingy at startup also amplifies its epicness (although the most epic startup title sound goes to Windows NT 5.0).

Nowadays, it's... eh... a lil bit outdated and extremely insecure. If you are gonna run it, do so in a virtual machine. I ran a 32-bit Windows XP in a VM just so I could launch 3DS Max 6 (even though, technically, it can run on Windows 7 32-bit cuz' the thing preventing it from running on 64-bit OSes is just a 16-bit security library - fricking proprietary piece of kit).

Linux

Linux

Linux to me is an operating system for work, rather than play. I say this because it's literally the case for me, but also seems to be the case with the people I work with as well. The folks who use Linux outside of work tend to be the ones that either cover our out of hours support line or simply are not gamers.

I'm a sysadmin and all of our servers are linux based. I was using windows at work for a few years, but when it came to setting up working local copies of sites to triage and fix issues, it made more sense to set it up with Ubuntu. I would say that it is a damn good OS to get to grips with if you prefer developing software over using it.

However, I'm only a web developer between 9AM and 5PM, Monday to Friday. This is when I use Linux.

At all other times, I'm a gamer, so Windows suits me down to the ground.

Ken Silverman's BUILD engine

Ken Silverman's BUILD engine

If I recall, John Carmack said something along the lines of the BUILD engine was held together with 'sticky tape and chewing gum'. I mean, the interactivity you could get in games like DN3D was way better than what you got in Doom, but then again you could get some serious vertigo from looking on x or Y axis in Duke 3D, which I never got in Doom (but also then again, Doom didn't exactly allow that kind panning, from my knowledge). Not a bad competitor engine in the early 90s at least. Even still, not too bad these day too as people still use it in games now.

The downsides to having a moustache

The downsides to having a moustache

This is a tricky one, reviewing having a moustache is easy, listing downsides is easy, but reviewing those downsides? I'm going to have to rate them out of 5 stars, where the more stars there are, the more significant the downside.

The hairs of the moustache catching the air when you breathe out of your nose	⭐⭐⭐	This is annoying and distracting, but you do eventually get used to it so a star gets knocked off
Food getting caught in it	⭐	Not as significant an issue as one would expect, assuming the moustache is trimmed
Shaving	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Best facial hair is no facial hair, but shaving is a pain to have to do. A lone moustache means you have to shave the rest of your face anyway, so you get the worst of both worlds
Hygiene	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Blowing your nose, food and drink, etc. It's an area of the face that is adjacent to two sources of mess, it can require more attention than the rest of the face. Why would you want hair there? It's like having a carpeted kitchen or bathroom
Hairs falling out and getting in your mouth	⭐⭐⭐	This happens occasionally, and it's annoying. Especially with Covid and guidelines against touching your face
People telling you that you look like a paedophile	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Doesn't happen too often, but it is an association that is there, and is yet another reason to not have a moustache
People telling you that you look like Tom Selleck	⭐⭐⭐	Not too significant, but it brings attention to the fact that I have never seen an episode of Magnum P.I., which is a shameful secret of mine
People telling you that you look like Ned Flanders		Hi-diddily-ho Neighborino!

Music