The crinkles leave me both unnerved and salivating.

Never give Nintendo money.

Careful, you might get metalosis.

Don’t use inline code / code blocks formatting for text. There’s no line breaks and the syntax highlighting is nonsense.

Black metal wouldn’t, but Einsturzende Neubauten might.

Downvotes on the comment suggest I already have.

I really adore the game-developing parts of Nintendo. I even admire their history of promoting creative randos. But their legal department is a threat to entire concepts on the internet and in general computing, so the whole company can go fuck a rake.

Never give Nintendo money.

OP has an essay due.

And the aquarium is a vampire.

Step one: cursed doll.

Step two: cursed doll.

Step three: cursed doll.

Step four: cursed doll.

Step five: transition.

Wider appeal.

Half-Life as a live-action film, in continuous first-person.

The game is deliberately cinematic to begin with. You’d cut down a brisk run-through to maybe an hour of set-pieces and combat, then build out the “dialog.” In quotations because I would make Gordon canonically mute. It’d become thematic.

Gordon took the hazard course qualifications that secretly exist to staff the extraterrestial excursion team, but they’re not quite desperate enough to risk having an astronaut who can’t use the radio, so he’s stuck on Earth pushing rocks. Without a helmet, because the excursion team keeps losing equipment, what with getting attacked by aliens. The aliens think the guys in orange suits are a distinct subspecies… which keeps kidnapping their kind.

Vortigaunts in particular would be seen maybe trying communicate with scientists in labcoats (a subspecies marked by their ridiculous ties) only to spot Gordon and freak out. They all hate the POV character on-sight. If they’re on-camera, they’re gonna start waving their hands to cast deadly lightning. They’d even try to communicate with the bug-eyed subspecies in splotchy green outfits, only to get shredded by submachinegun fire. The military wears those dehumanizing masks (and speaks over radio comms you can hear) because all they were told is “secret experiments, actual zombies, existential threat.” They saw one distended human with a jaw for his ribcage and the strength to slap a dude in half, and they didn’t ask any further questions.

This all comes together in Interloper. Gordon sees the biological factory where these creatures are enslaved to manufacture more of themselves. The ones inside know nothing about Earth. They prance up, curious and burbling incoherently, pawing all over Gordon’s bright orange carapace. He sticks a gun in their faces and they consider the object fascinating. But when he puts it away and tries communicating in sign language, they scatter, and a few start waving their hands to zap him. Gordon Freeman was chosen for this event because he is physically incapable of any outcome but one.

At that point, use AI as a filter. It’d be the perfect setting for some mild gloop.

If you forget the second step, well, that’s what sweet potatoes are.

Mozilla had the right idea with FirefoxOS - doing everything as HTML. All the apps people give a shit about are glorified browser windows anyway. What Mozilla fucked up was aiming for a low-end market… with an OS defined by constant power / performance overhead.

Every application in any modern phone could be transpiled HTML5 and you would not know the difference. If it’s not “one o’ them Genshin Impacts” then it probably already is.

I can recommend a big stupid project where it’s not a big deal if you fail.

Until recently, for me that would’ve meant “run Windows programs on Android,” mashing together Wine and e.g. Unicorn Engine… but now there’s like six different “userland emulators” vying for preference. FEX-emu, Box86, others with even sillier names.

I did manage a bespoke 8-bit FPS. That only took about two months. And then I’ve been idly tweaking it over the last two years. Splitscreen multiplayer, as a joke, was maybe not the best idea.

What’d take both time and space is some extremely low-end VR. I am convinced that Quest-ish headsets could cost, like, fifty bucks. The big players keep iterating clever hacks from a decade ago. Solving those problem, instead of avoiding those problems. Light should be collimated by default, which means a point source, which is any single LED. Rendering has to be detached from software performance, which means projecting the nearby world to e.g. floating dots instead of directly making a flat image. Inside-out tracking is at least the right idea, but it doesn’t have to be especially good in order to ground an inertial estimate.

It’s very inviting! Unless you want to say anything bad about anybody for any reason.

Can’t imagine that’ll come up.

Yeah, that guy’s not joking.

It’s not some kayfabe act. He is sincere in all of that posturing assholery.

Block and move on.

Sometimes an engineer has an idea and gets offended that it doesn’t exist.

We’re like wizards. The miracles you want are practical, mundane, boring. The miracles we want are whimsical bullshit. Guess which ones get done sooner.