Tito smoking Cuban cigars in the White House while sitting down with Nixon is also hilarious.

Nixon told him, “Mr. President, we don’t smoke in the White House.”

Tito laughed and said, “Lucky you!” and finished his cigar and no one attempted again to make him stop.

Did these guys actually have soap on their shoes, or they just do that anyway?

All of you in this thread are fucking psychopaths

Kalamata olives and similar little food objects are fine, they are often delicious

Eating the rest of these unflavorful little saltpellets on purpose is a ridiculous thing though

They definitely do check. I don’t know how detailed the checks are or how major a crime it is to use someone else’s info, but there are enough checks in place, you can’t just type in Porky Pig or made-up nonsense or anything.

Computers

• Tiny pop-up tent, easier to carry if you can fit inside
• Headlamps
• Sleeping pad or something to separate you from the cold ass ground
• Don’t interact with the cute little bear cubs

Google bought Waze, so at this point you’re probably not making any Israeli spies money if you make use of it. On the other hand, you’re making Google money, which is almost as bad.

Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.

Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”

Nice try Steve Bannon

You’re allowed to have a type of awe and reverence for the natural world, very much akin to religion, without needing to buy into any bullshit along with it.

It used to be pretty standard, and then the Christians (among others) fucked that up for everyone, and now you can’t be anything other than an aggressive humanist atheist without people starting to make assumptions about you.

If you ever study biochemistry, it leaves you absolutely in awe. The best engineering we can do is pretty amazing, we have computers and airplanes and all this magic stuff, but the stuff in you is a hundred, a thousand times better made. It’s stunning. Comparatively speaking, it is perfect. And that’s only the stuff we understand. The stuff in your brain, we do not.

You walk forward boldly with your lady into a more rewarding future

Yeah, IDK, I don’t think it has enough replay value to be worth playing today. Tunic is good, probably a pretty close analogue of the overall feeling. Some games from the NES era hold up really surprisingly well (Contra, Life Force, Bionic Commando) but more what I was saying about Metal Gear was just that it was a pivotal part of the evolution of games and a fun game to play at the time (and has ten times more soul than whatever nonsense they’re slapping the label on in the modern day.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsYLxNkeRGM

I miss old internet

You needed to play it as a little kid when it first came out.

We were just getting used to inventories. Stealth in games simply didn’t exist. The whole concept of key cards as far as I know didn’t exist, and even that whole structure of parts of the game that were blocked off behind abilities you didn’t have yet, or ways you hadn’t realized you could use your existing abilities, was still pretty brand new.

The thing I wish it had done, which Zelda 1 did very well but which very few games even up to the modern day have the balls / level design skill to do, is gate parts of the game behind combat that is just straight-up too hard for you yet. Almost always, the Metroidvania structure includes parts that are challenging, but everything you can reach is doable if you focus on it for a bit. And then, when you do them, you can unlock some more doable stuff. Zelda wasn’t like that. There were parts you could reach that would just outright murder you. You had whole parts of the game that were locked off behind enemies that were still too hard for you, for a long time, and so going into those areas felt like a for-real adventure. Once you got kitted up enough to be able to go hang out there, and explore it in detail and survive as long as you were alert, you feel super badass. It leads to this feeling of accomplishment that’s totally different from how it would feel if it was the exact same difficulty curve but all the stuff that was too hard for you gets locked away until you were ready for it.

Anyway, Metal Gear wasn’t like that. The combat was honestly pretty much just bad, even for the time period. But it introduced stealth and a new approach to big sprawling worlds, where you can’t even really make sense of the map because it is so non-Euclidean and you’re wandering through this bizarre and hostile environment. It’s like a Metroidvania where at any given time, you can only find 3 different gates, and they’re all locked, and so you have to go back over all your previous stuff and try to figure out what you missed. How all the different trucks move, what you can and can’t use your items for, finding new information or new frequencies for your radio, it was just this really surprisingly complex game that was still while the whole industry was shaking off the Atari era and trying to do real games. It was a new take on Metroidvania, all cramped corridors and locked doors and rooms that insta-kill you instead of open sprawling maps and inviting ledges you can’t reach yet.

It didn’t even have a plot, and it still had a massive coherent plot for the games of the time. It had a plot! I don’t know man. You can’t even really compare it to the “she breathes through her skin” era of Metal Gear because Metal Gear just defected from its original form into a totally different class of game, the Cinematic Bullshit-O-Rama With Occasional Gameplay At Times. It’s one of the modern AAA games industry’s favorite genres. But the old Metal Gear, for all its significant flaws, was a genuine and successful effort to move the medium forward.

Plus I was a little kid and I enjoyed playing it. I saw this magazine ad for it that was just this massive list of all the different items you can get, and it just wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. And, they followed through; they didn’t just pad out the list with weirdness, they actually thought of something you could do with everything. What about these cigarettes? Surely that’s just a little joke, right? No. The cigarettes are useful. You need them at one point. Of course you do. The empty cardboard box is useful. Everything is useful.

Because they are made by, and for, assholes.

None of the Metal Gear games after the original NES one did anything for me, so I didn’t really get it and wasn’t aware, but yes every time I learn something new about it (“she breathes through her skin that’s why she’s half naked all the time”) it just reinforces the original judgement.

The people who make video games are a bunch of weird assholes

You can also trigger a fairly bizarre cutscene where your character takes a shower with one of the female characters but she keeps all her clothes on, if you cultivate a certain level of unrepentant stink.

https://www.gameslearningsociety.org/how-do-you-trigger-a-quiet-shower-scene/

If you want to make changes without dealing with update hassles:

• Make a child theme to your current theme which inherits from it.
• Add a functions.php to your child theme, which only includes specific overrides for functionality you want to override.
• Presto change-o you are immune to stuff getting ruined with updates. (Aside from API changes and things but those are relatively rare in my experience, for the most part it all just works.)

Hugo is nice if you want extensive customization and you’re okay fighting with Go code and templates, a little bit.