sp3ctr4l

... Has anybody rewritten California Uber Alles for this piece of shit, and covered it?

I wonder if Point Roberts is ... even more checkpoint fucked than usual...

https://wheninyourstate.com/washington/13-surprising-facts-about-point-roberts-washington/

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Red line is the intl border, Peace Arch is just north of Blaine...

Yep, Point Roberts is a dangling peninsula.

...

Looks like the tariffs have not been fun:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/point-roberts-washington-trump-trade-war-canada-impact/

... Ok, that is legitimately impressive, from a technical standpoint.

Lua is a high level, not exactly very 'fast', very performant language. It is designed to be very, very human readable, and coding noob friendly.

Getting a 3D physics engine to work ... in lua... is not something I would have thought possible.

Usually you need to use a much lower level language to ... actually do that.

This is bullshit.

I demand HBO Maxine.

Valve has a long track record of collaborating with and sometimes even hiring very talented modder groups/individuals.

In this instance, the Black Mesa team's work has been so high quality and very much faithful to the original work (HL1) that they were allowed to actually commercially sell their mod, originally built in the HL2 engine, as its own game, sort of making it an ... officially ssnctioned, unofficial remaster/remake of HL1.

In particular... the Black Mesa team essentially completely reworked and expanded all the Xen levels of HL1... these were always seen as kind of rough, rushed, not as well executed as the rest of the levels of the original HL1, at least by many fans...

Black Mesa originally just wasn't even going to do the Xen levels, because they were so wildly different than the others, and when it originally released as just a mod, and also I think the first commercial release... it didn't have the Xen levels.

People generally thought that that version of Black Mesa was pretty good, but janky and rough ariund the edges... Source as an engine was undergoing some radical reworking at about that same time, as it was evolving from the HL2 source engine into the L4D2, Portal 2, etc, Source engine...

... and eventually, after a long time of figuring out exactly what feature set they'd need to portray a truly remastered 'Xen', and reworking the whole game to run on the required Source features and framework... Black Mesa was finally able to do the big, giant, total overhaul, with the Xen levels, in 2020.

I know much of this because I used to occasionally chat with some members of the earlier mod team way back in the day, some of them would experiment with stuff in Garry's Mod and start threads on Facepunch, before Garry nuked the forums.

If you're interested in other fairly high quality, but not as expansive HL2 mods, I suggest Minerva.

Very, very good level design... I think Valve actually hired the guy that made that mod at some point.

Fedi-Overflow?

Stackiverse?

Pretty much.

This is what the Republicans have wanted for decades, they've just also been largely lying about not being this craven or extreme for decades.

I come from a right wing household, was raised listening to Rush Limbaugh on the AM radio all the time.

The base has always been like this, the people on top, funding and puppeting the base, have also always been like this.

The mask is just off now.

Trump just gave them all permission to stop pretending they gave a fuck about making sense or pretending to give a shit about any principles.

It literally just is 'first the Dems get a Black President, and then they ask us to wear masks in a pandemic?'

Too much, the hard core rightoid loses their mind at this point, and just wants everything to burn.

Of course it doesn't help that neoliberal capitalism has been disenfranchising everyone for decades, but the base Republican voter is way way way too stupid, or horrendously misinformed to know what those words mean.

Hey, oh, guy of vaguely Italian American descent over here!

Yeah, Italians also were not 'really white' untill... what, roughly the 1960s/70s, in the US?

God commands, enacts and endorses genocide many times in the Torah, your theological/political worldview is... contentious at best, dubious at worst.

Zionists, Israeli Zionists, in point of fact, actively use these sections of the Torah to justify the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, regardless of whether or not they are Atheists or devout Jews, regardless of whether or not they believe these Biblical stories are literally, historically true.

The Palestinians are just the modern Canaanites, by their rhetoric, and must be cleansed to secure God's promised land.

This rhetoric is actively being taught in Israeli public schools, right now, and historically.

You have a very misinformed view of the world.

You just skipped over the part where you assumed an American Jew was an Israeli, just literally doing the thing I am pointing out that the ignorant often do.

I really don't know how to better spell this out for you than:

Yes, a good number of Israelis are more pale skinned... but...

There are many, many Israelis, as in, born, raised, in Israel, live in Israel, have Israeli citizenship by birth... who are significantly more tan than what most white people would consider 'white passing', as well as having different facial features than is more common is white, European heritage, American Jews.

...

Lets try pictures.

https://www.artfido.com/this-is-what-the-average-person-looks-like-in-each-country/

These amalgamations and averages were all done before AI image gen became a thing. They are the result of mathematical averaging algorithms, not hallucinatory nonsense, and fairly large sample sizes... I think the photos were originally collected and processed between something like 2010 and 2014.

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I look fairly close to this 'white american' composite.

My grandmother is Italian and Norweigian. Her husband was some kind of mixture of French and German. My dad is thus a mix of those, as am I.

My Jewish cousins come from my aunt, my dad's sister... but their father was ... well, before he died, he referred to his heritage as Yiddish, unfortunately he passed when both I and my cousins were still kids... I think he may have come from a mixture of German, Polish, Russian heritage, I am not 100% sure... his family got the fuck out of Europe before or during WW1, settled in New York.

My cousins are as fair skinned as I am, but have distinctive enough facial features (and a very stereotypically suffixed Jewish family name) that they've gotten a good deal of antisemitism in their lives.

Go look at all the Mediterranean or Balkan countries, their composite average representations.

Most Americans I've known fairly frequently confuse Greeks with Iraqis, Romanians with Iranians, etc.

This 'white passing' shit is rarely more complicated than just skin tone, and many more actual Israelis simply are more tan than many American Jews.

Many Zionists are white christians who support Israel's genocide out of a mix of theological and anti-muslim racism...

But many Zionists are also... Israelis. Many of whom are not 'white passing' by many of those same white christians.

You are the one with a wildly innacurate view of the history of the Jewish/Hebrew people, and the current state of things.

The kinds and levels of racism going on right now are so complex that they have basically horseshoe'd around into a new kind of insane nonsense, which apparently is what you subscribe to.

The history and present situation are more complex than your overly simplified view expressed in your above comment.

You say you agree but you still seem to actually not agree.

As for Israelis being white?

I mean....I literally gave an example of an almost certainly, generally 'white' or 'white passing', American Jew... who fucking shot two Israeli tourists in Florida, because he thought they were Palestinian.

I would very much be willing to bet that is because the tourists were more tan.

Myself personally?

So of course all this whiteness vs not whiteness and all racism is bullshit, but uh no, I cannot actually tell many Israelis from many Palestinians, if they were dressed similarly, I didn't know their names or anything about them... hell, even spoken Israeli Hebrew sounds pretty similar to spoken Arabic to my untrained ear.

Israelis are not all just easily, massively more white or pale than all Palestinians.

Like... you are saying the racist violent criminal made an honest mistake, that honest mistake being that his racist stereotype was innacurate to the point he thought actual Israelis were Palestinian.

You have assumed that the American shooter in the Florida story is himself Israeli...

When this is never stated in the article, nor any article about this I can find. In all likelihood, Brafman is an American Jew, not an Israeli.

My own cousins are American Jews, who consistently make their own unprompted, self-defaming jokes based on their Jewishness... and to me, many, many Israelis look distinct to them.

Not all Jews are Israeli.

Not all Jews are Zionist, my cousins for example are secular Jews who are not super religiously devout, but they do partake in many Jewish traditions (they're the reason I know the dradel dradel dradel song, etc) ... but they are also quite against the Palestinian genocide.

But they are also far more 'white' or 'white passing' than a significant number of actual, born and raised in Israel, Israelis.