He’s still around! He hosts a trivia podcast called Lateral.

I don’t even remember what led me to this, but watching the Amazing Race has been my latest guilty pleasure. The Amazing Race Canada, too. TAR still has all the super-dramatic reality TV editing and music but is way less focused on interpersonal conflict. It’s the places and tasks that make it interesting.

Compared to the US show, the Canadian show is way lower budget and milder in vibes, but the Canadian host is way more enthusiastic. He actually does the challenges while explaining them.

Fantastic movie that deserves its Golden Globe

Which one is this?

Denuvo. Shame.

I’d say it’s a step more “serious racing” than Kart. Transformed had more complex drifting and boosting mechanics to emphasize good racing skills. There are still powerups, but they’re relatively weak. The closest blue shell equivalent is the swarm, which summons a swarm of giant wasps to sit in front of the race leader, but it’s always dodgeable with good steering. The medium-level pickups require good aim or awareness of who’s near you. The Kart strategy of only caring about the last lap is still possible in Transformed, but trying to get ahead as far as possible is also a doable strategy.

Really hoping this can be a worthy successor to Transformed

Scroll down to a “Random article” card and select “More random articles” underneath.

You end up at the Randomizer, which lets you flick through a stack of random articles.

Note that the official Wikipedia mobile app has functionality like this as well. There’s a section with an endless stack of cards containing articles.

I’m sure someone at Valve also had fond memories of that toilet.

Amazingly, I played this game when it came out and discovered it has Steam Controller binds out of the box!

At this point, the fact that Portal is in the Half-Life universe is just a fluke. The plots of Portal 2 singleplayer, co-op, and PTI are very “distant” from anything happening with Half-Life. The two series are tonally very mismatched. Their strongest connection is that Aperture bumbled their way into possessing Half-Life plot-critical stuff and then losing the boat that contained it.

The one time I upgraded from an HDD to an SSD, I didn’t know about Clonezilla, so I straight up used dd to copy the raw bits. That was pretty insane in hindsight.

So can there be multiverses that contain every other multiverse other than itself?

Free tech tip: https://cht.sh serves practical, usage-focused help on common command-line tasks. You can visit the website, or even better, curl for what you want.

$ curl cht.sh/touch

gets you this:

 cheat:touch 
# To change a file's modification time:
touch -d <time> <file>
touch -d 12am <file>
touch -d "yesterday 6am" <file>
touch -d "2 days ago 10:00" <file>
touch -d "tomorrow 04:00" <file>

# To put the timestamp of a file on another:
touch -r <refrence-file> <target-file>

Append with ~ and a word to show only help containing that word:

$ curl cht.sh/zstd~compress

Result:

 tldr:zstd 
# zstd
# Compress or decompress files with Zstandard compression.
# More information: <https://github.com/facebook/zstd>.

# Decompress a file:
zstd -d path/to/file.zst

# Decompress to `stdout`:
zstd -dc path/to/file.zst

# Compress a file specifying the compression level, where 1=fastest, 19=slowest and 3=default:
zstd -level path/to/file

# Unlock higher compression levels (up to 22) using more memory (both for compression and decompression):
zstd --ultra -level path/to/file

For more usage tips, curl cht.sh/:help.

I’m certainly glad this one is more active than world’s.

Now I’m curious why it hit general release at 3.2.

I’ve always thought it was funny that panic has an exclamation mark in Rust. Among all the macros, it’s the most fun one to yell.

It would be more concerning if it wasn’t.

I hope the developer commentary is on.

The maps aren’t generated inch-by-inch, if that’s what you were hoping for. Each stage has a bucket of unique rooms it stitches together to create the level geometry. The devs did a clever thing and made rooms with multiple doorways, with two chosen at random to be part of the path, so you can traverse through the same room in a slightly different way each run. At this point, I’ve seen all the possible rooms, but the combination of character upgrades, surprise challenges the game springs on you, weapons, and enemies keeps it fresh. There’s a lot of replayability in just character builds alone, since you can find multiple ways to make each character effective, depending on what perks you got first and what risks you take.

The co-op works well. Gunfire Reborn is a lot easier in co-op because friends can revive each other with unlimited tries, whereas in singleplayer, you get only one revive by sacrificing the character-upgrading resource. Recently, they’ve added a Left 4 Dead-style bot co-op mode so you can have that experience instead of the pure solo one. I’ve actually ground myself into a weird corner where I’m way better than everyone else I play with and can carry a whole team, dealing like 80% of the entire team’s damage across the whole run. I’ve not actually tried public matchmaking, just playing solo or with friends.

In terms of DLCs, each comes with two new characters and a handful of weapons. Each DLC character has a different mechanical focus in case you’re getting bored of the characters you already have. The base game is just fine to start with. I have the first two packs, but the latest one, the third, I skipped during the Steam winter sale to buy more games. The character I was playing here, Zi Xiao, comes from the second pack, Artisan and Magician. His counterpart in that pack is Nona, who is pretty much the red panda version of Gaige from Borderlands 2 (no anarchy stacks, though), summoning and commanding a combat robot. The first pack, Spirit Realm, has a monkey who aggressively upgrades his guns and a fox who, with the right build, can just stop using guns and drop fireballs on enemies instead.

Okay, here’s my final pitch. The game is on sale as part of the launch of the new season. It’s not the all-time low, but it’s pretty close.