Alone in the Dark
Great little mini-documentary on creation of one of the first 3D adventure games: Alone in the Dark.
You can also watch the original GDC talk by Frederick Raynal
Movie theaters challenge you to bring your own bucket – and people do
Movie theater popcorn can often have over a 1000% markup compared to how much it actually costs the theater to buy and produce. While that might sound excessive, bottled water is often marked up over 4,000%
In an effort to help people come back to theaters, Cinemark ran a promotion in which they would fill any popcorn container you wanted to bring for $5. People responded!
Doctor Hauzer for 3DO
Before survival horror became a thing, at the same time as Alone in the Dark, Doctor Hauzer existed on the 3DO. A fully 3D horror game published in 1994.
Physical Pong
Daniel Perdomo started a project to re-create the classic Atari’s arcade PONG game – but in physical form. It uses mechanical paddles and a magnetic floating bit.
I recently got to play with one of the ones created via their successful kickstarter and it was awesome fun. I would love to own one, but it’s unclear if they’re still making them. They were also a cool few thousand dollars when they were selling them.
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Heineken kidnapping
Fascinating story of the real life kidnapping and ransom of the Heineken CEO.
I like how Hoog used old-school 90’s era graphics to tell the story. He seems to have a number of other videos that use this same style. Awesome
Flight instruments as art
SkyArt has a collection of unique and interesting avionics controls, dials, and readouts that you can buy and use as a cool desktop curios. They even have furniture and large art pieces that you can buy.
Google reports on how to transition to memory-safe languages
Improving code quality has become as, if not the, most important aspect of software. Bugs and security holes are exposing attack surfaces for personal data theft, infiltration, and ransomware. Google has been trying a number of approaches to improve things, and now they released a report on the effect of replacing memory unsafe languages with memory-safe languages.
Their approach stems from a number of somewhat obvious, but powerful observations. Memory vulnerabilities in a block of code decay quickly as it is tested in live conditions. In fact, they disappear exponentially with time as bugs are found and fixed. Therefore, the time when code is most likely to have the most memory safety issues is in brand new code.
It makes sense. As bugs are fixed, code becomes more and more bug-free (which is one of the big fallacies of the ‘lets scrap it and re-write all this messy code’ approaches). This also means that replacing old code with memory-safe languages actually doesn’t give you the best ROI. Instead, a team should focus on making sure the NEW code they add is in a memory-safe language to reduce the maximum amount of issues in the least amount of development time.
Google proved this out in their Android stack. By leaving the old code alone (just fixing bugs), they focused on just ensuring all NEW code was in a memory-safe language. This simple approach gave them a huge improvement in the number of memory vulnerabilities encountered each year:
Definitely worth a read
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Games done quick – on a saxophone
Dr. Doot does a speedrun of Elden Ring. That’s interesting in itself, but he is doing it using a Roland Aerophone as his controller.
Also musically inclined, there was a Crazy Taxi run that featured a real band covering all the songs:
What happens on Holy Saturday: Harrowing of Hell
Holy Saturday is a very quiet time in the church. There is no mass celebrated anywhere in the world. No sacraments are celebrated (except in danger of death). Catholic churches, for one day of the year, sit quite. Jesus lays in the tomb. To the world, he is dead. But tradition holds that Jesus is very much at work.
The Harrowing of Hell is the period of time between the death of Jesus on the cross at around 3pm on Good Friday and his resurrection sometime during the night on Sunday morning. Before Christ, everyone in the world is subject to death due to the disobedience of Adam and Evil that brought death into the world. Jesus was was able to redeem humanity by the sacrifice of himself. Jesus tells us that all who die to themselves and are buried in Christ by baptism and following his teachings will also find redemption in him as his friends at their death and rise on the last day.
On Good Friday when Jesus dies on the Cross, Christ triumphantly descends into death and tradition tells us he brought salvation to the dead held captive there since the beginning of the world.
There’s nothing explicit in the Bible about it. It’s inferred from a few passages (primarily 1 Peter 4:6 and parts of Ephesians 4) that Jesus descended into “Sheol” or “Hell” or “Hades”. Matthew tells us in Chapter 27 that right after Jesus’ death that:
⁵⁰Jesus cried out again in a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. ⁵¹ And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, ⁵² tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. ⁵³ And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.
While some might say it is “just tradition” and can be discarded, the Bible itself is a product of tradition and should not be considered a sole or separate source of authority—though we may regard it as the most important product of tradition. After all, most of the bible after the gospels are writings and traditions of the earliest Christians – including the apostles.
A Rare honest take on addiction
The United States has lost more than one million people to overdoses since 2000 — more than the number of Americans lost in all wars in the past 150 years put together, including both World Wars.
This New York Times article recounts the real story of Drew – an actual addict in Oregon that’s somehow survived the last few years of open legal drug use. In the end, he turned himself into police to be rescued from his addiction. His lawyers knew they could even get him off – but he, and the author, admit that open legalization is killing many more lives than ever before.
The data backs it up. Portlanders will hate this, but incarceration kept more addicts alive than legalization. Our death rates have doubled every year – an exponential growing rate – every year since legalization. Portland literally has around 1800 people dying a year in the streets vs just at 500 for years before legalization. That’s 4 dead bodies a day in the relatively small city of Portland’s 600,000 people.
What I’ve seen is that the fundamental leniency in recent years on the West Coast — toward drugs, toward shoplifting and toward homelessness — didn’t actually improve the well-being of those in desperate need. Our liberal compassion backfired: Instead of helping Drew, it endangered him.
I think the author sums the situation. These are people in deep need of assistance, but are often unable or unwilling to do it themselves. Despite a free treatment, free call center, and countless free resources – only a single digit number of people have gotten help. It doesn’t work voluntarily. The sad reality is that many people never hit ‘rock bottom’ and turn around. The majority of them die. Often die from the elements or an overdose laying in a tent beside an interstate, outside a building, or in a bus stop.
It’s more than time to admit these policies, predictably, are actually killing thousands of people each year in just Portland alone. That’s blood on the hands of those who refuse to realize that compassion alone creates a life of living horrors like Drew was living. If you were to design a policy to kill the most number of people in the most inhumane ways – I think we have achieved it.
Compassion must be tempered with wisdom of addiction behavior and understanding of the true value and dignity of the human person. It is not compassion to allow our brothers and sisters to sleep beside a busy interstate wallowing in the elements, ignorance, crime, poverty, and addiction until they die. The solutions are there – treatment is available. What is missing is the will to act on it. That action, however, may not look all that great. In European countries with legalization; they also throw addicts into prison if they refuse treatment – and they don’t hold punches. You are either getting treatment or jail. If for no other reason that you’re not going to be allowed to die in the streets.
It makes me wonder how many more thousands we will have to kill in the name of progressive policies before we come to the conclusions the data has already said loud and clear.