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E3 WTF

"With Halo Infinite, we will join Master Chief on his greatest adventure yet, to save Humanity… We're now at an exceptional moment of creativity in gaming!"
—Phil Spenser, Microsoft Xbone Zero 290 whatever at E3 2018

The ninth (more or less) Halo game, an unseen, suited protagonist with two ranks but no name, a cliché rail-shooter "quest" where you move through linear levels and gun down anything that moves, othering aliens and opposing cultures so you can personally murder them by the thousands. This shit is what you think creativity is?! Fuck you, Phil. Fuck your entire goddamned species and the shit studio that pumps this stuff out for you.

Funny story, I once interviewed with Bungie; I figured they had money and might not be jackasses. I figured wrong: It was top to bottom the douchiest brogrammers I've ever met; zero women, even security/reception was a dude; they are exactly what you would expect from their fans. By the end I was just openly telling them what I thought of their non-game, and walked out.

Anyway. I'm waiting for the Bethesda event, since they seem to be the least bad big game company these days.

So to get the "Twitch extension" on the sidebar to work, the "grant access" link does nothing. You have to go to your ESO and Bethesda.net accounts, and link to Twitch. Then back on Twitch, settings, advanced, Grant access. Pain in the ass.

What I'm Watching: Annihilation

Heart of Darkness with 5 female soldier/scientists, in Roadside Picnic crossed with Chaga, ending in Alien and 2001. I haven't read the books yet, I like some of Vandermeer's stories & anthologies, but the film really does feel like pastiche. Some of that is the director making a "subjective" adaptation.

The characters are wafer-thin, even Lena (Natalie Portman) and husband Kane who are closest to being people. I love Jennifer Jason Leigh from being Allegra Geller in eXistenZ, but as Dr Ventress there's nothing there.

Most of it is walking-in-woods scenes like any no-budget B movie. Possibly the weirdest part is it's supposed to be Florida… But they filmed it in England, and the plants and just the atmosphere are wrong. Which to some extent doesn't matter, since the area's "alien", but it's the wrong thing that's wrong.

The three "monsters" are… fine, really not that weird, the first one is like one of those terrible Jaws-ripoff flicks, the last one is literally just one of those creepy spandex bodysuits after some CGI bullshit. One monster scene is good (the chairs), the rest needed help from a horror director.

I'm disappointed, but none of it was terrible, just mediocre pastiche of better stories and movies. I expect people who aren't well-read think it's amazing.
★★★☆☆

Cookie warnings are usually quite annoying interruptions to a site's design, but JetBrains understands what their users like:

jetbrains cookie dialog

I still clicked No.

WWDC Prediction Gumbo

(I like gumbo more than claim chowdah, Ivar's on the Seattle waterfront is good but I prefer their fish & chips)

  • Predictions
  • iDeath: Dark Mode on the Mac. ✅
  • Item 0: Apple's best year ever: Shockingly silent. ❌
  • Item 1: Apple announces the end of mechanical keyboards: No hardware. Look for this later this year. ❌
  • Item 2: Apple announces the end of C, C++, Objective-C, AppleScript, Javascript, and Swift, in favor of a new cross-platform language: Workflow: Now called Shortcuts. ✅
  • Item 3: New Macs: No hardware. ❌
  • Item 4: Apple announces all-new game development tools: ARKit 2.0. ✅
  • streaming from a home server or iCloud Games server: No streaming. ❌
  • OpenGL is deprecated and then unsupported: Called it! Apple deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL. ✅
  • HomePod Hi-Fi: No hardware. ❌

Score: 4/9, which at least puts me in range of any pundit.

Fucking seriously, killing OpenGL is a pain in the ass. Unity and such will adapt easily enough, but MMOs and a lot of indie stuff uses OpenGL, and Metal may be too big a rewrite.

Microsoft Acquires Github

On the one hand, Microsoft under Satya Nadella are… still evil, but less annoying about it than they were under Steve "Eats Kittens For Breakfast" Ballmer and Bill "Never Met Someone He Didn't Fuck Over" Gates. Satya just wants to rule the cloud and Office licensing, and seems somewhat aware that Windows alone is not suitable for that task, and that Microsoft's own programmers are mediocre at best.

On the other hand, watching FOSS nerds freak out at this has been amusing. Some will manage to move to self-hosting their own git servers again as people used to before Github centralized "decentralized version control". Remember how we all had our own Subversion and Mercurial servers (and Bitbucket if you wanted C-DVCS)? Good times are back. A lot of people are going to learn very hard lessons about backups, redundancy, and system administration.

On the gripping hand, Github owns Atom, and Microsoft also has VS Code based on Electron; are they going to fuck up my IDE of choice or even "integrate" it into VS Code? Ugh. VS Code is too much like coding in Eclipse for my taste, no fun.

Update 2018-06-04 from Atom slack:

lee-dohm: I just want to let everyone know that we're here, we're ok, and that as soon as I have any news to share that I'll bring it here to all of you :grinning:
Just to let everyone know, I've been given assurances that Atom remains key to GitHub. Our product roadmap is
set and the team will continue all of their work.