All Kinda Classics

 This was the weirdest thing we saw on our trip to Yale last month, a stained glass window of siege weapons in a common room. Even weirder, I can't even find anything about it online. I'll probably do some more digging, but I didn't expect this to be hard to find out more about.

   Got this month's  Rotary Magazine  and it had a liberal education essay in it that was decent. Just gonna pull a few quotes to talk about a little tonight since I can't find a digital version. A liberal arts education is sometimes misunderstood as a preparation for nothing in particular. In fact, it is a preparation for everything.  Its core purpose is not to load students with specialized information but to cultivate habits of mind: critical thinking, ethical reasoning, clear communication, and above all, adaptability. 90% of the classes I took in undergrad were, at best, about as informative as reading a Wikipedia article, despite spending 40 hours (plus homework) and thousands of dollars on each one. Most of them were a decade out of date on specifics before syllabus week, and wouldn't touch anything involving thinking with a ten foot pole. The idea of learning  anything  that'd be useful in real life, versus just paying a bunch of m...

 My wife and I are on a cruise. One of my favorite parts of cruising is getting to try a whole bunch of cocktails that I'm interested in, but don't necessarily know how to make (or want to answer 15 questions for the bartender at a regular bar). I've been going in pretty hard on martinis this trip. Last time, they had the Vesper (James Bond martini-- 4 gin, 2 vodka, 1 discontinued apatrif that you sub with a different apartif and a little tonic), which I enjoyed way more than I expected to. I've been going more traditional. I've decided the following (in order of preference): Gibson: THE BEST! The pickled onion really ties it all together, and I don't have to say dry. It's a shame more people don't have cocktail onions in stock. But at least one of the bars on our ship does, so I'm good. Gin: Dry and with a twist Vodka: Olives

Call of the Machine is MachineGames' expansion for the Remaster. It reuses a bunch of expansion content (monsters more than the guns, because fuck you), a little Quake 1 content (because every id universe needs to be forced into being a linear series now), and one or two original enemies. Also one from the Playstation port (but they still left one out?) A common critique of Quake 2  is that it's sort of stuck between two generations of shooters. Quake  is a clear evolution of Doom. Weird maps that exist to be levels, piles o' monsters, blast everything.  Half-Life  and  Unreal  at least sort of try to be realistic, and bring the crazy factor down considerably.  Quake 2  kind of splits the difference, in a way that doesn't satisfy most people. Call of the Machine gives a kind of "what if..." approach, with 6 mini-episodes (your guns reset, it counts) hitting at different places on that spectrum. You start out on a not-quite-as-cool-as- Quake-1 ...

 Those are clearly classics. I was dumb and didn't take any pictures. Here's a picture of an obvious classic: Apparently Azteks have been cool for the last 5 years or so. I always thought they were cool. The SAFETY YELLOW is the canonical color. I went out tonight and saw one!

 I was looking at a game last night, and they had done some of the art with AI. It wasn't very good, but at one point there was some brainwashing/flashback memory/spot-the-difference bullshit. I thought maybe they'd used the glitches in the AI images as the spot-the-difference points. They did not. 

  College of Ben Franklin Heraldry at Yale