Thorry
Seems kinda weird to name the country after a font, but sure you do you I guess? I wonder if they have to pay royalties?
Absolutely, they pushed the limits on what was possible and used everything they had to make something really unique. They also wrote the book on level design with the Half Life series. If people haven't seen it already I would recommend this YouTube docu about Black Mesa which goes into detail about the level design aspect: https://youtu.be/G_TcAxAKCAI
One of the things Valve also did really well was to have a quick and easy update system. This allowed them to push updates out to users quickly and fix a lot of bugs and optimise the game. This is taken for granted these days and even hated as devs push out unfinished unoptimised games with the promise to fix it. But back then this was a new thing and a lot of people were very happy about it.
Half Life 2 was released over 20 years ago. It was meant to run on what is now regarded as ancient hardware.
When Half Life 2 released there was actually a whole lot of grumbling from gamers as the system requirements were very high. It ran like shit or didn't ran at all unless you had very recent and high end hardware.
I remember buying a new gpu back then specifically because of HL2. I didn't have a lot of money, so I bought an Asus 6800 card, which wasn't powerful enough to run HL2. However with a bit of luck those could be modded and overclocked into an 6800 Ultra which was powerful enough. However it was a lottery whether this was possible and ran without issues. The first card I bought couldn't do it, so I went to the shop and returned it. Went to another shop and bought one there, which also didn't work. Then I went over to another town and bought one there which finally worked out. Even though it was a mid-tier card, gpus were expensive back then so it cost me all of the money I'd saved up for a couple of years before.
HL2 has gotten a lot of optimizations as the years went on, but when it first released it was an example of an unoptimized game when released. And just like these days people were bitching about it.
Fucking tech bros. Yeah we can do tunnelling way faster and cheaper than anyone else. Sure buddy, as long as you make the tunnels so small they are basically unusable, remove any and all safety features, don't comply with any regulation at all and completely fuck over the environment while you are at it. And they are still slower than regular tunnelling companies and the cheaper part is hard to say with all the shady shuffling of money Musk is doing all the time.
I'm all on board with infrastructure projects taking too long and costing too much because of bureaucracy and nimbys. If we could fix some of those things, sure. But fixing a couple of things doesn't mean re-invent the wheel and make it super shit while they are at it.
Somehow for the past 20 years being a tech company that disrupts a sector almost always comes down to fraud, straight up lying to investors, disregarding regulations, exploiting workers and shady people stuffing their pockets
They are trolling, it doesn't matter at all.
A table saw is for lengthwise cuts, for cutting long things like these you need a cut-off saw.
Fun fact, you don't really need to tap soft aluminium like this. You can just drive the bolt straight in with an impact driver. I thought it was sketch at first, having always tapped them beforehand. But my buddy said it's a waste of time, just drive the bolts in right away. So I tried it and he was right, it works perfectly every time. They form perfect threads so you can easily remove and re-add the bolt just like when it was tapped beforehand.
I hate how this is obviously an ancient system at this point, but it still has PCI-E so my brain considers it a 'modern' system. I'm fucking old man...
Edit: Just checked this motherbord released early 2007, so pretty damned old. This picture is also around 10 years old...
Is that a tail or a penis?
My cats used to do something similar. The paw being close isn't because they love each other. It's to smack the other on the head more easily. They will tolerate each other when they want to share a comfy place, but are on a hair trigger to start a war.