#mesa lateral

[kryhara]

I might finish/fix this up later but Gordon and Adrian post black Mesa … I know they likely weren’t in the same place while Gordon was in stasis but I think the idea of Adrian having to spend all that time next to a sleeping Gordon is funny

Like THIS is the guy who’s caused all your problems?? This nerd?? And he gets to just take a 20 year nap while you have to live awake in the void forever ?? Man

Gordon doesn’t remember him at all bc he was asleep lol

[heartmeadows]

The residents of Mystic Mesa so far

[ace-of-hats]

honestly i love finding MORE plot holes/inconsistencies in fablehaven. brandy mole i know more about your books than you do. hire me.

[noirrelite]

Day 8 - We don't have any more Atomicycles, sorry

[canneddolts]

yesterday twas my mission to completely memorize the (mark 4) hev suit

[all-over-apertures-walls]

rattmann is the true vent-crawling roach. but black mesa stole the idea and thats how gordon freeman appeared

[harrenhalyuri]

Americans I'll be trying a sloppy joe for dinner tonight 👍

[saintofpride201]

Watts: This is un-FUCKING acceptable, the vending machine BROKE and robbed me of my two quarters, and now I cannot work properly without my Frito Lays, i want to speak to the manager immediately-

Marrow: Sir- SIR, sir... Does somebody need a new prescription for their glasses? I'm a security guard, not a vending machine guy...

Watts: Oh, geez, I'm SO sorry; if you're not the "vending machine guy" then who the FUCK is?? Because all I see is you pansy-ass bucketheads loafing around everywhere, like, are ANY of you NPCs programmed with ANY bit of responsibility?? ANYBODY at ALL?? *walks off*

Watts: *halfway out the door* What's a mutha FUCKA gotta do around here to get some FRITO LAYS!?

[gamergoff]

Half-Life is now 25 Years Old November 19th, 1998

[postmakerkiwi]

🌫️ Blue Mountaintops - Market Mesa 🔔

High atop the steep, flattened spires lies a sparse bazaar, a place for travelers to pop up shop, trade some wares, and leave just as quickly. The chill, howling winds may make the mountain seem uninviting, but stick around to see if the mesa's powerful bells can win you over.

photos via Moby Games

[kryhara]

Thinking about how there’s absolutely no way Gordon and even Barney didn’t know who Alyx was when they all worked at Black Mesa… like Eli and Gordon worked together and apparently Eli had Alyx with him and Azian at Black Mesa (which the specific details are kinda unclear I think like why would a 4 yr old be at the secret research base lol but I’m assuming the scientists all lived on base and since both her parents work there it makes sense)

At least for me my coworkers who are parents talk about their kids all the time (like everyday lol), so if two of Gordon’s scientist coworkers had a kid together and she lived at Black Mesa then yeah they would’ve been talking about her all the time! He would definitely know of her! If anything he probably knew too much I just know Eli would be bringing her up all the time lol. And then considering him and Barney are friends and I believe Barney also knew of / worked with Kleiner as well, then he would also at least know of Eli and Azian’s kid daughter.

Now do we know if Gordon and/or Barney actually ever met baby Alyx at that time? Not for sure but it’s also a possibility especially if all the scientists lived at Black Mesa in the same place! I can imagine they had some type of celebrations and/or birthday parties for her right? Also what was childcare like at Black Mesa… if Eli and Azian both worked who was taking care of Alyx during the day? I’ve been thinking about pre-resonance cascade Black Mesa a lot lol

[doedipus]

honestly I booted up HL2 for a bit the other night and even that was falling short of black mesa in comparison, just on raw game-feel.

there's like a unity of thought and action that really good movement systems in games are able to achieve, where you stop feeling like you're interfacing with a machine and just feel like you're controlling an extension of your own body, like riding a bicycle. the source engine is extremely good at facilitating this due to all kinds of weird physics jank- this is a big part of why tf2 has had the staying power it does, after all. characters like scout, soldier, and demo are able to use and abuse source engine air mobility to the fullest, and at a high level can close distances and navigate the terrain at high speeds, with great handling, in a way that feels perfectly natural with some practice. it's cool.

Black mesa really feels like it maximizes gordon for this sort of feel by giving him boomer shooter movement speed and auto-crouch jumping, a slide that basically deactivates friction, and the air dash in the latter third of the game. together this allows players to do things like bunny hop and air strafe easily and naturally, and allows for new types of physics jank stemming from the slide, like air strafing on the ground, or general traction control shenanigans in platforming sections. he ends up being one of the best-feeling video game characters I've played as, up there with like, the risk of rain 2 loader and giovanna gulitygear in terms of that sort of game feel. every action you take is fast, punchy, and responsive

but in hl2 valve wanted to slow things down a lot. the devs have complained that gordon's movement speed in the original made it so that players would just nyoom past important stuff without noticing unless they really went out of their way to make it obvious, which is restrictive for all kinds of reasons. so the solution was giving gordon a battery gauge that was shared between sprinting and the flashlight. this makes him feel more like a guy piloting a power suit of some description, but it does feel like piloting rather than being immersive in the same way, and you don't really get access to the full suite of source engine movement at will. when you have sprint power available it feels pretty good still, but you usually don't have much, so you always kind of feel like a dark souls character.

this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and there's lots of things hl2 does great, especially with characterization, but like, going directly from one to the other is pretty jarring.

*finishes blue shift* this was cute and pretty good, I quite enjoyed playing through this campaign :)

*thinks about any given sequence between like blast pit and surface tension* hougggghhhhhh nevermind that was kinda mid

[rcmclachlan]

Re: superhero Tommy

What are the chances of Buck persuading him to have sex in inadvisable places?

Also it's a good thing his ejaculations don't break the sound barrier

Buck would absolutely try to get Tommy to fuck him midair, or like at the very least hold Buck against the side of the Grand Mesa at 10,000 feet up and jerk him off.

When he tells Tommy this, Tommy doesn't even bother looking up from whatever car part he's tinkering with. "Pretty sure you'd get burns on your ass. That high up? The sun'll've been beating on it hard."

"You know what else should be beaten hard that high up?"

Tommy rolls his eyes and says, "I already have enough trouble controlling my strength when we have sex. Now you want to add heights to that?"

Which Buck latches onto like a dog being handed a lamb bone that still has meat on it, because it's an angle to their relationship he hadn't considered. A terrible angle. Terribly hot, that is.

"Wait, when we're fucking, you need to actively control your--really? Like, h-how bad would we be talking?"

There's a sudden spike in the nitric oxide in Buck's body, and Tommy smells the sweat that starts dampening Buck's armpits before Buck even feels it. He stops halfway through screwing a bolt into place and gives Buck the deadest of deadpan looks. "Really. The thought of me accidentally crushing your pelvis is doing it for you?'

"Oh my god, yes." Buck's going to combust all over this living room. His tongue is way too big for his mouth. There's a name for that but he can't think of it because his brain is too busy making Looney Tunes wolf noises. "Can whatever that is wait? I need you to not crush my pelvis right now."

Tommy puts down the screwdriver with a long-suffering sigh, but he does stand up and take his shirt off. And it's devastating like always and Buck's cock pulses in excitement like it usually does, but then his brain puts its bulging eyes back in its sockets.

"Hey, wait, do you have to control it for everything? Like, would you just rip all your shirts if you weren't thinking about it? How much force do you exert naturally?"

Tommy stares at him. "Are we having sex or doing science experiments?"

"Don't make me choose," Buck whines, shifting from foot to foot. "Like, I wanna suck you so bad, but I also really want to call Karen and see if she has a tensometer lying around."

With another eye roll, Tommy picks up the car part and walks out of the room, calling over his shoulder, "I'll be in the garage. Text me when you decide."

Eight minutes later, Tommy's phone pings with a new message.

Karen's on her way over 👨‍🔬🔬

[noirrelite]

The many ways I've drawn Sierra's eyes since Feb 2022, in rough chronological order (oldest to newest)

[sam-keeper]

Hey Look At This Comic: Calvin and Hobbes

I liked the idea of putting some more daily strip comics into my rss reader, and gocomics DOES post old strips in sequence every day (keeping archival materials in lively circulation 👍), and there IS a site that generates an rss feed for gocomics (they don't provide rss feeds themselves because they want you to subscribe 👎) so, I added the current Nancy run to my feed, alongside Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. a few days later it paid off big time with this strip:

I love this strip, but it's a bit weird, isn't it? I'm sure some people read the way you're "supposed to" move panel to panel in a typical comic: left to right across the top strip, then the middle, then the bottom. Easy. I didn't, though. My eyes darted across the page, circled around the upper left hand panels, before zipping to the big point of interest on the page: that big panel of Calvin's teacher as a great pink alien monster! the second panel in strip two, the view through the spaceship porthole of the alien landscape, got orphaned, turned into something I glanced at after the fact as I pieced the sequence back together.

which might just be how comics reading actually goes, in practice. more recent theories of comics, particularly ones coming out of the Franco-Belgian tradition, suggest we take in the page as a whole first before diving in panel by panel. that bottom left corner is also kind of a privileged position on the page, with a beautifully lumpy and toothy monster filling up almost the whole frame. no wonder my eye was drawn there "ahead of sequence"!

is that a mistake? one of my friends, when I posed the question, thought so, that the strip means to build up to that point but the page composition encourages you to read ahead. She also, intriguingly, suggested to me that even though we enter the strip seeing the whole page, we induce a kind of forgetfulness in ourselves so that we don't get spoiled. when we see the monster, do we already know it's there while experiencing it for the first time? (hypnosis, she suggested to me, is "merely a set of circumstances to help the mind do a set of things that it already does every day".)

others corroborated the weird reading orders but suggested it was deliberate. for Sarah, the whole left side of the page draws your eye down compositionally, from Spaceman Spiff's (Calvin's alter ego) gloved hands on the wheel, down to the Z shaped mesa, to the monster. this cuts out almost two thirds of the comic! but for her and a few other friends, that made sense: Calvin is daydreaming in class, and the point where his teacher pops up in front of him to demand his attention is a moment of concrete interest in a hazy sea of nonlinear sensation. another friend drew a diagram of an even weirder reading pattern:

actually, I think this makes some sense. theorist Thierry Groensteen's notion of "braiding" in comics suggests that we're constantly recomposing comics in our brains, not just panel by panel, but over the whole corpus of panels, looking for rhymes and resonances and ways the story relates to itself. it feels a little like panels 2 and 3 rhyme, to me. the frames are long and thin more than any of the others, they both have this prominent horizon line, and they both sit on top of panels 4 and 5. they relate to each other, to the point where I see how you could jump from one to the other, then back up the page and over! if I understand Groensteen right, he's not suggesting we necessarily jump around the page this way, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I do think one of the implications of braiding and of taking in the whole page is that we might get off track and start wandering through time and space... which is exactly what Calvin is doing, after all.

I love that the actual joke of the strip hinges on these two little panels buried at the bottom of the page: the only shot not from Calvin's point of view, of him looking frazzled after Mrs Wormwood's dressing down, and then a little panel of him holding the book. that's braiding too: we understand the previous and future panels because we draw an analogy between all the perspectives we've seen elsewhere of hands (or claws) and get that Calvin is drifting into a daydream again, taking on a new role. the scenario shifts, and the color scheme changes to a complimentary one (red to green), but both daydreams are much more powerful, on the page, than the interruption by reality.

how do you read the page?

you can read more reviews in the Hey Look At This Comic tag and support me on Patreon.

[all-over-apertures-walls]

oh the contrast between humans and aliens

..I forgot where I was going with this