mindbleach @ mindbleach @sh.itjust.works

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It's not a coincidence. I know DN2 began with a talk-show cutscene promoting his book, Why I'm So Great. It's a narrative self-awareness where the character is not in on the joke. DNF referenced that, but really whiffed on the tone.

The oft-forgotten origin of the character is as a beeftank dipshit who nevertheless does save the Earth. DN3D's immutable extension of that was crass humor and lurid sensibilities - but that doesn't require manosphere bigots would celebrate the end result. Duke, the character, can be just as intolerant of any human fuckboy who disrespects "our chicks."

... up?

If you're still explaining this after a century and a half - pick better words, already.

This is woosh limbo.

You had to crawl to let this point miss you.

In English, distinguishing those two symbols has become an affectation. The straight style is all anyone actually types, and it's unremarkable to see that style rendered or printed.

The length of a dash is even less important than that. Any style guide that's insistent about it might as well demand you type movie names in a different font. Can it be done? Sure. Does it have semantic value? Maybe. But the only people who'd care also know how to pronounce LaTeX.

This is the language that abandoned an entire letter because it was hard to print.

Reposting some thoughts from /r/Civvie11, when Randy Pitchford stepped down:

I admire their optimism for a Duke Nukem redemption. I don't share it, but I admire it. Some characters are deeply rooted in a particular era.

Personally, if I had crazy billionaire money, the route I'd go is less Johnny Bravo (self-obsessed dork with limitless self-confidence) and more like a shameless hedonist who knows what he's into and just does not waste time worrying about anything else. The kind of machismo-driven maniac who'd exit an exploding spaceship wearing a parachute and carrying a rescued blonde, have some one-liner suggesting a dramatic kiss as debris rains around them, take no for an answer, and then have a followup line playing off the situation. An egomaniac whose only response to aliens dropping a building-sized effigy mocking him is to admire the likeness - possibly after adding sunglasses, using a rocket launcher and their ships.

The durable goal is a larger-than-life figure like Theodore Roosevelt. Some fearless asshole with enough money and fame to try all the stupid shit that sounds equal parts impressive and deadly, and enough skill, brawn, and sheer dumb luck to survive it all. Someone who - if he is not already in the authorities' short list of troubleshooters to call when trouble arises and needs shooting - shows up anyway, kicks a jawdropping quantity of ass, and shakes the hand of whichever military or police leader marches up to call him a reckless idiot. (And if we jump-cut to him in a holding cell, he'd use an improvised hook to reach past the keys and grab his cigar.)

Toxic fuckboys are still going to distort that into support for their "nice guy" delusions of adequacy, but it's not like they'd be scared off by cliche scenes of polite respect and private complexity. Duke Nukem is is not a deep character. He's never gonna be the kind of guy to wax poetic about the nature of masculinity. He's unlikely to express any emotion besides anger, explosion, and penis. But the list of people whose urethras he'd invert with his boot includes a lot of assholes who think they're like him just because they drink and curse and piss people off.

It should be a fun line to ride. Duke is simple. He's not charismatic. He's not anyone you'd like in real life. He's a shallow dickhead who wants to be surrounded by shallow floozies, until shit goes down, at which point he'll strut through hell rearranging the faces and organs of whoever ruined his caveman paradise, and then he'll want to be surrounded by shallow floozies whilst watching himself on TV. It would be goddamn near impossible to make that both realistic and tolerable, but it should not be terribly difficult to make it entertaining.

DNF was a miss on most fronts. However: I think Johnny Bravo is a good example of what not to do, because he's not taken seriously by anyone. Not in his world or in ours. Duke can't have that... epic loserdom, I guess, where no amount of disrespect phases him. He's not Peter Parker shooting finger-guns in Spider-Man 3.

Being a loser doesn't mean being a bad person, it means lacking respect from others. It's a sort of social failure. Arguably the whole gag for Johnny Bravo is that he's socially inept in a harmless and predictable way. And either in spite of that or because of that, the near-universal rejection never bothers him.

You can't do that to Duke without ruining him. His machismo is not a punchline. He is genuinely a capable and witty protagonist, molded in traditional masculinity, draped in the trappings of late-20th-century excess. The difference between 90s games and now is that no sane dev team would start by saying "and any guy who's not like him is a WUSSAY!" But I feel like actively undermining his self-image for the audience is the same mistake for a new generation. There's nothing inherently wrong with gym rats who enjoy whiskey and cigars and loose women. It is a common archetype that many people strive for, and Duke embodies it with zero irony.

He can be that kind of guy without also being a complete douchebag. And the script doesn't have to mock or sideline him to do it. Less Jack Burton, more RJ MacReady.

A recognizable blank slate for action set-pieces sounds like a studio's dream. They can do anything and someone will watch it.

Three Jaffa warriors meet on a neutral planet.

The em dash as a concept is a relic. People now communicate those uses with a dash between spaces, or with two dashes.

It's like worrying which direction your quotation marks curl. They don't.

That would be an ecumenical matter!

The killer was misled by bugs?

Eat him.

One of these panels is redundant.

"Not happy with the gay rights situation" is screaming the quiet part at the top of your lungs.

OP: Thank you.

Yeah, I read the other guy's comment. That is already one step too many. I still had to click, for that bait.

OP: put it in the fucking title.

Put it in the fucking title.

New hit: Love Letter to a Dungeon Master.

IIRC he was serving a king and an archbishop, and the king felt so bad that he strongarmed the archbishop into declaring it was not suicide - a mortal sin.

Which had to be fucking hilarious from across the room. Two distraught men in fancy clothes and silly hats, crowded into a kitchen, arguing nonsense about an extremely dead guy. The one in the crown insists: maybe he fell on it. He was cleaning it, and it went off.

DirectX was always about displacing consoles. Alex St. John was talking about it in 1994.

The task is mostly complete. Software has won. The surprise is that Microsoft really hasn't. They assumed they'd dominate whatever computer-ified market emerged... and that assumption is getting shakier every year. Windows suuucks. Linux is already a better way to run most programs and games. Even x86 is not a sure bet, and whatever ARM does to unseat it, that'll transfer smoothly to RISC-V.

Everything old is new again. "The best Macintosh is an Amiga." The best WinTel box might be your phone.