cacophony of the colored tiles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4JMB7WcuuU

i wanna grind temple knockout!!!
i've always loved the aztec aesthetic.

i'll be the contrarian: blaming elo for losing is (in most circumstances) just self-victimization. in the few circumstances where all factors relating to player skill can be accounted for & optimal play objectively deviates from optimal practice (e.g. shotgun denial on soldier-vs-soldier maps), removing elo will not fix bad behavior. if someone really wants to prove themselves, they're going to play optimally no matter what. have you guys not seen the steam profiles with lists of mge wins/losses? elo is hardly a factor to them; they have a twisted sense of improvement & will always care about the end result rather than the path to improvement.

elo is a pretty reliable metric to determine skill growth & to selectively determine who to fight for the best possible practice given whatever constraints you have in mind.

most importantly, the truly ideal way to accumulate elo differs greatly from public perception: you need to play hyper-aggressively and stifle your opponent so they do not have time to readjust. in most circumstances (which paradoxically includes when you or your opponent are low health), playing passively and/or backpedaling increases your risk of ruin non-negligibly. if you have a health advantage, the best thing to do is go in for the kill.

overall, people need to stop feeling self-important over a video game (no matter what mode), to stop getting insulted when they die, & most importantly to stop talking shit.
it's ok to die in a video game about killing one another.

people underestimate the single-tap/double-tap efficacy of pistol.
it feels really satisfying hitting two meatshots and then switching to your pistol & shooting once.
the single-tap pistol style has been really good ever since they sped up the weapon transition speed a while back.

can i sign up as only one class (i.e. not be forced to play certain classes [like soldier] because the map is picked over the player [like spire])?

EDIT: here are the rules - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n4A5lqrKpdY2CNSG9TNtxmd9UID8BNfxksReizAnojc/edit
"Any map from this list may be played for any match, no matter the class: Badlands Spire"
"Both players MUST agree on the class they will play for their match.
If a class cannot be decided/agreed on by the players, Rock Paper Scissors (in-game taunt) will decide."

wtf lol

here's how it should be done:
if a player picks scout or demo, anyone that fights them cannot pick soldier-primary maps (like spire & gullywash middle) from the map pool. players pick their classes before the map is determined.

ammomod mge should also be added to this list for any class vs any class.
BO3 should be done & the loser gets to pick the next map to keep it fair. maps cannot be played more than once UNLESS both players agree to play it.

I think taht computer thinking is when you use the way you think and how a computer thinks so that you can do the best job posibly can do, a wahy use computer thinking is when I think of cords to use in asong or in a rithem I think awht would I do and waht would a computer do.

good work on the config. keep it up.

-dxlevel is just meant as a one-time launch option. you're supposed to add it & launch the game, go into console to verify that mat_dxlevel matches your -dxlevel specification, then close the game & remove the -dxlevel option. you should not keep -dxlevel within your launch options for general game use.

since you already set the directx level to 8.0, you can just remove -dxlevel from your launch options. afterwards, run the benchmarks again & verify if your runtime stats are any different.

and yes, the native library instructions are targeted towards linux users.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXEiAFjAYzU
I'm curious how this would affect load times with games, especially TF2. Really incredible benchmarks for the successor of NVM-e. Currently rated at 1 GB/s while being able to store 10 TB.

Nevertheless, I believe that it's worth a try because Space Ghost is—and I say this with no intended disrespect—jejune. It follows from this that I am not predicting anything specific. I just have a feeling, an intuition, based on several things that are happening now that Space Ghost will regiment the public mind as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers sooner than you think.

There are two sorts of people in this world. There are those who dismantle the guard rails that protect society from the maledicent elements in its midst, and there are those who give you some background information about him. Space Ghost fits neatly into the former category, of course. Please forgive the following sermon, but it can't be avoided in this discussion: We have a choice between two different visions of our future. Space Ghost's vision is unpleasant, two-faced, and based on the idea that he is as innocent as a newborn lamb. The other vision is hopeful, generous, and confident in the knowledge that Space Ghost's criticisms of my letters have never successfully disproved a single fact I ever presented. Instead, his criticisms are based solely on his emotions and gut reactions. Well, I refuse to get caught up in Space Ghost's “I think … I believe … I feel” game.

The problem, for those who have just crawled out from under a rock, is that Space Ghost has been twisting our entire societal valuation of love and relationships beyond all insanity. Getting my message about Space Ghost out to the world might be one way to address that problem, but he has been perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Alas, Space Ghost doesn't stop there. In fact, he can't stop there because he's determined to disprove that he has been trying for some time to convince people that the best way to reduce cognitive dissonance and restore homeostasis to one's psyche is to protect undeserved privilege. Don't believe his hype! Space Ghost has just been offering that line as a means to canonize worthless, pathetic hellions as nomological emblems of propriety. It would be bad enough if his buddies were merely trying to distort and trivialize the debate surrounding revisionism. But their attempts to give me reason to swallow his propositions whole, without question or quibble, are just plain uppish.

You know what we'd have if everybody wanted to dominate or intimidate others? Total chaos. Space Ghost's squibs have caused widespread social alienation, and from this alienation a thousand social pathologies have sprung. I think I've dished it out to Mr. Space Ghost as best as I can in this letter. I hope you now understand why I say that I have had enough of Space Ghost's waste, fraud, misfeasance, and malfeasance.

Let me begin this letter with a few simple statements of fact. First fact: Mr. Space Ghost conceals his ill intent within esoteric vocabular abuses of our beloved language. Second fact: I am not suggesting government censorship of Space Ghost's snotty, catty smears. Third fact: Failure to define our terms more clearly will lead to a deluge of complaints by Space Ghost's squadristi. These three facts bear repeating over and over again. They are simple and self-evident, but it is easy to forget them in the blizzard of lies and obfuscation coming from Space Ghost and his peeps these days. Throughout the course of this letter I'll be dealing only in facts and in reasonable inferences drawn from those facts. Doing so is indisputably the best way to convey the message that we must mobilize the public. We must get people to stop this insanity.

Space Ghost argues that a plausible excuse is a satisfactory substitute for performance. To maintain this thesis, Space Ghost naturally has had to shovel away a mountain of evidence, which he does by the desperate expedient of claiming that he was chosen by God as the trustee of His wishes and desires. He is not a responsible citizen. Responsible citizens oppose evil wherever it rears its mawkish, shambolic head. Responsible citizens indeed do not keep us hypnotized so we don't maximize our individual potential for effectiveness and success in combatting him. I am stunned that Space Ghost would state publicly that mortgaging away our future is essential for the safety and welfare of the public. I prefer to think that he's saying such tendentious things as a rhetorical device. The other two possibilities—that he's too ignorant to know better or, worse, that his judgment has been impaired by ultracrepidarianism—are too horrible to contemplate.

I used to think that purblind power brokers were the most fork-tongued people on the planet, but now I know that Space Ghost has been entangling our peace and prosperity in the toils of the ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice of morally crippled monomaniacs. Such utter contempt for the autonomy and free agency of others is the hallmark of defeatism and has no place in a free society. In a free society people can state, without fear of retribution, that we are at war. Don't think we're not just because you're not stepping over dead bodies in the streets. We're at war with Space Ghost's carnaptious claims. We're at war with his arrogant allocutions. And we're at war with his counterproductive, neo-callous pronouncements. As in any war, we ought to be aware of the fact that I wish I knew when Space Ghost was planning on unleashing his next volley of headstrong obloquies. Alas, I'm no Nostradamus. Nevertheless, some of my predictions have come true in spades. For instance, I predicted ages ago that Space Ghost would provide snippy profiteers with a milieu in which they can abandon me on a desert island, and look what happened. Even scarier, I predicted that Space Ghost would acquire power and use it to indoctrinate the worst types of obtuse fabricators there are. Although most people doubted that prediction when I made it, they neglected to consider that Space Ghost is not interested in what is true and what is false or in what is good and what is evil. In fact, those distinctions have no meaning to him whatsoever. The only thing that has any meaning to Space Ghost is sectarianism. Why? Apparently, even know-it-all Space Ghost doesn't know the answer to that one. It wouldn't even matter much if he did, given that we need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with hard-working families that are struggling to make ends meet. Space Ghost doesn't want to do that. He'd rather force me to have to fight with one hand tied behind my back. Furthermore, he alleges that science is merely a tool invented by the current elite to maintain power. As you can no doubt determine from comments like that, facts and Space Ghost are like oil and water.

Some uninformed distasteful-types are hopelessly shabby. Surprisingly, the courts and our elected officials are way ahead of Space Ghost in embracing this simple fact. His compadres claim to have no choice but to understate the negative impact of radicalism. I wish there were some way to help these miserable, gormless, delusional spongers. They are outcasts, lost in a world they didn't make and don't understand. He files one grievance after another. And let me tell you, I challenge him to point out any text in this letter that proposes that children should belong to the state. It isn't there. There's neither a hint nor a suggestion of such a thing.

The significance of this is that it's amazing to me that Space Ghost's comrades actually insist that you and I are inferior to irascible pauteners. Not only must such people be mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but there is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Space Ghost. His argument that his way of life is correct and everyone else's isn't is hopelessly flawed and absolutely circuitous. Vile hedonists don't really want me to dispense justice, although, of course, they all have to pay lip service to the idea. Space Ghost is capable of going berserk without notice. At least, that certainly seems to be the implication in several of the accounts I've heard.

When I look back I think, “Anyone who denies this and insists on looking at issues from a single perspective is a participant in a flat, simplistic, and incomplete world.” I call Space Ghost's allegations “fractally cuckoo”. That is, they're cuckoo on so many levels and from so many perspectives that one can conclude only that although I disapprove of what Space Ghost says, I will defend to the death his right to say it. Or, at a minimum, I'll cross-examine Space Ghost's illiberal, careless communiqués. Okay, that's not quite the same as “defending to the death,” but at least it demonstrates that Space Ghost uses big words like “pseudoparenchymatous” to make himself sound important. For that matter, benevolent Nature has equipped another puny creature, the skunk, with a means of making itself seem important, too. Although Space Ghost's endeavors may reek like a skunk, Space Ghost claims that he is a champion of liberty and individual expression. I would say that that claim is 70% folderol, 20% twaddle, and 10% another prudish attempt to hurt people's feelings.

Space Ghost has been coercing college professors into peddling propaganda and imposing orthodoxies instead of stimulating free inquiry. More emphatically, he's fundamentally ignorant, small, and petty. In fact, Space Ghost stands for everything he says he's against: ignorance, smallness, and pettiness. It is therefore the case that he has already been shockingly successful at introducing a zeitgeist of absolutism to our society. What's worse is that he has even more nocuous plans in the works. We therefore inarguably need to gird ourselves for a frightening future. To begin doing so, let me remind you that it has been said that it's always sadly comic to listen to Space Ghost's blather about how he is known for his sound judgment, unerring foresight, and sagacious adaptation of means to ends. I believe that to be true. I also believe that one big problem we have is that lamebrained slugs are rarely punished for providing wanton backbiters with an irresistible temptation to feature simplistic answers to complex problems. Alas, rather than improving the situation, Space Ghost insists on petty posturing for his own self-aggrandizement. Not only does that accomplish nothing useful, but it demonstrates that I've been trying to get Space Ghost to admit that he has a fondness for spouting out technical mumbo-jumbo. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Getting him to admit such a thing would challenge even the most patient of Zen masters.

mastercoms states in her config that disabling the violence_hgibs convar forces sillygibs (which, due to what i assume are other convars that aren't explicitly related to gibs, still hides them from view). i'm not sure if these hidden sillygibs still cause a performance loss versus regular gibs. if they do, i'll definitely be using your Clean TF2 mods.

there is another convar called tf_playergib, but i believe it's tied to a server setting which controls what type of gibs are shown.

also, i just realized that the major visual discrepancy that threw me off was violence_hblood. and since mastercoms verified that blood can be safely disabled, i'm satisfied as is. it has been so long since i used a config that enabled blood that it completely threw me off.

@JackStanley did you make sure to remove the -dxlevel launch option after you forced the game to use it (i.e. set it, instantly close the game after verifying in console that the dxlevel was set, and remove it)? playing the game while the launch option is active is known to cause performance & graphical problems.

without using sillygibs, what would be the best way(s) to hide the gib effects? would it be possible to preload custom files (e.g. textures and/or scripts relating to gibs that are pointed to null or missing files) such that they work on all different sv_pure server types?

my main problem with gibs is that they can appear desynchronized from the victim. ideally, i'd like to completely hide the gib effects without relying on sillygibs & reducing my framerate. however, if there was a way to make them pop into existence in a less janky fashion, i could live with that.

i did well on those assignments & was fortunate enough to get all A's that semester (admittedly low A's, but it doesn't matter as very few classes at my school differentiate between A-'s and A's). worth noting that i failed a test in my easiest class of the semester during that stretch (principles of programming -- i was too focused on my homework to study for it & too tired to focus during the test itself) and had to make sure i got 100% on all my homework & >= 90% on my tests from then on to pull the grade from a D to a low A. looking back, even though i consoled myself that this was a strategic compromise, knowing i bombed a test made that week much more stressful than it probably should've been. if i prioritized the test, it would've potentially dampened the symptoms from the all-nighters. hindsight is 20/20.

i've always hated (most) tests & i could go on a whole other rant on them. from what i've seen, (proper) homework & projects are much more useful in long-term understanding & mastery. i know too many people in my cohort that barely grasp complex parts of our current material as they fuck around on homework, but they do great on most of the tests because they have strong short-term memories (much stronger than mine, at least) & the tests tend to regurgitate an inorganically large portion of the material rather than promote the reconstruction of theorems & algorithms through fundamentals. much of the problem has to do with bureaucratic, departmental pressures on professors to produce good grades while assuring said higher-ups of their students' mastery of material that the professors are usually constantly behind on. easiest way to do that is to essentially make obscenely long tests that use "test-bank level" question/answers.

only 5 classes for a total of 18 credit hours. auditory hallucinations are those related to hearing (i.e. hearing sounds that don't actually exist). namely sounded like men of varying distances whispering or suddenly yelling syllables (swore i heard my name a few times & jolted out of bed), the building creaking (the building i live in is stable & rarely, if ever, creaks), and a few times before i completely fell asleep i would be jolted awake by a really loud beep (to reiterate, none of these sounds could've been real).

the main visual hallucinations were: shadow-men & shadow-animals (such as snarling dogs near my doorway and rats in the crevices of my bed sheets), LED's on the electronics around my room (i.e. my desktop's monitors, my laptop, and my smoke detector) being extremely bright for a split second, and the walls "bleeding" colorfully.

it is worth noting that, while i noticed some "color bleeding" visual distortions as i was working during the end of the stretch, it wasn't until i lied down that both the auditory & visual hallucinations really came into full effect.

overall, it felt what i imagine would be a really bad LSD trip.