For the next hour and a half, Musk sat in stony-faced silence and blasted techno music while dozens of users with names such as ELON_IS_A_PEEDOPHILE and ELON_MUSK_IS_PATHETIC repeatedly spammed the chat […]

Oh my god, Musk is J.P. from Grandma’s Boy. I can’t un-see it now.

The Vesper is James Bond’s personal invention, from the very first novel, Casino Royale. It’s basically his own custom twist on the vodka martini.

He explains he only has one drink before dinner, but he prefers it’s a large one, ice cold, and made very well. He drinks plenty of other types of alcohol throughout the books, but he’s pretty particular about this one evening aperitif.

The movies kind of latched onto it and just made him drink vodka martinis in general. Although the 2006 film Casino Royale had him order his custom invention from a bar, almost word-for-word from the original novel. It’s named after Vesper Lynd, the first girl Bond truly fell for in the novels.

James Bond was an alcoholic, with good reason. He didn’t drink vodka martinis for the taste, he drank them to dull the pain and horrors of his job. As much as he drank, he probably didn’t really taste the booze anymore.

The original James Bond from the novels was a dark and brooding high-functioning alcoholic, who operated at his best with a drink or two in him at all times. He was pretty useless without the drink. A vodka martini would quickly get him in the right headspace to accomplish his latest mission.

The movie Bond was reinvented to be this dashing, handsome womanizer who drank and smoked socially and was charming as hell. Basically, a 1950s ideal male fantasy. This Bond probably could’ve used a classier drink than straight vodka, but that’s one aspect of the books they kept pretty loyal.

It’s not that bad. They have three difficulty settings: Normal, Black Mesa, and Hard. I played on Normal and I haven’t really struggled anywhere. I think I’ve only died once in my whole gameplay, and it was when I was fighting off waves of Marines flooding a single large space that I couldn’t leave. I’m assuming “Black Mesa” is their suggested difficulty level.

Thanks for your support! My posts originally started as just a random screenshot or two of the latest game I was playing. But I always hated how people just talked about specific video games like everyone on the thread was intimately familiar with them. Especially if it was a game that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to know more about it!

So I decided to use my screenshots as a way to introduce newcomers to each game; give them a little intro to the plot and gameplay so they’d be interested in trying it out for themselves. Or to remind previous players of a great game they hadn’t played in a while.

By the time I started writing long-form blog entries on video games, I already had a bit of a series going and I didn’t want to suddenly change the title of my numbered posts. So they are “random” screenshots of my games, but they’re also a spoiler-free in-depth exploration of each game.

One day, I plan to go back and re-do some of my earlier posts so I can actually have in-depth discussion on those games too.

I’ve also been archiving my posts on a personal blog, in case any of them get taken down or blocked here for any reason. If anyone’s interested in checking out my history of posts, it’s a bit easier to review the archive at that link.

They put a ton of effort into remaking Xen so that it blends better into the gameplay and story. I think I read somewhere that Half-Life took about an hour to slog through Xen, but Black Mesa, despite having around 4 hours of Xen gameplay, was actually really enjoyable.

Here’s a bonus screenshot for you. I really like this image, just because it’s sort of an ominous “quiet before the storm” shot. Seeing both scientists watch you with silent anticipation as you’re about to cause a world-altering event in that next room.

I use a VPN that won’t load catbox images for some reason. If I turn it off, catbox starts working again.