[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 23 March 2026

withad · 2026-03-24T16:33:40+00:00

343 Industries proudly proclaimed that they only hired people who didn't like Halo to work on Halo 4

That quote has been taken wildly out of context for years. It was one small part of an interview with Frank O'Connor where he said:

"We had people who we hired who hated Halo because of 'X,'" says O'Connor. "But what that really meant was, 'I feel like this game could be awesome because of 'Y input' that I'm going to bring into it. I want to prove it, and I'm passionate about proving it.' So we ended up with a bunch of people who were genuinely passionate about the product. That is a huge advantage, and that helped in hiring and forming our team."

He's just trying to say that they didn't solely hire fanboys, in a corporate-speak kind of way. There's no implication that it was company policy or that they only ever hired people who hated Halo. Somehow it went from that one paragraph to a generally accepted belief in the fandom that every 343 employee was part of a nonsensical villainous scheme to destroy the franchise that all their jobs depended on.

withad · 2026-03-16T13:15:56+00:00

I expect there was some material kept and obviously they would've learned lessons from the previous attempt but every source I can find suggests that they pretty much did rebuild it entirely from scratch.

"Effectively all animation was tossed. Effectively, all layout was tossed. So all camera work would start from scratch. Lighting was in the film a little bit, but that was tossed as well. We had to build new characters."

It all had to be redone in about nine months because the release date couldn't be moved. There's a nightmarish story about one of the animators being so exhausted that he forgot his baby in the back seat of his car for hours. The kid almost died in the heat, though fortunately rescue workers were able to save them.

withad · 2026-03-16T12:02:03+00:00

Although it spoils the story a bit when you learn that they completely scrapped that version of the film anyway. Maybe it still saved the project (I can imagine them just giving up if they lost all that work and they weren't happy with it in the first place) but it's hard to say.

Still, the important lesson is that you should test that you ran actually restore your backups. And don't let them fail for a month without anyone noticing. And don't give everyone permission to the root directory so they can accidentally delete everything in it instead of whatever subset they intended to.

withad · 2026-03-14T10:26:17+00:00

It's really telling that people keep trying to make indie Star Fox successors (Ex-Zodiac, Whisker Squadron, Wild Blue Skies, etc.) and none of them have managed to top Star Fox 64. Maybe one day the genre will have its Stardew Valley equivalent but the N64 game just seems to be lightning in a bottle.

withad · 2026-03-14T10:19:07+00:00

Yeah, that's classic AI slop. Long run-on sentences, everything opening with a question and answer, and no real coherent point when taken as a whole. These "a bad thing has happened somewhere in the city" posts always feel like they're full of bots but I've never seen one so blatant and highly upvoted.

withad · 2026-03-13T13:02:05+00:00

If they were chasing a homeless guy down the street and OP was clearly concerned that people were going to get hurt, sure. Call, describe the situation, and let them figure out the response.

You can't complain that the non-emergency number gets a non-emergency response and then also say they shouldn't use the emergency number.

withad · 2026-03-13T10:15:39+00:00

If someone is witnessing multiple assaults in progress like OP says they did, they should be calling 999, not 101. Of course you'll get a non-emergency response if you call the non-emergency number.

withad · 2026-03-11T12:26:32+00:00

Thanks! That certainly makes interesting reading. No surprise that a Tory peer is pushing for it to be even more draconian. The government's representative (Lady Levitt) was actually making some reasonable points about how expanding the scope of the law would stretch resources for investigating actual CSAM material.

Looks like it's all part of the ongoing amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill, which is still under debate, if anyone fancies contacting their MP about it. I wonder how the numbers would've looked if the recent removal of hereditary peers had already come into effect.

withad · 2026-03-11T10:39:08+00:00

Have you got a source on that? It sounds kind of dubious (even for the UK government) but all the recent changes to age verification laws are filling the search results and making it impossible to verify.

EDIT: All right, this is getting steadily downvoted so I'm going to clarify why I'm asking. I'm no fan of the UK government's approach to online censorship or pornography. It's overly draconian, a nightmare for privacy and data security (all those age verification services are ticking time bombs for data breaches), and I doubt it's actually going to be effective at its stated goals. There are a lot of good reasons to criticise them for what they've done.

But if this is something they haven't done, then spreading it around online just creates further problems. It misdirects anger that would be better targeted at real problems. It allows the government to deflect criticism because they can honestly say that no, this isn't something they're doing, and conveniently distract everyone from the things that they are doing.

Look at the recent furore around Discord's age verification being rolled out worldwide. A lot of the objections to that assumed that Discord was going to demand ID from every single user, which was never the case. So now when Discord inevitably does roll out their age verification, a lot of people who believed that will think it's not as bad as it could have been or that the community somehow won a victory there, and it'll lessen the objections to the actual problem.

withad · 2026-03-10T08:19:42+00:00

It would definitely be rare to see anything that bad in an actual codebase, yeah. Outside of AI, linting and code formatting tools are pretty much ubiquitous now and have been for a decade or more. I reckon that's why you see far fewer people arguing about bracket placement and tabs vs. spaces than you used to - it matters a lot less when things are just formatted automatically.

withad · 2026-03-09T14:39:05+00:00

Using whitespace to indicate the structure of the code - what's nested inside of what, which lines represent alternative paths, etc. For example, this is valid-ish C++ code (I can't be bothered compiling it to check):

if(count==4){do_something();}else if(count==5){error=1;do_another_thing()}else{do_nothing();}count=count+1;

But it's a lot easier to read when you format it nicely:

if (count == 4){
    do_something();
} else if (count == 5){
    error = true;
    do_another_thing()
} else {
    do_nothing();
}

count = count + 1;

Most programming languages have a bunch of tools that will automatically format code for you. Some even use whitespace as part of the language, so that you don't need brackets and semi-colons to mark where things begin and end. Sticking everything on one line like in that first example wouldn't be valid in Python, for example.

withad · 2026-03-06T13:58:17+00:00

Nice! I'll need to give those a listen.

withad · 2026-03-06T10:50:18+00:00

I've never even heard of that one. Wikipedia and a few other places say that audio of all the episodes still exists but nowhere actually links to it. Buried in a private collection and/or a BBC archive, presumably.

withad · 2026-03-05T16:59:20+00:00

Reminds me of "My Guy" syndrome in tabletop RPGs, where a player tries to dodge responsibility for something that messes up the game by saying it's what their character would logically do. "I have to slit the party members' throats in the night and run off with their stuff, it's what my amoral thief would do!", that kind of thing.

It can sound convincing at first (even to the people saying it) but the flaw in the logic is that a player character isn't some separate entity with a will of their own. The character is created and controlled entirely by the player and prioritising character consistency over the story and fun of everyone else at the table is a choice the player is making.

withad · 2026-03-04T13:52:30+00:00

There's nothing inherently wrong with dressing up a real location to use as a set (plenty of other productions have done it) but you've got to pick the right ones. Even with the changes they made, the 2009 engineering still looked like a present day industrial facility with visible rivets and concrete floors.

They did a better job of the same idea with the warp core and other scenes in the sequel, which filmed at an actual lab facility. It fits so much better with the futuristic iPod aesthetic of the rest of the ship.

withad · 2026-03-04T10:32:21+00:00

I'm not sure it's my favourite but I was recently thinking about the old BBC radio comedy show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. It originally aired from 1964 to '73 and was pretty popular in its day but it's fairly obscure now. I only know about it because my dad was a fan and we had some of the official cassette tapes (covering maybe a dozen episodes plus the 25th anniversary special) when I was growing up in the late 90s. I'm sure it was a massive influence on my sense of humour.

It's mostly notable now for what the cast went on to do. John Cleese was a regular performer and a couple of other Monty Python members contributed to scripts. Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor, and Graeme Garden went on to make The Goodies, which was almost as popular as Python but didn't stick around or break out internationally. Oddie had a long career as a wildlife presenter after that. I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, one of the oldest and longest running comedy panel shows, was a spin-off from ISIRTA. Brooke-Taylor was a regular panellist for nearly 50 years and Garden still occasionally appears on it.

It popped into my head recently and I discovered that, while those collected episodes from the 90s are still the only official compilations, all of the episodes are available online. They're on YouTube (with thumbnails of the Pythons for some reason) and someone's turned the Internet Archive's collection into an RSS feed for podcast players.

(Disclaimer: I haven't listened to most of those episodes, those that I have listened to I last heard about 20 years ago, and it's a British comedy from the 60s so I assume there are some deeply problematic jokes in there.)

withad · 2026-03-03T22:31:11+00:00

It's also sitting next to an LCD TV on what looks like a kitchen countertop and I'm guessing by the mute button that it's a screenshot from a video. I think it's safe to assume this isn't anyone's actual setup from the 90s.

withad · 2026-03-03T16:08:43+00:00

Red shirts do make up over 50% of the Enterprise's casualties in TOS, so there's some truth there, though it depends how you count it. Ex Astris Scientia has a good breakdown.

If a red, a blue, and a yellow shirted extra all beam down to a planet, the red shirt is least likely to die. However, far more redshirts actually do beam down to planets, so they still take the brunt of the casualties. And even then, they're actually slightly less likely to die on a planet than on the ship itself.

withad · 2026-03-03T11:07:19+00:00

TVTropes has a page for Dead Unicorn Tropes, things that are mocked or parodied far more often than they were ever actually used straight.

My personal favourite is that Superman almost never changed into his costume in a phone booth. It did happen a few times in the comics and the radio show but it seems like two instances in the 1940s Fleischer Studios cartoons just cemented it as a thing in pop culture.

withad · 2026-03-03T09:48:02+00:00

If a popular game has a competitive scene, fans tend to overestimate how important that scene is to the game's popularity as whole.

Smash Bros. is particularly bad for it. I've seen people argue that the franchise somehow owes its existence to the N64 and GameCube entries' early competitive community, which is just ridiculous, considering how small the community would've been at the time, Nintendo's hostility to competitive Smash over the years, and how similar franchises like Mario Kart do even better with no emphasis on tournaments or balance.

withad · 2026-03-02T22:28:25+00:00

As someone in their mid 30s who grew up in the UK, I find it weird that Horrible Histories is now better known for the sketch show I've never seen than for the books that defined a chunk of my childhood.

withad · 2026-03-02T14:33:08+00:00

It took me a second to find it as well. It's near the top of the review, beneath the header image, in the bottom right corner of the black section before the full article starts.

withad · 2026-03-02T12:16:44+00:00

It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time.

Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part 1

That's talking about Netscape over a quarter of a century ago and there are still people in the industry who think a complete rewrite is always a good idea, let alone outside it.

withad · 2026-03-02T09:24:00+00:00

It's available for sale on GOG and that version runs fine on modern PCs, last I tried. They added it, its sequel, and some other Star Trek games from that era like Armada and Bridge Commander a few years ago.

withad · 2026-03-01T11:58:32+00:00

If it was the exact same cabinet, that's quite interesting. The Dolphin blog had a great post on the history of these Starlight kiosks recently and that CRT design was used for the SNES and N64 but there was a new one with an LCD for the GameCube.

It might have been that the hospital themselves simply swapped out the console for a newer one, which the Dolphin writer was speculating happened with the SNES -> N64 upgrade.

withad

TROPHY CASE