Tag: somehow
Veiled Experts is 3rd person Counter-Strike, and somehow it’s utterly fantastic
I’ve been meaning to write about Veiled Experts for over a month now, since playing it religiously during the Final Beta Test. I’ve been putting it off mostly because I’ve been busy, but also because I’m trying to find a way of saying “actually it’s really good” without people laughing and throwing garbage at me. It’s very hard to describe Veiled Experts to someone in a way that doesn’t prompt an instant dismissal. That was my reaction too. I saw it on Twitch, my mind said “third person Counter-Strike”, and sent an automatic signal down to my lips to proclaim the words: “sounds awful”.
Thank goodness for boredom. Later that day I was at a loose end and saw that Veiled Experts was free, so I downloaded it and tried it out. And here we are, a month and a bit later. The game is about to release into Early Access, and I’m desperately trying to get everyone I know to play it with me, because it’s bloody phenomenal.
Somehow Amazon’s Open Source Fork of ElasticSearch Has Succeeded
OpenSearch shouldn’t exist. The open source alternative to Elasticsearch started off as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) answer to getting outflanked by Elastic’s change in Elasticsearch’s license, which was in turn sparked by AWS building a successful Elasticsearch service but contributing little back. In 2019 when AWS launched its then Open Distro for Elasticsearch, I thought its reasons rang hollow and, frankly, sounded sanctimonious. This was, after all, a company that used more open source than it contributed. Two years later, AWS opted to fork Elasticsearch to create OpenSearch, committing to a “long-term investment” in OpenSearch.
I worked at AWS at the time. Privately, I didn’t think it would work.
Rather, I didn’t feel that AWS really understood just how much work was involved in running a successful open source project, and the company would fail to invest the time and resources necessary to make OpenSearch a viable competitor to Elasticsearch. I was wrong. Although OpenSearch has a long way to go before it can credibly claim to have replaced Elasticsearch in the minds and workloads of developers, it has rocketed up the search engine popularity charts, with an increasingly diverse contributor population. In turn, the OpenSearch experience is adding a new tool to AWS’ arsenal of open source strengths….
As part of the AWS OpenSearch team, David Tippett and Eli Fisher laid out a few key indicators of OpenSearch’s success as they gave their 2022 year in review. They topped more than 100 million downloads and gathered 8,760 pull requests from 496 contributors, a number of whom don’t work for AWS. Not stated were other success factors, such as Adobe’s earlier decision to replace Elasticsearch with OpenSearch in its Adobe Commerce suite, or its increasingly open governance with third-party maintainers for the project. Nor did they tout its lightning-fast ascent up the DB-Engines database popularity rankings, hitting the Top 50 databases for the first time.
OpenSearch, in short, is a bonafide open source success story. More surprisingly, it’s an AWS open source success story. For many who have been committed to the “AWS strip mines open source” narrative, such success stories aren’t supposed to exist. Reality bites.
The article notes that OpenSearch’s success “doesn’t seem to be blunting Elastic’s income statement.” But it also points out that Amazon now has many employees actively contributing to open source projects, including PostgreSQL and MariaDB. (Although “If AWS were to turn forking projects into standard operating procedure, that might get uncomfortable.”)
“Fortunately, not only has AWS learned how to build more open source, it has also learned how to partner with open source companies.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Genshin Impact fan somehow copies in-game animations on a calculator
One Genshin Impact fan has managed to use math and pure dedication to recreate several animations from the anime game in a graphing calculator. No matter how long you think this took, it likely took even longer. A Genshin Impact content creator named ‘Firestorm’ used a calculator to copy animations for Amber, Eula, Paimon, Hu Tao, Barbara, and even Baron Bunny with jaw-dropping accuracy.
MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Genshin Impact codes, Genshin Impact character tier list, Genshin Impact leveling guide
Deadpool 3’s Wolverine Is, Somehow, Completely New
Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is returning to the big screen next year, but according to Deadpool himself, it won’t be the character fans know and love.
Xbox Elite Series 2 with Xbox Design Lab (Somehow) Got Even Better
Somehow, the ultra-violent Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie is clearly inspired by Resident Evil 4 – here’s proof
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is a roaring carnival of witless bullshit. There are things in this movie which defy any sane classification: simply saying them out loud makes you seem as if you’re confessing to some crime or other. At about 15 separate points during the movie, your mind will whisper ‘can everyone else see this, or have I totally snapped? Am I dead?’. In the Silent Hill 2 remake, when James finds that tape, this will be what he sees.
There’s a section with a swimming pool which is, and I’m not being over-the-top here, the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Pooh – PIGLET – drives a BMW Estate, which sounds mundane (where’s he going after he kills all these people, the driving range?) until you say it out loud and wonder if you’ve accidentally seen something only the crew of the Event Horizon were meant to. Go on, say it out loud. ‘Pooh drives a BMW Estate’. Over someone’s head, granted. Does that make what I’m saying better? WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU ON ABOUT, MATE. See it immediately.
While you’re there, after everyone in the cinema has sliced open their thumbs into a petri dish to prove to each other, despite their life choices, that they are real people, you may begin to notice what seems like a pervasive influence on Blood and Honey: Resident Evil 4. Again, that sounds bizarre, but we’re here now. Go with it.
Oblivion: Somehow, 17 years have passed since The Elder Scrolls went mainstream and changed gaming forever
It’s completely absurd that the best part of twenty years have chundered along since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out. I barely feel old enough to have fully formed memories of doing things that long ago. But yes, fine, calendars don’t lie, and it really has been seventeen years, three console generations, and an entire global pandemic between the time that Oblivion first graced our monitor screens… and now.
It’s difficult to remember just how different the gaming landscape was back then. With the Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PS3 still months away from launch (and the latter stumbling its way out of the birth canal on a wave of bad PR), the Red Ring saga yet to hit Microsoft in the pocket, and Don Mattrick still working in relative obscurity at Electronic Arts, the Xbox brand was a serious, solid contender in the console space. It had beaten its contenders onto shelves by a full year, and by March 2006, the stage had been set for Next Gen to truly start.
Which it did. Despite Kaz Hirai’s flippant insistence that Sony, and Sony alone, would decide when the next generation starts, what actually kicked it off was a little game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in what would be a watershed moment not just for Bethesda Softworks, but for RPGs in general.
Ash’s Japanese voice actor nailed the Pokémon theme in a single take, somehow
Rika Matsumoto delivers an electric performance
The Super Mario Bros. Movie cast sang the theme song together, somehow
Jack Black is surprisingly good at scatting