It's 1997 Star Wars is back in a huge way. I had spent that earlier winter standing in line at out towns small and delapitated theater waiting to see the Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions. Over the course of a few months all three films had released. It was an exciting time to be a fan the toys where taking off again in a huge way and all the cross media stuff was everywhere.

Enter Fall of 1997 and Star Wars Jedi Knight Dark Forces II (I honest to god have no idea how that is supposed to be written out as I have seen it done a million ways). I remember walking in on my dad playing this demo of a Star Wars game. he was shooting various characters that looked like Bossk, the lizard dude from Empire Strikes Back, and then suddenly he pulls out a lightsaber and my mind was fucking blown away. The demo was the spaceport level refueling the bad guys huge evil spaceship thing with a probably evil Star Wars name. I can't remember it. Anyhow it was a few more years till I was able buy me a copy of the game.

Jedi Knight is called the first Jedi simulator and like the name makes sense, but it's not accurate at all. Jedi Knight II is by far more of a Jedi simulator. You get your lightsaber fairly early in Jedi Knight but this game is a shooter first and foremost and a rather damn good one at that. It's easily the first cinematic FPS game with a proper story and everything we are accustomed to today. It had a rather impressive 3D engine for the day considering it was one of the few non Quake based shooters.

This game is also notorious for its Full Motion Video sequences. Most levels start with and end with an FMV. The effects for the time are actually rather well done even if most of the environments are CGI. This was not a cheap game to make. But all of those production values pays off this is a really fun and memorable game with the highlight easily being the level where you have to escape a crashing spaceship. Here is a clip of the FMV cutscenes to see for yourself.

I won't go much into the story as it is typical Star Wars expanded universe flare from the 90's, but it's not terrible it gets the job done. This is a must recommend however it can be a real pain getting it to run on modern systems. As a lot of these now they are available DRM free on GOG.

This is most certainly nostalgia goggles, but I miss this era of Star Wars so much. It felt like so much was happening and that there was real fun to be had. I have not felt that about Disney's Star Wars at all. In fact it feels like they go out of their way to like rewrite the look and feel of Star Wars to be less Lucas. Now again this could just be me, but I don't feel the magic with Star Wars anymore. I did briefly with The Last Jedi, but I know I am in a minority of actually liking that film and it turned into a whole ass culture war bullshit. Anyhow Star Wars feels way too corporate now. It's sterile. These are just my personal feelings.

if you ever wanted to :awoo: in chosts, you're in luck: now you can!

i ported the @mutant standard emoji set by @dzuk to cohost with a userscript + a website!

features:

• it supports the full mutant standard emoji set
• it supports all variations, and has a picker for them
• you can make emojis in the default size or bigger
• it's fully accessible (automatically sets alt text & title based on emoji metadata, eg alt="paw hand (tan fur colour)" title="paw hand (tan fur colour)")
• it supports cohost posts as well as comments, and autodetects comment sections
• you can even use it in other places that support markdown/HTML
• everyone can see them, even if they do not have the script installed
• it has a nice UI for picking emojis

you can use it at https://mutant.us.to (no userscript required), and install the userscript (what is that?/how do i install that?) from there, and you can open the emoji picker by pressing CTRL+. (and Control+. on macOS) or the icon next to the old emoji button! and the source code is available on github (but it is a bit messy lol)

EDIT: i forgot to add an update URL, so if you installed it before i edited this in: reinstall the userscript you will get updates now (and there will be a few)

EDIT 2: i released a new update with a bunch of features! https://cohost.org/lexi/post/474136-b-style-font-size

a few technical details for nerds:

and it works on mobile now!!

I've been a long-term lover of Mutant Standard please

INSTALL THIS USERSCRIPT

pls

Today I'm working on my slides for my Haskell eXchange talk and this year my presentation will cover my new Fall-from-Grace language. The title and abstract are:

Fall-from-Grace: A Typed and Programmable Superset of JSON

Fall-from-Grace is a functional programming language project designed to be easy for others to fork to build their own domain-specific languages.

Fall-from-Grace is inspired by the Dhall configuration language, but boasts a few improvements such as JSON-compatible syntax, bidirectional type inference, and row polymorphism.

This talk gives a tour of the language's features and concludes with a demo web application that compiles Grace functions to interactive web forms.