WTF Happened September 2024
This is the fifth recap post, affectionately titled "WTF Happened." This is a monthly news post of sorts. I'll use these recaps to briefly cover cool, exciting and also not-so-good and downright terrible events which happened in and around the past month. I'll cover things like world news, movies, TV shows, tech, VR, personal projects (like this blog), cool game releases, and anything I find out during the month that I personally think is worth mentioning. I ask around on social media toward the end of each month for ideas, and I may or may not steal credit for the news I place here! I will cite references when it suits me! Moving on....
It's that time of the year again! That's right. It's October A.K.A. Halloween Month! That's a reminder follow-up from last month's article as promised. Costumes at the ready!
Here's some last minute Halloween costume ideas:
- Link from Breath Of The Wild (Amazon link: here) or Zelda, of course!
- Doomguy from Doom (unfortunately, this is DIY, but here's the helmet on Amazon: ref link)
- Scorpion from Mortal Kombat (get it from Amazon: here)
Ok, I'm stopping now. On with the news! 
In U.S. politics, we had quite an embarrassing election debate, one
that got meme'd quite well. It was a real headache-inducing event.
Donald Trump, the republican candidate, was as awful as ever during this
debate, and I think it's becoming really hard not to diss that guy in
every conversation I ever have. It's silly how anyone votes for that
guy after all his nonsense, but...
I always encourage everyone to research their polling options before voting. Do not vote for a party. Voting for parties is what gets us into these 2-party messes in the first place. Focus on your goals and vote accordingly. Think critically and teach others to do the same. Think of education as a preventative measure, helping our society avoid stupidity and selfishness in public office positions.
Weather has been getting more and more intense with Hurricane Helene recently flowing through the eastern coast of USA. North Carolina was even flooded.
In medical news, a potential cause for psoriasis has been discovered! For those not in the loop, psoriasis is a very serious skin disease that causes unprovoked rashes to constantly spread like wildfires across the person's entire body. This disease can affect a person's immune response to some diseases, especially diseases of the skin, and can result in occasional blood loss without injury as well as affect the person's ability to heal properly from cuts and bruises. According to U.K.'s University of Bath, "New research strongly suggests the hormone hepcidin may trigger the onset of the condition." The article references a nature.com article as its research, and at first glance, this seems very promising as a leaping off point for further research into a cure or at least preventative measures.
In entertainment news, Shogun star Hiroyuki Sanada won an Emmy! I can't recommend Shogun enough. Watch it if you're at all interested in the genre. "Hiroyuki Sanada is only the second Asian actor to win an Emmy for best lead in a drama series." - News 24
This also marks a unique year for the Emmys because last year's show was delayed to January of this year, making 2024 a year of 2 Emmys. Weird that they wouldn't just combine the events into a 2-year special, but I guess they make more ad revenue this way. 
Beyond the Emmys, way back in August, we got some BAFTA Game Awards going on. This is a rehash of something I already covered, but awards do not mean much for the winners in most cases, especially in the video game industry. I assume awards help the game sales but do not help the devs directly. I cannot make the same assumptions of actors, though. When an actor receives an award, it likely helps their resume a lot more, because it's usually an award for that particular person's work, not for a team's work. It would be nice if game devs got a similar treatment, but at least they can attribute the award to their resume when they're inevitably out of a job.
Despite the games industry being in quite a depressing state, Steam hit an all time high of 38.3 million concurrent online users on September 22 according to Tom Warren. This number keeps rising, too, and the record will keep getting broken until there's proper competition in the online game storefront business. Currently, Steam is still the best experience of all game stores on PC in my opinion thanks to their consumer-first refund policy and a variety of integrated technologies, including but not limited to Remote Play Together and SteamVR.
Godot Engine, right before having its discord communities implode from really terrible moderators, kind of quietly got a really cool feature: Native Quest 3 and Quest Pro support. It has a build that runs on Quest 3. That's right, you can run the engine itself on Quest 3, standalone, and make your game without the help of a PC and without having to take your HMD off. UploadVR wrote a nice article covering the feature on September 21st. This build can actually build projects as well, and it can build non-VR games, albeit unintuitively. If you want to toy with game dev but don't have a PC, this might be your golden ticket!
In related VR/tech news, the HTC Vive Ultimate Tracker now officially supports all PCVR headsets, from the original HTC Vive to Quest 3 to Valve Index to BigScreen Beyond. It does this using a PC dongle, though, so it still has some similar limitations to the limitations of older trackers in that it needs to have a dongle for each 5 trackers and requires minimal interference. The improvement is the dongle supports 5 trackers instead of just 1, but we had third-party dongles for the previous generations. These trackers are heavier than previous iterations of the Vive Tracker as well, and they're more expensive. Battery life is about the same as the v3. I would be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued by this evolution of the product. I would likely just not find enough use for these trackers based on experience with the previous generations. The software just isn't backed well enough. If they can fix the software support, I'll be there to finance myself a new set of trackers.
In addition to last month's news of PSVR2 becoming a PCVR option, I think we're finally starting to see interoperability between VR ecosystems. We just need it to work more in the standalone market. I know it's asking a lot, but I would like to see PSVR2 and Valve Index get official support on Meta's game store as a next step. I would also like to see a wireless adapter sequel to revitalize the aging HTC Vive and Vive Pro hardware. Perhaps give us new Vive wands with updated controls. Give us more updated hardware support instead of new hardware that acts as a replacement for the old stuff. Focus on revitalization of the old but good stuff and less on abandoning the old stuff for the next hype machine.
Speaking of abandoning the old stuff, Macromedia Flash MX 2004 came out September 2003 and introduced ActionScript 2.0. Soon after that, Adobe bought Macromedia and it was the beginning of a long death for Flash, but September 10th marked the 21st anniversary of ActionScript 2.0 and the last version of Flash released by Macromedia before closing their doors forever. They went down in web design history. You can take a ride down memory lane and see what they took away from us at Web Design Museum.
That's all the news I've prepared for this article. In personal news, I managed to clean up my VR space and redesign my overall streaming space to be more in line with my current values, which are more personal enjoyment of games and art and less focus on production value and green screens. I wasn't really utilizing the green screen backdrop, anyway. The new room layout is really working well for me. I'm enjoying the prospect of playing Wii, Wii U, and Kinect games again thanks to this change of space! I've designed the space to allow all the motion controlled games to be in the shared VR space. Next step is to get the Vive setup working again, though I'm starting to feel like selling that old hardware is wise. What are your thoughts? Sell or collect and likely never use again? 
That's
it for this month's recap of WTF Happened! Stay fresh!