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1. eisai (eisai@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 18:26:40 JST eisai
   I went to read about soviet hydro power plants, because someone referenced those on telegram. For a couple days I’ve been reading articles on Wikipedia and looking at photos.
   
   Damn, man, they’re gigantic! Some of them were biggest in the world when they were built. The title “Great constructions of communism” now sounds differently.
   
   Watching at some photos, they looked weirdly familiar. Thinking about that later, I’ve realised – it was in Half-Life 2! “Through the canals”! I must say, that I of course already knew about those canals and dams (at least about some very important ones), but it’s one thing to see a blue comb on a physical map or a 5×3 cm small picture in the geography textbook, and a whole other thing to see a spillway in action on a 3000×1400 px photo. The memories of HL2 dams and gateways were replaying in my head and I was like “This is Volga HPP!” “That’s the view above Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP!”.
   
   It’s only that in Half-Life 2 the canals and dams look… small, so there’s no real impression, that you’re crossing waterways connecting Black sea on the south with White and Baltic seas on the north. Now that I think of it, the scenery in HL2 changed from a post-soviet “big city with towers” (Moscow?) to a coastal area (Black sea?), and Gordon makes his way back (to the north?), and in the episodes nature becomes more woody, which hints at higher altitudes (Belarus? The Baltic? Saint-Petersburg area? or Karelia?), and in Half-Life 3 we were supposed to go to the Arctic, where Borealis is. So the game designers made good use of the actually existing canal system. Still, I wish it could show them wider, the dams – bigger and the nature more realistic. Alas, the ideas were good but hardly possible to implement for 2004 PC hardware.
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