Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is an action role-playing video
game developed by Troika Games (founders pictured) and first released on
November 16, 2004, by Activision for Microsoft Windows. Based on White
Wolf Publishing's role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, it follows
a male or female character who is killed and revived as a fledgling
vampire in 21st-century Los Angeles. Bloodlines is presented from first-
and third-person perspectives. Characters may use violent and nonviolent
methods to achieve their goals while moving freely between the available
hubs: Santa Monica, Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles, and Chinatown.
Troika's 32-member team began development in 2001, using Valve
Corporation's brand-new Source game engine, also used for Valve's own
Half-Life 2. Bloodlines was incomplete at its first release, with
disappointing sales of fewer than 80,000 copies initially. It divided
critics at the time, who faulted it for technical flaws. It now has a
cult following as a rarely replicated example of a game that succeeds in
both gameplay and narrative; critical opinion now styles it as a flawed
masterpiece.
Read more:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_%E2%80%93_Bloodlines>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1384:
Jadwiga was officially crowned as "King of Poland" instead of
"Queen" to reflect the fact that she was a sovereign in her own right
and not merely a royal consort.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadwiga_of_Poland>
1491:
Several Jews and conversos were executed in Toledo, Spain, for
the alleged ritual murder of an infant, who was later revered as the
Holy Child of La Guardia.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Child_of_La_Guardia>
1855:
Explorer David Livingstone became the first European to see
Victoria Falls, one of the largest waterfalls in the world, on what is
now the Zambia–Zimbabwe border.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Falls>
1938:
Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized the psychedelic
drug LSD at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann>
1992:
In Suffolk, England, an amateur metal detectorist found the
largest hoard of Roman gold, silver and bronze coins from the late
fourth and early fifth centuries ever discovered within the former Roman
Empire.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoxne_Hoard>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
machine elf:
A kind of otherworldly humanoid figure sometimes seen during
dimethyltryptamine (DMT) hallucinations.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/machine_elf>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton,
Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsberg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The
Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates,
Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary,
Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer,
Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, H.L. Mencken,
Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby Fischer, Emma Goldman, Peter
Kropotkin, you, and your parents. Is there really one kind of life which
is best for each of these people?
--Robert Nozick
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick>