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   eisai (eisai@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 18:26:44 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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      (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 18:45:27 JST 

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     • Hoss Delgado
     @Hoss @eisai Yeah, but you can guess from the clues. EP2 shows that Eli's rocket was launched to somewhere in European part of Russia. The Mi-8 Alyx wants to use to find Borealis has a range of about 1600 kilometers, so it's safe to assume that White Forest is somewhere in Northwestern Russia if Borealis is to be found somewhere around Arctic archipelagos like Svalbard or Novaya Zemlya.
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     Hoss Delgado (hoss@shitpost.cloud)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 18:45:28 JST Hoss Delgado

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     Don't they make it intentionally vague about where you actually are in HL2?
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     eisai (eisai@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 18:50:17 JST eisai

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     • Hoss Delgado
     @mint @Hoss > The Mi-8 Alyx wants to use to find Borealis has a range of about 1600 kilometers,
     Makes sense.
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      (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 19:08:12 JST 

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     • Hoss Delgado
     @Hoss @eisai Karelia is relatively flat, its peak Nuorunen is only 577 meters high. Kola might be a better match since its ranges are much more elevated (the peaks of Lovozero and Khibiny are twice that at 1120 and 1200 meters). Mining industry in Murmansk oblast is more developed as well.
     Physical_map_of_Karelia.png
     1280px-Вид_на_гору_Нуорунен_с_г…
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     eisai (eisai@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 21:10:13 JST eisai

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     • Hoss Delgado
     @mint @Hoss Er, I’m not following, what should the altitudes be indicating?
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      (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 21:10:13 JST 

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     • Hoss Delgado
     @eisai @Hoss How steep the land potentially is. The White Forest area is pretty mountainous.
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     eisai (eisai@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 10-Sep-2023 23:22:59 JST eisai

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     • Hoss Delgado
     @mint @Hoss Aah. The last time I played Ep2 was so long ago, that I forgot.
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