sincle354

…a lot of fights irl in such fast fat restaurants

You’re not allowed to edit that typo now.

That’s the thing. I’m NOT feeling it.

We have forced it, quite hamfistedly, to do anything. The organic hell-evolution of web browsers turned them into do-anything sandboxed mini-OS. It meant whatever hellish code you used to write your corporate mandated web app could now become a perfectly bloated standalone application. And the demonic language that would enable it was called Javascript. It does the backend and it does the frontend. You could consider those advantages over other devices, like toasters and those handheld electronic games from the 80s.

So it’s not that the Volkswagen cheated on the emissions test. It’s that running the emissions test (as part of the building process) MODIFIED the car ITSELF to guzzle gas after the fact. We’re talking Transformers level of self modification. Manchurian Candidate sleeper agent levels of subterfuge.

And that ancient Roman’s name? Julius Caesar.

Not kidding. My preferred source

If you want any encouragement, one of the DDR regulars at the arcade was a totally non-college age woman who needed a hand brace due to some age-typical RSI, I presume. That is, I could only assume because she played up at the 13s (well near 9 footers and above) with dogged passion. I don’t even know how old she was because she had that cardio build, the kind you might find a Zumba enthusiast with. I’m not being ageist here: I’m more terrified of the 30, 35 year olds on the machines because I know their passion dictates their body and not the other way around. If you can’t take the high impacts on your joints for higher speeds, it’s always just fun to play the medium level charts and maybe even go for high scores. She didn’t need to go high and that was fine.

If you wanna get back into the grove, YouTube has all of the charts of the better songs available. Just… load up Captain Jack (Grandale Mix), AFRONOVA, Dynamite Rave. Get back in the groove without a pad and just feel it come back! Unfortunately official cabinets have lost the rights to many of the older classic songs, but StepMania doesn’t care :). And if you do pick it back up and wanna chase the new stuff, well, you’re gonna have to dance for that privilege.

Actually my self esteem increased this past few years but I won’t pass up an ADHD infodump opportunity. DDR is, IMO, the most efficient path for videogamer enthusiasts to transition to healthy exercise.

DanceDanceRevolution (DDR) is an arcade rhythm game that is certainly not dead, much to your surprise perhaps. The Japanese arcade scene is a whole, far more in depth iceberg to chip at, but trust me when I say Konami focusing on machines did not (only) mean pachinko machines, it also meant their multiple arcade rhythm games under the Bemani brand.

I am not kidding when I say there was a DDR setup in my middle school in southern USA. I started a bit there, but I never got real dedicated gameplay until there was a new DDR cabinet installed at both Dave and Busters and a local arcade joint. Having access to a machine can be substituted by a home pad. Please, buy the L-TEK pad without the bar. Cheapest exercise equipment out there at 250 + shipping from Poland.

You start off just browsing the songs in the roster until you find ones you like. There’s some token English licensed songs, but the bulk come from Konami original songs and a selection from the massive library that is the Rhythm Game Song Genre™. Most weebs get their beginnings from anime OPs and TouHou and Vocaloid, so if you have early YouTube nostalgia jump right into Bad Apple and Night of Nights. Later on you get addicted to the super high BPM (400+) techno mixes of the “Boss” songs (more on that later).

So how is gameplay? Visually, four lanes of arrows travel from the bottom to the top, indicating when you have to step and in what direction on the four directional pads at your feet. You should learn quickly that keeping your feet on the arrows and never stepping in the center is the key to actual gameplay. The song’s patterns are designed to lead one into another. It’s far from dancing, but you transition from paying attention to each arrow to just stepping to the beat. You internalize patterns and you get better, right?

But then, there’s a hurdle. Some songs demand you turn your hips and move your right foot on the left pad and vice versa. Difficulty is based on number 1 to 19, so you keep track that you can pass 11s, but not 12s. Each new song introduces new patterns in ordering and timing. Your old highest level becomes your warmups as you get better and better. You start to take a liking to faster, more complex rhythms like triplets, syncopated notes, and more sounds that a drummer doing prog rock would grok. One particular song has you galloping like a horse to Japanese festival music. If you know, you know.

But there’s a catch, a limitation: your own body. Nearing difficulty 12 and 13, you’re doing the equivalent of a decent jog for around two minutes, right? You might start needing some time between songs to take a break and drink some water. At 14 and 15, you’re going for something called High Intensity Interval Training. That is, you go at your MAXIMUM SPEED for as long as the song demands you go. You don’t give up because that means losing and you paid for this arcade game, right? You push and push and sometimes fall over, but eventually you’re running ragged at 600 steps per minute begging that your life bar doesn’t sink anymore. You need more training. The next song is 440 BPM with 880 steps per minute.

You want it. You want to play the harder songs in the difficulty ranking. You start to jog outside of the game on treadmills and otherwise. You put on the same heartrending songs and you find yourself sprinting desperately for 2 minute bursts because it’s impossible to stop while the song is playing. I’m running for almost an hour straight, and I get a head start at running progress because of my DDR experience! It pays off and you can play up to 15s, but there’s still 4 more levels until you get to 19. Over 4 years (at college, see?) I bike to the arcade, I play my heart out, I bike back. My blood pressure decreases, I breathe slower and deeper, and my snacking habits are at least counteracted. Best videogame of my life.

Only downside? I can’t convince anyone outside of the rhythm gamers at the arcade that the music is good. The rhythms of those “Boss” songs are etched into your soul by the end. I can namedrop MAX 300 and everyone in the scene can practically play the song out in their heads. It’s literally a lifestyle hobby, and a rather healthy one at that.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World is the best song. Absolutely the closest I’ve ever gotten to drifting peacefully in the starry night sky. I wanted to cry when it was over. The ride operates on a 1-reservation a day system because it’s THAT good. I’m so sad I can’t ride it forever…

Disney Imagineers hiring PHDs in gravitational physics, with the research facilities actually disguised as said Guardians of the Galaxy Ride.

I got so flustered by the original that I made this as cheaply as possible. Just as much effort as the documentation I’m supposed to verify at my day job grumble grumble

Not a proper orthographic projection. The top view “B” has to be drawn above the front view “oo” and rotated 90 degrees clockwise in alignment. Also, the front is presumably a sectional view so there should be a cutting plane line or two somewhere with appropriate crosshatching. Don’t forget the isometric view in the empty corner.

Valley bullshit aside, I do have to defend the expensive exploration of the generalized AI space purely because it’s embarassingly parallel. That is, it just gets so much better the more money and resources you throw at it. It couldn’t solve math without a few million dollars worth of supercomputer training time. We didn’t know it would create valid VHDL-to-csv-to-VBA scripts, but I got phind(.com) to make me one. And I certainly can’t tell Wolfram Alpha to package the math solution it generated as a Javascript function.

Looks like a Madlibs entry

NESTLE and THE CCP are teaming up to buy SPAMCALLERS

H&K is just about the worst offender here, JonTron a close second.

You know I was about to make a North Korea joke about infant mortality and the post natal care, but if you believe the statistics (13.9 per 1000 live births, 22 per 1000 at worst), they’re better than 30-40% countries INCLUDING India, and handily at that (32 per 1000).

That said, I don’t know if surviving childhood in NK is more or less cruel.

Jerma985 was my most favoritest TF2 youtuber, and now look him, a big streamer with wide meme reach. I remember the first Jerma Rumbles, the pinnacle of simulated wrestling and the first inklings of his creative genius. I don’t watch streams and I don’t watch VODs, but I’m just happy he’s shooting for the stars.

Ok but Rando is a baller name.

It’s physics for computers, specifically the Direct Stiffness Method. The formal definition of what you send into a computer for stress analysis involves a whole lot of matrixes. You turn a structure into tiny little nodes not unlike pixels or voxels. Each point can be connected to other elements, and these connections have unique internal linear or twisting “stiffness”, like a spring has. Think how a spring and a stick of wood resist squishing and bending. They can be expressed as one massive square (important!) matrix. The equation in the third panel is essentially a mega version of Hooke’s law:

F = ku
“The vector of forces on the nodes = the matrix containing all information of the stiffness of the connections * the vector of positions of the nodes”.

This is a linear algebra problem, the easiest type of problem for a computer with a GPU. We can insert the known positions and forces on the bridge and solve for all unknown positions. If a truss on a bridge is calculated to experience too much force than it can handle, you can say that the bridge will fail under those conditions.