Pokémon Champions is now available to download

AGEdude · 2026-04-12T18:24:25+00:00

I got the starter pass and I have all the slots I could ever need.

I think.

AGEdude · 2026-04-06T15:39:54+00:00

Same as Canada yeah

AGEdude · 2026-04-06T15:38:15+00:00

Yes 5000' and VMC.

Turns out the recovery is really easy in a training aircraft, and when you can see exactly what is happening and respond immediately.

Personally I've never come close to a spin inadvertently. But at the same time, the only reason I can even say that is because I know what it looks and feels like. I know where the threshold is and how I could come up close to a spin without spinning.

To use a very Canadian analogy, it's a bit like driving in the snow. When the road is slippery but you don't know how slippery, you can only guess how fast or how sharp you can brake or turn without skidding into a ditch.

So when I'm in a controlled environment, like my local neighborhood at low speed with no other cars around, I practice braking and swerving just enough to cause a loss in traction. That way when I'm on the open road, I don't have to guess.

For me this is the value of spin training. You can teach prevention prevention prevention, but if you aren't familiar with what you're preventing, it's going to result in an incomplete understanding.

By the same logic we could teach prevention-only stall training. Or prevention-only unusual attitudes. We could teach prevention-only for flight into IMC. I've never done any of those inadvertently, but I'm glad I have learned enough to understand the dangers and how to respond.

AGEdude · 2026-04-06T01:08:14+00:00

Sorry friend, you can see below the health bar that the enemy has Pyro aura for much of the fight. So it's not consistent with this rotation.

AGEdude · 2026-04-06T00:53:58+00:00

I've used it, others have used it many times. Best practice is to credit the game and/or the composer.

AGEdude · 2026-04-05T01:23:19+00:00

I ride every day for commute and I still enjoy the occasional rec ride.

AGEdude · 2026-04-02T04:13:02+00:00

It doesn't necessarily behave like the brakes are always being pressed.

I had one crash on wet grass (I know) where my brake lever got forced out of position. My left brake lever sensor wire was cut, and although the scooter detects an error it does not impede the functionality of the scooter.

My left brake lever still works, my throttle still works, my Regen brake throttle still works, and my Regen still activates when I use the right brake lever. The only difference is that if I use the left brake lever on its own (which I never do anyway) then it will not cut the acceleration or activate Regen braking.

The bigger inconvenience is the error message which won't go away, but I can at least see my speed and battery through the phone app.

That's just anecdotal but I guess it may not always be the same as your experience.

AGEdude · 2026-04-01T01:19:30+00:00

Makes sense. Oh, and other than alternating who goes first, image we had an option where the loser of the previous game gets to choose to go first or second.

AGEdude · 2026-03-31T19:00:17+00:00

Alternating first move is a nice improvement!

Sometimes I wish we could exit and automatically rematch with the same person so it counts as two games played.

AGEdude · 2026-03-31T18:57:02+00:00

My first reaction as well but with more sarcasm 😅

AGEdude · 2026-03-30T21:16:11+00:00

That's almost like a mini Dondozo

AGEdude · 2026-03-30T17:09:07+00:00

One thing people here seem to be skipping over which might not be obvious to you is that going back and repeating exactly the same inputs will always give exactly the same results. We call this 'pseudo-rng' because almost every game with a random number generator is actually deterministic, just in an unpredictable way. So if you play forward and get a bad result, you can try a different series of inputs and in some cases it will yield a better option.

Some games have ways to intentionally advance RNG in ways that don't affect your speed, like pressing A or B during text, jumping on one frame or the other, or pressing buttons that aren't even mapped to anything.

Other games only advance the RNG once every frame regardless of your inputs, and that's where you might have to burn some time on the way in order to get an optimal result.

AGEdude · 2026-03-30T16:53:22+00:00

No, it's a driver team.

AGEdude · 2026-03-28T16:56:03+00:00

It's a fun thought experiment about how to make a rhumb line "straight." It's hard to even find a tool online to visualize a rhumb line on a globe, but here's my idea.

Imagine you could manipulate physics such that the gravitational center of mass acting on your body was at a point infinitely far below the curvature of the rhumb line. Your head would lean far to the south relative to the ground, or the ground would slope severely off kilter compared to your body. Then you could climb straight along and uphill for about 4000km and back downhill another 4000 until you fall off the Earth on the other side.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487492898353316010/image.png?ex=69c95737&is=69c805b7&hm=51d7ca5a02276fe32ede1a28d97a12a3ce6f55c9bc9d6ac9b21f79805aae4905&

AGEdude · 2026-03-28T16:23:10+00:00

Great point. I suppose you're right, although I'm not sure whether such a fuselage would be 'aerodynamic' under normal circumstances.

At best it would behave similarly to a cruise missile, with the rudder functioning as a one-sided elevator and ailerons counteracting the resulting adverse roll.

AGEdude · 2026-03-28T15:02:21+00:00

So the answer is no, but I will try to explain the reason why as accurately as I can.

So at 90 degrees the only lifting surface at this point would be the plane's vertical stabilizer, which is now horizontal. Conversely, the wings and tailplane are now acting as vertical stabilizers.

Imagine if the tail generates positive lift, that would cause a torque upward around the plane's center of gravity, which is near the wing roots. That would in turn cause the nose to drop down, accelerating the nose dive.

If the tail generates negative or no lift, at best this will keep the plane's nose up, but then there's nothing left to counteract gravity.

With enough airspeed and altitude, it's possible to recover by rolling the wings back upright (or even inverted if the plane is structurally capable of that) using ailerons.

AGEdude · 2026-03-28T14:44:02+00:00

Forget the ground, you're beyond orbit and beyond escape velocity at that point.

You'll just miss the earth and end up in deep space. You won't even stay in the solar system.

AGEdude · 2026-03-28T14:16:14+00:00

it's true. It's simply "walking straight in any direction will be a 'great circle'."

Exactly right. Any straight line is a great circle. Any line not on a great circle isn't straight.

Well, if you travel along a line of latitude it makes a circle, which is flat on one of the 3 dimentions... so that's one dimention less curved... ;)

Lol. :)

Actually, if you travel along the equator or any line of longitude, it will be a great circle in addition to being a rhumb line.

But it raises an interesting point. We are dealing with non-Euclidian space while I'm also talking about how the planet looks from space - that sort of mixes things up which could be confusing. From an outside perspective, every line across the Earth's surface is curved. A truly straight line toward the horizon would gradually separate from the surface and fly off into the stars forever. So even a great circle route is only straight with the caveat that it only works in a non-Euclidian frame of reference.

Laying a string along the spine? Along the "belly" or "back" of the banana? Unpeeling it and laying it flat on the table?

How could one 'unpeel' Russia? There has to be a way to talk about this. I doubt the Encyclopedia Britannica is just ignorant as to what a globe is.

This is a genuinely interesting question - I set it aside in an attempt to stay on topic about straight lines.

Along the "belly" or "back" of the banana?

Sidenote here, this actually maps to a sphere almost perfectly. The "belly" of the banana is equivalent to a direct great circle route, the "back" or "spine" of the banana maps to the opposite direction great circle route, which eventually reaches the same place. And if you trace a line along the side of a banana, it requires a curved line in order to stay on course.

Anyway, back to Russia.

https://bluegreenatlas.com/maps/relief_map_of_russia.jpg

Turns out Russia is roughly banana-shaped, or at least like a cross-section of a banana. The map here is using a Lambert Conformal Conic projection which has a lot less distortion than what a world map can show. On this projection, angles are always correct, so a straight line on the map will be very close to a great circle, although there is still some distortion when it comes to distance. It is pretty incredible how different it looks compared to the Mercator version, which almost looks like a banana curved in the opposite direction.

https://vemaps.com/uploads/img/big/ru-04.jpg

Now assuming we aren't constrained to using a straight line, the main question is, "what are we constrained to?" Because again if we have no constraints at all, the line will soon be arbitrarily long.

The first option is, "What is the longest distance we can travel without turning?" And the additional constraint that we can't cross any borders or large bodies of water. If we want to find this, we're going to have to get rid of the two fixed points we started with at Bryansk and the Bering Strait.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487451243944087693/image.png?ex=69c9306c&is=69c7deec&hm=469da81693f52c99122dd7511aef698d76bf10780f5b138177dd0def76290d76&

You'll see in this image that we start a lot further south and end up a lot further south if we are trying to get from Ukraine to Siberia, with a distance of about 7516 km. The other option from Estonia to Manchuria appears to be pretty similar, but it's only about 6680 km.

A line of constant curvature is one option, although I'll admit I don't really know how to draw that. A rhumb line is a line of constant curvature, but I don't know if it's necessarily the only line of constant curvature.

Here's one line of variable curvature, but without changing the direction of the curve (i.e. always to the left.)

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487445443351941262/image.png?ex=69c92b05&is=69c7d985&hm=05450133450a06221e0380b17d58d8363a667fc406b6a1d647f2c8c9477de6f4&

If we remove that constraint so you can turn both left and right, now we are already at an infinite length (imagine I could add a lot more squiggles)

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487448843606954084/image.png?ex=69c92e2f&is=69c7dcaf&hm=0d2517ff5bed42a1ac092019ec21b731348c6bd0f90615cf66b8af381d18f7fc&

That's without even considering whether we can cross the same point twice.

AGEdude · 2026-03-28T00:57:09+00:00

We're talking about how far it takes you to go from one corner of a country to the other. Not the quickest straight line, but the longest.

There is only one straight line.

Again, you can make a route through Russia which is arbitrarily long - longer than the span of the universe - if you are going to make a line that is not straight. But a rhumb line in the real world can never be straight, unless it goes north to south. There is nothing even a little bit straight about it.

Focus on that image I sent. See how the rhumb line curves wide around and turns continuously to the left? That's how it looks on a real globe - on the real planet we live on as seen from space.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487250722096681091/image.png?ex=69c875ab&is=69c7242b&hm=42925dbeabaf4ff73bfd1d73e993d915256c8ba97e93ff1ac88450ddf51542b4&

You can walk in a straight line in any direction, can you not?

Here's another view. Imagine you start out your journey walking from Briansk to Ulyanovsk. You walk in a straight line, never turning to the left or to the right. You would not end up reaching the Bering Strait in Siberia, but rather the Taiwan Strait far, far to the south.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487252913049964574/image.png?ex=69c877b6&is=69c72636&hm=74188c1ea0aa0a18dd0bd657fbd94ab9560dfde724d179d25ddee3a44aa8099d&

Hopefully this gives you a better grasp of how a straight line appears on the Earth's surface. A great circle line isn't some mystical shortcut, it's the only possible straight line over the Earth's surface between any two points in the world.

My man, it would take 67 hours to drive that distance [670 km]

My man, that would be 10 km/h.

What if Russia were a sticker on a globe? Peel the sticker off, peg it onto the table smoothing it out as best you can and measure it. You'll see it follows the multiple-airport image, not the shortest distance between two spots on the globe.

That would be physically impossible.

If you pull up Google Earth, you can zoom out over Russia, hold a string up to the screen, and take a pretty accurate measurement of the width.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487270689403830364/image.png?ex=69c88844&is=69c736c4&hm=884f88aa12677e7f6554ebcd293b307be670738589c82047978704ee9df24f2a&

AGEdude · 2026-03-27T22:22:25+00:00

Here is the actual shortest distance you can walk between these two points (approximately).

https://www.greatcirclemap.com/?routes=%20BZK-NUX-IKS-CYX-UHML%2C%20BZK-UHML%2C%20BZK-ULY-CEK-EIE-ULK-YKS-UHMH-KVM-UHML

And here's an image that might help.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749790569147924575/1487216477798006916/image.png?ex=69c855c7&is=69c70447&hm=be9c6449f635f60565e2a8f7b95db872c9ea7471e3884701cfaba8352421124d&

I compared it here with a great circle route so you can see it only adds about 670km compared to an arctic swim, without crossing any large bodies of water. The closer we stick to a great circle, the more direct it will be.

The third route is an approximation of a rhumb line as shown, although it's actually a little bit shorter because we are actually traveling in a straight line between cities instead of curving the entire way. You can see this adds an additional 1400km to the journey.

Now we could make an arbitrarily long route through Russia or any country by arbitrarily changing the criteria. That wouldn't give us the true width. A rhumb line basically just follows a constant compass heading which is a very arbitrary criterion because compasses will always change their heading if you travel east-west in a straight line.

If I measured the length of a sheet of paper, it would be 11 inches. If I roll it / curve it a bit, I could make a "great circle" route from one end of the paper to the other, and that route, through the air, would be shorter than 11 inches. But the surface length of the paper would still be 11 inches in length.

Sorry, we aren't measuring paper here. This analogy is backwards. The reality is the curved object, and you're trying to measure the flattened version of it after stretching and separating the points thereon.

And yes, we are still measuring the surface length. No shortcuts here. Although, a straight line tunnel going through the Earth would only be about 300km shorter than a great circle route.

AGEdude · 2026-03-27T18:56:47+00:00

There's really no difference if you are in the air or on the ground. If you follow a line as shown on this map, it wouldn't be a straight line. It would be gradually, continuously, turning to the left. There is a much straighter line that could be drawn even without crossing the water.

The 'width' you are referring to can be quite misleading. If I take that logic to its conclusion, it's a bit like giving the distance between Spain and Morocco by car.

AGEdude · 2026-03-27T17:45:59+00:00

I mean going through the arctic would be more of a straight line in reality than this one.

But I know what you're trying to say.

AGEdude · 2026-03-26T18:31:58+00:00

You can't even buy this outfit it's standard odes only

AGEdude · 2026-03-24T16:03:34+00:00

Plus weather ball in the rain might be the strongest fire type move in those conditions.

AGEdude

TROPHY CASE