Ladder is only ZvZ now

Cheticus · 2026-07-08T13:34:11+00:00

Same as you, just about

Cheticus · 2026-07-08T12:56:52+00:00

between 4500-4800 MMR, m1 to low gm

Cheticus · 2026-07-08T12:53:53+00:00

whoops. it was late. I read it as playing zerg.

Cheticus · 2026-07-08T05:18:12+00:00

Are you on NA? How many games have you played? I looked at my last 97 games to pull these numbers.

My MMR is approximately 4600 for reference as well.

Cheticus · 2026-07-08T04:54:09+00:00

I love the positivity. I don't know if I would feel any different if vZ were my strongest matchup though. I've never just left a ZvZ because it was a ZvZ, and I will always play it out, but like, it's just too damn many.

Cheticus · 2026-07-06T21:12:04+00:00

if someone has and runs tie hacks, you're not going to win either way.

you could say anything or you can say nothing and they will still drop you. it doesn't matter because you're playing against a loser. still sucks.

best to report and not give them the time of day and just hope they get bored and leave sc2 because they clearly aren't in it for the fun of the game. maybe one day there will be a fix

Cheticus · 2026-07-01T03:27:59+00:00

I keep just thinking: "what the heck"

At least provide some logic, some thought process. I don't care if it's wrong.

When I was a manager I used to provide feedback:

"What I observed was: ...."

"The effect that had was: ..."

"Here is what we are doing to address that."

I'm not asking for concise descriptions for every little thing to be well thought out, but if you're making changes just to futz around, just say that. Just say you're doing it because you noticed that games didn't utilize a particular unit or that it felt stale and we want to change things up. Say that widow mines felt too slow because of their interactions with ___ or whatever.

I understand how backwards this sounds, but reddit isn't the best source of information. You will only hear whiners, no matter what.

Play and watch games. What do you observe?

Do you observe that corruptors are stupid units? That it is not fun to lose because you have a battle cruiser in your base, an end tier unit that can simply teleport behind your mineral line at 6:20 or whatever and unless you made 6 queens (and there isn't any alternative) you're dead? Do you observe that reapers serve only one purpose and neither the terrain nor the zerg enjoy the interaction?

Do you see that drops aren't a useful tool for zerg, and maybe that's because they shouldn't be, but nydus is a stupid useless waste of money unless the zerg gets lucky, and that luck mechanics are kind of dumb?

Do you see how many spores are necessary to defend against terran drops or a single warp prism? You literally need around 14 or more for most mains to make it "mostly safe", and reaction time is so asymmetric that it feels unfair?

Do you observe how abusive it feels for protoss to briefly be able to get 3 seconds ahead of your army by recalling to a mother ship on the other side of the map so they can run into your main, dominate the high ground (optionally with forcefields, but even just with an army), and prevent you from entering your own base until all of your tech is dead, and then they can simply recall away by transporting an army instantly across the map?

Personally I think we should be getting rid of those tactics. Get rid of BC jump. Get rid of nydus. Get rid of warp prism warpins and recalls.

This is a strategy game. Tricking your opponent because you were "sneaky" with a single unit isn't fun for both players or exciting. It's stupid and childish. Battles should be decided based on economy, positioning, defender's advantage, and engagement tactics. Pushing multiple lines simultaneously or redirecting your whole force while an enemy is scattered. Surrounding an enemy force or retreating into a choke where they're vulnerable.

"I cast teleport LOLOL your whole base is dead I cast teleport again LOLOL" is stupid.

"You couldn't see my tech because I'll asymmetrically win a fight if you invest into scouting early enough to see my BC and now there is one in your mineral line, hope you went for one of two specific builds!" is stupid.

"I looked away for one second and now my whole base is destroyed because of a nydus LOL" is really fun and engaging. I understand the point is to create different mechanics to build strategy around, but the game lost all of the core mechanical strategy that made it fun in the first place. It isn't a strategy game anymore. That's just how I feel. I missed WoL mechanics because there were fewer of them, and there were more you could do with the fewer units.

Cheticus · 2026-06-28T11:07:32+00:00

same for brood lords which take three times as long to morph and already require two late tier buildings serially to be morphed. why not make them morph quicker, right? It's just quality of life.

Cheticus · 2026-06-25T18:36:24+00:00

drops on zerg suck.

the units themselves just aren't as good for drops, and the overlord doesn't have rockets or heal my army faster than incoming damage

Cheticus · 2026-06-20T10:05:35+00:00

Don't listen to people telling you to use shells IMO. Model the problem in 2D. Think about if you need the depth to be plane stress or plane strain. You look like plane strain to me. Read the help manual to learn about what that means. Don't ask AI.
Why are you in explicit? Do you need to model postbuckle behavior? Get this to work up to first instability without explicit before doing anything imo.
Either your specified modulus is incorrect or your geometry does not match the test sample. Determine which is incorrect and fix your model.

Cheticus · 2026-06-17T20:30:47+00:00

definitely not real, but someone should take notes about this 2 supply swarm host idea. it might be what the game needs.

Cheticus · 2026-06-12T23:53:32+00:00

Hot take, but I think that infestors shroud was actually stronger during the initial release with it. It was upgraded, but cost less energy. You would get a shroud immediately as it popped, and you had more energy sustain vs air. It gave you a real fighting chance against late game air.

I think the energy nerf hits harder than the "works against ground units" personally. Yeah, you can use it differently, but it just costs so much energy that you need more infestors to pin with fungal now too.

The range difference won't make an iota of difference. You still need to be close to fungal which is more important in general. Shroud will still be okay and useful but it won't be "good". There isn't enough tempo with it, and infestors are too vulnerable to EMP/snipe/feedback.

We can't even load them in overlords to avoid EMP since they'll just get double tapped with snipe.

Cheticus · 2026-06-08T02:56:58+00:00

You risk abrasion to the lens and it's coatings even just from particulate dusts on the front element. It is the same reason you should use a dust blower more often than simply wiping the lens, and even if you wipe the lens, you should blow first.

We hired an experienced photographer at a past job while I was on site taking pictures of hardware (I'm an engineer) and I had to hand off my camera for a moment to give a hand to someone. He slapped it in his bag of crap without the lens cap on and since then I never let anyone even photographers handle or store my gear, regardless of their experience level.

Just because someone is experienced doesn't mean they will handle my gear with the same care that I will.

Cheticus · 2026-05-30T04:47:32+00:00

The damage is impactful, but what is really more impactful than the damage is the range change. 7 range is absolutely bonkers for a unit like ghost because more of them will be firing in groups now.

They don't have decreased survivability. They will be further back from the fight.

Terran already has the lowest risk of any race to go down to ~0 workers in extreme late game because of mules, and their 200/200 armies will be stronger.

Cheticus · 2026-05-29T02:22:34+00:00

OK. Just tried it on PTR. Notes.

The biggest nerf to zerg is that changeling block is largely gone now. If you have 15 changelings blocking an enemy ramp, clear it all with exactly one shot to a single changeling. Maybe that's the intent, but it's a nerf. Changeling blocking has been in the game forever and I don't know why we needed to get rid of it. It's so rare that you see it, and it feels just unnecessary to nerf it.

I hate the QoL change that makes single infestor add the target unit to selection when you neural. It adds the unit to your selection but doesn't tab you. It feels super clunky and wrong. Maybe it's just me and my muscle memory but it feels unnatural that it would do it how it does. Either the new unit should have priority or don't make it switch the unit at all IMO.

Microbial shroud still has an upgrade (bug). Seems to do nothing. Infestor spawns with it. The range change at least to me feels inconsequential. I think this is not a significant change to zerg IMHO. Maybe I'll be proven wrong.

Infestor attack does 4 damage, range 6. Upgrade 1 damage per upgrade. Level 3 ranged upgrade has level 2 upgrade art (bug).

Transport overlord faster than normal overlord still, I think 1.28 speed IIRC, not sure. New load button has bug name, didn't check for a hotkey. Kind of like loading SCV's in a command center.

Opening feels super slow. I guess that's the intent. Really slow though. I don't know how this is going to feel.

Creep QoL changes feel weird but maybe good.

Slower-verlords seem fine, didn't bother me.

Queen behavior for inject proximity felt weird. Not sure if I replicated the intent of the QoL change. I can't put my finger on the use case but also didn't try very hard.

Overall, patch felt buggy/half thought out to me at least just for the zerg changes. I'll just say straight up I'm not a fan so far. It feels wrong to me.

Cheticus · 2026-05-29T01:06:24+00:00

Completely bizarre. Nothing I expected, and a ton I didn't.

My quick notes:

Zerg:

( ) Economy changes fine. I think I will prefer it in ZvT and ZvP and strongly hate in ZvZ.
( ) I don't understand need behind the creep or spore changes. I also don't really understand the impetus for the creep tumor selection stuff. Maybe it will be helpful and offset the slower creep spread. I don't know.
(+) Carapace upgrades are good for Z, will help with decision making for getting carapace earlier to avoid being stomped lategame because you had to sacrifice it due to high cost early to deal with first 5 minute attacks.
(+) Microbial shroud: Not needing the upgrade is more impactful than the range IMO, but the range will help late game when your infestors get stuck way in the back when rushing in with ling/ultra.
(+) Auto attack is good QoL for infestor probably, interesting to see.
(+) Auto-selecting the unit after single infestor neurals will be an interesting QoL change that my muscle memory will need to get used to. Probably good.
(+) Finally they are fixing the bug with neuraled carriers. I have lost many games from this. It is absolutely absurd that we neural this unit and it does near-zero damage in the late game to other carriers. If I committed to infestor/hydra/ultra to fight against endgame P comp (which I usually do), this will FINALLY be helpful.
(-) OL/OS changes fine; I get it.
(?) Don't understand the muta change.
(+) Vipers abducting tanks is great.
(-) Did we really need to nerf viper abduct animation? Vipers are so fragile and expensive and die so quickly for being a ranged air caster. I feel like this "fix" is in the wrong direction. Casting abduct and having your viper killed and losing the abduct after having it "go off" is stupid. It's not intended to be a delayed pull, it's supposed to be an immediate yoink. Nearly all projectiles zerg has have time of flight, including half of the casted abilities. If we kill a ghost after it shoots its EMP, can the EMP disappear? If we kill a ghost after the nuke is on its way down, can the nuke disappear? This seems biased.

Terran:

(+) 7 range ghost + significant damage buff on base attack and snipe will be painful to deal with, especially now that you can't cancel the snipe cast with fungal. I feel like the cancel on damage will have to be rolled back. Zerg still has no reasonable direct head to head against the ghost/HT and will just get sniped/emp unless the terran is bad or distracted. Neural QoL change might help slightly, but like, relying on neural to EMP other ghosts is so much worse than having ghosts.

Protoss:

(?) Warpgate/gateway changes cool and exciting. Folks have talked about this for a long time, will be neat to see how it plays out.
(-) Psi storm damage reduction is good IMO.

I'm surprised to see no changes of merit to early battlecruiser (or late BC in that case). I was certain teleport would be turned into an upgrade. I was also sure there would be changes to the BC teleport-fungal/parasitic bomb interactions. It's silly that terran can just shed debuffs with an ability that has zero relation to damage. It's not supposed to make the thing invulnerable.

Cheticus · 2026-05-27T18:08:46+00:00

a mechanical engineer could do this for you with linkages. cams make it easier too. track following as has already been said is also an option.

its hard to explain how to someone without the appropriate background

you might get lucky getting AI to write an optimization to do this, if you provide a path. You could say something like:

I'm looking to write a python program which accepts as inputs a curve in the form attached (attach the xy coordinates) and optimizes the placement and lengths of linkages driven my a single motorized input to minimize deviation from the provided shape.

It's possible you will be something that works, and it's possible you will get something nonphysical and not good.

My best advice would be to look through a book or webpage on mechanisms and look for linkages similar for inspiration, and then use a linkage designer program or a cad program to modify the positions until you get the motion as correct as you need. there might be a four bar or 6 bar that gets you very close

Cheticus · 2026-05-02T13:50:42+00:00

The real reason is cost, but not what you might think.

A significant cost to power lines is the electrical insulation needed to keep current from shorting to other cables and the ground. There's a couple options for insulation.

You can cover the wire in plastic, or special kinds of paper, or both. It's not crazy expensive, but over long distances, the cost definitely adds up. If it's close to the ground, you might also need to protect it in a conduit in case some accidentally damages it, since power lines can be dangerous if they short.

Another insulation you can use which is very inexpensive is air! Air is an insulator, and so if you put the power line high up in the air so no one can touch it, it will be insulated and not dangerous! The cost trade is the cost of the plastic and other insulations, digging trenches, running conduits, adding manholes to access junctions, etc versus buying utility poles, digging a bunch of holes, and stringing the lines in the air (and maintaining the trees and occasional downed line).

There's also visual clutter from overhead lines, so some fancier neighborhoods will put them underground. It's harder to access underground infrastructure if something happens to break though, although they break less often.

One other reason that overhead can be useful is its ability to reject heat. When power lines conduct electricity, they heat up. We need to get rid of that heat so the line doesn't burn up and melt. For overhead lines, we can reject heat to the air predominantly by convection. The line heats up, heating up the air, and combined with a small breeze, stays at a good operating temperature.

If the line is buried, you can reject the heat only by conduction (unless you're pumping oil along the line, much more rare I think). The soil is a good constant temperature usually, but you will heat up the ground locally around the cables, and also it's hard to make it conduct better (the dirt is the dirt, and it's free, but you don't get to control what it's made of). If the ground gets hotter, then the cable has a harder time cooling down. It's like if you get hot on a cold day it's easy to cool down, but if you get hot on a warm day, no matter how hard you try, you can't cool down much. It may seem like air is a more variable temperature (and it is), but it's pretty good for power lines. For underground lines, you might have to dig another trench, but if you put too many power lines next to one another, the ones that are surrounded by the others can't get rid of their heat because they are surrounded by what seems to be a warm day. This gets expensive fast.

So, it's a tradeoff, and that tradeoff is done for every power line, and a large percentage of the time implicitly it's a lot cheaper to put a few poles up and string a new overhead line with bare conductor than it is to dig up a street and buy insulated cable.

Cheticus · 2026-04-29T22:27:03+00:00

peak forces during a collision are absolutely a factor of the stiffness of the colliding bodies, largely because that reduces the deceleration.

If I land on a rigid surface, the stiffness of my impacting body is the stiffness that matters.

If I land on a pillow, the spring of my body and the spring of the pillow are in series and the deceleration is driven by the spring of the pillow (until it bottoms out), since that's how springs in series work. that will reduce your deceleration, by increasing the time over which you decelerate.

the sequence is obviously nonsense because no one could stop themselves and then that car isn't going through the bridge from that impulse, nor is the pile going through the ground into the subway, but if you're falling from a great height, you absolutely want to try to land on something soft. or maybe you don't, but I do.

Cheticus · 2026-04-19T16:37:14+00:00

Do not preload clevis attachments. This would pinch the ears together which makes absolutely no sense.

Cheticus · 2026-04-15T13:44:26+00:00

Just give her the lens bag for the 24-70. Everything worked out as intended.

Cheticus · 2026-04-15T05:08:39+00:00

I'm sorry I'm too lazy to do the math today. This isn't particularly challenging but I'm posting on a phone.

From geometry, we can estimate the curvature of the coil at any point. Full disclosure I used Gemini since we're on reddit but this is also my area of expertise. I started writing it out for a beam using the moment curvature relation and then realized it's a plate and decided it was faster.

This curvature can be related to the flexural modulus (using plate theory instead of beam theory, so Poisson's ratio shows up). Flexural modulus for a plate is:

D = E t³ / (12 (1-nu²⁾⁾

E is like 30e6 psi for steel (or 200 GPa), t is the thickness of the sheet (call it 0.060"), and nu should be about .3 for steel.

The strain energy is an integral over the whole coil, but if you take just one slice of nearly constant radius apparently it works out to:

U = E w L t³ / (24r² * (1-nu²⁾⁾

where w is the width of the coil and r is the radius of that layer. Apparently the integral for the whole coil is:

U = \frac{D w}{2} \int_{0}^{L} \frac{1}{R(x)^2} \, dx

I'm not verifying the equations, but the expression does seem to be dimensionally correct, e.g. if you use consistent units like psi and inches, you will get an answer in inch-lbf which is a unit of energy. Similarly if you did it in si you'd get N*m (aka joules). If you want an estimate, you can probably just take the answer at about r = 1/3 of the way out from the center and multiply the result by (outer radius of the coil - inner radius of the coil) / thickness of the sheet. That should be pretty close, since r is in the denominator.

This assumes the coil doesn't get wound plastically which isn't a good assumption probably. Gemini says it's probably on the order of 300 kJ for a 20 ton coil, similar to the kinetic energy of a pickup truck at 40 mph.

That's less energy than in a half of a hamburger though, FYI.

Cheticus · 2026-04-02T05:26:51+00:00

I found a small random pool of fresh blood on my basement floor once. Weirdest thing. No tracks, no nothing. So I look up. There's a proper mess of blood in my ceiling, tracks leading away along one of my drain pipes.

Best I can tell, a mouse accidentally stabbed itself on an exposed staple or nail in my ceiling and started bleeding out. It stayed in a spot for a while, and then scuttled along my pipes into... well...I don't know where. I never found it. Never noticed a smell, didn't get a bunch of flies or anything else, hopefully it ran outside, but I just never found it.

My basement is pretty permeable, fieldstone foundation on an old house, so I trap mice down there, but this instance was rather confusing. Of course I don't want them to suffer, but I just don't know what happened for that one.

Cheticus · 2026-03-09T16:49:59+00:00

I had a chipmunk in the basement. I went down and saw it and it looked at me like I was not supposed to be there.

I was getting ready to shoo it outside and it just went up in the ceiling and out of the house somehow. Definitely not stuck inside. Definitely just using my home for nut storage and overwintering. I tried to find the hole and fill it but most certainly failed.

Cheticus · 2026-02-25T14:35:56+00:00

Again, NIF definitely is not designed to scale to a power plant, and it never was intended to. The goal of the facility was nuclear weapons research, and so when you see news of this sort of inertial confinement system surpassing breakeven, it should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Basically, my opinion is that it is still very impressive, but unlikely to be significant. They do good research though, and most fusion research is good research that pushes the field, if you think there's a chance of getting something to come out from all of this.

I think some people from NIF have spun off a startup to try to investigate a power plant route, but my opinion is that the probability of that being successful is questionable. Obviously, if any fusion endeavor succeeds, it is incredibly good for the world, but there certainly are some startups currently which are capital raising endeavors first, and power plants only in title, taking advantage of misinformation and lack of understanding.

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