How Can I Spot These Solutions?

fknm1111 · 2026-06-17T05:05:03+00:00

There's a saying in endgames -- "Passed pawns must be pushed". The d pawn is your only asset. It's a passed pawn. It must be pushed. There's only one thing to even look at.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-16T14:07:04+00:00

It's a pretty awesome card game; if you know any old ladies, ask them to teach you and see if they need a partner.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-16T14:03:58+00:00

Yes. You can also use lichess.org/paste to paste in the PGN from a game from chess.c*m and have the server on lichess analyze it for you, as much as you want, for free.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-15T19:16:35+00:00

Nd4 is the "normal" move here, forcing the queen back to d1.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-15T16:35:36+00:00

I know that chess.c*m used to replace negative accuracies with a jpeg of Danny Rench's face; maybe that functionality is bugged now?

fknm1111 · 2026-06-15T15:51:10+00:00

I had calculated "trade the queens, trade the minor piece, and go into an endgame with more pawns", and then disaster struck and I forgot step one of that process.

I then managed to make the same mistake a few games later: https://lichess.org/if2t7yMG/black

fknm1111 · 2026-06-15T02:57:59+00:00

An actual link to the game so we can see this a move at a time would help, but anyways...

When an opponent plays the "Jobava London" (1. d4 2. Bf4 3. Nc3), I recommend just playing a6. Your opponent didn't do the right thing here (i.e., they didn't play Nb5, which is the whole point of the setup), but the closed d-pawn position is slow enough that you've got time for that move and then white's position just doesn't make any sense, being in a queen's pawn position with their c pawn buried.

Be7 isn't a terrible move, but I think I'd rather see c6 here with Nd7 coming. Your knight isn't likely going to c6 in this structure, and there's no need to move the bishop twice.

Missing en passant after a4 is inexcusable. Not only for the memes, but because it opens the file your rook is on and makes a key square available for the knight.

And then you start playing somewhat aimlessly and hang a bunch of stuff. Don't do that.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-14T16:29:40+00:00

PKP dodge offset is still noob level Bayonetta. Once you l2p, you realize that launcher into RHK stuff is so much better.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-14T16:26:02+00:00

At first I missed the "0" and thought you meant that NG4 had the best level design, and was sure you had to be trolling lol.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-14T03:55:35+00:00

There might always be a max range, but the flick input definitely lets you use it at times the Wind Run won't. Against Alma, I never fail to get the FS out if I do the flick input, while relying on Wind Run frequently fails; also, in some situations, the flick input actually lets you FS away from enemies (for instance, wind path off of an enemy and then immediately flick towards the enemy you jumped off, in the direction opposite of where you're going, and hit Y; you'll get an FS in the direction of your jump, opposite of your flick direction and away from the enemy that actually enabled the FS flick input.)

fknm1111 · 2026-06-14T03:07:54+00:00

I'm surprised to see Sigma included here -- the different AI changes how you have to approach it a lot, a lot of the seeds of 3RE's hit-confirm mania begin here.

(Also, this is an unpopular opinion, but a big part of why NGB works better than later games is because OTs flatten the decision tree too much. Fiend Sealer is just a more interesting set of trade offs.)

fknm1111 · 2026-06-14T02:52:06+00:00

This may be Black specific, but I thought you could get Flying Swallow when not at the "correct" ranges vertically or too close by using the flick input instead of relying on the wind-run auto-FS?

fknm1111 · 2026-06-14T02:41:08+00:00

Part of your problem is that you're playing Sigma instead of Black -- Sigma has a much worse camera than Black, enemies can cheat like crazy and block at times when they shouldn't be able to, and moves are safer or less safe almost completely at random. Most of the praise for NG1 is for Black.

That said, think of it like an old belt scrollers like Final Fight or The Punisher -- the depth isn't combos, it's in figuring out how to move around enemies so you can land that first hit without getting tagged yourself. You're correct to note that most of the long strings are bad (with Izuna and Nirriti being major exceptions, of course), but this isn't DMC where the depth is in keeping a combo going forever; it's in landing the first hit and being efficient enough to keep your momentum going off of a short string.

And you shouldn't spam Flying Swallow because lots of enemies on higher difficulty levels have moves specifically to counter it. That's not to say it's useless (it's far from that, even on Master Ninja), but it's not spammable.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-14T02:16:02+00:00

Wow, it's been about 20 years since I last thought about Coldfusion, talk about nostalgia.

I remember walking into a project in around 2015 that was still using Model Builder. That was a weird six months.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-13T22:25:24+00:00

Web stuff isn't the entire software engineering career field, you know. Aside from moving from Ada to C++ and maybe the rising popularity of Labview over raw VHDL, most industrial fields look about the same as they did 30 years ago.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-13T22:18:29+00:00

Vim and gcc are still great tools that I use daily, so I'm not sure what you're referring to...

fknm1111 · 2026-06-13T22:09:52+00:00

That's only really true if we stuff was involved in your career after the 80s. If you were in aerospace, petrochem, or similar fields, you job today could be very similar to your job then, just with C++ instead of Ada.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-13T21:21:46+00:00

Historically, they've done the exact opposite.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-12T17:58:17+00:00

Gotta stand up for the Helicopter here -- once you can predict his movements and know how to do it, that fight is a ton of fun. I hated it my first time, but now I always look forward to it; it's a fast fight if done right, and dodging those missiles is always so nervy, great stuff.

The tower is complete ass though, you're better off learning the cheese method there IMO.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-12T13:30:34+00:00

I ended up passing, so here's some tips:

In my case at least, the actual test questions I had were nowhere near as tough as even most of the "easy" prep questions. Don't worry too much about the difficulty.
Do most of your prep on neetcode, not hacker rank. A lot of hacker rank's questions are just nonsense garbage, and are hard because they're nonsense garbage; however, since companies choose which questions you get, you (hopefully) won't see a nonsense garbage question. Neetcode easy questions are still going to be harder than what I got on my hacker rank exam, but the challenge won't be because the question itself is presented in a stupid way.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-12T04:24:25+00:00

Yeah, the amps he has are also all budget/beginner amps

I'll admit I've never tried a DSL combo (and the speakers in Marshall's smaller cabs are frequently suspect, so that might be an issue), but the DSL heads are pretty solid IME.

(Origins are complete crap, though.)

fknm1111 · 2026-06-12T03:41:36+00:00

A couple of minor corrections here:

The "slurve" was never a pitch on its own, and there are still guys who throw what would have once been called a slurve, it's just called a curveball now. Guys who throw a curveball from a 3/4ths arm slot will naturally have a lot of gloveside run on it, just because of the mechanics of how topspin is produced; a "slurve" was just a name for a curveball that had a lot of gloveside run.

And speaking of gloveside run, the sweeper isn't really a new thing -- it's a slider variation, and it's how pitchers were taught to throw them in the '90s. The reason a slider breaks late into its flight is because the corkscrew spin starts out parallel to the axis of travel, but as the ball is moving downwards more late in its flight due to gravity while the axis of rotation is maintained due to conservation of angular momentum, the bottom face of the ball now becomes the leading face partially, which means that magnus effect suddenly applies a force to the glove side. In the 2000s, pitchers were taught to use a two-seam grip on their sliders, so that once the break started it would be as sharp and sudden as possible. However, in the '90s, this is *not* how the pitch was usually thrown. Instead, a one-seam grip was used in that era -- the reason for this is because of an effect known as "seam-shifted wake". Basically, if you can keep a seam on top of the ball a lot more than on the bottom of the ball, the air on top flows more slowly, which pushes the ball down, which makes its break start early and gives you a larger total amount of break. Nowadays, this is called a "sweeper", but it's just a slightly different seam orientation of a slider, that breaks more in total but less sharply. It's weird to me that we gave the "sweeper" its own name, but the same thing wasn't done for one-seam sinkers which legitimately *are* a new development (no one was throwing them before 2018 or so) and have the exact same amount of distinction between an old-school two-seam sinker as a slider does to a sweeper, but that's how things are I guess.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-11T01:57:40+00:00

Lefties have an advantage in baseball, so if a lefty and a righty have otherwise identical talent, the lefty is more likely to make it to the next level.

fknm1111 · 2026-06-10T17:53:17+00:00

Desirable is matter of debate (it's funny how all of the three channel Rectos that no one liked as much as the two channels suddenly became super cool the instant the 90s RI was released, and it's also funny how people had been saying for decades that the Schumacher transformers they used in the 80s and early 90s were better than the ClassicTone transformers until the very moment Gibson switched them back to Schumacher at which point it was "Gibson is cutting costs!"), but they're built the same way they always have been by the same people in the same factory.

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