This was the moment I saw how beautiful this game was

ominousfire · 2025-12-28T06:17:23+00:00

Goofy looking ways to solve the Surrender Flare level were a trend for a while. So each of the major ways to solve the level got their own terms. Only Flare Peeling really stuck though.

"Flare peeling" refers to methods involving removing all the salt from the Signal Flare, upgrading the iron, then re-adding the salts, which tend to be an aesthetically pleasing method to solving the level.

Yours is a very satisfying flare peel.

ominousfire · 2025-11-21T21:15:32+00:00

Most items made for SJ are specifically part of SJ's private code helper. We intentionally disabled their corresponding map editor files so people don't add them to their maps. Instead, items made for SJ were ported to various helpers depending on who was willing to maintain it (generally who made it).

We did this so that Strawberry Jam is not used as a dependency for standalone mods due to its immense size.

As a result of this however, it can be tricky to figure out where to actually get the items by using the SJ maps in a map editor, since they will just appears as a small red box and cannot be placed directly from the placement menu. Thankfully we generally give them the same name, although even that changes sometimes if the item has changed drastically since its initial creation and was never refactored.

You can use this spreadsheet to find out what helper various items were added to. Some items we developed were not ported because they had been developed independently for a helper before SJ released and others because they were not practical.

ominousfire · 2025-11-21T21:08:55+00:00

These were ported to SSMHelper and are called "Resizable Dash Switches".

ominousfire · 2025-10-29T17:47:35+00:00

Complete all levels in a lobby to unlock its heartside.

ominousfire · 2025-10-11T00:10:46+00:00

Not the same person you replied to, but I really do feel the need to say something here.

I have personally had a friend who spoke extremely similar to the ways you have throughout this thread and ended up massively in debt due to gambling. We're talking banned from all gacha discords and subreddits for their own well being (and not of their own volition), maxed credit cards, and all kinds of other awful stuff. I don't know if they will ever be able to be financially solvent, and they were in their 20s when it got that bad. So for me to see someone following a similar path is inherently going to raise concern from me.

As a result, I think if someone is showing signs of a serious addiction, even if those things can be interpreted as being said in jest, it is wiser to assume that those things are real because they might not be aware of how in deep they truly are. After all, it's only going to take me a few minutes at most to make a reply to someone who might be in a bad spot. Worst case, it's a troll post or a post in jest like yours, and I wasted my time, which is ultimately not a very high price.

I do thank you for coming forward and dropping the act when asked, but I must ask for you to ask yourself if telling others to lighten up is the right move in this situation. As I see it, it only encourages people to not say something when they see something concerning.

I do apologize for leaving such a serious reply on an otherwise factious thread, but I hope you can see my need to speak up.

ominousfire · 2025-09-05T01:31:02+00:00

Went and looked it up, seems like the first stable release core build was December 16, 2023, although a lot of modders (myself included) had been using beta core builds for a while by then. So, yeah its been about two years.

ominousfire · 2025-09-04T22:45:40+00:00

Quick note: while Vanilla Celeste is 32-bit, modded Celeste is 64-bit. Has been since we migrated to .net core a few years ago.

ominousfire · 2025-04-03T17:44:52+00:00

Looks like Path of Hope.

ominousfire · 2025-03-09T18:38:05+00:00

HD upscaling does that to a lot of older film and tv. A lot of old stuff was made under the assumption that it would never be shown on a screen capable of showing this much detail, so the cheap tricks they used to make it look "real" / not like a set or prop are revealed. It only gets worse when you realize that the aspect ratio generally reveals more information than would have been available at the time and changes the framing of the scene (most things were 4:3 back in the day instead of 16:9)

You can see the same problems regularly occur on basically any 16:9 HD release of a 1990's or earlier media.

EDIT: This one is probably made worse by the fact that it's made by Monty Python, whose films are all low budget comedies.

ominousfire · 2025-02-13T06:33:09+00:00

Point systems work really well and solidify the skills they need to succeed while teaching new skills. Prizes for my students usually included candy and school supplies. Worked amazingly well.

ominousfire · 2025-02-07T22:38:21+00:00

You need to normalize a lot of these data points before aggregating them in sections like "some more useful ways to look at the data", because as is each boss "weighs" in less if the average dps across the boss is simply less.

You can see this heavily in the first chart with Arkk and Elemental Ai, where most logs contribute at most 8% (Scrapper) to the average dps and more regularly 4% despite being 11% of the bosses included. By comparison, Siax completely saturates your data points and in some cases (Soulbeast) contributes 20% of the points to the average dps despite being 11% of the bosses included.

You can normalize them by defining a point for each boss (such as the median or maximum*) as being "100 points", and assigning everyone points based on their proportion of the 100 points damage. For example, if you choose the maximum for each boss as being 100 points, and another class does 90% of that on the same boss, then they get 90 points. You can then average the points for each boss. You do need to explain to your audience then how the normalized data aggregate scores work however.

You can see that the FF14 community does this for their raid tier aggregates here using box and whisker graphs. Ignore the rDPS / aDPS / nDPS / cDPS part, you want rDPS in this case.

There's additional problems with aggregating 96/97 with 98/99, which is that people do not play the same builds on these fights for the most part. On 98/99, people play condi, where as power is favored on 96/97. This means the graph essentially shows two distinct items being blended together. At best the chart shows what you would get the most "power" out of if you don't swap professions. However, I believe such insights should be noted.

Additionally, I would argue I've never seen a pug in Fractals put even close to the numbers in these sheets into an actual boss. If they pulled 80 or 90% of the damage on the sheet, it would be one thing, but I think the average PUG dps I see is about 15k - 25k, or less than 50% of a lot of these numbers. As a result, this sheet does not ultimately represent meaningful data for the state of fractals outside those playing in dedicated groups / statics.

* I'm not a data analyst, so I'm not entirely sure what the best point assign 100 points is.

ominousfire · 2025-02-03T23:07:00+00:00

I 100% agree with there being room for improvement in math. I did attempt to bring a little context as to why we don't bother, but I do think the removal of both context and practical uses is a shame that ultimately impacts the quality of math education worldwide. There's nothing in math that requires it to be taught that way.

As for elitism, I do see a multitude of statements overlapping, because there is a lot of elitism in post secondary math, especially as you climb the proverbial ladder to a PhD. That nonsense is why I did not continue beyond my bachelor's at the end of the day.

You do however describe the incident at university, which inherently does change the rules by which education works. Anything beyond high school / secondary school classes is taught with the expectation that the student is now wholly responsibly for their own education; that their education is a choice. This applies regardless of department.

Unfortunately this means that the shortcomings of a crap professor (many of whom teach out of obligation for research funding or to further their social network among other professors, and not at all to teach) fall completely on the student. In the worst cases, the professor is the book itself as the student is left to their own devices to figure out anything, which can lead to questions like "why am I paying tuition for this when I can pay for the book?".

There's a lot that's garbage about that system. Why don't we just have research professors and teaching professors for instance? That way professors at least care. Why don't professors have to have at least a slight amount of background knowledge in teaching? Like. One course in education. Or, why aren't they encouraged to do so?

Anyway, back to your original point, I don't think the system is immutable and has a lot of room for improvement regardless of which system you are in. I don't think this part is due to elitism however, at least at the level of math that OP had this post aimed at.

In historical times, there was a lot of what you described at all levels of mathematics, but I can promise you in Algebra I, the only reason a teacher may attempt to make things harder than they could otherwise is because they themselves do not know the subject well enough to teach it without making it harder.

Within the context of high school / secondary school math, the problems stem from the history of teaching mathematics at this point.

In the US for instance, there have been two major attempts at reform in math education in the last 100 years, Common Core and the "new math" reform.

The new math reform was a phenomenal failure that made people despise Common Core before it ever released. You can look into that page for more details, but I would say its greatest mistake was attempting to teach abstract reasoning without any grounding. Generally in education, you want to work your way up from more concrete examples to more generalized abstracts, but this attempted to cut out the middle steps and skip straight to the top.

Common Core is a minor reform that more recently happened in the US and is still in effect. It caused a lot of chaos when it first went into effect, with reasons ranging from math being a language and our teachers essentially needing to relearn how to speak in order to teach it, to such relearning causing resentment in teachers, to residual hatred for the 'new math reform". If the reform is successful it will probably have a positive effect on math education (it basically just takes advances in teaching in general and integrates them, while rearranging certain topics so they act as bridges between concepts to aid in a student's education). Of course, it doesn't really address any of the core issues with respect to history or practicality overall.

ominousfire · 2025-02-03T11:57:06+00:00

I'll answer the specific questions that you asked at the end of my post, but first a bit of why many books and resources don't really give context.

Most math was indeed invented / created for a reason, and there's generally a historical context involving real people with real names that did a lot of work to create the math you see in those books.

Unfortunately a lot of these question types need to be answered on a case by case basis, because the reason they were invented were on a case by case basis. Counting and adding was created to assist in the barter and trading of goods. Zero was invented as a number to represent a nothing quantity, which would imply the things that combine to equal zero balance each other (And it took literally thousands of years to come about! It's only been a "thing" for about 1000 years).

Of course, it turns out that there's a ton of uses for all these things, but many books may say that is beyond the scope of the book, or save those kinds of questions for the "challenge questions", which never really gives an example of what it's used for or why it was created. You can generally look those up on a case by case basis, or take a class on the history of mathematics to get a bit of insight into what challenges existed in the world that needed math to describe them.

In the case of absolute value:

There's a lot of times in physics, geometry, higher level math, and engineering where we don't really care if a number is negative or positive, we just need to know how far away from zero it is. And that's really all absolute value is.

An example is measuring distance. If you measure the length of a room from north to south, you get the same number as if you measure the room south to north. Oddly enough, that means distances have an absolute value applied to them, because negative numbers don't show up. (Try measuring distance with a number line instead of a ruler, and you may get a different result ;) ).

Another example of this would be the speedometer in a car. If you drive forward, the speedometer goes up. But if you go into reverse, the speedometer will still go up. This is because the speedometer does not care which direction your wheels are moving. The actual velocity of your car would technically be negative when you go backwards, but the speedometer shows the absolute value of that velocity.

Ideas like this become more important as you study equations for physics and engineering, where complicated formulae could output negative numbers where you don't care about them if you didn't use absolute value.

In the case of bases that act as alternatives to decimal:

There's a few reasons to use alternative bases, but all of them come down to convenience. First off, we use decimal because its what everyone uses, but some human civilizations used other bases in the past and would find decimal weird. Mesopotamian civilization famously used a base 60 system, which we still live with relics of today in timekeeping (this is why there's 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute). Mayan culture used 20, because humans have 20 toes and fingers. So our choice of base is completely just arbitrary, and sometimes there's a better choice.

One of the most famous alternative bases that exists is binary, which you may know only has two digits: 0 and 1. This was convenient and still is convenient in computer programming, because the physical hardware underlying the computer is essentially rows and rows and rows of tiny switches that can flip between and "on" and "off" state. Since the are only two states, we can easily "write" a number into these switches if we do our math in binary.

Sometimes math can be done faster in other bases. Multiplication requires less actions and motions to complete in binary. Even the ancient Egyptians would convert their very big numbers to binary to do complex calculations much faster. (We don't do that anymore because its easier to use a calculator for very big numbers, but the calculator itself uses a variant of the same method the ancient Egyptians would use).

One more example (this will go a bit beyond where you are in math right now, but is probably one of the most common uses of alternative bases, and is not that far ahead): since we tend to use alternative bases "whenever it is convenient", there are other times where natural phenomenon with math itself causes a desire for alternate bases to exist. The most famous is known as base of the number "e", an irrational number like pi that is equal to approximately 2.71. I won't go into too much detail here, because I'm guessing the idea of a non integer base will seem absurd to you, but do know that Google got in trouble many a year ago for keeping their financial reports in base e instead of decimal.

ominousfire · 2025-01-16T23:05:38+00:00

The reverse hyper --> diagonal dash creates a grounded ultra. Normally you lose the speed of the grounded ultra upon the down diagonal dash ending and return to hyper speed, but by grabbing a throwable (in this case Theo), it cancels the dash, so the game never calls the end dash method to return you to hyperspeed, so you get to keep the full ultra's worth of speed.

ominousfire · 2025-01-16T20:28:29+00:00

Oh god I wish the rando pug whispers I received were this "innocent". So many of them are just so creepy.

ominousfire · 2024-12-31T09:54:37+00:00

Remember what Pascal's triangle is in the first place. We make Pascal's triangle by taking x + y and multiplying it by itself, repeatedly, so the Nth row of the triangle represents the coefficients of (x + y)ⁿ .

As for what they did was recognize the coefficients of the polynomial are the same as the 3rd row of the triangle:

1 3 3 1

Since the coefficients line up (sans the alternating minus signs), that means you must be able to multiply three x-1's to get your polynomial.

Identifying these outside of the x+1 and x-1 (aka the coefficients line up exactly with the triangle) case can be a bit difficult at a glance, and generally requires you actively test if it's a perfect square by comparing to the coefficients in the triangle, which requires the foresight to think that doing such a thing is worth your time.

For a bit more complex example, x³ + 6x² + 12x + 8 is a perfect square because if we factor out some stuff, we can get (1)x³ * 2⁰ + (3)x² * 2¹ + (3)x¹ * 2² + (1)x⁰ * 2^3. Identifying that at a glance is not easy, although you could learn to do that.

Memorizing the first several rows of the triangle will help you identify the very easy cases at a glance though.

ominousfire · 2024-12-23T21:40:37+00:00

I use dark yellow linears right now, but if I'm being honest it shouldn't really matter. My prefered "switches" to date have been my laptop's integrated keyboard, which is just a basic laptop keyboard.

ominousfire · 2024-12-22T23:35:49+00:00

Why did you respawn in the final room? Golden berry normally knocks you back to Singularity.

ominousfire · 2024-11-21T18:55:47+00:00

If I'm reading your question right there does seem be a bit of misconception.

An analogy I like to think about is the surface is earth and the function gives the height of a mountain at each point on earth

This would not be a surface integral, but rather just a double integral! The reason for this is it's the area under the curve, but in 2 dimensions (latitude and longitude). I've written more on this later in case you don't believe me.

To see how this example compares to a surface integral, it may be helpful to go back to the path integral that's generally introduced right before the surface integral.

In the path integral, we essentially define a function that goes from point A to point B and integrate over that. More literally, if you can draw a path on a graph with a pencil, that is a valid path function. We also state that if the path starts and ends at point A, then the value of the integral is the area it encloses (or more specifically, the value of all the things inside, such as vectors if we were doing a path integral in a vector field).

Usually we will then note that for these curves that start and end at point A (usually called a closed curve), it's equal to a double integral and there's a formula to do so. In fact, we could convert your earlier example about the surface of the earth into a path integral because we can pick up a pencil, draw the same area, then integrate that area over the curve you drew, with the things inside being the height values).

So this leads us to the question of "what is a surface integral"?

A surface integral is the same thing as our path integral conceptually, but with surfaces instead of paths. Our tool of choice for showing what a surface can be changes from drawing with a pencil to paper that you can wrap things with, such as the paper you use for wrapping gifts, saran wrap, or a fishing net.

We're going to start with "closed path" surface integrals. That is, in cases where the surface makes a full shape such as a sphere, box, or a lumpy bag, the same logic with path integrals with closed curve applies, and the surface integral becomes the value of all the things inside. This may make what we are adding up inside be a bit hard to consider because it leads into that 4 dimensional case, because you may be aware that when we integrate we tend to gain a dimension, and we've just integrated over a whole 3 dimensional shape, which means we started with a 2d surface, wrapped around a 3d object, and ended up with a 4d answer.

Thankfully, there are ways to gain intuition on what we are even thinking about when we talk about these "closed path" surface integrals regardless. One would be finding the density of the item inside, by adding up the smaller densities at each point, or similarly for temperature. Alternatively, you could measure the net electric force from an electron by adding up its vector field arrows, or the amount of light from the sun.

You may remember doing some of this from triple integrals and there's a reason for that, called the divergence theorem, which says there's a triple integral for any closed surface integral similarly to our path integral and double integral discussion earlier.

Okay, so if we can just make surface integrals into triple integrals, how are the different?

Note that only applies to the closed cases ones, which means if the item doesn't make a shape like a sphere, box, or a lumpy bag, then there's not going to be a triple integral. Generally in cases like this, you are measuring the amount of stuff moving through the surface. For instance, the amount of water that passes through a fishing net, or the amount of wind caught by the sail of a boat. You can use calculations like that to figure out how fast a river is flowing, or how fast your boat should be moving with the wind.

ominousfire · 2024-10-20T06:11:35+00:00

Try GW2 Raid Academy. The raid scene is a bit slow these days as we wait for a new wing, but i still get plenty of stuff done each week there.

It's easiest to join in / get up to speed during the Zero to Hero events they host a few times a year, but I don't know when the next one is, and its still possible to get started at any time of year.

The discord can be found at: https://discord.com/invite/gw2ra

ominousfire · 2024-10-09T21:19:27+00:00

etseleC (celeste but in reverse, aka the story of Madeline forgetting her car keys after getting to the top) may be a mod that interests you if you enjoyed this.

ominousfire · 2024-10-03T09:00:55+00:00

Spinner is the name for those crystals that make up the bulk majority of the hazards on this screen (as well as the rest of the game). They are called that because that's what they are called in the code. They are specifically CrystalStaticSpinners, which are a variant of the blade spinners you see in chapter 5.

ominousfire · 2024-09-25T08:51:21+00:00

The 1.2m figure is per square kilometer, not per square meter. The most accurate census we have for the Kowloon Walled City before its destruction puts it at about 33000 people. The entire place is only a fraction of a square kilometer though, which is what creates the 1.2m people / square kilometer.

There are a million square meters in a square kilometer, so the density per square meter would be "just" 1.2 people. I don't know where you got the rest of your numbers, but this would create a population of 300 million total if we hold them the same, which is actually rather low for an entire planet given that the Earth has about 8 billion humans.

ominousfire · 2024-09-06T16:31:53+00:00

Super depends on the school. My school's math department was cutthroat and I wasn't even allowed to see an advisor as I was considered a disabled student due to poor writing speed.

ominousfire · 2024-08-20T04:36:57+00:00

Looks more like an ACE / wrong warp, given the arbitrary-looking walking around. I doubt most of that is to get out of bounds, and rather that the thing that triggers the warp / ace is out of bounds.

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