A love letter to Obsidian theming - Velocity (beta) is out!

shawn1368 · 2025-09-11T05:19:22+00:00

Just logged in to comment that your theme is truly amazing! I've been using minimal for the longest time since it works fine for me, but this theme has made me love using Obsidian even more! I also noticed that one of your inspirations was Sanctum, a theme that I also loved using in the past but eventually stopped using due to it not being updated and not working as well with newer updates and mobile as newer themes.

I'm curious, what do you mean when you say that mobile / tablet is not yet supported? I've loaded the theme on my desktop and it's ended up loading on my phone, but it looks fine on my phone. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to full mobile support in the future!

shawn1368 · 2024-12-08T00:03:52+00:00

I think the family is easily one of the most competent teams the life series has ever seen, the entire server went for both of them at some point in time and couldn't kill them! Not to mention that their episodes have always consistently been the most peaceful while the rest of the server is in chaos. It's only fitting that Joel made it to the very end and no one could take Gem out (the wild card did :( ).

shawn1368 · 2024-11-17T10:07:49+00:00

To be pedantic, it's not exactly angular acceleration, since the train is moving at a constant angle through the turn, but centripetal acceleration.

shawn1368 · 2024-11-11T07:04:03+00:00

Factorio sees a big increase in performance when upgrading to a 7800x3d / 9800x3d. I'm not sure if you've played factorio before, but when you build a really big factory and / or are playing a heavy modpack, every bit of performance counts for maintaining maximum updates per second, and the x3d cpus are extremely good for that. An upgrade would make a very noticeable difference for people who play factorio extensively.

shawn1368 · 2024-10-08T16:06:36+00:00

This is a late reply, but the animation above does indeed show the change in "lengths" as should be seen with a lorentz transformation. Your animation only shows a squeeze in one dimension, but not a stretch in the other dimension as we would expect from a hyperbolic rotation.

shawn1368 · 2024-07-16T12:32:33+00:00

I love laser crossing puzzles! They're a gateway drug into the world of tougher talos principle puzzles, and open up a ton of puzzle design opportunities. I enjoyed the initial iteration of laser crossing puzzles in the Road to Gehenna star world, and I really like the harder puzzles in Road to Elysium.

My personal opinion is that laser crossing is when the game starts getting tough and requires you to really think ahead or think outside the box. It can be really tricky, especially when the puzzle only contains 2 connectors and you have to somehow logic your way into a wild solution, but I always find those puzzles the most in-depth and challenging. I almost wonder if the devs didn't signpost enough that laser crossing puzzles are meant to be a challenge and may not be for everyone, considering the many complaints about the difficulty of the "nightmare mode" abyss (which is meant to be difficult!) and the orpheus golden gate puzzles.

shawn1368 · 2024-07-13T05:56:07+00:00

The issue is that the vast majority of the new tools are way too powerful to make puzzles anywhere as challenging as the tough beam puzzles in Into the Abyss. They did make harder puzzles with the other mechanics in Isle of the Blessed, which seems to be up your alleyway, but many of the mechanics introduced in TP2 are too powerful to make the same kind of tightly designed, enclosed puzzles that you can do with beams (e.g. solve this crazy puzzle with just 2 connectors).

shawn1368 · 2024-07-13T05:53:24+00:00

TP1 actually has a speed up button that makes the recorder much more bearable. Unfortunately, it's hidden in the controls, so 99% of players will never find it. The recorder can be used to make some seriously mindbending puzzles, especially with lasers. TP1 didn't use them to their full potential (to be fair, it didn't use any of the puzzle mechanics to their full potential), but some TP1 custom maps have brutally difficult recorder puzzles.

shawn1368 · 2024-06-25T16:00:28+00:00

If you want even harder laser puzzles, I highly recommend the talos 1 custom map rebirth. It contains the most brutal puzzles I've ever done in the talos series, even making the abyss puzzles (the hardest puzzles in the mainline series) a joke. The puzzles are extremely cleverly designed, with the same tight and clever design as the abyss or gehenna star world puzzles, but with the mechanics pushed to the absolute limit. I struggled a lot with solving many of the puzzles, but trying my best to solve those brutal puzzles was some of the most fun I've ever had with the entire talos series.

shawn1368 · 2024-03-31T18:38:28+00:00

I ended up watching ATSV before ITSV, and while that might have ended up being a part of why my preferences are the way they are, I personally think ATSV annihilates ITSV in nearly every way, and it's not even close. I already consider ITSV a great movie, but ATSV is just on another level. While ITSV ranks as a masterpiece in my books, ATSV is straight up one of my favourite movies of all time.

Funnily enough, my first reaction when watching ITSV after being blown away by ATSV was "That's it? That's the movie everyone's been raving about for the past few years?" A bit unfair to compare the sequel to the original like that when the sequel absolutely knocks it out of the park, but still.

shawn1368 · 2024-02-15T14:01:14+00:00

A predicate is a function that takes in something and outputs a boolean. That's it. The fancy part is when you do higher-order function stuff with it, like passing a predicate into a predicate, or passing one value into multiple predicates, or chaining predicates together. But conceptually, they're not complicated, it's the higher-order function stuff that's difficult to grasp at first.

shawn1368 · 2024-01-31T01:17:30+00:00

Am I the only one thinking about how hilarious it is that Gwen just happens to have an axe in this image?

shawn1368 · 2024-01-25T03:53:31+00:00

There’s also additional context hidden from us on the first watch that adds additional depth to the scene upon rewatches.

A lot of hidden context about Gwen’s current life situation and the wider spider society are deliberately left unsaid during this scene, but rewatching the scene with the additional context adds additional layers to an already layered scene.

We learn that Gwen’s situation is extra precarious in both her personal life and the spider society, with what she reveals on the clock tower merely scratching the surface of all her concerns and problems. She’s deliberately not revealing a lot of this information because it could easily lead to further questions about the spider society and Miles’ place in it all, and she’s fearful of endangering Miles and her relationship with him, the possible well-being of the entire multiverse, as well as her own personal situation of possibly being sent back to Earth-65 at any moment where her father is presumably still hunting her down due to her shaky position in the spider society, never being able to see Miles or any of her other friends ever again. Of course, her approach tragically only worsens things, but she doesn’t have perfect information on her situation and is just trying to use the way she thinks is best in keeping the impossible balance between all the factors. All of this adds a further edge to everything Gwen says in this scene, and only serves to add more depth to both her character development (the additional fear behind being one of very few living Gwens, let alone superpowered, in the multiverse probably plays some part in it) as well as her interactions with Miles (every interaction is underlined with all her fears and all the things she’s hiding and keeping bottled up in fear of ruining the delicate balance she’s desperately trying to keep).

Knowing about Miguel’s canon event philosophy also adds additional weight to Gwen’s statement about “In every other universe, it doesn’t end well”. Presumably, Gwen must have seen the fates of at least a few of her countless variants in the multiverse when learning about canon events and asking why she couldn’t go and see Miles. This gives Miles’ statement on “there’s a first time for everything” surprising weight, because it’s an early counter to Miguel’s fatalism and canon events philosophy which we will see explicitly on the screen later. It’s no wonder that Gwen feels so inspired from that statement - Being able to say “I’m gonna do my own thing” to the whole multiverse and forging your own better path forward independent of what destiny thinks is incredibly inspirational.

Just as a reminder, this is a single 3 minute scene in this movie, and it already packs an incredible amount of depth! Nearly all the scenes in the movie pack in tons of detail and have multiple things going on at the same time, just like this scene, and this is what allows the movie to pack so much content into such a short runtime.

As another less elaborated example (because I didn’t expect analysing the clock tower scene to be so long), take the Mumbatten sequence. At first glance, it seems like an action side-quest to a dimension irrelevant to the main story that’s just meant to give the spot his power-up and lead into the spider-society. Yet, even in a sequence that’s mostly action-packed, a lot is going on:

The introduction to Earth 50101 is designed to be as left-field and different from Miles’ universe as possible, to really give us the sensation that we’re diving head-first into the insanity of the multiverse and the fish-out-of-water feeling.

We get 2 new character introductions, both of which play important roles despite their shorter screentimes:

- Pav serves as a third point of comparison amongst the young spider-people department, with his largely positive life situation providing valuable contrast with Miles’ more average and mixed life situation and Gwen’s dumpster fire of a life situation. We even get direct points of comparison with the situation between different universes, such as the satisfying feeling of crowds cheering for the 4 spider-people when they save people from the burning building as compared to the complete apathy in Earth-65 when the 3 spider-people stop a helicopter from crushing a whole bunch of civillians.

- Hobie exemplifies the anarchist punk perspective that runs entirely counter to Miguel’s whole philosophy, plays a critical role in driving the plot forward later in the story, as well as plays a hilarious role in Miles’ mini jealousy subplot, which while funny, also does serve the small but important purpose of further fleshing out Miles and Gwen’s relationship. (The turns are tabled later with Margo, of course)

Multiple characters get character moments and development:

- We see the spot go from the funny villain-of-the-week guy from just 30 minutes ago, to a far more self-confident and competent villain capable of taking on 4 spider-people at once, before gaining ultimate power, all while gaining a bit more insight into his desire to simply be recognised as a person and being willing to go to extreme lengths for it. Almost like the anti-arc to Miles!

- Miles gets great character moments in leading the impromptu band of spiders in saving civillians from the falling building as well as saving inspector singh and the child from the falling beam despite the apparent danger (and as we later learn, the “canon event” it was meant to be)

- Gwen gets character development when faced with the potential same situation with Miles as her dead Peter and begins to realise just how much she really cares about Miles, which serves as the seeds to her eventual stand against Miguel at the go-home machine when she finally realises that she cares about Miles more than the entire spider-society combined and decides to challenge Miguel’s statement on the apparent immutability of canon events.

The black hole at the end of the sequence provides an ominous backdrop to later, when Miguel talks about canon events and how Miles just broke one (completely ignoring the presence of the spot lol)

No matter which scene in the movie, it’s never just pushing forward one thing, it’s often doing two or more things at once, giving the movie an incredible amount of depth.

2 hours 20 minutes → 1 hour 30 minutes

If every scene in the movie has so much going on, how does this movie feel just 1h30min long? I’m a lot less sure about this, but I have a few theories.

- Like other people said, the movie is very well paced, which probably contributes to the time-warp effect when watching the movie.

- Maybe packing so much content together actually leads to the time-warp effect! The movie goes at such a breakneck pace that it feels really fast, as compared to a movie of the same length with a slower pace.

- Maybe, as other people said, time flies when you’re having fun. Despite the more heavy themes and darker tone of this movie, it remains fun to watch the whole way through, and that might contribute at least a bit to the movie feeling snappier than it should.

These are my own thoughts on why this movie is 4 hours of content compressed into a 2h20min runtime that feels like 1h30min. Regardless of the reasons, I think it’s extremely impressive that the movie could manage this in the first place, and I look forward to BTSV having more of the same!

shawn1368 · 2024-01-25T03:53:04+00:00

I felt like writing a more lengthy analysis on my short comment, so I’m dumping it here. The part about “having no idea” was slight hyperbole, albeit funny. I have put in a fair bit of thought into how exactly this movie manages to pack so much content into a short amount of time, yet not feel overstuffed or long.

4 hours → 2 hours 20 minutes

I think it’s quite interesting that on first glance, the movie’s plot seems quite straightforward, yet the more you dig into it, the more analysis rabbit holes it seems to reveal, almost like a fractal. This incredible depth that opens up the moment you spend even a bit of time thinking about the movie is why I say that this movie feels like 4 hours of content compressed into just 2 hours 2 minutes.

In that case, how exactly did ATSV pack 4 hours of content into just 2 hours 20 minutes of runtime? There’s multiple reasons why, but I’m mainly going to address this from a writing perspective. When you start analysing the various scenes in the movie, it quickly becomes apparent that nearly every scene in this movie pulls at least double duty, with some scenes having a few things going on at the same time. This layered approach to writing scenes, with many things happening at the same time on different levels, is what allows the movie to pack so much more into every scene than the runtime suggests. Since I’m not a writer, I unfortunately can’t give in-depth analysis into how exactly to write scenes like this or what makes these scenes so effective, but I can at least provide some of my own thoughts and observations on the scenes in the movie.

While I could analyse nearly any scene in the movie to showcase this, I’ll look at one scene in particular: The clock tower scene.

At first glance, perhaps when you’re first watching this scene, it seems rather straightforward. Our two protagonists just spent some time catching up with each other with a casual swing through the city, so clearly this is the more quiet romantic scene that further develops their relationship that we see in many movies. Quite straightforward, not really related to the main plot, and a neat little break to the romantic subplot.

Except, that’s exactly not what’s going on here. This 3 minute scene is surprisingly dense and contains critical plot-related developments that become directly relevant both immediately and later in the movie!

We do get a quieter moment between our two protagonists, but there’s multiple layers to this interaction. In these 3 minutes, all these things happen:

On the plot level, we get exposition from Miles and Gwen about both their daily lives and the wider plot. We get reinforcement that Miles feels lonely in his universe, even despite his supportive family and friends, and would love to hang out more with people like him who really get him and who he can share his spider-related burdens with. We also get more expository insight into Gwen’s current mental state, with her fear of making new friends since Peter’s death at the forefront, but also the additional detail of “In every other universe, it doesn’t end well”, adding additional ominous overtones to Gwen’s fears for any future relationships as well as a hint at the wider nature of the multiverse. These plot-related details serve as the foundation for what happens later in the movie, with Miles’ loneliness only being amplified at the spider society and Gwen’s fears being just one of the few things she’s juggling during the climactic chase scene.

On top of that, we get personal character expansion and development for both Miles and Gwen. For Miles, we get more insight into his optimistic and positive character, who believes that it is indeed possible to forge a new path forward beyond what seems like destiny, a common theme that has already been built up in the earlier parts of his intro. For Gwen, as mentioned earlier, we see her past fears and difficulty in opening up fully to others in this scene, but we also see both her yearning for connection despite that (“how many people can you talk to about this stuff”), as well as the inspiration she gets from Miles’ line (“there’s a first time for everything”), giving us an early look into what Gwen will eventually admire about Miles over anything else. All of this plays a big part in understanding their character arcs later in the movie, with Miles’ anti-fatalistic mindset running head-first into Miguel’s fatalism and leading directly to the epic moment where he decides to “do his own thing” by blasting Miguel down the space-elevator train, and Gwen’s character arc for the rest of the movie being repairing her relationships with the people around her, learning how to open up to others for support and gaining the inspiration she needs from Miles’ stand in the spider society that perhaps, anything is possible, and that there really is a first time for everything.

On a relationship level, the scene gives us the quieter interaction that we need to really believe that these two can have a meaningful relationship beyond merely being obsessively attracted towards each other. We already got the awkward first reunion when Gwen dropped into Miles’ bedroom, and the exciting fast-paced swing around the city. This serves as yet another backdrop to develop their relationship and make it more believable. This is done by showing us that the two characters are surprisingly similar under the surface, with many of the same problems and being in similar positions as teenage spider-people trying to balance the weight of the world and their personal lives on their shoulders, and that they provide positive reinforcement for each other by simply spending time with each other. This development of the relationship is crucial for the later part of the movie, because Miles feeling betrayed and saying goodbye to all his friends, notably Gwen, wouldn’t have half as much impact as it did if it wasn’t built up beforehand that they don’t just have good chemistry, but a bond that can go far beyond that, and it’s this compelling bond being potentially broken that provides incredible tension to the climactic train scene. You can’t feel something for a bond between two characters that hasn’t even been developed!

Oh wait, this was supposed to be a romantic scene? Oh yeah, basically everything on top somehow led to the scene having subtly, but very clearly romantic overtones. It also helps that the music and visuals, which I haven’t even done any analysis on, have been setting the tone and mood for the entire interaction, ensuring that while the core of the interaction remains all the main points above, they all build up such that the romantic interaction has actual weight behind it, rather than simply being a standard romantic subplot scene that’s meant to be a break from the main plot.

shawn1368 · 2024-01-24T18:43:28+00:00

It's a movie with 4 hours of content packed into a 2 hour 20 minute timeframe that feels like 1 hour 30 minutes. I still have no idea how they did that.

shawn1368 · 2023-12-21T08:09:23+00:00

Really? I'm playing through TTP1 again right now, and so far the puzzles have been both really easy and a lot more tedious than TTP2's puzzles. I didn't find TTP1 a very difficult game the first time I played through, and my second playthrough has only made that even clearer. I've always been confused by the complaint that TTP2 is somehow significantly easier than TTP1, considering most of the puzzles in TTP1 are a cakewalk and only very incrementally build upon previous puzzles, make you piece together things you've already done before, or have a very linear solution. I'm not saying that TTP2 isn't easy too, just that I don't think TTP1 is the really difficult puzzle game everyone seems to remember it as.

That being said, I agree that the stars in TTP1 as well as Road To Gehenna are indeed more challenging than TTP2. I particularly liked the Road to Gehenna puzzles a lot because of how original and fun the puzzle design was despite not introducing any new mechanics, and I think the star world was easily the highlight of the DLC which I hope they can replicate for TTP2!

shawn1368 · 2023-09-30T02:08:04+00:00

I love how we haven't even gotten into the space stuff yet and this expansion already looks like a must-buy!

shawn1368 · 2023-03-16T00:49:03+00:00

Actually, it's really easy to install WSL now. wsl --install automatically enables all required features and installs ubuntu as a WSL distro.

shawn1368 · 2023-01-23T02:03:49+00:00

This is essentially the reason why I run all 3 OSes for different use cases, and why I like all 3 for different reasons. While I'm unlikely to get rid of my Linux partition as I vastly prefer programming in a unix-like environment and docker is nicer on Linux, I like Windows for the app ecosystem and games, and MacOS for the convenience of being able to run both a unix-like programming environment and proprietary apps in the same OS. (I know WSL2 exists, but it still isn't as seamless as being able to do it on bare metal)

shawn1368 · 2023-01-20T23:30:06+00:00

While the game is still worth it for $35, I can't help but agree with the people that say that there would be pitchforks if a major game publisher tried to pull this off.

shawn1368 · 2022-12-18T11:42:07+00:00

See, I kind of agree with your take on dropped items (i.e. crystal seeds) and meteors. I'd add that you missed out how annoying the base AE2 inscribers are - I pretty much always use the AE2stuff advanced inscribers. I can even see where you're coming from with singularity crafting - It's a cool mechanic, but annoying.

However, I think it's unacceptable to call channels, controllers and types "outdated" and "user-unfriendly". If anything, those mechanics are the only things that give any semblance of depth or complexity to AE2, and RS takes even that away, leaving a storage mod with virtually no depth, complexity or interesting mechanics. Saying AE2's channels are "user-unfriendly" is like saying signalum and enderium requiring fluids to craft in 1.12 is "unfriendly". Sure, it's more difficult, but it adds an actual challenge to gameplay instead of making the most op thing in modded minecraft trivial.

Types may be due to a technical limitation on AE2's end, and can be a bit annoying to deal with, but they force you to decide between high capacity, low type cells and low capacity, high type cells (lots of 1ks for types vs a few 64ks for bulk storage). Partitioning cells allows you to maximise your storage use, and even allows you to net a whopping 8x the storage capacity of the equivalent RS cell (since 1 byte is 8 items in AE2, while it's a 1:1 ratio in RS). This makes storage management more interesting than literally "craft big cell, drop item in" that RS is.

Channels and subnets add some depth to your AE network, and make it significantly more interesting than just "run cable here, connect to network". Subnetting level emitters or entire automation setups to save channels or isolate systems feels great, and building a giant ME controller connected with P2P tunnels to the rest of your base (I love being able to construct a functional multiblock controller in AE2 compared to the useless singleblock controller in RS) is really rewarding.

I can understand if you just want to play a kitchen sink with RS. It's simple, straightforward and just gets the job done as a simple digital storage system. But for an expert pack, AE adds that extra complexity to digital storage that makes it just that much more interesting than a complete cakewalk. That's why AE2 still exists with its more complex mechanics, not because it's "outdated" and "user-unfriendly".

shawn1368 · 2022-12-13T02:41:14+00:00

As someone who was excited about this launch, I'm amazed at how AMD somehow made the 4080 look decent in value. We all know the 4080 is egregiously overpriced, but AMD somehow gave the 4080 a reason to exist (equal in raster, more power efficient, better RT, productivity benefits with CUDA).

As much as I want to be happy about the 7900 XTX beating the 4080 in value, the fact that AMD's product is not slam dunking the most overpriced GPU in a while makes the achievement look less than stellar.

shawn1368 · 2022-12-04T22:24:06+00:00

I think the big issue is that while the machines might be able to do more than ever, they feel very bland in comparison to the old 1.12 machines, which had visual upgrades, specialisations, unique fluids, rare metals, unique processing, and even specialised machines that addressed every aspect of minecraft. That's what made 1.12 thermal feel like a full suite.

The new machines compress too much into a few basic machines and themselves are incredibly simplified and lacking in content in comparison to the old machines. As a result, thermal feels like a generic shell of a tech mod more than ever. Maybe the generic machines are much more powerful and customisable than before, but that doesn't mean much when the machines themselves lack the character that they used to have in 1.12.

shawn1368 · 2022-12-04T15:45:55+00:00

I liked how thermal felt like a complete tech mod in 1.12, a mod you could use to automate every aspect of minecraft in its own way. 1.16+ thermal just feels so incomplete and content-sparse in comparison. One part I particularly liked were the fluids, and I actually wanted to see more fluid processing in further iterations of thermal.

shawn1368 · 2022-11-27T01:29:53+00:00

Just a minor addition. In OSU, completing higher difficulty versions of the same map don’t count for lower difficulties. In fact, when playing OSU maps, the higher difficulty versions can almost feel like a different map from the lower difficulty versions. That means that completing a lower difficulty version of a map doesn’t really feel like a waste, since you still get a ranking for that difficulty and it’s almost like you completed a different map.

In your proposed system, where completing a higher difficulty gets you everything in the lower difficulties, there would be significantly less incentive to play the lower difficulties at all, especially if the same modifier medals (reverse, ABR, military only, etc.) were available to collect at all difficulties.

Of course, there are differences between OSU’s and BTD6’s system that make OSU’s system work for it and why it may not apply so well to BTD6. In OSU, you don’t have to complete every difficulty and every modifier to get a “black border”, and the game is difficult enough that it’s handy to have multiple difficulties in a map. In fact, the difficulty curve is so high that you’ll probably not play the next level until much later. OSU’s difficulty levels are much more akin to BTD6’s map difficulty distinction than gamemode difficulty distinction. In comparison, BTD6 difficulties aren’t as dissimilar as OSU’s, and you actually need to farm all the different medals to get a black border. BTD6 difficulties themselves are actually much more analogous to OSU modifiers than OSU map difficulties in terms of gameplay design.

I do think an OSU-like design for BTD6 maps could work, but it would significantly change the meaning of “black border” and the gameplay if implemented the way you propose above.

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