So Before Mario Kart 8 Came In And Stole All Of My Time, I Was Working On A Pseudo-speedrunning Mappack

So before Mario Kart 8 came in and stole all of my time, I was working on a pseudo-speedrunning mappack for Mari0 called Retrush. It involves time gates; the number on the gate is how many seconds the player has to reach the next gate. Hopefully I'll get back into it soon.

"Wooo I finally got around to updating my blog! I've got so many ideas for posts that I can write over the next few days! Maybe if I'm lucky I can write some in advance and queue them up so I don't have to worry about it!"

~two days later~

NOPE, I haven't done anything. This is why we can't have nice things.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Ray Hargreaves, 2P START!

Took fourth place in this week's GameXplain tournament. I had first at one point! Then the other players beat me out. Oh well, I'll take it. Congrats to everyone involved!

Keepsakes

There's a weird pocket in the top right corner of my browser that houses a mishmash of various urls. It's called the "Other Bookmarks" folder, and despite its generic name, its contents are carefully chosen. If I deem it intelligent, hilarious, thoughtful, unique, or otherwise extraordinary, it receives the honor of being inside. (The only anomaly is the end, to which is appended the next video in whatever series I'm watching; this is hardly an exception, however, as I wouldn't be watching it if it weren't somewhat entertaining.)

Okay, so perhaps I made it sound better than it really is. But I thought to myself: Why do I do this? To reread them later? No, because I almost never do that with anything. To show them to other people? I rarely get the chance to do so. So why not post them?

Here are its current contents. Be warned that some of these may be disagreeable, distracting, or NSFW.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/top10/2645.html http://www.mother4game.com/ http://www.siliconera.com/2013/12/03/emulating-megadrive-3ds-isnt-easy-enter-3d-sonic-hedgehog/ http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-allowed http://jay-machalani.squarespace.com/blog/2013/12/12/fixing-windows-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtxhSQiduMk http://worldsbiggestpacman.com/ http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-went-to-hell-1555599284/

I have a tendency to find patterns in two steps. This is both a good thing and a bad thing; it means I'm generally quicker to catch on to things than most people, but it also means that I often find patterns where they don't exist.

Let's use a mathematical example, shall we? I love math! Say I'm given two numbers:

1, 8

Here's the order in which I think of what patterns this might fit in:

Sequential cubes - 1³, 2³ (3³, 4³, n³) Add seven to previous number - 1, 1+7 (8+7, 15+7, 1+7n) Multiples of eight - 8⁰, 8¹ (8², 8³, 8ⁿ)

What tends to happen when I point out the first pattern that comes to mind is that I'm often wrong. Even if I go through all the patterns that come to mind, it could still be a different pattern, or it could just not be a pattern at all!

So what I've trained myself to do is wait for a third term to see if I have it right. I've been wrong on the third term before, but far less often. Most of the time my suspicion is correct at that point - except with things like human behavior, which I'm usually more careful about.

...no, I don't treat human behavior like numbers... I look for patterns in different ways...