RubixsQube

N I N E (three + one + three + four = eleven, so nope!) (9 is also not the number of leaves, either)

Oh, neat! SO. TIME FOR ME TO SPIN A RIDDLE I SUPPOSE Ok, how about I do this. I'll give a puzzle that's pretty straightforward, and then one of my favorite "puzzles" to give to my bright students, for Idle Thumbs extra credit. PUZZLE THE FIRST Take a number, like "5." Write it out as an english word, in capital letters: "FIVE." It takes 10 straight line segments to write out that word. If you restrict yourself to only those words with english representations that require straight lines (so, 2 --> "TWO" wouldn't count, because of that O), which number has the same number of straight line segments as the number it represents? PUZZLE THE SECOND I currently live in New England after living my entire life in southern California. I'm pretty blown away by the fact that there are "seasons" here, including the most glorious of them all, autumn. In the autumn, for those of you who are unaware, leaves change color, and then fall off of the trees in a very attractive way. Let's say you had an isolated tree, and all of the leaves fell off the tree onto the ground at once. How thick would the pile of leaves be (in units of "leaves")?

Wait what, it's not bookkeeper?

Two questions: 1) Why did Thomas Wayne create a last will and testament under the assumption that he would be killed and that he'd never see his son grow up. Did he travel to the opera / theatre / whatever under the assumption that he was gonna get it in the alley? 2) Did he write his will thinking: "also when I die my wife is going with me, so, I don't need to write her into the will."

I don't want to insinuate that I was providing more flack, and I apologize if my comment came off that way, Sean. You couldn't, of course, really control who helped who on the server, and it just seemed, from our perspective, like the balance was tipped heavily in your favor. It's fun to see that apparently Olly's chicanery worked pretty well, as you were fairly on guard about potential treachery. (I and hundreds of others still watched, enthralled, so, fuck the haters) Has there been any actual post mortem on what happened? I suppose there will be some discussion in this week's cast. I am most interested to know who the hell just up and shot Olly near the end. What was that all about?

Yeah, I was firmly on #TeamOlly when I saw that Sean's MO was like, having a henchman convention. He spent so much of his time just in a giant talking circle, givin' nicknames. Even if there was a traitor in his midst, he had to know that the traitor couldn't shoot him, right? So, why would he be worried? Things were interesting, though, up until Olly's "crew" was just killed out of nowhere without Sean's knowledge, and from there it was pretty easy to hunt Olly down.

It's pretty mediocre. Artoon, the third party developer that worked on it (referenced above by syntheticgerbil) decided to add in more babies, which should satisfy your intense desire for a crying baby Wario. Also, because it required you to shoot eggs to the top screen at time, the gap between the DS screens makes the game more annoying than it should be. The greatest sin is that the level designs aren't super inspired, which means you find yourself playing only because you remember a better game that it look and plays like. That's the worst reason to ever play a video game, everybody! I like to think about it like Yoshi's Island methadone.

I'm scanning through and I can't immediately find it, but I'm pretty sure this is the podcast that Sean was referring to, since it's Ken Levine, Chris, and Kieron Gillen. I'll let you know if I can find it. Edit: I couldn't find it! But I was half paying attention. Hopefully someone else can do better.

Bjorn, that's badass! If anyone wants to add me on Steam, my username is my steam name. I only have a few people I "compete" against. I'm a nice guy!

Oh ho! You are probably correct! (Tough, fans of Mario platformers, you're going to have to wait until 2006 to get another proper platformer (unless you count Six Golden Coins))

This sounds great! I think that review scores are unfortunate, and it seems as if they're seen as "necessary," because of the money involved in buying games. I think that it's also dangerous to only find reviewers who agree with you, since you want to also read games criticism that's well written and does not share your opinion. Fight the confirmation bias!

I would love to hear Danielle on the show more often. Not only is she really fun to listen to (Home Alone jokes!), and has well-thought-out opinions, but she was able to bring up Nintendo and the WiiU without anyone getting all antsy about talking about Nintendo. That's great! Of the polygon reviewers, I've found that her reviews hew pretty close to how I end up feeling about a game. I don't know if I've said it on this forum, but I really wish that the current model of video game reviews shifted closer to film criticism, where reviews are tied to people, rather than websites. We tend to follow individual film critics rather than individual publications (look at how rotten tomatoes tracks things), but then ascribe a review score to an entire website, which blurs together multiple people's opinions. It's pretty easy to find the authors of individual reviews, but it should be more prominent, especially given the power of review aggregates like metacritic. Also, some of the opinions in this forum regarding the validity of critiquing video games through the lens of gender studies are completely bonkers! Of course you can make a feminist, or race, or queer critique of any video game! And it's valid! And it should be encouraged! Video games are not childish! They're art! I don't think it's possible for my arms to flail more like a muppet over here!

"Oh, you liked Yoshi's Island? You consider it one of gaming's masterpieces? Well, here's what betrayal feels like." Eventually, we were given Yoshi's Island DS, which was, in fact, Yoshi's Island 2, but it was so disappointing.

Today's PC Daily Challenge resulted in my very first visit to Olmec AND I killed him. I...feel pretty good about myself right now. If I had remembered to kill myself in the ice level with the Moai head, I would have been able to unlock the city of gold (I got to the black market, stole the ankh, and even killed anubis for his scepter), but I instead was more worried about rogue shopkeepers, angry that I had pilfered a shotgun early on.

The problem is that while we "learn" things, teachers may not actually confront our initial misconceptions, so we don't incorporate things into our own mental schema for how the universe works. This is a where they ask Harvard grads to describe why we have the seasons. (It's important to note that this has most likely been cherry picked to only provide the silliest explanations) (before you watch it, ask yourself: why do we have the seasons? I'm an astronomer and I've had to teach this basic concept to so many undergrads over the last ten years who have fantastic made-up reasons. I'm at an ivy league school at the moment. It's sometimes frustrating, but that's how it is) We develop a picture for how things work from a young age. In order to change this picture, we have to work with it to understand that things are different from what we believe. It's pretty easy to make the assumption that the Sun goes around the Earth, and even if you're told, you'll still believe it. A good instructor will work with this assumption to help develop learning. It's important to not be a jerk to people who believe "silly" things like this. It's ignorant, but you don't fight ignorance with negativity.

I was just told, in the IRC chat, that there's a smiley of... OH YES THANKS, IRC CHAT.

When I saw the list of games discussed for this episode, I flipped all kinds of shits. Astro Blasters! Majora's Mask! Yoshi's Island! I know that writing on page 5 of the episode thread is like shouting into the Grand Canyon, especially when I already had a fantastic discussion regarding Disneyland with one other person, but jeez, Majora's Mask is really important, even if liking it is cliche apparently at this point. It's pretty absurd that Nintendo hasn't announced the 3DS remake, because that game needs a re-release so people can experience it again. Also, Yoshi's Island is my GOAT, and if you haven't watched the AGDQ 2013 Yoshi's Island run (it's 3+ hours, I recognize) you should at least take a quick look, because seeing a person completely destroy the game is an absolute joy. It's made better by the dude on the couch in green ("CarlSagan") who gleefully explains each and every weird nuance of the game (for instance, areas where designers left a 21st red coin way, way off screen accidentally, but it can be hit with a well placed egg shot, allowing for a 100% speed runner to skip a red coin elsewhere) (or, even more interesting, each stage a speed runner wants to skip the "bonus challenge" segment, which requires a series of clever pauses to enter the end-level ring at juuuuuust the right time). I was perhaps going to write in about this (as many of the AGDQ segments are wonderful to watch for someone who is remotely interested in seeing how humans interact with their video games at the limits, I mean, just watch the Yoshi's Island speedrunner's hands), but I feel like it's maybe not of interest.

Even though I purchased this on my PS3, I could never find the time when I'm sitting at home in front of the TV (the TV gets a lot of traffic in my shared apartment), but I only own Macs. Then I realized that I had gotten CrossOver in a Mac software bundle, and it turns out it's pretty easy to install Spelunky through PC Steam using CrossOver! And it runs great! I'm using an SNES-style USB controller remapped to the keyboard, and I'm really happy with how snappy it is.

I'm aware of the red cards (I did not know they used RFID tags, actually, that's pretty interesting), and I've definitely been handed them many times on rides. I just don't know how accurate the whole process is, as you mentioned, due to latency. I actually think that those apps that allow for crowdsourced wait time updates are slightly more accurate, although I have to assume that they do some sort of time averaging with an outlier removal, lest they are influenced by people who are less reliable time keepers. The real question, though, is how correct is the time given on the sign when you enter the ride compared to your actual wait time. God, I wish I had access to Disneyland's data / I wish I had access to a statistical sample of people who could go to Disneyland and start to answer this question for me.

I give Cars Land a pass because it does actually feature Route 66 prominently, a road that begins/ends in California. Radiator Springs is most likely in New Mexico or Arizona, and not the midwest. As I've mentioned previously, they have currently changed the rules such that people are limited to their assigned Fastpass window. I was unaware, as Tabacco has written, that the ride operators are looking at the actual state of the line when they let stand-by passengers in. This is still a value judgment that tends to be biased against stand-by riders, which artificially inflates the lines. I think that perhaps better estimates of the stand-by lines length would perhaps help, as most people don't really understand that the stand-by line includes members of some "virtual" Fastpass line as well. If the E-ticket attractions are going to be at max capacity on a busy day anyway, I wonder how removing the Fastpass will affect the actual hourly ride throughput. It will most likely affect the line length on average, yes. Finally, sorry to tell you, Terri, but they removed the Tortilla Factory and put in a Ghirardelli Chocolate Store in its place. They give out free chocolate squares, and they are now able to make money with the space (not to mention it fits with the San Francisco wharf theme a lot better), but I also miss warm flour and corn tortillas. On your birthday they gave you a whole stack of the things! If anyone does find themselves in the Ghirardelli store, wait around a little as their wall diorama has quite a few cute rotating effects depending on which dessert they are showcasing at a given time.

I think I'm fine with the cast members recycling the Fastpasses. While I think that, overall, Fastpasses are a net negative to an average park guests enjoyment, I think that the fact that cast members are allowed to do all kinds of targeted things to increase individual park enjoyment (including but not limited to giving away free, inexpensive shop items) is awesome both for the guest also for the cast member. I can't imagine that the "inflation" due to recycling has an enormous effect. I think that perhaps the most important thing has to be the arbitrary way in which cast members decide when to let in some number of standby line members. Standing to wait for the Space Mountain queue and just watching as the cast member stands there waiting on Fastpass holders is infuriating, especially on a summer day when the line seems to just drag on forever. You also bring up single-rider queues, which is a fantastic idea, I agree, and I've thought quite a bit about their workings as well. While I'm not a huge fan of Cars as a film franchise, I think that Cars Land is the single best reason to visit California Adventure (the recent redo of Buena Vista Street and the Tower of Terror coming in at a close second and third), and the centerpiece is Radiator Springs Racers, a ride that manages to make Test Track into something thematic and interesting. The line for that ride can get to be two to three hours, which is ABSURD (but mostly based on the insane popularity of Cars as well as the fact that it's new), especially since the ride is what, two minutes, tops? The imagineers, though, built the ride to have two rows of three seats, for a weird 6 member car, which makes the single-rider queue completely necessary. It's the only way to enjoy the ride without giving up a significant chunk of your day to stand in a queue. The only drawback to a single-rider queue is that you don't get to enjoy the ride sitting in the same car as the rest of your party (although I've seen pairs from the same party get put into the same car, again, because it seats 6). This tends to benefit people who are coming in small, older groups (teenage and above), since the only people who are really trapped into riding attractions together are families with young kids, the target demographic for Radiator Springs Racers. Which rides at either park are the most necessary to enjoy with your party? Tea Cups, certainly, as sitting across from some random people might be a little awkward, and most omnimover two to three seater rides, but overall, I agree with you. Putting in more single-rider queues for the "E-ticket" attractions with the large lines would really help with the flow of the park, as they actually serve the best purpose: ride fill efficiency. Merus, your point echoes what I was saying above about how Fastpass benefits people who get there early, and then know what they're doing such that they can get a Fastpass for a long-queue attraction (I generally recommend that my friends try for either Star Tours, Space Mountain, or Indiana Jones, although I think that the popularity of Star Tours has died down somewhat), and then get in line for something distant from the entrance (Matterhorn, Space Mountain, or Splash Mountain), and, later, come back around to the closer rides. This means that the best two things you can do to maximize your Disneyland enjoyment are 1) Careful Early Day Planning, and 2) Making Reasonable Ride Expectations.

I could probably discuss this issue for as long as you could. I'm currently wondering about the effectiveness of the recent rule change that locks you into the exact time specified on the Fastpass, rather than allowing you to go at any time during or after the window. I can only assume that only hurts people with Fastpasses who can't make their window, or forget, which may lengthen the lines for the stand-by folks. Fastpass is a stupid system overall because it's not explained well, and it mostly benefits those who go to Fastpass kiosks early. If you're not as informed about Disneyland when you go, it's probably pretty confusing. I've also seen special ticket packages which include Fastpasses, but maybe I'm imagining that. And I'm glad someone else appreciates how stupid the Indiana Jones setup is, wherein everyone waits in a boring portion of the ride, and then runs past an incredible feat of imagineering (there are so, so many things to look at on the way into the ride. Kids these days probably don't even know that the Maran language scattered throughout is just english in a weird, simple typography!) on the way to wait in the final portion of the queue. It's absurd! I think perhaps that Disney is fine with the setup because it means that people can be watched as they queue in order to prevent things like vandalism. The same thing is true with the re-opened Star Tours, which forces the guests to wait in that tiny boring overflow room, while you rush past one hundred million Star Wars themed jokes in the queue. It could be worse, since Magic Mountain in Ventura has a similar system (with way worse line queues) but you have to pay for the passes.

For years, I've been kicking around the idea of writing up a very simple theme park Monte Carlo simulation to see whether or not adding in the Fastpass system lead to shorter wait times overall for park guests. Like, I think that when you utilize Fastpasses over the course of your Disneyland trip, you probably save time, but you can only use a finite number of Fastpasses on a given day because of the system they have in place that locks you out for a given amount of time. The standby line for a given ride then balloons out as they wait for Fastpass holders to pass through. I wonder what happens to the distribution of wait times when you add in a Fastpass.