Don't forget the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism
AernaLingus
joined 3 years ago
Here's that fanfare that sounded like something from Pokémon Red & Blue—I've made it into a clip where first the MLP fanfare plays, then the bit from Pokémon, then the two overlaid (with the Pokémon one stretched ever so slightly to accommodate for the slightly faster tempo). It's notable that they're even in the same key, so no pitch alteration was required.
The main difference is that the MLP tune is in 6/8 instead of 4/4, which explains most of the subtle rhythmic differences. Pitch-wise, there is only a single note difference, with the MLP fanfare walking up diatonically (G♯-A-B) while the Pokémon melody jumps down to the tonic and then up a fifth (G♯-E-B).
Also, just to be clear, I'm not implying that there's anything untoward going on--both pieces are evoking that martial quality by emphasizing the strong tonic-to-dominant motion and a using a march rhythm in the snare. When you strip the melody down to its essential notes, it's basically just walking up from the tonic, skipping over the 4th degree. The embellishments added on top of that core are also straightforward, so it wouldn't surprise me if whoever wrote the MLP score came up with it independently. Of course, it's also possible they did the classic composer thing where you think you're writing something original but are actually pulling a lot from memory...but even then, it's such a small snippet that it doesn't matter.
Sounds like a Zork command
That was my first thought, but there would be more trailing woobs, as in
woooooob WOOOOB woooob......wooob woooob
I've gotten back into working on my Japanese vocab and it's so much fun...can't believe I've been putting it off for so long, as is ever the case with anything fulfilling that requires effort (thanks, brain!). I love how kanji make every word into a little puzzle, and how each kanji in turn is a puzzle in and of itself, with rebuses nested in rebuses.
you're nicked m8
I've narrowed you down to living somewhere on the continent of North America
Which makes this even funnier:
On March 18, 2020, a man pleaded guilty to threatening to assassinate the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham. He cited Clyde as an inspiration for his desired attack.
Come on, dude, have some self respect!
Mega mega THREAD THREAD 
I hope this initiative will bear fruit! I was glad to hear that the Japanese Game Preservation Society has secured enough supporters to survive into next year, and maybe this program will provide them additional support. It seems that Japan's copyright laws are even more draconian than the US' in many ways, so it will be hard to effectively preserve works without reform.
Ever since I got introduced to the joys of Minesweeper by Girl_DM_ I've been having a lot of fun playing it as a little timewaster. I'm specifically playing the version from Simon Tatham's lovely Portable Puzzle Collection (more specifically the Android port via F-Droid) which unlike the original Minesweeper does NOT require guessing. Most of the time, I'm well-versed enough in patterns and testing candidate solutions that I'm able to clear a 16x16 board with 99 mines in about 3-5 minutes. But on a fairly regular basis I'll run into situations where I get stuck and it seems like I'd either have to calculate an inordinate amount of possible solutions or just make a random guess, neither of which are appealing. Here's one such example:
with annotations
without annotations
There's probably some cool Minesweeper shorthand I could use to describe the constraints, but what I tried to show with my annotations is how I understand that, for each of the annotated squares, there is a mutually-exclusive binary choice (or in the case of the 3, two choices) for where a mine could be located. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, while the choices are internally mutually exclusive, it doesn't seem like there's any permutation of those choices that is invalid so I can't eliminate any possibilities. My usual strategy is to fix one choice and see if it results in a contradiction. For instance, if the other mine for the 2 is the upper choice, we can clear the lower square. That means the lower square for the 1 must be a mine, and this still leaves either of the two bottom choices as valid for the 3 (so this is a possible configuration based on these constraints).
The only remaining sections have a lot of freedom which makes them daunting to analyze. Of the remaining unanalyzed squares, from top to bottom they have 2, 2, and 3 mines remaining, respectively, which is quite a lot of options to fully check, and I can only eliminate a few heuristically (e.g. the top 3 must have at least one mine in either the east or southeast space, since otherwise the 4 to the south can't be fulfilled; the 4 must not have the remaining mines all in the east column because otherwise the 2 and 1 can't be fulfilled). I'm sure if I went through them methodically I would eventually arrive at an answer, but that's pretty tedious, so I usually just give up and generate a new board in this kind of situation.
TL;DR: am I missing some neat heuristic(s) that will allow me to either slash the possible solutions to a more manageable number or eliminate individual solutions very quickly, or is this kind of difficult spot just an inevitable outcome for some boards?
I've never heard anyone call them "munchkins" as a generic term, personally