Here’s a weird one: Pac-Man World. 3Dish platformer with a lot of neat tricks and surprises. It’s not groundbreaking, but it made me genuinely happy when I played it.

Also, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. There’s so much stuff to do in this game, and if you do it right the

and there’s even more stuff to do.

It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”

So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.

The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.

Gross.

releasing a new kernel, re-written entirely in Golang using Copilot

I just got so mad.

Oh wow. The box is long gone and I’d rather keep it, but that’s awesome.

Yeah it’s ridiculous how many ranges of movement they fit in. And I have no idea how I got it. I’m guessing it was a drunken stumble to the mall.

Ninja 5-0 for the GBA. I got out my collection recently and had no idea I owned it. It’s Elevator Action, but you’re a ninja.

That’s the first game I bought for my GBC. I didn’t have enough money for a playstation and was jealous of all my friends playing MGS. It’s super well done. I just got an analog pocket and I think I’ll dig MGS out again after I finish my Castlevania games.

Yeah we finally got a decent used record store in town and it’s awesome. Before that, I had to dig through a lot of John Denver to find any ELO and Blue Oyster Cult

Vinyl records and playing cards (Western, Hanafuda, and Tarot decks.) The vinyl collection started when I got my parent’s old record player and started hitting thrift stores for bargains.

The card thing was sort of an accident; my wife (gf at the time) and I played a lot of Hwatu and cribbage and kept finding decks we liked.

I had zero plan beyond “live on my own, away from my parents, and try to sustain that.” The churches I went to as a kid emphasized getting married as soon as you’re old enough and having a ton of kids, so I did the opposite and was a feral stoner nerd/wook for a decade and a half. One day I was doing a hungover stumble from my apartment back to my car and saw a guy my own age playing with his small daughter at the playground. She’d fallen off the swing and he was hugging her until she stopped crying. I still can’t fully describe the feeling I had there, but I shrugged it off immediately as “that ship sailed. I’ll just dedicate myself to hobbies and non-serious relationships.”

Now I’m married, have a kid, and live in a house. Life’s weird.

Yeah, they’re pipes / jars / whatever. You have to find a potion, throw it so the pipe is available when you go through the door, and then go down the pipe.

Yep, world 5-3. I dimly remember being able to Luigi superjump onto the birds in 7-1 and short-circuit a bunch of that level.

I do most things on the command-line and for me, the trick is not having a lot of scripts laying around. If it’s a common action I do a lot (like running the local test bed), I rely on shell history. Beyond that I just start chaining stuff together on the fly. It forces me to keep knowledge of the utilities fresh, and also keeps me from having a ~/bin folder full of outdated crap that almost does what I want.