Fonze

"Draw me like one of your french sloths" 🥰😂

The resurgence of mediafire linked wads is 🤮

Hyped!!! 😄🥰

❤️ Rxckstxr best animal whisperer 🥰😂

https://youtube.com/shorts/a7cE_3UY1Jc?si=OxY_TrZLK50YHlnC

I played my first ever rp rolly dice game today on the apocalypse players discord, was a ton of fun! We played a oneshot, What's in the Cellar, and got tpk'd despite the keeper's admirable efforts to the contrary 😂😂☠️🪦 My headcanon is that the demon started to feel bad for us making it too easy on him. My first roll was a 100 (worst fumble), I spent 50 luck on reviving a teammate, the final two of us went out in a desperate, last effort suicide pact thanks to the gun my character brought and my mostly unconscious, pleading eyes, we got the worst ending, and I think I've finally understood what was going on as the demon is currently feasting on my brains, or lack thereof. All-in-all it was a ton of fun and I'm very thankful for the folks I played with being newbie friendly as I wildly flailed about running from corner to corner of the basement when 💩 💥 the 🪭

Trying to go through the what are you working on thrreadbrn and ran out of likes for the day. Outrageous! I just wanna like all the pics! 😂😂

Not sure if phone alarm clock app has better or worse knowledge of space/time than I do... 🤔🤔

We found a new route for vagrant% in Ato today and I used it to cut about a minute off my pb time to take back 1st on the src leaderboard 🤓 Not bad when my previous attempt was blown out the water by >45 seconds on a 12 minute run (13 for my previous pb)

Map:

Objectives:

Old Route:

New Route:

The boss vagrant is a late-game boss and requires several things to be able to fight. There are 4 vagrant locations spread throughout the game in true metroidvania fashion, each needing to be visited in order. The first two times you find vagrant, he can't find his sword and thus decides to flail his arms wildly while wilhelm-screaming and walking slowly towards you... as one does when one forgets their weapon in a sword duel. He deals next to no damage and dies in one hit. Truly the bravest of bois. The third time you meet him, he's powering up dbz-style like he's about to go super saiyan and also dies in one hit. The fourth and final time you face him is the real fight and he puts up a tough one, making for a fun "final" boss of this category that grabs next-to-no powerups throughout the run.

Along the way to grabbing these 4 main objectives, we also need to finish the prologue (which requires fighting 4 other bosses) to get the ability to break crystal barriers in our path, gather 10 coins for a coin gate, and fight another boss, geisha, in order to reach vagrant 3, for a total of 6 bosses in the run. This of course leaves a lot of room for routing, such as what coins to grab, what fast travel points to get or use, and what checkpoints to hit for safety or for save+quits. In the "Objectives" pic, several other coins could be grabbed instead of these, these are just the 10 I thought were quickest to get. On harder difficulties, the coin directly below vagrant 1 can't be grabbed, so the other nearby coin to the east we pass by on the way here is grabbed instead.

Up until today, we were grabbing a warp point near the end of the prologue, as we do in all other categories, and then later a checkpoint by that warp point for save+quitting that upon some thought, isn't actually necessary. We happen to run a couple rooms below the final checkpoint just outside of the final vagrant fight, so that can be used instead to save a lot of time from grabbing the second warp point, then warping there later to grab the checkpoint at a time where it'll be usable, then running to final vagrant from there, as opposed to skipping it, getting the checkpoint by the end, and running out of vagrant 2.

It's been fun to see this category (and others) be routed and rerouted, running it/them in each iteration. I love the process of analyzing the map, our move set, and what's available to come up with a new way of doing things, helped along with this game (and particularly this category) being relatively new, and with a small community it leaves a lot of room to find new routes, speedrun tricks, and boss strategies to get an edge in our friendly competition against not only each other, but the clock in general.

My first match in the Ato race is starting up in an hour! There's only 5 of us racing, it's double elimination, and I'm going against the 2nd seed, Glitchiness. My personal best is currently at 24:39, sum of best low 22's; their pb is 22:57, so while there is some possibility that I can win, it's looking pretty dire for me in this first round! 😅 Wish me luck; I'm gonna need it! 💀🪦

Ato is having an any% tourney through challonge in about a month, so I decided to work on some stuff today to get myself ready for it.

Today I practiced slamspam, which is done by pressing jump as you contact the ground during a ground pound spell. It's frame perfect, but allows you to get the full offensive effect while canceling the stun you receive afterwards, which lets you do another ground pound instantly, a sword slash, or whatever else right afterwards. It is a huge boost in damage output when done correctly. Following it with another gp doubles your dmg while following it with a sword slash can be used to skip the slo-mo effect on a boss's death.

I still have a ton of work to do on movement throughout the game as well as getting this strat down better, but here is a gif of me in boss rush mode taking the first boss down in <5 seconds, poor little guy 😂🥺:

I got 2 slamspams in this fight, one at the beginning and another at the end

It's cooking with scorpion! 😂😂😋

Hey all, it's been a little while! I hope everybody has been well since I was last active here *hugs* I figured I'd make a blog post rambling and sharing one of the things I've been up to lately.

I recently have been learning to make maps for a fun little platformer called Frog Hop (made by an indie dev that also made a very fun metroidvania I speedrun now), where you play as a 🐸 doing frog things such as hopping, jumping, and using your tongue as a weapon. It's very similar to Mario but if frog instead. You move slower on the ground than in the air, so you want to hop a lot, and there are triggers, switches, conveyor belts, movable blocks, little nodes you can lick to bounce/swing/slingshot off of, difficulty flags for objects (similar to doom), objects can be 'tied' with other objects to move/etc with them, etc. There are also no limits on map size, number of maps per world (level), complexity, object limit, and lots of other stuff. Needless to say, lots of freedom in map design and I like that.

I've always liked watching kaizo (and non-kaizo) mario hack videos but I've never made maps for a platformer before so it's been a fun learning experience so far! I just finished my third map minus some small finishing touches, so I'm starting to figure some things out and have some tricks I've picked up on, but I also know I'm only scratching the surface and have so much more to learn. Anyway, rambling aside, here are some screenies and... more light ramblings!

Myfirstfroghopmap.wad.world: Jungle Jumpies

An idea of how much is shown on the screen in game:

Other than chosing a color palate, I have no idea how to do aesthetics for 2d maps, or for doom maps either 🤓 so eventually I gave up and tried to make it look nice in the editor since that's what I was looking at the whole time. I'm not sure how well it translates over to the gameplay side of things but I'm hoping I keep it not so busy that it isn't clear what is a background block and what is a foreground block. I wanted something kaizo-light, small, and simple for my first map (all the nodes do different things depending on their color) and I think this did okay for that. It is fairly easy with a couple tricky spots, tons of checkpoints because yes please and even has a little speedrun skip accidentally built in at the start lol. For my next maps, I took the luxury of being able to place checkpoints everywhere and totally neglected it 🙃

My second map: Frantic Fugues

I wanted at first to make a more traditional kaizo-ish level with bouncing on enemies and stuffs in 3 parts, with this being the first one. For this, I started experimenting with making diverging paths so each would lead to a different door I could use to tie into a separate map for each difficulty, so I wouldn't have any problems with tiles being immovable between them. I also wanted to make easy difficulty an autoscroller if the player wanted it to be, and in the process quite liked the interaction with one of the enemies that flies off horizontally at a fast speed and having the player go that same speed just in front of them, like a chase scene, which made this map very long/big. I also made a 2nd, more casual way to play the map on each difficulty in case the player wants to explororize and doesn't want to jump on enemies' heads the whole time. That influenced heavily the rest of the design for medium and hard and thus this map is not at all the kaizo thing I had originally envisioned, but instead an easy-going, layered experienced that encourages players to make their own fun and I think that's pretty cool! Even if I didn't place any checkpoints in the map 😈

On a dev note, I made a large-scale, quite ugly grid tile layer to use during this map to make lining up/measuring jumps and distance easier, especially while in game, which helped a ton, and I did different things with the aesthetics, trying to envision some light source from the top right. Jury's still out on that one but given there was so much I think it ties itself together(?); it was cool to try. I also made a really silly short story for it involving aliens because why not 🤪

Here's a video to show what it looks like in game:

My third map: Red Velvet Cake Land 

This one is kinda the 2nd part to go with the previous map. I'm not sure if I'll stitch them together or not at this point given the difficulty spike between them but for now with this being standalone I made starting and ending maps to match the previous and next ones. I also made it so each difficulty level gets moved to its own separate map, so I have total freedom to tune them, cut parts out, add stuff in, etc, as I wish. I really liked the color palate I chose for this map, largely inspired by doom's red turning brown as it gets darker, and it made me think of red velvet cake. But you can't have cake without icing and it took a while to figure out how to get the icing right. Eventually I found out that in Tiled, you can give tile layers offsets, so I made a couple new tile layers and gave them offsets, which allowed me to make the phat icing look without it looking super blocky like the clouds in the previous map. I didn't go crazy with lighting in this map and I def could have done more with the icing to really smooth things out since I made the 2 offset layers at different times and I could prolly do better with more foresight going into it, but I think the effect and overall aesthetics turned out pretty decent! This map makes me hungry now and I like that 🤤

I got the kaizo feeling down more for this one which seems to transfer well to this game. Controls are tight and responsive so it meshes well and there is a lot of room for creativity in map design and object/player interactions. I put in a setup early on where you guide an enemy projectile through a set of doors by jumping alternating on 2 big crabs 3 times each while hitting a green switch above/between them each time you pass it in order to cycle open the doors below you which let that projectile pass through so you can bounce on it on the other side to reach the next area, which is very much something I saw in a mario hack somewhere, so little homage there.

Anyway, thought these would be fun to share here since I haven't posted in a while and this community has so many mappers in it; it would be cool to hear ppl's opinions! If there's interest, I'll post more level pics as I make them 🐸 

Daily Puzzle - Real Hitori - Extreme 20

I've been doing some more of these hitori puzzles to balance out the kakuro in my vain attempt to stretch them out and I've really been enjoying the different gears these get turning! Honestly I'm still not too experienced with these puzzles, but I think the lines between difficulty levels seem to be blurred in that the extreme level puzzles don't seem to be much harder than the challenging or even hard level puzzles, though on average they do tend to be slightly more tricky.

From what I can tell thus far, easy and most medium puzzles tend to be solved by the two main special cases:

1) two numbers of the same value with one space between means the space between must be open

2) two adjacent numbers in a row/column plus a third elsewhere in the same row/column means that the third (plus any more) must be closed.

These, along with the 3 main rules, usually lead to cascades of info in the easier puzzles while the harder ones tend to leave these at dead ends, requiring you to figure at least one, if not multiple steps for mini cascades of info later on. Some of these have genuinely stumped me to the point of having to guess and check a bit more than I would like, but all of these kinda require some guessing and checking to smaller degrees (at least to learn the pattern) so it's tough to draw a line on what's acceptable and what's not really helping me learn. Still, I think looking for the patterns is the key to solving these """legitly""" so hopefully as I get stumped more I'll also pick up more of the patterns to look out for; seeing the forest for the trees.

A weird thing to note: apparently the process of scanning these puzzles has begun to kinda mentally hurt my eyes and general nerves, like seeing an unclean puzzle is just that much of an affront to the senses or something... nah but seriously idk it's a weird observation that the beginning process of scanning the puzzle and marking off non-conflicting numbers edges on my nerves throughout even my body in a weird way (making me feel almost anxious) about around the 5's and 6's, sometimes earlier but usually letting off as more numbers are marked off and I get to the easier-to-spot 7's and 8's. Maybe it's the process of looking so thoroughly and as quickly as I can up/down/left/right at each number spotted as I move along row by row. Sometimes it helps to switch to column by column, or at the 7's to just look at the whole thing and spot them less methodically, something also easily done with the starting 1's. Changing screen brightness or nearby lighting doesn't affect it and it's usually after doing a couple in a row because I'm a helpless addict. Idk just something weird.

Today's puzzle has an intimidating name: "Extreme 20," but it's actually just a teddy bear deep down; a good feel good, example puzzle to show one of the powerful patterns of these types of puzzles. After solving it I figured it'd make for a good example to post, so I went through and solved it again while taking screenshots to post along. If you feel confident enough, try to beat my time, then check the solve :D

This solve assumes you've read my previous solve (to save time and copious screenshots) so if you feel lost I highly recommend that you try checking that out to learn some of the more basic stuff.

I will again briefly cover the three main rules of these puzzles:

1) No numbers can repeat in a row/column

2) Two squares which are crossed off, or "closed," cannot be adjacent to one another along the four cardinal directions, meaning that "closing" one square "opens" up to four squares around it.

3) All open squares must connect to each other along the four cardinal directions; no squares or sets of squares can be "cut off" from the rest. We're building a snek.

The goal is to eliminate repetitions in rows/columns, thus we only have to mark the squares we "close off" to solve the puzzle. Brown squares are used to mark squares which are "closed." White squares are unknown, but count as "open" for the solve, meaning they don't have to be specifically marked. Yellow squares are to definitively mark off squares as "open," but are otherwise treated the same as white squares and again are not necessary to fill in to solve the puzzle. Paper notations use X's and O's respectively but this app uses colors. Honestly I prefer the colors as they're easier to process as the puzzle fills in.

The first thing that I'm gonna start with (for the sake of cleaning a few things up, making things easier on the eyes and easier to explain) is cross off as "definitely open" all numbers that either have no conflicts, as well as processing the numbers which interact with our two special cases listed earlier: opening those that reside between two numbers which share the same value as each other (the one in question, the middle one, doesn't have to share this value) and closing those in the same row/column as two other numbers which are adjacent to one another and share the same value as the first. Basically the 1 in the bottom left between the two 8's is an example of special case one and we'll get to an example of special case two in a moment.

This is all going to leave us with this:

These numbers all do not conflict with any other number in their rows/columns and thus are definitely open. We don't have to mark these but it does clean things up and make further steps easier to spot/process.

From here let's address that special case two: the 6 on the bottom of the puzzle shares two more 6's, which happen to be adjacent to one-another, in its same column. This means that this 6 on the bottom row of the puzzle is closed, as if this were open it would close both other 6's and two closed squares cannot reside by one-another.

This leads us to a small cascade of information: the 3 adjacent to the closed 6 is now definitively open, which in turn closes the 3 to the far right. That closed 3 opens the 7 above it, which then closes the 7 to its left and above it. The 7 above it opens a 2 to its right which closes a 2 on the far left of the puzzle. That is the end of this mini cascade of info but we'll find some more good stuff quickly.

From here we've hit the first brick wall of the puzzle and nothing further is given freely; this is what separates the harder puzzles from the easier ones, however there are a couple places we can gleam some important info on that will help us to break this puzzle wide open. I'll first show the easier one to spot then spoiler the second one in case a random reader wants to try to find the second after seeing the first as an example. It's good practice :)

Let's start by taking a look at these two blocks in particular:

Or more accurately: the 6's beside them and to the right in the same rows.

This is a pattern that is good to learn to recognize: if either the red-circled 2 or 3 is closed, then both 6's adjacent to the closed 2 or 3 would be open, which would then close both of the 6's to their right:

This violates rule two that no closed squares can be adjacent to one-another and thus it is safe to say that both of these squares (the 2 and 3) are open.

The newly opened 3 closes a 3 above it, which opens another 3 to the left of the now-closed one. The 2 closes a 2 to its immediate left, as well as another down below it. The latter closed 2 (on the bottom) opens a 2 beside it, and that leaves us with another dead end:

From here, can you spot the second one of these?

 

If either of these 8's are closed, it would open both the 7 and the 9, which would then close both the adjacent 7 and 9 to the right, which cannot happen. Therefore both of the 8's must be open.

 

This leads us to a major cascade of info which will essentially solve the puzzle. The lower 8 merely closes an 8 below it, in the bottom row (you could then open the 8 in the far bottom left since it doesn't conflict with anything if you want to clean things up but I just wound up doing that later), while the higher 8 closes an 8 to its right and closes another 8 above it:

 



 

The last closed 8 (3rd row from top) opens a 6 beside it, which closes a 6 below that. It also opens a 3 above it which closes a 3 to the right of that:

 



 

This 3 opens a 2 beside it, which closes the adjacent 2. That then opens the adjacent 9, which closes the 9 to its far left in the top-left corner of the puzzle, as well as one below it:

 



 

This 9 in the top-left of the puzzle opens a 7 below it, which closes a 7 to its right.

 

The lower 9 in the middle-ish of the puzzle opens a 7 above it, which closes a 7 to its left, that in turn opens a 6 above it.

 

We can also go ahead and clean up the two remaining 8's which dont conflict with anything anymore, which finally leaves us with this:

 

From here we are so close to done! The bottom 9 has to be open or one of the snek's hands (the open 5 between the closed 8 and 6 on the bottom row) will be cut off from the rest of the puzzle. This closes the 9 above it.

The same thing applies to the rightmost 2: it must be open or the whole bottom-right of the puzzle would be cut off. This then closes the left 2:

This finally clears up what to do about the two remaining 1's: at this point we can see that closing the bottom one would again cut off the bottom-right of the puzzle, so that must be open, which closes the 1 above it, solving the puzzle! Great job if you've followed or solved along!

And a shot of my original time for a little lighthearted competition ;D

All-in-all not too tough of a puzzle to do, despite the name. It was a pretty fun solve getting to see the same kinda logical pattern in play twice. I'll have to figure out what these are called, but for now I'll make up a fancy name... associated pairs? Good enough! 

Hopefully this read hasn't been too dry and will be of some interest to some folk, or at the very least will showcase the fun these puzzles are, regardless of how crappy my writing is! I really recommend giving these a shot; they are cool to solve!

Find the apps I use here on the google play store:

Real Hitori

Real Kakuro

These apps are amazing and I <3 their dev for making them. They control well, look aesthetically pleasing, and have thousands of puzzles to solve of varying difficulties. Really great apps!

Daily K-- Hitori?

So following concerns that I would eventually run out of new puzzles to do in the real kakuro app, (which to be fair is several hundred away from being pressing) I've started to try different approaches while putting the speed of solving secondary. I also (and what this post is about) looked into other apps by this dev and found a new type of puzzle im unfamiliar with, which is kinda exciting!

They're called hitori and are kinda like reverse sudoku puzzles where you're given a block with numbers filled in and then have to eliminate repetitions because those dirty repetitions must pay, presumably for causing so much conflict in the puzzles with one-another. Maybe it's just that the instructions in this app weren't clear enough, or that they didn't provide more than one example of stuff so I could see the pattern, but I opened the first easy one up and realized that these puzzles are nuts and people who do them are nuts. At the same time the nerd in me is like "yeah you know this is what we're about to do right" so I looked up a couple examples to start with and plodded forward learning these... after doing a few they are very fun!

I like that the puzzle is continually (re)defined by the squares you "close off," (or the repetitions you eliminate) as one of the main rules is that closed squares cannot be adjacent to one-another, which means that closing a square opens up to 4 squares around it, which occasionally cascades to other numbers in their respective rows and columns. I also really like how you can also use the shaping of the puzzle itself as you close off squares to logically open others, since all open squares have to be part of a continuous thing, moving only along the 4 cardinal directions like the old snake game. That's right we're building a snek... with multiple faces and appendages idk I don't question it. These two main, foundational rules seem to define most of the derivative strategies that follow. Otoh I dont like how methodical I feel like I have to be to solve these, they're kinda like sudoku in that aspect of methodical and potentially tedious solving, but there are also some fun logical chains and strategies to go with solving these. It treads a fine balance between mind-crushing logical searches/steps/chains, satisfying cascades of new info, and the tedious steps required to get there, which all combined is pretty interesting. Would recommend.

Important to note: idk what to call squares that you cross off, so I call them "closed" being defined based on how they affect the non-closed squares' ability to stay connected as one whole piece, not being cut off or separated fully from other "open" squares. So closed/open makes sense to me, and hopefully it will for the reader too.

Anyway, let's solve one! This is supposed to be "easy:"

I know, it looks like a lot; even with the 2 basic rules it looks like absolute hell and can be tough to tell where to start. What must the tough ones look like!? (the same) While I'm still new to these and thus may not yet know a better, more efficient way to start these, I find the tedious, methodical approach to be best for simplifying things to make it all easier on the eyes, so let's start by "opening," (or more accurately marking as being "definitely not closed") some numbers which do not conflict with one-another. You could also skip this and go to the next step which we'll get to in a moment, (2 pics) but I think at some point you'll be doing this anyway so may as well be methodical and not miss any small details which could cost time later.

So we start first with the 1's; take a look and see if any conflict with one-another:

Now for this app, we mark the "definitely open" squares as yellow, and the closed ones as brown. As you can see I've marked every 1 in this puzzle yellow because none appear in the same row or column as any others. Some friendly 1's in this puzzle; I approve!

Tangents aside, from here we will do the same for the 2's; see if you can figure out which ones to "open."

I count four of them. On to the 3's: they seem to be on the war path and there is only one that I see which is not conflicting with any others:

Wait something's different. There's an 8 marked as "open" Fauxnze check your googles. That's actually one of our special cases there: a nice, logical way to mark something as known. If we look at the 3's in that column, directly adjacent to and above/below the 8 marked in yellow, we can safely say that one or both of them have to be closed. Since you cannot have two closed squares adjacent to one-another, this means that no matter what combination of those 2 squares is closed, the 8 will be open. You know, I like the 8's; they never give me any trouble, expect that one time there were no 9's... the 8's weren't happy about that at all and made war everywhere. But that's a puzzle for another time.

Now from here we could look at the 4's, but let's stay methodical about the new info we got and follow it through to its end before continuing on. Noticing this 8 btw is one of the things we could have started with instead of starting with the 1's, then 2's, etc. but I find I wind up crossing the non-conflicting stuff anyway so taking note of every number on the board methodically makes things so much more clear, sooner. To me at least for right now with my current skill and familiarity with these puzzles. Wow that was a qualifier right there. 

Anyhoe, the 8's. Not all of them, just these two. Look to the left of the 8 we marked off as "definitely open;" there's another 8 wth that's not supposed to be there. Close that thing immediately it's not welcome here with its strife and conquest. That was scary I was worried for a moment.

This first "closed" square is a very nice piece of info to get as it will net us some more good info, probably. Remember that each square adjacent to a "closed" square is "open;" let's start opening these up. The 4 above the 8 has another 4 far to its right which it conflicts with. Knowing that this one above the closed 8 is open, we can close the one on the far right. From here you could jump to that closed square and begin opening stuff around it but be careful not to neglect the new info gained by opening each square around the squares you close. (as you'll see me do later ironically enough, though I did at least notice it on the following screenie so the damage wasn't nearly as bad as another mistake I'm about to make) So I'll stick with the closed 8 for now and continue from there:

The 9 to the right gives us nothing, but the open 3 below the closed 8 gives us info that the 3 to the right is closed.

From here we can move on to either the newly closed 3 or 4. I'll just do the 3 because my eyes are drawn to it. The 4 and 9 to the left and right of the 3 respectively give us nothing, but the 6 below it closes a 6 to its left:

Honestly at this point I'm following this new cascade of endorphins and the closed 4 is old news now so ima go with the closed 6. So the newly opened 6 above the closed 6 in turn closes another 6 on the far right of the puzzle, as well as one above it mistakenly marked as "open" for a few screenies here. (sorry!) The 8 to the closed 6's left closes the 8 below it. Wow this is nice. The 4 to the right of the closed 6 also closes another 4 to its right, yes! And the 5 below the closed 6,(!) ... is worthless dammit 5 you messed everything up by being friendly and not conflicting with your neighbors. I'm so triggered.

Continuing on the trend of being totally unhelpful, the 7 to the left of the newly closed 8, as well as the 6 below said closed 8, do nothing to help the cause. Neither do the 8 below and 9 to the right of the newly closed 4 in the bottom right-ish. It's ok tho we love em anyway, but it sure would be nice if they did something productive:

Look at them with judgement. 

Anyway, we miss the highs of our former cascading days of finding new information and making progress, so let's go chase that dragon one more time and revisit the 4 we said was old news when times were better and the numbers were bursting out of their baggies-- I mean squares. The 4 above the closed 4 is thusly open, closing the 4 two squares over to its left, (if you remember the rule we used for the 8 earlier in the puzzle, there's a 7 here that we could have opened earlier with no previous info required, which would have closed a 7 below it, but we'll get there soon!) the 6 beside the closed 4 closes two 6's; one to its left and another (which I forgot to mark for this screenie, noticing it afterwards) above it, and the 5 below the closed 4 closes a 5 to its left! Awww yeah that's the stuff I remember. It doesn't feel as good as the last time but if I keep going it'll surely get better as I continue to uncover new strategies for finding more and more numbers oh yes.

Ok now that I have no idea what I'm talking about anymore, I'd like to make a quick note that if you'll notice, I've unmarked one of the 1's we marked as "definitely open" earlier. If we hadn't have started with that to see that this one on the right hand side of the puzzle doesn't conflict with anything else, we would also be able to tell at this point that this 1 has to be open, because closing it would "cut off" the open 5 and 9 adjacent to it from the rest of the open squares. Idk if we'll be using that in this puzzle or not, so I figured this would be a good point to just note it down so the reader can see how the shaping of the puzzle itself defines also what logical steps to take. Back onto the solve!

There's lotsa stuff to do from here, but as murphy's law would have it, there's a 3 on the rightmost side of the puzzle near the bottom (below and to the right of the aforementioned 1) which fits nicely into this segue. If this 3 were closed then it would cut off the 9 above it from the rest of the puzzle, so we can safely open this 3 up. This in turn closes a 3 to its left, which is helpful, but also to be fair the closed 6 in the middle-top-ish of the puzzle was about to do that for us anyway. Still, is nice! By this same logic we can also open the 2 diagonally below and to the left of the newly closed 3, which in turn closes a 2 above it!

Taking a look at the 6 in the far top-right which I forgot to notice to mark when it had happened on the screenie previous to this one, the 4 and 7 to its left and right respectively give us nothing, but the 7 below it (which I mentioned in a previous italicized note) closes a 7 on the bottom of the puzzle. 

Moving on to the nearby closed 4, the 3 below it gives us nothing.

Looking at this, the questionable 5 and 7 diagonally adjacent to this closed 4 both have to be open, as if they were closed they would split off a part of the snek, but syrupents aren't whirlms and that'd kill them so we don't do that. So we can open these two squares. The 7 gives us nothing, but the 5 closes two other 5's to its left! 

From here we can open the 8 in the top-left, as well as the one up top-center; neither give us anything but we can also just open the final 8, in the bottom-center, since it doesn't conflict with anything and thus we can put the 8's to rest. Additionally, we can mark off three 9's as being open around the puzzle for being adjacent to closed squares, which only leaves two 9's, neither of which conflict with any other 9's, so we can just open them to also solve the ultra-friendly 9's of this puzzle. Good job 9's, you didn't contribute at all to my fun.

While we're on the mental gear of numbers, there are only three 7's left. One is next to a closed square, so we can open that one, which in turn closes the one below it. The final 7 doesn't conflict with any other 7's so it is ok to live and let live. The relationships between these numbers is getting deep.

Silliness aside, there are only two 6's left and neither conflict with anything, so we can mark those as open as well. Likewise with the 4's.

From here we are basically done, but can still go about this a couple ways. I choose to look at the 2 in the middle of the puzzle, which if closed would cut off the 4 below it, so that has to be open. This closes the 2 below it on the bottom of the puzzle, which in turn opens the 5 above that. (which we already were gonna do for the closed 3 above said 5) This closes the 5 to the right of this, which opens the rightmost 3 and closes the leftmost 3.

I'd also like to make a correction in my notation, but I marked a 6 as open earlier which was supposed to be closed, and I just noticed it because it lead to this puzzle having multiple solutions when they cannot. So that's finally fixed!

The last thing for us to do is decide whether we want to go for speed in these final seconds by going for the final conflict directly or fulfill our ocd-like tendencies by marking off all the "definitely open" squares... I say give in to the hedonistic desires of wasting time and fill in all the pointless information!

We don't have to mark all the open squares; white squares are treated as open so you only have to mark the closed squares. But I did this... honestly idk why. Nevertheless, from here we can now clearly see that the last piece of info we need is with this final, dangerous duo of 5's. As with other stuff in this puzzle previously, we can see from the shaping that the topmost one would block in a 9 to its right if it were closed, so that one must be open while the 5 on the bottom must be closed. And that, finally, wow so much text, brings this to a close!

Hopefully this will be an interesting read and a good introduction to these cool types of puzzles for those who happen upon this. I think this one, despite being easy and never making me sweat, kinda showed off some of the balance I mentioned earlier between the three components of its plot structure, for lack of a better term, in an easy-to-follow way and hopefully my rambly writing did not get in the way of that. If you like sudoku, I think you would love this. If you used to like sudoku but have moved on, definitely don't write these off; they are a ton of fun! I still think I vastly prefer kakuro but these are a great alternative with some similar logic stuffs which don't require any math and strike me as being less tedious than sudoku, while still retaining some similarities, but in reverse! Or something, idk, just give 'em a try and see how you feel after doing a couple!

Find the apps I use here on the google play store:

Real Hitori

Real Kakuro

These apps are amazing and I <3 their dev for making them. They control well, look nice aesthetically, and have thousands of puzzles to solve of varying difficulties. Really great apps!

Let's do some more Kakuro! Today's puzzle is a tough one and it does involve some decent math, but it also had some really cool logic that I was able to put into play for it and it was fun for that, so I figure I'll share it:

It looks intimidating with the name and size, but for the shaping it's not as bad as it may seem :D For one, this shape can certainly be difficult depending on how vague the number hints are that you're given, but this is also not the most difficult shape and allows the puzzle to be split in half, which is nice. Secondly, this individual puzzle gives some decent numbers to start with before hitting an early brick wall, however using logic and pushing past that early wall leads to the entire rest of the puzzle falling into place, as always with no guessing needed. I try to avoid getting to the point of guessing and checking, however there is no denying that in some situations it can be faster to do so and when the goal is the lowest time that makes it an acceptable strategy to employ; I just try to stay away from it for the extra challenge and practice for myself, as well as for the love of doing these in the first place. Anyway, enough blabbing, on to solving it:

Spoiler the solution:

For any who have solved along: congrats! For any who have read along, thanks for reading; I hope this intrigues you and you find yourself giving these a shot one day as they are a ton of fun! Especially so when you can push past the mathy stuff and get into the logic of it all; it's super interesting to solve these and explore the logical relationships between squares based on the shaping and sums of the puzzle. It's my own personal little soap opera. Cheers y'all stay with it.

Daily Kakuro, quick and easy for the day. These things are a ton of fun, requiring far less math than one might suppose based on the premise.

Spoiler the solution:

For anyone who happens on this, if you've never given these a shot then this is a good opportunity to try one out! While there is a math-y element to these in that the foundation of the puzzle involves addition between the numbers 1-9, a much larger portion of both solving these and what makes them interesting is the logical (as opposed to numerical) connections and relationships between positions or between the numbers themselves. To this extent, I would say that while these are certainly math-y puzzles, I see them as being more akin to logic puzzles than any other type, however I will also note that the easier difficulty puzzles have a lot less logic built into them and come across as being more math-based, which is a bit of a shame, though also I guess it makes sense since the first thing you need to learn is the combinations of numbers to sums and how that relates to available squares to reach that sum given no number repeats. I will also note that for the Real Kakuro app on android you can use the "cheat sheet" or better called the hint button to show a list of possible numbers for rows and columns, which could help take some of the math aspect out of this for people who are looking for a more logic-focused experience and would like to deal with a bit less math.

If you like to do puzzles then I would definitely suggest giving these a shot; once you get the basics down you'll come to find that a lot of the tougher-level puzzles have some really interesting logic and sequences built into them. Additionally, I find the aesthetics of these puzzles to be super cool to look at and that adds a nice layer of satisfaction to solving them.

Cheers y'all stay sharp :)

Daily kakuro! This one is very easy (let's set a par time for 5 mins) once you've gotten the basics down.

A thing I like about a lot of the "challenging" level of difficulty puzzles in this app is that most can be speed-solved with only basic notes and without algebraic approaches or making really long-winded connections/comparisons/correlations/whatever, though those can be fun too.

Spoiler the solution:

Stay sharp! Can you beat my time of 3:42? :D

Getting close!

Just want to post these random stupid doodles somewhere; not looking for any conversation.

Made a couple cheesecakes for my coworker who is retiring after tomorrow; I cut my finger while making the stencils for this and also wound up destroying said stencils while the cakes were baking, but without enough time to make new ones, so I freehanded the designs. They didn't turn out particularly well, heh; I'm only as good as my stencils, but I guess it's not too bad for freehanding. Still, half of foods reception is in its presentation, so I'll definitely lose points there, however they turned out well otherwise and taste awesome; I made the standard 1:8oz:1/4cup:1/2+tsp egg:cream cheese:sugar:vanilla mixture for the base layer, took the leftover from that and added in more sugar, more vanilla, and sour cream to make a top layer. I baked the bottom layer for about 25-30 minutes before adding the second layer on top and baking for another 35 at 325F. Cheesecakes are really quick, easy, and impressive treats to make, but they are also really easy to muck up; these wound up with about 1 fair-sized clump per 1-2 big spoonfuls of batter, most likely because I didn't warm the eggs beforehand and added them perhaps a bit too fast for how cold they were, as that can cause slight clumping the same as not warming the cream cheese can. I leave cream cheese on the counter for several hours to warm it up; 30 minutes and even an hour has never proven enough to rid my cakes of lumps. The eggs in this case I stuck in the fridge and forgot to pull out 30-to-an-hour beforehand.

Keeping in mind they are related to retirement, can anyone tell what they are or are they too messy to tell?

My girlfriend's 22 month old daughter wouldn't let me play some tdm alone... she got her first frag tonight ^^

Don't tell her mother

Finally got tired of cleaning the messes of others unnecessarily left for me, so a gift for my esteemed co-worker:

Christmas came early 

Stop skipping parts of cleaning and leaving them for me you lazy slob.

I baked a couple double-layer sour cream cheesecakes today. Taking one over to my girl'shouse; she likes irises so I made a stencil and put in a design with some powdered chocolate :)

Nothing like seeing Dume in-action every time I turn on my phone :)

Here are a couple valiant efforts from our beloved Doomguy: apologies on quality; phone comes with a gif recorder but it's only 15 secs max, and it takes a few secs to save and get the next one set up, so some parts are to be left to the imagination, heh.

Round 1:

 



 



 

Round 2:

 



(Assume death; you can see Doomguy has no evasion here, heh, and that cybie up close always weks him)

It's a major shame that the author of this wallpaper didn't take the time to make it legal by requiring iwads to be run, as it is not only constantly entertaining, it also is rediculously light on battery use, to the point where I see no difference between having it and having a static one; it is by far way more conservative on battery use than any other live wallpaper that struck my fancy, though the shake em up one was hilarious with the right settings, heh. Still, I nabbed it from the play store when it was up there and I refuse to get rid of it or not redownload to new phones, lol.