#mse's playing head over heels

[ettadunham]

the nature of science and math is that many games my random adventure game generator gives me are going to be older titles. which i absolutely love and is admittedly one of the reasons i got obsessed with this little project of mine; trying to figure out where to find and how to play those old games is the kind of challenge my nerd brain loves (sometimes even more so than the games themselves).

that being said, it's nice when an old game is actually available on steam to play.

well... it probably would've been nicer if head over heels (originally from 1987) wasn't so damn buggy. at least when it comes to the 2019 PC remake that is on steam right now. it took me several tries and restarts to be able to edit the controls (which didn't work in their default settings with my controller or keyboard), it crashes regularly, and even when i close it normally, it often ends up running in the background without me noticing.

some might even find the latter feature a bit suss, given how it could easily sabotage people trying to take advantage of steam's refund policy that's available under 2 hours of gameplay. on the other hand, it's also a game that could be finished in an hour (not by me, but someone i guess, lmao), and i know with those games, developers get screwed over more often than not. in any case, i already paid a reduced sales price for it, so i'm personally not gonna complain much about it.

as for the game itself... it's a cute platformer. you play as two dogs, who can jump around, build steps and fire doughnuts(?). they can also jump on each others heads so you can control them together. apparently.

i haven't actually got around to that part tbh. this game is hard, okay?? idk how to see in this weird 3d space. i just watched someone else play through the game, lmao.

the remake's graphics look really cute though, and the intro song slaps. so it definitely wasn't a waste.

#adventure game extravaganza #mse's playing adventure games #mse's playing head over heels

[thousandmaths]

So I’d never heard of this blog until I was chasing down an image for some post and I fell head over heels in love. Instead of trying to find the right words to say about it, I used random.org to choose ten completely random posts from this blog. They are about:

cyclic sieving

an unusual sequence

reflecting functions on the upper half-plane

golden ratio in polyhedra

the top 20 journals in analysis?

polynomial approximations of square wave

more on that unusual sequence

attempting to distribute items uniformly

exact numerical integration

distribution of knight positions

and if you read them, you will probably agree that

wow that is a pretty diverse set of interests

they are all pretty substantive 

they are all pretty interesting

they all lie somewhere between good and excellent

they are all rather quick to read

most of them are very accessible

a lot of them pose small open questions

a lot of them contain code to play with

The guy who writes this gem is a professor at Syracuse University named Leonid Kovalev, who works in geometric function theory. Unfortunately, his web presence is very minimal; [ apparently Kovalev is someone who I’ve actually interacted with a lot on MSE, in the wayback machine o.O ] the blog does not even have an ‘about me’ section, and his webpage is similarly spare.

Although a perfectly valid way to enjoy this blog is just to start at the top and read the posts in order. There are about 225 of them, written over the last 5 years, as of the time of this writing. 

But you probably don’t want to rush through them in a week because you’re surely going to want to fiddle around with some of these ideas. So I’ll let you in on a little secret: every year he selects one post from each month to put on his “Calculus VII syllabus”. Here are links to those syllabus posts: (2012) (2013) (2014) (2015) (2016 isn’t out yet)

[ Why 7, you might ask? Nobody knows the answer to that, apparently...]

#math #maths #mathematics #mathema #blogging #writing #outreach #blogs I like #woah #stealing other people's content #mostly