sleepmode!

So I'd like to propose a schedule so we can organize things

• MONDAYS are for objectively insane exhortations about other people's social behavior ("If you use a knife at a restaurant you are a sociopath")
• TUESDAYS are for engaging in paranoid reading of other people's posts ("Oh cool another post erasing the breeding fetish community")
• WEDNESDAYS are for calling out people you know only secondhand
• THURSDAYS are for hyperspecific "X group of people be like that" posting ("Women in Silverlake always wearing shorts, why?")
• FRIDAYS are for saying the most banal thing imaginable in a quote-retweet of a popular post ("Sounds like you're describing capitalism")
• SATURDAYS are for lifestyle posting ("Taking the kids to the dog park")
• SUNDAYS are for mutual critique of lifestyle posts ("If you go to a dog park you are a gentrifier and a fascist")

Hi, I'm Newton. I generally post about the things I'm playing or watching. You probably won't find anything remarkable on here.

Current interests

• Fighting games (primarily Tekken)
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Headphones and IEMs
• a bit of Anime

Thanks for stopping by!

Other places you can probably find me:

twitter
fediverse
youtube
twitch (i don't usually stream tho lol)

Hi. I post about fighting games, riichi mahjong, weird arcade shit, MMO encounter design, the neverending nightmare that is computers in $CURRENT_YEAR, and left-field special-interest holes that I fall into for a week until emerging in the aftermath of a Looney Tunes explosion.

Current projects:

• Sound and gameplay programming for Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers, an online kart racer with roots tracing back to ancient Doom source ports.
• A VRChat mahjong parlor that I kitbashed together with my boyfriend. Did you know that UdonSharp is a 1000x speed-down from native C#?
• I stream sometimes, most notably a month's worth of bizarre and forgotten fighting games every December.

Also, one time I got a glorified CSV reader blacklisted by a commercial anticheat.

Feel free to stop by and say hi!

So people are talking about L-cancel in Super Smash Bros Melee over in Elon’s World, and I have thoughts on this topic which would be better expressed in a single post than in a twitter thread.

I appreciate that you touched on hitstop here, that aspect of the conversation seems to go missing too often. In traditional fighters, people seem to mostly agree that the ability to hitconfirm is a skill worth testing, so the idea that L-cancelling rewards the ability to distinguish hits from whiffs is worth some scrutiny.

As for shield drops, fuck 'em. I'm down to remove spotdodge from all future Smash titles if it means I can have baby-easy Z+Down platform drops from SSB64 again. I miss you.

Comparing L-cancel to hit-confirming idea is one I hadn’t really considered! I think there are some limitations to the comparison but it does remind me of a point connected to the hitstop argument that says there’s an interesting strategy in potentially running into your opponent at low % (probably with crouch cancel) to force a missed L-cancel and punish because they expected the move to whiff. I think I have other problems with that from a design perspective, but that may be functional as an analog to traditional hit-confirms in a game like Melee, where much of the game is played “in advance”, so to speak

Yeah, I'm not going to argue that a successful L-cancel is meaningfully a "hitconfirm" in nearly enough situations to justify its inclusion in the game, but it's a nice framing to think about edge cases like Fox dair IMO. As designers, what skills do we want to reward players for, and why? What sacrifices should be made to create a context that rewards those skills?

the world isn't ready to hear "crouch cancelling is a conditionally available parry"

okay but no joke crouch cancel didn’t start making sense to me (and by extension stop making me mad) until someone described it as “basically like parrying”