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Can the controller go diagonal?

Aw, that was such a sweet time in video game history.

I get that my performance will change depending on whether I'm expecting a test or not. But I think if my car has its breaks slammed, it's going to stop in less than 9m starting at 30km/h, regardless of whether it's expecting it or not. It's the stopping distance that I'm feeling is larger than it should be.

A couple questions. Is the stopping distance in this diagram the distance the car travels after the driver has completed their reaction time and started hitting the breaks? And where does the value from this distance come from?

I wouldn't have thought to ask you before. A lot of times people just post things they find online that impact them in some way. But you seem to have a lot of knowledge that goes beyond just seeing this image.

And, anecdotally, I was driving late last night and an animal jumped out into the road ahead of me. I would like to avoid hitting an animal just as much as hitting a person. But I didn't immediately slam on my breaks to stop the car as quickly as possible. I gradually squeezed that break pedal until I was rapidly slowing. So maybe my assumption about stopping distance is wrong. Maybe the car can stop faster, but when driven by average people it doesn't, simply because average drivers don't stop optimally.

And looking at 60km/h, that's 17m/s and they are claiming a 43m stopping distance. That would be like hitting the breaks and your car just slides on the pavement for 2.5 seconds, traveling the distance of an Olympic swimming pool, before stopping. That's only reasonable in the worst possible driving conditions. Or maybe with an enormous and heavily loaded vehicle?

Or maybe I'm being too optimistic here? Maybe these are numbers from actual accidents and in real life people hit the break slowly at first and stuff like that?

I'm trying to figure this out too. Those distances seem really suspicious. At 30km/h, I'm pretty sure I can stop my (admittedly small) car in less than 1 car length. Maybe half a car length, something like 2m? Way less than 9m.

I'm honestly having so much fun getting out in my neighborhood and completing quests

Okay. A couple of others now that I'm thinking about them.

From The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente, a book about an Earth swallowed by rising seas:

MY NAME IS Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, and also the hibiscus flower that has recently decided to grow out of my roof, but I haven’t named it anything yet. I love encyclopedias, a cassette I found when I was eight that says Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 on it in very nice handwriting, plays by Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Webster or Mr. Beckett, lipstick, Garbagetown, and my twin brother, Maruchan. Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears. But he doesn’t visit anymore.

Also by Valente, the opening for Osmo Unknown and the Penny Woods

Once upon a time, in the beginning of the world, a certain peculiar Forest fell in love with a deep, craggy Valley. The Forest was very dashing. For a forest. Full of tall, thick trees and soft meadows and thorny brambles and a number of clever, bushy animals. The Valley was quite the catch as well, full of great big blue stones and clover and fat black hens and orange flowers. The whole wide earth agreed it was a very good match. And so the Forest and the Valley decided to do as folk have always done and settle down together to see what they might make between the two of them. They put their heads together and tinkered with the stones and the sky and the moon and the autumn and the spring. They pottered about with mushy dirt and rainstorms and exciting new sorts of pumpkins. They went abso- lutely bonkers over mushrooms. They experimented rashly with a year boasting four hundred and seventy-eight days, rather than the usual three hundred and sixty-five. They dabbled in badgers; hedgehogs; raccoons; bears both giant and pygmy; red-, green-, and blue-tailed deer; jackdaws; owls; parrots; cassowaries; flamingos; coots; herons; and pangolins. Most of these weren’t meant to live anywhere near the Forest or the Valley, but they were young and rebellious then and cared nothing for anyone else’s rules.

I remember the book Feed by Mira Grant having an opening scene that 100% full throttle right away. I looked it up just now. It's not quite how I remember it, but it's good and it was a great book, so I'm commenting with the quote here.

It’s amazing what you can use for a ramp, given the right motivation. Someone’s collapsed fence was blocking half the road, jutting up at an angle, and I hit it at about fifty miles an hour. The handlebars shuddered in my hands like the horns of a mechanical bull, and the shocks weren’t doing much better. I didn’t even have to check the road in front of us because the moaning started as soon as we came into view. They’d blocked our exit fairly well while Shaun played with his little friend, and mindless plague carriers or not, they had a better grasp of the local geography than we did. We still had one advantage: Zombies aren’t good at predicting suicide charges. And if there’s a better term for driving up the side of a hill at fifty miles an hour with the goal of actually achieving flight when you run out of “up,” I don’t think I want to hear it.

I get that you're being practical here. You're not technically wrong, and the people who are disagreeing with you really are arguing points of nuance.

But they aren't wrong either. That nuance matters in certain contexts.

You can pick this hill to defend. Or you can learn something that you didn't know about the people in your online community, and probably your IRL community too.

Embrace learning something new. It will almost never be a waste of your time.

I appreciate you.

Wow. Yeah, absolutely. I had forgotten about that game until you mentioned it. Thank you for reminding me. It's entirely unique and deserves to be remembered. But yeah, I don't think I have it in me to replay it.

Third vote for Silverbullet here. I'm really enjoying using it.

This is exactly where I'm at too.

They wasted tons of time showing us battles between people who don't matter just so they could work in a gratuitously long genocide as early as possible. And that means there's no time to develop Aang's character or relationships. So we just get wooden actors staring at the camera and saying "You are a kind and generous character. We are friends". If they had put the characters first and trusted that the audience will care about these people without CGI battles, when they did get around to showing scenes of emotional turmoil and conflict it would have been way more impactful.