silverchase

Did you know you can throw objects in Portal 2? You pretty much use your player camera as a cannon to fling objects by letting go of them while moving your view. This is not intended, so clever throws can just bypass or break some puzzles.

This quirk came up in a puzzle while playing co-op with a friend. We figured out a throw that would bypass the main part of the puzzle.

I've played the co-op campaign multiple times, but this time I was playing it with a friend who hadn't. It took them a while to get used to thinking with four portals. I would hang back and let them take charge in solving the puzzles, since I'd obviously know how to solve them. Except…

This level, Funnel Drill, I didn't remember how to solve, so the two of us were stumped together. After some co-op thinking, we had roughly narrowed down the flow of the problem. We needed to pass an object through that barrier to block a laser with it.

We played half-court basketball instead.

I had an exit portal facing the laser. As soon as the ball came out of it, I quickly sent out an excursion funnel right behind the ball, completely bypassing the need to carry it through the barrier.

We probably could have figured out the puzzle in the time it took us to get a successful throw.

Bonus video 🥏

I throw a disc like I'm playing ultimate with GLaDOS! It actually lands in the disc reader!

You can visit the website, or even better, curl for what you want.

$ curl cht.sh/touch

gets you this:

 cheat:touch 
# To change a file's modification time:
touch -d <time> <file>
touch -d 12am <file>
touch -d "yesterday 6am" <file>
touch -d "2 days ago 10:00" <file>
touch -d "tomorrow 04:00" <file>

# To put the timestamp of a file on another:
touch -r <refrence-file> <target-file>

Append with ~ and a word to show only help containing that word:

$ curl cht.sh/zstd~compress

Result:

 tldr:zstd 
# zstd
# Compress or decompress files with Zstandard compression.
# More information: <https://github.com/facebook/zstd>.

# Decompress a file:
zstd -d path/to/file.zst

# Decompress to `stdout`:
zstd -dc path/to/file.zst

# Compress a file specifying the compression level, where 1=fastest, 19=slowest and 3=default:
zstd -level path/to/file

# Unlock higher compression levels (up to 22) using more memory (both for compression and decompression):
zstd --ultra -level path/to/file

For more usage tips, curl cht.sh/:help.

Guess my games.

He's back with another December megadoc!

Yes, every single one

Fuck Ea-nāṣir, did my man Nanni dirty

I haven't logged into Steam for several days now. All my gaming recently has been rRootage, which I recently rediscovered after looking around on Flathub for unrelated software.

This is an old favourite of mine. Years ago in high school, I snuck it onto some computers and later saw it on others, so people were definitely copying it around.

rRootage is a bullet hell with all the extra stuff ripped out. Yeah, that's just about all there is to say about it. There are no minor enemies. Each level is a rush of five bosses. Each difficulty, from 1 to 9 then 0, has three hand-crafted levels, plus a fourth where the bullet barrages are created randomly using a genetic algorithm! All my footage here is captured from my attempts on difficulty 8. It features four game modes. There's a "normal" mode plus three modes with mechanics inspired by other shoot-em-up titles: Giga Wing, Psyvariar, and Ikaruga.

Some bosses are so dense with bullets that the game actually starts slowing down. It even seems to me that the game is balanced around this. You get more time to figure out how to navigate a field packed with bullets and your ship moves slower, which lets you nudge around safely.

It was originally released in 2003 by Kenta Cho (aka ABA Games), who has made a name for himself making shmups and quirky minigames. A few years ago, he updated it, and more recently, someone ported it to Switch. He also created a markup language called BulletML for describing bullet barrages, which has appeared in some of his other games as well as in games by others.

Getting the game

rRootage costs nothing. The official page offers Windows downloads. Some Linux distributions offer a package, and if yours doesn't, you can get the Flatpak.

(It's also free software released with the 2-clause BSD license, so you're free to mess around with its 2003-era C++ codebase, which features an obsolete version of SDL. Good luck building it from source.)

Bonus video

This is me somehow making it through a relentlessly fast bullet pattern on pure instinct.