General Chat: Dawn of THE FIRST DAY (72 hours remain)

i am legally old enough to drink now and have been for a few years.

what do i win for guessing correctly?

Yeah me too. I've been legally avoiding alcolol for years now. Do I get a prize? This game is too easy.

Sometimes I like to slip typos into words if I think they're subtle and make the word more interesting.
Also:
Arena Trap dugtrio w/ focus sash, EQ/Stone Edge/Memento/Reversal, does that sound fun or what? Might make one if I can make a Magnezone before ORAS comes out.

yo

hiveswap.

Episodic release definatly fits homestuck's M.O. I don't know what everyone else's opinion on it is, but unless I hear some strong arguements for otherwise, my reaction is 'yeah, fair enough!'

I am surprised at the change in game dev studios, though. I wonder why that happened?

Tomorrow I'll finally be able to catch up on Homestuck and stuff.

Hey, I'm legally old enough to drink even by american standarts and I don't drink alcohol either. We should start a club or something.

I'm A-OK with episodic releases and cannot drink!

Also Nintendo just sent me an extra ORAS demo code for some completely unknown reason if anyone doesn't have one yet and wants it.

Pay the hip bard cA!!!!

OCTI I DONT HAVE THE DEMO YET CAN YOU PM ME THE CODE

Of course! Sending it over now.

Well, I am legally old enough to drink and don't, but am I still eligible to join the club if the only reason is lack of booze funds?

I am not sure if that counts, but I guess you can join. You could be our designated nega-driver. Counter-driver? Anti-driver?

...

You can be that one guy who has to drink because we need to drive someone home

;P

Because that makes perfect sense, naturally. Sadly, I won't have time to drink this weekend, since I'm leaving this afternoon for a programming competition over in Chapel Hill tomorrow.

Hey, you won't hear me complainin'. Someone's gotta that job after all, apparently!

Also happy halloween everyone, and have a/ had a/to have had had a spoopy evening! And remember, if you see a fairy, stay the eff away. We had assemblies in primary school warning us about fairies magicing away little children. Ireland is a dangerous place...

Also have fun with the programming competition cA, what does the comp entail? Speed coding? Hacking? Showmanship? Programme that most closely adheres to the heuristic principles of design?

you guys can drive me to and from the bar
and i guess i will buy tinning cheap shitty beer like budweiser until he stops complaining about it

that way you guys can drive two people to and from bars

Basically, you get a bunch of problems that you're supposed to write programs to solve. You have five hours to solve as many as you can as quickly as you can, and in the fewest attempts. For example, one of the qualifier problems was to write a program that could tell you whether a given representation of a chessboard was a valid solution to the Eight Queens problem.

Hmm. Off the top of my head I can only think of a brute force solution; a nested loop to run across the board, if a queen is found you check all the squares radiating from that point (x +1, y + 0, x + 1, y -1 etc) to the end of the board and if another queen is found, false, finish the loop completely, true. A bit of a pain to get those specific loops going but it's logical and straightforward. Is there a better way to do it? Sometimes these things have solutions that are so way out of the left field it's hard to know how anybody thought of them on the first place.


Like, the algorithm for checking if a point is in a randomly drawn enclosed shape. What you do is, you draw a straight line in one direction (any) from that point so it passes through the shape. If the line intersects the shape edge (excluding tangents) an even number of times, it's outside the shape, odd is inside. It's remarkably clever and not at all obvious.

The brute force solution is what I did, and it got accepted. There was one trick to that problem though: your program needed to make sure that there were actually eight queens on the board.

Oh, okay. I'm fairly confident I'd have gotten that, as long as the question defined the parameters of the board you're testing. It's the kind of thing I'd spot.

Sounds pretty interesting. I've never done any kind of code competition though because I'm not really competitive and in massive doubts about mah skillz D:

EDIT:

GUYS A FUNNY HAPPENED
so I got a great ditto from a neat guy on Smogon (seriously it's got perfect Hidden Power special sweeper stats, AND modest) so I started breeding my Magnezone! I should get it shortly. But then I panicked! Because I haven't got a nickname ready and I already used Turing for my Rotom and Tezzles (Tesla) for my in-game Helioptile.
So I was desperately trying to think of something techy, thinking of people known for code, coming up blank... and then I thought broader, into electricity and that... and a name dropped into my head: Faraday! Like the Faraday cage. Which sounded good after a double-check.

Aaaaand then I wondered if anyone else had ever called their Magnezone Faraday. And you know what the fourth result was?
https://pokemonquarantine.forumotion.com/t23-the-nickname-suggestion-thread

Uhhhhh, "similar" minds think alike?

Weeeell, at least you'll not have going to be dissapointed then. Past you was looked forward at you approvingly.

On the other hand I AM. I said I'd name either my slowbro or my Y character chief, and I did neither :I Fair enough on the slowbro because I got an awesome one for the secret almost santa, but no excuse for Y-guy.

Well, I am excited about those game news.

ALSO, GUESS WHO HAS ACCESS TO A NEW POKEMON GAME?

DID YOU GUESS?:

Homestuck update was the best update. Is it weird that I actually really dig Cal's drawing style here? This "sucky" way of drawing must take absolutely ages to accomplish, and I kinda like it. #clearlynotagoodartcritic

Also OJ I expected different, but you could not have gotten a better pokemon game, so good for you.

Thanks tinning, I saw it cheaply in the store I went to to ask about that Shiny Gengar event thingy, so I bought it. I'm excited to play it, I greatly enjoyed Crystal and was very sad when I noticed that the battery had run out and everything had been lost.

HeartGold/SoulSilver are still in my opinion the best main series Pokemon games ever made. Better than XY even (though only marginally, those two are very close). I'm like 100% certain ORAS will knock them off that spot when they arrive for me, but yeah. You made an excellent choice.

Also, has anyone else been playing around on Pokemon SHowdown with the ORAS Megas? We have the stats, so showdown made a lovely ORAS OU Tier for us, so I've been testing things out. Mega Diancie, whilst not yet tested by myself, is going to be really, really good (considering its non Mega is already excellent). Mega Salamence is truly terrifying, you have to kill it quickly or you WILL be swept.

I really like Mega Lopunny, it fills the exact role I hoped it would (A buffed Mienshao) and I've been having a lot of fun with it.

Mega Swampert I've done like one battle with, but he seems great too.

I quite like the new meta. The pre-ORAS one was pretty great, mind, but few of the new megas seem really broken (though IMO Sableye is kind of a ticking timebomb... someone's gonna figure out a way to tear teams apart with that thing. It's such a weird Pokemon). And Slowbro is unfairly bulky. But the rest? Surprisingly fun to use! Even Pidgeot and Beedril have proved themselves as being not terrible! 

Sooner MSalamence gets the boot, the better! I'd nearly say a quickban on release. The thing is worse than gen 4 Garchomp. And I hate Game Freak for what they did to Greninja... Protean was already such a blatantly OP (that's not to say Broken, though) ability, and 'ninja had JUST enough to make use of it viably. And then they give it tools to dismantle all of its counters. Admittedly not all at once, but you're fighting a losing battle trying to guess, and Protean Gunk Shot and Low Kick on mixed sets have already replaced Hydro Pump and Dark Pulse on a lot of common sets. ALSO still no word on Defog so imma hate GF even more >

on the other hand, Knock Off Diggersby + Synthesis Gourgeist + Drain Punch Chesnaught <3 I nearly don't miss Aegislash - everything is so varied nowadays!

What's the highest level of voltorbflip you guys reached?

I forgot. What are the numbers involved, again? I came up with a good algorithm for most of them, but ultimately the harder ones all come down to coin flips. Fun times were had... for terrible, terrible payoffs. In my head, I think I could reliably get to 4??? Is 4 a thing in voltorb flip that is hard???

P.S. Homestuck is really good lately!
P.P.S I had something else to say but I've forgotten that too so I'll edit it later.