On Growing up and Decisions

As a child your parents teach you the difference between good and bad decisions.  They wait behind you and give you a choice: one bad and one good.  When you choose the bad they swoop in and chastise you for picking the wrong one and if you pick the right one they explode overjoyed at your selection.  From a psychological standpoint this is called operant conditioning where they use positive and negative reinforcement along with their own ideas of good and bad.  This portion of parenting is designed to give you basic decision-making skills and keep you alive and whole to learn enough to develop your own value system and make informed decisions.

As young adults we try to adapt those ideas we were taught as toddlers to the world at large and soon we realize that there is no black and white; that nothing is so simple as what was used to teach you.  As an adult, no decisions are wrong or right, but rather decisions have consequences and you have to decide if your goal or your desire for achieving that goal justifies the risk present in the consequences.

SF4 Game Mechanics: Meaties and Safe Jumps

>Youtube Video – Proof of Concept – SF4 Game Mechanics: Meaties<

>Youtube Video – Proof of Concept – SF4 Game Mechanics: Safe Jumps<

When you knock your opponent down, you have a number of options to sway the match to your advantage, whether that is creating space between you and the op or building meter. Two other options you have are: meaties and safe jumps. A meaty is an attack timed to make the active frames of a move coincide with an opponents invincible recovery while a safe jump is usually a meaty jump-in timed so where if the opponent does a reversal on wakeup you can still block/avoid it. Both meaties and safe jumps lose to certain moves, namely non-normal strikes invincible specials and grabs. They lose because invincible specials effectively make the move whiff so remaining active frames and recovery frames determine if the reversal will hit. Both meaties and safe jumps allow you to “force” a situation that wouldn’t be possible otherwise and allow option-selecting.

SF4 Game Mechanics: Blocking (Balrog Emphasis)

>Youtube Video – Proof of Concept – SF4 Game Mechanics: Blocking<

Blocking allows you to avoid 2/3s of all attacks in the games (strikes and projectiles). As Street Fighter is “loosely” based on actual fighting, there are a number of mechanics that fall under blocking such as: autoguard, proximity blocking, trip guard, fuzzy guard, block strings, and block stun. In general, you can block strikes and projectiles, you can’t block grabs but you can tech normal grabs and you just have to avoid command grabs in general. Normals don’t cause chip damage when you block them, but specials do; generally specials are slower than normals so in a chip damage situation an op will start a simple block string with a normal and then cancel into a special to inflict chip damage..unless you have a dragon punch. Also something that makes normals really good is that in block strings they maintain your opponents STUN, meaning that if you get a good combo in on them, and keep hitting them, even if they’re blocking their stun doesn’t go down.

SF4 Game Mechanics: Focus Attacks (Balrog Emphasis)

>Proof of Concept – SF4 Game Mechanics: Focus Attacks<

Focus attacks in general is a game mechanic which changes properties depending on how long you hold it,  there are three levels when you charge a focus attack. A focus attack has hyper armor during certain points  of the move’s animation in which it can absorb a single non-armor breaking attack. Focus attacks have startup, active, and recovery frames.  Level 1 and level 2 focus attacks have hyper armor during the charging but not during the swing (animation where charging stops and the actual attack begins, this will be referred to as the “swing”) while level 3 FA’s have armor up until the attack hits. Lvl 1 can only crumple stun on CH, lvl 2 can crumple stun on hit but is blockable, while lvl 3 is unblockable, crumple stuns on hit, and breaks armor.  No focus attacks cause chip damage.

PART II – Money Woes – What a budget can/can’t do

This is more of an opinion-piece and a collection if ideas that supplement things said in the first part.  Topics it touches on include debt, stretching money, as well as my ideas on what to do with unexpected costs.  Towards the end I note some maxims, presented in bold.  Some of them are pretty far out, and were described by the word ridiculous by those who proofread.  That aside the are still applicable to financial decisions you made especially using the process lined out in the first part.

PART I – Working to Make your Money Work for you

When it comes to managing money, the argument for nature vs. nurture comes to mind.  Some people inherently know how to use money efficiently and effectively, while some simply do not.  This guide is intended to spell out methods of using money in a way to keep more of it in your pocket and also at times make it seem like there’s more than it really is.  A general tool for managing money is a budget: a cyclic plan describing how much can be spent on what with the goal of under-spending in regard to your income.  Under spending is when you spend less than you make, and over-spending is when you spend more than you make.  The remainder of this article will describe how to make an initial budget and caveats to the process as well as a sample budget.

Inherent Fallacies

Dayna and I were on the way to Don’s house to meet his brothers and I had an epiphany I labeled “inherent fallacy”. I used that to describe situations where someone believed with all their might that something was true but it was based on some really bad logic. For example, there are guys who cheat on their girlfriends/wives chronically and believe without a doubt that they (meaning their partner) will never cheat on them or leave them. I mean its like a big circle jerk. Its this property that they use to glorify the situation by rationalizing that she’s my number one because she’ll always be by my side.

SF4 Game Mechanics: Fireball Avoidance Patterns

In Street Fighter an important caveat is the difference between fireballs and body projectiles. Fireballs are an extension of the character without a hurt box and can cause damage full screen, while body projectiles follow the character and can be countered since the hurt box follows as well. Just as much as its important to have a seemingly random fireball pattern that zones you opponent both in mindset (impatience/annoyance) and where they are in the environment, its important to have a pattern of fireball avoidance, that moves you forward and puts you at an advantage.

Ranbat Season 1: CASUALties – Tourney #1 a.k.a. 38 Cent Invitational

This was a local Houston impromptu tourney organized by Antonio Alexander (3nigmat1c) subtitled 38 cent invitation because of the hobo who asked to “hold” 38 cent while Mycah Leonhart and party went to grab some change for pizza and some squares. The idea of the tourney was to play each other, get better, and try to rekindle the comradery that the scene down here should (or doesn’t seem to) reflect. Also players got to have their matches on youtube to make it easier to get feedback if they were so inclined.

Rant #3

I had this brainstorm the other night, while talking to my girlfriend about parenting.  It was: Parenting by Reflex; let’s say ” that few parents ‘plan’ how they are going to raise a child.They’re children and just make decisions as they go.  Some parents may raise a child a certain way because of how they were raised or because the detest the way something is done.  I just want to have an outline, a colletion of ideas about parenting so when we decide, or we’re thrust in such a situation we’ll spend more time raising and less time figuring it out.  And yes I understand you can’t know everything prior to, but having an idea of what you would do is just as valueble.