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I could stare at this for hours.

Okay, so I was dicking around on ebaumsworld and I came across the following page:

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/peoplecount.html

I’m not spoiling anything when I say that there are 12 people in the first part of the animation, and 13 in the second. However, I have been staring at this for about 40 minutes now and I cannot figure out where the extra person comes from. I even loaded up this picture into an image editor and recreated everything by hand, and somehow an extra person comes out of nowhere and I have no idea why.

If anyone can explain this to me, I will give birth to their child.

So, I had my class today in Databases, but the subject matter is not important. What’s important is the projector that the professor used to teach the class. This is just an ordinary projector. It took video input from his laptop and shined it onto the whiteboard at the front of the class. I’m sure most of you have seen this kind of thing before. He was using Power Point to display various screens with white background and black text. The projector was bright enough that he was able to leave the ambient room lights on.

Then I realized the part of this that blew my mind. The black text being displayed was just the color of whiteboard it was being displayed on. That is, if a projector wants to display a black portion, it doesn’t shine any light at all on that portion. So, when I saw black text, I was reading the non-lit parts of the whiteboard surrounded by the lit parts. The text looked genuinely black.

Whoa.

I am a fan of time attack movies. For those not familiar with time attacks, they are videos of speed runs through various video games. An important thing to note is that an actual human is not playing these games. They are carefully executed frame-by-frame to (hopefully) complete the game as fast as is technically possible. If this interests you, check out this site.

You can grab AVIs of the time attacks, but the way time attacks are distributed in the purest form is with an emulator movie file. This file contains all the information about which buttons were pressed at which moments for the entire run through the game. Then, if you wanted to watch it you could plug it in to an emulator with the game ROM and watch it played via those button presses.

Now, I am building up to talking about a very specific time attack video I watched last night. Somebody managed to create an emulator movie file (series of button presses) that works for two different games, Mega Man X and Mega Man X2. In case that didn’t sink in, that means that the exact same controller input will complete two different games from start to finish. In fact, when you watch the AVI of it, you see both games played through side-by-side. You see both Mega Men jump and shoot at the same time, but in two completely different situations. How the author (DeHackEd) did this I may never understand.

I suggest you download and watch the greatest time attack ever conceived (as of July 17, 2005).