Discussion (111) ¬
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Sean Thomason @seanthomason.bsky.social ⋅ 8h
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 9h
Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com ⋅ 10h
Dana Simpson 
@danacorn.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Dana Simpson @danacorn.bsky.social ⋅ 1m
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Barb O. Saur 
⚧️
Sal gonna break the world record aint she?
She’s on a post-sex high, she can do anything.
Honestly speaking I really hope not. Sal beating a record that is heavily implied (if not outright stated I don’t remember) to rely heavily on complex glitches to be possible would go right past my suspension of disbelief.
IIRC, the glitch that Amber’s been trying to do is literally impossible to do on the base NES hardware.
So is beating Tetris. Humans lack the reaction time to reach the level where it glitches out and ends (which is considered beating it apparently).
… except some kid did. It was on the news. A human played Tetris so long and so well that he broke it, a feat that only AI has accomplished before.
Or, to quote, “Nothing impossible, Mario, only improbable.”
At that high level of Tetris, you’re not reacting to the piece appearing, you’re reacting to it showing up in the Next box. That gives you just enough time. As for Mario, one or two speedup tricks require pressing Left and Right at the same time, which is physically impossible on a stock controller. (Which means that those tricks are actually banned for RTA speedruns.)
You’ve confused a couple things there. See, it’s not that human reaction time is too slow, it’s that the way the game had been played until sometime in the 2000’s was by pressing a direction and holding. At level 29 a piece needed more frames to get over to the side than were possible moving it that way. What happened is people started hyper tapping (I think that’s what it’s called?) and then “rolling” to move pieces faster, getting past the traditional kill screen. What the kid did earlier this year was crash Tetris, which requires you to get to certain levels and clear a specific number of blocks while there.
Yeah, the issue with the NES Tetris was that the physical controller response times were too slow to get past a certain point. People COULD respond fast enough but the hardware couldn’t. Someone however figured out a trick for how to get faster reactions out of the controllers by triggering the inputs in a different way. And even then the kill screen only happens at certain points because it’s based on how at certain points in the game there’s a risk of a buffer overflow in memory.
It’s fascinating stuff, really.
Yeah, the repeated input if you keep the pad pressed is rather slow. People started just pressing and releasing repeatedly. But that, too, turned out to be too slow, so they invented a new completely bonkers method where they hold the controller upside-down, have the pad press on a hard surface, and instead they tap with their fingers on the back of the controller, this way they can “roll” by tapping with different fingers and that’s faster than tapping with always the same finger.
All in all, Tetris championship seems, to me at least, to be very unhealthy for one’s carpal tunnel.
Rolling is actually a lot less hand-destructive than hyper-tapping.
I know it isn’t certified, but my mom absolutely beat/broke Tetris playing it in the 90s because she would get absolutely outraged at having to start over and couldn’t go farther.
Fuck certification anyway. Oh, some shadow cabal of democratically elected Nerd Chancellors grants this video game legitimacy? Big friggin’ whoop, fight the machine in all its forms.
I, for one, welcome our new mechanical overlords.
It’s not like they’re going to do any worse.
i love thinking of the speedrun certification team as the ‘Video Game Shadow Cabal’
Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-spension of Belief
Summing Salt Voice: Sal123’s one-handed ‘flip the bird’ strats on the NES controller single-handedly revolutionized the game when it came to Super Mario Bros. 1 speedrunning
(“We’re Finally Landing” by Home starts randomly playing out of nowhere)
She might break Amber’s viewership record, if she’s on stream playing video games in her underwear. (She said she left the stream running yesterday.)
That would be a fiasco if Danny left his laptop streaming video on, that would mean a lot of people watch them have sex.
uh oh
Spaghetti-O’s
Welp, here’s Amber’s supervillain origin story.
Gonna be weird with a supervillain and a superhero sharing the same head. Bet they have to tape a line down the middle and everything, like on old sitcoms.
Is that what the corpus callosum is for?
That’s what it’s against.
IIRC Einstein lacked an adjacent fissure between the left and right part of his brain, apparently
Works for sentry.
I dunno. Given Amber is confirmed DID, I think that would play too much into the stereotype of there being a “good one and a bad one”?
I’ll agree with you because I love the idea that the only reason Amber ISN’T evil is that she doesn’t want to be a cliché.
That sounds like it should be an M. Night Shamalamadingdong movie. The hero can never catch the villain in the act. Then at the end we find out they were the same person.
what a twiiiiist!
Interesting. I know Sal likes Mario Kart, but I sort of got the impression she otherwise doesn’t game much. If this helps her dexterity, though, I’m all for it.
Woohoo! Seven (7) months! :O
Yes, it is so comforting to know that when David dies we still have something to look forward to, if only for the following seven months.
Hopefully Willis won’t die until his 90s, or later! By then, the comic should be in the characters’ Junior year of college.
Seven months is impressive on multiple levels.
Just like in “Night Of The Comet.”
And that is how they became mortal enemies once more.
No, absolutely not, I’ve watched Summoning Salt and I refuse to believe she can do a TAS level run first go
Would actually do more damage to my suspension of disbelief than the kidnapping sagas.
“Car surfing superhero car chases with last second motorbike rescues I can handle but a completely inexperienced player with a gammy hand recreating a tool-assisted speedrun is where I DRAW THE LINE!”
THIS WAS IN FACT THE TRAIN OF THOUGHT IN MY HEAD, YES
The key difference is that Amber and Sal already had the skills necessary to pull it off. An inexperienced player pulling off something like this is like Rey beating a Sith on her first try while it took plenty of training for both Anakin and Luke.
Yeah good thing that when she finally did actually face a Sith, she had training and pretty much the entire light side of the force helping. Cause Kylo was never a Sith, and she merely fought him to a standstill while he was severely injured.
God, Rise was so bad.
Wider shots of the TFA fight give you a better idea of how both Rey and Kylo fight. Rey thrusts like she’s still holding her staff, Kylo is sloppy not only because he’s bleeding out but because he thinks he’s easily going to win. Then Rey gives herself to the Force which is the classic “I win” button in Star Wars. The Force Awakens has its problems, but they’re almost all entirely tied up in how it’s just Episode 4.1.
One of the things I have realized on rewatches is that the fight chorography is very much being used as part of the storytelling. Like some of the stuff with Ben in Rise I initially thought was bad choreography I later realized was trying to show that he was now much more in tune with the force.
And TFA being 4.1 was a direct result of fan complaints about the prequels. Disney was trying to avoid those complaints and went too far.
Luke got his ass handed to him every time he fought a Sith. The only time he slightly won was when he started flying into an intensive gamer rage on Vader, and then he got his atoms deep-fried with lightning for his troubles.
Rey lifted some rocks and got called slurs for it.
a little-known runner by the name of ‘MotorbikeScarQueen69’
Yeah, as a huge speedrunning nerd (who just watches other people do it and content about it), this is like… not a possibility, period
I think it would make more sense (and be more interesting) if Sal somehow accidentally streamed on Amber’s Twitch account and her cool girl persona combined with her awkwardness with video games made her incredibly popular amongst Amber’s viewers.
Maybe she’s just going to get really into it and do it after a bunch of practice.
What she just lucks into a random glitch/skip that hadn’t been discovered before? That seems plausible to me.
You’re gonna lap yourself if you’re not careful, Willis! (You’re scarily impressive!)
I just know that someone in this comment section is going to know exactly what level Amber’s talking about, even if that someone is not me, and for some reason that makes me happy.
Also I’m pretty sure that should be “Piranha” Plant, not “Pirana”?
Amber, of course, is using the misspelling that was present in the original SMB manual.
It’s apparently been fixed…
I’m pretty sure that’s a new background, unusual perspective.
I mean, if Sal throws herself into this pressing buttons while keeping rhythm and memory in mind, like she would play music…….
She’d probably like Beat Saber.
I haven’t played Hi-Fi Rush, but I’m pretty sure there’s at least one character she could cosplay and would never need to work again.
Home – ‘We’re Finally Landing’ plays on a hacked muzak
Someone had to perform that summoning
If it hadn’t been here, I’d have done so
I’m listening to the 1:00:00 loop right now, except to get it all through the last loop they had to make it 1:03:07
I would ugly cackle omg.
oh no
xD
You just had to say the magic words, didn’t you, Amber.
do it sal
So a blind speedrun. Imagine…
SPEEDRUNNER SAL IS BACK BABEYYY
in the dark souls scene there was a case where a novice discovered a completely new glitch that turned the entire strategy upside down.
Recently, the Tetris record was broken due to changing the way the gamepad was held.
Sal breaking the record is possible, but it’s also very unlikely, plus she’d have to stream it
Someday I strive to have the level of Autism™ that Amber does
or the sheer luck from the author that Sal does
Yes! Like, I need to finish the real Hollow Knight ending. If I have only 25% from Amber, I could end it, for sure.
Sadly, my “level of autism” is tots different.
It’s all about training and building up your muscle memory. First time I discovered GodHome I didn’t even dream of trying the Pantheons. Now I have all chains on all of them (only the first two with all chains at the same time though XD). It’s all a matter of training.
Also do yourself a favor and don’t unlock Grey Prince Zote yet XD
Too late. I hate this boss. :,(((
Yeah Zote is a PAIN, all my homies hate Zote. I wish you good luck
Dum, dum dum!!!
Oh no!
This is going to be more brutal than the robbery, ain’t it? <.<
I sense a disturbance in the Force.
Sal exists to take things from Amber and I don’t think Amber has grown enough to quite get over that fact. Though it would be a rather nice bit of development for them both to bond over this and become actual friends rather than simply “We used to be enemies but her alter-ego plays roller derby with me.”
Joke’s on all of you, Sal is contemplating eating that controller. She’s gonna put it in her mouth and chew, and there’s nothing Amber can do to stop her. The taste isn’t an obstacle, the viability isn’t an obstacle. This isn’t a court of law, Sal is just simply going to eat that controller.
Sal’s going to get caught masticating on-stream.
If she somehow beats the speedrun record that way, she’s going to break Twitch.
Twitch could probably stand a little breaking. I don’t keep up with current events on that website, but it’s gotta have some glaring problem or other that could be helped with a little ruination and decay.
Oh i like you.
Ah the rivalry continues.
I’m sure have a rival like Sal in her favourite game could help Amber be interested in what’s happening around her again. But I’m worried this could hurt Sal and make her relationship with Danny more complicated.
Why would either of those consequences happen?
Haven’t you seen Reefer Madness? Basically that.
No, I have not seen the 1936 film Reefer Madness.
Me neither.
What??? It’s a classic!
Not saying what it’s a classic of.
It’s an anti-weed propaganda film inspired by anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese hate that resulted in the substance being banned in the 1930s
Not really worth the watch unless you need it for a class assignment or something
Congrats on 7 month buffer, Willis. Thinking about it, you’re getting, like, faster than time.
Didn’t she say she left her stream running last strip? So everything Sal’s about to do is going to go live isn’t it?
I’m pretty sure Sal is still in Danny’s room? Unless she randomly decided to walk over to Amber’s room in her underwear.
Yeah, I don’t quite follow what’s supposed to be happening here.
It’s all narratively set up as if Sal’s going to at least challenge Amber’s speedrun record on stream, but all we’ve got literally is Sal’s thinking about playing something in Danny’s room?
Okay. Last time we saw her and Danny, they did talk about Amber’s stream, so there’s at least that link.
Even then it’s weird that she’s still in Danny’s room.
I could see her walking back to hers without putting pants on.
What, you’ve never just hung out in somebody else’s room while they went and did some stuff for a while? It’s not that weird.
If she needs pants, she can borrow the ones Joyce left there.
pulling a sweet prank by hiding Danny’s ukulele. And blankets.
Not only a 7-month buffer, this comic is implying that Willis is drawing it with his eyes closed.
while jumping backwards down the stairs
lmao the nemesis
…Amber’s gonna stab Sal again, isn’t she.
Amber never stabbed Sal, that was Ethan.
Why did Amber stab Ethan?
GJ on the 7 month buffer!
If I had one of those on anything I’d be sorely tempted to take a digital nomad visa in the mediterranean for at least 3 of them.
worth remembering that sal is pretty good at gaming from the little we’ve seen
say what you will about mario kart, you don’t pick up random crazy strategies like bouncing yourself off a moon immediately (and successfully deploying them) without a surprisingly intuitive understanding for someone who, as far as we know, hadn’t been gaming before that
this could get wild
DRAMATIC MUSIC INTENSIFIES
7 month buffer? Dang, son… rate you’re going, the day you retire, no one is going to notice for 3 years.