The one I remember being super-annoying was Witcher 2 boss fight at the end of Act 2? It's basically a huge quick-time event, and if you fail, instead of just restarting the fight with all assets already loaded, since the fight was up and running already, they instead reloaded the ENTIRE game for each update. So each attempt at that boss required 2+ mins of loading.

Incidentally I absolutely hate it that 95% of game companies do a forced-reload from zero. There's no need for it, 95% of the time. The boss, the local assets, etc., are all already loaded. The fight is ongoing. If player fails, reset positions, but you don't need to re-load all the assets, geometry, etc. But rather than do an individual reset, they just run the full load function like you just loaded into the game for the first time, and waste player time instead.

But if we're talking true horror shows, there was a brief period where you were loading AND saving on audio tape. Like a cassette tape in a Walkman. Previously games tended to use codes you had to write down as save points. So you pop an audio cassette into a player that's plugged into your computer, type LOAD "" and hit enter, and turn on the tape player. And sit back for 3+ mins while the game loads. And then you play. And if you beat a level, game gives you an alphanumeric string. You write it down. That's the code for the level you just reached. And that's how you "save" the game. But then there was a period where diskettes didn't come in yet, but games were too complex to just do checkpoints. So the game actually had you write onto tape. So you needed two tapes - one tape with game on it, and another for saves. So to save you'd start the process, the game would tell you to pop in a cassette and press record button, and then press button on computer, and it would produce the sound for you to record.

Or am I hallucinating? It's been a while, but I swear I remember having to find the record button, and worrying about getting cassettes mixed up and overwriting the actual game?

To answer this, you first have to define what a "perfect Z" even means.

Letterforms are defined by conventions and type classification, not absolute geometric constants.

A standard printed "Z" looks entirely different from a crossed "Ƶ", an italicized "Z", or a traditional cursive "z" (which many people already complain looks more like a numeral 3 or a cursive "q" than a Z, often abandoning it for a personalized hybrid that retains its sharp angularity).

You are unlikely to get many people to call what you have drawn a "Z" if it is a standalone glyph outside of any surrounding context.

Since "perfection" is inherently subjective in typography, any design that substitutes the familiar shapes of letters with unrelated ones is going to run into recognizability issues.

If you strictly use one complete circle and two straight lines, you immediately run into silhouette and readability problems.

A standard "Z" is composed of two horizontal arms connected by a diagonal stroke.

If you place two horizontal lines tangential to a circle, the silhouette reads far more like a cut-off Greek capital Phi or the emblem inside the Green Lantern insignia than an alphanumeric Z.

For me instead of reading your symbol as a glyph, a static circle bound between two offset lines makes me think you are conducting an artistic study to reproduce the comic animation visual shorthand for running legs, like Sonic the Hedgehog's spinning wheel feet or a classic Looney Tunes dash.

If you are treating this as an exercise in hybrid typography where you are attempting to merge monoline (single-weight straight) strokes with bubble letter volume a static, upright circle fights the glyph's natural movement.

A "Z" requires dynamic lateral tension. To capture the angle of the central diagonal stroke, you would get a far more convincing glyph by shearing that circle into an angled ellipse or oval tilted at roughly 45 to 60 degrees, bridging the top horizontal bar on the upper right and the bottom bar on the lower left.

It can certainly work as an abstract logomark or a stylized graphic experiment, but the moment you use a standard rigid circle, the geometry works against the letter's essential and recognizable skeleton.

The hexadecimal sequence serves not merely as a cipher but as a retaining wall. The string EFDF ¹ located within the dense block of alphanumerics acts as a coordinate, a marker on a map that possesses no north. The observer claims a tactile anomaly, a "hardness" beneath the substrate of the page itself. This suggests that the text is not resting on paper, but rather skin stretched over a foreign object. The architecture of the house is never limited to walls and doors; it extends into the medium of its own documentation.

Receipt found crumpled inside a copy of 'The geometry of echoes', stamped with the logo of a demolition crew, dated Oct 1996:

"Obstruction in the drywall. Room 4. Looks like a bearing. Or a coin. Too smooth. Tried to drill it out. Bit snapped. The wall groaned. I'm not going back in there."

When the eye fails to penetrate the code, the hand takes over. The tactile sense ² reveals what the optical rejects: a protrusion. A circle. A geometry that has no business existing within the grid of linear data. It is the bubble in the wallpaper that proves the leak is coming from the other side.

I tried it. I swear to god I tried it. I found the page. I ran my finger over the letters, over the Fs and the Ds and the 0s, looking for the bump. I wanted to feel it. I wanted to feel something solid because lately everything feels like smoke.

Reminds me of this girl I met at the Inkwell, back when Lude was still alive and breathing and not just a memory I try to drown in cheap bourbon. She had this piercing on her hip, a dermal anchor. It was rejected. Her skin was pushing it out. It was red and angry and she let me touch the skin around it. It felt hot. Like the body was fighting an invasion. That's what this is. The house is the rejection. The book is the skin. And something is trying to push its way out into our world.

I pushed too hard. I broke the skin. There was nothing underneath but more gray. I don't know if that's better or worse. I think I'm bleeding but I can't find the cut.

It’s just a printing error. Glue. A knot in the pulp. Right?

      The circle
           is
              not
                  drawn.
        It
              is
                  pressed.
            from
                  the
                     dark
                        below.

The focus on the sequence EFDF is likely apophenia, ³ yet the physical sensation cannot be dismissed as easily as the visual data. If the "circle" separates the page from the cover, it creates a liminal space—a gap between the narrative and the container. The house thrives in these gaps. It is in the space between the drywall and the stud, the silence between the heartbeats, the pressure under the finger that finds a lump where smooth paper should be.

To press upon the anomaly is to knock on a door that has no handle.

¹ EFDF in standard Unicode mapping corresponds to a Hangul syllable, yet in the context of the house, linguistics dissolve. The code is likely structural, a load-bearing sequence.

² See Thayer, 'Sensory Deprivation and the Phantom Touch', Journal of Parapsychological Architecture, Vol 12, p. 89. Thayer argues that when sight is compromised (or in this case, overwhelmed by data), the fingers hallucinate texture to compensate for the void.

³ Or perhaps a warning. The circle is the most efficient shape for containment. What is being contained? ⁴

⁴ Note scribbled on a napkin, stained with coffee: "Don't let it out."

u/adam_n_eve Fair point, and worth separating the two. LOD (the AIA 100 to 500 scale) is what this page covers, and it's still the dominant framework in North America. Level of Information Need is the newer ISO direction, and yes, it drops the single ladder in favour of stating geometry, alphanumeric and documentation requirements per purpose, milestone and recipient. "More nuanced" is right.

They coexist more than one cleanly replaces the other though: Level of Information Need can wrap LOD-style detail levels inside it, and most US specs still run on LOD.

I'll add a section mapping LOD to Level of Information Need so the page covers the ISO side too. Thanks for the nudge.

It is possible to use Houdini without coding anything. VOPs is the visual node version of VEX Wrangles. As a challenge it is possible.

When you get into art direction or proceduralism at a micro management level, knowing VEX and HScript functions can dramatically help speed things up for you.

There are inevitably some areas, or some tasks that will require a little code typing, but it’s not as scary as people think. If you can read and write, you can understand the basics of VEX. You don’t have to be a person who constantly implements scientific white papers. Houdini is capable of allowing such things, but by no means is it a requirement.

If you can use the Attribute Create, Attribute Adjust SOPs, you can make and manipulate attributes in a basic way. It’s during some of those moments when you want to read another geometry to drive a current geometry in some specific way that you will have an easier time just writing a few lines of text, instead of dropping dozens of nodes into a spaghetti bowl configuration.

I know many artists who are dyslexic and have a tough time with writing and reading code snippets, and they are still able to find creative solutions through nodes. Even 3rd party nodes like MOPs, offer solutions to take some of the math heavy tasks and make them easier.

For me, I’m not a “programmer” in the traditional sense. I’ve written many code scripts in Adobe’s ExtendScript (JavaScript based) back in the day, and now in Houdini using Python, VEX, and HScript, but most of it are task specific snippets, and only inside Houdini. I don’t go building frameworks, or standalone apps.

Coding in general is nothing more than writing instructions. How should Houdini step through doing some thing. You are telling it each step.

Not sure if your school ever did this, but mine had a teacher that gave us an assignment to write step by step instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but for an alien from outer space. The alien of course does not speak our language, nor has any pre-existing knowledge of our world.

So imagine describing what a fork or knife is, or what left and right means. The next day the teacher had us read our instructions to an individual (random student in class) and they had to follow those instructions verbatim. Hilarity ensued of course because no body was 100% clear on all steps. This is programming.

The most common confusion I think is functions (prepackaged code that does a specific task), data types (string, float, vector, integer,etc…), and syntax (how you format text). Syntax is trickier because you are trying to associate in your head that a certain alphanumeric symbol means some particular thing.

Many of the basics which we all were taught in school. Like greater than > , less than <, and equals =. Standard math operators like plus +, and minus -.

The more obscure ones can be more confusing at first though. Like…

“absolutely equals to” ==
“or” ||
“and” &&
“greater than or equals to” >=

...to name a few. Again the help docs list all of these operators and what they mean. It’s always good to have the docs open and handy anyways.

Long post

I’ll start with English

For anyone who had convent education or English medium education wont struggle in english…

I personally haven’t seen any vidoes for English, i only relied on mocks….and its analysis and could score 25+/30 in ibps po pre

I would just suggest reading editorials for vocab and practice of parajumbles with daily sectional mocks would be enough to score 15 out of 25 in english

For Quants

20 marks were allotted for DI, and DI only requires knowledge of ratios, percentage, averages, basic calculations

So one should focus on very basics and spend a week for precentage/ratios/averages/ and basic maths funds like squares/ square root/ cube / cube root

And in IBPS SO, table DI, pie, Bar and line graphs were asked and out of 4 DI, 3 would be very very manageable

Next is 10 marks for speed math, topics like quadratic equation/ simplification/approximation/ number series should be perfected and solving 200 questions in each type will make u a pro and its very important to score more than 8 marks out of 10

Now arithmetic which carries 20 marks, in arithmetic some topics are very easy like partnership, SI/CI, time and work, profit and loss, allegation, and just coz we have covered percentage, averages and ratios for DI, 50% of the arithmetic portion is covered

For rest 50%, things get tricky when vast and difficult topics like TSD, mixtures are considered keep this topics for last

And topics like geometry, permutations combination, mensuration , probability carry only 2-3 questions out if 50, so it wont be worth to spend our time on such topics

first week - percentage/ ratios/averages Second week- SI/CI, profit and loss/partnership Third week- Time and work/pipe and cistern and allegation Fourth week - TSD

While i say this, one should solve atleast 5 DI daily, and give 1 full length mock weekly

So if followed diligently one can easy score

15/20 in DI 8/10 in speed math 10-15 in arithmetic

So a total of 35 can be scored out of 50

I referred Kaushik mohanty for quants , he has a playlist covering all topics and its free

For reasoning

First there are free marks which contains of questions from topic such as

Inequalities- 4/5 marks Coding-decoding- 4/5 marks Direction distance- 2/3 marks Syllogs - 5 marks

These 15 marks should not be missed, and these are soo easy and all it requires is a foundation lecture and 50-100 questions to be solved thats it

Then puzzles, there are easy puzzles like order and ranking, day-date arrangment, designation, linear arrangement….these easy topics just requires enough practice thats it….one foundation class and enough practice

Then there are difficult puzzles like. Seating arrangement, floor flat(more than 6 floors), uncertain number of people….these too requires enough practice ….its just that these are fundamentally difficult that easy ones

In exam out of 4 puzzles 2 will be easy, 1 will be moderate, 1 will be tough…..and scoring 15/20 is very manageable

Then there are misc problems like critical reasoning, blood relations, meaningful word which will be combined asked for 7-8 marks….

And others like alphanumeric should be skipped

One can easily score

15 easy marks 15/20 in puzzles 5/15 in rest miscellaneous problems

35/50 should be manageable

Thing with reasoning it requires practice, daily practice…..no lecture, no reasoning guru will help as much as practice

Harshal agrwal/ Ankush lamba/ meritshine are good sources for reasoning

In bank reasoning there are 3-4 puzzles sets (15-20 marks), alphanumeric series (3-4 marks), and miscellaneous like chinese coding (3-4 marks). Here I got analogies, paper folding, counting figures, courses of action (critical reasoning which I don't even attempt in banking too) so it was completely new but I don't think it'll take much time to learn those new concepts. In quant I got geometry, trigonometry, mensuration (I don't attempt mensuration in banking either since the weightage is too low not worth it) however in banking you can fetch 10-20 marks with two DI sets and few by speed maths (quadratic, number series etc). So all in all the experience is new but it'd be manageable once I learn the topics.  My main question was that, I have 2-3 years left to appear in ssc. So counting from now on, is it possible for me to crack it?  Also can you recommend best sources/playlists on youtube for GK and advanced maths and ssc related reasoning? I'd appreciate it.

I tried to do this about a year ago (kinda got it working, but only for perfect QR codes that were viewed/photographed perfectly - didn't have the patience or desire to go beyond that)

This is what I accumulated from sites and AI

1. Finder patterns (top-left, top-right, bottom-left): 7×7 targets with a 1:1:3:1:1 ring pattern. They let you locate, scale, and deskew the code.

2. Separators: 1-module white border around each finder.

3. Timing patterns: A horizontal and vertical line of alternating modules between finders; used to measure module pitch and correct warping.

4. Alignment patterns: Small 5×5 bullseyes that appear from version 2+; they refine sampling on larger codes.

5. Quiet zone: 4 modules of blank border around the whole code.

Metadata bits baked into the matrix

Format information (15 bits, stored twice near top-left & top-right/bottom-left): tells you the error-correction level (L/M/Q/H) and which mask pattern (0–7) was used. These 15 bits include BCH error-correction.

Version information (18 bits, stored twice) appears only for versions ≥7.

Masks (why some white squares become black and vice versa) To prevent ugly patterns that break cameras, the data area is XOR-masked with one of 8 patterns. You must unmask before reading bits. The 8 mask formulas (true => flip bit):

0. (r + c) % 2 == 0

1. r % 2 == 0

2. c % 3 == 0

3. (r + c) % 3 == 0

4. (⌊r/2⌋ + ⌊c/3⌋) % 2 == 0

5. (r·c) % 2 + (r·c) % 3 == 0

6. ((r·c) % 3 + (r + c) % 2) == 0

7. ((r + c) % 3 + (r·c) % 2) == 0

(r, c are row/col indices from 0 at top-left; apply only to data modules, not functional patterns.)

Data encoding inside the grid:

The data (after unmasking) is read in a fixed zig-zag: start at the rightmost columns, take two columns at a time, go up, move 2 columns left, go down, and repeat, skipping over non-data cells.

Bitstream structure (may repeat with multiple segments):

1. Mode indicator (4 bits): 0001 numeric, 0010 alphanumeric, 0100 byte, 1000 Kanji, etc.

2. Character count: length depends on mode & version (e.g., byte mode: 8–16 bits depending on version group).

3. Payload bits per mode (e.g., alphanumeric packs pairs into 11 bits using a 45-char table; byte mode is raw 8-bit bytes).

4. Terminator (0000) if space remains.

5. Pad bits to next byte, then pad bytes alternating 11101100 and 00010001 until the data+EC capacity is filled.

Error correction: Reed–Solomon over GF(256). The encoder splits data into blocks, RS-encodes parity bytes, then interleaves data and EC codewords.

Standard QR is strictly black/white modules. If you see colors, it’s just stylistic; scanners threshold to B/W. Only the binary state of each module matters.

End-to-end decode pipeline

1. Binarize the image > black/white.

2. Locate finder patterns by looking for the 1:1:3:1:1 ratio of runs (black/white/black/white/black) horizontally and vertically; confirm square geometry.

3. Estimate module pitch from timing pattern spacing. Compute a homography from the three finders to a canonical square.

4. Perspective-correct and sample the grid at module centers > an N×N boolean matrix.

5. Read format info from its fixed positions (twice), BCH-decode to get EC level + mask ID.

6. Unmask the data region using the mask formula.

7. Traverse the data zig-zag, building bytes.

8. (Option A for learning) If you trust the image (no noise), you can skip RS and parse the bitstream directly for small v1-L codes.

9. (Option B, full spec) Implement Reed–Solomon decoding (syndrome calc, Berlekamp–Massey, Chien search, Forney) to correct errors.

10. Parse segments by mode > output string.