summoning salt

Summoning Salt traces the speedrunning history of Mario Kart 64's Choco Mountain track and its famous shortcut, through the successive record holders and discoveries. It carries an epilepsy warning for flickering lights.

Joseph Everett argues, drawing on the book The Salt Fix, that most people benefit from more rather than less salt, and reviews studies on sodium, potassium and blood pressure.

The Explosions&Fire channel taste-tests the chloride salts of the alkali metals (lithium through cesium), plus some alkaline earth metals and ammonium. The presenter describes the flavors, and the results are more pleasant than expected.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on thorium molten-salt reactors (LFTR). He covers why the technology was shelved after early development and argues that now is the right time to revisit it.

A KQED Truly CA documentary narrated by John Waters about the Salton Sea, a once-glamorous California vacation spot now home to an eccentric community. It covers the area's economic, political and environmental problems and features Salvation Mountain.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, a design that could burn nuclear waste and use thorium as fuel. It draws on Oak Ridge National Laboratory work from the 1950s and 60s.

Summoning Salt's roughly two-hour documentary traces the history of Tetris world records, from early play through the modern competitive scene. It is a long, well-researched narrative about the players and techniques that pushed the records.

Scott Manley explains the nuclear salt water rocket, Robert Zubrin's concept of a rocket fueled by a rapid nuclear reaction in uranium salt dissolved in water. He covers its extraordinary performance and the dangers of managing it.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science builds and operates a simple mass spectrometer, using it to measure potassium isotopes in a salt substitute. He explains the design choices and the theory behind it.

A short documentary about the 1980 Lake Peigneur accident in Louisiana, where an oil rig drilled into a salt mine beneath the lake. The lake drained into the mine, creating a whirlpool that swallowed barges.

A 2011 remix of over six hours of talks by Kirk Sorensen and other thorium advocates, explaining thorium as a nuclear fuel and the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). It argues LFTRs could produce energy without long-lived transuranic waste.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk making the case for the liquid fluoride thorium reactor as an abundant, safe source of electrical power. It covers the technical motivations and design of thorium molten-salt reactors.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andrej Karpathy on why reinforcement learning is flawed, why AGI may blend into steady GDP growth, why self-driving took so long, and the future of education. The conversation runs about two and a half hours.

Pannenkoek2012's commentated tool-assisted Super Mario 64 run collecting the Watch for Rolling Rocks star with half an A press, using parallel universes and QPU movement. The video is marked outdated in favor of a newer version.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) shows 'reverse emulation', using a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge to give an unmodified NES new abilities such as playing SNES games. The video starts in a strange way and gets stranger.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

Matt Parker analyzes the Minecraft speedrunning controversy in which Dream was accused of cheating via improbably lucky drops. He walks through the probability and the statistical arguments in the original accusation and the reply.

A long video essay on MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod uploaded by an anonymous user that hides unsettling secrets in its walls. It tells the story of the map, its mystery and its liminal horror.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow by MrWint that uses arbitrary code execution to push Game Boy hardware to its limits. Through crafted inputs it injects code and ends up running other programs, such as Tetris, inside the game.

A recording of the TASBot block at Awesome Games Done Quick 2017, where a robot plays games via tool-assisted speedruns, including Super Mario 64 and Portal on an SNES via arbitrary code execution, and ending with a Twitch Plays segment. It showcases console exploits and creative hardware hacking.

Modern Vintage Gamer examines the claim from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project that the game shipped unoptimized, and puts it in the context of 1996 N64 development.

Pannenkoek explains how Super Mario 64 handles wall, floor and ceiling collisions, including triangles, normal vectors, quarter steps and out of bounds. It is a detailed 37-minute technical walkthrough of the game's physics.

A look inside Dr Abrasive's lab as he engineers a flash-card replacement for the Sega Saturn optical drive after cracking its CD protection 20 years on.

In the finale of Double Fine's Devs Play, speedrunner SMK demonstrates glitches and exploits that skip entire sections of Psychonauts while Tim Schafer and the dev team watch. The developers react to and discuss the bugs as they appear.

Linkus7 explains how a community reverse-engineered The Wind Waker to predict its random number generator and beat the Sploosh Kaboom battleship minigame consistently. It includes d3 animations by Peter Schmidt-Nielsen.

A 33c3 talk by marcan on reverse engineering the PS4 hardware to run Linux with 3D acceleration. It covers how the console differs from a PC and includes a story about tunneling PCIe over RS-232.

A five-hour documentary history of the Super Mario 64 A button challenge, which aims to beat the game with as few A presses as possible. It covers the bugs and exploits discovered over the years.

SethBling performs the first credits warp in Super Mario World on a real SNES console, a glitch that plays the ending without beating Bowser. The run relies on pixel-perfect positioning and tools such as a helper ROM hack.

Cosmo's 22:38 Ocarina of Time speedrun, performed live at AGDQ 2013. The runner uses a complex exploit to skip much of the game.

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.

RustConf 2020 closing keynote by Sian Griffin that dives into Pokemon Blue glitches, notably Missingno and arbitrary-code-execution tricks. It uses them to explain how memory unsafety works and how memory-safe languages like Rust prevent such bugs.

The fail0verflow team (bushing, marcan, sven) present console hacking at 27C3, covering Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 exploits. They explain how the PS3 was cracked after Sony removed Other OS.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

A short Coding Secrets episode explaining why hitting a Sonic 3D cartridge triggers a hidden level select. The cause was a custom crash handler that redirected CPU error interrupts to the level select screen.

FitMC tells how the Nocom exploit let griefers track players across Minecraft's oldest anarchy server, 2b2t, and the fallout that followed.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow on Game Boy Color that uses glitches and frame-precise inputs to make the game execute an arbitrary program. It was later obsoleted by an improved run.