David V. Kimball's Blog, page 2

My Thoughts on Rivals of Aether II

Since it's release about a month ago, I've been really enjoying my time with Rivals of Aether II. The shiny new platform fighter makes its way onto Steam after its predecessor, Rivals of Aether, had been getting updates for nearly a decade.

I wanted to share my thoughts on Rivals 2 as it's an interesting cross section of what I really love and appreciate about platform fighters, and has surprised me in several ways, with just a few complaints.

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Game Feel

In short: it feels great. Thanks to more ...

Technology-Aware Parenting

ContentsJust Days Away

My wife Esther and I are expecting a newborn son in the coming months. Time moves so fast that I might as well consider it mere days at this point.

Amid the excitement and myriad of other complex emotions - I'm feeling a sense of uneasiness, specifically around technology use around my children-to-be. I don't want to use screens as a crutch to raising them if at all possible (maybe it's a na��ve sentiment to think I can avoid them to begin with?). Regardless, I want to sa...

A Deep Dive into Melee's Cut Stages

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Why I Pay for Email Now

In the early days of the internet, I was always on the hunt for free services.

Whatever was free. Sign me up.

Email was no exception. I started with Yahoo Mail in 2005, and it felt like magic to send messages instantly to anyone around the world at no cost.

Quickly I realized there were better options out there (that were still free somehow), like the promising competitor Gmail. I still remember the excitement of receiving a beta invite. It was sleek, had tons of storage, had cool new features l...

Everything We Know About Super Smash Bros. Melee's Development

Super Smash Bros. Melee Development Documentary

To start things off, I present to you my first documentary about Melee's dev, Elevated: The Development Story of Super Smash Bros. Melee. This is a 2021 video I uploaded that covered most of the story.

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Digital Functional Optimization: Get to Flow State With Software

I write a lot about technology and productivity generally, but today I'd like to talk about an approach to interacting with the digital world and provide a definition I haven't seen articulated before (at least holistically). It's deeply personal to me because it's connected to my love of technology and communication, and at the same time relates to my personality type, how I process information, and how I get things done.

When "digital functional optimization" (as I'm calling) it is properly em...

Competitive Stages Are Actually The Best Casual Stages, Too

I've written about competitive vs. casual fighting game player preferences before, but here I'd like to focus on just platform fighting game stages.

Of course, what better showcase of this topic than beginning with the Super Smash Bros. series? By far the most popular games in the platform fighting game genre - it has a healthy dose of both competitive and casual players to consider.

Novelty vs. Predictability

A question I posed in my previous blog post on the topic is how do you measure fun for...

The Antidote to Too Many Messaging Apps

How many messaging applications do you use? Here's a few of them:

SMS / RCS text messagingDiscordSlackFacebook MessengerLinkedIn MessagingX / Twitter Direct MessagingWhatsAppSignalInstagram Direct MessagingTelegram

Imagine being able to use all of these in just one app organized by threads. That actually exists!

A relatively new app called Beeper aims to be a one-stop-shop for all types of messaging apps. According to their manifesto, they created the app based on the belief that the ...

Super Smash Bros. Melee Twitch Stream Overlay Tour

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I've been streaming on Twitch for 10 years now, and my stream setup has gone through a lot of change in that time - and so has my overlay design.

I decided to create a video that goes through each element of it, and I wanted to do a more detailed write-up as well. So here we are!

To get everything to work, I use OBS Studio with StreamElements (SE.Live), MixItUp stream bot, a Stream Deck XL, and a GoXLR Mini audio interface. I may go over my stream setup in more detail in a future post.

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Top 5 Productivity Apps for Couples

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My wife Esther and I have been looking for helpful productivity software and apps we can use to help with scheduling, organization, budgeting, and getting things done.

While admittedly I was the driving force behind this pursuit initially, she has adapted quite well to our tools and I think we're in a good rhythm now.

We have established repeatable processes for life occurrences. For example: we get invited to a social gathering? We check our shared calendar. We have a new online accoun...