I totally agree. I was focusing on getting the positioning of symbol layers and such right, and I wanted that to be independent of the number of thumbkey so when I add thumbkeys back in (say for weteor/grumpy) the core layouts will remain the same.

Personally I’m not sure it’s worth it longer term. 5x3+2 is my preference but I’m doing this to sort my layers so I can try some of the unibody split keyboards that have less keys to go round.

Yeah I’m doing it to establish a common layout for my symbol / number / navigation layers more than anything else, so I can expand from there to some 28 and 30 key keyboards as well as the Ferris Sweep with some consistant muscle memory.

It’s my own layout starting from Colemak DH with the “missing” outer keys on another layer.

Somewhere in the middle? More of late night realisation than anything else.

To be fair I am planning on putting them back at some point.

I’m working on a core 18-key layout that I can expand anywhere up to 34 keys, so I have a consistent layout that I can use on some of the unibody split keyboards that are usually in that range of keys.

I use the Hario Switch almost exclusively for pourovers. It’s glass plus you can throw in immersions with it. Bit spendy compared to the plastic cones though.

I think that is where I am heading in my thoughts. In principle I love the idea that “everybody plays the same game” so I am in favour of the single queue, fixed timeouts approach and I see how that naturally leads to MR12 because much of the player base just does not have the spare time for MR15. BUT … the economy is the beating heart of CS and losing that ebb and flow - as you describe it - either to steamrollering or to irrelevance will be terrible.

I don’t know what the solution is. I would personally fix it by removing pistols (except as default secondarys to avoid reloads), increasing the available cash for round one and rebalancing the rifles for greater variation in cost and performance, then adjust the loser bonus to be bumpy enough to return some ebb and flow to each round. But that is just out there theorycrafting 😁

Beautiful design. I love the casing over the nice view and roller.

Having watched Launders comments I am kind of curious about the effect of having more pistol rounds - in the sense that as he says the maps are designed around full utility usage and guns with certain characteristics, and pistols just aren’t suited to execute on that properly so the rounds behave completely differently.

Would we want our economy to become compressed so that there is one pistol round at the beginning of each side to determine a kind of advantage then, from there, there is no significant “breaking” of the economy? Or would we want the opposite, where one break can basically decide the outcome of a side of a map?

The thing about MR15 is that we don’t really have to make those decisions because there is always time to recover, especially with the way the loss bonus works. Just the change to MR12 means a team lagging behind might not have enough rounds left to build up max loss bonus for a full buy, and further enhancing the loss bonus compresses the economy as I described above leading to full buys almost every round.

And let’s not get into situations like when Valve decides to add a few hundred dollars to the price of an M4 or something like that. MR12 will magnify the impact of every game balancing decision.

Will there be other changes, say to loss bonuses? Breaking will become far more significant because there will be fewer future full buy rounds from which to recover round deficits.

On the flip side, going 12-N and losing a few rounds on the trot will feel far more pressurised because there won’t be so many rounds to make up and force OT.

Thinking of the third map of the Katowice final where it was seemingly impossible that G2 could catch up to Ence’s lead but they were kind of doing it? With less rounds on the board that game would have been done and dusted before Ence was able to buckle down, win a bloody round and get to 16. That would be your 3-0 grand final folks. Yay?

Yeah they’ve left the dipper in it too.

I know you don’t want to spend too much but there’s also no point buying something that misses the mark in terms of the grind you need for the espresso you want. When I was looking at grinders for espresso I narrowed it down to the 1zspresso J-Max for a hand grinder or the Baratza Encore ESP for a machine grinder. Both are a bit more expensive than the basic options but give much more versatility for dialing in grinds.

Yes it’s to keep my wrists a bit further apart but also to give my pinky fingers less work to do.

Yeah I’m new to it and still getting used to it. I’ve gone the slow but accurate route, which is incredibly frustrating, but I’ll get there.

Haha its actually a Neon Genesis Evangelion themed keycap set so the additional keycaps are icons of the angels. I have them wired up to Vim and AutoHotkey shortcuts.

It’s mostly a copy of my 34 key layout so the thumb keys are shift - space - enter - layer. Having the spacebar would throw that off. I was tempted but in the end I didn’t want to lose a key on the top three rows for “enter”.

I just worked out that a rotary controller can be mapped onto a mouse scroll wheel, which suddenly makes a lot of sense. I’ve been sitting here thinking “why would I want a volume knob? Why would I want two?” Is there anything else I am missing about rotary controllers?

I think once you accept that standard keyboards are laid out as they are just by convention and nothing else, and that moving to a new layout will take a bit of time, the prospect of having a keyboard where everything is exactly where you want it to be becomes quite thrilling. This is actually my first bit of real typing using Colemak DH. It is excruciatingly slow to touch type but I didn’t know it at all two weeks ago. In two more weeks time I’ll have my first split keyboard in my hands. So it’s definately doable…

I was going to write a bunch of things about the Switch but I guess they would apply to most other pourover drippers too. I’m coming from the Chemex as a comparison, which is lovely but a bit slow and unwieldy for that one cup of coffee.

Having said that what makes the Switch stand out to me is that it feels like such a high quality piece of kit, and having the immersion element in the mix really suits me. My brain interprets that as “big aeropress” for whatever reason.