#tilde ath->til death

[mmmmalo]

Just saw a very special word on my dash so here's a dumb pun I was humoring earlier:

Caliborn's shirt depicts a red tilde striking through the letter U, right. Consensus circa 2012 was that this represented the Red Miles killing a Universe, while also invoking the ~ATH (til death) code that brings Lord English into dead reality. But since the cherubim's U can mean You (parcel to their function as parodies of the audience), ~U also works as a more general icon of aggression -- since Caliborn is flipping people off all the time with his little tumut emoji, "FUCK YOU" feels right. So if we take the tilde to mean "fuck" and consider that ~ATH was introduced alongside Sollux's lisp, we could read the programming language's name as "FUCKASS".

[newttxt]

exceptiional work on that 4/13 drawing for being the exact visual experience of being attacked with a large metal baseball bat while scrolling down ones dashboard not just for the homestuck of it all but the SCATHING accuracy to characterization. i cant argue or get mad because youre absolutely 100% right. that is EXACTLY what troll straw hats would look like. that is PRECISELY what their horns and colors would be. you peered into a parallel dimension where all media is made of homestuck humans and trolls and saw this like some kind of terrible oracle. im applauding you the way a warlord does to the adversary that defeats him right before being executed . im in awe. im furious. great work all around thank you for sharing

ANKDKDKCKDK THANK YOU SO MUCH

yes. i actually put a lot of thought into that. i dont know if you actually wanted to hear it, but now i have an excuse to ramble.

the whole thing started as an excuse to make law’s death tattoo say ~ath like in homestuck (its a pun on tilde + ath. aka “til death”). but then my brain started whirring. like making mutant blood luffy (god-coded) but the universe is a beetle not a frog.

i wanted the straw hats as trolls, and the rest of the worst gen as humans. then i was coming up with horn designs (chopper keeps his. usopps are slingshot shaped. etc). that was fun. i knew i wanted zoros to be santoryuu and sanjis to be curly. oh, and fuchsia seadweller sanji who hides his blood color anyway.

idk the rest is stuff that i couldnt jam in one drawing. law dragging luffy to his quest bed after he gets a hole punched in his chest. beposprite. eustass kid setting his strife specibus to like, wingnutkind, and killer telling him “you cant change that, you know.”

normal things. im normal about one piece and homestuck.

[bolasmasivas]

hey did you know ~ATH isn't just a funny programming language and that if you're not an idiot like me you'll get it on the first read. TILDE ATH. TILDEATH. The whole language is about loops executing a function after something dies. Til Death.

WHAT .

[sadderqueerenergy]

I just realized.

~ath

Tilde ath

Til death

Wow

a selection of items and accessories ive made for the homestuck fangame The Genesis Project

[georgebbwbush]

confession: i literally didn't get the "~ATH" programming language bit from Homestuck until i saw someone explain it like two months ago. it's "'til death"

[night-dark-woods]

OK im listening to a podcast abt homestuck and ~ATH the programming language sollux uses??? ITS PRONOUNCED FUCKING TIL-DEATH (TILDE-ATH). i have been. just. calling it Ath this entire fuuuuucking time.

[qqweebird]

honestly the fact that ~ath is supposed to be “tilde-ath/til death” is still really clever to me. when i first found that out i was like oh my god, the absolute madman. the goddamn genius

[29pageshomestuckeveryday]

Homestuck, page 2,002

======>

It is a thick programming manual called "~ATH - A HANDBOOK FOR THE IMMINENTLY DECEASED." ~ATH is an insufferable language to work with. Its logic is composed of nothing but infinite loops, or at best, loops of effectively interminable construction. The above page in the intro section documents the simplest possible ~ATH code structure. Any code deviating from this basic structure will not compile. You have a whole bunch of code samples you've been messing around with on your computer. It's been frustrating at best, and debilitating to your machine at worst.

Author commentary:

As far as satirical programming languages go (which is a genre I invented, as far as I'm concerned), ~ATH is a pretty good one. It's pronounced "til death"; that's tilde + ath, for those keeping score at home. It's also not a bad "mascot programming language" for Homestuck itself, if you'd like to view it that way. A framework for labyrinthine logic based solely on interminable cyclical patterns, whose exits are predicated on the mortality of certain individuals, or even of the universe itself. Yep, that checks out. The fact that the supreme embodiment of all evil behind everything that ever happens is set to be summoned upon the execution of a ~ATH script supports this idea as well.

[missfinefeather]

(After tireless searching with Google being ridiculously obtuse about it...)

What does that…

wakraya

Yelp.

Tilde ATH.

'til Death.

Oh…

wakraya

;D

John actually uses ~ATH way back in Act 1.

Funnily enough? The other programming language he uses is ^cake

Caret Cake.

Carrot Cake

Hence the icon.

I’m going to pause for an hour or two! I have overloaded my brain! :D

[graham-folger]

This is interesting! As someone else in the reblogs pointed out, he's probably using both meanings of execute (to do, and to kill), and ~ATH is pronounced Tilde-ATH, or 'til death.

I think we can say this much: for some reason, while both loops run concurrently, the U1 thread runs until it dies. Meanwhile, U2's thread runs until it's... not dead?

This is interesting. While ~ATH(!U2) could be interpreted as meaning "Until U2 is not dead," it could mean "Until the inverse of U2 dies." Now, "Inverse of U2" could mean "Everything outside of U2," but AH played a lot with boolean math in the early stages of the story, so I don't have a hard time believing that he put some thought into this aspect of it.

I think !U2 refers to post-scratch U2, which is where Karkat lives. It's a version of U2 where everything is opposite, but the opposites are derivative of the original, like molten iron in a molding cast (AH was also into intro-level philosophy).

So, until the death of U1 and !U2, this program doesn't do anything. On the death of each of those though, they each destroy the other. Jack Noir destroyed U1 at the same time that he destroyed !U2, which is interesting, because it could be argued that the trolls created him, but it can also be argued that the humans created him! So in a way, both of these destroy each other.

So I guess what the program does is it synchronizes the universe deaths, specifically in a way such that the causal nature is ambiguous and shared between them.

You don’t know how he does stuff like this. What does this even mean? It’s nonsense. Is it even syntactically viable?? Are you allowed to color text like that??? ARGH. Maybe you should ask him about it some time.

…hm.

You see, at first glance, this code does look syntactically viable, but only if we don’t pair the brackets in the way the coloring implies. If we write the code like this:

Then it’s a loop bound to the lifespan of Universe 1. Inside that main loop, it’s running a loop bound to the inverse of Universe 2′s lifespan - my guess being that this loop only runs while Universe 2 is dead.

If Universe 2 is ever registered as ‘alive’, the program waits for the blue THIS to die, and then continues. And when the main Universe 1 loop ends, it will wait for the red THIS to die, and finally exits. 

In other words: This program will exit when U1 is dead, U2 is alive, and both ‘bifurcated’ iterations of THIS are dead. 

However, the red/blue coloring implies that the brackets are paired in a completely nonsensical way. 

I’m with Karkat here, This is nonsense. You can’t put the top half of one code block inside another - at least, not in any language I’ve worked with. I’m sure there are weird, esoteric languages that do it, but it’s definitely not the syntax du jour.

This ‘merged bracket’ interpretation is probably the correct one, though, since the colors match up. The reason this compiles at all is probably due to the special behavior of bifurcate THIS[], which we’re not privy to. 

I do have a theory about what bifurcate is doing here, but… oh my god , guys, this is so silly. Will I post it? I’m going to post it. 

TA wears 3D glasses, right?

What if we’re meant to do the same?

If we view these two loops as not inside each other, but adjacent to each other in 3D space, then this code makes a lot more sense. Suddenly we’re just looking at two simple death loops - one which which exits when U1 dies, and one which exits when U2 lives. 

They’re not blocking each other, because they’re probably executing on different threads, which may be the true function of bifurcate. Viewed like this, this code becomes a simple, multithreaded script that works similarly to my original interpretation - the difference being that now, the colors match up properly. It’s kind of beautiful, to be honest. 

Now that I’m viewing this program as two threads, it seems as if the blue loop waits for the red thread to die before it can exit, and vice versa. 

If I’m right about this, it means that this program is deadlocked - neither thread can exit, because it’s waiting for the other one. The two threads are back to blocking each other, and this program will never exit.  

This code, when executed, immediately causes the user’s computer to explode, and places a curse on the user forever, along with everyone he knows, and everyone he’ll ever meet.

Not surprisingly, later on you would run this code in a fit of stupidity.

None of this, however, explains why it curses the user. 

I think I need to borrow Karkat’s ~ATH manual.