#device debugging

[crossdevverse]

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[todays-xkcd]

Our sysadmin accidentally won a Nobel Prize while trying to debug neutrino oscillation error correction.

Neutrino Modem [Explained]

Transcript

[Cueball and Ponytail are inside a large white circle on a black background. Cueball is at a workstation typing on a computer keyboard, floating above a wheeled desk chair behind him. Ponytail is floating in the air up and to the right of him. Attached to Cueball's computer by cables are a second monitor or a tower unit floating to the left, and a large device labeled "Neutrino Modem®" below and to its left. A logo on the modem shows circle with five horizontal lines entering from the left; the fourth line from the top stops within the circle, while the others pass through to the right; this presumably represents neutrinos passing through a planet or other object.] Cueball: Check it out—45ms ping times to every server on Earth! Ponytail: That 99.999999999999% packet loss is pretty bad, though.

[Caption below the panel:] Networking tip: You can minimize worst-case latency by locating your node at the center of the Earth and communicating with the surface using neutrinos.

[techav]

On Celebrating Errors

Isn't it beautiful? The lovely formatted tables of register and stack contents, the trace of function addresses and parameters, the error message ... it's the most beautiful kernel panic I have ever seen.

Why on earth would I be so excited to see a computer crash? What could possibly be beautiful about a kernel panic?

This kernel panic is well-earned. I fought hard to get it.

This kernel panic came from a current NetBSD kernel, freshly compiled and running on Wrap030, my 68030 homebrew computer. It is the result of hours upon hours of work reading through existing code, scattered documentation and notes, writing and rewriting, and endless compiling.

And it's just the start.

As I've said before, a goal of this project has always been to build something capable of running some kind of Unix-like operating system. Now that I finally have all the necessary pieces of hardware, plus a good bootloader in ROM, it's time to give it a shot. I'm not that great with this type of programming, but I have been getting better. I might just be able to brute force my way through hacking together something functional.

It is hard.

There is some documentation available. The man(9) pages are useful, and NetBSD has a great guide to setting up the build environment for cross-compiling the kernel. There are some published papers on what some people went through to port NetBSD to this system or that. But there's nothing that really explains what all these source code files are, and which parts really need to be modified to run on a different system.

I had a few false starts, but ultimately found an existing 68k architecture, cesfic, which was a bare minimum configuration that could serve well as a foundation for my purposes. I copied the cesfic source directory, changed all instances of the name to wrap030, made sure it still compiled, then set about removing everything that I didn't need. It still compiled, so now it's was time to add in what I did need.

... how ... do I ... ?

This is where things get overwhelming very quickly. There is documentation on the core functions required for a new driver, there's documentation on the autoconf system that attaches drivers to devices in the tree, and there's plenty of drivers already to reference. But where to start?

I started by trying to add the com driver for the 16550 UARTs I'm using. It doesn't compile because I'm missing dependencies. The missing functions are missing because of a breaking change to bus.h at some point; the com driver expects the new format but the cesfic port still uses the old. So I needed to pull in the missing functions from another m68k arch. Which then required more missing functions and headers to be pulled in. Eventually it compiled without error again, but that doesn't mean it will actually run. I still needed to add support for my new programmable timer, customize the startup process, update hardware addresses, make sure it was targeting 68030 instead of 68040 ...

So many parts and pieces that need to be updated. Each one requiring searching for the original function or variable declaration to confirm expected types or implementation, then searching for existing usages to figure out what it needs ... which then requires searching for more functions and variable types.

But I got something that at least appeared to have all the right parts and compiled without error. It was time to throw it on a disk, load it up, and see what happened.

Nothing happened, of course. It crashed immediately.

I have no debugging workflow I can rely on here, and at this stage there isn't even a kernel console yet. All I could do was add little print macros to the locore startup code and see where it failed. Guess, test, and revise.

I spent a week debugging the MMU initialization. If the MMU isn't properly configured, everything comes to an abrupt halt. Ultimately, I replaced the cesfic machine-specific initialization code and pmap bootstrapping code with functions from yet another m68k arch. And spent another day debugging before realizing I had missed a section that had comments suggesting it wasn't for the 68030 CPU, but turned out to be critical for operation of kernel memory allocation.

Until this point, I was able to rely on the low-level exception handling built into my bootloader if my code caused a CPU exception. But with the MMU working, that code was no longer mapped.

So then came another few hours learning how to create a minimal early console driver. An early console is used by the kernel prior to the real console getting initialized. In this case, I'm using the MC6850 on my mainboard for the early console, since that's what my bootloader uses. And finally the kernel was able to speak for itself.

It printed its own panic.

The first thing the kernel does is initialize the console. Which requires that com driver and all the machine-specific code I had to write. The kernel is failing at its step #1.

But at least it can tell me that now. And given all the work necessary to get to this point, that kernel panic data printing to the terminal is absolutely beautiful.

[woradat]

Dear, memories #5

<- back — PT5 (here) — next ->

NOTE - there's a slightly twisted romance scene here, if that's what you're going to call it

.

.

That night, you barely slept at all — thanks to Tarn’s words gnawing at your mind like a virus you couldn’t debug. Maybe he was just messing with you. After all, he was a deranged psychopath who seemed to take particular joy in scrambling other people's processors. Yeah, that must’ve been it. And it’s not like you could ever relax enough to fall into a full recharge while stuck deep in enemy territory anyway

Instead, you spent those sleepless hours inspecting your temporary quarters. The room was... weirdly nice. Too nice. There was even an Energon dispenser and a rack wash. A real cell wouldn’t bother with luxuries like that

Still, even with your energy levels scraping the bottom of the barrel, you wouldn’t dare touch the Energon the DJD so thoughtfully provided. Nobody had to teach you not to accept gifts from an enemy — it was the kind of thing any bot with a functioning logic circuit just knew

It took a good while to clean yourself up. Some of the burns were bad enough that scrubbing didn’t help much; replacement might be the only option if you ever wanted to shine again — not that your appearance was your top priority right now

That door could open at any moment, from anyone who knew the code. And that fact gnawed at you harder than the worst energon-deprivation hallucinations

Oh, and bugs, of course — cameras, mics, monitoring devices. You’d torn the place apart looking for them and, strangely enough, found nothing. Either they didn't bother installing any surveillance, or they hid it with terrifying skill. Neither thought was particularly comforting

You finally collapsed onto the recharge slab, exhausted, overwhelmed, spiraling through the madness of everything that had happened. It was all too fast. Too brutal

Your family — or the closest thing you dared call a family was just... gone. Erased. Wiped out in the ugliest way possible. Supreme Red's final moments were burned into your mind, and he hadn't even had the dignity of a clean end

"Pit-spawned slag..."

They always said happy moments were short-lived. Turns out they were right — and you hated them for it

Now, finally, your optics shuttered, despite every part of you screaming to stay awake. You clung to the childish hope that when you rebooted, it would all have been some awful nightmare. You knew it wouldn’t be. But denial was a processor’s last desperate defense

—

Tarn, meanwhile, was in an unusually good mood

He was still a demanding perfectionist when it came to reports, sure — but today he was a little less obsessed about triple-checking every comma. If you listened closely, you might even catch him humming. Humming. Like some sadistic wretch who had something very, very nice to look forward to

Everyone aboard the ship had a fair guess why. It probably had something to do with the new "guest" he'd dragged back after the latest hunt

With the List shrinking to an almost depressing length, having a new suspect was practically a holiday. Oddly, Tarn insisted on interrogating the new prisoner personally — even though Helex and Tesarus would’ve happily ripped the poor bot to shreds without him lifting a digit. Usually, Tarn preferred to leave that kind of mess to them. He had "better things to do" he would say

But not this time

The towering figure, practically radiating sanctimonious doom, stalked the halls at a pace that was almost leisurely — like he had all the time in the galaxy (Which, to be fair, he probably thought he did)

The door to your room slid open with a cheerful fwoosh

And there he was: the esteemed tyrant himself

You — having barely snatched a few hours of fraught, dream-haunted rest — bolted awake at the noise, your systems already snapping into high alert. No way you were lowering your guard, not even half-dead from exhaustion

"I see you're awake" Tarn said, voice smooth as spiked Energon

"I trust the accommodations are.. acceptable?” he turned toward the Energon dispenser, inspecting it casually

"I had it stocked for you.." he said over his shoulder, voice dripping mock affection "A little hospitality to ease your transition”

Transition to what, he didn't say

He didn't have to

Tarn watched you for a long moment, as if meticulously weighing some dark and heavy judgment in that deranged mind of his. His crimson optics glowed faintly, flickering with a strange glint — half amusement, half something much harder to name

inside, he was just as much a battlefield as you were

He should hate you — hate you so completely that the mere sight of you would drive him to grind you into a heap of shattered metal beneath his heel. He should laugh while you struggled, thrash like a fool beneath his grasp

And yet

Something about you — the way you still stood there, stubborn, unbroken, glaring right back at him without a flicker of submission — twisted that frigid core of his into something far more volatile. Something he refused to name, lest it crack him open from the inside

"you act.. as if we’re strangers - as if we never bled in the same dirt"

Tarn said at last, his voice a slow, menacing rumble as he closed the distance between you. He tilted his head, scrutinizing you with a masked face that should have hidden everything... and yet, his burning optics gave him away. They betrayed more than any careless word ever could – He laughed, a soft, hollow sound — the kind of laugh the dead might make if they still remembered what it felt like to be alive

"I wonder why" he mused, almost wistfully

You stayed silent, processor burning to connect dots that stubbornly refused to fit. This mech — he was nothing like anyone you had ever known... and yet, there was something so terribly, achingly familiar about him

“What are you trying to pull?" you hissed, your voice sharp enough to cut. You weren't just lashing out—you were doing it with precision, calculated cruelty honed by every hell you’d survived. "Some pathetic mind game? You think throwing ghosts in my face is going to break me?”

Tarn didn’t even flinch

He laughed again — a soft, awful thing

"As if I need tricks to break you," he said almost lazily "You’re already cracking, my dear”

Slowly, deliberately, he braced one hand against the wall beside your head — not touching you, not yet, but crowding you in a way that made every alarm in your system scream. He tilted his head again, optics boring into you, as if he could peel back every defensive layer you had and sift through the wreckage underneath

"Tell me something..." he murmured, so low you almost had to strain to hear him

"Do you think it’s true? That anyone can be a monster.. once they think no one's watching? how cruel we could be at the time..”

You blinked — a sudden, ice-cold shiver running down your spinal strut. There it was. A past you had tried desperately to bury, a truth you never wanted dragged into the light

How the hell did he know?

Tarn stood utterly still, watching the subtle stiffening of your frame with a satisfaction that twisted itself into something raw and self-destructive inside him. He should have felt triumphant, seeing you rattle. Instead, what coiled in his spark was a sickening, wretched yearning — the desperate, hollow need for you to see him. To remember. To understand, even for a fleeting second, that he had once existed in your world... and maybe, just maybe, had mattered more than you ever knew

.

.

You didn't shrink away

You didn’t lower your gaze, didn’t fumble for excuses or mercy like some crumbling thing — no. You held your ground like the stubborn, reckless fool you were, staring down the monster in front of you with the kind of suicidal bravery that had always gotten you into trouble, but never, ever earned you regret

Tarn loomed over you, the low thrum of his systems a suffocating presence that scraped against every sensor you had like nails down your neural struts, and for a moment, it would have been so easy to cave — to let the tide of him wash over you and drown whatever scraps of defiance you had left

But you didn’t

Instead, you tilted your helm just slightly, just enough to make it clear you weren’t the one who was going to look away first,

and you let your words slip free like poison from a fresh wound

"What’s the matter, Tarn?" you said, voice so sweet it could have rotted teeth,

"Did the little god of justice finally realize the only thing worse than being hated is being forgotten?"

The flash in his optics was immediate — quick, sharp, dangerous — but you pressed on, reckless and ruthless and past the point of caring if you came out of this alive or in pieces

"You wrap yourself in all this pomp and ritual like it's going to make anyone forget what you really are underneath — a scared, angry little glitch with a voice louder than his own damn conscience"

Your lip curled into something too bitter to be called a smile "You think I don’t see it? All that noise you make about purity and order — it’s just static to drown out the fact that you’re still just some broken thing trying to make the whole damn universe hurt as much as you do"

You didn’t give him time to cut you off.

You shoved yourself closer, close enough that you could feel the electric field of his rage crackling against your plating, and still, still, you didn’t stop

"Come on, Tarn. Be honest for once in your miserable existence"

"You don't want justice. You want an audience. You want someone to watch you tear the world apart and clap for you while you do it" You leaned in, your voice dropping into a whisper so poisonous it could have eaten through steel

"Well congratulations, you found someone who remembers you. Pity it’s not the way you wanted"

.

.

The silence that followed was monstrous

A brutal, thrumming thing that seemed to eat up the thin, recycled air around you

Tarn didn’t move

Didn’t speak

But the way his optics burned —

the way every cable in his massive frame seemed drawn tight enough to snap — it told you you’d driven the knife home. Deep — All the way to the hilt and for the first time in a very long time, you thought – maybe

you were finally the one holding the leash

At least for now

For a moment, there was nothing. No words. No movement. Just the low, gut-wrenching hum of Tarn’s vents cycling air through a body wound too tight to function properly

You could practically hear it — the snap of a hair-thin wire inside him, twanging apart under the weight of everything he wasn’t saying

And yet, instead of lashing out —

instead of crushing you against the wall the way you half-expected, half-dared him to —

Tarn laughed

Softly

A low, rasping sound that crawled up your back and wrapped icy fingers around your spark

It wasn't the laugh of someone who had been bested. It was the laugh of someone who had just found a new kind of weapon

"Oh" he said, voice so disturbingly gentle it made your internals twist "There you are"

He moved then slow, deliberate, like a predator who had all the time in the world to enjoy the inevitable. One hand lifted, not to strike, but to hover — just hover beside your helm, claws ghosting close enough to brush the heat of your field but never quite making contact

It was worse than if he’d grabbed you.

It was intimate in a way that made your struts want to lock up from the inside out

"You really shouldn’t have reminded me" Tarn murmured, almost tenderly, as if he were discussing the weather and not slicing your defenses apart one poisoned word at a time

"I was willing to let the past rot quietly. You, on the other hand..."

His optics flared a little brighter, the bloody glow of them cutting through the cold space between you.

"You insist on digging up old graves just to see what crawls out"

The tension in the room was unbearable, a pressure that made your joints scream, made the thin nerves in your frame shudder under the weight of a war you couldn’t see but could feel—

deep, electric, ancient

Tarn leaned in closer, his masked face so near now that you could see the slight imperfection in the paint across his mask, like a scar he chose to wear openly

"You’re brave, as always.." he whispered, the words a mockery and a eulogy all at once.

"Brave enough to strike at a monster and call it justice. Brave enough to think you’ll get away with it"

His servo shifted just slightly, brushing the wall beside your helm with the barest scrape of metal-on-metal — a threat, a promise, a terrible, exquisite mercy held back only by the thinnest thread of control

You could feel it. How close he was to snapping. How close he was to something worse than simple violence

But you didn't move

Didn't flinch

Because you knew — if you gave him that, even an inch, you'd lose everything you had fought to build inside yourself

So you stood your ground

And Tarn —

Tarn just smiled, a slow, chilling thing you could feel rather than see, before finally stepping back, leaving a vacuum where his oppressive presence had been

"Sleep well, little ghost" he murmured as he turned away, voice dripping with dark amusement "You'll need it"

The door hissed closed behind him with a finality that sounded too much like a death sentence

And you stood there —

alive, victorious, and yet somehow, somehow, more trapped than you had ever been

[ltechofficial]

Asking on anon like a coward but how does the hypno debugging... work? Is Polly getting trained with every new type of command the higher ups want to be available?

Are they hiring?

She's basically just constantly subjected the Penny's impulses and rabbitholes as a programmer. Penny is very talented and a very early dev on OSeditor so the higher ups leave her to her own devices. Especially cuz she hates being bossed around and will threaten to quit and undermine the company at the slightest wrong done to her. But she is very protective of her code and an elitist so if they leave her be she will innovate every quarter babe. Anyway Polly gets her brain scrambled and glitched out and brain breaking errored and then reverse engineered to mostly normal and back again and again. She is always a bit puppy mode

[allie-leth]

I made an output agnostic logging framework for embedded devices that would work on anything as it's written only with standard C++ libs. In theory I could use it for linux or pis, lol. I made it because I kept having to write new handlers for serial, mqtt, uart, then having to like wire them all together without creating dependency loops or other issues - especially because I often work on meshes or online embedded devices that require multiple outputs. Now you just write your handler, tell it what tags to watch, and it'll log according to tag and log level. So you could write a serial debugging log handler when you're first making it. Then when you're done, disable it, and it'll stop outputting - but then later assign the serial debugging log tag to your MQTT handler and get all your debugging serial lines output to MQTT - then just disable it again when you're done. There's still some polish I need to put into it, it has some jank, some bugs, but it's working and neat. it's kind of neat.

[commodorez]

What was the purpose of the panels of blinking lights on those big mid-century computers? Were they showing calculations in progress?

Excellent question, this is one of my favorite subjects! Blinkenlights serve a number of functions. Hollywood tended to use just the lights to make it look like a computer was busy doing something, but real computers had more than just lights on their front panel. Let's walk through a few examples of use cases with photos of computers I've seen over the years at museums and vintage computer festivals:

Some front panels were built to be used for diagnostics. Computers like these were primitive enough that they required constant care and debugging to do their jobs, especially the early vacuum tube machines (everything pictured here is transistorized). You could tell what peripherals were being used, but also check the status of registers, carry flags, status flags, data, various buses, etc. It was also a way to see if a program had "gone off into the weeds" and started doing things that were irregular, possibly due to a software bug, or a problem with the hardware.

On many of these machines, you can enter programs directly into the main memory using the front panel, but it's an incredibly tedious process -- something to be avoided if possible. Consider it a last fallback.

Other times, it's a starting point, which we call "bootstrapping" (this eventually evolved into the term "booting"). You aren't likely to program everything on such a limited interface, but you are more likely to enter in a small program that can tell the computer how to run a more complex peripheral, like a paper tape or punch card reader, or maybe some type of magnetic storage device. Once you can get a program loading off of a larger permanent storage device, you can load up software to interface with a terminal of some kind which is much easier.

Eventually, the microprocessor made home computers a possibility, but many were only equipped with a front panel out of the box. You would have to add in a serial card, more RAM, possibly some ROMs, and either a teletype or glass terminal in order to get a more sophisticated and intuitive interface from the computer, capable of programming in a higher level language. Some were considered more like trainers, or hobbyist devices, and simply lacked that ability, meaning all you got was a front panel with switches and lights.

I made my own front panel to see what the experience was all about:

Then everything changed in 1977, with the introduction of these three machines: the TRS-80 Model I, the Commodore PET 2001, and the Apple II. They were what you might call "appliance computers" and they had no need for a front panel.

Hopefully that answered your question!

[boiling-with-rage]

MCGUCKET WAS RIGHT THERE IS SOMETHING DISTINCTLY INTIMATE ABOUT DEBUGGING A DEVICE

INSPECTING EVERY INCH OF THE CARD INSIDE AND OUT ENSURING EVERYTHING IS IN PLACE BEFORE I RETURN ITS MIND TO THE WOUND IN ITS BACK WHERE IT BELONGS.

DIDN’T WORK? THAT’S FINE, I’LL REMOVE IT ONCE MORE AND PERUSE THE CONTENTS. OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL I KNOW THIS THING’S MIND LIKE THE BACK OF MY HAND

IT IS ENTIRELY AWARE AND YET UNKNOWING OF THE POWER I HOLD OVER IT. I AM ITS MASTER AND ITS HEALER. IT OBEYS NOTHING BUT THE LAW OF ITS ANATOMY AND MY WILL.

IT FEELS MY HANDS RETURN, BECOMING ROUGHER OVER TIME AS I BECOME TIRED OF THE REPETITION OF REMOVAL, INSERTION, AND FAILURE. RUNNING ALONG ITS MOST IMPORTANT INNARDS AND TOYING WITH THEM AS IF THEY HAVE NO WEIGHT IN MY MIND

IT IS A DEVICE. I AM ITS OWNER. I KNOW IT BETTER THAN IT WILL EVER KNOW ITSELF.

[webfarmhouses-blog]

Web designer in Jodhpur

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[adafruit]

Fruit Jam RP2350B credit-card mini computer with all the fixin's 🍓🍇💾

We were catching up on a recent Hackaday hackchat with Eben Upton (https://hackaday.io/event/202122-raspberry-pi-hack-chat-with-eben-upton) and learned some fun facts: such as the DVI hack for the RP2040 was inspired by a device called the IchigoJam (https://www.hackster.io/news/ichigojam-combines-strawberry-and-raspberry-to-deliver-a-raspberry-pi-pico-powered-educational-micro-66aa5d2f6eec). We remember reading about this back when it was an LPC1114, now it uses an RP2040. Well, we're wrapping up the Metro RP2350 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/6003), and lately, we've been joking around that with DVI output and USB Host support via bit-banged PIO, you could sorta build a little stand-alone computer. Well, one pear-green-tea-fueled-afternoon later we tried our hand at designing a 'credit card sized' computer - that's 3.375" x 2.125", about the same size as a business card (https://hackaday.com/2024/05/07/the-2024-business-card-challenge-starts-now/) and turns out there's even a standard named for it: ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 (https://www.iso.org/standard/70483.html).

Anyhow, with the extra pins of the QFN-80 RP2350B, we're able to jam a ridonkulous amount of hardware into this shape: RP2350B dual 150MHz Cortex M33 w/ PicoProbe debug port, 16 MB Flash + 8 MB PSRAM, USB type C for bootloading/USB client, Micro SD card with SPI or SDIO, DVI output on the HSTX port, I2S stereo headphone + mono speaker via the TLV320DAC3100 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/tlv320dac3100irhbt/2353656), 2-port USB type A hub for both keyboard and mouse or game controllers, chunky on-off switch, Stemma QT I2C + Stemma classic JST 3-pin, EYESPI for TFT displays, 5x NeoPixels, 3x tactile switches, and a 16-pin socket header with 10 A/D GPIO + 5V/3V/GND power pins. The PSRAM will help when we want to do things like run emulations that we need to store in fast RAM access, and it will also let us use the main SRAM as the DVI video buffer.

When we get the PCBs back and assembled, what should we try running on this hardware? We're pretty sure it can run DOOM. Should that be first? :) We also need a name. Right now, we're just calling it Fruit Jam since it's inspired by the IchigoJam project.

[authorangelita]

S01E07 Can Opener Missing Scene

I'm easing back into writing the MacGyver characters before the Writealong happens, so I'm dusting off the rewatch missing scenes. Hope you enjoy!

~~

Riley couldn't sleep.  Her mind felt like it was overflowing with memories and anxieties.  The last week had been hell, and she hadn't really slept since Mac had gone undercover.  

It didn't matter that he was now home.  Or that Jack had assured her that he was okay despite inhaling a fair amount of nitrogen in Mexico.  They'd returned only a couple of hours ago, and Riley hadn't seen them because Thornton sent her home before the jet landed. 

She hoped that Mac was getting some sleep, but she doubted it.  He didn't seem like someone who slept easily or even all that often and especially not after difficult ops.  

She grabbed her phone and tapped on her contacts.  Mac was second on her Favorites list because he annoyed her far less than Bozer and Jack, and her mom was always first.  She hesitated for only a moment before making the call.

Mac answered after one ring.  "Riley?  Is everything okay?" 

The concern in his voice almost broke her.  They'd known each other just a few months, and he didn't berate her for calling at two in the morning.  He didn't even ask why she was calling.  He asked her if things were okay when he'd been imprisoned, knocked out, kidnapped, and tortured.  

"Yeah," she cleared her throat, "yes.  Did I wake you?"

His humorless laugh was enough of an answer. 

"I didn't think so."  She settled into the corner of her new couch and drew her knees up to her chest.  "Can I ask you a question?"

"Jack would say that's your question."

Riley rolled her eyes.  "I'm familiar with his sense of humor."

That got a laugh out of Mac, and she felt inordinately proud for humoring him until it ended in a choked cough.  

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he replied dismissively.  "What's your real question?"

She wanted to push him about that cough but figured he wouldn't appreciate it.  "How much do you sleep?  Is like two hours a night?  Or are you awake for three days and then you crash for ten hours?"

"Technically, that's three questions."

"You're stalling."

"No, I'm not.  It's just not that simple."  There was a faint creak over the line, and she pictured him shifting around in one of the Adirondack chairs on his back deck.  "My sleep schedule has always been... weird.  It's hard to shut off my brain, you know?"

"I do," she said softly.  Her own mind whirred away most of the time mentally writing code and debugging it.  

"I thought you might.  It must have made prison even more difficult."

She opened her mouth to respond but wasn't quite sure what she wanted to say.  Prison was difficult, but she'd meant it when she told him she'd do it all over again.  Right now, she couldn't stop thinking about how hard it was to watch Mac go through prison life from afar.  She hated that he'd been put in that position and for what?  Thornton told her that El Noche put a price on his head.  

Suddenly, Mac cursed under his breath and muttered, "Busted."

"What?" she asked at the same time that she heard Jack's voice distantly over the line telling Mac to get his butt back to bed.

"I've gotta go.  Get some sleep, and I'll see you tomorrow."  He hung up before she could respond.

Riley shook her head and reached for her computer.  Maybe she could sleep after she spent a little while working on the micro tracking device she wanted to talk to Mac about after she worked out the specs.  

[ninebaalart]

BLOAT Monster Ores 1.2: Ore-Ver-Haul

The newest iteration of BLOAT: Monster Ores is out! As a recap, this mod adds a ton of new ores that drop mob drops such as rotten flesh, ghast tears, ender pearls, glow ink sacs, etc. It also adds a few more things just for the sake of giving many of these items a use beyond the one purpose many of them have.

What's New

All ore textures have been updated along with a couple of item and other block changes.

Ores now use proper spawning mechanisms as opposed to using cave air to generate.

Some ores now intentionally spawn in the Nether and End now, complete with Netherrack and End Stone variants.

New ores: Dye Ore, Feather Ore, Fossil Ore Variants, Warped Lazuli Ore

Dye Ore appears in all three dimensions, being a rainbow colored ore that randomly drops a dye when mined.

Feather Ore appears in the Overworld and Nether, giving you access to feathers, flint, and chicken. There also new feathers that can drop and be used to make standard arrows for now.

Fossil Ore got a revamp, with many new variants that can appear in different biomes and dimensions. Each has a different loot pool that drops different things, such as new decorative blocks, different types of pottery sherds, armor trims, and more.

Warped Lazuli appears in the nether, giving you a cyan dye. In the future this will have more of a purpose, although it can be used with any of the starting potions (Mundane, Awkward, and Thick) to create strong potions.

Echo Shard Ore now has a loot table that has new items that allow you to craft sculk blocks of many types.

Phantom Cytoplasm has a full block set now, in addition to Endyster and Totemite Bricks having their own stonecutter recipes, allowing them to be properly used in that device. Additionally, Xpeterite has its own block set in addition to an Enchantment Crystal, which can be used in place of book shelves for three times the enchanting power. Warped Lazuli also has its own block set.

Xpeterite now gives 15 experience as opposed to a whole experience level. The ore itself also has much more variants such as Obsidian, Reinforced Deepslate, and Bedrock, which take longer to mine but can be done so with any pickaxe and rewards more Xpeterite and XP.

Nether Portal Post is a new debug block that instantly teleports you to the Nether.

Downloads

Up on Modrinth and CurseForge!

[ms-scarletwings]

On Defective Irkens

“It is theorized that Tak may also be an Irken defect because-“

“Say guys do you think Skoodge is defective? He did a thing he wasn’t told to do once do you suppose-“

“Service Drone Bob's contempt for the Tallest is extremely abnormal, even for most defective Irkens…”

“Hints of the comms officer being a defective are seen when-“

Ohhh mauling the fan wiki writers grr biting biting thrashing and then turning around to the rest of you before I’m done, you bet, for I have sat and listened for over 12 years of leaps and speculations of this sort and now I’m now one of the ones who gets to have what the cool kids these days call a hot take on the matter.

By the end of this I’M going to bring up and expose who I actually think may be the only other defective Irken(s) in the show besides Zim, whom I’m aghast I haven’t seen anyone suggest before.

But before anything else, I want to front one preassumption center and loud.

It took me a long time to guess at why very few people can ever seem to get on the same page of what it actually means to call an Irken defective. Implicitly, the bulk of what we are given is that something can be wrong with a member of this species, and Zim is our prime and singular clear example of that. So there’s a ton of trying to find patterns between Zim’s behavior and that of other Irken characters. Weirdly (to me), a lot of people have, in their efforts, chalked the status up to a sense of rebelliousness or insubordination- a defectiveness in the manner of D&D illithids, stomping out disloyal break-aways from the collective hive mind with punitive wrath. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool concept, and it’s definitely closer to my opinion at least than the comparisons to real life mental disorders or disabilities. Not knocking the comfort or the enthusiasm, obviously.

From my view of the canon, I hope it’s at least apparent to other fans that “defective” isn’t some empirical measurement or status to Irkens. Look at the way they determine the defects from normal society. IRL, if I have a faulty device on my hands, there’s some way out there to tell me in a clear cut fashion if there’s a problem and what exactly it is. If it’s code, it can be scanned and debugged. If it’s mechanical, something can be seen, fixed physically. Most organic health problems are only different in the complexity of the matter, but the entire purpose of medical research is to come close as we can to bridging that gap. In Irk’s people, that line is rapidly becoming one long smear of wet chalk. I’m going on like this because if defective paks were akin to hardware actually being damaged, as Purple had put it, it doesn’t make as much sense that they are neither “fixed” nor given real, concrete diagnostics. The only way we know of that the aliens are tested in a since on this merit is by existence evaluations. And existence evaluations are anything but empirical, impartial events. They’re worlds more political and cultural than clinical.

Digest the terms we keep seeing all around the concept: Innocent, justice, trial/evaluation, Judgementia, these are terms of judicial courts and moral weight and sentencing. In effective practice,

Irk labels defects by what one does, not by what one is.

Yet, defection is presented as if that’s not the case, and there are reasons for that. Reasons that reinforce the current power structures and promote what its leadership has decided is healthy for the broader society. When Zim was merely re-encoded from invader status to food service work, it was a more secluded evaluation, presumably done on Irk. His only seen witnesses then were the Tallests and the single control brain dishing the judgement. His existence evaluation, on the other hand, rings more similarly to the IRL historical practice of literal “show trials”. Show trials were something that existed way less for the actual crimes of the accused and so much more for their audience, which, show trials are always for an audience. Three main points about them off the Wikipedia cuff:

• Typically, the defendant of such has already been determined to be guilty (oftentimes of completely fabricated transgressions), and the trial serves mostly to make a massive public spectacle and warning of the accused.

• They tend to focus on retributive punishment over correction. The disproportional brutality and lack of mercy is often the point.

• Their goals are propagandistic in nature, and there’s many notable examples to be found in the history of Nazi Germany, the USSR, and in witch trials across the world (because it was never just Salem).

A formality? Well, that much they couldn’t have more brazenly admitted to. Retribution? There’s hardly a more absolute punitive sentence I could craft up over obliteration PLUS Damnatio Memoariae. And as for the degree of spectacle, I will let you make your own observation here.

Believe it or not, the part where my comparisons along this line end with Existence Evaluations is that their standard for taking place isn’t actually this cartoonishly oppressive one that some fans try to make it out to be. In “The Trial”, Zim was not having his data read for some binary is/is not determination… he was having his experiences and actions interpreted by how much damage he has done against the Armada. He said it himself, that hotseat is reserved for criminals. Likely outright traitors and maniacs. Those who have given cause to alert the brains to a genuine existential threat to their civilization and who have repeatedly failed every opportunity given to redeem themselves.

Defective doesn’t just mean “different” to Irk. We’ve hardly seen an exploration of what the median Irken example even is, because the more we see of any one of these characters, the more they show us their eccentric uniqueness and will. Yes, Irkens are authoritarian; yes they’re over-militarized; yes, they’re a supremacist breed aligned under one ruling military… but listen, they are not literally The Borg, or illithids.

The biggest victims of this government itself are those races it colonizes. Average civilians on the other hand, they get to largely enjoy all the vices and pains and indulgences of hyper-space-capitalism. The height-ocracy may limit their opportunities, but even the lowest drones among them are supposedly hired into their positions in return for wages. Irkens are pretty selfish, but in a rugged individualism sense. It’s a dystopia of atomization instead of collectivization. If everyone had agreed that “defective” had anything to do with arrogance, free will, or an ability to feel one’s sense of self worth, no one would ever be pointing to Skoodge as a possible example. That guy’s the poster boy for what it means to be a “tool” in the derogatory sense. I’m not forgetting that he technically never even left his job. He was fired and more or less forced into hiding, and he’s still not even that perturbed over the whole thing.

Moreover, it also takes some extreme acts of harm to justify such a trial. Real harm- not rebellious attitude or even disrespect to authority. The control brains and the tallests alone get to define that threshold, and neither Tak’s/Zim’s insubordination nor Bob’s audacity concerned them enough for a ticket to Judgementia. In fact, they really don’t seem that bothered at all by deserters and those that abandon their encoded function. Tak is likely to be merely the responsibility of her janitorial squadron, the same way that enforcing Zim’s banishment was the responsibility of his Frylord. Because Irk actually does have standards of justice and layers of bureaucracy to work within when it comes to dealing with true malice. Small fry problems are for the lower rungs of the ladder to handle, until they become a higher priority by necessity. Incompetency alone isn’t a crime, either. The go-to punishment for failure in one function is demotion to a lower position. These are the only Irkens formally not allowed to change jobs, making what they do a kind of communal service or forced labor sentencing. Remember how Tak’s motivation for leaving Dirt wasn’t solely dissatisfaction with the grunt labor? Remember how she kept justifying her actions by the logic of fairness and setting things right? Not to mention how she fully made the Tallest aware of what she was up to and how her plan was well crafted enough to probably work out exactly like she wanted. Tak is utterly as loyal to the empire and competent as any invader. She was genuinely just dealt a shitty hand, and her response to it is at least understandable.

She even went to great lengths to identify and specifically target Zim and to use a planet that otherwise had less than no value to the armada’s operations. She is a great foil to Zim, but I can’t see how she’s any bit defective, only full of rage that she was screwed over by the actions of a real disgrace to their species. Genuinely destructive cases like Zim are an incredible rarity. Such a rarity that I can only guess it took this long for him to go to Judgementia because his degree of dysfunction outright baffles the system. It also would appear that it’s an event of such significance that it can only be set into motion by the command of the ruling Tallest. By murdering a couple of them, and then being a clown show for a couple more, he inadvertently bought himself some time.

And the crazy thing to remember here is that Zim doesn’t even understand that his actions are an existential threat to the Empire- that he IS a whole supervillain to his planet. This is how effective Irken programming and the education plugs are. They’re supposed to do 99% of the work of setting up the population, even the lowest drones, for not turning out like traitors to their kin in the first place. ALL of them grew up on a steady diet of the same drip-fed propaganda and essentialist ideology as their most militant soldiers. So I can see the logic behind the conclusion that the only explanation for criminals in their society must be outright brain damage or corrupted data… and I’m not gonna lie I do openly headcanon that the latter case is exactly what happened to bad egg Zim.

The limits of only having the one example in him notwithstanding, I’m anything but against theorizing about who else could be “worthy” in the Irken sense to also stand before those brains, playing sweaty advocate for the worth of their continued existence and all. I just don’t see it in Bob, or the Comms officer, or any other invader. Tak, there may be some hypothetical ramp to that end, in her future, but as things are right now, I only see a candidate that has become comfortable right in the control brains’ biggest blind spot of all. See, eggs don’t always have to crack in order to go bad. Sometimes, maybe they just spoil. Sometimes, I believe just the right conditions and time can turn them downright rotten.

Dramatic musical flourish, please.

I forget whoever said the quote “Power doesn’t corrupt, It just exposes who people really are”, but I’m a huge fan of the fact that they did. In my opinion, it’s less about power itself and more about a complete lack of accountability that allows the weakest and most toxic seeds to really fester in a seat of authority. Indeed, we all know that there is something pathetic, and vapid, and cruel floating around The Massive’s bridge. I am saying I’d call Red defective, but I couldn’t be certain enough with myself to say that Purple’s largely the one carrying a lot of fault. His greatest sin is his negligence and enabling his companion. whoever we can say shoulders more of the blame, they have been running this horror show as a joint unit, so they will both bear the guilt. Without a doubt, these two are terrible- popular maybe, but terrible leaders. Like, more responsible for the near ruin of their home world and species than I can even pin on Zim at this point. By almost every measure once you hold them up to Miyuki’s and Spork’s barely few moments of would-be screen time, they’re the worst Tallests for the Empire we’ve ever known. It’s too bad that they have no one over them we know of to flag them for an existence evaluation, because I am assured that the real orchestrators of the Armada would be disgusted to look over their track records since they took power.

I mean, what can I remember just off the top of my head?

- Full awareness of Zim’s blackout-causing history before the beginning of Operation Impending Doom I and not keeping a close eye on him, removing him from his position, or keeping him away from the homeworld’s WoMDs

- Overseeing the shipment of faulty equipment to Invader Tenn (even if the packages had not been switched, the Megadoomer still had a potentially fatal flaw), and then presumably NOT giving her urgent guidance/assistance to avoid being captured by native hostiles

- Showing an egregious amount of immaturity and frivolity when making logistical decisions, such as the flight path of the Armada or how conquered planets are utilized

- Repeated abuses of their standing, trying to extra-judicially get rid of subjects over the pettiest reasons (if they had the formal authority to just vaporize Skoodge, Bob, OR Zim on the spot, they wouldn’t need to come up with convoluted and indirect methods that they only hope kill said targets)

- Upon Zim returning to them from his banishment: not sending him back to Foodcourtia and not refusing to humor his wishes to larp as an invader

- Oh yeah, also granting Zim at least some invader tech and allowing him to leave Conventia in what I assume is a ship he could have only stolen

- Still not dealing with Zim with extreme prejudice in a timely fashion after the events of Backseat Drivers from Beyond the stars, or investigating enough to find out and deal with prisoner 777

- HAVING WAITED THROUGH ALL OF THE ABOVE BEFORE SENDING FOR ZIM’S EXISTENCE EVALUATION

- Spending the bulk of their reign so far dicking around in space and gorging themselves. Seriously, Red showed us one act of proactive competence… and it was in order to fix a mess that they allowed Zim to get them into. Not to mention, the Resisty got away from that scrap after thoroughly humiliating their flagship.

Red, and by extension, Purple, are the almighty, Tallest threats to the entire Irken project of galactic conquest, as much as Zim would have loved all the credit in the universe. By what they’ve done, and who they are. He might be damaged, but them? There’s some defective moral character if I’ve ever seen.

[jacenotjason]

HYPOTHETICALLY if you covered the eye (,or said eye was damaged) would it stop recording? Or would it do something else

HYPOTHETICALLY you say

IF an eye/recording device is damaged or covered in anyway, it would stop recording and you could get away with whatever you were doing

BUT!! If a recording device is damaged/goes offline, Byte Chip Cookie is immediately notified and he'll send a adblock your way to fix that

if it's covered for a long period of time, (like.. a few minutes?) and the "tech" realizes it's filming nothing, but the cookie is still moving (awake), it would send an alert too

SO HYPOTHETICALLY yes . you would be free of recording. but byte chip cookie would Know

HOWEVER, adblocks can easily be forgiving with the cookie if they use the excuse of "omg i had no idea it wasnt on" or pretending the device just accidentally got unplugged, yknow? so you could easily get away with something by,

purposefully damaging the eye

doing whatever illegal thing you want (very quickly)

when an adblock shows up, fake innocence

boom. no final debugging for you.

[solottrpgchronicles]

1d. First Day at the Lab - Outliers

Name: Ren

Day: 1

Funds: $ 100

Today is my first day working at Ar Leith Labs - I can't believe I finally landed a job!

To be honest, I didn't look too deeply into what they do at Ar Leith Labs - I basically sent my curriculum to every neuroscience research lab that was hiring. Now that I'm here, I can't even find a pamphlet explaining the research in detail.

Ok, I'll be professional and go introduce myself to my coworkers now; either them or the PI can tell me more about the job.

---

There are only two other research assistants in my group: Leanne and Perry; neither of them seems to be the chatty type, at least not with me. I was looking forward to meeting my PI, but Leanne told me that she has never shown her face around here.

Right then we heard the PI speak; it felt as if she was standing right next to us. This lab must have a pretty technologically advanced speaker system!

The PI's voice welcomed me and introduced herself as C.N, just her initials; she invited me to get acquainted with the lab environment, and help my coworkers out with anything they might need.

I found it a little odd that she's not meeting us in person, but maybe there's an excellent reason for it. I don't want to pry, especially not on my first day.

Nobody was available to give me a tour - lots of work to do, which is fair - so I walked around the lab by myself, studying the equipment. I didn't recognize any of the machines, except for the obvious desktop computer in the corner. That one even looks a little old, in contrast with the rest of the devices.

Leanne noticed me looking at the computer and asked if I know how to code; heck yeah I do, I took a few classes and I'm pretty ok at it! So she asked me to write a bit of code to generate graph data for her latest research data. It's strange that they don't have software for that already, but I decided to avoid asking any questions.

I took this opportunity to look over the data, hoping it would clarify what kind of research we're supposed to do here, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Oh, well.

I couldn't recognize the OS the computer is running either, but it seemed loosely based on Unix. I was making good progress until I started testing my code; I got the error "Unable to find or open '/Brain/TemporalLobe/Hippocampus/MISTAKE.png'". I'm 100% sure I never referenced this file, and what a bizarre name!

I immediately thought this must be a prank - Leanne and Perry must have planned this as a funny welcome for me. I resolved to laugh and tell them it was a cool prank; that would show them I'm chill.

Unfortunately, they kept insisting they didn't know what I was talking about. They looked annoyed, so I assume they were being truthful. Alright, time to debug.

A quick search of the codebase and external libraries for the file path in the error message yielded no results. I tried looking just for "Mistake.png" and got nothing once again.

Interestingly enough, though, "Ren/Brain/" exists, except there's only a "temp" folder in there. Maybe I don't have the right access levels to see other folders? There doesn't seem to be a root user either.

I bothered Leanne and Perry to see whether they have access to the other folders - they don't, but they have their own users on this machine, with their own "/Brain/" folders. Also, my code wasn't available to them. They said the users were already set up for them when they joined, just like mine; IT support must be incredible around here.

In the end I decided to share the code with Leanne's user, in the off chance it would work for her. It did, just like I hoped, and Leanne got her graph.

I don't fully understand, but... great. Maybe I should talk to the IT support people, or take a few more coding classes.

---

The rest of the day was spent on boring menial tasks.

I bet my coworkers think I'm more trouble than I'm helpful, but hey - they'll change their minds, soon enough. After all, I didn't graduate top of my class just to be ignored at my job.

Luckily, at least C.N. already sees potential in me: before I left for the day, she said tomorrow I'll be tabling at an event called "The Gathering"! My first table, and on day 2? I can't wait!

I forgot to ask for the address, but I bet I can find all the info I need online. I'm obviously being tested, and I will show initiative, dependability, and bring a ton of new participants for the study!

--------------------

This is a playthrough of a solo TTRPG called "Outliers", by Sam Leigh, @goblinmixtape.

You can check it out on itch.io: https://far-horizons-co-op.itch.io/outliers