#i miss irc

[eoinmcgonigal]

So I saw a post about tumblr wanting to try this 'communities' thing, and I just gotta vent/say my piece. (the tl;dr is 'fuck that shit')

1. I really hate the current trend of fracturing and fragmenting things down into little pieces so they can be categorised into boxes. That's not natural. (Also, discord pushing threads, which I already detest for 1) making me feel like I'm gonna hurl from the violently dissonant, ugly layout, 2) the severely narrow topic problem, and 3) how neurodiverse-hostile they are.)

Like, naturally conversations meander. If you're only allowed to discuss one topic, it's gonna be stifling. You WILL run out of things to say. Making another little box isn't going to fix it, it'll just add to the clutter

2. Quite importantly, honestly, just stop fucking changing shit. It's unnecessary

3. It's not going to be neurodiverse-friendly. As if fandom hasn't changed enough to become increasingly unfriendly to people who are just here to enjoy their hyperfixation and/or special interest. I don't need another thing to learn to navigate. I don't need another place with different rules to carefully traverse. Yes, I'm fandom old and salty. I'm AuDHD and a spoonie with about half a spoon to spend on a good day. I do not have the energy to do all this switching about and jumping from thing to thing. It's exhausting. I want everything where I can find it, and where I can be passionate without having to perform tasks like it's some customer service job, or job interview

4. FOMO shit is toxic. This whole 'be a part of the thing!' necessity if you want to 'engage' or see the conversations and 'content'. Why? I guess it's a social media model that drives engagement, but the stress of it is going to fuck people up. What if you don't have the time, energy, health, spoons, social skills, etc? I have no idea how much interacting will be expected with other people in the 'community' but I can see it becoming a twitter-like circlejerk, and if you're not one of the 'in' crowd doing your required interaction/reblogging/commenting then you might as well not exist to that fandom/group

5. From the description, it looks like these things will be ripe for drama, toxicity, clique shit, becoming echo chambers, etc. because 'semi public' means you gotta opt in/join in some way and whatever's said isn't visible to any old user

Like, who is going to create and mod these things? Who decides what the rules are? What if your fave is 'problematic', or your kink is 'gross' (if nsfw is allowed at all), your take doesn't fit with fanon, or you are just a bit weird and people shun or turn on you for that?

I hope I'm wrong and either these things never happen or they're not as bad as I fear, but fuck sakes I have the above worries because it's shit I've seen happen time and time again, and I don't want to see given a place here

Also, genuinely, what the fuck is tumblr going to be like if you can't/don't want interact with these community things?

Quickly, 6. it creates an 'us' (in crowd) vs. 'them' (not part of our gang)

And then 7. who is going to be dominant in these 'communities'?

Yes, I'm upset right now, because tumblr was just fine (well, fine enough) until this point. I mean:

We have the ability to make sideblogs! (My Star Wars sideblog from... well a decade ago oops... is still out there, I don't touch it any more but I left it up for people to go through). Tumblr even made it so we can reply with sideblogs, which was a very neat update.

Tags!! I don't think it's as usual these days for people to go through tags to find new content, but that's how I do it, how I've always done it, and how I always intend to do it. I'm not following everyone who makes an SAS:RH post. I love you guys, but no. My dash would cause me to have a panic attack. It's already too much for me most days.

EFFORT!!!! I can be here every day full-time doing Stuff if I want! Or I can zone out for weeks if I want/need, materialise and contribute a silly meme, then drift off into the sunset again. If I 'miss' anything, I can go back through the tags, or scroll someone's blog. But honestly, who notices/cares on here if someone lurks or goes afk for a bit. It's super low pressure, because I'm doing what I can/want when I can/want

I want to opt in/out on my own time and terms. The thought of having to be part of a 'community' so I can see/not miss Content TM is freaking me out. I don't want there to be an 'appropriate' time window to interact with things like there is on other social media sites.

So, idk how the shit will look, but I don't agree with making things harder for people to access/find. I won't be posting stuff 'semi-privately'.

And you know what's super upsetting? The thought that I won't be able to see conversations and creations for things I love, because they're hidden away behind some complex new social thing I can't navigate. (Which is already an off-putting, ostracising problem on discord.) That's not how fandom communities should be.

The thought of there being less stuff 'out there' because it's in some 'community' somewhere... really not the direction I'd ever hope this site wold go in

I'm fuckin exhausted. Just lemme do my fandom whateverness without having to perform to some arbritary social interaction standard/requirements that I neither understand nor can do

[stxalq]

The Absolute Hubris of every discord server thinking it's The One server for everything (plus the one reason you're here in the first place)

[sivavakkiyar]

the first and only person to ever say to me ‘I dunno I know Satie is important but Debussy did the same stuff better’ and have me mumblingy apologetically instead of ready to throw hands

[memorydragon]

Me at the translator: He would not fucking say that.

[sreegs]

I reblogged it earlier but I'm glad the Something Awful Forums 9/11 thread was archived because it's an incredibly important slice of internet history. For the record I think 9/11 was thousands of personal tragedies for the direct victims of the attacks but one big national farce that led to America's ongoing slide into fascism, and the nationalism and remembrance around it is a joke especially in the wake of the same amount of deaths every fucking day in the US during the height of coronavirus.

Nevertheless I think it's important that if you do not remember because you were too young or just didn't exist on Sept 11, 2001 to read the Something Awful 9/11 forums to get an idea of what the internet was like at the moment when America changed to 24 hour news cycles and renewed hyper-nationalism not seen since WWII.

This all happened before Twitter, Facebook, before Discord. Before smart phones. Before most people had cell phones. When a lot of people still had dial-up internet, even. Some people in the thread were relying on radio because internet and TV weren't keeping up.

It was a live event of internet denizens reacting to the biggest national event (and among the biggest international events) of the past 25 years. It was also a slice of what the internet was like at the turn of the millennium. Not only that, but people accurately calling out who was responsible, and what would result before the attacks even finished.

Keep in mind that the links that follow contain images of the event, lots of Islamophobia, people calling for the Middle East to be nuked, people blaming Palestine, casual racist and homophobic language (this was Something Awful after all), etc etc. They preserved the first 17 pages which spanned about 24 hours during the events. It's the origin of the "WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR" screenshot.

Links under the fold. I've also annotated the pages with notes regarding the timeline and any posts of interest. Note the thread was preserved in Pacific Time even though the page says times are Eastern. That's incorrect. Post timestamps are 3 hours behind Eastern Time, which is the time zone where the attacks occurred:

Page 1 - Note the first post was edited to include images of the second attack. The thread started after the first plane hit. Second plane hitting the WTC happens here too.

Page 2 - Poster accurately calling out Bin Laden was responsible at 9:14 AM EST

Page 3 - "WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR"

Page 4

Page 5 - First official acknowledgement it was a terrorist attack.

Page 6 - Pentagon hit

Page 7

Page 8

Page 9 - Commercial flights grounded by FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)

Page 10 - First mention of towers collapsing at end of page

Page 11 - More reactions to collapse of first tower. People thinking it was a bomb or yet another plane. Rumors about a fourth plane just missing the White House (these are false and predate the actual 4th plane crash by minutes)

Page 12

Page 13 - By this point there's just rampant speculation about more bombs at the WTC, the US Capitol building being hit, etc (all false). Remember this is all just people reacting to TV news and radio and the rumor mill via phone, AIM, IRC, and maybe text messages.

Page 14 - By this point internet news sites are overwhelmed

Page 15 - Second tower collapses. First acknowledgement of the fourth plane that crashed in PA.

Page 16 - There's an abrupt time jump in the threads, I think it was the result of admins pruning the activity or the SA forums going down. This page starts on 9/12 even though it is page 16. American flag signatures and ribbons start appearing.

Page 17

[seat-safety-switch]

I don't know if you've ever been to Paris before, but I recommend going. Normally, I would not have gone, but I made a really rich enemy on IRC and he spent a lot of money to have me kidnapped and brought to his home country. While I was there, I got to try a bunch of restaurants (they're hostage-takers, not barbarians) and came away impressed. Something was missing, though, and herein is my genius idea.

In Paris you can get any kind of food. Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai: and it's all good. All of it. You literally can't find a bad restaurant. At one point, I walked into a convenience store and got a plate of one-Euro nachos that made me cry at the beauty of the arrangement.

Everyone around me was taking this for granted. Having lived there for years, their quality threshold had crept invisibly upwards until nothing could impress again. They needed something to re-calibrate their sense of truly bad food. That's where I came in. After I got kicked out of the country, I decided to come back with some investor support. I can burn cereal, usually by roasting it gently with a blowtorch on the top of an old gas can. Investors were easy to find.

Our first week of opening was tremendous. Hardened Parisians were discovering their first taste of truly incompetent food. The novelty of it all had captured them. There's just one problem, though: after making an entire lunch rush's feast of poorly-cut toast in reheated canned soup, my cooking skills began to improve from sheer experience. The complaints began to change tone. You got too good, they cried, you're not the same bad chef we once loved. Again, I was deported.

I looked out the window of the plane as it left De Gaulle, staring down onto the beautiful streets of Paris. Down there, I imagined, real gourmets were now eating food out of trash cans out of desperation to recapture what they had experienced with me. If there is one nice thing to be said, I now have two Michelin Stars here in my homeland of Canada, where my consommé-and-grilled-cheese recipe is now so much better than most of our restaurants that it made the Prime Minister Herself come and spit in my face for ruining the economy, before awarding me an Order of Canada. It's not the same.

[apas-95]

maybe this is just the autism speaking but i miss 'lurk moar' culture. the expectation being that any given person should silently watch and analyse the norms, behaviours, and shared facts of a space before engaging in it themselves is both relieving (when you do suddenly join a conversation for the first time, with no introduction, acting practically like an insider, it's a nontopic) and also avoids so much of the irritation modern online spaces have, where people seemingly don't value others' time and will petition openly for other people to provide them with knowledge they could have spent five minutes searching for.

i suppose part of it is that there don't really exist anymore, in popular usage, spaces to actually lurk in. instead of irc channels and forum boards, the modern internet is an interconnected sea, where there's no actual membrane separating one group from another. someone showing up in the replies of your post hasn't navigated to it. they aren't engaging in a specific space for this post or for your social circle. at most they're browsing through a hashtag. the post and them have floated past each other and it's likely they'll never interact with you again. there is no delineated community for them to lurk in and become accustomed to.

[evilvillain123456789]

My demonic fucking boomer f*ther is always telling me not to make posts like this while waching tiktoks picture in picture on my samsung zflip 5 and slamming celsuis energy supplement and ritalin and sudafed and caffeine pills while doing promotional work in an IRC channel on the family santa fe's onboard computer all while doing 90 on i75 northbound (to go steal from the gainesville athleta [because, yes, i have been banned from every mid priced womens athliesure retailer in the orlando metropolitan area, thanks for asking]). news flash "dad", as if you didn't grow up staring at the gaydge cluster on your old boomer car and fucking shifting gears every five minutes, because it's literally the exact. same. thing. also im mentally ill and need constant stimulation or i WILL crash the family santa fe into other cars or pedestrians. Whose fauult is this exactly??? let's see, whos the sickly, old boomer war criminal with a taste for poisonous offgasses, which mutated and weakened his focking sperms, hmmmmmm??? The pathetic little fuck is barely clinging to life now and i think it would push him over the edge if he learned that i borrowed against his settlement, because god forbid anyone provide for this fucking family, and god forbid a mentally ill queer woman be a fucking antraprenore... its like my rival investment guru always said, no one ever made seven figures rugpulling on doomed NFTs by hanging around in the persian gulf inhaling toxic fumes like some kind of- FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK YOU BITCHES MADE ME MISS MY FUCKING EXIT!!!

[thecruellestmonth]

https://refugeerights.org/get-involved/

"Daily clicks" are useless and distracting. An entire year of clicks raises $0.22 USD. Donate $1 to a fundraiser or organization to do more than a year of clicks. Share links for free to do more than a year of clicks.

"Daily clicks" are useless and distracting. An entire year of clicks raises $0.22 USD. Donate $1 to a fundraiser or organization to do more than a year of clicks. Share links for free to do more than a year of clicks.

Some helpful newbie guides

https://jasonbasics.carrd.co/

Jason Todd comics and other media guide (Carrd) and guide on Tumblr by @dailyjasontodd

Robin Jason comic recs by @robiinjason

Guide to the Batfam by @comic-commentary

The Incomplete Bat Lore: A Biased Guide to Chaotic Canon on Archive of Our Own

Hoopla Digital (US & Canada)

This blog contains a lot of Jason Todd. He is not my son, he is not my boyfriend, he is a specimen that I study.

Masterposts and meta

Jason + cops

Jason + literature

Does Jason Todd support the death penalty? (No, he doesn't.)

Jason and Steph are smart by wonderwondered

Robin II: DC Animated Universe and source material - comics influences and parallels on the DCAU's second Robin

Jason vs security

Jason’s knife skills by wonderwondered

Jason's lesser-known skills by wonderwondered

Jason's fighting skills by wonderwondered

How does Jason feel about Sheila Haywood?

Known canon blood types of various Gotham-based characters

Jason's trust issues and bond with Dick (2023)

Jason + dogs - fondness for dogs (and cats)

Jason's numerous crimes and atrocities by wonderwondered

Is Jason known to be a Wonder Woman fan? (Kinda, but Diana isn't his favorite Wonder Woman.)

quick & dirty guide to Jason Todd in the modern masterpiece Batman: Battle for the Cowl by Tony Daniel

How many times has Jason Todd tried to murder Tim Drake and Damian Wayne? (once: Battle for the Cowl by Tony Daniel)

Some other blogs: @dailyjasontodd, comic-commentary (inactive), fuckyeahjasontodd.tumblr.com (inactive), @theunavenged, robiinjason.tumblr.com

Fan fiction recommendations

Jason Todd 2022 fan fiction recs

Jason Todd 2023 fan fiction recs

Talia & Jason fic recs (to be added)

Dick Grayson & Jason fic recs

Stephanie Brown & Jason fic recs

Bruce Wayne & Jason fic recs: sweet and bittersweet

Bruce Wayne & Jason fic recs: bitter and toxic (to be added)

Cassandra Cain & Jason fic recs (FIGHT!)

Damian Wayne & Jason fic recs (to be added)

Spooky Jason fics recs (for Halloween season)

Batman and Batfamily: canon vs fanonized myths

FANLORE Wiki

Re: "What are in your opinion the biggest difference between the comic and the fanon versions of the other Batfamily members?" by @theflyingwonder

Batfam canon vs fanon by @bat-lings

Re: "How do fandom tropes compare to actual canon characterization for the robins " by @thebatmanfiles-blog

Nicknames: What do the Bats call each other? answered by kiragecko, sohotthateveryonedied and solidpunchkindaeyes, cornflakepizza and batsgalore, and bluebeauregard

These are some facts that are easy to miss if you mostly read fanfiction instead of 20 year old comics. (Slightly Tim-centric, of course.) by kiragecko

Masterlist of Comic Knowledge Posts by sohotthateveryonedied

Other "Bat family" blogs

Talia al Ghul: katefatale (semi-inactive), onlytalia (inactive)

Stephanie Brown: Stephanie Brown Wiki, our-happygirl500-fan (multifandom)

Rose Wilson: Pre-Flashpoint reading guide by roseworth

Dick Grayson: theflyingwonder (inactive), @northoftheroad, @nightwingology, @nightwing-ing-it, nightwingmyboi (inactive)

Damian Wayne: yicruz48 (inactive), @arabian-batboy, @wesavegotham

[bitternest]

/rubs eyes it's seven am who gets up at 7am

People who get dinged repeatedly about Tumblr shutting down apparently.

Christ on a bike. Okay, long post inbound. On Tumblr's fate, enshittification and navigating the post-web2.0 world.

So I've been meaning to make a post like this for a while now, but because tech is literally my job I... haven't.

First off, Tumblr isn't being shut down. It's being put on legacy support. Maybe one day it will be shut down, but Automattic seems to have the costs dialed in and don't seem to want to nuke it. Yay.

This day was always going to come for one simple reason - social media websites are fundamentally impossible to fund. The cost of that much image and video hosting and bandwidth is not scalable without passing that cost over to the user. In most cases, this is done by making the user the product. But this is non-sustainable. As Tumblr discovered, as Twitter is discovering and as Google Has Ordained, that social media will inevitably be censored and restricted at the whim of the people actually paying - advertisers. And then your users stop caring. Some sites get around this by also robbing you of your dopamine production as well as your privacy - i.e. getting you engaged with their Algorithm.

So, enough with the reasoning, what can you do about this. Well, you can try the next big thing. For many people, that's bluesky. I don't know about you, but I don't think highly of Twitter 2.0 - from the dude who couldn't make Twitter profitable the first time around. And to be clear, its sole goal is to be profitable. It's a corporation. That's... it's purpose. It's purpose is to extract wealth.

For me, the only two vaguely viable options are cohost and the fediverse. Cohost because haha palette-swapped Tumblr but also because the core ideas the founders had are neat and resonate with me.

And the fediverse because that's the only technologically viable way forward for what we've come to expect social networks to be. It is a network in the real sense, an interconnected sprawl of self-hosted servers that individuals or communities are responsible for and the best way to deal with the costs of social media - distributing them. Mastodon is the most famous service in this space, but there are others. Explaining the fediverse outside of "a network of social networks" is beyond the scope of this post and is a real issue with adoption because, no, it's not necessarily easy.

But now we get to the real crux of my post:

The resilient things aren't easy. If you want to build and participate in something lasting, you need to do some hard things. Sometimes that's learning what the fuck @bitternest@mastodon.me.world is supposed to mean. Sometimes it's learning how to read an RSS feed. For artists it can mean learning to set up your own website, with zero code and for free even! (sorry @varethane, i'll get the post up eventually) For tech people it means finding an IRC (what, you think Slack is gonna survive its own enshittification?).

Frequently, it's learning how to back up your posts. Because no matter the site, the day will come when hosting 20 billion jpegs overtakes the cash flow of shiny rainbow crabs.

It is a requirement of the post-web2.0 world that you become more tech-savvy. As we tire of corporate horseshit, we must become more capable of forging our own way. If you want to stay connected, you need to learn how to make and maintain those connections, both social and technological.

And to not end this post on a somber and self-important note, that mastodon id isn't me - I never joined because no server ever appealed to me. If anyone's got suggestions I'm listening. I'm bitternest on cohost as well. Mutuals can DM me for my Discord.

Miss me with those bluesky invites tho

[ach-sss-no]

i see people talking about the discordification of fandom and it just seems like going back to when forums were a thing. when i started going online my fandoms were splintered into a handful of little free proboards forums where you could go to rp, or post fic, or make a fanart thread, or just, you know, fight with other children. and if it wasn't on the forum, essentially nobody saw it. and it was awful because it was full of children. it was terrible.

and people would pop up and be mysteriously popular and beloved even though you have never seen a single thing they've produced and you'd find out: oh they wrote a novel on this other forum you've never heard of. they're really cool but you weren't there you missed it you missed the whole thing and that forum is password protected and you can't get in because all the mods went to college and it's never coming back. and there'd be that amazing artist that started a thread, posted one masterpiece and left. and there'd be trolls of the blatant variety and of the type that are just subtle enough to not get banned

and there were custom emojis, like discord. and there were Mods, like discord. and you'd find a couple of cool people and go into DMs and complain about the other little children who were less cool than you, like discord. and if someone like me had a stupid opinion, i could go into someone else's thread and derail it, instead of making a tumblr post that drops harmlessly into the void. like discord.

the only thing missing: proboards forums could have custom color schemes and could be made ugly and it was magical

Yes I am too young to have done IRC or yahoo groups and NO I'm not sorry I missed it

[rawro]

sometimes I miss the simplicity of irc and aim

[a-solitary-sea-rover-backup]

The Bruce Farr designed 58-foot aluminum Maiden has won the 2023-24 Ocean Globe Race, taking first in IRC handicap rankings against the 14-boat fleet. They have also been written into the history books as the first ever all-women crew to win an around the world yacht race.

The former Whitbread yacht, sailed by an international crew took the title after 153d 2h 16m 53s of racing around the world. Virtually none of the crew had previously faced such an epic challenge and only one had sailed in the Southern Ocean before.  …

“It’s very exciting to be the first all-female crew to win an around the world race,” noted skipper Heather Thomas, the youngest skipper in the fleet. “It’s a historic moment. The girls have worked really hard for it and we’re very proud of our achievement.

“To those we raced against, it’s been a pleasure to get to know them and we’re going to miss them. It’s been an incredible first OGR and I hope the ones that follow are as good. Maiden won’t do the next one, but I will.”

…

It’s fitting that Maiden should take the title with her poignant Whitbread history, as she came fourth in the 1981-82 Whitbread, known then as Disque D’Or 3. She was later renamed Stabilo Boss for the 1986-87 BOC single-handed challenge, coming seventh. In 1987, she was bought by Tracy Edwards MBE, who made headlines in the 1989 Whitbread skippering the iconic yacht around the world with an all-female crew. 

[broodpuff]

are you seriously saying under a post about genocide how much you love media that glorifies genocide? you're evil

no, you foul fucking dipshit. maybe it didn’t come across clearly as to what i meant; that franchise was extremely important to me growing up as a kid and I was devastated once it was unveiled that it was created by zionists and israeli apologists. I denounced my support of naughty dog as a whole amongst any remaining supporters aware of the fact.

I’m heavily involved in any way I can in terms of supporting the end of the genocide, donating to

just as anyone with spare change should contribute towards, as well as inquiring about any brands who are in support of Israel, my method is using the following:

in summary of what i meant through my tags:

the game meant the world to me > found out that naughty dog is filled with zionists > denounced any support towards anything to do with naughty dog > literally just want to know if Ashley Johnson is also a zionist because i haven’t heard a thing about her involvement because i adore(d) her and need to know if i need to denounce her because it’s not her fault she’s been involved with something that’s only just been brought to light has actual evil contributors after Oct. 7th to my knowledge.

I really hope you see this anon and recognize how unsettled i am to even be misconstrued as anything other than a supporter of the end of the genocide in Palestine.

Literally all I want to know is who tf to stop supporting, who is delusional enough to support trigger happy, demented, corrupt murderers.

Don’t ever, EVER accuse me of being anything other than a supporter of Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Yemen, etc.

If you have an issue with something I’ve said or feel as though I’ve done something wrong in the future, don’t start hurling insults at me, try speaking to me first.

If you need anything clarified, if I’ve left anything out or need to be made aware of anything further that I might’ve missed, especially because I’ve needed to take a break from twitter due to every single post being nothing but dead palestinian children, so i’ve probably missed a few integral updates over the past week or so.

In case it needs to be reiterated, Fuck Israel and anyone who’s been stupid enough to blind themselves into believing they’re doing any of this in defense while they cheer when shooting a civilian a mile away with a sniper and then making jokes about it…. And fuck you, anon, I’m real pissed at the accusation while a Palestine pendent hangs from my neck, the proceeds of which went straight to Gaza relief aid. Eat a dick.

edit: It’s come to mind that i saw a post a while back saying that tlou2 came to fruition through Neil’s despise towards Palestine, which I never saw firsthand so I can’t source it and I wondered if that’s what you meant by the glorifying part, i’m not certain that that’s true, if I could be linked, that’d be great and whether it’s true or not, it doesn’t take away from anything said above or at all about Druckmann’s role in all of this, he’s still a despicable zionist. Just wanted to include this whether it’s true or not.

[blubberquark]

The Dark Arts

As a beginner programmer, you should know that eval() is evil, that you should never copy and paste code in cases when you could just put that code in a function and call that function from both places, that you should use a real debugger instead of printing out values, and that you should not use raw sockets in Python.

Sometimes I see beginners who do not yet understand why you can’t just use eval() or sockets - or eval() together with sockets, even - pretend to be more experienced so the greybeards on IRC will explain to them, only to come back a couple of days later with a bug that should have been really obvious if they were really as experienced as they claimed. Topics like eval() are not closely guarded secrets that the greybeards want to keep to themselves, they are much more like actual literally esoteric knowledge, knowledge that is accessible only to those who have been initiated.

This time, I am trying something different. Instead of explaining why you shouldn’t use those things unless you know what you are doing, I will give you the exceptions. This knowledge will be next to useless unless you have been initiated in the art of software engineering, unless you could already have arrived at the same conclusion on your own.

You have been warned.

Print Debugging

I tried to debug a platformer with break points. Super annoying. Instead I use print, I draw boxes on the screen, I have an in-game log console, I have a button I can hold to show more debug info. It varies from game to game.

Debugging movement is not even about bugs, but about game feel.

eval()

I use eval() in my yarn.py library. It’s something like YarnSpinner, which is something like Twine, but for dialogue trees and multiple choice text embedded in games, not for whole games that are just text. Since it doesn’t use it to run code that was sent over the wire, but code that is part of data files that come with your application, it’s reasonably safe to do this. Statements like <<if $EXPR >> and <<print $EXPR >> will evaluate $EXPR in the scope of the yarn.py session, so that they have access to local variables. The statement <<run $PROG >> will execute $PROG with exec().

I thought about having statements like <<set $VAR to $VALUE>> and to store variables in a dictionary. But why bother? After all this, I’d have my own interpreter for a language that’s worse than Python, so I might as well use eval() and exec().

Adding convenient functionality to yarn.py, like the ability to query a node that has been visited, is only a matter of implementing a function in Python and adding it to the interpreter scope in eval(). Instead of adding a special case to the evaluator to handle visited nodes, I have added a visited dictionary to the interpreter scope, and so users can write <<if visited[”StartNode”]>>.

Copy+Paste

I copied and pasted code in a game of mine that lets you save and view replays. In addition to keeping the the gameplay code under source control, for every major revision of the game I copied the gameplay code into a new file. This way, I can import the appropriate gameplay module for a replay file, and run that.

Gameplay code is decoupled from input handling or rendering. Those actually get updated with every new release.

If I had substantial code sharing between versions, I would need to carefully add conditionals each time I made a change. And if I didn’t have old versions of the gameplay code at all, characters would just miss jumps, get stuck in the ceiling, or otherwise come out of sync with the original gameplay as I tweak the physics of movement.

Good thing I have the animations decoupled from the gameplay, or I’d need to version those too.

Raw Sockets

In my multiplayer real-time strategy game I used raw sockets. Every frame, the game receives UDP packets and updates data structures that keep track of received network communication. Then it sends UDP packets back. As long as a packet goes unacknowledged, it is sent again and again on every subsequent frame.

There were no problems with partial data, because I used UDP packets, which either arrive whole or not at all. There were no problems with buffering and de-syncing, because if no packets were received, the game loop would just continue and try again next frame. Packets didn’t have sequence numbers, but they had time stamps and frame numbers.

This form of networking does not require rollback, client-side prediction, async, or a separate thread, but it does introduce a small, fixed amount of lag. With good networking conditions (wired Ethernet LAN), the lag can be as low as a single frame.

pickle

Just kidding! You should never use pickle.

[silvernevermind]

mine hourly comics!!! i had a lot of fun doing em i hope you like ^_^ i know this pics here are a bit shite but i plan to clean these up with a pen later

transcription of all text in image description/below cut!

-cohost.com / oh shit its hourly comic -hey i could do that! -aw fuck! / has already been awake 4 hours 4:10

-hey can i buy a custom fetish video? / yeah of course! what do you want in the vid? -fuck yes i love money! -custom video you are a pure piggy addicted to smelly sauces. 1- you need a jar of mayo spilled mayo on…" 5:00

-where is this last person? / me playing fortnite -the circle is the size of a pea… -literally a foot away / bang bang / (still won btw) 6:40

-lalalala / (dipped donuts in coffee 4 the first time yesterday and going to get more) -lalalala -wehhhhh / (donuts missing) 7:05

-today i will learn a good method of pirating kindle books -(learning IRC chat stuff) / (it was kinda scary…) -YAY!!! / douglas adams / dont panic 8:20

-animal crossing! nooks store opened! heres todays items / baby bear -shortcake shirt -twig parasol / (the only item i didnt buy) 9:20

-ive been craying spicy ramen a lot recently… -im in an online class as i draw this… / (anthropology class) -(crying cause spicy) / but as soon as class ends im eating mine ramen!!! 10:40

-i dont USUALLY like spicy instant ramen -so since i started craving it, ive been trying new ramen brands -todays was so yucky i tossed it out / bleh! / and made another that i liked 11:40

-my sleep patterns suck -usually i take 2-3 short naps a day / and when i nap is always shifting -anyways, its time for bed! / zzz 12:00

-i had a dream about Law one piece / Beppo is here too -i was debating with someone if he would kill me -now that im awake, i think he would NOT kill me cause im so nice and cute <3 / "nice nice devil fruit" 19:20

-i feel like all the hourly comics ive seen have pretty detailed scenes / wow! -empty space / i guess thats just not where my focus goes when drawing -heres my bedroom to make up for that 20:10

-joined call with friends -they have no clue im drawing this! / BITCH! -theyll find out soon though! / END 21:50