#reading a file in python

[evg]

in so deep into modding sims 3 that I made a script to mass change 2000 cc files' hex header 😭😭😭😭😭

[jellyloveru]

ugh.

[sql-datatools]

Python - How to Read OR Convert PDF Files into JSON files

[relto]

man he used eval. in python. thats what you get from using generated code.

[analyticsvidhya]

How to Read and Write With CSV Files in Python?

In Python, handling CSV files is straightforward. To read, use the csv module's reader, and for writing, employ the writer. Explore our comprehensive guide on "How to Read and Write With CSV Files in Python" to master these essential skills and efficiently manage your data processing tasks.

Structure of CSV in Python

[prajwalyyy22]

How to Read and Write With CSV Files in Python

In Python, reading and writing CSV files is simple. Use the csv module to read data and write to CSV files. Learn more about handling CSV files in Python here.

Here is the Structure of CSV in Python:

[syrinq]

yeah i really love it when you want to build a website and learn coding and programming and scripting and set yourself on fire and the experience is basically just this

[sad--tree]

what do u do when u tell ur parent in no uncertain terms Thank You For The Offer But I Do Not Want A Tutor For This Course It Will Not Help And I Am Deeply Uncomfortable With It Do Not Get Me One

and then they go and book u with an online tutor. without asking. what the fuck.

[komaedalovemail]

komaedas have you tried straw.page?

(i hope you don't mind if i make a big ollllle webdev post off this!)

i have never tried straw.page but it looks similar to carrd and other WYSIWYG editors (which is unappealing to me, since i know html/css/js and want full control of the code. and can't hide secrets in code comments.....)

my 2 cents as a web designer is if you're looking to learn web design or host long-term web projects, WYSIWYG editors suck doodooass. you don't learn the basics of coding, someone else does it for you! however, if you're just looking to quickly host images, links to your other social medias, write text entries/blogposts, WYSIWYG can be nice.

toyhouse, tumblr, deviantart, a lot of sites implement WYSIWYG for their post editors as well, but then you can run into issues relying on their main site features for things like the search system, user profiles, comments, etc. but it can be nice to just login to your account and host your information in one place, especially on a platform that's geared towards that specific type of information. (toyhouse is a better example of this, since you have a lot of control of how your profile/character pages look, even without a premium account) carrd can be nice if you just want to say "here's where to find me on other sites," for example. but sometimes you want a full website!

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neocities hosting

currently, i host my website on neocities, but i would say the web2.0sphere has sucked some doodooass right now and i'm fiending for something better than it. it's a static web host, e.g. you can upload text, image, audio, and client-side (mostly javascript and css) files, and html pages. for the past few years, neocities' servers have gotten slower and slower and had total blackouts with no notices about why it's happening... and i'm realizing they host a lot of crypto sites that have crypto miners that eat up a ton of server resources. i don't think they're doing anything to limit bot or crypto mining activity and regular users are taking a hit.

↑ page 1 on neocitie's most viewed sites we find this site. this site has a crypto miner on it, just so i'm not making up claims without proof here. there is also a very populated #crypto tag on neocities (has porn in it tho so be warned...).

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dynamic/server-side web hosting

$5/mo for neocities premium seems cheap until you realize... The Beautiful World of Server-side Web Hosting!

client-side AKA static web hosting (neocities, geocities) means you can upload images, audio, video, and other files that do not interact with the server where the website is hosted, like html, css, and javascript. the user reading your webpage does not send any information to the server like a username, password, their favourite colour, etc. - any variables handled by scripts like javascript will be forgotten when the page is reloaded, since there's no way to save it to the web server. server-side AKA dynamic web hosting can utilize any script like php, ruby, python, or perl, and has an SQL database to store variables like the aforementioned that would have previously had nowhere to be stored.

there are many places in 2024 you can host a website for free, including: infinityfree (i use this for my test websites :B has tons of subdomains to choose from) [unlimited sites, 5gb/unlimited storage], googiehost [1 site, 1gb/1mb storage], freehostia [5 sites/1 database, 250mb storage], freehosting [1 site, 10gb/unlimited storage]

if you want more features like extra websites, more storage, a dedicated e-mail, PHP configuration, etc, you can look into paying a lil shmoney for web hosting: there's hostinger (this is my promocode so i get. shmoney. if you. um. 🗿🗿🗿) [$2.40-3.99+/mo, 100 sites/300 databases, 100gb storage, 25k visits/mo], a2hosting [$1.75-12.99+/mo, 1 site/5 databases, 10gb/1gb storage], and cloudways [$10-11+/mo, 25gb/1gb]. i'm seeing people say to stay away from godaddy and hostgator. before you purchase a plan, look up coupons, too! (i usually renew my plan ahead of time when hostinger runs good sales/coupons LOL)

here's a big webhost comparison chart from r/HostingHostel circa jan 2024.

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domain names

most of the free website hosts will give you a subdomain like yoursite.has-a-cool-website-69.org, and usually paid hosts expect you to bring your own domain name. i got my domain on namecheap (enticing registration prices, mid renewal prices), there's also porkbun, cloudflare, namesilo, and amazon route 53. don't use godaddy or squarespace. make sure you double check the promo price vs. the actual renewal price and don't get charged $120/mo when you thought it was $4/mo during a promo, certain TLDs (endings like .com, .org, .cool, etc) cost more and have a base price (.car costs $2,300?!?). look up coupons before you purchase these as well!

namecheap and porkbun offer something called "handshake domains," DO NOT BUY THESE. 🤣🤣🤣 they're usually cheaper and offer more appealing, hyper-specific endings like .iloveu, .8888, .catgirl, .dookie, .gethigh, .♥, .❣, and .✟. I WISH WE COULD HAVE THEM but they're literally unusable. in order to access a page using a handshake domain, you need to download a handshake resolver. every time the user connects to the site, they have to provide proof of work. aside from it being incredibly wasteful, you LITERALLY cannot just type in the URL and go to your own website, you need to download a handshake resolver, meaning everyday internet users cannot access your site.

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hosting a static site on a dynamic webhost

you can host a static (html/css/js only) website on a dynamic web server without having to learn PHP and SQL! if you're coming from somewhere like neocities, the only thing you need to do is configure your website's properties. your hosting service will probably have tutorials to follow for this, and possibly already did some steps for you. you need to point the nameserver to your domain, install an SSL certificate, and connect to your site using FTP for future uploads. FTP is a faster, alternative way to upload files to your website instead of your webhost's file upload system; programs like WinSCP or FileZilla can upload using FTP for you.

if you wanna learn PHP and SQL and really get into webdev, i wrote a forum post at Mysidia Adoptables here, tho it's sorted geared at the mysidia script library itself (Mysidia Adoptables is a free virtual pet site script, tiny community. go check it out!)

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file storage & backups

a problem i have run into a lot in my past like, 20 years of internet usage (/OLD) is that a site that is free, has a small community, and maybe sounds too good/cheap to be true, has a higher chance of going under. sometimes this happens to bigger sites like tinypic, photobucket, and imageshack, but for every site like that, there's like a million of baby sites that died with people's files. host your files/websites on a well-known site, or at least back it up and expect it to go under!

i used to host my images on something called "imgjoe" during the tinypic/imageshack era, it lasted about 3 years, and i lost everything hosted on there. more recently, komaedalovemail had its webpages hosted here on tumblr, and tumblr changed its UI so custom pages don't allow javascript, which prevented any new pages from being edited/added. another test site i made a couple years ago on hostinger's site called 000webhost went under/became a part of hostinger's paid-only plans, so i had to look very quickly for a new host or i'd lose my test site.

if you're broke like me, looking into physical file storage can be expensive. anything related to computers has gone through baaaaad inflation due to crypto, which again, I Freaquing Hate, and is killing mother nature. STOP MINING CRYPTO this is gonna be you in 1 year

...um i digress. ANYWAYS, you can archive your websites, which'll save your static assets on The Internet Archive (which could use your lovely donations right now btw), and/or archive.today (also taking donations). having a webhost service with lots of storage and automatic backups can be nice if you're worried about file loss or corruption, or just don't have enough storage on your computer at home!

if you're buying physical storage, be it hard drive, solid state drive, USB stick, whatever... get an actual brand like Western Digital or Seagate and don't fall for those cheap ones on Amazon that claim to have 8,000GB for $40 or you're going to spend 13 days in windows command prompt trying to repair the disk and thenthe power is gong to go out in your shit ass neighvborhood and you have to run it tagain and then Windows 10 tryes to update and itresets the /chkdsk agin while you're awayfrom town nad you're goig to start crytypting and kts just hnot going tot br the same aever agai nikt jus not ggiog to be the saeme

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further webhosting options

there are other Advanced options when it comes to web hosting. for example, you can physically own and run your own webserver, e.g. with a computer or a raspberry pi. r/selfhosted might be a good place if you're looking into that!

if you know or are learning PHP, SQL, and other server-side languages, you can host a webserver on your computer using something like XAMPP (Apache, MariaDB, PHP, & Perl) with minimal storage space (the latest version takes up a little under 1gb on my computer rn). then, you can test your website without needing an internet connection or worrying about finding a hosting plan that can support your project until you've set everything up!

there's also many PHP frameworks which can be useful for beginners and wizards of the web alike. WordPress is one which you're no doubt familiar with for creating blog posts, and Bluehost is a decent hosting service tailored to WordPress specifically. there's full frameworks like Laravel, CakePHP, and Slim, which will usually handle security, user authentication, web routing, and database interactions that you can build off of. Laravel in particular is noob-friendly imo, and is used by a large populace, and it has many tutorials, example sites built with it, and specific app frameworks.

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addendum: storing sensitive data

if you decide to host a server-side website, you'll most likely have a login/out functionality (user authentication), and have to store things like usernames, passwords, and e-mails. PLEASE don't launch your website until you're sure your site security is up to snuff!

when trying to check if your data is hackable... It's time to get into the Mind of a Hacker. OWASP has some good cheat sheets that list some of the bigger security concerns and how to mitigate them as a site owner, and you can look up filtered security issues on the Exploit Database.

this is kind of its own topic if you're coding a PHP website from scratch; most frameworks securely store sensitive data for you already. if you're writing your own PHP framework, refer to php.net's security articles and this guide on writing an .htaccess file.

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but. i be on that phone... :(

ok one thing i see about straw.page that seems nice is that it advertises the ability to make webpages from your phone. WYSIWYG editors in general are more capable of this. i only started looking into this yesterday, but there ARE source code editor apps for mobile devices! if you have a webhosting plan, you can download/upload assets/code from your phone and whatnot and code on the go. i downloaded Runecode for iphone. it might suck ass to keep typing those brackets.... we'll see..... but sometimes you're stuck in the car and you're like damn i wanna code my site GRRRR I WANNA CODE MY SITE!!!

↑ code written in Runecode, then uploaded to Hostinger. Runecode didn't tell me i forgot a semicolon but Hostinger did... i guess you can code from your webhost's file uploader on mobile but i don't trust them since they tend not to autosave or prompt you before closing, and if the wifi dies idk what happens to your code.

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ANYWAYS! HAPPY WEBSITE BUILDING~! HOPE THIS HELPS~!~!~!

-Mod 12 @eeyes

[surfeitoflampreys]

It is so handy how on Unix you can just write files to /tmp and they will be cleared up automatically upon shutdown!

So if I want to write a disposable python script to test something - put it in /tmp!

Or if I want to view e.g. an MS Word document that my browser can't read, just save it in /tmp.

And of course if it's worth keeping, then move it to somewhere permanent.

[valeriehalla]

mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah I just found your VN and it's so cute and arresting and so full of nonbinary longing I'm absolutely in love already and it's kinda inspiring me to do the scary job of opening up a word doc and try writing some of my own stuff for the first time ever

also wrt aster i love love love love love the idea of being freed from agab. just... can't remember. who cares. no longer having to measure up to a gender metric or constantly minimizing your male shoulders or female hips and worrying about your ratios or presentation - and just relax and enjoy it instead of treating it like a constant chore of maintaining a dozen spinning plates to avoid being "found out". freed from presentation pressure. mwah.

also also as a fellow web developer I'd love to hear more about your stack for ssg - gatsby? svelte? vite? 93 nested imported html docs? one really really big div? I ask because while I don't know if I'll ever have the chops for music production, reading and discovering that inline music player absolutely tickled me, both narratively and as a developer, what a delight, so so so good

My “stack” ... hmmm. “Stack” .................

So, for the main website I just used “Lektor”, which I picked out of a hat on the basis that it was python-based and could do the one thing I cared about (HTML templating). But the CURSE/KISS/CUTE reader is coded from scratch. It is a single-page app, and it loads and displays story content by grabbing the HTML from a JSON file I call the “story file”. The JSON in turn is created by a parser that I wrote in python that parses a specially-formatted markdown file which I also confusingly call the “story file”. The script format for this latter file is slightly custom but is mostly just “normal markdown but I repurposed code ticks as a macro format”:

The music player is pretty rudimentary and just offloads all the complicated business to howler.js.

It’s a funny patchworked leaning tower of python but it gets it done and gets it done entirely client-side and that means I don’t have to dip even one of my toes into the haunted pool of server-side web development =w=

[corseque]

@selemchant @noxconsortium

Here's a breakdown of what I did

I went through the ">conversations" section, looking for which files actually made up the dialogue trees. It's a little different than Inquisition, but I eventually found that they seem to be within the "FC_ConvFlowLayer" files.

Frosty actually has the strings linked correctly within these files, but it's very cumbersome to look at in Frosty. I wanted to make it easier to read. When you export these FC_ConvFlowLayer files, they are .xml files that link to numbers instead of strings.

When you export the raw script of DAV from Frosty Editor, every line is paired with the same matching little numbers (minus the first "0x" for some reason).

The raw script is a .csv file that looks like this:

So I added an "0x" to every line of the .csv file (so they would match) and then made a python program that found all the strings within the <StringId></StringId> tags in all the xml files, and then looked up the matching number in the Raw Script .csv file and then saved the second column (the text) from the .csv file into the .xml files.

So now instead of numbers, I have strings:

Now, these .xml files have a lot of information in them that someone smarter than me could figure out how to make a comprehensive dialogue tree out of, because I think all of the information you would need is provided by the xml files. But that's hard and for now I just wanted a .txt file of who spoke what line.

It wasn't hard from there to write another little program to extract just the speaker and the lines into a plain .txt file

And then to merge all the text files together and use notepad++ and the power of regular expressions to clean them even more:

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PLAY AROUND WITH THE .XML FILES THAT HAVE THE NUMBERS REPLACED WITH STRINGS but that still have all the conversation information intact, like how each of the lines are linked to each other, I uploaded them here on google drive (there are 1500 files, but they're pretty small):

LINK TO THE XML FILES FOR YOU TO DO WHAT YOU WANT WITH

[britishraptor]

Gonna kick the hornets nest here, but the file from the most recent episode of The Magnus Protocol was incredibly underwhelming. It didn’t take into account at all anything that actually makes snakes scary, little to no foreshadowing, and basically attempted to jumpscare the audience with a reveal that reads more like a parody of a horror story than an actual one.

I might look like an idiot or a fool when everything all strings together later than the line, but I’m questioning so much about this episode.

Parasites are scary. Worms, and insects and mold and rot. Decay, possession. Spiders are scary because they’re hard to see, hard to pinpoint and they move fast, plus the connections with webs related to control, and manipulation. So yeah, a worm lady, sure, a person filled with spiderwebs, also sure. But the only connection between snakes and parasitism could be a joke about ‘shedding your skin’ or how disturbing that one scene in Harry Potter was.

Snakes are scary for two reasons:

1) the same reason bears and tigers all that are scary. Hunt style being hurt, and killed, and eaten. Simple.

B) uncanny valley reasons. Snakes don’t blink. They don’t have facial expressions. The way they move and eat and exist is totally different from humans and mammals. They’re often described as alien and cold.

My questions:

a) why rodent control? why was he even actually brought in? His walls are FULL OF SNAKES. It wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. It doesn’t make any sense even if you know he was concerned about parasites. Snakes don’t give a shit about other snakes. To call someone a snake is to literally call them callous and prone to betrayal. A snake eats the rodent, so you kill the snake. Plus a snake store would have access to medications to kill mites and deal with snake illness? Why call the guy at all?

b) the foreshadowing on the owner is terrible. You could have mentioned his skin needed moisturising. That it seemed dry, flaky. Scaly. But just. A red rash? A rash? Are you saying being full of snakes is an infectious disease? That’s what he said at the end, right? That his throat itches. It was swelling. You can just?? Grow your own snakes?? Is that the implication?

No uncanny valley mention on the owner either at all. He didn’t move weird, being full of snakes? Didn’t sway or limp as he walked, didn’t move sluggishly? Bad hearing, didn’t know what to do with his hands? No? Just a short tempered customer. Okay.

c) You lost me at the thousands of snakes. THOUSANDS? What is this, a clown car? A snake clown car in some random guys skin, who explodes because he was mad a customer walked out.

Look, I’m Australian. And when I ask my friends ‘hey, how big do you normally picture a snake being?’ we picture snakes about 1.5m long. Dinner table length is pretty common for all of our common brown, tiger snakes, red bellies, and even longer for our common carpet pythons. But even if I adjust to like, other countries’ grass snakes, thousands?

The throwaway line at the end was plot relevant I’m sure, but I’m all around confused, and totally not even a little bit scared.

The only praise I have is that the description of the crickets was very creepy, and I loved the visual of them moving around like a shuddering wave of pixels on a screen, only really perceived by their screaming.

But yeah. The setup, the foreshadowing, the coherent theming and consistency all just fell totally flat for me. The only thing I learnt was that this guy applied to the institute and was rejected, and that snakes can’t do dishes.

[mariacallous]

One of the largest federations of unions and several former officials of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration have raised concerns about the possibility that Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency could potentially gain access to sensitive information shared with OSHA and the Department of Labor by whistleblowers at the centibillionaire’s companies.

While Musk serves as a “special government employee” in the Trump administration, SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company are the subject of more than 50 ongoing workplace health and safety cases opened by OSHA in the past five years, according to a public database maintained by the agency. OSHA sits within the Department of Labor, where DOGE operatives have been working since at least March 18.

In a memo shared exclusively with WIRED, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which is currently suing the Trump administration over DOGE’s access to records at the Department of Labor, says they believe that the news reports and OSHA cases in its memo allegedly illustrate “gross mistreatment and even abuse of workers” at Musk companies in five different states. In the memo, the union federation alleges that as Musk attempts to exert “unilateral control” over the federal government through DOGE, “his record as a boss should be of concern to every worker in America.”

Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, OSHA, and the Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.

There’s currently no public evidence to suggest that Musk or DOGE has accessed confidential files at OSHA. But the fact that DOGE has tried to seek access to other potentially sensitive databases at the Department of Labor and a number of other federal agencies worries both the AFL-CIO and former OSHA administrators.

Jordan Barab, former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA under President Barack Obama, tells WIRED that “no company who is being cited by OSHA or investigated by OSHA” should obtain the ability to access the agency’s “internal and confidential files.”

In a March 29 court filing, lawyers representing the Trump administration in the AFL-CIO’s lawsuit said that DOGE operative Marko Elez currently has read access to four record systems at the Department of Labor, including a database for managing employee access to federal buildings and systems, and another for keeping track of unemployment benefit claims. The filing states that Elez “has not accessed any of the systems,” but has installed Python and a tool for editing software code at the agency.

Tesla is currently the subject of one active OSHA investigation, according to the public database, meaning OSHA has yet to issue a citation or dismiss the case. The case was opened last month in response to an unspecified “safety” complaint about a Tesla facility in Lathrop, California.

Since April 2020, OSHA has issued 46 citations to Tesla—for a variety of allegations, including claims of violating OSHA safety regulations, failing workplace inspections, or because a worker was injured at the facility—more than half of which Tesla is currently disputing. During that same time period, OSHA had six investigations that resulted in citations to SpaceX and three to the Boring Company, a tunnel construction company founded by Musk.

In the memo, the AFL-CIO highlights some two dozen accidents and alleged safety issues reported at Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company since 2016 as the basis for its concern, some of which were the subject of recent OSHA investigations. In one incident reported to OSHA last year, a licensed electrician named Victor Joe Gomez Sr. was electrocuted and killed after being instructed to inspect electrical panels at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, that OSHA determined had not been properly disconnected beforehand. (The case remains open, as Tesla is actively disputing it.)

Two separate OSHA citations at other Tesla factories involved fingertip amputations. At a SpaceX facility in 2022, an employee “suffered a skull fracture and head trauma and was hospitalized in a coma for months,” according to the final OSHA accident report, after experiencing what the agency described as a technical problem with a newly automated piece of machinery. SpaceX did not contest its OSHA citation and $18,475 fine.

Liz Shuler, the president of AFL-CIO, claims that a number of Tesla workers have repeatedly alleged to the federation that safety isn’t prioritized at the car company. The AFL-CIO works with the United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), but it does not represent employees at Tesla or SpaceX.

“There are clearly some serious safety hazards in their facilities,” Debbie Berkowitz, former chief of staff and a senior adviser at OSHA under Obama, alleges, referring to Tesla.

After OSHA issues a citation, employers have the right to challenge it, and Tesla does this often, according to the agency’s public database. Of the 46 Tesla cases in which OSHA issued citations over the past five years, the memo cites 27 that remain open because the car company is actively disputing them with the agency. Two SpaceX cases and one Boring Company case remain open for the same reason. The cases can’t be closed until both OSHA and the companies agree on the terms of the citation, which may include associated fines and specific changes the company has to make to improve worker safety.

David Michaels, the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA under Obama, tells WIRED that, in general, big companies typically don’t have a financial incentive to challenge OSHA citations, since they usually are accompanied by fines costing only a few thousand dollars. However, a company isn’t required to address the specific hazard that led to an accident until after a case is closed. In order to avoid addressing these alleged problems, Michaels says that generally, some companies may be motivated to keep cases open.

“Some employers decide they don't want to abate the hazard, they don't agree with the citation, and they will spend many, many thousands of dollars fighting the case, and it'll cost them far more than simply paying a small fine and abating the hazard,” Michaels says.

There is currently no evidence that Musk has access to any confidential databases at the Department of Labor that may contain personal information about whistleblowers. But former OSHA administrators say the agency does house records that would anonymize whistleblowers, as well as employees who participated in anonymous interviews with agency investigators.

Berkowitz says her fear is that someone with this amount of access could be able to identify every whistleblower who has contributed to an OSHA investigation into one of his companies. Michaels adds that, generally speaking, there is “a very significant concern” that whistleblowers who have their identities revealed would be subject to retaliation or intimidation.

“If those were released to the employer, workers could suffer retaliation, and while that retaliation is absolutely forbidden by law, it's very difficult for OSHA to protect those workers,” Michaels says.

Shuler tells WIRED that whistleblowers speak out about their companies at great personal risk, and that she is extremely concerned that their anonymity and safety won’t be preserved. “It's, to me, an abomination in terms of the checks and balances that we've put in place into these systems,” Shuler says. “Knowing that our government has trust, that we've been able to get workers to trust that their government will keep them safe, and now we have an unelected billionaire basically disrupting that sense of security.”

Musk has at least twice discussed retaliating against people who leaked information in recent years. In March, Musk said that he would “look forward to the prosecutions” of Pentagon workers after information was leaked to journalists. At X, Musk threatened to sue employees who violated their nondisclosure agreements.

The future of OSHA under the Trump administration more broadly remains unclear. Rebecca Reindel, director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO and a member of OSHA’s National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety & Health since 2022, tells WIRED that the group would have normally met twice already by this point in the year, but no meetings have occurred. Her committee was working on crafting guidelines to prevent heat-related injury and illness in the workplace.

In recent weeks, DOGE has canceled the leases of seventeen OSHA area offices, according to a website where the group lists how much money it claims to have saved the federal government. Neither DOGE nor OSHA have said whether these offices will fully close, downsize, or merge with other existing area offices. At least for now, DOGE doesn’t appear to have orchestrated mass firings at OSHA the way it has at many other federal agencies. “We have not seen massive cuts yet,” Reindel says. “We are expecting them to come.”

[nautiscarader]

The search for Nautiscarader's backstory, ep. 2, Endless Shmaltz

For those of you, who missed episode 1, I am trying to piece together the origins of my writing hobby by finding the oldest fics I've read, with the help of my extensive backup on a portable hard drive, and exploring my earliest ships and fandoms.

And boy, have I jumped the gun with the Monty Python gif in the og post, because this is already an order of magnitude weirder.

But first let's start with Minimax.

Minimax was a Polish(-ish) cartoon tv channel, which showed a hecking lot of cool cartoons (Magic School Bus, Code Lyoko, Lou!, Wakfu, yes, Wakfu, with Polish dub before the English Kickstarter! and many others) However, after hours, it gave way to gaming channel called gameOne, quickly renamed as Hyper. (Minimax itself had an edgy skater phase calling itself Zigzap, and then it became Teletoon+).

Now, if you are scratching your head, remember, we are talking about late 90s/early 2000s, early-internet, pre-Youtube era of TV. Gaming programmes were a thing. But aside from trailers and reviews, Hyper also showed a heck lot of anime, like Neo Genesis Evangellion, Record of Lodoss War, CyberSix (which is effing awesome!), and the topic of today's trip to the past, Gundam Wing.

This was not my intro to the mecha genre, General Daimos, which aired on Polonia1 was, but that channel is a story for a different day.

But most importantly, aside from big robots and political intrigue IN SPAAAAAAAACE, it also had...

...Relena Peacecraft (left), on whom I've had a huge crush as a 14-ish-years-old. In fact, this is also when I have discovered odd dissonances between anime openings and endings. Seriously, make someone new watch the og GW ending and try to convince them it's a space mecha show.

And so, once again, I went to The Internet to find fics about her and the show's hero, called... er, Heero. Yeah that was weird. Anyway, when I've started looking for GW fics, I have noticed a slight disproportion between number of M/F and M/M fics, in favour of the latter.

I would like to remind you, I am from Poland, which is, at low tide, 117% religious.

Anyway, this is how I've discovered yaoi.

But let's go back to Heero/Relena (or HxR, or 1xR, ships had these alphanumeric codes referring the pilots' numbers, AND THEY STILL USE THEM THIS IS SO CUTE @i-just-wanna-be-by-your-side)

I remembered exactly one fic, called "Do it in the road", and, sure enough, I had it saved.

But it was not the only file with that name...

You see, for SOME COCKING REASON, 16 YEARS OLD ME STARTED TRANSLATING IT INTO POLISH.

And this is where the fun trip down the memory lane turned into an existential roller-coaster, cos I've had no recollection of doing so!

...and why would I even do that?! Not to impress my classmates, nor, god forbid, my teachers, I was not going to publish it, and since I have started translating it, I obviously could enjoy it in English anyway. I say 'started', because I have not finished translating this one.

This one.

BECAUSE LO AND BEHOLD, I WAS ABLE TO FIND THREE MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SAME PERIOD.

AND THESE ARE FINISHED.

And... I... er, I... find it difficult to explain! Can you even BEGIN to imagine the emotional whiplash I've experienced last night month when I've started writing this?! Now I know how characters in time travel stories feel, when they meet their older/younger counterparts. You should never meet your Heeros.

Now if you are insane inquisitive, you might ask about the quality of these translations. Well, they are... correct. I have mistranslated some idioms, and a few sentences have clunky structures. In other words...

...they could use...

...some...

...polish.

Now, this where I've hit a bit of a snag: it seemed this fic is gone from net. I had, however author's email - in pre-social media days it was customary to sign fics with them. Buuuuut since it's two decades old, I don't think I will eve-

NEVER COCKING MIND

So, I have managed to contact Beck and asked to reupload fic. Here is their FF account. At the moment it hasn't been reuploaded, so you cannot read it.

SCRATCH THAT

In fact, I have found an ooooooooooold lemon repository, called "Blissful Ignorance", and this is 100% the source of these fics for me. And here it is!

Oh, and one these fics lead to a slightly saucy fanart, which I have definitely saved.

(in fact, holy shit, I might have found it in the nick of time, cos the rest of the website 404s. In fact, two links there 404 as well. BACKUP STUFF YOU ENJOY, KIDS!)

Other fics from screenshots above:

Heero gets some!: https://anime2.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600021477

Lunch Break: https://blissfulignorance.com/Old/lemons/lunchbreak.htm

Waiting for tonight: https://blissfulignorance.com/Old/lemons/waitingfortonight.html

Power games: https://blissfulignorance.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4260

WAIT HANG THE COCK ON

SO NOT ONLY IS BLISSFUL IGNORANCE UP AND RUNNING, IT IS NOT A DECREPIT HTML HELD BY GLUE AND WISHES BUT A PROPER PHPBB

and here is ANOTHER copy of "do it in the road": https://blissfulignorance.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=890

This... is truly bizarre. I thought I'd be finding a few dinosaur bones, and instead I found a working Jurassic Park.

W I L D.

And that would be it for today's internet history lesson! Not only have I found old fics, met their author, I have found an old example of another one of my hobbies - translations. Cos, yeah, I sometimes do them, just for myself, usually, I just like also comparing og lines with translations...

The funny thing is, I did remember name "Blissful Ignorance", but I thought it was a Sailor Moon fic repository, and... oh, but I shouldn't spoil what's coming in episode 3 :)

See you next time!

[iheartchv]

could i ask for a matchup? also i hope your having a nice day/night/afternoon!! also, please excuse any bad grammar, english is not my first language.

im Cuban Puerto Rican, i speak both my mother tongue and English. kinda trying to get myself to learn German though. im a bit of an ambivert, i mostly enjoy spending time with those i know well.

im 5’2, i have a huge scar in my left leg due to an accident i had when i was younger. i have brown, nearly black eyes and i use glasses. i have a mole near my collarbone and another one just above. my hair is brown and medium sized with some side-tails.

currently studying with a forensic sciences major, a bit of a nerd.. i enjoy drawing, reading Sci-Fi and spending time with my pet snakes. (their ball pythons, they are super adorable…) i absolutely love heavy metal bands like Rammstein, korn, Slipknot, i listen to Type O Negative, Slaughter to Prevail from time to time aswell alongside jazz. i dress in a bit of a grunge way, it varies since i enjoy fashion a lot.

i enjoy watching true crimes series (Forensic Files being an all time favorite), watching Caso Cerrado, and documentaries regarding military history. i love the rainy weather and from time to time going to the beach. truly calming, really.

anyways, i really hope you are having a pleasant time, again. also i absolutely love your writing style!!

🤔I'll match you with...

Simon "Ghost" Riley 💀

I think Ghost would be your match

For this scenario, lets just say that Ghost was to keep an eye on you for a mission

You had shown potential that anyone working for the law would want you to work with them

You have an internship working for the police in your area, getting some practice for the field

You weren't bad, quite good actually

And because you were so good, you would also become a threat to any criminal facing charges for murder, etc.

One of such being Makarov and the Konni group

TF 141 got word that Makarov killed their spy that was sending feedback and intel

You were unfortunately the one looking over the said body of 141's spy; the FBI and CIA wanted to know exactly who done it

As Ghost continued to have constant vigil over you in the shadows, he didn't like the idea of seeing you make your way home alone

He finally decided to start blending in with people, and sometimes walking your way

It's just for the mission, he'd tell himself

🖤

At first, seeing his appearance was a little scary, intimidating

But you didn't sense no ill will coming from him, at least not toward you

You initiated conversations with him, and little by little he was talking more than just a word or a sentence

Over time he got to know you pretty well, as much as you allowed

He noticed how open you were to him, letting him know that you trusted him

You were just full of surprises;

One thing after another he learned so much about you besides what was in your personal records

He started to see you as you, not just another nameless target to protect

🖤

Even after the mission is complete, he comes back to see you...

Maybe stay for a while...

I can totally see you and Ghost going to the beach during times when there's no one around

Just you two

And rainy days?

He'd be all for it

A hot cup of tea and being with you is one of those perfect moments he feels at peace