#like just use rust for servers and stuff

[engiiiiiii]

i love how articles have taken the 'stop using c/c++ for secure applications due to memory vulnerabilities' and taken that to mean no-one should ever use it, c/c++ is over I guess... (I mean both windows and linux are written in a lot of c/c++ so...)

[grub-hut]

I don't use Tiktok, never will, In my opinion I think the app should shut down. [ But that will never happen... So I will cope.] But god are ya'll are insufferable on there. The fact you have this strong par asocial attachment to Sebastian and claim that Zerum is ""ruining the character"" is just blasphemy and shows you guys know nothing to zero about writing and do not play the game whats so ever. I've talked to Zerum; Ive talked to the devs and mods ; and all the false claims and misinformation that's being spread like a wildfire IS CRAZY. Everyone's so exhausted. It takes just a couple of minutes to prove it's false but that would actually require these people to literally sit down and fucking read. Zerum never banned anybody. Zerum doesn't handle the bans in the server. If you got banned or muted, it was most likely the automod in the server that they have implemented to avoid people saying anything weird or sexual... [ A friend of mine got muted because they sent a gif that had a weird name to it; nothing related to the gif, the gif was fine and they filed a ticket and got unmuted. Its just the bot doing its job.] and even then the mods probably banned you for something completely unrelated...

and even then, can we STOP normalizing this??

Like this GRINDS my gears, it fucking rusts, it makes me want to break down and combust into flames- Stop. Stop. YOU ARE THE ISSUE. Creators want to create. Either for ourselves or for others, whatever it maybe people enjoy letting their creativity flow because ITS FUN. IT SHOULD BE--- FUN!!! We are giving you literally something free and something to ENJOY because we enjoy it just as much! This stupid fucking mindset being so normalized makes me SO SICK. " whatever is put on the internet is free reign!" you guys have ZERO respect for any creator; even yourselves and its so BLATANTLY OBVIOUS. You guys preach about "respecting artists/creators" till it doesnt fit with your agenda, because we should just "expect" our works to be disrespected and used. Like our feelings never mattered. Are we going to ignore the discussion of AI art too? Or copyright, or literally anything of that sort here? Yes, its the internet, there WILL be people who are so drastically cruel and do something you will not like. I do agree its best to ignore those kinds of people but that does not mean we should just LET it happen. It does not mean we should suck it up and take the blows. This is how people stop creating, youre killing artists, youre shunning them away because "its the internet, lol, dont get mad if ppl -" Stop it, you're teaching younger generations that it does not matter if you have boundaries or not and that your voice doesnt mean anything. I mean fuck, you put your oc here I can use it however I want then! Because you shouldve expected the moment you click post for other people to use it! Who cares right?! its OUR oc now >:)!!! No matter what the character is from, by a indie game, a comic, a book, yadda yadda. If youre gonna be scum, you are gonna BE scum. Artists should be respected and be listened to. If Zerum ships her oc to her oc, so fucking what? She created him. YES. SHE CREATED HIM. Just because she is a """co-owner" You forget she wrote and designed him. You forget its STILL HER CHARACTER. WHICH BTW, HE WOULDNT EXIST IF IT WASNT FOR ZERUM!! ITS HER CHARACTER- Not yours, and if your first thing that comes to mind " oh but shes ruining her character" then so what, its not MADE for you. Hell, Sebastian is only like 1% of the whole entire game! ENJOY THE GAME, ENJOY THE ACTUAL LORE. MAKE YOUR OWN OCS, GO WACKY WOOHOO AND ENJOY IT WITH OTHERS. If you make headcanons for Sebastian or any other characters! Great! As long as you are respectful who literally cares. HAVE FUN! Stop harassing and bullying and literally spreading misinfo; I am so sick of people with this mindset! This is why the internet is such a shit place to begin with because we just let this stuff happen. Grow up! Like PAInter said.." YOURE NO FUN AT ALL!"

[ladyshinga]

I wish like hell I could drive this point into every American head: you CANNOT have Constant Uphill Progress while ignoring the ongoing maintenance of infrastructure

Like oooo your little AI bot is sooo cool, how are you maintaining those servers? Is it sustainable? Is it causing local problems with power and water?

Ooo nice fancy new military jet, did we spend 8 billion dollars to make it and then will let it slowly rust in a hanger bay while you rush to make a NEW 12 billion dollar jet?

Nice new highway lane, how are the potholes on EVERY other road in your city?

Nice new football stadium, local college, wow! Did you notice your science and art buildings are falling apart?

Interesting house design, Random Architect hired to make cheap housing that costs too much for anyone to buy anyway, is it CLEANABLE? Did you make annoying high windows people can't reach, did you build closet shelving with cheap little nails because you don't care that people actually have to LIVE IN THIS HOUSE and TAKE CARE OF IT and actually PUT things on the shelves you built so they need to handle ACTUAL WEIGHT, do you think about that at all? Or is all that thinking "annoying" and it "stops ~innovation~"

It feels like a constant uphill battle just to get Americans to think further than one goddamn year into the future. How will this be maintained? How will you fix it, keep it running, how can OTHERS fix and maintain it after you're gone? How will this road look in 10 years? How will this website function in five years? Why are we designing this war machine we claim we have no use for because we're "not at war", after all?

American individualism = "who cares about what happens in the future to other people, all I care about is how good I feel about this right this second and asking me questions about how to manage this stuff in the future is buzzkill loser behavior, hdu"

[mintywolf]

A Long Road Home - Page 81

Page 81

Imogen’s outfit here came from some concept art I drew for a 1950s-themed Bells Hells cosplay.

(Which you can see in person on this post!)

The plant Imogen is using to stuff the mattress is lady’s bedstraw, which, as its name suggests, was traditionally used as mattress stuffing because of its vanilla-like scent and natural insect-repelling properties. (She is not actually stuffing fresh damp flowers into the mattress; there’s a desiccated pile of them next to her that she has dried out presumably with prestidigitation.)

The middle panel here was originally different and showed them settling into their new home:

Panel 3: Evening. There's a fire in the wood stove, now cleaned of rust. The loft is furnished with the straw mattress and the blankets and furs from their bedrolls. A sideways wooden box nailed to the wall forms a kitchen shelf on which are stacked a few dishes and cups. (NB every time we see the cups they have switched between being rightside-up and upside-down.) The washtub and some pots and pans hang on the walls. A table made of crates and boards holds a vase of colored leaves. There's a rag rug on the floor. Sitting by the fire, Laudna is sewing a quilt patch from odd fabric scraps she has collected, with Pâté and Calamari beside her. Imogen is stretched out nearby on the rug, reading. It's very cozy.

I even got as far as sketching it but I felt like I needed to address how the two most noodle-armed farm girls in Exandria managed to get the dead tree off the roof with their combined strength of 13. (As unfortunately it’s too early for Imogen to levitate it off using Telekinesis or Laudna to simply ask it to roll away with Animate Objects.)

My friend Snow and I brainstormed for a little bit and came up with using pulleys and levers, having a friendly monster carry it away, or just leaving it there and using it as a coat rack, but in the end I decided that Imogen’s lightning magic could probably break it into pieces with the least amount of visual explanation.

Laudna working on a quilt was meant to be a recurring visual motif throughout this chapter though so I will have to find a way to put that in later.

The underlying sketch of the last panel is REALLY old, it was from that unfinished comic I have mentioned before that I was channeling all of my frantic energy into between episodes 33 and 34. So long before they had any kind of established romantic interest in each other. They were just Like That.

It was late and by the time I was painting the interior objects I was too tired to create a new color palette so the rug is just the Southern Gothic server colors. ;)

[cattimeswithjellie]

Stream Recap, TangoTek, 6/10/24

((This is the funniest one yet, good lord. Things get wild starting around 2:08:00.))

8:30 Tango opens the stream hot, calling Chat jerks and telling them his shirt is red. Chat is skeptical. Tango wishes everyone a happy Monday and pushes out a video. He was waiting to put his video out until Pearl pushed hers out, and she pushed hers out just a few minutes ago. Tango tells everyone they can leave now and watch the video, which is “only” 51 minutes long. It’s a double video, stuff with him and Pearl, the copper farm, and hilarity with Tango and Zed. Today’s job is finishing the aquarium. He thanks the chat for subs and donos.

11:00 Tango makes some funny noises, explains that every time he messes up a take in the video, he just makes the cartoon noise and cuts it off. About 40% of his clips end with complete brain-farting. A chatter asks if he’s seen the League of Legends show. Tango doesn’t know much about it. Chat says it’s called Arcane, Tango says it sounds awesome.

12:00 Pearl appears and boops him, surprising him. He demands to know why he is being booped, Pearl tells him that she’s been standing around up above him but he didn’t notice her. He blames his powers of observation. Pearl offers him some apology redstone for the terrible timing of her video push. It seems like she was waiting for software that took a long time, but she dissolves into wailing before the full explanation is rendered. Tango assures her that it’s fine and tells her it’s a good video. He asks if she finished all the detailing and she tells him yes, it’s all done. Tango asks if he can take the chat over and play Wordle, and they make tentative plans for later. Pearl leaves.

13:40 A chatter asks Tango if he had fun in Zedaph’s hole, Tango says of course he did. Tango explains the water kitten aquarium he and Zed started. He is having a hard time making words happen today. Chat is alternately sympathetic and laughing at him. He goes to find more copper to put on the top of the aquarium. He says he has a new copper farm and it is working. A chatter asks about Wordle, Tango encourages them to go watch Pearl’s video, because Wordle is amazing. A chatter teases Tango about stream and video at the same time. Tango jokes that it’s always feast or famine with the Hermits. A chatter writes Tango a poem. Impulse is still sick after his vacation, but he had a great time.

17:20 Chat is still trying to figure out what color Tango’s shirt is. Suggestions include maroon and rust. Tango begins placing copper. Today’s challenge will be finding axolotls in the lush caves underground. Chat says Joel has some that can be bred, Tango says maybe, but an adventure might be more fun. He looks at the wheat farm and says he has 10 stacks of hay bales now. He consults with chat about details to add to the aquarium before putting axolotls in. Chat has lots of decorative ideas. A chatter suggests warped logs for the animation effect, Tango likes that idea. A chatter asks about Tango’s megabase this season, he says it is the steampunk factory. He also tells Chat that the copper farm will eventually have a steampunk airship built around it, something that the video audience doesn’t know yet.

21:50 Tango wants decorative and functional copper pipes in Minecraft. Chat suggests using lightning rods as pipes, but they are too thin. The Skizz scream noise goes off a a piglin dies to the extermination machine, Tango jokes that nobody even notices it anymore. He goes to get buckets. Chat reminds him to be very very careful not to waterlog the floor, which has farmers beneath it. He promises to be careful.

23:40 A chatter asks how he doesn’t take fall damage in his drop shaft, Tango explains the powdered-snow-under-carpet trick. In chat, Xisuma asks everyone to not go to the End Dimension. Tango begins placing water in the aquarium. Doc signs onto the server and X asks him specifically not to go to The End. Doc tells X he is already there, announces he is joking, and then asks why he needs to steer clear. Tango notices the exchange and says he doesn’t go to The End anyway, then suddenly realizes he kind of needs to get more shulkers and gear. X explains that he is currently moving mobs and Doc agrees to stay away.

26:30 Tango continues placing water and considers where to put the warped logs. Cub signs in, X asks him to not go to the end. Cub immediately makes the same joke about already being there. Xisuma yells “twice!” Doc laughs.

27:30 Tango places a patch of warped wood. He likes it. He heads on a quick nether adventure to get more. He asks chat about water kitten husbandry. Chat advises him that they can drown on land if given a place to get stuck. Tango finds a pillar someone made of warped logs all the way to the ceiling and decides to steal it. It’s a little terrifying. Someone mocks him for “being that guy” and leaving a single floating log. He says that nobody cares what the nether looks like anyway. He solicits fun ideas for a shroom shop from chat. Chat thinks it should be a mushroom or a warped tree. Someone suggests a shroom monster. Tango likes that, something like Treeza from S8. Pearl whispers that she would be willing to help, Tango says that would be great but he would just be watching slackjawed while she builds. She says if he teaches her redstone, she will teach him to build a monster. Tango thinks the monster needs to have a lot of puns involved, a pun name and a pun dispenser. Its name can be Fun Guy.

34:00 Chat suggests some more punny names, including Fun Gus and Mike the Myconid. Tango gets a bit lost on the way home, but makes it back to the nether hub. A chatter jokes about the monster having a warped sense of humor. Tango returns to the aquarium to place more warped logs while chat puns at him. He is now excited about building the shop. Next episode might not even take 16 days!

36:30 Tango checks the wheat farm, no flooding yet. He returns to placing water. Chat is upset that one piece of warped wood is out of alignment. Tango does not care. He finds a deep hole and wonders what is down there. He jumps down the hole and declares spoilers for the video that just came out. There is a hole in the bedrock going into the void. He leaves it open in case Zed comes over to visit.

40:00 More water placement. A chatter suggests hanging a fox with a torch in the void as a dynamic light source. . Tango likes that idea. The aquarium is starting to get very dark. A chatter asks what water kittens are. Tango explains they are axolotls, but calling them water kittens is more fun.

42:50 Tango needs sea pickles. He makes a graceless exit from the tank and looks for his sea pickles. He remembers he was going to add a few oxidized grates for steampunk style. Grates can be waterlogged without looking stupid. He puts away some water buckets. Mrs. T appears and asks what he’s doing. He says he is making a tank, she asks if it will have a pineapple in it. He says Gem makes the pineapples, not him. He begins placing sea pickles. She asks if there are other colors of sea pickles. He says no, but he could place coral. She wants pink coral. He is not shocked about this. He offers to put in a pink axolotl for her. She asks if that’s even a question. He shows her the copper grates and says it’s a grate idea.

45:15 Tango starts to tell Mrs. T about the shroomlight farm idea, but her lunch is ready and she leaves to get it. He places more grates into a sort of pipe structure and asks Chat if they like it. Mrs. T comes back and asks what the grates are for. He says for steampunk reasons. The vote goes against the grates. He tells Mrs. T about the shroomlight shop and all the puns. She is in favor of it, but in the “being supportive of my spouse” sort of way. She suggests “Shitake the Fun Guy” as a name. A chatter asks who Tango is talking to. He welcomes the chatter to the stream. Tango finishes “Watering up his hole.” Mrs. T sighs. Tango says if she wants more of that humor, watch the new video. She says ain’t nobody got time for a 51-minute video.

49:00 Tango waters the hole. He gets very close to finishing before flooding the outside of the tank. He decides not to waterlog the ceiling. Time for decorations. Mrs. T says to call her when it’s time to show off the kittens. Tango needs more pickles because the tank is still very dark. Chat suggests glow lichen. Tango goes to look for glow lichen. Chat cannot spell lichen for love or money. Tango does not have any glow lichen. He thinks about using froglights. Chat suggests robbing Skizz, but the problem with robbing Skizz is you can’t find anything.

53:00 Tango attempts to rob Skizz, going one chest at a time. He finds some moss , but the lichen may be out by the pyramid. Impulse signs onto the server. Tango finds some twisted vines, but they cannot be waterlogged. He finds a squid head and some vines. He goes to look in the pyramid chests and finds glow lichen. He steals all of it. He finds a Tango head. Chat suggests leaving one lichen behind so Skizz can bonemeal it. Tango agrees that would be considerate, but does not do so.

56:30 Tango returns to the aquarium and learns that you cannot waterlog heads. He adds lichen to the tank. Chat suggests a head on an armor stand, but Tango thinks that’s a lot of work. The lichen doesn’t seem to be adding much to the brightness. He tries a twisted vine, but it does not waterlog. He accuses the vines of hating fun. He places and bonemeals some kelp. Tango asks about who sells coral, Chat tells him Gem. He says he should buy Gem out because it will make her happy. He starts to drown. He finishes kelping and says he will snip the kelp down to size later. He also thinks about placing a wet sponge.

1:00:00 Tango’s phone rings with its boomer ringtone. He hands the phone to Mrs. T and tells her to change his ringtone. She agrees cheerfully. Tango thinks they may be done building the tank. Chat reminds him to get the coral. Mrs. T shames Tango for having two “Settings” buttons on the first page of his phone, one line apart. He says when one has his powers of observation, one must adapt to it. He heads for the coral shop.

1:02:00 Mrs T begins cycling through ringtones. Chat says each is more boomer than the last. Tango finds the coral shop. Chat suggests using the Skizzle Scream a a ringtone, Tango says that would be great in public. Tango decides he doesn’t want coral blocks, only coral fans. Chat starts making jokes about Onlyfans. He buys several colors of coral, including pink, and says since Gem doesn’t have an ender chest, he doesn’t have to pay. He pays.

1:05:00 More ringtones. Tango assures Mrs. T that chat is really enjoying this. Tango flies to Two Tek Delay and checks his stock. He doesn’t think he’s sold any pistons yet. He needs to do some restocking. He heads back to his factory, showing Mrs. T the giant firework along the way. He explains how much work it was, how many temporary blocks. Chat points out that Scar would do it too. Tango agrees, but says he wouldn’t do it. It’s almost water kitten time.

1:07:50 Tango puts pink coral in the tank to appease Mrs. T. She wants other kinds of pink coral, the kind that is not so flat. He asks how she knows more about coral than him. The tank is so full there is almost no room for more decorations. Chat says he needs yellow coral. He leaves the tank and looks in. The coral is invisible. Chat says the blue glass was a bad idea. Tango blames chat for choosing blue glass in the first place. He says they can swap it out, but for what color? Chat wants clear glass.

1:11:00 Tango puts his coral and other decorations away. He finds clear glass and says this is going to be an interesting swap. He also grabs shears for the kelp. Chat wants a sponge, he says he will go back for it later. He trims the kelp in the tank to stop it growing. Grian signs on, Chat is excited. Tango begins carefully and quickly replacing the glass piece-by-piece. He predicts that the next thing Chat will demand is the Connected Glass resource pack. Chat agrees that he definitely should get that. He steps back to look at the first few rows and admits that the unconnected glass does look pretty bad. HE says he may do that next. He says he doesn’t like using things that will make things look nice for him but bad for others who visit. Chat points out that everyone else is already using connected textures. Chat is not sure about what the best way is to get connected textures. Tango says Chat is always right and never right, and his job is to sort out the consensus. A chatter says the blue glass was better.

1:17:30 Tango continues discussing datapacks versus modpacks with chat. Tango pauses the game to go choose a datapack that will give him connected glass. Chat helps him navigate the menus. He finds Unobtrusive and selects several glass options. He downloads the pack and implements it. Chat is mildly concerned that clean borderless glass will be invisible. The world renders back in with little stripes on the glass but no borders. Chat says clean and borderless are not compatible. Tango can live with it. Chat likes it. He and chat continue discussing the possibilities of resource-pack altered glass.

1:22:50 It’s water kitten time! Chat reminds him again about the sponge. Tango finds some wet sponges in his ender chest and places two in the aquarium. He thanks the chat for donos and subs. Tango is excited about a new version of Clank coming out. He looks at the tank and is satisfied. Chat is full of suggestions for armor stand scuba divers, shipwrecks and treasure chests. Tango says he might get Cleo to do an armor stand. He asks for how to breed water kittens and tells chat that the plan is to try and find wild ones, give up after five half-hearted minutes, then go breed Joel’s.

1:28:30 The adventure begins. Tango flies around looking for azalea trees. He realizes he’s forgotten an ender chest and goes to steal one from Zed. Zed does not have one. Tango figures maybe he won’t need one. In chat, Pearl warns Tango that the lush caves nearby kinda suck. Chat is full of advice on finding lush caves. Tango admires Scar’s portal as he flies by. He finds Jevin’s head farm and is confused by it.

1:32:50 Tango realizes that the other thing he forgot is a bed. Impulse sleeps, averting a crisis. Tango finds a tall hill with cherry trees on top and calls it Magic Mountain 2.0. It is already hollow, meaning the Magic Mountain crew could’ve saved a lot of time if they started with this one. Chat says it’s time to relocate. Tango finds a pillager outpost and releases the iron golem just for chaos’ sake. More flying, more looking for azaleas, more getting lost-ish. Tango realizes that without his ender chest, running out of rockets could be a serious problem. Chat spots an azalea tree, but the stream delay makes things difficult.

1:38:20 Unable to find what Chat says they saw, Tango flies onward. He looks around in a spruce and ice biome for a little while, then decides that the rocket situation is too precarious and he should head home.

1:40:00 Tango spots an azalea, and a lush biome that starts on the surface. He notes down the coords and begins to dig, harvesting the rooted dirt. The hole opens into a lush cave canyon. Tango goes exploring.

1:43:20 Chat notes that this is not a very good lush cave. Tango agrees. He fails at some parkour and makes a joke about 39th place skills. He starts digging down further, following the rooted dirt. Tango really wishes he brought his ender chest. The hole opens into a much better cave, except it is full of hostile mobs. Tango flees. He also did not bring a bow.

1:46:30 Tango predicts that he will die down here and it will be horrible. He updates his coords. He remembers that he forgot a totem of undying. He is surprised he hasn’t seen any water kittens. Chat informs him that they have seen some. A chatter helpfully tells him they look like pink lizards. Tango begin clearing out the hostile mobs to help the mob cap and increase his chances of survival.

1:51:00 Tango catches his first water kitten, a color that is hard to pin down but is probably pink. There is great rejoicing. Pearl is stream-sniping and cheers along in game chat. He catches a second one, a brown one, and asks chat if they should go for more. Chat says he should get more colors if he can.

1:55:00 Tango searches fruitlessly for several more minutes. Chat contemplates how nice it would be to have a bow. They suggest that Tango should collect small dripleaf. Tango says he doesn’t even know what that is. Chat says it is dripleaf that is small.

1:56:40 Tango finally hits the axolotl jackpot and finds a whole family group. He is very excited because one of them is pink. He catches a pink one, gets jump scared by a spider, then catches two yellows and another pink. The last yellow baby gives him a run for his money, but eventually gets bucketed. He celebrates his 39th place skills.

1:57:30 Time to go home, but how? Tango begins working his way out of the cave with gravel, sparing use of rockets, and digging straight up.

1:59:40 Tango reaches the surface and rejoices. He is right on the edge of Joe’s build. He pokes around the build, looking for a portal. Chat directs him to one and he gets to take a shortcut home. Back at the factory, he puts away the rooted dirt and other goodies he collected. Chat wants him to name the water kittens, but confesses that they will not despawn if not named. Chat convinces him to name them for fun. Tango is disappointed that there is no way to know the color while they are in the buckets. Chat is full of name ideas. He names the water kittens Swim Shady, Pumpkin, Hockey Puck, 39th Place, Water Smitten, and Swimpulse.

2:06:30 Tango releases the water kittens into the tank. Swimpulse is pink. He asks if they will jump out, then covers the hole to prevent it. He looks at the tank and is pleased. The tank looks good. Chat is very happy.

2:08:20 Tango hears a fart noise. He checks to see if Skizzleman is on the server. He is not, but Chat confirms they heard the fart. Tango begins searching for the farter. Scar drops down the elevator and says hello. He claims he had nothing to do with any backend exhaustion. He is the burper, not the farter. Tango suggests he must’ve burped on the wrong end. Scar says again that it wasn’t him, and that he came out to compliment Tango on his ask-a-lottles. Tango proudly shows off the tank. Scar offers to thin the herd if needed, but Tango says he’s going to grow the herd instead. Scar asks if it is possible to breed axolotls, and Tango explains yes, they do it by ripping Nemo to shreds. Scar thinks that is cool.

2:10:20 Scar and Tango have a conversation about connected and clean glass textures Scar has the same pack that Tango does. They both think that the stripes are just too white. Scar says it’s better now than it used to be, when glass was really terrible. He made his own texture pack back in the day that smoothed wool and wood, cleaned glass, and made mushrooms bigger. Scar suggests that maybe the tank needs a turtle or a dolphin, and says that he could help with that. Tango likes the idea of a turtle. He asks if Scar can deliver one. Scar says he can deliver anything, with a 50% chance of it being alive on delivery.

2:12:45 Scar is distracted from the turtle conversation when he catches a glimpse of the factory’s object-moving infrastructure. He is fascinated by the way that the blocks bob up and down “Willy Wonka style”. Tango admits that it’s just lag, probably because Doc’s on. Scar asks if Doc is still on a rampage about his stolen diamonds. Tango says he doesn’t know, but they agree that it’s pretty funny Doc is mad about stolen diamonds when he literally uses diamond ore for building blocks. They both hope that whoever the diamond bandit is, they keep going and take more. Tango implies that maybe Scar was the culprit all along, but Scar insists it was not him. He has to stay on Doc’s good side now because of his many crimes against the guy in Season 9. He remembers the tunnel bore disaster, where Grian banged and then he banged and there was a whole lot of banging and in the end he had to hide in a toilet.

2:15:10 Tango asks if Scar wants to do something dangerous. Scar immediately says yes. “Like really dangerous?” Tango presses. Scar nods. Tango tells Scar to follow him. He leads Scar over to the hole. Scar asks if this is where Decked Out 3 is. Tango confirms it totally is Decked Out 3. Scar looks down the hole and asks where it goes. Tango encourages him to drop down and Scar does, using his elytra for a soft fall down the two-wide hole. Tango follows, expecting Scar to have fallen into the void, but find him two blocks away in a two-deep hole in the bedrock. Tango tells him he missed. Scar gets himself out of the hole and immediately falls into another one. He climbs out, says “Jeez, there’s holes everywhere!” and instantly falls into the void hole. Tango cackles madly.

2:16:10 Tango freecams into the void and finds Scar rocketing around under the bedrock, calling for him and looking for the hole. Tango encourages him to “follow the sheep!” Scar makes several passes by the hole before managing to find it and shoot through it. Tango cheers and pops back into his body just in time for Scar to die of experiencing kinetic energy. Tango tries to figure out where Scar’s bits went. He uses freecam to search up to farm level, where he finds Skizzleman wandering around the edge of the hole. Chat informs him that Skizz (who is also streaming) has collected Scar’s things.

2:18:20 Tango flies up the shaft and finds some of Scar’s things at the top of the hole. He also finds Scar, who bounds over yelling “THIS IS A HELL-HOLE MURDER CHAMBER!” Tango compliments Scar on doing a great job getting out of the void. Apparently falling into the void resurrected all sorts of traumatic Season 8 memories of being thrown down the Boatem Hole. Skizz is nowhere to be seen at this point. Scar asks where the rest of his stuff is. Tango says he doesn’t know, but that he suspects there is someone else around here. Scar threatens to shove an askalottle in their face. He jumps back down to the hole and asks if he flew all the way up here, even as Skizz makes an appearance. He is wearing Scar’s hat and giggling.

2:19:10 Scar greets Skizz as “Skizzie-lizzie!” then asked Tango if he really flew all the way up that hole. Skizz thanks Scar, telling him that he has been streaming for seven seconds and he already has what might be the best blooper reel moment ever. He explains that he was sneaking up on Tango and happened to turn around just in time to see Scar for a tenth of a second before he exploded. Skizz returns Scar’s things to him, telling him that he made himself into a chest to collect Scar’s stuff for him. Scar, who is digging in his ender chest, suddenly realizes that he has found “The Flatulenster” who was making the fart noise earlier. Tango laughs. Scar confronts Skizz, who tells Scar to put his ender chest back on the ground and open it, then look for the “thank you” he owes Skizz. Tango points out that Skizz was not online when the fart occurred.

2:20:30 Scar thanks Skizz for saving his things and apologizes for fart-accusing him. Skizz doesn’t even know what Scar is talking about. Scar proceeds to tell Skizz the tragic tale of his visit to Tango where he just wanted to compliment some asskalottles and was accused of a fart he did not commit. Skizz commiserates, saying that the same thing happened the last time he streamed with Tango, and that he suspects it is Tango’s fault and/or imagination. Tango insists that his chat heard the fart too. ((The fart noise is audible on VOD review.)) Scar says they need Mrs. T to confirm that Tango is a fart-denyer.

2:21:50 Skizz is still wondering why Scar exploded. Tango explains it’s because he jumped down the hole. Scar leads Skizz over to the hole and encourages him to jump down, saying it’s fun. He tells Skizz that it is cool, and the reason that he died was because he came up too fast and had an accident. Skizz leans over the edge for a better look and Scar, in the least surprising act of Betrayal-By-Scar since The Lion King, kicks him down the hole. Skizz yells and begins attempting to rocket out of the hole with limited success. Scar insists he needs to go _down_ the hole, it’s super fun! Skizz manages to escape the hole and says no, because he doesn’t want to die. Tango and Scar assure him he won’t die (if he’s competent, Tango adds parenthetically.)

2:22:40 Resigned, Skizz asks if there’s a side he needs to jump down, then flings himself into the hole. He does a perfect full-send fall, right into the void, and falls out of the world. Tango shrieks in horrified delight. Scar calls down the hole that he feels bad now. In chat, False says “oof.” Tango demands to know why Skizz didn’t deploy his wings. “He would never have survived Boatem,” Scar observes dolefully.

2:23:10 Tango sees that Skizz is not in a group for chatting and opens in-game chat. “dude. for real. wings.” he types. “YOU HAVE THEM” Scar adds. Tango does not understand why Skizz did not just press space bar. False pipes up in in-game chat: “It’s Skizz, this is on you guys. :p” Tango says he can’t even feel guilty because he just doesn’t understand. Scar highlights a comment from Skizz’s chat about “40th place skills.” Impulse says that False is right. Skizz leaves the game, to howls from Scar and Tango. They decide that they will have to assemble a care basket for Skizz to help him replace all his lost bits. Skizz rejoins the game.

2:24:15 Tango and Scar leave the hole. Scar can’t believe that Decked Out 3 is down there somewhere. The pair begin digging through their things to find stuff for Skizz. Scar says he will give Skizz a special pair of wings. Tango asks if they will auto-deploy. Skizz reappears, naked but for an elytra, and tells them to gather round and shut up. He tells them that he is going to give them a list of what they owe him, and that it’s coming back. Tango, barely able to talk from laughing, asks if he owes Skizz a space bar. Cause if that’s broken, he will definitely get Skizz a new one. Skizz stutters, then screeches “SHUT UPPP!” Tango loses it. Skizz tells them that he fell into the void and rocketed upwards “like a beast” but it wasn’t happening because he was falling AT TERMINAL VELOCITY, JERK. He demands to know why that hole is there, it makes no sense! (“That’s what she said,” mutters Scar.)

2:25:50 Scar asks why Skizz didn’t use his space bar to deploy his elytra. Skizz protests that he did, and that the first time he left the hole they gave him a bunch of static about how he was supposed to go down the hole. He thought that the little black square at the bottom of the hole was carpet. By the time he realized he was in the void, he was too deep to rocket out. Tango presents Skizz with an elytra named “Spacebar” and tells him that might help him next time. Skizz sighs. He tells Scar and Tango that the bow he had on him was a top-shelf bow, his only good bow of the season, and it was a gift from Grian. He also says his axe was amazing and it’s gone. Scar, who has been yawning through this, tells Skizz to stop complaining and they’ll work it out. Tango tells Skzz they’ll make him a care package. Skizz tells them he ALSO had a briefcase of five thousand dollars. Scar tries to give Skizz the HotGuy bow, but Skizz can’t accept that, so Scar tells him he’ll make him a “Hot-something” bow. Tango begins working up some enchanted diamond armor with the armor and books he has in his storage. Skizz claims that he’s not even complaining, he’s just stating something that happened, and it’s that his friends were JERKS. Offscreen, Scar opens a shulker box and tells Skizz to grab a pickaxe. Skizz sounds a little intimidated as he asks Scar why he has so much awesome stuff. Scar says it’s because he is awesome. Tango creates “Boots of Speed Falling.”

2:28:15 Tango gives the boots to Skizz, who gets a pair of pickaxes from Scar as well. Skizz is starting to feel like he’s making out pretty well. Scar tells the story of the time he lost his shovel in the mail system and Tango replaced it with a vastly inferior shovel. Tango disputes the veracity of the story. Skizz wants to know when he gets his bow. Scar tells him he’s going to make it, and that it will be a HotGuy bow with a different name. Skizz assumes it’s going to be Spacebar again. He demands to know why Tango didn’t tell him what was down the hole. Tango points out that if he had, Skizz wouldn’t have jumped. He just assumed that Skizz would have plenty of time to react during the eight full seconds it takes to fall into the void with wings.

2:29:20 Skizz says he’s gonna do it again. Tango tells him he won’t remiburse him this time. Skizz says he knows, he’s going to use his unenchanted wings and make Tango hold the good ones. Tango offers him rockets. Skizz waffles a little about doing it. Tango encourages him. ((Scar is mostly still and silent during this period because he is mocking Skizz on Twitter.)) Skizz approaches the elevator drop shaft and worries he’s going to lose his wings here. Tango tells him to take his boots off, at least. Skizz says he’s going to take it all off. “I bet you are,” says Tango, kicking him down the drop shaft. Skizz screams “STOP IT!” as he falls. Tango follows him. He attempts to prank the shaft and kill Scar, but is a second too slow. Scar plays the Inside Joke horn.

2:30:50 Skizz goes to unequip himself and tries to get Scar to put down an ender chest. Scar eventually puts one down. Tango tells Skizz that the real challenge is to fly to Zed’s base through the void. He tells Skizz that Zed has a big hole and he just needs to head west. There will be a pink sheep to light the way. Skizz doesn’t realize that it’s possible to survive in the void long enough to fly anywhere, drawing derision from Void Veteran Tango. Scar says he gets it, Zed and Tango are setting up a hole-to-hole network the way that there is a crack-to-crack network in Magic Mountain. Tango confirms this is exactly correct. Scar complains that the crack network is all hype and no substance, he wants to join the hole network. Skizz suggests that Tango should go with him on the trip, but Tango says he needs to go to Zed’s and make sure his hole is ready to accept. The recapper is very upset. Chat is beside themselves.

2:32:30 Tango heads for Zed’s base while giving Skizz travel advice. Skizz needs to turn on hitboxes so he will see the sheep better and fly due west. Scar doesn’t know what Due means and demands and explanation. Tango confirms that the hole is very much open. Skizz cackles, and Tango says he really needs to watch Tango’s new episode. Skizz reiterates that he can’t believe they let him die. Scar points out that Skizz kinda let himself die. Skizz disagreed, saying he got himself out of the hole and they told him to get back in there. Tango tells him to get in the hole. He and the Chat experience the radio play version of Scar leading Skizz back to the hole into the void. Skizz asks if Scar will do it too. Scar yawns and says no, he has all his stuff on him, then says fine. Skizz is pleased. Tango freecams into the void to watch while Scar and Skizz prep for the jump.

2:34:45 Skizz announces that he is going. “I’m going. I’m Going. I’M GOOIIIINNNG!” he yells. He immediately dies by falling from a high place. Tango puts his face in his hand. Skizz declares that the thing is stupid. Scar declares that he is going and yells his way down the hole, ending with a disappointed groan. He has popped his totem. He dives into the hole anyway and quickly becomes visible to Tango, who attempts to guide him in. Scar heads for Tango and the safety of Zedaph’s base while treating him and the Chat to a barrage of perhaps the most atrocious phrasing in the history of accidental dirty talk. He escapes the void and immediately dies of kinetic energy again.

2:36:00 Skizz demands another pair of wings so he can get back to the hole again. Tango demands to know how many wings Skizz could possibly need. Scar asks Tango to collect up his bits because he has suddenly realized he needs to go. Tango collects Scar’s possessions where they are scattered across the bedrock. Skizz interrupts and demands attention to say that he demands somebody do something. Scar tells him the adults are talking. He asks Tango to pack up his wings and rockets for him and Tango confirms he has them. Skizz says this base is dumb and he hates it. Scar leaves. Skizz tells Tango he needs to collect his wings from the edge of the hole before they despawn. Tango heads back to his base to get the wings, arguing with Skizz the whole time.

2:37:40 Tango jumps down the hole, successfully deploying his elytra for a soft fall. The wings are not there. Skizz tells him to look harder. Tango freecams and looks around, but there are no wings. They argue about the wings for a few minutes, and then about the deployment of Skizz’s spacebar and how he possibly could’ve died if he was flying correctly. Skizz wants his wings so he can try again. Tango asks rhetorically what Skizz wants him to do as he begins to ascend the hole. Skizz says he wants Tango to catch him and jumps in the hole. He falls past Tango and dies from a high-place fall. Tango arrives at the top of the hole and sings a bar of “Strangers in the Night.” Skizz says “Whatever” and starts talking about how he was throwing dice in the alley. Tango has no idea what’s going on and asks Skizz if he’s been drinking. Skizz says no, and Tango suggests that maybe he should. Skizz tries to explain that he was channeling the United States of Whatever. Impulse drops down the elevator shaft.

2:40:10 Tango informs Skizz they have a guest, then moon lands at Impulse until he joins the group and says hello. Tango cheers that Impulse is back from the dead, though still kind of dead. Impulse sounds pretty rough, but says he came over because he found something. He asks where Skizz is, but Tango doesn’t know. Skizz killed himself to get back to his base quicker, but is on his way back. He comes down the drop chute, and Tango doesn’t have the heart to sabotage him. Impulse presents Skizz with an enchanted elytra. It is also called Spacebar. Tango is confused and asks Impulse if he found them, and how. Impulse said he was in the void and caught them. He is clearly lying. Tango says now Skizz has two spacebars, and he is probably going to need them with the way he flies. Skizz agrees, because he is probably going to spend one now on another attempt.

2:42:00 Skizz begins quizzing Tango on what he does to successfully jump down the hole. Tango’s answers are not entirely helpful, probably because Tango is so used to elytra flying that some things are muscle memory. Skizz challenges him to jump down the hole and not deploy the wings until he is in the void. Tango tries to push Tango down the hole again and Skizz yells at him that he is naughty. Tango refuses to take the challenge. Impulse admits that the wings he gave Skizz were a pair of Scar’s wings he found one day and kept. Skizz is okay with that. Tango asks Impulse how he’s doing. Impulse is still not feeling good. Skizz tells him there’s something down this hole over here that will help with that. His attempt to fool Impulse rapidly derails into a retelling of his own story of hole-related woe, and Impulse is not convinced.

2:44:20 Tango tells Impulse he named a water kitten after him. He opens up the aquarium and lets Impulse jump in to meet Swimpulse. Impulse is charmed and admits he thought it was going to be something rude. Impulse decides he will try to get through the hole-to-hole connection. Skizz is offended that Tango cares about Impulse being set up properly, when he just kicked Skizz down the hole. Impulse points out that Skizz should’ve known he was in for something, being as how this is Hermitcraft. Skizz, mimicking Tango, asks Impulse if he wants some soup. Impulse actually would like some soup. Tango notices Scar’s tweet and dissolves into laughter. Skizz and Impulse both laugh too. Tango goes and finds Impulse a bed. Skizz continues complaining.

2:47:45 Impulse sets his spawn. Tango directs him to the hole, and then he and Skizz head for Zedaph’s base. Skizz nearly falls into Zed’s hole. Impulse falls from a high place. He loses his elytra. Tango apologizes for his defective hole. Impulse falls out of the world. It was tactical.

2:51:40 Impulse tries again. He makes it down into the void and heads for Zed’s hole. He flies cleanly up into it and survives, then immediately says “I’m going back” and dives into the void. Tango follows him and immediately gets lost. He figures out where he is and somehow smashes himself into the space one block above the void. Skizz, who is too afraid to jump into the hole, demands an ender chest so he can put his wings away. Tango invites both of them to join the hole network.

2:53:00 Tango and Impulse have a conversation about hole architectural improvements while Skizz goes on in the background about all the cool stuff he has and doesn’t want to lose by jumping into the void. He asks where they are. Tango says they are at his hole. Skizz says they can’t be at his hole, he is at Tango’s hole, then realizes he is at Zed’s hole. Impulse tells him to get his holes right. Impulse does a clean free-fall from the top of Tango’s hole into the void and catches himself with a rocket. Impulse calls it exhilarating. Skizz finds a box to put his stuff in and prepares to jump again. Chat says this is why women live longer than men. Tango agrees. Skizz jumps in the hole. He realizes he is using exploding fireworks moments before he dies of being exploded.

2:57:00 Skizz respawns at his own base. He tells Tango he owes him more wings. Tango just laughs at him. Skizz realizes he stashed his gear in Zed’s fireworks box and accidentally picked up a stack of Zed’s fireworks instead of his own rockets. He tells the others that he has a problem because now he has to keep trying until he succeeds. Tango points out that he’s going to run out of wings fairly quickly at this rate. Skizz tells him to shut up, he has to believe. Tango asks what they can do to help. Skizz asks Impulse to get his stuff from Zed’s place, because he needs wings and rockets. Tango starts laughing all over again about the exploding fireworks thing. Tango asks if this means Skizz also dumped a whole stack of Zed’s (very expensive) custom fireworks down the void too. Skizz says of course it does.

2:59:20 Skizz decides to make another attempt at the hole. Tango and chat are just listening to the drama unfold at this point. Impulse jumps down the hole and flies over to Zed’s place through the void. His casual flexing at this point cannot be overstated. A chatter posts a clip of Skizz’s firework-enabled demise from Skizz’s POV. Tango watches it with great delight, treating chat to a reprise of Skizz’s screaming. He compliments Skizz on his amazing death and they discuss the thought process that goes through one’s head when one is flying in the void with half a heart left and nothing but exploding fireworks. Impulse arrives at Zed’s and finds Skizz to help him ready up for another attempt, notably by making sure he has flight rockets. Tango’s chat is empathizing with Skizz’s chat in the clip, who clearly knew that Skizz had taken the wrong fireworks and were trying to warn him.

3:00:30 Another attempt is made. Skizz was not ready, but successfully dives into the void. Tango watches the Void from freecam and encourages him to follow the dangling sheep. Skizz and Impulse successfully make the flight from Zed’s hole to Tango’s. Tango congratulates him, then says it’s actually fairly low-risk. Skizz asks if he’s maybe considered making it a bigger hole. Tango says he thinks the hole network should be everyone’s normal means of traveling. Skizz asks about the sheep on the lead, Tango describes the process of dangling a sheep in the void. Skizz realizes he left his stuff at Zed’s house. Tango encourages him to go back to Zed’s house the cool way, but Skizz is extremely reluctant. Tango jumps into the hole and goes to Zed’s house. Skizz and Impulse go the uncool way.

3:05:15 Impulse, Skizz and Tango look at Zed’s contraptions, playing with the elevator and the enchanting table game. Skizz asks how the enchanting game works, Imp and Tango explain very badly. Skizz plays with the game for a few minutes and realizes that the only reward is the ability to enchant one’s items. Tango asks Skizz if he needs anything replaces from his adventures, but Skizz says Tango and Scar fixed him up. They agree that it was a very funny adventure and Tango leaves. Impulse says he will stay behind to fix the enchanting game, which is now mysteriously broken.

3:09:30 Tango returns to the factory. He agrees with Chat that his face hurts from laughing so much. He summarizes the accomplishments of the day and tells Chat that the VOD will be uploaded soon. He reminds Chat that his new video is also up now. He thanks Chat and raids into Skizzleman, then ends his stream.

[agapi-kalyptei]

Not gonna lie. I wrote my first programs 34 years ago but I never was a "real" developer in the sense that I'd write fast desktop apps, manage threads, and all that low level stuff. So learning Rust in the past few months, even if I have some very basic experience with programming in assembly, is still a lot to digest. However, today I got back to my test project and am really hyped that I have.... a button that increments a number.

"Ha, I can do that in javascript in 10 minutes." I mean yeah. Obviously. Anyone can. Here's the cool thing tho. I made mine overly complicated.

The UI looks as you'd expect it to, mostly a starter project leftovers:

The HTML is as simple as can be, just plain HTML and javascript, no compile step. We live in stone ages here and we love it.

The submit button has a simple handler in javascript:

This is, once again, trivial, and all just from the template project. Bottom part says "when a user clicks this button, call "greet" function". The top part is the greet function that invokes a Tauri command also called "greet".

What's Tauri? An open source project that lets you write JS/TS/Rust applications with WebView and bundle them as stand-alone, self-contained, one-file applications for desktop, and starting with Tauri 2.0 (now in beta.2) also for Android (and later iOS). If you know Electron (Slack, Spotify, Discord etc all use Electron, they're just websites with Chromium and C++ code packaged around them).

Anyway. Tauri runs a Rust "server" application that serves your HTML/JS app, but also lets you run high-performance Rust code. Adding a command is relatively simple:

Here's where things get interesting. For me.

Because I wanted to learn Bevy, a game engine written in Rust, because I want to learn how to write using a high-performance functional-programming-like pattern called ECS (Entity Component System), I have added Bevy to this project.

However, both Tauri and Bevy block on the main thread, so I had to find a tutorial on how to spawn Bevy in a different thread, and how to pass information to it. An example:

#[tauri::command] turns a normal function into a Tauri command that I can call from HTML/JS. It injects resource called BevyBridge which is just two lines of code: #[derive(Resource)] pub struct BevyBridge(pub Sender<u64>, pub Receiver<;u64>);

Sender and Receiver being from crossbeam-channel bevy crate which is for sending data back and forth safely and quickly between individual threads.

so "state.0.send(1)" means I'm sending a 64-bit unsigned integer with a value 1 to the channel.

And this is how to receive the message - inside of Bevy engine, in a separate thread. For simplicity, if I send zero, it resets the counter, and if I send any number it adds 100000 to the number, just for clarity. (Elsewhere I'm incrementing it by 1 on every game loop, so theoretically 60x a second. Or 15000x a second because Bevy is unreasonably fast and it doesn't need to render anything in this setup.)

And the best part is that with a single command (cargo tauri build) I get an .msi file, an .exe installer, both around 4MB, and a 11MB .exe file with no dependencies besides WebView (installed on every current desktop OS by default). There's just something about giving someone a floppy disk with an executable that you made yourself.

Is it dumb? Yes. Does it make me happy? No. Does it make me glad, and very relieved that I'm not completely lost? You bet.

[firesnap]

hi firesnap I see we’re doing asks if you could get a complete/finished storyline out of either rust!crimeboys, osmp!crimeboys, or the arg!crimeboys that was never real but would’ve been a banger concept if it was, which would you choose?

(You may pick another unfinished/not exactly real crimeboys rp dynamic other than the ones listed if you wish those are just the ones off the top of my head)

RUST. It's been YEARS and I would start watching that again in an INSTANT. Like, Wilbur had a full on script for that ready. He had plans. He had a varied cast of people on the server that were fun and exciting. He and Tommy were doing a full on "we are brothers from the start" thing and there was CANNIBALISM and RELIGION and SCAMS and faith in family versus faith in the unknown versus faith found in oneself stuff being laid out. There was Wilbur teaching Tommy guitar and Tommy being a source of chaos that also had moments of completely surprising Wilbur. There was a whole thing where you could tell Wilbur was going to end up falling for the very scam he was selling to other people and Tommy was going to have to drag them out of it.

There was SO much potential. Like, Wilbur becoming a false prophet who ends up thinking he might actually be a prophet? Or the cult they formed becoming too intense and not wanting to let them go? Or the cult having to go toe to toe with the cannibalism faction and that testing the group when it becomes clear that rust!Crime's priorities are that the brothers survive, together, no matter what and everyone else is secondary?

Ugh it was such a good concept. I would, again, pay Wilbur Soot to let me see his google doc. DO YOU REMEMBER HE SAID HE'D JUST DROP THAT FOR US IF WE REALLY WANTED TO READ IT and then went "wait you know, this was REALLY good so I'm going to save it in case I want to use it in something else" AND THEN NEVER DID.

[prince-rowan-of-the-forest]

Ribbons and Rainstorms

Epilogue - 2000 years later...

----

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for reading this far!, since you've made it here I'm assuming you enjoyed my fic, but hey! Consider reblogging? Or leaving me a nice comment? Thank you to everyone who gave me advice and support whilst I wrote this, it wouldn't be the same without everyone in the Big Bang server helping to make this happen <3

Do read this epilogue, though, I personally think its worth it :D

I can't remember who it was who suggested the names for the characters in this chapter, but I love you, and thank you so much.

This fic is my child, I even have a wall in my bedroom dedicated to it, so, you best appreciate it or I'll be coming for your kneecaps!!

<- Previous | Masterpost

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“You sure it’s this way?” Lara said, turning to her companion, who was squinting at a map as he deftly avoided the thick plant roots that seemed perfectly placed to trip up a person.

“Certain,” he replied, “But— Lara— are you sure we should be doing this? The forest— eugh— definitely doesn’t seem to want us here.”

“Sure, it’s a pretty dense forest,” She said, “But I don’t think forests are sentient, Nathan.”

“Right, right,” Replied Nathan, before he stepped straight into a muddy ditch, getting the stuff all up his trouser-leg, “Why are we doing this again?”

Lara rolled her eyes, “The locals tipped us off about an ancient temple in these woods, it could be the discovery of the century! Don’t you want to be famous?”

“Not if it means getting killed by a forest that seems far more dangerous than it should be,” Nathan said, glancing back at his map, “We should be nearly there— just up this hill, if this temple even exists.”

Half an hour of trekking through the forest that just seemed abnormally out to get them, the pair of archaeologists finally came upon the temple. The place was old, black marble chipped and no longer shining, the braziers fixed to the pillars rusted and filled with ash and fuel long since burned out. The inside was dim, filled with dust and the smell of mildew. Vines and plants trailed across the floors and up the walls, hugging the pillars and walls with thorns and probing shoots. The place was certainly old, and certainly abandoned. 

“Wow…” Lara whispered as they mounted the crumbling steps, clicking on her torch as they entered the dark space.

“We— we should check that the walls are structurally sound before we go in here,” Nathan protested, staying back at the entrance, Lara turned back, rolling her eyes.

“It’s not like we’re taking a sledgehammer to it,” She said, “If it hasn’t collapsed in the time it’s been standing here, I doubt it’s gonna collapse now.”

She dumped her pack on the ground, fishing around inside until she pulled out a high-grade camera. Quickly flicking up the lens cap so she could take photos of the space. 

In one corner was a pile of moth-eaten blankets that barely resembled blankets anymore. A closer look revealed that they had become home to a fair few critters over the years. Nathan deftly cut a sample of the material, running his fingers over it and calling out that it was certainly a good two-thousand years old. Frankly, he was astonished any of it was still here. 

“There’s not much else here — I don’t think,” Lara called, running her hand over the crumbling stone altar. The draped fabric had been entirely eaten away, but the priceless metal decorations — the candelabra, the bowl, the chalice, still remained, “I bet these would fetch a pretty penny, I wonder if the British Museum would be interested.”

Nathan scoffed, “As long as it’s stolen from a native people, I’m sure they will be.” 

“Okay, maybe not the best idea, but we should— we should definitely report this to the historical society.”

“Yeah, good idea— hey Lara— what’s that?” Nathan asked, gesturing behind her. 

“What’s what?”

“Behind you, on the wall.”

Lara turned around, stepping black so the beam from her torch could light up most of the wall. 

Against the back stretch of wall hung a tapestry, a tapestry that depicted two figures holding hands, one with flowing black hair, dressed in beautiful robes that fit the fashion two millennia ago, and the other with tan skin and dressed befitting of a prince from a fantasy book. 

“Oh how beautiful,” Nathan whispered, the sight taking their breath away, “What a lovely tapestry…”

“Can you tell when it was made?” Lara asked.

“Well— based on their dress and the needlework—" he said, slowly approaching the tapestry and running his hand over it, before lifting up the bottom corner and checking the back, “And the wool, it looks to be from a few thousand years ago, but…”

“But what?”

“The fabric has almost no wear and tear whatsoever, the colours are exceptionally bright…” Nathan mumbled, “If someone told me this was made yesterday I wouldn’t be surprised, based on condition alone.”

“How is that possible?” She asked slowly, joining him in front of the fabric to run her hand along the edge, “It should’ve been ravaged by the elements, moths, other forest creatures— but it’s not damaged in the slightest… not even frayed…”

“Very strange,” Nathan nodded, stepping back again to see what it depicted, “Do you think they were friends?”

Lara looked at him with an odd expression, before letting out an exasperated sigh, “‘do you think they were friends’ no friends look into each other’s eyes like that— they’re holding hands— are you dense?”

“Okay okay ,jeez,” He raised his hands in surrender, “Who were they, do you think?”

“Perhaps the ones who live in this temple?” Said a voice from behind them. Both archeologists turned in sync, wide eyed, to stare at the tall figure in the doorway. When he took a step forward — into Lara’s torchlight — they both gasped, because he almost perfectly matched one of the figures on the tapestry. Dress and all — he looked like he’d just stepped out of a storybook, he was almost glowing. 

“Who are you?” Nathan asked hesitantly.

“Why, I’m Ro, of course,” they said, “I know mortals have been severely lacking in whimsy the last few centuries, but surely you haven’t forgotten us all completely. Also, I thank you for correcting your friend, that is in fact my husband.”

“Wait— slow down— just a little bit,” Lara said, raising a hand, “This tapestry is two-thousand years old, you’re saying you are this person— and the other is your husband?”

“Precisely,” Ro said, as though the information made any sense at all, “See?”

He gestured to their hair, where an elaborately designed crown sat atop his bun — the only thing about his appearance that wasn't depicted in the tapestry. It seemed to be made from gold and silver embellished with red and purple gemstones. It looked… incredibly expensive. 

The archeologists didn’t know what exactly the garment meant — unfortunately the culture around hair accessories had been lost to time, and now there were only brief records of the practice — but they could easily assume it was special to this strange person. 

“Now,” He said, reaching behind him and drawing a sword that was as thick as both Lara’s arms and twice as long, “Do you wish to do harm to this temple?”

—-

Lara and Nathan left the temple with no clue how to explain to the rest of society that they had just met — talked to, been threatened by — a God, but they would have to work it out before they got back, because that was without a doubt what had happened to them today. 

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<- Previous | Masterpost

[lesbianchemicalplant]

Request for Programming/CS/Math blog recommendations:

I've been looking for more programming / computer science / software dev (and also math/probability/statistics) blogs to add to my RSS reader

(I’m not very picky about adding blogs, since I can always remove them later, and it’s tough to accurately estimate “how much will I really like having this in my RSS reader?” in advance. also, most blogs aren't updated that often anyway, so it's not like I'm going to be inundated with posts regardless)

I may as well list the ones I've liked so far, and a few of the languages/topics they post about. They all post about Software Engineering In General as well as whatever I mention explicitly

Ones I’ve been following for a little while (and/or I’ve read a bunch of their older posts):

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne ��� language design, formal methods, model checking (TLA+)

https://blog.plover.com – Haskell, functional programming, math, git, CLI stuff (see "subtopics" in the sidebar for tags)

https://www.johndcook.com/blog – math, probability/statistics, numerical methods

https://blog.yossarian.net – Rust, Python, cryptography (tags listed here)

https://fasterthanli.me – Rust, profiling, Go (derogatory), networking, async

https://blog.ploeh.dk – Haskell, F#, functional programming, category theory, design patterns, testing, .NET (tags here)

https://jvns.ca – networking, servers, CLI stuff, SQL

https://wunkolo.github.io – graphics, fun with intel ISA extensions / SIMD

https://randomascii.wordpress.com – profiling, performance, windows-ecosystem things, fun posts about floating point

https://esoteric.codes – esolangs

https://www.parsonsmatt.org – Haskell

Others I’ve thrown onto my RSS reader but haven’t been following for as long, or haven’t read so much from their archives yet (not an exhaustive list):

https://thephd.dev/ – C++, C, Rust

https://fa.bianp.net – machine learning, math, probability/statistics, algorithms, optimization

https://danluu.com – added on the strength of this post, basically

https://nedbatchelder.com/blog – Python

https://martinheinz.dev – Python

https://hynek.me/articles – Python

https://www.b-list.org/weblog – Python

https://blog.demofox.org – graphics, gamedev, math, algorithms

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog – linux, sysadmin-ing, zfs, Python

For all of these blogs, I scroll past and try to ignore anything that’s not technical content (or about labor conditions / industry things)

I’m also interested in learning about things outside of the scopes / focuses of the above (e.g. I don’t really have any js blogs in there yet, but would definitely be interested!)

I would also definitely appreciate any recommendations for essays, article series, books, interesting repos, archives of blogs that are no longer active, anything along those lines

(Please no LessWronger recommendations. I’m not following any of these people for their politics, but LessWrongers will use anything and everything to plug their insufferable neo-reactionary cult shit, it’s too much to just scroll past. Unfortunately, most of the people on tumblr who post about math and/or programming are also LessWrong/SSC adherents.....Which unfortunately also means I’m unlikely to actually get any recommendations out of posting this. But you never know, worth a shot)

[limeinaltime]

Y'all seem to like Nathan so have more, plus some stuff on his father-daughter relationship with Eko.

Eko’s relationship with Nathan varies across the AUs she’s in. In Hell. Pain Even, Nathan and Indy got together and raised Eko as a family, while in my personal AU, Indy passes away and Nathan takes up raising Eko on his own as his ward-turned-daughter.

Nathan is unusually tall for a Worker Drone, so he was taller than Eko for most of her life. She only started surpassing him once she reached high school, and she hasn’t stopped growing since.

Core Drones were given the AbsoluteSolver program, but it’s not nearly as body horror-y as the Disassembly Drones, and will just put a stop of Eko’s regeneration abilities until she eats enough metal, and Bunker 9′s fairly sheltered environment has allowed her to stockpile repair material for later. Nathan got quite a few scares early on when Eko would fall from a high ledge or cut herself, only for her to bounce back, unscathed and unharmed, and his toolbox would be missing a wrench. He started holding onto pieces of scrap metal for Eko to eat, just in case of an emergency.

Having known Indy for a while, a lot of people assume that Nathan only took Eko in because she reminds him of his long-gone “forbidden” flame. Nathan is quick to shut the gossip hounds with the glare, but the rumors have sadly reached Eko, and used to affect her a lot as a kid thanks to the cruel rumors and mockery from her classmates.

Nathan is the same age as Khan, but just chose to get himself hair and figured that aging like Keanu Reaves wasn’t such a bad idea. He’s a robot, his biological clock is non-existent. He would sooner disassemble himself than put on a mustache.

While intimidating, grouchy and sarcastic, Nathan is quite the heart-throb among the bunker’s unmarried women (and a few men, in secret) due to his looks, but his heart will always belong to Indy and he has no real interest in finding someone new (despite Khan’s well-meaning encouragement). Those women are also mean to Eko, so no dice.

In a previous version, Eko was being raised by the teacher guy, but a scrapped that. However, Nathan is also a teacher at the high school (he teaches mechanics/building), and the only one who can put up with Uzi’s antics without batting an eye, having acted as a pseudo-godfather of sorts before he and Khan had a falling-out following the death of Uzi’s mom. Nathan doesn’t voice it explicitly, but he greatly appreciates that Uzi is willing to be Eko’s friend, and sees a lot of his own relationship with his daughter in the growing bond between the two outcasts.

I don’t have a specific label, but Eko is 100% neurodivergent (yes I am projecting) and had difficulty focusing and studying during her school years, despite getting good marks. Nathan found strategies that worked best with Eko when he tutored her, and uses those when he teaches. His homeroom students, while intimidated by him, openly admit that they learn a lot and find his lessons enriching. Khan suggested putting Eko in the gifted kids program when she was younger. Nathan asked if the rust had finally gotten to his main servers.

Despite his best efforts, Nathan wasn’t able to protect Eko from everything, and the arrival of the Disasembly Drones only made things worse. For this, he is not fond of the company Eko, Uzi and Thad choose to keep, but trusts that N and V are more stuck out there with Eko than Eko’s stuck out there with them (and he is 100% right lmao).

The prom prank has heavily soiled Nathan’s relationship with the bunker, and he mostly just sticks around because he’s the only sharpshooter now that Eko’s started spreading her wings. He has little to no respect for the teens who were responsible or the teachers who turned a blind eye, even though a few of said teens become Eko’s occasional co-workers later on, and one of them starts crushing hard on his ward (this is canon in both AUs; Eko gets a boyfriend named Sam in HPE, and might end up with Sarah, the investigator lady from episode 2, although this is currently just a crackship).

A lot of Eko’s sarcasm and take-no-shit attitude was learned by watching Nathan. He is secretly very proud and internally wipes away a tear of fatherly pride every time she verbally destroys an insufferable co-worker or a know-it-all parent.

[spencermorgans]

Incorrect Quotes Generator V: Unsub College Apartment Edition

I'm writing a college AU where the absolute terror trio of Hankel, Foyet, and Frank share an apartment so. Fleshing out the world

Squad is playing Among Us Foyet: I believe Hankel is innocent, I was with them the whole time. Frank, what were you doing? Frank: Oh, I was just murdering… I mean, nothing!

-

Hankel: Is Foyet always like this when they lose? Frank: Oh, yes. You should've been there for the Great Jenga Tantrum of 2015. Foyet: You bumped that table and you know it!

-

Hankel: Not gonna lie, I'm kind of afraid of Frank… Foyet: As you should be. Hankel: No, for real, they're kind of- Foyet: As. You. Should. Be.

-

Foyet: Guys where did Hankel go? Frank: They got arrested. Foyet: How the hell- Hankel: bursts in through the window The cops are after me, I thought it would be fun to steal crackers and throw them at people.

-

Frank (brainstorming ideas for pranking Hankel): How much could a serial killer mask possibly cost? Foyet: Well it’s hard to find a high-quality one made out of leather or silicone, but if you did find a good one like that it’d be a couple thousands of dollars. I can try to hook you up with one but I don’t know if I’d be very successful. Frank: Huh, that’s pretty interesting actually- Wait, how the hell do you know that? Foyet: …I am very passionate about Halloween, Frank.

-

Foyet: The best part of an oreo is the cookie part, not the frosting. Deal with it. Hankel: Darkness without light is an abyss. Light without darkness is blinding. You cannot have a coin with one side. Frank: YO SOCRATES! IT'S A FUCKING COOKIE!

-

Hankel: I mean. Foyet's just standing there now. Hankel: Waiting for me, I guess. Hankel: But it's okay, I think they've pretty much settled down. Frank: Settled down? Hankel: Well, they only stabbed me once.

-

Frank: Coca Cola can remove rust from metal, imagine what it’s doing to your body. Hankel: Pfff, getting rid of the rust, idiot. Frank: THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS! Foyet: Hmm… I've been drinking soda and my body's rust free… not sure where you're getting your facts from…

-

Hankel: It's locked. You got a lock pick? Frank: Yeah- Foyet: kicks in the door

-

Frank: You are irrationally angry 365 days a year. Foyet: Well, that’s just your personal opinion, I don’t have anger issues. Do you guys think I have anger issues? Hankel: Well, I wouldn’t really call it an issue. An issue is something you can fix.

-

Hankel: But what about Spencer? They were my SOULMATE! Foyet: You said that about a ball of yarn once!

-

Hankel: Blue M&Ms are the best. Foyet: whAT IS THIS SLANDER? Hankel: What about it? They are. Foyet: I WILL NOT ALLOW SUCH LIES ON MY CHRISTIAN MINECRAFT SERVER! Foyet: THE RED ONES ARE THE BEST! Hankel: YEAH? WELL YOUR MOM'S A HO! Frank: They're all chocolate inside, the colors don't mean anything. Spencer: I like the yellow ones. Hankel and Foyet: SHUT THE FUCK YOUR MOUTH!

-

Hankel: They… well, I wouldn't call it inheritance per se. What do you call it when you kill someone and get their stuff? Spencer: Um, murder??? Frank: Adventuring! Foyet: Tuesday.

-

Hankel: Oh, fiddlesticks! That really ruffles my feathers! Foyet: Please, just say fuck.

-

Foyet and Frank are in a car teetering on the edge of a cliff Hankel: oh my god, Frank, backwards! Frank: Really, Hankel? I thought I might go forwards into the river, I thought that would be a fun thing to do.

-

Frank: If I may interject… Foyet: Oh, awesome, Frank was eavesdropping.

-

Foyet: What's wrong with you? Hankel: Off the top of my head, I'd say low self-esteem, a lack of paternal affection, and a genetic predisposition for anxiety and depression.

[guzsdaily]

201 Days

Day 201 - May 24th, 12.024

Yes, I didn't notice that yesterday was the day 200 of the daily blogs.

Past Promises

If you are reading this since the first months of this personal challenge, you probably are wondering what happened to the projects like Hobbiest Monologue and the Elementria comics that I presented on the comemoration for 100 days. Well, I pretty much forgot about them. It is somewhat disappointing, but I kinda learned that it is better to do things before promising them, not only because it helps with not disappointing people, but also to keep your motivation and the urge to keep doing said thing.

Will I make said projects in the future? Maybe, the YouTube channel for Hobbiest Monologue is done, and both of them also have their respective logos and brands made. However, I'm not really focused on creating more content besides these blogs. Maybe one day when I have a professional job and a good enough workflow and tools to help mitigate the time and energy that these projects need, I will go back to the ideas. I do still love video creation and art, but I have other focus now. And it isn't like I won't make anything related to these topics, but a long-term project is not a good idea for now.

Past Achievements

Besides, I was able to do some projects. The main idea of "The System" wasn't really made into reality, since the whole idea of it were somewhat broken. However, said idea made me do a lot in the process.

I have finally started to learn, and completed a project with the Rust programming language! It is a simple project, and I didn't really make everything that I have planned, but it is good to have a CLI tool to manipulate markdown, which I am actively using in scripts on my Obsidian vault, and hopefully said project will grow and stabilize to be used by other people in their files. For now, I don't know how much about Rust I will continue. The main focus for me with the language is CLI tools and AST manipulation, since it feels to be a good use of it and in general I had a better experience (compared to something like JavaScript for AST manipulation). Yes, I could learn more about async and lifetimes, but I have already wasted a lot of my years just learning stuff, so if I need to in a project, I will learn them, I just don't want to actively be just studying concepts and syntaxes.

Talking about actually doing stuff. I really learned to not step too close into the sun, and stop abstracting even my fucking NixOS configuration. Programmers do love making abstractions before they are necessary, but fucking god, having anxiety and trying to predict every outcome of the program because of it, really takes it into the next level. And that's why I'm learning Go.

Like Rust, I was influenced by ThePrimeagen to learn Go, and HTMX (with some sprinkles of AlpineJS maybe), for server-side and web development in general. And it is being a great experiment, it is also funny how I haven't even read the docs of Go, and still am able to create a working website and server, without any dependencies. It is a breath of fresh air after learning so many JavaScript frameworks, build tools, libraries, etc. Nonetheless, learning the language can also help to find a job, it feels like it's starting to have more attention and opportunities, and besides I'm not "just another JavaScript developer" at least.

And hopefully the continuous task of improving my GitHub and LinkedIn profiles, improving my portifolio, getting certificates, and just trying to be more active on my accounts, can also help. I already send more than 70 applications, without any feedback whatsoever, but I will not give up, because I want to be able to hug my girlfriend and have a house with her in the future.

Past Chaos

Besides all what I somehow achieved, these last three months were a lot harder than I expected. Actually, I couldn't even predict what happened, and it feels like time passed by without I'm even noticing. I'm surprised that I even managed to complete anything.

I do not want to give a lot of personal information on the internet, even less if it is related to family and nothing to do with creative process or work. But as you probably noticed on a past blog post, I lost my (grand) grandmother, the person who raised my dad, that my mom took care of for pretty much 16 years, someone who lived until 99 years old with an incredible health to her age. My dad's family has a lot of issues, every family has, and my parents sacrificed a lot of themselves, since others didn't do anything better to take care of her. However, said sacrifices started to hit a lot this year, and my parent's mental health were in the limit, as my grand grandmother's health as also hitting the limit. I didn't work a lot during the time, since I wanted to be with my parents, not just to give some support, but also strength to fight, so others would take some action. And they did, but it didn't last that long.

Something that I want to be clear, you do not know what really was happening these three months, even less these 16 years, it may be my anxiety kicking right now, but I do not want no one to judge, make assumptions, say what we should have done, anything like that, now or in the future. You don't know me, I don't know you. She lived a healthy and long life, and my parents now can rest and are better thankfully, and this is what I care about.

The only thing that I want you to take from this, is to take care of the people that you love, they can be parents, grandparents, partners, friends, I don't care, take care and be with them when they need, the same way they were when you needed it. And know, independently of what happens, you will be okay in the end, do not let chaos make you give up, I beg you. I may be just 19 at the time of writing, but I gave up on so many things for so little, that these three months really showed me how much stronger I can be, mostly because of the people that are around me. So I ask, I beg, whatever you want to make in life, do not give up easily, be strong, be there, for you, and for the people that you love.

---

Thanks for reading, hopefully the next 100 days will be better. And besides, whatever happens, I hopefully will meet you tomorrow, and every day until day 300.

- Someone who's trying to improve.

Today's artists & creative things Music: You Will Be Okay - by Caleb Hyles

© 2024 Gustavo "Guz" L. de Mello. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

[quietmarie]

What am I working on right now?

I realise I haven't really listed what I am doing and have been doing in terms of projects on Tumblr so far, so in case you're curious what I'm doing, here you go. With images and all this is gonna be quite lengthy, so have a look under the cut:

First of all, Job and Uni:

At the start of the month, the new uni semester begun, and I also got a job in programming! Uni courses are pretty chill this year, and I'm at the job two days a week. It's really nice so far, and it involves developing algorithms used for CAM and CNC-machines.

As a uni project I did..

A physics engine for Godot:

Godot is a game engine. As part of an uni course, two fellow students and I wrote the mathsy bulk of a physics engine for it. This includes stuff like collision handling and various joints (like hinge joints you'd use for a physics-based door etc.), but because of time constraints doesn't include collision detection, which is handled by Bullet. Outside of the planned curriculum, I also derived the equations for and implemented rope joints, which simulate, well, ropes.

And currently, outside of uni, I still want to work on the engine by implementing..

Portals:

Yea I want to implement portals using the custom physics engine we built. But not just portals as Valve did them, that would be too easy. I want them to be able to move and interact with other objects while remaining physically accurate (or, as physically accurate as they can be considering they're portals). The current state of things:

The dream is to be able to build gorgeous architecture, like, I'm thinking buildings resting on top of pillars that are always moving. If I can get this to work I really ought to discuss the vision with some artists and creative folk in general, because I feel like there's so much unexplored creativity in art with portals. But yeah, there's still a lot of very intimidating maths/physics until I get there.

As for other private/free-time projects..

SSBToni:

SSBToni is probably my most ambitious project yet. Toni is a Discord bot for the competitive Super Smash Bros. community (currently in 1.9k servers wowee). Her main selling point is the ability to show frame data and hitbox gifs, but she can also do some other stuff like guide you through a full match of Smash Bros. according to a range of competitive rulesets, from rock-paper-scissors through stage bans all the way to game reporting. She's written in Java with JDA, and her code is hosted here.

I want to do ranked matchmaking and Smash profile images later on, so I have to do some web backend work. The bulk of that is private still, but some of that spun off into separate projects which are..

instant-glicko-2:

The Glicko-2 rating system is great, but it has some issues if you want to use it for real-time ratings/rankings. This Rust library aims to solve these issues to allow for good real-time rankings that are still accurate to the Glicko-2 system. I wrote about how I achieve that here, and the code is hosted here. Note that I do want to change some stuff still which I don't mention in the article I wrote, and in the current form it is probably not production-ready.

cache-compute:

In all honesty, maybe my proudest public thing yet, and it's a single-file ~500 line Rust crate. Based on this blogpost by fasterthanlime, the library makes caching for async stuff much easier, which is gonna be extremely useful in web backend stuff. If a resource isn't available locally (cached), you might have to spend some time making a request to get it from elsewhere to cache it. This library makes sure you only make that request once when you need it, and sorts everything out so that everyone waiting on the resource gets a copy the moment it arrives.

Part of why I'm so proud of this is that, for one, I consider the core finished and very much usable, and secondly, because I wrote so many and such long and exhaustive tests for it, just to hopefully be able to catch any weirdness that comes up. Because writing this kind of concurrent code is hard.

And that's it for projects I would want to show off and write about.

There are of course always ideas in my idea list (currently four or five good ones I'm not working on), maybe I'll post about those too sometime. If you're curious or starved for ideas feel free to ask about them too, I don't think I'll be able to do all of them and the list is only growing larger.

[made-ofmemories]

When Life Tears You Asunder, But You’re Not Alone

(Chapter 5/17)

General Warnings/tags: Found family, implied Wayne/Susan in future chapters, Max & Eddie have a sibling like relationship, fluff, hurt/comfort

Chapter specific warnings/tags: Nothing way too detailed but there is some talk of shitty parents, past childhood traumas and parental death, Billy’s abuse is also mentioned in this chapter 

Word count: 2559

Summary: Billy was a pretty shitty brother, there was no denying it, but Max still finds herself mourning for the sibling relationship they never got to have. With him gone she thinks so are her chances of ever having the big brother figure she’s always wanted. Then in a turn of events that she never saw coming, Eddie Munson waltzes into her life. Or more like, almost runs her over.

Notes: A lot of the stuff about Billy and Max in this chapter directly references or was heavily inspired by the book ‘Runaway Max’

Co-written with the wonderful @ladydorian05 and crossposted on AO3. Updates every Friday.

Series Masterlist

——-

Max is in a bad mood and has been since the first period of the day, English with Mrs. Ross. By the time the bell rings at 3 pm and she’s stomping out of the building to where Eddie is waiting for her, she's long past hiding it. She spots the van across the parking lot. Eddie seems revved up, as usual, his hands on the steering wheel are drumming along to whatever song is playing on the stereo and he’s banging his head back and forth to the rhythm of it.

The entire vehicle shakes when she slams the van door behind her. Eddie flinches at the sudden noise and she feels a little guilty for startling him. He must pick up on her mood pretty quickly because he doesn’t make a remark about it like she would expect from him any other time.

“How was school?” He asks tentatively as they’re leaving the parking lot.

“Fine.” She grumbles. She really isn’t in the mood for small talk, she can feel a headache coming on and to make matters worse Eddie just had to be playing that song, “Can you turn this off?” She snaps, maybe a little too harshly.

“Uh- sure.” He sounds confused and Max can’t blame him. Usually, she loves anything by Metallica, just last week she had been shouting along to the lyrics of the very same song with him. Right now though, all it’s doing is dragging up memories she’d really rather not deal with.

He turns off the stereo and they travel in silence until Eddie stops somewhere that very much isn’t the trailer park. Max had been too caught up in her own head to even realize they had been driving the completely wrong way for the past 5 minutes.

“What are we doing here? I just want to go home.”

“I’m hungry, aren’t you hungry?”

“No. Eddie. Please can we just go, I have… homework.” It’s a lame excuse, unconvincing even to her own ears.

“It’s Friday, you have the whole weekend to do homework. Come on.” He’s hopping out of the van and heading towards the diner they’re parked in front of before she can get another word in.

She groans, throwing her head back against the seat. He’s impossible sometimes. She weighs up her options, she can either stay here in this freezing cold rust bucket of a van which is only going to get colder or she can go along with whatever the hell this is.

“This is technically kidnapping of a minor you know.” She complains when she catches up to him.

“Yeah yeah, add it to the list.”

She waits close to the entrance while Eddie orders to go. She’s skated past the building several times before, but it’s the first time she’s ever been inside. There are a few servers bustling around and one or two customers but overall it’s not too busy. Some old 60’s pop song is playing quietly on the jukebox.

Max insists that she doesn’t want anything. Eddie orders her a hot cocoa anyway and despite her grumbling, she has to admit that the warmth of the hot drink is appreciated. She takes a sip of it once they’re back in the van, it’s good.

“There used to be a place just like this near where I grew up.” Eddie says breaking the silence they’ve once again fallen into, “My mom used to take me there when I had a bad day and we’d eat ice cream and drink milkshakes until we both felt sick.”

He looks sad despite the faint smile tugging at the corners of his lips, a bittersweet memory Max thinks.

“She sounds nice.”

“She was. Things got hard, near the end, but sometimes she’d have a good week, manage to stay clean for a few days and I’d get my mom back for a little while.”

“What happened to her?” She asks cautiously. He’s never really spoken about his birth parents to her before and she’s more than a little wary of crossing some kind of line.

“She passed away when I was a kid. My dad had always been kinda shitty but he went totally off the rails after that and ended up in jail a couple of months later.” He taps his fingers against the steering wheel, his rings clinking against each other, “I was, uhhh about 10? At the time. I didn’t have anywhere to go so Wayne took me in and I’ve been with him ever since.”

"My stepdad, Neil, was kind of shitty too before he left. My real dad is… less shitty, but I don’t even know where he is right now. I lost contact with him when we left California."

“Shitty parents are the worst,” Eddie confirms. He starts the van which rattles to life with a splutter and they fall into another silence while he drives.

Max is less surprised this time when they come to a stop and it’s somewhere other than the trailer park. She has to admit Sattlers Quarry seems like an odd choice, but trying to figure out how Eddie’s brain works rarely gets her very far.

“Come on, let’s eat.” He grabs the paper bag containing the food as well as his own cup of cocoa.

Max follows when he hops out of the van and takes a seat on the floor beside him. They’re at the bottom of the quarry, next to the water. She hasn’t spent much time out here, but it’s kind of pretty when the sun low in the sky hits the water just right illuminating it to a vibrant shade of blue.

“I’ve always liked how quiet this place can be,” Eddie says, reaching into the bag to pull out a carton of fries. Max reaches over to steal some, she’d barely eaten at lunch and now that she’d calmed down somewhat the hunger was starting to creep up on her.

Eddie rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything. He reaches into the paper bag and pulls out 2 burgers wrapped tightly in foil, he sets one onto his lap for himself and hands the other to Max.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He chuckles, handing her a paper napkin from the bag when she takes a bite of her burger and smears ketchup across her face in the process, “I can assure you I’ve dealt with worse just walking down the street.”

Max doesn’t doubt that it’s true, she’s heard the things people say about him even now after his name has been cleared. None of it is true, of course, but she thinks maybe that makes it worse. Eddie never seems to let it get to him. She’s not sure how he does it, her fists clench just at the thought of some of the awful things she’s overheard.

“Someone said something, at school,” Max says, picking up the disposable cup of hot cocoa from her side and swirling the remnants around in the bottom of the cup.

“Said something? About you?”

“About Billy.” She’s staring down at the plastic lid covering the cup in her hands, not able to bring herself to make eye contact, “And it’s stupid really because I thought I was over all that shit but turns out I’m not.”

“He was your brother, right?” Eddie asks and Max forgives him for needing the clarification. Just as he never talks about his birth parents Max doesn’t have a tendency to talk about her family either.

“Stepbrother, technically.”

“And the mall fire, I’m guessing that wasn’t a fire?”

“No. Not exactly.” She scoffs at the lame government-issued excuse, mall fire, sure.

She forgets sometimes that he’s been around for even less of all the crazy upside-down stuff than she has, usually they make an effort specifically not to talk about it. He wasn’t there for the demodogs, the underground tunnels, or the mind flayer versions one and two. All he knew from the pre-Vecna days was the very brief and massively oversimplified version of events given to him the day they had found him hiding out in Reefer Rick’s boathouse.

It sounds crazy, even to her own ears when she starts recounting the events of the past 4 years. She tells him briefly of the stuff Lucas had recapped to her from the year when everything began and Max was still back in California thinking the biggest problems in her life were going to be an asshole of a brother and a shitty step-dad. She goes into a little more detail when she gets to her own experiences with the upside-down after moving to Hawkins, but puts the most focus on the Summer of ‘85. She tells him about starcourt, about the mind flayer, the flayed, and what happened to Billy. What really happened to Billy, not the watered-down excuse that had been fed to everyone who wasn’t there to witness the truth.

“Well, shit.” It takes him a moment to process, understandably, “And you still miss him.” It’s more of a statement than a question, he’s expecting her to agree but she hesitates. She shrugs and her eyes dart to Eddie’s for the first time since she started talking. Eddie has never judged her for anything, but she’s worried this might change that.

“It’s complicated.”

“Complicated?”

“He was an asshole.” She states matter of factly, “I was so excited when my mom told me I was going to have a big brother. Then Billy came along. I thought he was cool at first, but that didn’t last. He was awful to me, and my friends. He hated me, I hated him. And Neil… Neil didn’t know how to deal with him and only ever made things worse. He thought all of his problems could be solved with a belt. Or his fists.”

She glances at Eddie. The hand resting on his leg balls up the fabric of his pants so hard his knuckles are turning white. She’s never seen him angry. Frustrated, or scared? Yes, but never truly angry. She thinks judging by the sullen expression on his face that this is as close as she’s ever going to get.

“He never touched me, didn’t think I was worth it, I guess. I was just some stupid little girl to him most of the time.” She’s quick to clarify and Eddie lets out a relieved breath, though he still seems tense. He encourages her to continue with a little nod when he realizes she’s paused, "I just- for a long time I would have given anything to have Billy out of my life and now that he’s  actually gone, I don’t know. It feels like it was my fault, maybe if I hadn’t had those thoughts or if I’d done more than just stand there he’d still be here. And maybe things wouldn’t have changed and we’d have still hated each other and he’d have continued making my life hell, but I wish we’d gotten a chance to try to be real siblings. I didn’t want us to hate each other.”

She takes a deep breath and fixes her eyes on the cup of hot cocoa in her hands again. It stirs up a strange mixture of emotions talking about everything, the guilt she still feels over Billy, the fear she feels when she wakes up from a nightmare and isn’t sure if she’s still in her bed or trapped in the upside-down, and the longing she would feel for a real sibling bond on those rare occasions when Billy wasn’t terrorizing her and everyone around them. But she also feels the relief of finally getting so many years worth of bottled-up emotions off her chest. She’s barely even scratched the surface and still, she’s never shared this much before, not even with Lucas.

“I had no idea. Shit.” She hears rather than sees him lie back onto the crunchy dry leaves scattered around them. It’s a lot, she knows that. She doesn’t think she’d know how to respond either, “It wasn’t your fault. None of this was ever your fault. Not Neil, Not Billy being an asshole, and certainly not Billy’s death.” He says after he’s taken a moment to process everything. It’s said with a fierce tone, one that doesn’t leave room for negotiation,  she’s only ever heard him use it a few times, usually when he’s arguing with Mike or Dustin about something.

She sniffles, managing to hold back the tears that are starting to sting at the back of her eyes. She doesn’t trust herself to speak so she just nods in acknowledgment, she’s done enough talking for now anyway, she thinks.

“I’m sorry that you never got your second chance with Billy.” His voice is softer this time and she peeks over to him and sees him sitting upright again, “Hey, you have Harrington though. He seems pretty awesome, surprisingly.”

It’s meant to lighten the mood and it works, the mention of Steve bringing a small smile to her face. Steve had shown her a kindness she never would have expected in those first few months in Hawkins. He had put himself right in the face of danger to protect her and the others without second thought time and time again. He’s a mother hen for sure and a good friend, but he’s not the first person who comes to mind when she thinks of the word brother.

“Yeah. He’s pretty cool.” Her voice wobbles just a little, but her smile grows wider, “If you ever tell him I said that I will end you.” She jokes, jabbing a finger in Eddie's direction.

“I’m sworn to secrecy!” He raises his hands in surrender. He gives Max a few minutes, before he asks, “You ready to go?”

They gather up their trash, balling up the foil from the burgers and placing their empty cups into the paper bag which Eddie then tosses into the back of his van. Max is slowly starting to understand why it’s always such a mess in there.

Eddie drops her off in front of her trailer, as usual. She grabs her things, says her goodbyes, and starts making her way inside. She makes it as far as the front door before the thoughts gnawing away at her brain finally win. She dumps her school bag and skateboard outside and turns to face the other side of the street.

“Eddie!” She yells when she sees that he’s just gotten out of his van and hasn’t made it inside yet. He stops in his tracks and turns to look at her with a confused expression when she calls him. He looks even more confused when she’s jogging across the street towards him.

“Hey, did you forget somet- oof.”

She wraps her arms around him in a hug so fierce it makes him stumble back a step or two. It takes him a couple of seconds to register what’s happening, but when he does he brings his arms to wrap around her and squeezes her back just as tightly.

“You’re a pretty great big brother.” She says from where she’s squished against his chest.

If she happens to glance back on her way over to her trailer and notice him wiping at his eyes, well no one needs to know.

[hydralisk98]

LibreVastServitor computing stack designs 1/?

Just a quick reminder here, this is a customized computing stack manifestation game where I simply write what I desire and then let the wider universe manifest it for me whatever way that means, including personal efforts of mine. Boils down from customizing and adapting research material into a actionable series of items to manifest.

Ashur dream specifications

(mid-tower personal workstation computer)

2+ 2560x1440p monitors (one vertical, one or more horizontal)

Intel Core i5-4690 @ 3.5 GHz with its 4-cores (hoping forward to upgrade the RISC-V + OpenPOWER like processor for something decent with ~12-cores & much more open design) central processor unit

32GB of RAM

Some recent mid-range AMD GPU

64 GB Linux swap partition (mostly for virtual machines and RAMdisk partitions)

4TB+ SSD storage

Bluray burner

Floppy drive

Cassette / datasette drive

Themed GRUB bootloader

S6 init system

Arch-like package manager and software ecosystem

Customized alternative Linux kernel between Linux Libre & Zen kernel ( XanMod + Liquorix )

ZealOS, Parade, OpenBSD, OpenIndiana...

CLADO, DIS, Venera, Perseus, Maskoch, Synod, Monad, Valenz, Constans?

KDE Plasma with Liquid shell as desktop environment, complete with custom ricing, dot files & all the KDE desktop environment utilities;

Bash + Fish, Tmux, Astro-Neo-Vim with LSP, Emacs, LibreOffice Suite, Calligra, Bottles, Wine, WineTricks, QGIS, Firefox, LibreWolf, Dolphin, Konsole, Inkscape, Karbon, OpenStreetMap, GPlates, GProjector, Itch, Steam, GOG Galaxy, Lutris, Cyberpunk 2077, Ken Silverman's, FreeBASIC, Common Lisp, Godot + Qodot, VLC, MPV, .ogg / .ogv media player, musical tracker, 'Landchad.net', Brasero, K3B, FloppyFormatter, LibreCAD, AutoCAD, Blender, Kate, Qt, Nim, MUSL, C compiler, assembly monitor, HxD debugger, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, F#, C#, GNU make, NASM, Sweet Home 3D, some digital audio workstation software, Audacious, FFMPEG, Wayland, Morevna OpenToonz, some HTTP(S) web server suite, MongoDB, Hexo, Netlify CMS, RSS feed reader + generator, Pomodoro, Calendar, timely Tracker, Notion-like service, Tape, Gollum, some level editors, FreeCiv, The Sims 2, SimCity 4, Quake 1, Doom 1 & Doom 2, Markdown / Argdown, Konqueror, some WYSISYG rich media editor, some Raycaster engine, Daggerfall Unity, Portal 2, Source (1 & 2) Engine modding, some VirtualTableTop software, some remote desktop control software like VNC, OpenSSH, some distributed share storage software, Trenchbroom, StableDiffusionXL, ChatGPT open source alternative, DAO, Krita, GIMP, G'MIC & its plugins, PaintDotNet, CataclysmDDA, CataclysmBDA, Evennia, Python 3, Firefox for KDE (Developer Edition), Perl, PHP, MariaDB, lighttpd, Apache, Nginx, Themix Oomox GTK+ theme editor, Falkon, ...

Custom shell scripts, interactive REPL programming languages, some GUI programs, command aliases and dot file configurations;

?

Venera (computation "deque" project)

Original components:

RISC-V + OpenPOWER = LibreVast (tribble word-based open hardware architecture designed for daily use & tinkering developer purposes)

Tropix + OGAS = Nucleus (optimized distributed processing micro-kernel, like 'Inferno' & 'Plan9')

RedSeaFS + Parade = CLADOgram (direct-access rich media agentive filesystem & file server suite)

KDE + POSIX-compilant CDE = VUE (lightweight desktop environment with profound customization options)

CommonLisp w/ CLOS + Nim = Pan-Lisp (both low-level and high-level REPL programming language)

Existing components:

Fish, Tmux, Vim, Konsole, Flatpak, Git

KDE Plasma w/ Liquid shell alternative

Konqueror, LibreWolf

GIMP w/ G'MIC & Krita w/ G'MIC

Hexo (flat blog self-hosting web server), MariaDB, "Landchad.net" stuff

QEMU, Wine, Wine-tricks, Proton, Bottles, Lutris

Trenchbroom, Godot w/ Qodot

Kate, KDevelop, Okteta, Mousepad, Notepadqq

[...]

[seanmonstar]

hyper Polish Period

A couple weeks ago, we announced the first release candidate of hyper 1.0. hyper is a protective and efficient HTTP library for all, written in the Rust programming language.

I'm calling the time period between the first release candidate and the final release the "hyper polish period".

Areas of Polish

The main thrust is to polish the edges, and make the final release of hyper 1.0 as smooth as possible for all. It's still quite a lot to do, and several of the areas will actively benefit from a mixture of experience helping out. It seems there's four main areas of work to do, so we need a few things from the community:

Folks to volunteer to "lead" an area.1

Anyone to pick a task from an area and work on it.

Try to use the release candidates, and give us feedback.

How about some more details about each area.

Area: Docs

hyper should have stellar documentation, all around. We should be an example for all Rust crates on how to have top-notch documentation. Caring about the documentation is caring about the developer experience. They are our users. They should be delighted whenever trying to do something new with hyper. Certainly, there will always be ways to improve them. But that doesn't mean we can't try to make them awesome for the 1.0 launch.

The API documentation needs to better rounded out. Behavior should be explained here, a user shouldn't need to go read a guide to understand if a type has a certain behavior.

The website, hyper.rs, can be improved to better accomplish its various purposes. The examples from the repository could be rendered on the website. The docs folder containing internal documentation could be rendered as a "contrib" section. It could be easier to find the blog (and we could use that more).

While guides are technically part of the website, I view them to be sufficiently big enough to consider separately. We could use a more in-depth guide using more of hyper, perhaps slowly building on pieces from previous guides. WIth so many useful pieces now in hyper-util, guides should help show how to include and use them. We can also add a Tower section, showing the power of adding Tower middleware to your server of client.

Area: Utils

Many of the less stable, higher level parts of hyper 0.14.x have been removed, with the promise of most showing back up in hyper-util. Some of these are very simple ports. Others will be made more generic or configurable, encouraging users to plug and play on top of it all.

For example, consider the previous hyper::Client . It combined many concepts together for the convenience of users: a mechanism to establish new connections, a pool to store idle connections for a period of time, and a way for the connector to signal to the pool if HTTP/2 was negotiated via ALPN. You could only customize those pieces if specific options were part of the client Builder. As part of the move to hyper-util, the way those pieces plug together can be made public.2 That does likely mean more work on our part though.

Area: Upgrading

We want as smooth of an upgrade as possible.

The smoothest would be if there were only types or methods being removed. Then we could just add deprecations in 0.14.x, and the compiler would help people prepare early. But, when an upgrade involves changes to methods, or behavior, it's more complicated.3 Still, the more we can do to make things easier, the better!

As described in the upgrade meta issue, we can backport some of the new additions, and we can use #[deprecated] to guide people to start using better stuff earlier.

We can only backport additions, since that won't break code. We can't backport removals, or changes. In some ways, this work is on the easier side, since it's not solving new problems. It's taking copying working code from the release candidate, and pasting it into the 0.14.x branch. Likely some internal types or methods have changed names.

It does mean in some cases including significantly more code, so we'll make the backports opt-in with a Cargo feature flag.

Once some of the new APIs are backported, we can add deprecation messages to the things they are meant to replacing. They can include a link back to a specific issue describing the motivation and anything else they need to consider about the change.

There are other parts of that are removed completely, without a replacement in core hyper. It seems like it would be useful to let people start preparing for their disappearance. Each deprecation warning can point to its own issue, explaining what the user could do instead, perhaps changing the pattern they use, or copying the code of what's in hyper-util.

I don't expect everyone to upgrade to 1.0 as soon as it comes out, so having the compiler help people to be more ready and make their eventual upgrade smoother has significant value. It helps earn the trust of our users, hopefully reducing upgrade fear for future releases.

Area: Integration Feedback

The release candidate period is principally to allow for gathering of feedback about any further breaking changes that should be considered before stabilizing.

Some users have already tried out the release candidate, and filed issues of things we need to address. But we can't simply assume that if no one complains, people like it. More often, if someone doesn't like something, they just quietly use something else entirely.

We also can't assume people will even try it out on their own during this time period.

So, we'll want to actively engage people with different use cases, help them try to upgrade, and record their feedback ourselves. The more reports we can gather, the better. I also have a simple list of people at big companies, start-ups, and hobbyists that I'll be sure to check in with.

If you're able to help give the feedback, we recognize the time and effort to do so as a valuable contribution towards the hyper project. The project and community are made better because of you, so thank you!

This may also reveal changes that would be good to make in hyper-util. But releases there are easy. The most urgent part of this area is to make sure we take care of all necessary breaking changes in hyper core, before calling it 1.0.

Join us!

We expect this polish period to last a couple of months. There's a lot to do, and a lot of places for people of all sorts to join in and make this release awesome.

Check out the boards, implement something cool, write a guide, give us feedback, backport something, volunteer to own (or co-own) an area. You can make a big difference for users of Rust's HTTP libraries.

1.0, here we come!

Volunteering to lead an area doesn't mean you'll be the sole person responsible. Multiple can do so. ↩︎

Since the client pieces are not part of the stable hyper core, we don't have to be quite as careful about not exposing some internals. It's less of an issue to release breaking changes of utilities. ↩︎

I suppose it is doable by stretching those kinds of changes out over 2 major releases. You could add a stop-gap method and deprecation on the original the current version, then in the next make the breaking change and add a deprecation to the stop-gap method, and then remove it in the second release. hyper isn't at that level of stability just yet, but something we could consider after 1.0. ↩︎