#that's like. arbitrary code execution at this point

[caelos-legacy]

Now this is a question that I am 99.9% sure no one asked

since Moon can eat viruses, isn't there a chance that Moon might get corrupted by the Viruses he has eaten? if he does get infected by a virus, would it infect both sun and moon personalities?

Ie Sun being snappy or paranoid about everything Y/N does

and Moon being very hostile to Y/N (since I think the 'camera' work on both side since Y/N can come in what stop sun/moon/eclipse form getting out?)

nah, moon eating a virus is him as an antivirus neutralizing (or deleting permanently depending on the case) the malicious file. if files could infect your antivirus by it interacting with it that would be a bit of a problem, wouldn't it?

that said it's not like it's impossible to infect the executable file from which sun and moon run. but that would depend on the nature of the virus itself.

as it stands: sapient ai is an unheard of concept for the world the events take place at, or at very least people are Extremely skeptical of the possibility. kinda hard to imagine someone would make a virus that would screw with their personality Specifically.

someone would have to Really have it out for an obscure operating system barely anyone uses, if at all.

[elsaclack]

took a day or so to wait on this just to make sure i wasn’t talking out of my ass here but

the censorship on tiktok has ramped up significantly since service was restored to americans

i’ve been active back on here long enough to note that the level of censorship on tiktok that was present before the ban was a joke on here. words like “unalive” are stupid and ridiculous (and in certain cases when it comes to filtering specific words, downright dangerous) to non-tiktok users, but the reason words like “unalive” and other heavily coded language came to be so ingrained in tiktok users’ vocabulary is because the platform itself would either flag videos with the actual words like “kill” or “murder” or “dead/die/died” and remove them from the platform, suppress the video to the point where large creators were getting maybe 20-30 views (when their norm is 20,000-30,000+), OR it would shadowban not just the video, but the user themselves. tiktok’s user base linguistically developed into the heavily coded version of english that the public sees (and in many cases, rightfully makes fun of) today specifically to get around the platform’s arbitrary and ill-defined censorship rules to reach the widest possible audience they could reach on the platform. it sucks and it’s stupid, we think so too, but it’s what we had to do to make the platform what we wanted it to be.

now that tiktok is back online for americans, i’ve seen a lot of people testing whether the algorithm is still working by saying things like “trans rights are human rights” and “universal free healthcare” and things like that, and the algorithm itself does appear to be working as comments on those videos assure the creator that their video was on the fyp and found their target audience. HOWEVER. many users, myself included, have noticed that comments speaking negatively about trump specifically are being forced through a creator-approval process when that NEVER happened before. additionally, videos discussing trump in a negative way are now limited on the number of times they can be shared in-app, meaning that if i wanted to share one, the platform would limit me to only 5 shares before it tells me that i’ve reached the max number of shares. instead of being able to send a post to a sixth friend’s tiktok dm, i would have to copy the link and send it to that friend outside of tiktok, and that’s assuming the platform would allow me to copy the link at all.

one creator even tried to include a clip of trump HIMSELF FROM HIS OWN RALLY IN DC saying IN HIS OWN WORDS that he rigged the election, and their video was flagged and taken down. does it annoy me that i watched one creator say, verbatim, “d.t. just admitted that he rigatoni’d the electioni (pronounced ee-leck-tee-oh-nee)”? YES THATS SO ANNOYING. but it’s also the only way we can communicate there now, and the implications of that are terrifying. mass deportations start in the next 24 hours along with the 100+ other HORRIFIC executive orders trump is signing the second he’s back in office, and the biggest social media platform in america was essentially just gagged by the platform itself. i am BEGGING any american citizen (or anyone else!!) who reads this to not allow your biases against tiktok blind you to the reality of what’s happening directly in front of our faces.

[foone]

hiya foone! i'm working on the surprisingly lofty task of modding barbie fashion show 2004 and i've been told twice to ask if you have any leads on how to get to the game files. i don't know how to simplify it because i'm so in over my head at this point. here is the thread

okay so here's how you reverse engineer an arbitrary game, the quick version:

Research. Who made the game? what else did they make? Maybe they made a game with the same engine, and someone already figured out that one? (not that I saw on a quick look, but you may be able to dig deeper) Also, look in the game files. There's a PowerRender.dll and a sipEngine.bc file. Nothing for sipEngine, but PowerRender has a hit on the internet archive, maybe that download includes some info on how it encodes files?

Look at the files (with a hex editor, like HxD). KAR files seem to be the main storage mechanism, and they've got a RIFF header. RIFF is a standard, though they're not using it exactly. But this might help. Another thing you can spot in the KAR files is a bunch of english strings (CreditsTb.kar is lousy with them). That's a good sign: it means the files aren't compressed, so you don't have to figure out the compression method.

Static analysis of the EXE. Get Ghidra and load up the EXE. Find where it opens files (CreateFileA/CreateFileW on windows), trace back from there. Check the strings. Hey look, function FUN_004e6260 is called with "KAResource.kar". so FUN_004e6260 is probably a function to load arbitrary resource files. Dig through that, figure out how it works.

Dynamic analysis of the EXE. Stick it in a debugger and see what it does. Set a breakpoint on CreateFileA/W and follow the execution. I don't have a good recommendation for what tool to use here, I'm from the past. I've used Ollydbg a lot but it hasn't been updated in 9 years.

Hijack the EXE and make it do your work for you. One thing I noticed while looking around was references to Python. This game apparently embeds a python interpreter, version 2.2. Maybe you can find where it loads the code from, or inject your own code?

Anyway those are some introductory ideas. feel free to ask any follow-up questions, but this hopefully gives you some idea of where to start?

Good luck!

[triviallytrue]

So @kaiasky you asked for me to write something if I figure out more about how video game hacks work, and I did some more research.

At its most basic, if bytes are written on your machine, you can modify them. So if you have a binary on your machine, you can easily decompile it to assembly, modify the assembly, recompile it, and run it.

Except, wait, that sucks.

You have to know assembly well, which is miserable

It's really easy to brick a program that you do this to because of offsets

A lot of programs have checksums and other failsafes to detect direct modification

So that's not going to work very well.

Instead, you can ride along in the process that's executing the binary and execute your code there. For windows machines, it seems like the easiest way is DLL injection.

Now we get to use C instead of assembly (thank god) and we have a lot more flexibility. We don't want to touch the underlying binary because of (2) and (3), but since we're in the same address space as the program, we can write to the addresses that the program accesses. If we discover the location of a variable, we can overwrite its value with whatever we want.

We can abuse this further by messing with function pointers - if we can overwrite a value containing the location of another function within the binary, we can point it to our code instead, achieving arbitrary code execution. Yay! I think there are some countermeasures to this that cheat developers have to watch out for, but this is just a broad overview anyway.

Okay, great, but how do we figure out what to modify? We could read the entire binary in assembly, but I think I'd rather kill myself. Instead we have to use some tool to spy on the program. I remember using CheatEngine when I was little to cheat in flash games, and it turns out it still works pretty well - if you can repeatedly modify a value, you can use a tool to find its memory address (usually).

You can even trace back a pointer chain (ie, an attribute contained within a player object contained within a game object, but usually with many more layers) to its root and find a way to do location discovery entirely automatically, though this seems a little tricky sometimes.

Anyway. This is a very broad overview that raises as many questions as it answers for me, but I'm going to try playing around with some tools and seeing if I can get anywhere.

[bonefall]

Question about Tiger- what WAS his end goal? We know that he wanted to be TC leader but he really quickly pivoted to "world forest domination" after that failed, which is one of those things that feels like thistle's law would oppose. Also why did he start going after half clan cats while also preaching for the clans uniting under him and him alone one leader? Other than kitty racism of course.

(Gently) If you think that Thistle Law would oppose total forest takeover, then I really recommend you head over to the masterpost on Thistle Law as a concept. Nothing about Thistle Law is isolationist, never has been

The ideology sets itself apart from Hard Traditionalism because it becomes willing to enforce some standard of xenophobic purity. That's what Tigerstar wanted to do. There is no "other than kitty racism." That's it. Stonefur, Mistyfoot, Stormpaw, and Featherpaw's lives are the result of codebreaking and that makes them lesser than other cats.

There is no logical reason for bigotry. It's not a principle. It doesn't make sense. It's reactionary discomfort and cruelty given form.

Tigerstar wanted to decide who was pure enough to live and who was filthy enough to die. These categories are arbitrary.

(Under the cut TW: speaking frankly about miscegenation, segregation, and genocide.)

"But if they all united under one Clan, then they'd just start mixing in the end, wouldn't they?"

No. They wouldn't. The steps go like this;

The groups live together and mingle too closely. To prevent them from interbreeding, the code is emphasized.

Someone breaks the code. They are punished.

The kits are dealt with; either eliminated or considered lesser.

But every birth of mixed children poses an "existential" threat. "Purity" is a concept that has to be protected, if a Pure parent mixes with the wrong parent, ALL of the resulting children are dirty. It is a threat to the concept of purity.

And this continues to happen, and "purity" must be protected, so... the groups need to be kept separate.

There is no such thing as "separate but equal." One group is an underclass, prevented from moving freely. This would have been RiverClan.

But the groups continue to mingle, people won't stay put in a ghetto. More extreme measures are taken. Sterilization, kidnapping, execution...

But that still doesn't work. There's only one solution; Genocide.

The logical conclusion of this ideology is genocide. That's where it ends. It doesn't matter if the fascist believes this at the stage he's at or not; that is the built-in conclusion.

Fascism is a death cult.

Tigerstar's goal was to take over the forest and arbitrarily decide which cats would be "True" cats of TigerClan. He would have weeded out cats seemingly at random, but heavily favored ShadowClan. Eventually, the Clans would shift into various classes, before each one is systemically eliminated.

IF he went unopposed. Fascism is unstable. Hyperemotional, self-obsessed, frothing egotists are REALLY bad at organizing government and its very structure is prone to infighting.

The enemy is everywhere, both strong and weak. You live in a constant state of paranoia. You waste all your money on ridiculous vanity weapon projects and overestimate your abilities to absurdity. You kill off all the intellectuals because you're too fragile to be told no. The biggest liar in history is the person who equated any kind of fascism with "evil genius," spite is blinding and insecurity makes you do stupid things.

Turns out, that's really bad for holding onto power. These regimes crumble like a shitty jenga tower eventually; problem is, they're deadly before that point and drag down thousands of innocent people on the way down.

[ryunumber]

I have a question, if a character can only be seen via glitches, would it work for a Ryu Number? Like, a glitch being able to make an unused character appear that could otherwise only be accessed by hacking (for instance, there's a bug in Earthbound that allows you to get to the Debug Menu, where Kirby is used to navigate said menus)

I have actually thought about this a bit ever since a glitch was discovered in 3rd Strike that allowed players to actually see the otherwise hidden Doraemon in one of the stages.

I'm inclined to say no, and vaguely gesture toward developer intention and the existence of arbitrary code execution, but I fully recognize that the former is only so relevant up to a certain point and is not infrequently in conflict with the player experience, and the latter can be well-defined for exclusion so as to still allow for less involved glitches. (I think.)

In short, I guess, but I would probably be compelled to include another route without glitched appearances.

[grovelin-green-goblin]

Why Should we Play Glitchy Games?

How many times has this happened to you? You booted up a new game, you got it day one, and it has some glitches, and you aren’t too fond of the graphics, so, as such, you stop playing it and don’t really come back to it. You go back to whatever you were playing before and whenever your friends talk about it with you you always remark on how you couldn’t get past the way the graphics were. Some time passes, and you decide to watch a video on it, and you realize you missed out.

I think we’ve all been there, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of, lots of people judge books by their covers or just by the first few pages. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. Even if a game is unpolished, has poor graphics, or is glitchy, should stick with it. If not for just the sake of seeing what’s on the other side.

Talking about video games, it’s also easy to get caught up in the details. I’ve seen so much discourse about the graphics of games and how powerful the consoles are, it’s almost like the games themselves stop mattering at a certain point. It’s become more of “how close can we get to a movie without just making a movie?” Now, granted, multiple years during the Game Awards, Geoff Keighley and other speakers have spoken about how they hope to see video games get even closer to being like movies. While I’m all for advancements, and granted this is mostly from Playstation and Microsoft’s AAA output, they all play so close to one another, and if that’s not happening, Playstation is remaking The Last of Us again.

So, what’s the point? All these games look the same, and while there’s depth to them, but at the same time, there’s a lack of variety in the actual genres. So many of these games have become samey. There’s not enough variety, but with the actual content of the games, there’s not too much actually covered. So much of this has become a discussion of graphics and less about the games themselves. The discussion, and focus, should start to veer towards the actual content of these games, not just the performance and graphics.

Now, sometimes, the contents of the games aren’t completely polished, but I’ve seen so many stories of people playing these unpolished games and having a great time. A big example is Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game that has become renowned for its glitches such as the Wavedash and L-Canceling along with the roster’s unbalanced nature has made it an enduring classic for two decades, or Pokemon Red and Blue, games that, while a complete experience, are held together with duct tape and a dream, allowing for Arbitrary Code Execution, a way for people to make precise inputs, rewriting the game while the game is being played due to an insecurity in the game’s coding, allowing again for new discoveries to be made and be played for decades. So much so that people are still finding new techniques and the hierarchy of characters' competitive comparisons to one another to this day. Along with games that haven’t aged well or were unpolished, some games are made with glitches in mind, whether for comedy, like Goat Simulator, or simply that a glitch inspires a whole new concept. One of the most influential examples being Street Fighter II, where the designers found that different attacks had ending lags and could also be strung into each other, allowing for concept of combos to be born, and essentially creating the basis for all modern fighting games.

Now some may say that, no, playing unpolished games leaves you with a frustrating experience, with constant crashes and choppy, inconsistent frame rates. An example of this that I can think of is the Steam version of Fallout New Vegas, a game that, in general, is colloquially considered one of the best video games in the Fallout series, if not in its genre. But, due to the game not being developed for PCs first because it was first developed for the PS3 and Xbox 360, the game’s development being 18 months, and how old the game is, the Steam version is riddled with lots of bugs and frequently crashes. Despite this, however, the game still sits with an overall review average of “Very Positive” on its store page. Why is that? People found that, despite all the issues, players still love the game and found ways to not only work around the crashes, whether through toughing it out or modding the game to tighten up the experience, preventing these crashes from happening. This even happens now, with online games, like Fortnite and Fallout 76. These games, for as popular as they are, there’s always glitches that come with new additions and get fixed as they come, and they release with these glitches. People still play them. Even a game that came out three days ago, Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, has framerate drops and a strange lack of anti-aliasing, but guess what? I’m already halfway done with it, and I believe it’ll get fixed within time, whether as a patch or it was intended to work better on whatever this Switch successor will be. The point is, even if these games have these problems, a lot of the people who pull through usually end up at liking games like this.

Of course, this doesn’t work for consoles, but usually these don’t go that far as an issue.

All in all, even if the games aren’t polished or have glitches, it may still be worth it to play them. While, that doesn’t mean you can excuse extremely poor performances, you might find that you can still get enjoyment out of them, and can still be worth your time.

[tokiro07]

Undead Unluck ch.226 thoughts

[Closing the Book]

(Topics: character analysis - Apocalypse/Juiz/Julia, thematic analysis - Rules/Unjustice, predictions - Unjustice vs. the Master Rules)

Apocalypse

I've heard of books making people cry, but this is ridiculous!

Ever since Juiz said she considered Apocalypse a member of the Union, I figured he'd get a big moment sooner or later, but I didn't think he'd die! I didn't even think he could die! I guess it makes sense, I just never really thought about it...

This definitely helps build on an idea I lightly touched on last week, that someone had to die to raise the stakes of this arc and make it feel less like it was a flawless, easy victory, but I stopped short at Juiz, who was already dead, not returning. I should have considered how much more impactful it would be for someone to die in real-time than to simply realize that someone else just wasn't coming back

With that in mind, Apocalypse is unfortunately the perfect character to do that with. He's been built up for a long time now to be less of an antagonistic force than he presented himself as, but ultimately, what would his place in the world be once the game concluded? Would Julia/Juiz just carry him around everywhere she went? Would he be condemned to sit in place in the Roundtable Room forevermore without any real purpose? Would he go back to sleep and be buried again? Or would he just fade away with the Gods and UMA?

This way, that question is resolved and Apocalypse is given a fitting send-off, where we remember him as more of a hardass taskmaster than a petulant villain. This little redemption concludes his role as quest giver while also giving closure to his friendship with Juiz, fully rounding out his character and making him much more memorable than his initial role as a talking MacGuffin

Furthermore, it also provides the perfect impetus for Julia to awaken Unjustice

Rules Are Made to be Followed

I've always wondered why Unjustice was one of the first two Negators to manifest. Undead makes sense, the whole point of the game is to go on for eternity, so having someone who can be present through the whole thing makes sense, but Unjustice always seemed like an arbitrary choice beyond just being a cool character concept

I now realize though that I am a fool, and Unjustice is the perfect Negator to be present in a game all about Rules. Justice, morality, chivalry - codes of conduct, laws, rules meant to guide how the individual and society interact, to maintain order and balance. Of course the Rules that govern the world, that dictate the very definition of right and wrong, are opposed by the vessel of Unjustice, who questions that definition

While UMA Justice is one of the current enemies, he hasn't at all been established as any kind of foil or parallel to Unjustice. Apocalypse, however, is quite literally the rulebook for the Gods' game, the judge, commissioner and referee for how the quests are conducted. UMA Justice likely upholds a sense of duty and chivalry in God's favor, but Apocalypse is, despite all appearances, a neutral party. He acts indignant when Quests are completed and becomes upset when they're skipped, but so long as the rules of the game are being followed, he accepts the outcome, as that's how it's meant to be

For a God or even a Master Rule to interfere with the proceedings of the game, to prevent the players from participating, to outright say "nevermind the rules of the game," clearly goes against the very purpose of Apocalypse's being. He was trying to fulfill his purpose as he was created for, and right at the end he was told to betray that purpose under threat of death. Soul retaliation against Apocalypse was, without exaggeration, an execution for the crime of staying true to the rules. In other words...

An Unjust death

Whatever Juiz's tragedy was, whatever Julia sees in Apocalypse's memories, it's plenty clear that Julia already understands the pain that Apocalypse felt being manipulated as he was, and the injustice that his death implies. The memories she's about to see will simply give her context and understanding, but the death of a friend is the necessary tragedy to trigger Unjustice's manifestation

Even more fitting, then, that this death was the final straw in a long line of injustices

It's Not Cheating When I Do It

"You're a UMA, and you can't even follow the Rules?"

"You're going to let [Sick] escape? Why are you interfering in the Sacred Quests?!" "[Because] Undead is boring."

"I'm calling the shots here. If you won't do what I ask, I'll just make you do it."

The "Rules" have been interfering, lying and cheating from the beginning. Any opportunity they get, they find a loophole to take advantage of a situation to get what they want and leave anyone and everyone else out to dry. The "game" has only ever mattered to Apocalypse; the Negators wanted out no matter what, and the Rules wanted to win no matter what. The Negators had the excuse of being made to defy the Rules, but the Rules themselves were always secretly designed to be able to bend in whatever way they needed to justify that they're always right

With that in mind, the role of the Negators isn't to demonstrate that Rules aren't necessary, but that the Rules as they exist are fundamentally wrong. Rules and order are necessary, even Negators have to follow rules, but the purpose of Rules needs to be the maintenance of order, not the retroactive justification of means. Rules are supposed to protect the ruled, not empower the rulers

This entire series, the entire power system, is an explicit analysis, deconstruction and critique of that aspect of our society. I'm not politically minded enough to suggest that UU proposes some kind of anarchist government system, but philosophically it certainly seems to advocate for a greater balance between freedom and order (another parallel to One Piece, I might add!!!). The inclusion of Unjustice is, in and of itself, a direct refutation of the current prevailing definition of justice, one that calls not for justice as a whole to be discarded, but examined and reconstructed

I think in a way this is reflected in Juiz's narrative as well

The Times Are A-Changing

Juiz spent eons developing her specific vision of justice, but in the end it never amounted to anything in its own time. The longer she maintained that vision, the more she lost sight of it, becoming entrenched in a distorted and arguably corrupted version of it until it finally resulted in the people she thought she could trust most to see her vision through betraying her for their own, incompatible visions. The things she was willing to do to make her vision come true ran counter to the original vision's purpose, and it was only when she found a new vision in someone else that she was able to finally let go of her old ways, embrace change, and rest

Julia, a young and naive version of Juiz, represents the entrustment of Juiz's justice with Fuuko, and the faith that Fuuko's vision of justice would create the legacy that Juiz had truly strived for since the beginning. No longer carrying the weight of the world on her own and insisting that her way is best, Juiz's new, refreshed self acts to ease the burden of another and believes in visions beyond her own

In L100, Juiz's inability to see from the perspective of others caused her to misread both Victor and Billy, costing her her most valuable ally and her arm respectively. Juiz believed that Victor wanted to die and couldn't see that he wanted her to be happy; Juiz believed that Billy wanted to betray the Union and couldn't see that it pained him to make enemies of them. Ostensibly she had faith in him, hence why Billy couldn't use Unjustice, but her faith was that he was trying to save the world, not that he was still an ally, and she paid dearly for that misapprehension

Julia did not make that same mistake

Julia believed in Apocalypse's justice, in his commitment to the game and desire to make the Union strong enough to create a truly equal clash between Sun and Luna's supposed ideologies, so while the same arm that Juiz lost was damaged, Julia was otherwise unharmed, and managed to bring her "betrayer" back to his senses and her side

In other words, everything that Juiz lost because of her justice, Julia was able to retain and regain on her behalf. Thanks to Fuuko's guidance, Julia became an embodiment of Juiz's redemption, and in turn became an agent of Apocalypse's

The question now, then, is what will be the outcome of Julia's newfound vision of justice

Rules Are Made to be Broken

It's clear that the idea of Julia's awakening is to turn the tide against Sun and the Master Rules all at once with Unjustice, but is it that simple? In the past, Unjustice's effect on the Master Rules was to prompt them to self-destruct, but like I said last week, would that be satisfying?

Soul was upset with Luna's interference before, but now he's going so far as to say the game doesn't matter. Is he simply accepting the situation and trying to win with the hand he's been dealt, or is there something more going on here? Is Soul being influenced by Luna the same way that he's influencing Apocalypse?

And if that's the case, are all of the Master Rules being influenced? Do any of them want the fight to happen this way? Luck clearly wants the Union to use Remember to make things more fair, but is that because Luck thinks it would be more fun, or is it because that little bit of encouragement is the best that Luck can do to defy Luna's will?

When Unjustice fully awakens, will history repeat with the Master Rules removing themselves from the equation, or will Julia, with her fresh eyes and new take on Unjustice's definition, free the Master Rules from their unjust masters and create the aforementioned balance between freedom and order?

As things stand, it doesn't seem like Tozuka intends to delve into the individual fights between the Union and Master Rules as I initially projected. Julia's role as the new Unjustice is absolutely going to shape what happens next, for better or worse, and in my opinion, forcing a team-up would be far more interesting than just singlehandedly ending all of the other fights. This would allow us to get the moments we were hoping to see from the match-ups while both keeping things fresh and reinforcing the themes of the story

Of course, it's also possible that Soul's ability will prevent Julia from taking out everyone else at once and she'll need to focus on him alone, or she really will clear the entire battlefield save for the Gods. Either way, with such a strong chapter like this, I'm more assured than ever that Tozuka knows exactly what he's doing

If nothing else, I will always have faith in an author who cries when drawing the death of one of their characters. Oda is on record as crying at Merry and Ace's deaths, so Tozuka doing the same for Apocalypse very clearly demonstrates the love he feels for his cast and story. If that doesn't convince readers that this is the story Tozuka wants to tell, I don't know what will

Until next time, let's enjoy life!

[themissingnumbers]

(I was reading the Bulbapedia page for Bad Eggs and

Oh my god. Arbitrary Code Execution. Ace.)

[YEAH OKAY SO. THATS SOMETHING WE THINK ABOUT A LOT ACTUALLY

would you believe me if i told you that wasnt originally on purpose??? i dont remember the original reasoning other than "Ace Maple is a nice sounding name"

we've had ace around as a concept for. years now? they're OLD but have always been "pokemon processor specializing in 'anomalies.'" (fun fact anomalies originally moreso meant Pokepastas and evolved into being more about Glitches!) (this is an excuse to point at old art- the very first concept we have of ace! they've changed so much yet so little lol)

all things considered though. this coincidence has only become more and more fitting for them as they developed more. we're excited for you guys to get to know them more! ^^

we're really glad people have been enjoying the original aspects of this story, and not just the more familiar pokepasta stuff <:) we all really hope you'll continue to enjoy things like this to come!]

[transfem-juice]

So right now I'm playing pokemon emerald in japanese on my 3ds (if anyone wants a link to probably the best rom site I've ever found let me know) so that I can get to a point where I can use arbitrary code execution to give myself the required item and hidden flag to do the battleable mew event (it was only ever release in japan) and then I'll use more arbitrary code execution along with rng manipulation to find a shiny one, and I just realized how cool it would be to do it on pokemon day cause it's the anniversary of red and green but something even better than doing it and having the catch date of pokemon day 2025 would be pokemon day in 2026 which is the 30th anniversary, but unfortunately I don't know if pokemon bank will still have their servers up by then and I don't want to risk missing out on transfering it to pokemon home

Oh well, maybe I'll do it again next year or come up with something different next year like doing the 8f glitch in virtual console red and blue if bank is still online

[skyeqt]

I wrote a quine, without strings, in a calculator

Okay so I should probably clarify some things, the calculator in question (dc) is more of a "calculating tool", it is built into most linux distributions, and it is a command line tool. I should also clarify "without strings", because dc itself does support strings, and I do actually use strings, however, I do not use string literals (I'll explain that more later), and I only use strings that are 1 character long at most.

So first of all, why did I decide to do this, well, this all started when I found a neat quine for dc:

[91Pn[dx]93Pn]dx

If you're curious about how this works, and what I turned it into, it'll be under the cut, for more technical people, you can skip or skim the first text block, after that is when it gets interesting.

So first of all, what is a quine, a quine is a computer program that outputs its own source code, this is easier said than done, the major problem is one of information, the process of executing source code normally means a lot of code, for a little output, but for a quine you want the exact same amount of code and output. First of all, let's explain dc "code" itself, and then this example. Dc uses reverse polish notation, and is stack-based and arbitrary precision. Now for the nerds reading this, you already understand this, for everybody else's benefit, let's start at the beginning, reverse polish notation means what you'd write as 1+1 normally (infix notation), would instead be written as 1 1 +, this seems weird, but for computers, makes a lot of sense, you need to tell it the numbers first, and then what you want to do with them. Arbitrary precision is quite easy to explain, this means it can handle numbers as big, or as small, or with as many decimal points as you want, it will just get slower the more complex it gets, most calculators are fixed precision, have you ever done a calculation so large you get "Infinity" out the other end? That just means it can't handle a bigger number, and wants to tell you that in an easy to understand way, big number=infinity. Now as for stack based, you can think of a stack a bit pile a pile of stuff, if you take something off, you're probably taking it off the top, and if you put something on, you're probably also putting it ontop. So here you can imagine a tower of numbers, when I write 1 1 +, what I'm actually doing is throwing 1 onto the tower, twice, and then the + symbol says "hey take 2 numbers of the top, add them, and throw the result back on", and so the stack will look like: 1 then 1, 1, then during the add it has nothing, then it has a 2. I'm going to start speeding up a bit here, most of dc works this way: you have commands that deal with the stack itself, commands that do maths, and commands that do "side things". Most* of these are 1 letter long, for example, what if I want to write the 1+1 example a little differently, I could do 1d+, this puts 1 on the stack (the pile of numbers), then duplicates it, so you have two 1s now, and then adds those, simple enough. Lets move onto something a little more complex, let's multiply, what if I take 10 10 * well I get 100 on the stack, like you may expect, but this isn't output yet, we can print it with p, and sure enough we see the 100, I can print the entire stack with f, which is just 100 too for now, I can print it slightly differently with n, I'll get into that later, or I can print with P which uhhhh "d", what happened there? Well you see d is character 100 in ASCII, what exactly ASCII is, if you don't know, don't worry, just think of it as a big list of letters, with corresponding numbers. And final piece of knowledge here will be, what is a string, well it's basically just some text, like this post! Although normally a lot shorter, and without all the fancy formatting. Now with all that out of the way, how does the quine I started with actually work?

From here it's going to get more technical, if you're lost, don't worry, it will get even more technical later :). So in dc, you make a string with [text], so if we look at the example again, pasted here for your convenience

[91Pn[dx]93Pn]dx

it makes one long string at the start, this string goes onto the stack, and then gets duplicated, so it's on the stack twice, then it's executed as a macro. In technical language, this is just an eval really, in less technical language, it just means take that text, and treat it like more commands, so you may see, it starts with 91P, 91 is the ASCII character code for [, which then gets printed out, not coincidentally, this is the start of the program itself. Now the "n" that comes afterwards, as I said earlier, this is a special type of print, this means print without newline (P doesn't use newlines either), which means we can keep printing without having to worry about everything being on separate lines, now what is it printing? Well what's on top of the stack, oh look, it's the copy of the entire string, which once again not coincidentally, is the entire inside of the brackets, so now we've already printed out the majority of the program, now dx is thrown on the stack, which as you may notice is the ending of the program, but we won't print it yet, we'll first print 93 as a character, which is "]", and then print dx, and this completes the quine, the output is now exactly the same as the input. Now, I found this some time ago, and uncovered it again in my command history, it's interesting, sure, but you may notice it's not very... complicated, the majority of the program is just stored as a string, so it already has access to 90% of itself from the start, and just has to do some extra odd jobs to become a full quine, I wanted to make this worse. I started modifying it, doing some odd things, which I won't go into, I wanted to remove the numbers, replacing it entirely with calculations from numbers I already have access to, like the length of a string, this wasn't so hard, but then I hit on what this post is about "can I make this without using string literals"

Can I make this without using string literals?

Yes, I can! And it took a whole day. I'll start by explaining what a string literal is, but this will largely be the end of my explaining, from here it's about to get so technical and I don't want to spend all day explaining things and make this post even longer than it's already going to be. A string literal is basically just the [text] you saw earlier, it's making a string by just, writing out the string. In dc there's only 1 other way to make a string, the "a" command, which converts a number, into a 1 character string, using the number as an ASCII character code. Strings in dc are immutable, you can only print, execute, and move them around with the usual stack operations, you cannot concatenate, you cannot modify in any way, the only other things you can do with a string, is grab the first character, or count the characters, but as I just explained, our only way to make strings creates a 1 character string, which cannot be extended, so the first character is just, the entire thing, and the length is always 1, so neither of these are useful to us. So, now we understand what the restriction of no string literals really is (there are more knock on restrictions I'll bring up later), let's get into the meat of it, how I did it.

So I've just discussed the way I'll be outputting the text (this quine will need text, since all the outputting commands are text!), with the "a" command and the single character strings it produces, let's now figure out some more restrictions. So any programmers reading this are going to be horrified by what I'm about to say. If I remove string literals, dc is no longer Turing Complete, I am trying to write a quine in a language (subset) that is not Turing Complete, and can only output 1 character at a time**. You can't loop in dc, but you can recurse, with macros, which are effectively just evaling a string, you can recurse, since these still operate on the main stack, registers, arrays, etc, they can't be passed or return anything, but this doesn't matter. Now I cannot do this, because if I only have 1 character strings via "a" then I can't create a macro that does useful work, and executes something, since that would require more than 1 command in it. So I am limited to only linear execution***. Now lets get into the architecture of this quine, and finally address all these asterisks, since they're finally about to be relevant, I started with a lot of ideas for how I'd architect these, I call these very creatively by their command structure, dScax/dSax, rotate-based execution, all-at-once stack flipping, or the worst of them all, LdzRz1-RSax (this one is just an extension of rotate-based execution), I won't bother explaining these, since these are all failed ideas, although if anybody is really curious, I might explain some other time, for now, I'll focus on the one that worked, K1+dk: ; ;ax, or if you really want to try to shoehorn a name, Kdkax execution, now, anybody intimately familiar with dc, will probably be going "what the fuck are you doing", and rightly so, so now, let's finally address the asterisks, and get into what Kdkax execution actually means, and how I used it.

*"Most commands are 1 character long, but there are exceptions, S, L, s, l, :, ; and comparisons, only : and ; are relevant here, so I won't bother with the rest, although some of the previous architectures used S and L as you may have seen. : and ; are the array operations, there are 256 arrays in dc, each one named after a character, if I want to store into array "a" I will write :a, a 2 character sequence, same for loading from array "a" ;a, I'll get into exactly how these work later **I can only output 1 character at a time with p, P, and n, but f can output multiple characters, the only catch being it puts a newline between each element of the stack, and because I can only put 1 character into each stack element, it's a newline between each character for me (except for numbers). I'll get into what this means exactly later ***I can do non-linear execution, and in fact, it was required to make this work, but I can only do this via single character macros, which is, quite the restriction to put it lightly

So I feel like I've been dancing around it now, what does my quine actually look like, well, I wanted to keep things similar to the original, where I write a program, I store it, then I output it verbatim, with some cleanup work. However, I can't store the program as strings, or even characters, I instead need to store it as numbers, and the easiest way to do this, is to store it as the char codes for dc commands, so if I want to execute my 1d+ example from before, I instead store it as 49 100 43, which when you convert them back to characters, and then execute them in sequence, to do the same thing, except I can store them, which means I can output them again, without needing to re-create them, this will come in handy later. So, well how do I execute them, well, ax is the sequence that really matters here, and it's something all my architectures have in common, it converts them to a character, then executes them, in that order, not so hard, except, I'm not storing them anymore, well then if you're familiar with dc, you might come across my first idea, dScax, which, for reasons you will understand later, became dSax, this comes close to working, it does store the numbers in a register, and execute them, but this didn't really end up working so well. I think the next most important thing to discuss though, is how I'm outputting, as I mentioned earlier "f" will be my best friend, this outputs the entire stack, this is basically the whole reason this quine is possible, it's my only way of outputting more characters from the program, than the program itself takes up, since I can't loop or recurse, and f is the only character that outputs more than 1 stack element at once, it is my ticket to outputting more than I'm inputting, and thereby "catching up" with all the characters "wasted" on setup work. So now, as I explained earlier, f prints a newline between each stack element, and I can only create 1 character stack elements, and because in a quine the output must equal the input, this also means the input must equal the output. And because I just discovered an outputting quirk, this means my input must also match this quirk, if I want this to be a quine, so, my input is limited to 1 character, or 1 number, per line, since this is the layout my stack will take, and therefore will be the layout of my output. So what does this actually mean, I originally thought I couldn't use arrays at all, but, this isn't true, the array operations are multiple character sequences yes, but turns out, there actually are multiple characters per line, there's also a linefeed character. And since there is an array per ASCII character, I am simply going to be storing everything in "array linefeed"! So now, with all of this in mind, what does the program actually look like.

Let's take a really simple example, even simpler than earlier, let's simply store 1 and then print it, this seems simple enough, 1p does it fine, but, lets convert it to my format, and it's going to get quite long already, in order to prevent it getting even longer, I'll use spaces instead of newlines, just keep in mind, they're newlines in the actual program

112 49 0 k K 1 + d k : K 1 + d k : 0 k K 1 + d k ; K 1 + d k ; 0 k K 1 + d k ; a x K 1 + d k ; a x

now, what the fuck is going on here, first of all, I took "1p" and converted both characters into their character codes "49 112" and then flipped them backwards (dw about it), then, I run them through the Kdkax architecture. What happens is I initialise the decimal points of precision to 0, then, I increment it, put it back, but keep a copy, and then run the array store, keep in mind, this is storing in array linefeed, but what and where is it storing? Its index is the copy of the decimal points of precision I just made, and the data it's storing at that index, is whatever comes before that on the stack, which, not coincidentally, is 49, the character code for the digit "1", then I do the same process again, but this time, the decimal points of precision is 1, not 0, and the stack is 1 shorter. So now, I store 112 (the character code for p), in index 2 of array linefeed, now you may notice, the array is looking the exact same as the original program I wanted to run, but, in character code form, it is effectively storing "1p", but as numbers in an array, instead of characters in a string. I then reset the precision with 0k, and start again, this time with the load command, which loads everything back out, except, now flipped, the stack originally read 49 112, since that's the order I put them on, the top is 49, the last thing I put on, but after putting them into the array, and taking them back out, now I'm putting on 112 last instead, so now the stack reads 112 49, which happens to be the exact start of the code, this will be important later. For now, the important part is, the numbers are still in the array, taking them out just makes a copy, so, this time I take them out again, but rather than just storing them, I convert them to a character, and then execute them, 49 -> 1 -> 1 on the stack, 112 -> p -> print the stack, and I get 1 printed out with the final x. Now this may not seem very significant, but this is how everything is going to be done from here on out.

So, what do I do next? Well now's time to start on the quine itself, you may have noticed in the last example, I mentioned how at one point, the stack exactly resembles the program itself, or at least the start of it, this is hopefully suspicious to you, so now you may wonder, what if my program starts with "f" to print out the entire stack? Well, I get all the numbers back, i.e. I get the start of the file printed out, and this will happen, no matter how many numbers (commands) I include, now we're getting somewhere, so if I write fc at the start of my program (converted into character codes and then newline separated) then I include enough copies of the whole Kdkax stuff to actually store, load, and execute it, then I can execute whatever I want, and I'll get back everything except the Kdkax stuff itself, awesome! So now we come onto, how do I get back the "Kdkax stuff", and more importantly, what are my limitations executing things like this, can I just do anything?

Well, put simply, no, I cannot use multicharacter sequences, and I actually can't this time, because it's being executed as a single character macro, I don't have a newline to save me, and I just get an error back, so okay that's disappointing. This multicharacter sequence rule means I also can't input numbers bigger than 1 digit, because remember, the numbers get converted into characters and then executed, and luckily, executing a number, just means throwing it on the stack, so I'm good for single digit numbers. Then in terms of math (I know, this is a post about a calculator and only now is the maths starting), I can't do anything that produces decimals, since the digits of precision is constantly being toyed with, and I also can't use the digits of precision as a storage method either, because it's in use. I can actually use the main stack though! It's thankfully left untouched (through a lot of effort), so I'm fine on that front. Other multicharacter sequences include negative numbers, strings (so I can't cheese it, even here), and conditionals.

So it was somewhere around here, I started to rely on a python script I wrote for some of the earlier testing, and I modified it to this new Kdkax architecture when I was confident this was the way forwards. It converts each character into a character code, throws that at the start, and then throws as many copies of the store, load, and execute logic as I need to execute the entire thing afterwards. This allows me to input (mostly) normal dc into the input, just keeping in mind that any multicharacter sequences will be split up. So now I can start really going, and I'll speed up from here, effectively, what I need to do, is write a dc program, that can output "0 k", then "K 1 + d k :" repeated as many times as there are characters in my program, then "0 k" again, then "K 1 + d k ;" repeated just as many times, then "0 k" again, then "K 1 + d k ; a x" also repeated just as many times, without using strings, multicharacter sequences, loops, branches, recursion, any non-integer maths, with a newline instead of a space in every sequence above. Doable. The program starts with fc, like I mentioned, this prints out all the numbers at the start, and leaves us with a clean stack, I'll explain in detail how I output the "0 k" at the start, and leave the rest as an exercise to to the reader. I want to do this by printing the entire stack, so I want to put it on backwards, k first, k is character code 107 in decimal, and I can't input this directly, because I can't do anything other than single digit numbers, so maths it is, here I abuse the O command, which loads the output base, which is 10 by default, and I then write "OO*7+a", which is effectively character((10*10)+7) written in a more normal syntax, this creates "k" on the stack, and then I can move onto 0, for which I write "0", since a number just puts itself on the stack, no need to create it via a character code, I can just throw it on there, keep in mind this will all get converted to 79 79 42 55 43 97 48, but the python script handles this for me, and I don't need to think about it. The stack now reads "0 k" and I can output this with f, and clear the stack, I then do the same deal for "K 1 + d k :", the next "0 k", "K 1 + d k ;" but here I do something a little different, because I want to output "K 1 + d k ; a x" next (after the "0 k" again), I don't clear the stack after outputting "K 1 + d k ;", and instead, I put "a x" on the stack, and then use the rotate stack commands to "slot it into place" at the end, this is a neat trick that saves some extra effort, it makes printing the "0 k" in between more difficult, but I won't get into that. For now the important part, is the output of my program now looks something like this "(copy of input numbers) 0 k K 1 + d k : 0 k K 1 + d k ; 0 k K 1 + d k ; a x" this is amazing, this would be the correct output, if my program was only 1 character long at this point, now keep in mind I'm writing non-chronologically, so my program never actually looked like this, but if you're following along at home you should have this at this point:

fcOO*7+a0fcaO5*8+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**afcOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**af0nOanOO*7+anOanOO*2O*+aOO*3-a08-R08-Rf

definitely longer than 1 character, you might think at this point, it's just a matter of spamming "f" until you get there, but unfortunately, you'll never get there, every extra "f" you add, requires an extra copy of the store, load, execute block in the program, so you're outpaced 3 to 1, so what do you do about this? You print 4 at once! I want the stack to look like "K 1 + d k : K 1 + d k : K 1 + d k : K 1 + d k :" and similarly for the other steps, and then I can spam f with greater efficiency! This was somewhat trivial for the first 2, but for the ax, because I'm using the rotate to push it at the end, I need to do this 4 times too, with different rotate widths, not too hard. And now, I can finally get there, but how many times do I spam f? Until my program is exactly 3/4s printing on repeat, which makes sense if you think about it, and below, is finally the program I ended up with

fcOO*7+a0fcO5*8+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**aO5*8+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**aO5*8+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**aO5*8+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**affffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffcOO7+a0fcO5*9+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**aO5*9+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**aO5*9+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**aO5*9+aOO*7+aOO*aO4*3+aO4*9+a355**affffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff0nOanOO*7+anOanOO*2O*+aOO*3-a08-R08-ROO*2O*+aOO*3-a082-R082-ROO*2O*+aOO*3-a083-R083-ROO*2O*+aOO*3-a084-R084*-Rffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

I say finally, but this is actually pre-python script! The final program I actually ended up with will instead be included in a reblog, because it really needs its own cut. But anyway, this was how I wrote a quine, for a calculator, without using string literals.

[antheraea]

Flash Was Killed Because It Was Objectively Dangerous

I get it, I get the Flash nostalgia and the fondness for old Flash games. I was big on Neopets before they decided to ruin the art and make all the pets samey paper dolls to play dressup with (completely ruining the point of the far more expensive "redraw" colors like Mutant and Faerie and Desert). I have fond memories of Newgrounds games and I even managed to take a class for a semester in high school where I could learn flash.

But I also remember how terrible it was. And you should too.

Leaving aside all of the issues involving performance and inaccessibility (such as being easily broken by bog-standard browser actions like the back button, and its ability to modify web code AND OS code in real time likely broke a lot of accessibility tech too), Flash was legitimately one of the most dangerous web technologies for the end user. An end-user is you, or more specifically back then, child-you.

According to Wikipedia and its sources, Flash Player has over a thousand vulnerabilities known and listed and over 800 of these lead to arbitrary code execution.

What is arbitrary code execution? That's when someone can just run any commands they want on a machine or program that didn't intend it. A fun way to see this is in this infamous Pokemon tool-assisted speedrun where they manage to get an SNES to show the host's twitch chat in real time. It's not so fun though when it's someone stealing all the files on your computer, grabbing your credentials so they could clean out your Neopets account (yes, really, it was a pretty common concern at the time), and other nefarious works. Also, there was a time where it allowed people to spy on you with your webcam and microphone.

Oh and on top of all of this, Flash had its own "flash cookies", which could not be cleared by ordinary means and thus could be used to track users indefinitely, at least until Adobe slapped a bandaid over it by introducing yet another screen an ordinary person wouldn't know to use. (I assume this is how the infamous neopets "cookie grabbers" worked, so they could get into your account. This is mainly what I remember about using Flash back in the early 2000s lol) So it not only was a "stranger taking over your machine" concern, but a bog-standard privacy concern too, arguably a precursor to our current panopticon internet landscape, where greedy websites would track you because they could and maybe get some money out of it, facilitated by this technology.

When Apple decided to block it, it wasn't out of greed; Steve Jobs cited its abysmal performance and security record, among other issues such as an inherent lack of touchscreen support, and Apple cited specific vulnerability use-cases when blocking specific versions before they nuked it entirely. When Mozilla, who makes Firefox, decided to block it, it's not like they would've gotten money out of doing so, or by offering an alternative; they did so because it is fucking dangerous.

Your ire and nostalgia is misplaced. Flash was not killed by our current shitty web practices that ruin unique spaces and fun games. Flash was killed because both Macromedia (its original developers) and Adobe were incapable of making it safe, if that was even possible, and it was killed after third-parties, in an unprecedented gesture, collectively threw their hands up and said enough.

Well, that and HTML5 being developed and becoming more widespread, being able to do everything Flash can do without being a pox on technology. One could argue that you should bemoan the lack of Flash-to-HTML5 conversion efforts, but that requires asking a lot of effort of people who would have to do that shit for free...and if they have to run Flash to do so, opening themselves up to some of the nastiest exploits on the internet.

Nostalgia is a fucking liar. The games themselves I think are worth having nostalgia over (look, I still find myself pining for that one bullet hell Neopets made and Hannah and the Pirate Caves), but Flash itself deserves none of that, and absolutely deserved to be put in the fucking ground. You're blaming the wrong causes. It was terrible.

(specifics and sources found via its wikipedia page, which has a lot more than is mentioned here. and also my own opinions and experiences back then. lol)

[canmom]

since I've been talking about FFXIV modding, lately, a caveat on risks.

you may have heard about an infamous event in ffxiv modding where the author of GShade, a widely popular ReShade fork, got pissy about people forking their code and decided to demonstrate the risks of installing untrusted code on your computer... by pushing an update that makes GShade automatically shut down users' computers. basically torching their own mod and ejecting themselves from the mod community to make a point.

the impact on the modding scene was ultimately minor. almost all GShade shaders could be ported straight back to ReShade (the main thing that GShade added was support for reading the depth buffer, which can be turned on in ReShade). but it does illustrate that a mod scene, is, well, literally downloading code by strangers on the internet and running it, with all the dangers that entails.

one thing I like a lot about the FFXIV mod scene is that a whole lot of the development is open source - indeed, a ton of the infrastructure for distributing mods is straight up built on GitHub. the level of technical knowledge is some of the highest I've seen in a mod scene. this doesn't rule out attacks! simply being open source doesn't mean the level of code scrutiny that you would get in a high-profile open source project, with many mods being the work of a solo dev or a tiny team of very passionate nerds. it would not be difficult for a mod author to do what the author of GShade did, and push an update with an attack. but it is at least a check, and a general incentive to cooperate.

the risks are increased further by mods like Mare Synchronos which allow other people to give you a list of mods to download. Mare Synchronos does not allow arbitrary code execution, it is limited to replacing game assets and certain specific tricks like skeleton modification, but the attack surface is still present - if there's any problem in the way the asset replacer mods modify the game's memory at runtime, I'm sure it would be easy to break out and take full control of the game process.

from there, you're still limited by the privileges of the user account - FFXIV does not run as administrator. but there's still considerable scope for shenanigans.

for this reason it's kind of surprising to me that some mod authors do not publish source code. e.g. for PuppetMaster and MidiBard, a combo which is widely used by in-game performers, the github repo is literally just metadata and binaries. like, guys. it's in everyone's interest to be able to know exactly what the code is doing; if you refuse to show the source that is immediately sus. but when i started talking to modders in the scene to ask for some advice on getting started on my pie in the sky animation mod project, I was warned that people can be quite protective over the tricks they've learned, and to back up any resources I use in case they disappear at random. (be assured I am going to devlog this project in great detail like I always do lol.)

I can't really tell you where to set your acceptable risk level. for me, since everything is backed up locally and remotely, and my sensitive data is encrypted, I figure the outside risk of attacks is worth it for the chance to see peoples' custom character designs and add another layer to the game. I think the risks are considerably less than, say, downloading cracked games. but it is an attack surface you are exposing so you gotta make that call! don't go in unaware of it.

[purenguyening]

Since it’s father’s day, some assorted thoughts on Norman most of it is based on Emerald’s interpretation but I do touch a bit on Ruby/Sapphire and Pokemon Masters EX:

(Warning, this is very unorganized and I’m just writing whatever pops into my head)

Norman has two kids, Whitney and Brendan.

When they were living in Johto, Norman was a super stern father. To the point when both Whitney and Brendan asked to dye their hair he said no.

Whitney waits for her family to move to Hoenn to dye her hair

Brendan learns to knit and makes his iconic hat. He made it while in the back of the moving truck and used his Advance SP as light.

After moving to Hoenn he wanted to loosen up and because he felt like he was too hard on them (I think there was some period of time where he moved to Hoenn first just so he could get acquainted with the Hoenn Pokemon and properly become a Hoenn gym leader there)

He taught Whitney how to catch her first Pokemon outside of Olivine.

He wanted to teach Brendan how to catch his first Pokemon, too but decided to teach Wally how to catch his first pokemon as warm up (This was promptly ruined the moment Brendan showed up to Petalburg gym with his starter and at least one Pokemon) Hence why Norman says “Oh. I see, you’re with your Pokemon”)

Norman then gets the brilliant on the spot idea to get Brendan to teach Wally how to catch Pokemon because he believed in his abilities (and also because he thinks it’s a great opportunity for Brendan to make his first friend not knowing that technically Brendan’s first friend was May)

After Brendan beats him and wins his Balance Badge he tries to come up with a way to schedule time so they can eat a meal together.

After you beat him in Emerald he talks about how the player should go home and visit their mother (a hint to the player the mother will give you the Amulet Coin)

If you call your mother in Emerald after you beat your dad she mentions Norman only ever comes home to eat and then goes back to the gym and jokes that he took losing to you very hard

Conclusion: Norman is trying to ask in a very roundabout way to ask his son to eat a meal with them as a family.

I have also thought Norman set aside the Amulet Coin to give to his son as a congratulations for beating him.

This is even better in Pokemon Masters EX where Norman asks the playing character if there’s a good place that young people like to eat: "Do you know of any good restaurants that are popular with young people on Pasio? I was thinking I'd like to take my son out the next time we have a day off!"

(Brendan may or may not have already eaten with Latios:  "Latios has the ability to make people see images of what it has seen or imagines in its head. But my Latios is actually kinda shy. Earlier he was acting so fidgety, I was wondering what was up... And it turned out he just wanted to tell me he was hungry! Isn't that cute?")

(My favorite running gag is to constantly have his plans “foiled” by outside forces, hang in there Norman....)

Norman sometimes tries to bond with his son by giving him rare berries he finds on his walk (in Ruby/Sapphire when you scanned in the E-Reader berries you go to Norman to pick them up).

Similarly when you scanned in the Eon Ticket the only message that is played when you load up the game is just the game saying “Go see your father.”

When you use Arbitrary Code Execution to activate the Eon Ticket event, you just go get the ticket from the Lilycove Department store, one way to read this is that Norman won the lottery and his decides to give the ticket to his kid

In general Norman always frets about his kids but learns to give them room to grow and is just overall doing his best

(He even mentions this in Emerald if you call him after you get your 2nd badge: "Hm… Little by little, but also very surely, you're getting tougher, <player>. The stronger you get, the farther and higher you soar from Mother and me… This feeling is hard to explain." )

To some extent, I think the reason he doesn’t accept Brendan’s challenge right away is because he knew his team would be hard to beat for a rookie. Losing can be pretty discouraging, so I think he wanted Brendan to develop a stronger sense of confidence and gain more experience before accepting his challenge.

Even though badges 2-4 can technically be done in any order, I do think it makes sense narratively for Flannery to be the last gym leader to fight before Norman.

When you first arrive at the Petalburg Gym Norman says this: Hmm… Then I guess you're going to become a Trainer like me, <player>. That's great news! I'll be looking forward to it! , which I can imagine Brendan reading as he’s expected to eventually hone his skills and become a gym leader (even though that’s not what he actually said) Coupled with a personal HC that Whitney is his older sister, it adds an extra layer of pressure to follow the “family tradition”. 

Added to that in the original RSE designs, Brendan’s sprite shows his sideburns that are of similar color to Norman’s hair, meaning it’s possible Brendan was design to look a lot like Norman (And why I HC Brendan made that hat and wanted to dye his hair, he wanted to create an image of himself that was for him)

After you beat Flannery she says this: "Oh... I guess I was trying too hard... I... I've only recently become a Gym Leader. I tried too hard to be someone I'm not. I have to do things my natural way. If I don't, my Pokémon will be confused. Thanks for teaching me that. For that, you deserve this." and apparently after you talk to her again: she says this:  "Your power reminds me of someone... Oh! I know! You battle like Norman, the Gym Leader of Petalburg." 

I think this always sets up to the core part of Brendan’s early journey about struggling to be himself and while getting comments comparing him to his father (I say this but the only other time it’s mentioned is Birch mentioning that the playing character is a chip off the old shoulder kind of comment)

This is also why I really think Brendan’s hat is important to his character design and why I think Brendan was always designed with the intent on being Norman’s son (even though throughout this entire post I’ve been sort of using Brendan/the playing character almost interchangeably)

Overall, if you made it to the end, I don’t think Norman is a bad father, but I think he was unprepared for fatherhood and was trying to figure it out as he went. Also I guess, the post got derailed at some point and started to talk a little too much about personal interpretations of Brendan, but I think they were important to explain Norman’s effect on Brendan, specifically.

Edit: I forgot to include it but if you do have a Pixiv account please like and bookmark [this work]. There’s a lot of cute works where Norman is just being a dork with Brendan and May and his junior trainers and made me appreciate Norman a lot more.

[4denthusiast]

The implication in the comment isn't correct. Consider the following game:

Player 1 picks a nondeterministic Turing machine

Player 2 picks an execution of that Turing machine

If it terminates with an empty tape, player 1 wins. If it terminates with a non-empty tape, player 2 wins. (If the Turing machine doesn't terminate, then neither does the game.)

This is obviously Turing complete, but there's also an obvious winning strategy of just picking a machine that immediately halts.

There's maybe a related but correct statement, but I'm not quite sure what it would be. I don't think it even implies that a brute-force algorithm to find a winning strategy wouldn't work, since the algorithm only needs to find a single winning solution, not all possible games, so it could just interleave the execution of possibly non-terminating states until one of them wins.

I guess this could fail if, as part of all winning strategies, the opponent of the ultimate winner is able to force the execution of an arbitrary Turing machine along the way, but in that case they could force the execution of a non-terminating TM, and thus avoid losing. (I'm assuming that if the game reaches a non-terminating state, that means neither player can win, so it counts as a draw. I don't know what the actual rule is.)

I guess it implies that checking whether there's a winning strategy from an arbitrary state is uncomputable at least.

Also, in a paper I found on the topic, they conjecture that it isn't even computable to determine what counts as a legal move (Conjecture 2), in which case you kind of can't even enter the game into an algorithm for finding a winning strategy in the first place.

I had assumed that the "running DOOM" thing would leave you tediously executing DOOM by hand, but the paper points out that you're allowed to use arbitrary shortcuts in MTG games, which implies that if you beat your opponent enough to be able to basically do what you like, choose to tediously set up a bootloader of some sort with your Magic cards, convince your opponent that the card-based computer you've set up is equivalent to a silicon computer you have handy, enter the DOOM code into it, then run that, it would count as a valid way game of Magic The Gathering. If you have your opponent playing DOOM though, they'd still have the right to slow it down to make it easier. To avoid the issue of relying on timing like DOOM, you could turn your Magic game into a non-real time game instead, like chess. Or recurse, and run Magic in Magic. (Technically an actual Turing machine, like the one they describe, accepts all its inputs at the start rather than as it runs, but I assume that's fixable.)

why is chess the Big Boy Smart Brain game?? there’s been no advances in strategy for 70 years. you can sit down and teach yourself the five winning moves in like a day. show me a computer that can flawlessly win any game of MTG and then ill be impressed.

[starseedfxofficial]

The Hidden Code: Mastering the "Square of 9" for GBPNZD Precision Trading Cracking the "Square of 9" Code: The Secret Weapon You Didn’t Know You Needed Picture this: You’re staring at your charts, trying to make sense of the madness. The market moves, but it feels like a chaotic mess—until you realize that price isn’t random. It’s all part of a hidden mathematical blueprint. Enter the Square of 9—a tool so powerful that it’s practically the cheat code of professional trading. And if you’re trading GBPNZD, a volatile yet rewarding currency pair, understanding the Square of 9 could mean the difference between catching a perfect entry or watching your trade sink faster than a leaky ship. But first—what exactly is the Square of 9, and how can it reveal the hidden turning points of GBPNZD? Let’s break it down. What Is the "Square of 9"? (And Why Is It So Powerful?) The Square of 9 is a geometric-based price/time forecasting tool developed by legendary trader W.D. Gann. While most traders are fixated on RSI and moving averages, Gann believed that market movements are influenced by natural laws and mathematical cycles. He built the Square of 9 to identify key support, resistance, and reversal levels with insane precision. At its core, the Square of 9 is a spiral of numbers where each value corresponds to a degree-based relationship. Certain angles act as support/resistance zones, and when price aligns with these angles—BAM! Market reversals tend to happen. Key Components of the Square of 9: - The 0° (Cardinal Points): Major turning points in price. - The 45° Angles: Minor, but reliable support/resistance levels. - Time & Price Harmony: When price and time synchronize at key Square of 9 levels, expect significant moves. Sounds complicated? Don’t worry. I’ll break it down with real-world GBPNZD examples. Applying the Square of 9 to GBPNZD: The "Magic Numbers" That Matter Step 1: Identifying Key Price Levels Let’s say GBPNZD is currently trading at 1.9750. Using the Square of 9, we project critical price levels based on its unique number sequence: - 1.9900 (Strong Resistance - 180°) - 1.9650 (Major Support - 90°) - 1.9800 (Pivot Zone - 135°) If price approaches these levels, expect a reaction. And here’s the kicker—most traders are blind to these zones. They’re looking at arbitrary Fibonacci retracements while you’re trading based on an advanced price-time formula. Step 2: Timing Entries With Precision Price alone isn’t enough. The real magic happens when time aligns with price. For example, if GBPNZD is hovering around 1.9650, but the Square of 9 also shows that we’re at a key time cycle (e.g., a 144-day cycle), it’s a strong signal that a major reversal is brewing. Why Most Traders Get It Wrong (And How You Can Avoid It) Myth #1: "Markets Are Random" Wrong! The market follows natural laws and geometric cycles. If you think it’s random, you’re missing the bigger picture. Myth #2: "Indicators Are Enough" Indicators are lagging. The Square of 9, on the other hand, forecasts where price is likely to react before it happens. Wouldn’t you rather be ahead of the game? Myth #3: "Only Experts Can Use This" You don’t need a PhD in mathematics to use the Square of 9. With a little practice, you can start spotting precise price reversals like a pro. How to Predict GBPNZD Moves With Pinpoint Accuracy 1. Look for Key Price Levels on the Square of 9 Use the Square of 9 to map out critical price targets. 2. Time Your Entries Using Gann’s Cycles Combine price and time for deadly-accurate trades. 3. Confirm With Market Structure Look for additional confluence with support/resistance zones and price action patterns. 4. Enter With Confidence, Manage Risk Wisely Once your entry aligns, execute the trade with a well-defined stop loss and target. Final Thoughts: Unlock the Next-Level Strategy That Most Traders Overlook If you’re trading GBPNZD without factoring in the Square of 9, you’re leaving money on the table. Most traders focus on outdated methods, while the pros are quietly using price/time geometry to make precise moves. Want to take your trading further? Check out these advanced resources: - Get Exclusive Forex News & Market Insights - Master Advanced Forex Strategies - Join Our Elite Trading Community This isn’t just another trading theory—it’s a game-changer. The question is: will you take advantage of it before the rest of the market catches on? —————– Image Credits: Cover image at the top is AI-generated Read the full article