i dont understand half of the words here but god if this isn’t the funniest thing i’ve ever read
im pretty sure red and blue weren’t programmed but just sort of… mutated into cartridges
Red and blue are why QA teams were invented
for fuck’s sake they weren’t badly programmed. They were bleeding edge. It’s so easy to forget that but Red and Blue were literally pushing the limits of what they could fit on the cartridge.
They used every trick in the book. In that way, the programming behind them is GENIUS. It’s frankly a lost art, in this era where hardware is insanely cheap and scalable, when you can just keep throwing more resources at the problem. But Red & Blue were when programmers had to get creative. Not currently using a piece of memory? Repurpose it, we can’t just leave it lying around. Only have a couple registers? Juggle them, keep careful track so we can restore them when we needed. Does this data need to be single purpose, or can we also use it for, say, a seed value?
And all this WORKED. I guarantee you 99% of children playing this never saw a bug in casual play. MODERN games are buggier by a landslide. Remember when X&Y came out and there was an ENTIRE CITY you couldn’t save in because it’d DELETE YOUR SAVE? Imagine that happening in the days of Red&Blue. It couldn’t have. I can turn on my red cartridge TODAY and have it work. And the bugs that did exist, those edge cases they missed? They produce this behavior because the game REFUSES TO CRASH. Sure, you can make it crash if you try hard enough, but goddamn it’s resilient. It just plugs away with garbage data in memory for as long as possible.
Y’all looking down from your 64-bit quad-core smartphones with 128GB SD cards like Red & Blue were programmed by amateurs. What, you also going to bitch that the Wright Brothers didn’t make a jet engine? These are artifacts from pioneers who wrote the goddamn book that others would use as gospel.
Sincerely, a pissed off goddamn programmer.
The Game Boy has 8 kilobytes of RAM. Most of the icons on this site could not fit into the working memory of a Game Boy intact.
Oh, I really am sorry about this. I am afraid that it is working as intended. My tumblr is set so that it’s only viewable for people who are logged into tumblr, a privacy setting I maintain on purpose. Tumblr in its infinite wisdom has intepreted this as meaning that my entire tumblr can only be viewed on your own dash. Side effects include:
My blog can only be viewed on your dash.
I cannot do “readmore” links (i.e. those links that shorten a reblogged post, or a post on your dash, that you can click through to see the full post on the user’s tumblr.) If I do a readmore cut, it will create an Infinite Loop and you (the reader) cannot see anything behind the cut.
My blog has no theme.
I can’t have an “about me” or other additional informational pages.
My tags usually don’t work on desktop (although they work on mobile.)
You can’t easily link to my posts.
Statcounter and other useful tools find it all very upsetting.
If you try to link a friend to elodieunderglass.tumblr.com/hereisacoolpostElodiedid then it does nothing! nothing happens.
You can’t see dates indicating when I posted anything.
There is no archive.
You can’t search.
You can’t do truly “anon” asks, as you have to be logged into a tumblr account to ask me something, and must be careful to press the “anon” button.
It is Invisible to the Googles.
Everything is transient, impermanent and unhelpful.
Reading this blog is cryptic and confusing and an ultimately futile experience, rather like trying to seriously and meaningfully discuss the impact of the Dow fluctuations with a distracted fairy who doesn’t like you very much.
This is all working exactly as intended. Well, most of it.
@elodieunderglass The mobile app also makes it possible to search blogs like yours, and I think readmore links work there, too.
“But why,” you ask, “would they implement these features in the mobile app but not in the main website?”
“Why,” you exclaim more urgently, “can they not simply have the webpage check if you’re logged in, instead of redirecting you to the dashboard view? What makes this so difficult that they would destroy so much blog functionality just to avoid it!?”
“WHY,” you demand of the heavens, arms raised in futile supplication, “didn’t they just MAKE their MOBILE APP a thin WRAPPER around their WEBSITE and then add FUNCTIONALITY to their WEBSITE, the CENTER of their ENTIRE BUSINESS!!??!?!?”
“WHY,” you sob between spasms of grief as the sky darkens and you fall to the floor, “CAN’T THEY COUNT NOTES PROPERLY??? WHY CAN’T I SUBMIT AN ASK WITH THREE PERIODS IN A ROW UNLESS THERE’S A SPACE ON ONE SIDE??? WHY DOES HITTING “UNDO” WHEN RESPONDING TO A REPLY RUIN THE FORMATTING???WHY! CAN’T! I! JUST! READ! MY! FRIEND’S! BLOG! NORMALLY! ON! A! NORMAL! WEBSITE! LIKE! A! NORMAL! FUCKING! PERSON?!?!?!”
As you lie slumped in defeat before the twisted, melted remains of your computer, the inky smoke seeps into your very bones, and you begin collapse inwards, your fragile form crumbling into lifeless clay.
As the forests wither and the oceans boil, you muster your last reserves of strength and substance and lift the dust that was once your arm, reaching hopelessly towards the blue dashboard in the distance.
As the final shreds of your earthly body dissipate and your soul, no longer tethered to this world, is pulled into the vast black maw of the Abyss, the roaring inferno drowns out your last faint supplication: “Can’t we just have a functional website?”
And in the heart of the Abyss, Tumblr looks down on you, and whispers “No.”
i want more fantasy stories where wizards are treated in that culture the way hackers are treated in ours. like ‘and then the wizard spelled the door open. he spelled the guards to be on the good side. he spelled all the food to be poison. he spelled the mayor to give everyone a medal. he spelled his friends to be invisible. he spelled all the swords to explode.’ and anyone who’s actually done any spellwork ever is just sitting there quietly frustrated like magic doesn’t fucking work like that, it’s 90% fussing with numbers alone in your room and 10% lying to people.
blackash26 