The bomb ticks down: 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 4, 3 – then pauses for a painful second, and flicks back to 500 to start all over again.
"The King of All Reality is so overwhelmed by the burden of his office, he takes a vacation every day. We're powerless to stop him."
Another hard battle with the toothpaste golems… Your comrades must look away… Froth soaks your chainmail… Your teeth are shining…
The only skin on the vast beast is the red pit of a healed wound. You nuzzle it between its scales, and feel its warmth for the first time.
You peel back the bedsheets, only to find your body turned to sweat in the night, and now you are your bedsheets. You hope you'll dry soon.
You glumly prepare for your looming mana-battle by vacuuming your apartment, then picking out grains of loose mana from the dustbag.
Pokémon gym that loses its league accreditation mere moments after you defeat the leader, thus making your hard-earned badge null and void.
Pokémon gym where you have to help one of the gym trainers depose the current leader, so you can easily get the badge from them instead.
"Don't worry, folks! We get one contestant a year who's so stumped by the decision to come back next week that they tear clean in half."
The witch's name is Myrna Malice🙍 De Miscreante. That's you. She trapped you in her name. You're free if your pals can pronounce your body.
Shipments of neutron star matter are hoped to end the gravity drought, and turn tied-down houses and suction-cup boots into foggy memories.
The operation silently fails - save for a tiny, unbidden whimper.
"The six Destruction Crystals were made only for peaceful purposes… Humanity prospered, until the unthinkable happened…"
"Remember, young one… believing in yourself isn't enough… You also have to believe that believing in yourself is enough!!"
Alas, you're so badly outclassed that the entire battle consists of the monster slipping you in their mouth and pulling out a skeleton.
The customer wants you to curse your former friend into a goanna. You want to refuse, but in this economy… "Haha! It'll be a pleasure, sir!"
Fictional characters checking if the current situation is canon by pinching themselves and opening books to see if the print's legible.
Not realising your picture was being taken, your limit break character portrait is of you bravely dropping your spellbook on your foot.
The chivalrous knights each raise their morning-stars, then pause to draw each spike from its own tiny scabbard.
The "Blue Smudge", the first photo of Swamp 2 from space, became a celebrated icon despite mostly depicting the astronaut's flailing arm.
Not Super Mario World's little-liked Atari port.
At the end of a grand and arduous journey, you ignomiously get your tongue stuck to the ice of a frozen Fountain of Youth.
"When the portal was opened, demon soldiers poured forth, annexed the barracks, and dibbsed all the top bunks. Snore levels are critical."
This change hasn't yet propagated down to either Chrome or Firefox's let implementation, though.
Update on this: the ES6 spec was recently changed so that the first example should in future work "correctly" now (https://github.com/rwaldron/tc39-notes/blob/master/es6/2013-11/nov-20.md#for-let).
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/PokemonYellow-CaptureTutorial.gif - Also, this added scene teaches the capture mechanic earlier, and much more beautifully seamless with the plot.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/87035724917/pokemon-yellow-version - Recently, I was surprised how much better this scene establishes character than the corresponding Red/Blue scene.
The superhero trio of the future. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=13595879)
Your tiny robot wrongly estimated you were size XXXXXL when ordering surprise clothes, and is sobbing under vast packages when you get home.
"Newborns have so much data to mine," says the NurseBot, "they're big warm data piles!" You know their passion for data makes them the best…
While you're away, your tiny robot tries to TED-talk a friend into existence, mistakenly believing that's how all technology is created.
The priestess blow-dries the blood out of the eldritch tome after having neglected to move it off the altar before performing the sacrifice.
https://twitter.com/VietnamCrystal/status/470025235962417153 - Oddly touching, awe-struck videogame dialogue.
"A timid species cursed with a fear of heights and the dark, their warships stumbled on Earth after soaring wildly with their eyes shut."
Presenting the typof keyword:
Objct typof Object
>true
document.getElementByID typof document.getElementById
>true
null typof Object
>sure
The giant spider offers to spin you new armour. You refuse, but smile as if to say "I just reloaded from that death ending and it was cute."
Skin-mite conspiracists suspect some kind of "megalo-mite" deep under your scalp is secretly piloting your entire body via sub-dermal wires.
Hey! The game Micomonocon should look like this: http://www.raquelmeyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/micomonocon_intro_anim.gif but on my computer it looks like this:
"No animal laid these eggs. We find em on the mountain. Some say it's the mountain itself trying in vain to sire a child" says the waitress.
"Your computer is currently turned off," reads the dialog box. "Click here to fix this problem."
You move the cursor over, then reconsider.
Birds can see syntax highlighting in ultraviolet, revealing code structures far more complex than humans can hope to perceive.
"Hold still. The pick should strike a fissure that will make you explode into kittens, but if you move, you WILL explode into fruit bats."
In her lair: life-size statues of you, depicting the moments of your past defeats. You step onto the empty pedestal at the end. As expected.
"Knowing only the strong techniques is a mistake – true power comes from mastering the weak, feeble moves!!"
*loses tournament immediately*
"Everyone stand back!" cries a muscular figure, approaching the jammed door. "OK, now everyone rush forward and ram it" they say, departing.
You'll never talk! Your mouth bravely swallows itself, leaving your lower face bare. You feel smug, until the taste of stomach acid hits you
"At midnight during the Full Hell Moon, all demons triple in strength. They usually use it to rearrange furniture or do a lot of yard work."
What would this mean for human society
What if graphic horror films explored their unstated premise that human flesh and bone actually has the firmness of slightly cold butter
(The second-placers are "Mega Fire Pig Pokémon" and "Stone Home Pokémon".)
Unrelated: I went through all the species names on http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Species and can indeed confirm that the best one is "Ogre Darner Pokémon".
Or, Slakoth into Vigoroth - who then evolves *back* into the sluggish Slaking.
And, of course, the renowned Magikarp and Feebas lines.
The Pokémon evolutions I find most interesting are ones where they evolve into their thematic opposites. For instance, Whismur into Loudred.
The door scanner finds you clean of naughty thoughts. But you have a second brain hidden in your butt that thinks only of utmost wickedness!
"I'm not tiny. I'm," she squeaks, puffing out her three-centimetre chest, "succinct!"
One thing I sorta like about Pokémon equating trainers and mons is that it produces dialog like "These Kimono Girls are obscenely strong."
Speaking of D.I.Y., a reminder that I posted these microgame screenshots back in the day:
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=29443
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=33593
Since you probably don't have a means of doing that, just watch the included GIF on that page to get the full gist of the microgame.
Sadly I can only provide it as a .mio file, which you can play by loading it in a flashcart or emulator's DIY save file with certain tools.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/7217 - This is a WarioWare D.I.Y. microgame I made in 2011, my sole opus in that game development program.
What if she named it Garchompfield
Why does Cynthia have a Garchomp? What does this particular Garchomp mean to her? What sort of pride does she take in it?
Take, say, Cynthia's Garchomp. We know who Cynthia is, but her Garchomp, the thing you actually fight in-game, is anonymous, "her Garchomp".
The gym leaders and masters have distinct identities, but their mons seldom feel like unique individuals, reflections of their trainers.
I feel like one big lost opportunity for NPC character development in Pokémon is that none of the opponent trainers' mons have nicknames.
"I quit! SHE can fight the Shadows for all I care!" yells the passerby, tossing her Cosmic Wand into your hand. As the transformation begins
Insects have to search the web and constantly wonder if that cutie in this entomology article picture is just a carefully posed corpse.
"If your birthday was especially catastrophic, you can have your next one eleven months early - but you will be forcibly aged up to match."
These wretched elvish child-safe bottles won't open for anyone under 40.
With your voice, you pledge fealty to your summoner. With your mind, you wonder where in the fridge you could shove his cling-wrapped soul.
You were going to contribute to society today, but while waking up this morning your elbow slipped and set your bed to Attack Mode
The first 30 mins of a dark wizard duel involve naming afterlifes the loser will be sent to ("Tartarus's pit!", "Riccus, plane of blades!").
Today's decisive argument that proglangs like Javascript need more unique characters for their syntactic structures.
By far my favourite Chrome console bug.
I can't believe it's been six generations and Pokémon still doesn't have different messages for 2x super effective and 4x super effective.
"Sadly, he has all the self-esteem of a 'kick me' sign rolled into a scroll and sealed with tape, so that it's literally stuck to itself."
"Despite vowing to "beat evil the world over", most episodes depict him goofing off with his pals and entering inner-tube eating contests."
"Much like this coin, humanity has two sides… The head, representing reason… and the state bird, representing heartless, unspeakable evil…"
This cheap, defective wall has only one side. You try to peek behind it, only to see your own butt at the far end.
The replacement sun is still dim enough to look directly at. Its scaffolding makes it look like a grate in the sky – Earth dark as a pit.
The angels fled to gas giants, the fairies and vampires to distant moons – the spacefaring age saw humanity's old rivals finally part ways.
While you understand the isNaN() function and the newly added wasNaN(), the willBeNaN() function ominously returns "true" for all inputs.
Videogame vines that pollinate solely via the gripping, climbing hands of platforming adventurers.
You become aware that the only rest you've gotten on this whole adventure was while you'd fainted in battle from an enemy's attack.
To make wait times in the elevator appear shorter, a vast mirror maze was installed. You hope you can escape before it reaches your floor.
You're trying to power your magic with the support of all your friends, but you owe a bunch of people $50 each and it's frazzling the spell!
You walk into the interview, and find all of the earlier candidates behind the table. Seems they were hired as HR interviewers on the spot.
The shockwave is so strong, it blows off the negative space between the trees' leaves and boughs, making solid domes of wood and chlorophyll
Invisible poltergeists mock-gasping at a family having breakfast, jokingly swooning at the "levitating cutlery" and "eerie chewing noises".
"me, a chat bot? dang ya got me, turing test flunked ;_;" you reply – before realising with horror that you already said that 3 minutes ago.
Hundreds of ghosts sliding into your bare bed on cold winter mornings to soak up your warmth.
"Well, I remember being alive, clear as day" croaks the skeleton. "My bones were milk-white… I serenaded my family with my clattering jaws…"
"The curse was broken with a kiss, then returned with another kiss, then unwittingly toggled on and off by more kisses over the next week."
As you lumber into the kitchen, the fairies quickly kick the toaster's release, launching their dried clothes out and onto their bodies.
"You've got acute social media angst," mutters the paramedic, wheeling out the gurney. "Hey," he pauses. "Didn't you unfollow me last week?"
Today, in crap Javascript hacks that are bad and wrong, but still, nice try.
The empress declared her love would last a hundred thousand years. When it did indeed end, she had 100,000 added to the current year.
You cautiously sip a cup of human life energy on a dare from your succubus chum. When she sees your amazed face, she's all "I know, right?"
In idle chat with your AI friends, you count some objects, and unwittingly start from zero. You start fretting that they took offense.
Above you see the ceiling lined, not with spikes, but the dangling, waggling feet of every hero she's captured! And it's descending rapidly!
Fallen angels in the playground, swinging on the swings as high as they can.
"All attempts to bless a stoat will badly fail - the blessing will bounce off, flip over into a curse, and doom the cleric performing it."
"It's the year 36 trillion… Humans turned 100% of Earth's mass into consumer goods… A movie star agonises about this while punching people…"
It seems you and this wall you're chained to will have to put aside your differences and team up to bust out of here.
You mustn't let on to this interviewer that your novel's plot was meant only as linking material between crap frog puns… Sweat is pooling…
"Yes, the song "Effed-Up Maze That No One Can Escape" is loosely inspired by my mansion. All tours are both free and unsupervised."
The charismatic Magiknights rapidly cast Attack Up after Attack Up on themselves… The loser always surrenders before a single blow falls…
"Unlike you Earthlings, I was schooled on a gas giant! The gravity was too strong to raise our hands! So we had to get it the first time!!"
Your accomplishments:
* Avoided setting bed on fire from friction of leaving too quickly, by taking half an hour
* Probably brushed teeth
Everyone's favourite JRPG subgenre. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=22899788)
Having painstakingly collected the gear icons from your apps' config menus, you build a vast machine that can configure… the entire world!!
This is the same way your ex used to erotically devour your soul, you silently realise as your partner erotically devours your soul
You'd never visited a habitation sector <2km below the surface. You find their tradition of blue ceilings and green floors oddly depressing.
You've only got half an hour before the traveling wifi truck moves to the next enclave. You open all of your download accelerators at once.
You are stripped naked by being round-tripped through a set of lossy serialiser and deserialiser functions.
You can't pay for your meal, so you drain out some of your experience points. Now this young waitress slew those ten roboscorpions, not you.
"Due to the discovery that koalas aren't as vicious as expected, Operation Giant Koala has been replaced with Operation Much Gianter Koala."
*types 'crocodile egg hatching' into image search*
Hell yes
You can't dance in a perfect rectangle alongside your NPC spouse. "You dance OK," they say, which you can tell is their lowest compliment.
This feels like one of the more intuitive ways for users to define colours in a text-based proglang, more so than anything HTML or CSS has.
I recall Game Maker had, along with some basic colour keywords, a merge_color() function that mixed two colours with a specific ratio.
"Since you've surrendered the city to me faster than I expected, I must confess the 'off' switch on my t-rex mecha's remote is painted on."
"So you succeeded in jumping those blocks… But a dark era is coming… Far more than mere blocks will have to be jumped… We will meet again."
The skeleton was apparently using its remaining hand to search "can you run out of bones" on its phone as it hurled all its bones at you.
"Is nothing more melancholic than millionaire romance authors releasing pages of their manuscripts into the sea? We go live to the scene."
"My weakest attack can shake the sky with such force that the full moon's fluid will slosh out, staining the seas with unearthly light!"
Unusual variant of a heart attack.
And, of course, you may find yourself late in development unable to reorganise large swathes of your story - the structure being "ossified".
One concern is that it may make games more brittle - shifting the position of a passage could unexpectedly, non-obviously break the code.
so, tapping into that data would be no small change for Twine's conceptual model. But, it may well be convenient for certain games.
The story map passage positions currently have no bearing on the final game (though the data is included in the built HTML as of 1.4),
so, you could do [[Go north|north()]] to link to the passage directly above, without having to use its name.
Sudden idea: Twine functions called "north()", "south()" etc. that tell you which passage is adjacent to the current one in the story map,
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/85154210196/super-mario-world-2-yoshis-island - RT if you identify as this boss.
https://twitter.com/__proto__ - I really hope the bottom tweet in this timeline actually happened.
even though the latter implicitly constructs a new array just for the call. (But, that might be optimised away by certain engines).
The upshot of this is that referencing "Array.prototype.slice" is ~technically~ less reliable than writing it as just "[].slice",
but thankfully, the built-in constructors disobey this - their original "prototype" value is always used:
Javascript's constructor pattern states that the "prototype" property value of the constructor function determines the construct's prototype
"Only our free-thinking company offers employees:
*Yoga balls for chairs
*Ball pits
*Perpetual hallway soccer
*Giant hamster-ball cubicles"
Python 3 / Perl 6 slashfic
Finding an old to-do list from over a year ago, and only being able to cross off two-thirds of the items.
Examples: Astonish, and Night Shade ("The user makes the target see a frightening mirage.").
I like the idea that Ghost-type Pokémon moves are actually about making the foe faint from fright, rather than from physical damage.
You suddenly realise you don't have to be bored when your imagination has no limits. This intoxicating power makes you faint from pleasure.
A car passenger seems to wave at you, but really they're tossing a cigarette. This is your most intimate interpersonal experience today.
"My hobby is being dangerously close to things."
Even though you only have 10 dominos, you enchant them to fall over really, really slowly.
A regular expression that matches your body, with wildcards at the locations of your erogenous zones.
One consequence is that even if you run "delete Object.prototype.__proto__" (as many recommend), you can still use __proto__ in literals.
This is definitely confusing, but that's what had to be done to get the spec matching those pesky live implementations.
This syntax only applies if __proto__ is unquoted: { "__proto__": {a:1} } creates a plain, inert "__proto__" own property, as expected.
But, there's also a separate __proto__ syntax for object literals:
{ __proto__: {a:1} } sets the object's prototype to {a:1}.
__proto__ in ECMAScript 6 is actually two distinct entities, the first being a "__proto__" getter/setter property on Object.prototype.
The way social web apps refer to all user-uploaded images as "photos" I find really telling about their fundamental design assumptions.
"Netsurfer Tip: if you encounter an acronym that you don't understand, the 'k' always stands for 'know'. (Examples: idek, jsyk, ikr.)"
After giving you another bad dream, the nightmare fairy lies on your chest and lets your quickening heartbeat lull her to peaceful sleep.
It's the 100th day you've powered on and been too late for work to apply your firmware's updates. w/e, your brain's too tired to get hacked.
http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2013/05/multi-line-strings-in-javascript-and.html - While I have a perverse relish for Javascript kludges, this one makes me a tad queasy.
The only thing you've created this whole week is a sandwich.
Screw it, you're putting it on your résumé.
(These tweets inspired by Go's semi-insertion http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#semicolons which, funnily, also enforces K&R braces at penalty of silent error.)
(Although, one other thing semicolon insertion bungles is paranthesised expressions vs. function calls, so it wasn't bug-free even then.)
What are two things semicolon insertion badly mangles? Object literals and array literals - neither of which existed in Javascript 1.0.
Thinking about Javascript 1.0 again, it occurs to me that the semicolon insertion wasn't implemented that badly in that original version.
Your computer started to distrust you when it noticed how many of your emails you told it to "mark as read".
Unfortunately for your foes, this game's combat is too abstract for them to make any good taunts. "Your HP is sooo lowerable," they hazard.
Also, "Mirror Move" is a move that only bird mons can learn. The reason is that in the original language, it's "Parrot Mimickry".
"Assist" is actually this saying http://is.gd/F07QNi which is why only cat mons can learn it.
"Fire Blast" is actually "Daimonji" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimonji
"Night Slash" is actually "Tsujigiri" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsujigiri
It's interesting reading about innocuously named Pokémon moves which actually have very specific meanings in the original Japanese.
Your two sentient swords have bad blood between them. You go to the sword therapist, who laughs hysterically that he finally has a customer.
Up above, a flying saucer is being chased by a flock of rocket-cats, its cargo of Milky Way milk sloshing against its sides.
"Each paint colour has a different psychological effect on your room (instil warmth, quell sorrow, grant foresight, ignite berserker rage)."
"'San serif': singular form of 'sans serif', in which only one of the font's letters is missing a serif. For fun, try and see which one!"
Bullied by the existence of gravity
The ant answers the door. All humanity is outside, asking for lodging after civilisation failed. The ant points to a manhole-sized entrance.
"We traveled 900 light years to this puny planet! We're not fools! Winning this dance-off with our high-tech powers will make Earth ours!!"
The programming language's help forum assures you that multi-digit number literals aren't necessary when you can just add 9 and 1 in a loop.
"Wow, I never wall-jumped on the first try before," mutters the ninja assassin, before booming at you, "You're dead! I got beginner's luck!"
No one put peanut butter on a celery stick before. You plan to spend the millions people will give you out of gratitude for inventing this.
In a weird dimension, between two planets,
your body doesn't know which way to fall.
So,
you plummet to your death one way,
then the other.
Wow, cynical.
"All of the forked identities that arose during the hivemind's telepathy outage will now be merged. Avoid having any independent thoughts."
"The Wizard hurls zots and fwackooms from his tower. Unless you like being a sizzle or a croak, hide under a clang or fwoosh like a zoom!"
The sheer awkwardness of respawning in your ex's apartment, because you still haven't bought your own save point after the breakup.
"Mountain goats eat telepathy thistles to communicate over vast distances, only to find the pain of eating them is all they can talk about."
Samus freezing enemies in midair,then standing under them in the rain while waiting for a bus
Two caterpillars sharing a chrysalis
Pretty sure this videogame fanart is also movie fanart in some way. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=1082329)
Your friend did great painting your face back on this cursed mask that won't come off. You only turn her lower body into a doll as reward.
The crowd pressed their heads to the ground as the Flying Contraption flapped and whirled. God! Three inches of lift! Many of them fainted.
Your last hiccup rattles you so hard, your soul launches out of your body!
You become the Hiccuping Ghost: beloved by kids, mocked by teens,
Tickleopolis's star reporter interviews you in the palace dungeon about your bungled escape – as her fingers interrogate your crooked soles!
"How did so meek a wizard as you tame a dragon?" hollers the sorcerer. "Sshh!" his friend hisses atop the beast, "it doesn't know I'm here!"
"Care to join me?" hisses the serpent woman. You shake your head so vigorously, your brain slides onto a puddle of old teen hormones. Uh-oh!
"We need you to dot the i's, tickle the t's, poke the o's, slap the a's–" She opens the door to reveal the alphabet having a pillow fight.
Concerns: should the hook name be at the start, when the inline syntax puts it at the end? Is the line of hyphens a bit too general?
Thinking of a potential 'block' syntax for Twine 2's hooks, alongside the regular syntax.
This was your finest howler.
2997. The galaxy's premier file format is CATL, the cat markup language. Its postcardware license brings trillions of cards to Earth daily.
You absent-mindedly confused time and place and drove to 7PM early. Now you have to wait until the restaurant, for her to arrive.
The Go language's char type is a 32-bit int called "rune", which I imagine reflects the computer's contempt of inscrutable human scripts.
http://www.jibbering.com/faq/names/event_handler.html - That was probably well-known to you, but I still find it *adjusts spectacles* remarkable, yes, quite remarkable.
#TIL in HTML attribute-based event handlers, the element's properties are in scope, as if a "with" block was used.
http://play.pokemonshowdown.com/sprites/xyani/xatu.gif - I never thought about what Xatu would look like in flight, and now I can't ignore how implausible it looks.
"You'll be in my heart until I die" you murmur as your lover prepares to leave Earth. "Just like our eggs," they reply, stroking your chest.
You read about a technique to kill functional programmers during sex, by first assuming the tail call position, then optimising them away.
I also want to give object o the function "oO" for making null-object dicts, and call it the "ant's thought bubble".
o.oO( {a:1, b:2} )
"The ultimate goal is the Family: a wife, three healthy clones, two pure-bred cars, and as much lawn as you can annex from your neighbours."
"All the major stocks are gaining strength, as well as speed, endurance, and cold intelligence. Investors are turning to flee as we speak."
Two AIs from different codebases discussing whether or not the act of freeing memory "feels" the same to them.
