Leon's Microblog – June 2016

Months/minutes tokens in a few languages: strftime (C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust): %m / %M Java, Joda-Time, .NET, Moment.js: M / m

A declaration of love, grasped inside an actual, real declaration, guarded by indifferent if-statements, and measured by bored variables.

Generally, the only way to ensure a comic's saving is to manually save all of its pages' URLs in the lower-right: https://archive.org/web/

You have to understand, the odds of the Wayback Machine saving more than 20 arbitrary .jpg files from any webcomic is basically zilch.

This reminds me that I really love the Back In Time glitch, and that it's in three different Zelda games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTXKDT-bo2k

(In reply to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL8TCplAaWc)

(This particular kind of pixel glitter look is not unfamiliar if you know my dearest visual influences: http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/24701940182/stardust)

This may be one of the most obscure Pokey From EarthBound referential "clues" that the game gives you during the first half.

I also feel loathe to apply this trope to single episodes or chapters, as I think it is most potent when it encompasses the whole narrative.

Some people mentioned Steven Universe but the only case that really applies thus far is Lapis in Ocean Gem.

Similar striking and empathetic, works that have coarser worlds are too pragmatic to use it: Bone doesn't, and Nausicäa doesn't either.

A big part of what makes the contrivance work is the small size of the world: CS and UT are one cave, CQ and OTGW, a cozy fantasyland.

This is a heady power fantasy indeed, as these simple but striking plots show… but the contrivance they require leaves them a tad rare.

and to break the curse is to leave the story free of conflict and subjugation, every character on an even keel.

It also promotes empathy for the antagonists, weak as they are: to solve their curse is to know them more than themselves,

And such is the prevalence of adversarial climaxes that to end a conflict with mutual benefit seems miraculous, to do the impossible.

It's appealing in that it allows the story's conflict to slowly reveal itself as a puzzle to be solved, a grand Answer to be found.

Undertale and Cucumber Quest feature it, and to a lesser extent Over The Garden Wall, Cave Story and other contemporary all-ages adventures.

(By which I mean: reluctant main antagonists knowingly compelled by a powerful curse or law, or other intangible, asocial onus.)

It's a shame there aren't any Mario 64 inspired games that implement this obvious improvement, especially by Rare.

I think so much of the baleful turgidity of the Galaxy games could be alleviated by just letting you get as many stars as you want at once.

A second example, from Contra III.

(I at some point wanted to instead do something similar to Perl 6's junctions, but those were separate, different-precedent operators.)

I recognise this is all a big natural-language kludge, but this was confounding so many new users that I could wave it off no more.

This should also work for expressions like "$a and $b < 5", "$a < 5 and 6 and 7 and $someBooleanFlag", and such.

So… I made it so that if "and" or "or" join a comparison and a non-Boolean value, Harlowe interprets the value as "it [comparison] [value]".

ADDITIONALLY, it's also necessary that people write "$a < 4 and $someBoolean" as usual, where $someBoolean evaluates to a boolean.

However, numerous new users write such expressions when they intend to write "$a < 4 and it < 5", and are discouraged when it doesn't work.

(Reminder that Harlowe has strong typing and non-Booleans cannot be converted to Boolean without an explicit comparison operation.)

As you know, in proglangs the expression "$a < 4 and 5" is interpreted as "($a < 4) and (5)" – a comparison wrongly joined to a non-boolean.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nRNaAJjz0k)