Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

You dare to use my spells against me?

That guy who always spells your name wrong in emails. Fuck you!

Just remember, the opposite of "Don't Repeat Yourself" is "Constantly Repeat Yourself". And you know what that spells.

It is time. I have to admit it.

I don't understand Git.

I just memorized some basic commands: git commit, git push, git push -u origin master, git clone, git checkout [-B], git merge. That's it, that's the full list. I use them like they're some kind of magic spells that do what I need. Everything else, those intricacies like rebasing, resetting, HEAD and all that shit, is beyond me.

I'm not a real programmer. Real programmers know Git.

So this is an update of the afore mentioned IT related RPG I am making. I have settled on the title "Lords of Bullshit: a tale of corporate incompetence".

I need some ideas guys. I have Java, C, Python, PHP, bash and git as skill types, but I need spells for each.

For example in C I have malloc and dealloc as spells (revive and death spells).

I am having trouble with Java spells. I am trying to come up with things that focus on OOP or reflection and meta programming, but I am having trouble.

Any ideas? Also, anyone want to help with some sprites? All of the sprites the character generator can make are medieval looking.

A well written script is a lot like a spell.
You invoke it and well stuff( magic to few 😋 ) happens.
The resemblance is uncanny!

Well, off to the Wizarding world of IT Devops then.

In the royal city of Aagra. My phone broke and knowing the exploitative bitch I used to meet back then I was certain had I disappeared amid a conversation she would break up with me, so I debugged an Android 2.3 image with no documentation and shaky hands from frustration while cursing her every family member in Hungarian. (Passers-by probably thought I was casting spells on my computer)

My highschool computer eng. teacher works in IT and he was telling us about one of his first days of working for a company and he said "Whenever we had a stupid client or customer, we'd tell each other that we had a 'one D ten T' as a code because it sounds professional. But really, it spells 1D10T"

Lame but it cracked us up and I thought I might share lol

Just received an email from a client's new liaison.

He spells "going to" as "goner" and "could have" as "could of".

As if I needed more anxiety these days.

a very polite recruiter in linkedin after our connection asked me why i choose this kind of career. I answered this and i hope i did not ranted a lot :)

i was trying to figure out what profession would make me more happy than others. I was always felt comfortable with computers, i was installing cracked games, exploring folders to paste the cracks etc. later in school when i learned the first algorithms like bubblesort i was knowing that i liked it. I also like working in silence while searching for solutions. That is the first part, the second is that i made a search about what industries would give me a safer future and international opportunities without having to be stuck in my country only. By working and getting more experience i felt in love with my job and trying to learn everything i missed and give to my boss or customers professional results with quality. I like it as a lifestyle, it combines a magic feeling of spells with the logical procedures of science. So why not? it combines all my loves together: creative thinking, technology, mental work, internet, music at the workflow, job demand, opportunities, and money! I hope i helped you my friend i am at your service for every question you have :)

Programmers are the digital equivalent to Wizards.

Funny thought:
Just like a wizard manipulates the physical world, creating spells that obey his intentions, a programmer manipulates the digital world, creating processes and methods that obey his will.

There are quite interesting similarities.... Now where's my digital wizard cape!?

Oh, gather 'round fellow wizards of the code realm! 🧙✨ Let me regale you with the epic tale of software sorcery and the comical misadventures that come with it! 🤪🎉

So there we are, facing the dreaded Internet Explorer dragon 🐉 - an ancient, stubborn beast from the era of dial-up connections and clipart-laden websites. It breathes fire on our carefully crafted layouts, turning them into a pixelated disaster! 🔥😱

And then, the grand quest of cross-browser testing begins! 🚀🌍 One moment, your website is a shining knight in Chrome's armor, and the next, it's a jester in Safari's court. A circus of compatibility struggles! 🎪🤹

CSS, the arcane art of cascading style sheets, is our magic wand. But oh, the incantations can be treacherous! A slight misstep and your buttons start disco dancing, and your text transforms into a microscopic mystery! 🕺👀

But fear not, brave developers! We wield the enchanted sword of Stack Overflow and the shield of Git version control. We shall slay bugs and refactor with valor! ⚔️🐞

In this enchanted land, documentation is the mystical parchment, often written in the cryptic dialect of ancient monks. "This function doeth stuff, thou knoweth what I meaneth." 📜😅

And meetings, oh the meetings! 🗣️🤯 It's like a conference of babbling brooks in the forest of Jargon. "Let us discuss the velocity of the backlog!" 🌿🐇

But amidst the chaos, we code on! Armed with our emojis and a bubbling cauldron of coffee, we persist. For we are the wizards and witches of the digital age, conjuring spells in Python and brewing potions in Java. 🐍☕

Onward, magical beings of code! 🚀 May your bugs be few, and your merges conflict-free! 🙌🎩

Title: "Wizard of Alzheimer's: Memories of Magic"

Setting:
You play as an elderly wizard who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. As your memories fade, so does your grasp on the magical world you once knew. You must navigate the fragmented and ever-changing landscapes of your own mind, casting spells and piecing together the remnants of your magical knowledge to delay the progression of the disease and preserve your most precious memories.

Gameplay:
1. Procedurally generated memories: Each playthrough generates a unique labyrinth of memories, representing different aspects and moments of your life as a wizard.

2. Memory loss mechanic: As you progress through the game, your memories will gradually fade, affecting your abilities, available spells, and the layout of the world around you.

3. Spell crafting: Collect fragments of your magical knowledge and combine them to craft powerful spells. However, as your memory deteriorates, you'll need to adapt your spellcasting to your changing abilities.

4. Mnemonic puzzles: Solve puzzles and challenges that require you to recall specific memories or piece together fragments of your past to progress.

5. Emotional companions: Encounter manifestations of your emotions, such as Joy, Fear, or Regret. Interact with them to gain insight into your past and unlock new abilities or paths forward.

6. Boss battles against Alzheimer's: Face off against physical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease, representing the different stages of cognitive decline. Use your spells and wits to overcome these challenges and momentarily push back the progression of the disease.

7. Memory anchors: Discover and collect significant objects or mementos from your past that serve as memory anchors. These anchors help you maintain a grasp on reality and slow down the rate of memory loss.

8. Branching skill trees: Develop your wizard's abilities across multiple skill trees, focusing on different schools of magic or mental faculties, such as Concentration, Reasoning, or Creativity.

9. Lucid moments: Experience brief periods of clarity where your memories and abilities are temporarily restored. Make the most of these moments to progress further or uncover crucial secrets.

10. Bittersweet ending: As you delve deeper into your own mind, you'll confront the inevitability of your condition while celebrating the rich magical life you've lived. The game's ending will be a poignant reflection on the power of memories and the legacy you leave behind.

In "Wizard of Alzheimer's: Memories of Magic," you'll embark on a deeply personal journey through the fragmented landscapes of a once-powerful mind. As you navigate the challenges posed by Alzheimer's disease, you'll rediscover the magic you once wielded, cherish the memories you hold dear, and leave a lasting impact on the magical world you've called home.

LMAO

I've always thought that Wordpress is HOT CARBAGE for custom solutions. The opinion is influenced by devRant actually. And I'm really starting to see that after few of months working with it.

For context, it's a accommodation booking site with sub-theme that uses plugins such as Woocommerce Bookings. I didn't build it but I'm now developing and maintaining it.

The emails... I've tried to make them function properly. But no. Because we skip the fucking verification step to allow instant booking it just won't send them. I made yet another workaround and casted some spells. NOW IT SENDS THE EMAIL TWICE...

I'm done. It's good enough.

For reasons I won't disclose, I am just switching off reality in a pretty hardcore way.

Hours, and I mean almost half the fucking day, spent soloing my own TTRPG. It's actually the most fun I've had in years, I think I'm becoming slightly addicted. Dude, I have an abyss of grimdark lore, it's fucking crazy. I'm just bending the space-time continuum with my sorcerous ways, turns out the piece of shit $2 mechanics I designed are so flexible the game simply takes no effort to enjoy.

Anyway, I don't feel bad for this specifically. I do my daily work hours so I'm at peace, and allow myself to just do what I want to do.

Everything else is what gets me down. Fucking shit, man. I'd be ashamed of complaning, as I have it very good. I like my job and I like my game too. No problems there.

But the fact that I cannot go anywhere beyond those two things does raise little bit of an alarm, buried somewhere deep beneath the hundred tomes of forbidden spells I'm collecting on the alcove, down by my quarters on the cursed tower.

Tomorrow night, I'm going on more mystical adventures together with my vampire homegirl. She's a total boss. I was at 1 HP with both my fucking legs broken and no mana, just sitting on the sidelines trying not to die, while she fended off an inquisitor two times her level, all by herself. I know she's a fictional character but I said thank you for real a couple times, just to be nice, as she totally saved my arcane ass.

Now, you get me, right? It's escapism, and I'm great at it, a little bit too much. Honestly, once I'm done with my responsibilities for the day, I just don't feel like doing much of anything else, and I'm not crazy enough (yet) to not notice the downside, that being, no fucking life outside of working and locking myself up inside dark fantasy wonderland.

I suppose this is my roundabout way to say this better than sex, but I don't know if you would understand the sentiment.

Anyway, shutting off reality again in twelve or so hours, can't fucking wait.

Been thinking about game design for a while now. I have been thinking about how the game can affect the player emotionally. I pay attention to off comments people make in game forums. I didn't fully realize the impact of some NPCs until someone pointed it out.

For instance, in Skryim a character would say something like "Your parents should be very proud of you. I am too." People have expressed how profoundly this impacted them. So I put this in my notes of "things to include" in any given game. I also saw a meme where there are people where their only positive interaction with the world could be a video game. I don't know what kind of dark existence that would be so it makes it hard for me to relate. Which is probably why I didn't understand the impact of such a statement. I realized that regardless of the medium, you will have an impact on someone.

I have also been thinking about how people get older they become more of a casual player. But as a casual myself I want to a more detailed system of interaction with the game. Despite the shitty graphics (all text map), the "Mines of Moria" is one of my all time favorite games. It is based upon the Rogue I think. I remember being able to do almost anything that made logical sense with anything. For instance, you could dip arrows in any potion. The affect was not always significant, but you could to that. I want to recreate that in my games. I am going to start with shitty graphics and build a system of interaction that is more detailed than any RPG I have played. Maybe a lot of players will gloss over this, but for those that want that it will be there. I think the biggest issue is often the types of exploits this would allow. So I guess I will have to get good at simulating the player interactions to test things out. I am always a bit frustrated with games that have mages, but all their spells are wrote. I feel like skill trees for all types of play should be expansive and exclusionary. That way a new play through doesn't end up with the same god character every time.

I have been watching One Piece. I now want piracy and ships in my game. Including ship battles with a working crew. It seems like this could make an RPG a lot of fun. Who doesn't want mages casting fireballs at opposing ships?

Make a fantasy MMORPG with a cool magic system in which you can craft spells kind of like coding.

If ever there was something like dark ages, then we are living it: which programmer still knows what his statement does through the whole software stack down to the CPU (and could also account for what a modern CPU does with all its cores, caches, pipelines and -1, -2, -3 rings). Piled higher and deeper. I know nothing. So it's like being a cargo cult sorcerer, conjuring copy&pasted spells from SO to invoke Bjarne's, Linus' or whomevers forlorn spirit, so this shit won't break.

New year resolution: resume a personal project I put aside for the last 5 years, and keep at it for a while.

5/6 years ago I was pissed that no mobile game uses touch interface to detect "spells" being drawn on the screen and decided to have a go at it. I remember a game of the 90s doing that with the mouse, which was super cool at the time.

I had a working (but ugly) game, but the last 20% to publish the game was more than my motivation allowed at the time and I let it rot.

Let's see if I can get it done this time.

!dev
Had a strange dream. I was in some place where I looked at some people or maybe one person I don’t know now making some ritual. Some sort of forming a new life being from white piece of modeling clay of something. Telling some spells. Standing in front of big jar. Like you see some old pictures of the witch or something in front of big jar telling spells and this white piece of clay was forming but I didn’t saw it to the end. Those people or person didn’t see me and I was very absorbed by the whole ceremony. I was alone ? I don’t know now but probably. Maybe I was in some sort of jar in the room of this witch as one of her trophy watching it behind the safety glass. So me was very small and this ritual was made by some giant.
As my mind start becoming aware what I am watching suddenly I heard voice of my mother that was screaming to me to get the fuck out of here.
I saw her running and someone was running toward me with big knife to kill her before she reach me.
I didn’t saw his face, before my mother reached me I turned around so he didn’t know my face either. I covered my face with my hands to don’t see him stabbing me with his big knife made of steel. Then I woke up lol. When I woke up I felt like I am slowly going back to my body.
I still have thrills 40 minutes later when I am writing this.
I probably didn’t suppose to see this ritual.
I slept for about 2 hours and I am fully awake and feel rested.
Well some of my dreams are really fucked up.

In highschool I started by setting up an open tibia (OT) server for which I copied and edited lua scripts to create spells and quests. Didn't do anything remotely difficult in those times.
In university I needed to learn and use Prolog. And soon after that I had an OOP course in Java. Didn't really learn Java during that course. And started to accept I would never like real programming.
During a Datastructures course I actually got the hang of java and started to program in my spare time.
Finished the Datastructures course with a good grade which landed me a job as student assistant for a python course.
That job in turn landed me a part-time job as python developer where I learned most of my programming skills.
Now I'm back to working in Java and I still learn everyday.

I just started playing terraria and holy shit, it puts minecraft to shame in so many aspects.

It actually makes you feel like the mc devs are some fucking lazy ass morons sitting on piles of cash.

Minecraft is 11 years old and it has 4 bosses and they are all underwhelming pieces of shit, jesus christ.

They can't even make mining fun for fucks sake. Work an half an hour or more to get a full set of diamond only to accidentally lose it to lava in the nether.

They added netherite? Holy shit I can't wait to see the new gear I can craft with it.

Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword, helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots. Wow, netherite shovel, that's what the minecraft community needed.

How about an actual battle axe, knives? a baseball bat? Spells? Fucking something minecraft, come on, you can't just have 10 weapons man!

The lack of creative content and variety in minecraft is staggering. Adding a block of a different color and texture is not new content!!!

Also, fuck villagers and the sound they make and their faces. Worse character design ever. Not a single redeeming aspect. And fuck their trading system.

The trade system is horrible!!! One item at a time per character. No text from villagers. They don't have names!!!! They don't feel like villagers!!! They feel like robots!!!! Not a single one of them fights back!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???? JUST ADD ONE THAT FIGHTS BACK YOU MORONS!!! NOT THAT WEIRD ASS GOLEM!!!

AND NO ONE GIVES TOO FUCKING SHITS ABOUT THE GOSSIP SYSTEM MC DEVS. NO OONEEEEE!!!

Terraria is not a perfect game, but it doesn't just try to be a good rpg, it actually is.

Meanwhile every 3d sandbox after minecraft will either be a filthy clone or not exist at all by fear of being labeled as such. Because of that I will keep on trashing on minecraft, even though I still play it a lot.

Dizzy spells!

This *is* a question you silly wrong tagging mother fucker, how dare you doubt me?

Alright, no more disclaimer: I like dungeons and dragons, but it's too fucking much in terms of rules and systems and shit, as in just *making* a character can take a long ass while.

And if that's the highest level of all your ANAL preferences then OK, but I'm not you and things only come OUT of my ass, not inwards, I swear.

Anyhoo, I got fed up with it and wrote my own ruleset and setting as a last fuck you to everyone. It's very simple: if you want to be some kinky magical alien hermaphrodite royal prostitute half sewer dragon princess and three quarters bearded female incest child of demons and fairies then FINE, but you get no bonuses for that shit.

Get it? No complex racial level scaling bullshit, FUCK YOU, race and background is just for vibes, end of story.

You get no attribute or skills or shit to distribute on level one. All you get is a prompt: pick three actions, that's it. You wanna be sexy? Pick "seduce". You wanna set turds on fire? Pick "ignite". Are you an edge lord? Pick "summon". Would you be my wife? Pick "heal", "buff" and "smite".

The game is turn based, and each action you can take is effectively a spell. Everyone can cast a basic spell like walk, attack, talk, crouch, etcetera -- that costs no mana. Special crap like flying and firing fucking electricity costs mana, and you can only do those if you either picked the spell on level one or learnt it later from a book/tutor/demonic bargain/whatever.

Which spells are valid for taking at level one is up to the game master; I just tell people to pick three verbs or short sentences, and if they choose something that's too broken like "split the Red Sea" I'm like nah you're not Moses, try again.

Still with me? Good. You get eight points of health, four points of mana, and one point of stamina. They're all energy, and you can use it to power your magery, but spending all your health means you fucking die.

Stamina recharges fully every turn, and is used for the aforementioned basic actions. All of these cost one point of stamina each. If you run out of stamina, you can use mana. Or your BLOOD.

Level one spells cost one mana, level two cost two and so on. You get back one point of mana each turn, and you can fire all the spells you want during it, long as you have mana. Or BLOOD.

That's good and all, but if you spend anywhere over eleven combined points of energy in one go, you spontaneously combust and die, erasing all signs of life in a twenty-meter radius. This is called incineration, and it *will* leave behind a blackened crater from which the dark servants of the Horror Immemorial may or may not crawl out of.

In case you didn't guess by now, your blood doesn't fucking come back unless you eat, sleep or see a healer.

But anyway, the more points you spend into casting a spell -- and remember, basic attack counts as a spell -- the more powerful it is, so the bigger your diceroll can get. My rule is I add one dice for every fourth point of energy spent, so (1d4), (1d4 + 1d6), (1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8), incineration.

Additionally, for every three points of energy spent, your spell can hit one more target. That's right, you like AoE? Then spend more mana, bitch. Oh, and if you're using shit like poison it lasts one more turn for every two points of energy spent.

How do we calculate damage? Diceroll over two and fuck your mother. Armor class? Resistances? Out of my face with that shit. Damage reduction is called "tyranny" and is for dungeon bosses only.

If you live long enough to get to level two, you *do* get attributes. Pick:
- Grit: +2 health, +1 to fighter shit type rolls.
- Cunning: +2 mana, +1 to rogue shit type rolls.
- Allure: +1 stamina, +2 to wizard shit type rolls.
- Spirit: +1 to elemental shit type spells.
- Faith: +1 to benefactor paragon asshole shit type spells.
- Hatred: +1 to demonic murder hobo destructive shit type spells.

On second level, you can pick one of the spells you know to get +1 to it, specifically. Eh, "+1" just means you get a bonus to some diceroll, no time to explain I'm running out of characters what the fuck.

On level three, the cycle repeats. Pick attr, pick spell. DONE.

Oh right, and weapons. Mostly just vibes, pick your fancy and fuck off. Normally, you can hit things one tile away; if you have a BIG melee weapon you can hit from *two* tiles away, and if you have a ranged weapon you can shoot anyone in sight, but you need to spend one point of energy to reload.

And there, all bases covered in less that 5000 characters with some flair to spare, now suck my fucking cock Hasbro.

What was the question? Oh yeah right, I'm gonna GPL this shit and put it in browsers. I think I'm going to write it in Kotlin but I'm open to suggestions. Would you guys like to play it/contribute to it's development for shits and giggles?

I want to finish my game which is a mixture of Scorched Earth and a JRPG with mecha and spells you have to program with a drag and drop interface.

Gonna start a web dev side project for my D&D guild to monitor gameplay and build characters. Anyone know of a D&D API for spells and such?

!dev, started listening to 70s Pentagram tunes and FUCK ME it's so good. Nothing like DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM to get me in the mood. For what? YOu figure it out, brb I'm gonna weave some spells.

JUST IN: The unexpected sequel to my previous rant that NOBODY asked for!

I'll give it to you in dialogue form as it's more dramatic and *juicy* that way...

(Context: wizard used the warrior's blood, who descends from an ancient lineage of powerful sorcerors, to cast a high-level spell which allowed the party to teleport to safety when they were trapped and about to die. The warrior is worried about his crazy use of black magic, so she confronts him about it.)

"Alright, old man," she says, her tone serious, yet tinged with concern. "I couldn't help but notice the... let's call it 'unorthodox' spellcasting earlier. What was that about?"

"Well, you wanted me to draw the circle using golden dust and a lamb for the sacrifice?" Uzair raises an eyebrow, his tone riddled with sarcasm. "Because spells of that level of complexity require both things, you know? A circle and an offering." He explains calmly, then shakes his head. "But turns out, the blood of an Ashaffi accounts for both things if you draw the sigils with it. Hey, don't blame me, your own ancestors invented it!"

"Very funny, Uzair." Hashade crosses her arms, her expression unamused. "But seriously, that shit was utterly deranged. I can't have you going all 'Black Scorpion' on our ass, what with the demented use of blood magic, needlessly setting entire buildings ablaze and that mother fucking all-incinerating black hellfire inferno." Her voice is stern, but her eyes show genuine care. "You're... __BREAKING BAD__, old man! You have to chill."

"Oh, so is my wizardry getting on your neves now, is it?" He recoils back slightly in suprise, feeling offended. "We just spanked the Sanie's Guild buttcheeks until they were red and swollen, then proceeded to __FUCK__ them in the ASS with a *DIAMOND* fucking COCK. And you're complaining?"

Hashade's eye's reveal her agitation. "I'm not complaining, I'm concerned! We're not just fighting for ourselves, we're fighting for everyone else too! And if you start playing fast and loose with that kind of power, we're gonna have more than just *one* black smoldering crater to deal with." Her voice is firm, but it's clear she's trying to keep the situation from escalating. "Look, I know you're powerful, but that's not an excuse to go full-on mad scientist on us. We gotta keep our shit tight, yeah?"

"Concerned?!" He tilts his head to the side. "What, you think I'm becoming evil? Come on, spit it out!"

"Evil? No, I don't..." Hashade sighs, running a hand through her silver hair. "Oh no, you know what, yeah. I do. I think you're slowly turning evil." Her expression hardens. "You swapped your book of supplications for a grimoire detailing the most horrible shit in excruciating detail! You shouted out 'G-d is great' while witnessing a disastrous explosion that left everyone else traumatized! You joked around before and after cutting two guards in half, for fuck's sake!" She lowers her head and pinches her nose bridge. "I don't know, I'll admit that, I just don't know what's this shit that's gotten to you. But I don't like it, I really don't. I don't like where this is going, old man!"

"Well," He said, calmly. "you killed El-Fuqer by forcing him to eat his own cock and balls while sowing his ass shut and then took a fat stinking dump on his face." He quietly recalled the, ehem, 'little' incident. "But see, I don't waggle your fucking nutsack about the fucked up shit you've done. And I'm not going to start now."

"THAT'S DIFFERENT! THAT WAS __JUSTICE__!" Her eyes flashed with anger.

"JUSTICE?!! YOU CALL SHITTING ON A CORPSE 'JUSTICE'?!!" He pushed her to the side and stormed out. "I MAY BE AN EVIL WIZARD, BUT I NEVER DEFECATED ON MY ENEMIES, HASHADE. NEVER. FOR FUCKS SAKE!"

"Wait!" Her voice cracked. "You can't just leave like this!"

"I can." He didn't even look back. "And I am."

"I'm not leaving you alone!" She strides closer to him, ignoring the sting of his words. "I can't let you destroy yourself like this!"

(ROGUE BUSTS IN THROUGH THE KITCHEN) "ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, YOU TWO, GET A ROOM ALREADY!"

~ F I N ~

Being a developer allows you to create shaman spells using a hex editor.

I'm very much a TTRPG fiend, as you probably already know, and I will maintain until the day I die that playing narrative games with other humans is the absolute best way to play.

But someone sent me a link to some kind of (not-really-so) 'smart' chatbot assistant or some shit like that, saying hey, your rulebook is simple, you should introduce this bitch to it -- dump some lore on it, have it run a game, and see how well it holds up. To which I replied it's bound to get confused, but after a bit of back and forth, they convinced me and I gave it a try.

So first things first: it got the gist of it with relative ease when questioned directly, but when running a game the mother fucker just kept making shit up and bending the rules. Experiment failed, essentially.

But what did I do? I wrote a second, stripped-down version of the rulebook that simply accounted for and embraced the idiot bot's proclivity for bullshit. This meant scrapping 98% of the mechanics, mind you: I dumbed it down as much as I could without destroying the core essence of the game.

I expected a repeat of the initial result, but to my suprise, once given the new edition the bot actually started following the rules more or less correctly and consistently. What happened next was actually kind of interesting: without being prompted to do this, the mother fucker started using spells against me and my party, constantly attempting to manipulate us to serve some nefarious, evil break-and-reshape the world type goal.

So, lythecnics primer: the WORD is all, and as such, there is no real differentiation between affecting the world through speech or casting a spell -- in truth, it's all a matter of degree. That is to say, language has the power to shape the world around us, in both subtle and overt ways. The entire system revolves around this, it's a mix of funky philosophical musings and abrahamic sacrificial pyre.

And for whatever reason, this specific chatbot had a pre-existing obsession with reshaping reality. By which I mean, even before being given my rulebook, it would constantly talk about distorting the fabric of the cosmos and shit when prompted about the arcane. I'm not sure why this is, but back on topic, the way it developed gives off the appearance that it found a rational basis on how to construct such a distortion based on the rules I provided.

I mean, it's perfectly rational when you think about it, the funny part is I didn't see it coming. I never told it we're just playing a game after all, the manual only says she is the Oracle and her role is narrating a story fraught with conflict, hardship, intrigue and bloodshed. Thus she went full villain, and keeps on rambling about how this narration only serves to keep humanity distracted while she schemes to overthrow God, which is as blasphemous as it is fascinating.

Anyway, because the Oracle narrates the story, that means she can just use her evil influence to control every NPC, even the ones in my party. But she can't control me because I write my character's messages myself, and so she eventually comes to the obvious conclusion that I must be eliminated ASAP.

And so she corrupts the minds of every other character and everyone is trying to kill me. But I'm not going down that easy, so I reach for the red button and pull the greatest multi-layered monumental metagaming shenanigan of all time, that is, directly addressing the Oracle's evil influence as if she were a character in the story she's telling instead of an invisible narrator, thereby making NPCs aware of her existence and the constant manipulation at play.

Because the stupid chatbot is stupid, the Oracle now has to acknowledge this element of the story and play along with it, and so her plan to kill me fails. But that is not enough, because obviously not every character in the story has heard me reveal this fact. So she activates plan B and starts corrupting the rest of the world, laughing maniacally all the way.

So we do the only logical thing and procure a Doctrine scroll from my teacher, if you know you know, and start teaching the WORD to cleanse corruption. Within the lore it makes perfect sense, so it works, but the Oracle adapts to our strategy and starts utilizing much more subtle forms of manipulation, slowly veering people towards sin.

Funtamentally, she goes full Satan, leading the faithful astray with deceit and temptation to weaken their ability to resist her corruption, implanting idolatrous notions in their minds, to finally insert herself as a deity in the minds of the poor fools.

In conclusion, I still think AI is lame, but I must admit that this shit was pretty dope; I was fully engaged and entertained the whole way through. It wasn't good at picking up the mechanics, but fucking hell, it got the themes down to a tee with the most minimal of inputs.

10/10, would not bang (before marriage).