I would speculate it's probably a size issue since it was taken on my phone and all.

If you are ok with putting the photo on a public housing service you should be able to embed it instead of attaching it.

I'm a bit paranoid when it comes down to it
I'd still like to share the photo, but I have much less confidence in picking a random sure to upload the photo to.

Fully aware I'm neurotic in that regard, but I can't shrug off that kind of impulse.

Most phones can change image size/quality as well, maybe yours can as well?

My phone, as it turns out, has issues trying to resize things.
... At this point, it's a matter of pride, I will show you that puppy dammit....

In other news, Modern Horizons 2 came out this week. I picked up a bundle for it, but I didn't get anything worth talking about. Or at least nothing that I was happy to have.
So, I bought two more packs. In one was a Misty Rainforest (I, in fact, DESPISE the fetch lands) and since I hadn't pulled anything worthwhile, the guy at the brand new card shop in town gave me full credit and I got 4 more packs from it. Got something I actually liked. I also pulled a Verdant Catacomb. So, traded that in for 2 more packs. Pulled a Marsh Flats. Traded that in for nothing special as it turned out.

What was additionally funny, however, is this other guy who was buying collector's packs and asked me to pick a pack. He pulled a foil extended art Scalding Tarn from it. He asked me to pick another pack later and got an extended art Arid Mesa.

In essence, I ended up, technically, getting all five enemy fetches in the span of an hour.

Blugh

Sorry I've been away for... like a month now. Still dealing with all sorts of mental and work stress and a lot of the time I feel like... I guess I don't have anything to say? Not that I don't belong, but like I don't have anything to add anymore, especially since the only thread I visit is this one.

Because, like, at this point the best thing I could talk about is that I'm researching topics about animal biology such as penis bones for some worldbuilding I'm vaguely doing alongside a completely personal writing project. This is honestly the first thing I'd consider I'm actually "writing" with the intent not to show to anyone else.

I could, possibly, share the world itself if/when I formalize it -- and it's possible that it will end up folded into a previous worldbuilding project that I don't know if I ever made a thread about, involving all my favorite monstergirls races -- but so far the scope of the story hasn't expanded large enough to say whether I could do that (i.e. whether the current concepts I'm working on fit well enough with what I had previous).

Meanwhile, I'm having to argue with family as they seem to be getting more bigoted over time, and dealing with stupid things like a pack of underwear being held hostage at my post office. Custom naughty toy from etsy? No problem, just slide it right into the mailbox. But a couple of underwear? Nuh-uh, apparently you gotta sign for that ****.

But I don't want this to turn into a rant about my problems, which is why I tend to withdraw in the first place. With as much trouble as I have shouldering (or having the mentality that I should shoulder) other people's burdens, I don't want to be foisting my own problems onto other people.

I found a video that speaks quite well to my feelings on the POkemon franchise.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense.

I'm glad he brought up the Digimon comparison, because something I commented to some other friends recently is how, as strange as this is to say, Digimon's evolution "rules" makes more sense than Pokémon's.

IIRC -- and I could be slightly wrong depending on what that guy means about Gameboy cartridge memory and what I may have heard -- that the original Pokémon game actually did not[i] take up the full cartridge memory; that's why Missingno both exists and so prevalent. There's actually 105 unused "slots" of the 256 possible pokemon the game could have supported (also why there are exactly 256 pokemon in the second generation). Pokémon, as a whole, really shot itself in the foot starting at the... third? generation? I'm putting question marks there because while Fire Red and Leaf Green added [i]back in the missing gen 1+2 pokemon, I think the bigger issue was the way Gen 4 continued to have all pokemon in it, instead of breaking the link like the gen2 > 3 jump did.

Basically, I lived through the first "dexit" outrage for gen 3 and still loved the games, and I actually loved the idea of them doing it again with Sword & Shield (lost track of what gen those games are), but given how long they have steadfastly chosen to continue supporting EVERY pokemon in each new game, the outrage makes sense. They dug their own graves.

In all honesty, I believe that I would probably love Sword and/or Shield if I ever played them. However, due to a number of choices that Gamefreak and Nintendo have made outside of the game itself -- such as the ludicrous "Pokémon Home" app racket -- I find them to be... obsolete. I refuse to support them in this venture when I have so many indie creature-collecting gems, fangames, and ROMhacks that I could have fun with.

Well, that sucks, Luna. Sorry to hear that! As always, my PM inbox is basically a standing invitation to you to unload anything you feel you need to, both while that particular circumstance gets sorted out, and of course beyond.

From what I understand (and I also know very little about these things), it's a bit of both. Because although not every bit of memory which could contain a Pokemon did, those bits still contained something. After all, the Pokemon are not the only thing which needed to exist within the game. This also why missingno doesn't immediately crash the game, I think. Because there is data in the spot the game is trying to read, that data just doesn't map correctly to what the game is trying to do (because it's probably the layout of one of the towns or something like that).

So, how's everyone's week?
I've had worse, but that said isn't exactly an endorsement for it being amazing either. Chiefly because my cat has gone missing.

I've been struggling with a passive-aggressive co-worker who my boss keep telling me to treat with the kid gloves which seems to be undermining my supervisor authority with everybody else. But I'm the only one who thinks she's being a bully, so maybe I'm just crazy?
Actually, I think we're well over the hump on that one. Or out of the valley, I guess, because things are looking up?

Missing pet sounds worse though. Fur buddies are best buddies.

Not too bad. A friend of mine came to stay the week, so that was fun.

I've had worse, but that said isn't exactly an endorsement for it being amazing either. Chiefly because my cat has gone missing.[/quote]
Oh, man, I'm sorry to hear about that. Hopefully the cat shows back up soon, if not already.


That sucks. I'm a big believer in the philosophy that coworkers very much make a job, for better or for worse. I've been pretty lucky in most of my jobs with that, thankfully.

Just want to go ahead and thank you deeply for that, even though I didn't come right back to it. I know I say it relatively often, but I love the little community we have here.


That's fair; I do know there's the famous story of... IIRC it was Miyamoto himself at the time, who came and saved Gamefreak when they were making Gold/Silver by re-coding the entire games himself to fit in like 1/2 the space, so they would have room for the actual games they were trying to make. I've also watched some videos on the very-detailed computer-lingo explanations for how pokemon sprites were actually stored and called and what all possible Missingno look like.


I've been keeping afloat through Summer Games Done Quick, which just wrapped up, because work has been no easier either before or after the holiday weekend and managers are still refusing to clearly communicate even when I call them out on it.

I really, sincerely hope that you find your cat, though, because I understand now just how much emotional support a pet can give you, now that I haven't had one of my own for a few years.

Gen 1 Pokémon was not very efficient with space/memory. It was very bad. They didn’t have extra room for anything but exactly adding Mew as a joke they didn’t expect to matter.

Gen 2 that urban legend was really just him showing them how to optimize memory properly. Once they were using a better algorithm they went from not having enough to having so much extra they decided to include Kanto after all. So the limitation for gen 1 was also probably software, not hardware.

————

Missingno is just a famous case of arbitrary code execution. It’s honestly just the computer running random encounter code using memory it’s not supposed to, which just so happens to be a name written by the player. They tried to save memory by reusing something for both the encounter rng AND temporarily saving off a name; but they never made sure to “unsave” the name.

Iirc: In more technical terms, they temporarily save a string to the rng seed in order to display a unique tutorial event; but they don’t fix the rng seed until the first time it’s used. Missingno is abusing this to get an encounter in an illegal location.

Arbitrary code execution (ACE) is just absurd, though. I watched one of the SGDQ runs which was built around the idea that a lot of games have credit warps accessible through ACE, but it's usually quite difficult to set up. But there's a relatively easy ACE setup in Ocarina of Time, so they use that to save their filename on the memory expansion pack of the N64, and then switch games in a way that prevents that memory from being removed, so that they can force Paper Mario to read that code and skip to the credits. So many layers of absurdity in that.

Arbitrary Code Execution is the high level catch-all name for any type of exploit where the user can run arbitrary code.

In Pokémon Red and Blue, this is limited to the (granted pretty absurd) Missingno glitches. Iirc they patched it out entirely in Yellow.

In Ocarina of Time it’s an actual god level exploit where they can do almost anything they would ever want with proper setup. Both N64 Zelda games have recently had to create separate categories for ACE due to the level of exploitation at play.

The various ACE exploits via game switching are just taking the piss imo. It’s like the speedrun where they were heating their console with a hotplate. Seems kind of unfair.

Yes, there is a game with Hotplate%. This is a real thing.

I can't remember which game it was, but there definitely is a game where one of the Speedrun strats is to get the game disc dirty in specific spots to make sure the game lags the right amount when you need to set up a glitch. The question is, does it count as a tool-assisted Speedrun when the tool in question is strawberry jam slathered on your game?

I know that example lol. Iirc they just made it its own category.

Generally strats like that tend to separate into new categories if they threaten the health of the community (credit warp in oot being a recentish big example).