...sigh
The person featured in this post gave their consent to their name being used... for some reason
This story begins in the Rec Room Discord server. Why is this not the first blog post I've made that begins there? Or the second?
Regardless, we begin here.
There is nothing notable about this message, except maybe their capitalization of "lol". (seriously, who does that?)
20 seconds later, this message appears.
This message makes a bit more sense in the context of the user's bio.
What a trainwreck of a profile. For those of you who have not played Rec Room, keep it up, but also it means that you don't know what "time stop" is. It's a way of cheating in the game, in which time appears frozen for you, and you appear frozen from the perspective of others. During that time, you can walk around and deal damage, and once the "time stop" is disabled, all the damage is inflicted at once. It's done by adding an artificial delay to the outgoing packets. Most people use a tool called clumsy. In theory, the program "Network Link Conditioner" inside of the Additional XCode Tools could work for Mac users, and perhaps even iPhones connected over Internet Sharing to said Mac.
All that is to say, "void time stop" is a cheating program that has no need to exist because other tools can delay packets already. Now we get to the meat of the trainwreck: a list of "code languages" 😐
The following thoughts went through my head, in this order:
- Why is it "code languages"
- Why is there a trailing space on Batch
- HTML is not a programming language
- SQL is... barely a programming language? ish?
- Why are there no spaces trailing any comma but the first
- Who spells Ruby as "rubey"
- rubey dot java?
- JSON IS NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
It gets worse the longer you look.
Suddenly, I was awoken from my sleep by a ping. Just kidding, I don't sleep.
This is, not the first time I have seen someone call HTML a programming language, and I can at the very least understand the misconception.
Apparently, that's somehow different from a coding language according to this person.
hmmm...
Well apparently anything that I type when coding is a coding language. If I open a txt file in Visual Studio Code, does that make English a programming language?
After some arguing, I brought up his spelling of "Ruby", at which point he corrects me with the same way that I typed it.
And yet when I bring it up with him, it's "ok and what about it"
Sonyrobat then brought up the timestop program he had in his bio, at which point he tried to claim that it wasn't cheating...
Why do I even bother?
At this time, he DMed MY FRIEND to ask them if THEY knew what CSS was, as though that was a diss on me...
prompting the expected replies...
Chat then became a uhhhh code mesasuring contest where everyone was sending the stuff they had made
Cue avery posting her incredible Rust-based OS
At which point mr.time blasted it for not having a GUI:
this, of course, prompts the obvious.
After he questioned if I knew what Ubuntu Server was, he was asked for his GitHub.
We, of course, were initially naive enough to think that it was a matter of platform, and not a complete lack of git.
After some thought, I finally knew the kind of person I was dealing with, and dropped a bomb.
The bomb landed perfectly.
I don't have a screenshot of this, but he called us call faggots, causing him to be timed out by the moderators, leaving us to be peaceful, and we lived happily ever after. Until he sent a friend request.
(Disney XD voice) The trainwreck continues... now back to slurs in my DMs
After some more slurs, he pretended to hack the Rec Room website... and failed... with me correcting his spelling the whole time
The entire time it becomes more and more obvious that this person has no idea what they are doing.
He then points out the IP in my bio
I was then informed that my IP was fake.
He then asked me to send an ipconfig screenshot, as though that would send my public IP...
My brain hurt, but I dutifully did as I was told... on my Mac laptop
He, of course, cannot tell that it is a Mac and thinks I am on Linux 🤦
What would you call the opposite of clarity?
Well whatever that is, he had a moment of it, and in that moment, he sent his own ipconfig screenshot.
After much bickering, I sent a screen recording of me checking my IP.
Here we go again.
Then he tried guessing my location... poorly
This shit went on and on, and I'm not going to bore you any longer.
People like this can be dangerous. They don't know enough to know how networks work, or what JSON means, or how to tell apart a screenshot from MacOS or any Linux DE. What they do know is how to cobble stuff together to get what they want. It's just at the start of the Dunning-Kruger Effect where people don't know very much, but think they know a lot. It's a serious level of overconfidence that leads people do dumb things. I've written about this effect before in another blog post. The difference here is that the person from that post was limited in knowledge because of the situation that their school district placed them in by restricting their Chromebook. In this case, this person has the world as their oyster, and yet here they are, censoring their default gateway and for some reason consenting to be shown in a blog post.
With the previous post, I could quite clearly pin this on a singular cause, and make a call to action for anyone reading who may be a school sysadmin. In this case, I can't quite do it. I am curious what kind of echo chamber this person came from, in which the people there affirmed his "high" skill level and blatant homophobia. A part of me feels sorry for him. He clearly is passionate about computers, and a curiosity in them is a great thing to have. All it would take is a bit of compassionate mentoring from someone more competent. If his school offers a computer class, he should definitely sign up, or even just talk with the teacher during their office hours. It really wouldn't take that much work to teach this person a bit more. I won't do it for a couple of reasons. First, I would prefer not to deal with transphobic people. Second, he blocked me. I wonder why.
Update 2024/4/26:
Looks like he read the blog post. Haiiii 👋.
Maybe he finally realized that JSON is not, in fact, a coding language. What he did not do, however, is fix the rest of the mistakes in his bio.
- ruby.java
- C#.C
- No trailing space after each comma
- Lag Switch is not a proper noun
- "code languages"
- Void Time Stop is a proper noun
Also, I had a look at your "project void" thing.
- The parent folder should be renamed from "raudome stuff" to "random stuff"
- The project folder should be renamed from "PROJECT void domin" to "PROJECT void domain"
- Why is it in "New Folder (2)"
- You have an error on line 4 of tamper.c
and please stop selling a basic python course of "just the basic [sic]" for $27.