#this post is specifically about java script

[cobalt-axolotl]

me every time i open visual studio: aw sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension!

[mc-my-world]

Frequently Asked Questions

CLICK READ MORE TO SEE FAQ

More may be added!

"How accurate is the AU to the game itself?" As accurate as can be, but with hints of realism thrown in here and there. Steve's inventory has Mary Poppins bag mechanics. Doors create pockets of air underwater. Large enough masses can be left floating mid-air. For more, see the #mechanics tag. ---

"What version is the AU about"? A mix of Bedrock and Java. As for which game version; the latest. (UNLESS an update shows something that severely changes the lore/story). Features from various versions of the game may be included. The AU began during 1.21.8. ---

"What are the mechanics of Steve?" Steve spawned with no memory, except their name and basic survival knowledge. They respawn when die, and do not age (but their beard and hair do grow, and they may get wrinkles from injury/stress). They heal exceptionally fast, as long as they have energy (full hunger bar). They are physically powerful, and have exceptional tolerance for pain and otherwise harsh conditions. ---

"What was Steve's first death?" Died shortly after spawning for the first time because they thought they could pet a creeper. ---

"How does death work?" When an entity dies, its corpse will gradually dissolve into a sort of 'smoke'. It will only leave behind whatever items it is meant to drop. The same is for Steve's corpse. ---

"What are the cave ambiances?" It's what Steve feels when they're down there. Similar to the music that plays in game, it's Steve's imagination. ---

"What are Villagers and Illagers like?" V/ILLAGER LORE MASTERPOST HERE Also check out the #villagers , #villager lore , #illagers as well as the #worldbuilding tags! ---

"What are Piglins like?" PIGLINS LORE MASTERPOST HERE Also check out the #piglins tag. ---

"What is *insert mob here* like?" Consider searching the tag for it on the blog in case I've answered or shown it already. ---

"Can Steve speak to the mobs?" No. There is a one sided language barrier. Mobs such as Villagers, Illagers and Piglins can understand Steve. Steve cannot understand them. There is no shared script/alphabet, the closest is the Standard Galactic, but the other mobs don't exactly use it the same way Steve would. There is no way of circumventing this. There is one exception. ---

"Does gender exist?" Nope. Characters can use any pronouns, though you'll see some pronouns be more prominent for specific characters for convenience. But gender as a concept doesn't exist. ---

"Order of the posts changes depending on the way we view them, whether it is the Archive, Next and Prev buttons or the Masterposts." Yes, the orders are a bit different, but due to the story being told non-chronologically and sometimes prompted by asks, posts have had to be re-organised a bit. Some minor posts are missing from the Masterposts for cohesiveness and if they're not too important, but they can still be found through the archive or certain tags. ---

"Are MC: Dungeons and Legends canon?" I use tidbits from the other games (or MC media as a whole) as references, but maybe... ---

"Do other game modes exist? Commands? Glitches?" Spoilers. ---

"Will Alex appear? Other players? ⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕?" Who?

[strongest-soldier-jyl]

New intro post bc it was easier to just start over than to keep editing the old one

Hello! You can call me Jyl, though I answer to many names (Azamina, Nyl, Spider, Night, the list goes on).

I am J's Strongest Soldier <3 She's quite possibly my favorite character from any piece of media.

Sideblogs

I have a tendency to abandon my sideblogs. They never get that much traction and I just kind of love my main more.

I have a few sideblogs, such as @welcome-to-megalophobia, but I don't use them much anymore :3

Where can you find me?

You can find me on Discord, my username is "azaminajyldesigio" and I keep friend requests open to everyone.

If Tumblr does go down for whatever reason, I will accept all friend requests made to that account, so feel free to send me one if that happens and you want to remain in contact. As of right now though, I'll only accept friend requests if you tell me that you want to add me first (for example, if we're mutuals and you want to add me on Discord, just send me a Tumblr DM saying so along with your Discord username).

Non-fandom interests

I do a lot of stuff besides fandom :3 I might post about these occasionally, but don't expect them often (However, if you want to talk to me about them, do feel free! I can honestly probably infodump about these more than any fandom I'm in).

I'm a math major! Differential Geometry is my greatest love <3 I'm interested in learning Lean or Agda for the sake of formalizing my proofs, but as of right now I do my work on paper :3

I'm also a physics major :3 As of right now I don't think I have a favorite branch, but QM and General Relativity are contenders :3

I'm a programmer and amateur computer scientist :3 My favorite language is probably Rust but I also do work in many other languages (I'm at least familiar with C, C++, Python, and Java, I use Bash interactively but don't write many scripts, and I've dabbled in some others like Zig and MATLAB)

I use Linux! I'm not gonna put a particular distro here because I distrohop fairly frequently, but yes I've used Arch, yes I've used Nix, no I haven't used Gentoo or gone through LFS, no I don't have a favorite, yes I recommend you switch to Linux, and if you do, do research about distros before making a choice, and yes I understand there are reasons not to leave Windows and that Linux is not an option for everyone.

I'm not a HEMA fencer yet, but I’m looking to learn :3

I play many TCGs, but keep up-to-date primarily on Yugioh! My favorite decks are Fire King, Azamina White Forest, and Ryzeal

I’ve started working through Lingua Latina, but currently don’t know much Latin

Fandoms

Below is a non exhaustive list of pieces of media that I’m interested in. You are allowed to talk to me about any of them regardless of their placement on the list!

The "big" ones (ones which you will almost certainly see on this blog):

Murder Drones

Undertale/Deltarune

Hollow Knight/Silksong (P5, RadAbsRad, RadKoth)

The "medium" ones (ones where I'm deeply interested in them personally but don't interact with the community all that much):

The Yugioh anime (specifically Yugioh Duel Monsters as well as Yugioh Zexel)

The Pokemon games (though... after SwSh it's been a little... mehhh~ I haven't made it through Legends Arceus yet)

Anything Brandon Sanderson has written (I’m not caught up with the Cosmere as of rn)

The Licanius trilogy

Girl’s Night

Doom, both the classics and the modern ones (I love Boomer Shooters in general and would love to talk about Dusk, Blood, Ultrakill, you name it). GGs to Coincident on Okuplok :3

Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 3, Sekiro, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring

Inscryption (No Skull Storm yet)

The "small" ones (ones where I used to be deeply interested in them but no longer am, or ones where I'd love to be deeply interested in them but haven't interacted all that much with the media in question. Feel free to talk/infodump to me about them anyway!):

Celeste (I’m like 8/24 in terms of Dashless+ Progress I think? I don’t remember)

The Pokemon anime

FNaF, as well as some other FNaF custom nights and maxmodes (both the ones from the official games and from fangames)

Some IWBTG fangames (I haven’t done any super hard needle but I’d love to practice in the future)

Dust: An Elysian Tail

I don’t play much Geometry Dash anymore but I’ve cleared cCc and have Acu in a few runs idk lol maybe I’ll go back and beat it eventually

I haven’t played Dead Cells in a while but I’ve cleared 5bc so that’s cool

I also haven’t played Hades in a while, I got the epilogue and didn’t really bother to keep going with higher Heat and stuff

Punch Out (I haven’t beat Mike Tyson in the NES game yet)

Ori and the Blind Forest/Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Hyper Light Drifter (I’ve only beaten the game and have done little else, am looking to get back into it)

Yume Nikki

Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion

Buckshot Roulette

My Friendly Neighborhood

Indivisible

Doki Doki Literature Club

Portal/Portal 2

Superhot (the whole series, though I haven’t played the VR one)

This blog

This blog was originally meant to be Murder Drones exclusively, but nowadays is multifandom. Although I have posted nonrandom things here in the past, I'm thinking about creating a sideblog for that, so that only fandom things stay here (I'm not sure if I'll ever make fandom specific sideblogs for the purposes of sorting between Murder Drones, UT/DR, and HK/SS, I think most people who followed me for one of the three fandoms are pretty content with seeing all three)

I generally don't reblog ship art (unless it's platonic) or anything I consider too suggestive or raunchy. This blog is to remain SFW at all times.

Please keep me out of queer discourse, shipping discourse, or any other discourse. I'm not here to fight. I don’t like it when groups throw horrible words at each other.

Asks

I don't roleplay. I used to do this thing where I'd answer asks in J's voice but people would misconstrue this for me being a J roleplay blog so unless you're close I will no longer allow this.

If you want to be friends with me...

I'm going to be up front about this, I break down pretty frequently and need a lot of comfort/reassurance when it happens (and just in general). I know I'm a very chipper and easily-excitable person but if you find it difficult to handle me while I'm having a breakdown or otherwise am in need of comfort, I kindly ask that you try to be a little careful when you talk to me. I want the people that I'm close to to be the ones that I'm able to be vulnerable with.

Tags

#jylposting - My own text posts

#jyl answers - Asks which I've answered

#pen friend j - For old stuff related to me answering asks as J

#jyl archive - For things reblogged from my old Tumblr account

#enzaposting - For @grapekn1ght posts

#sytoet - For a fiction project I started called "I've Decided It's Too Hard To Go On" (I wrote one chapter for this and then got real busy with university. I may come back to it later though, as I have a lot of ideas).

#jyl tickles - You can block this tag, I don't mind. Although I don't use it much, occasionally I find some insanely good tickle art for a fandom I'm in or just feel the need to leepost on main.

That's all! :3

Lots of love to the Azaminae: @entitiy-4, @ziekkfreak2-0, @l0cal-corvid, @confused-and-thriving, @four-of-heartssssss, @nepenthesintent, @deepseadrone, and @b-berry-shortcake. You all are some of my most wonderful friends and I love you all so much <3 /p

Here's the link to my previous pinned post if you want to see it.

<3

[opextras]

Hey! Thanks for visiting my blog! For best viewing experience, check it out on desktop. There are a lot of extra features that make finding specific content easier.

Updates

[5.15] I just got java script editing back, so I’ll be updating the navigation pages.

[5.15] Added navigation and FAQ pages in description that are easier to use on mobile. Mobile navigation page to be updated after I finish updating the desktop version.

[7.12] Navigation pages updated: “nav” “party” and “school”.

About

This blog was made to collect any extra material that isn’t the main story of One Piece, so it’s easy to find in one place. This includes SBSes, cover stories and pages, spin offs, activities, etc. The current spin offs aren’t fully translated in English so I’ll also be working to fill in any gaps that I can.

Asks and submissions are always open. This blog is run by @kai-teaa​ :)

Translation Disclaimer

I am not a native/fluent Japanese speaker nor learning in an academic setting. I just translate for fun and to the best of my ability. Therefore, there will most likely be errors or nuances I miss.

Schedule

Posting four times daily. Translations of One Piece Party and School updated randomly.

Quick Links

Navigation | FAQ | OP Party (tag) | OP School (tag)

[judhudson]

Types of Programming Languages & How to Use them?

Welcome to my blog. My name is Jud Hudson and I am a custom software developer from United States. I have been worked in this industry for more than 7 years and I have developed hundreds of great tools for various clients using different kind of software programming languages. I have the ability to call my self experienced developer since I have a lot of past projects using Python, Java & Ruby. I have worked with many other programming languages in the past, but these are my top 3 which made me a professional developer.

Types of Programming Languages

In addition, I am a very creative person who have such a lot of ideas during the creation process. However, I always follow the these types of programming languages:

- Procedural;

- Functional;

- Scripting;

- Logic;

- Object-Oriented Programming Language.

What kind of Projects (Tools) you will find here?

At this blog I will write some useful information regarding the software development process and I will try to write as much as more simpler so the beginners will be also able to understand the whole concept. I will write posts about some of the projects I have worked in the past and I will also mention some details about the current projects. However, I will not reveal that much information of those since they are still in the building process. As I already mentioned above, I work for some clients and most of them don’t want their projects be copied by some random people.

Tutorials & Guides

I will really try to write simpler so everyone can understand. My guides will contain very basic sentences and with that they can be easily followed. I am also opened for answering any questions. Therefore, feel free to leave your questions in comment below any specific post. I will try to answer once I noticed the comment.

That is all to say in the welcome post. Stay tuned for the first guide at which you will learn how you can develop a tool which will be able to reset specific version of software. I will try to explain which programming languages are necessary for doing this and how to follow some super-simple steps in order to reset particular software. Please keep in mind that I am pretty busy during the day since I work for the clients and as of reason of that I will try to update my blog at least once a week.

[southeastasianists]

If you’re a medieval historian, you normally work a lot with manuscripts. A manuscript is just a text written by hand, although manuscripts are distinguished from inscriptions by the material on which they are written: a manuscript is normally written on perishable materials — like calfskin in much of Europe, birch bark in Russia and Central Asia, bamboo and paper in East Asia, and palm leaves in India and Southeast Asia — while an inscription is cut into a stone or metal surface. Manuscripts are usually a lot more informative than inscriptions and also a lot more diverse in content and authorship. In Europe and Northeast Asia there are a lot of medieval manuscripts.

An image from Royal Armouries manuscript I.33, the oldest armed martial arts treatise in the world. It was written in southern Germany in the early fourteenth century, and is thus older than almost any extant Indo-Malaysian manuscript on any topic. This says a lot about the range of sources historians working in each region can expect to use. Full manuscript can be found here (Wiktenauer).

Manuscripts are often illustrated, giving valuable information about life and times not explicitly recorded in writing. Their pages can be dated chemically, giving reasonably precise dates even to texts without written chronograms — although this isn’t necessary with many texts, as close dates can often be established on the basis of the script. If the script looks like a fourteenth-century script, you’re probably looking at a fourteenth-century text (although there’s more to it than that). There are enough texts to allow for this kind of detailed palaeographic analysis in much of Europe and temperate Asia.

The language and script (littera hybrida) of this manuscript tell us that it was written in around the middle of the fifteenth century in the Low Countries. There are tons of manuscripts in littera hybrida; it was practically the national script of the Netherlands in the fifteenth century.

All of this should be reasonably obvious and well-known. Here, though, I want to point out that medieval Afro-Eurasia — let’s leave the Americas aside for the purposes of this article — wasn’t a single temperate environment in which both state and private archives hoarded and preserved large numbers of texts written on organic materials. These kinds of sources just aren’t available for much of the world, whether because writing never developed there or because organic materials don’t last long in certain environments. Naturally, these problems are particularly acute in humid tropical climates.

In much of the tropics, insects, heat, and humidity meant that even if texts were written on palm leaves and animal skins, they had to be deliberately preserved or copied perhaps once in a generation in order to make their way down to us today. This wasn’t the case in England or China; a locked wooden box in a parish church or town hall would be sufficient to keep a piece of parchment safe and few special measures needed to be taken. The medieval historical record is thus inherently biased in favour of societies in temperate climes.

The number of genuinely medieval manuscripts from Southeast Asia can be counted on one hand, even though we know from inscriptions that writing has a long history in the region (dating back to the fourth century and possibly earlier). The oldest extant Malay manuscript has been radiocarbon dated to the fourteenth century, even though the oldest Malay inscriptions date to the seventh century and are thus slightly older than the oldest texts in English. We are consequently reliant on inscriptions for the reconstruction of much of medieval Indo-Malaysian history and society, and on much later (definitively post-medieval) manuscripts for the study of Southeast Asian literature. This gives a particular spin to historical events and restricts what can be studied through traditional philological methods.

“Raja Barus”, ‘the King of Barus’ in a Malay manuscript of 1797, one of the oldest copies of the Hikayat Raja Pasai. The story probably dates to the fourteenth century. Yes: it was written in the late eighteenth century. Yes: it’s a good source for the fourteenth century. That’s how a lot of history in the tropics works. Deal with it.

This presents scholars of the medieval Old World tropics with a bit of a problem. Historians of medieval Europe can freely parade manuscript illustrations in books and, nowadays, on social networks without any qualms because the illustrations they’re showing off are bona fide medieval images. But you can’t do that if the manuscripts didn’t survive, and there are a lot of issues involved in using later manuscripts to demonstrate earlier art and history. How can a complete picture of the Hemispheric Middle Ages be created and shown to the world when Indonesian and tropical African manuscripts are so late and so poorly represented?

Should scholars of the medieval tropics focus on ‘legitimately’ medieval things — bronzes, inscriptions, reliefs — or should they include later images of supposedly earlier phenomena and risk collapsing the entire history of e.g. Indonesia into one undivided whole?

In museums you tend to find the latter approach. In the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the oldest keris in the world (made, or at least inscribed, in 1342 CE) is in the same case as a piece of nineteenth-century Muslim headgear. Colonial-era dress and artworks rub shoulders with tenth-century bronzes and thirteenth-century statues. I find that problematic; you wouldn’t put a medieval English sword and a Regency-era lady’s bonnet in the same display, I shouldn’t think. Europe and Indonesia are thus treated differently: Europe’s history is divided into sections that are studied more or less independently while Asian history, and especially tropical Asian history, is treated as one inseparable whole, divided more by region than by period. This is one reason among many why Southeast Asia may never be integrated into the academic study of the medieval world (let alone the popular imagination about the Middle Ages).

And what about eastern Indonesia and New Guinea? Neither part produced any written literature, as far as we know, before the fifteenth century, and the oldest manuscripts from eastern Indonesia date to the early sixteenth century. New Guinea was part of the medieval world; it was certainly known to people in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Java and other parts of Indonesia. But what can we show the world to represent this medieval Papuan history? There aren’t any manuscripts. There aren’t even any sculptures or very many bronze objects (although some of the latter are occasionally found). That doesn’t mean New Guinea just vanished from the world in the Middle Ages or that the people there preserved some primordial ‘Stone Age’ lifeways, though, as the popular imagination seems to have it.

Art in New Guinea, whether on the coasts or in the highlands, is dominated by wooden sculpture. While plenty of carved wooden objects survive from temperate medieval Eurasia, no examples of the wooden sculpture of medieval New Guinea have come down to us. Can we assume that modern sculpture is representative of earlier tradition?

That seems like a big leap to me. New Guinea isn’t a primeval place unchanged since the dawn of time but rather a place full of creative human beings, a place where fashion and religion operate like they do anywhere else. Showing a Papuan carving made in the twentieth century by a specific artist from a particular ethnic group as if it were representative of a prehistoric or medieval tradition would ultimately be as peculiar as using David Hockney’s oeuvre to showcase medieval English painting. Style always changes. Where truly medieval eastern Indonesian art has survived, as with a few of the lovely textiles preserved as heirlooms in Timor, the motifs are strikingly different from modern ones.

If we want to raise awareness of the tropical world, then, how do we go about it? How can scholars working on Europe get to know island Southeast Asia and the Swahili coast without introducing an orientalist bias that treats the Middle Ages as identical to modern times, or to some arbitrary ‘traditional’ point in the past? It’s a real conundrum. I suspect, though, that the solution is to help expand the traditional medievalist’s view of what constitutes valid evidence about the medieval world — and perhaps to highlight the ways in which the temperate world diverges from the tropics.

Does the absence of a written or artistic or sculptural record exclude a place from consideration as part of the ‘Global Middle Ages’? Yes — if you restrict yourself to the methods and ideas of traditional medieval scholarship. But if the objective is to account for and better understand the world before the Columbian Exchange, methods simply have to be broadened: the triangulation of archaeology, comparative ethnography, historical linguistics, oral history, and ethnohistory has to be brought in to complement traditional philological scholarship. If that isn’t done then our image of the medieval world will always be restricted to what was written down and preserved, and that naturally introduces a bias towards the temperate — and perhaps also to the European, the white, and the colonial.

This article first appeared as a post on the Medieval Indonesia blog, and a version of its argument has appeared in print in Bryan C. Keene (ed.), 2019,Toward a Global Middle Ages, Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum.

[shinelikethunder]

Fandom Userscript Cookbook: Five Projects to Get Your Feet Wet

Target audience: This post is dedicated, with love, to all novice, aspiring, occasional, or thwarted coders in fandom. If you did a code bootcamp once and don’t know where to start applying your new skillz, this is for you. If you're pretty good with HTML and CSS but the W3Schools Javascript tutorials have you feeling out of your depth, this is for you. If you can do neat things in Python but don’t know a good entry point for web programming, this is for you. Seasoned programmers looking for small, fun, low-investment hobby projects with useful end results are also welcome to raid this post for ideas.

You will need:

The Tampermonkey browser extension to run and edit userscripts

A handful of example userscripts from greasyfork.org. Just pick a few that look nifty and install them. AO3 Savior is a solid starting point for fandom tinkering.

Your browser dev tools. Hit F12 or right click > Inspect Element to find the stuff on the page you want to tweak and experiment with it. Move over to the Console tab once you’ve got code to test out and debug.

Javascript references and tutorials. W3Schools has loads of both. Mozilla’s JS documentation is top-notch, and I often just keep their reference lists of built-in String and Array functions open in tabs as I code. StackOverflow is useful for questions, but don’t assume the code snippets you find there are always reliable or copypastable.

That’s it. No development environment. No installing node.js or Ruby or Java or two different versions of Python. No build tools, no dependency management, no fucking Docker containers. No command line, even. Just a browser extension, the browser’s built-in dev tools, and reference material. Let’s go.

You might also want:

jQuery and its documentation. If you’re wrestling with a mess of generic spans and divs and sparse, unhelpful use of classes, jQuery selectors are your best bet for finding the element you want before you snap and go on a murderous rampage. jQuery also happens to be the most ubiquitous JS library out there, the essential Swiss army knife for working with Javascript’s... quirks, so experience with it is useful. It gets a bad rap because trying to build a whole house with a Swiss army knife is a fool’s errand, but it’s excellent for the stuff we're about to do.

Git or other source control, if you’ve already got it set up. By all means share your work on Github. Greasy Fork can publish a userscript from a Github repo. It can also publish a userscript from an uploaded text file or some code you pasted into the upload form, so don’t stress about it if you’re using a more informal process.

A text editor. Yes, seriously, this is optional. It’s a question of whether you’d rather code everything right there in Tampermonkey’s live editor, or keep a separate copy to paste into Tampermonkey’s live editor for testing. Are you feeling lucky, punk?

Project #1: Hack on an existing userscript

Install some nifty-looking scripts for websites you visit regularly. Use them. Ponder small additions that would make them even niftier. Take a look at their code in the Tampermonkey editor. (Dashboard > click on the script name.) Try to figure out what each bit is doing.

Then change something, hit save, and refresh the page.

Break it. Make it select the wrong element on the page to modify. Make it blow up with a huge pile of console errors. Add a console.log("I’m a teapot"); in the middle of a loop so it prints fifty times. Savor your power to make the background wizardry of the internet do incredibly dumb shit.

Then try a small improvement. It will probably break again. That's why you've got the live editor and the console, baby--poke it, prod it, and make it log everything it's doing until you've made it work.

Suggested bells and whistles to make the already-excellent AO3 Savior script even fancier:

Enable wildcards on a field that currently requires an exact match. Surely there’s at least one song lyric or Richard Siken quote you never want to see in any part of a fic title ever again, right?

Add some text to the placeholder message. Give it a pretty background color. Change the amount of space it takes up on the page.

Blacklist any work with more than 10 fandoms listed. Then add a line to the AO3 Savior Config script to make the number customizable.

Add a global blacklist of terms that will get a work hidden no matter what field they're in.

Add a list of blacklisted tag combinations. Like "I'm okay with some coffee shop AUs, but the ones that are also tagged as fluff don't interest me, please hide them." Or "Character A/Character B is cute but I don't want to read PWP about them."

Anything else you think of!

Project #2: Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Fork (DIY blacklisting)

Looking at existing scripts as a model for the boilerplate you'll need, create a script that runs on a site you use regularly that doesn't already have a blacklisting/filtering feature. If you can't think of one, Dreamwidth comments make a good guinea pig. (There's a blacklist script for them out there, but reinventing wheels for fun is how you learn, right? ...right?) Create a simple blacklisting script of your own for that site.

Start small for the site-specific HTML wrangling. Take an array of blacklisted keywords and log any chunk of post/comment text that contains one of them.

Then try to make the post/comment it belongs to disappear.

Then add a placeholder.

Then get fancy with whitelists and matching metadata like usernames/titles/tags as well.

Crib from existing blacklist scripts like AO3 Savior as shamelessly as you feel the need to. If you publish the resulting userscript for others to install (which you should, if it fills an unmet need!), please comment up any substantial chunks of copypasted or closely-reproduced code with credit/a link to the original. If your script basically is the original with some key changes, like our extra-fancy AO3 Savior above, see if there’s a public Git repo you can fork.

Project #3: Make the dread Tumblr beast do a thing

Create a small script that runs on the Tumblr dashboard. Make it find all the posts on the page and log their IDs. Then log whether they're originals or reblogs. Then add a fancy border to the originals. Then add a different fancy border to your own posts. All of this data should be right there in the post HTML, so no need to derive it by looking for "x reblogged y" or source links or whatever--just make liberal use of Inspect Element and the post's data- attributes.

Extra credit: Explore the wildly variable messes that Tumblr's API spews out, and try to recreate XKit's timestamps feature with jQuery AJAX calls. (Post timestamps are one of the few reliable API data points.) Get a zillion bright ideas about what else you could do with the API data. Go through more actual post data to catalogue all the inconsistencies you’d have to catch. Cry as Tumblr kills the dream you dreamed.

Project #4: Make the dread Tumblr beast FIX a thing

Create a script that runs on individual Tumblr blogs (subdomains of tumblr.com). Browse some blogs with various themes until you've found a post with the upside-down reblog-chain bug and a post with reblogs displaying normally. Note the HTML differences between them. Make the script detect and highlight upside-down stacks of blockquotes. Then see if you can make it extract the blockquotes and reassemble them in the correct order. At this point you may be mobbed by friends and acquaintainces who want a fix for this fucking bug, which you can take as an opportunity to bury any lingering doubts about the usefulness of your scripting adventures.

(Note: Upside-down reblogs are the bug du jour as of September 2019. If you stumble upon this post later, please substitute whatever the latest Tumblr fuckery is that you'd like to fix.)

Project #5: Regular expressions are a hard limit

I mentioned up above that Dreamwidth comments are good guinea pigs for user scripting? You know what that means. Kinkmemes. Anon memes too, but kinkmemes (appropriately enough) offer so many opportunities for coding masochism. So here's a little exercise in sadism on my part, for anyone who wants to have fun (or "fun") with regular expressions:

Write a userscript that highlights all the prompts on any given page of a kinkmeme that have been filled.

Specifically, scan all the comment subject lines on the page for anything that looks like the title of a kinkmeme fill, and if you find one, highlight the prompt at the top of its thread. The nice ones will start with "FILL:" or end with "part 1/?" or "3/3 COMPLETE." The less nice ones will be more like "(former) minifill [37a / 50(?)] still haven't thought of a name for this thing" or "title that's just the subject line of the original prompt, Chapter 3." Your job is to catch as many of the weird ones as you can using regular expressions, while keeping false positives to a minimum.

Test it out on a real live kinkmeme, especially one without strict subject-line-formatting policies. I guarantee you, you will be delighted at some of the arcane shit your script manages to catch. And probably astonished at some of the arcane shit you never thought to look for because who the hell would even format a kinkmeme fill like that? Truly, freeform user input is a wonderful and terrible thing.

If that's not enough masochism for you, you could always try to make the script work on LiveJournal kinkmemes too!

[unichrome]

jRAT: The Spy and Controller

jRAT (also known as Adwind) is, as the name suggest, a RAT. This is a type of computer malware that is probably the worst type to get infected by, as the acronym stands for Remote Access Trojan, meaning the attacker behind the infection will have complete control of your computer remotely. The attacker can, for example, log everything you type (including passwords), spy through the webcam, download and upload files from your computer, stop programs from running, and more.

In this post I will write specifically about how jRAT works, but the purpose of the malware is the same as any RAT - spying and stealing information. And don't worry, you won't need a computer science background of any kind to understand this post!

As with many other malware infections, they start by the user initiating the infection chain, thinking it is something else. This is where the "Trojan" part comes in, as in the Trojan Horse - You think you are opening one thing, for example an invoice or shipping confirmation in an email, but it is actually the malware you are starting up. It can arrive as an attachment asking for payment, a link in an email that seems to be from DHL with a package tracking number... The lures are many and sometimes very well made.

jRAT is depending on having Java installed, as the initial malicious file will run on Java, and its file will have an .jar-extension. It will start by establishing contact with a so-called "C&C" (Command and Control) server, which I have written more about in this post, but it is in short like a secret meeting place on the internet where malware go to fetch further instructions or files. one of the reasons for doing this is that it makes it harder for antivirus software to stop it. Once it has made contact with the C&C, it will immediately replace itself with the newest version and fetch three new files with different purposes. All of the will be located under the folder AppData/Local/Temp/, which is common for malware as it's kind of an all-purpose location, hiding in plain sight among other random files. The fetched files are:

1. A .class-file with a random name, for example _0.57339082331822999210753159459375475.class - this is the main malware "body" and is actually a .jar (Java) file, and it is responsible for all the control the attacker will have of your computer. It will also drop a copy of itself under the user folder, which is later used for persistence (I will go into this part later).

2. VBS-files (Visual Basic Script, a kind of scripting language made by Microsoft and is commonly used with Windows software) with random names, for example HOMgGlvQhbNYUpH8623951051131488128.vbs - these files will check the system for any antiviruses and other security products installed. Kind of like checking the perimeter for guards.

3. A .reg-file also under the same location and a random name such as cYlDEVVYAP4997887052104582959.reg - these will execute via reg.exe Windows process to create registry entries. The Windows registry is kind of a library for software, where settings and information software use is stored and referred to. Here jRAT will create entries of known antivirus, analysis and security products, for example Malwarebytes antivirus. The purpose of all these entries is so that whenever the system detects a new program started and it is in this registry list, it will immediately be stopped. So most of the tools available that could remove or analyse this infection will no longer start up or work.

Additionally, once the infection is complete and jRAT is landed safely in your system, it will create assistance files that provides the many spying functionalities of jRAT. They are all named “Windows” followed by 19 random digits, to appear like they are part of the system and avoid being deleted.

Now, returning to what I said about persistency: In malware terms, "persistency" means "how the malware will start up again whenever the computer is restarted, without user interaction or knowledge". There are many ways to achieve this, and here's how jRAT does it; since it is depending on Java to run, it will add Java to the Windows Auto Run registry collection. Windows looks into this part of the registry whenever your computer is started to see which programs it will run immediately on start-up, which is why you have programs like Spotify, Skype and Steam popping up in your face first thing in the morning. Additionally, in this auto run registry entry, it will also tell java that it should run the jRAT "body" file stored in the user folder under another randomly named folder. And as simple as that, jRAT will now run whenever you start up your computer

That's it, a short and hopefully not too technical explanation of how jRAT enters the system and remains hidden. but if you feel like you don't understand some part or have other questions, please don't hesitate to message me. I do not think there's such a thing as a stupid question. :)