Four Island

One of my myriad of strange hobbies is making what I call "shitpost music". It's a hard to define genre, but for me this takes the form of tracks that are generally 20-30 seconds long, featuring a lot of samples from various things mixed together in a bizarre and comical way. It's pretty much the audio equivalent of the kind of stuff I'd post on Twitter.

I haven't talked about it on this blog before, because I mostly did it between 2014 and 2018, when I was not updating Four Island. It's also fairly sophomoric at times (I mean, my stage name is The Third Vagina, so like what do you expect). Plus, I've fallen out with the people who used to inspire me to make this kind of thing.

However, I'm happy to say that after a seven year hiatus, I've released a new shitpost album: How To Knock Over A Laundromat (Part 1)! (link)

It was fun to work on a project like this again, even if it's not exactly "high art". I mean, maybe it's art you'd come up with when you're high. I've never been high but I've watched TV before. Anyway.

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I've been watching Pluribus.

It's good! I've been trying to make a point of consuming new media lately, and I've gotten a lot of top-tier recommendations from friends. This, Severance, and my favorite, The Summer Hikaru Died, have been plaguing my thoughts. When I have feelings about media, my instinct is to write them down, whether that's via fanfiction, media analysis essays, or just infodumping into my friend Tooth's DMs. That is how I express my love for the work of others.

Of course, that's what this is. There's a question that constantly comes up when you talk about Pluribus. It's a funny one, because it purports to bring about unity, yet even asking it draws out concerns and beliefs that are individual to each of us. That question is: would you join the hivemind?

And, no. No, I would not.

(Spoilers for Pluribus after this point!)

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I know I've mostly been writing blog posts that are thousands of words long lately, but this is going to be a quick one! I just wanted to share some webdev advice that might be helpful. Maybe I can actually use my blog as a blog sometimes!

I like to include a lot of media in my aforementioned very long blog posts, in order to break up the blocks of text. The problem with this is that all of that media has to load, and it can be a little slow depending on how large the files are. By default, web pages do not know how much space to reserve for external media, which results in the contents of the page shifting around as everything loads in. This can be annoying, especially if you refresh the page when you're somewhat far down.

The main way to solve this problem is to set the HTML width and height attributes on the <img> tag. This way, the page can reserve the appropriate amount of space before the file gets fully downloaded. The reason this doesn't immediately work for me is because most of my images are intentionally wider than the content area of my website. I have max-width: 100% set on img tags in blog posts, which shrinks the image down to the right size. But if you have the image's height annotated on the img tag, the image will shrink to the correct width, but will be stretched out to the original height! Uh oh!

Luckily, the fix for this is very simple:

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Speedrunning is neat because it offers an incentive for replaying a game. Often, a second playthrough loses some of the charm of the first because you already know what to expect. You've already had the epiphanies. But speedrunning gives you an excuse to play the game in a different way. Now you make the rules (or, well, a community that manages a leaderboard makes the rules). And then there's the fact that many games have multiple categories to do runs in, giving you even more ways to look at the game and practice and have fun.

The Witness is no exception. It's a versatile game, and there are plenty of goals you can come up with, which exist on a sliding scale of "reasonable" to "how did you even think of this". It all just depends on how creative you are. I've been known to set bizarre goals in games before, like when I basically turned catching Raikou and Mewtwo in Pokemon FireRed into puzzles.

yr dedication to making games rly hard awes me

— 🇰🇷3 springrolls please✡️ (@shirAdrenaline) March 20, 2020

Today, I'm going to talk about a category called Minimum Right Clicks.

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Happy third day of the new year! It's time for the annual post I'm most likely to be consistent at doing because it's not very difficult to write: the roundup of the best quotes from last year. Last year's was fun so I hope you like this one too!

There were 78 new quotes this year! We had an average of 6.5 quotes per month, with March and November having 11 each. Most of the quotes are still submitted by me and most still contain me but I'm always happy when other people submit and when there's conversations that don't include me! And we got a lot of upvotes this time too, so we have some pretty clear winners.

As a note: there were 12 quotes tied for tenth place with 4 votes each, so I chose my favorite for that position. Also, if you've never seen the quotes on this website before, most of them are pretty NSFW so keep that in mind.

With that, let's get started!

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Happy New Year, everyone! It's 2026 now, and you know what that means: it's time for me to try to revive my blog by writing nostalgic posts! My aunt and I made a pact to blog more this year, so we'll see how well I can stick to that. In the past, I've done annual goals or silly predictions on the first of the year, but this time I think I'm going to cut in early with my music review post.

2025 was a great year for me in terms of music! It's been a goal of mine to listen to more new music (especially since the Great Debacle of 2023 when I only listened to two albums all year). I purchased or received eleven CDs since Christmas 2024 (but only ten albums, as I got one album twice!), which is improved from 2024 when I got five. While I did not reach an average of one album a month, I still think I kept myself occupied with songs I enjoyed listening to, rather than being stuck in a hole of listening to Memory Reboot and nothing else over and over.

This was also the year that I implemented the silly box on the sidebar of my blog that shows a random song I've been listening to lately. Just some fun with the last.fm API! It's been spoiling the names of some of the songs on my upcoming album, which I find amusing.

Once again, I've created a playlist of some of the songs I'll be talking about. Feel free to follow along as you read the post!

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(TL;DR I made a short Pokemon fangame that gives you the experience of catching a certain Mythical Pokemon! And no, it's not Arceus.)

What? Who's this?

It's Arceus!!

And it's a real, not-at-all-hacked one. I got it back in 2017ish (holy hay that's eight years ago now) from my ex, when we were still close. They had been talking with one of their coworkers and found out that that coworker had an event gen 4 Arceus from Toys 'R' Us way back then. They weren't interested in Pokemon anymore so they traded it to my ex who traded it to me, because Arceus is my favorite Pokemon (tied with Swoobat). And I'm like omg I have a legitimate fateful encounter Arceus![^2]

One of the reasons this is Awesome is that, well, back in 2017 you could not get Arceus without attending an event. Nowadays you get one for fully completing Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and then another one in Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl if you've finished PLA. But there's another reason this is Epic, and it's because having an Arceus in HeartGold / SoulSilver actually unlocks a secret area that cannot be otherwise accessed.

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Back in 2018, I was really into Celeste. It was pretty decidedly my favorite game at the time; the gameplay is fun, the music and art are beautiful, and the depiction of mental health issues was very striking. I highly recommend it, in case you've somehow made it this long without playing it.

One of the things that I got pretty invested in was the Golden Strawberries. Once you get far enough into the postgame, you unlock a special golden strawberry at the beginning of each stage, which you have to escort to the end without dying. In the past, I've tended not to enjoy deathless challenges because they felt like pointless difficulty padding, but there was something about Celeste that made it feel achievable, like you'd be able to get there if you just practiced hard enough.

There were 24 levels in the game at that point, and I made it my goal to get all 24 golden strawberries. I wrote about my progress as I went, and posted little video clips when I could. One of my favorite moments in this was practicing 6-a while sitting on the sofa at the office on my lunch break, and then suddenly realizing I was almost at the end. I can still remember the befuddled face my coworker made at me when I collected the berry. I managed to conquer all of the A-sides, all of the C-sides, and the first four B-sides, which meant my next task was 5-b.

So, a little time has passed. Seven years, in fact. Trying to get the 5-b golden strawberry proved too difficult for me back in 2018. The cycles and the spinners and the Theo section are all pretty intimidating. I even learned the spike jump skip in the second checkpoint so I could skip a room, but I still barely made it into the third checkpoint most of the time. I gave up on it eventually, and took a long break from Celeste.

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The Witness was released on January 26th of 2016 at 5pm UTC, and by the end of the day, it had already been patched twice. It would, in fact, receive another 7 patches before the week was up. None of these updates changed the content of the game, of course. They were all about fixing bugs.

This is not uncommon when it comes to video games in the modern era. No matter how much you test software before release, there are always issues that quality control misses. Sometimes this has to do with the different technical environment that release puts your game in, and sometimes it has to do with gameplay bugs that only a wider audience can reveal for you.

Speedrunners have an interesting relationship with game updates. A game is usually updated in good faith, with the goal of bettering the casual player's experience. Stuff like lag reduction and increased leniency in difficult portions of the game are generally considered positive by everyone. But there are some changes that are beneficial to casual players which hinder speedrunners: most notably, the removal of useful glitches.

Today, on the nine year anniversary of its release, I will be talking about how The Witness has changed for speedrunners over time, and the history of New Version vs Old Version.

Disclaimer as per usual that this post contains a lot of spoilers for The Witness, including major mechanic reveals and also some full puzzle solutions. It's also long; I'm talking 13,000 words long. It got so long I had to widen a database column and split part of it into a separate post. Have fun!

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Well folks, I really did it this time. My propensity for prolix loquaciousness and overly comprehensive tutorialization has aggrandized to a heretofore novel level. I was working on a post about the history of updates to The Witness and how they affected speedrunners, and it got so long that it overflowed the database column (it had a max of 64kb, which I hit at about 11k words). I've resized that field now, but I had been considering breaking out some of the content into a separate post anyway, and I took this as a sign that I should get on that.

Old Version has a bunch of cool quirks and glitches, but there's one trick in particular that I spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about. It makes use of a glitch that no one thought was useful, it prompted discussions about whether you could mess with game files during a run, and research had to be done into the game's internal workings, the results of which ended up being important beyond just this trick. And also I was "at the scene of the crime", as they say.

Today, I'm going to talk about Force Bridge Skip.

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