Tea Talk: The TF2 Community and charity

I frequent Reddit a lot. More specifically, I frequent /r/tf2 a lot. It’s like a more civilized SCUD with more fun things happening. Recently though, there was a thread that caught my attention. A teacher was asking for help. He or she has a student that falls on the autism spectrum, and the teacher found out that he likes TF2. Recently, the student has been getting into trouble and getting frustrated. One of the reason is that the student was getting bored of the entertainment available. Thus, the teacher turned to the community and requested for TF2-related images. The only… [Continue Reading]

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The Joys of CSS

No, I’m not talking about Counter-Strike: Source. I’m talking about Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading Style Sheets, better known as CSS, is a language used to make other languages look prettier. More specifically, it tells your web browser what a web page should look like. Even more specifically, CSS tells specific elements in your HTML what they should look like. Using CSS, you can make a background any colour you want, you can make text bigger and smaller, you can make links change colour when you hover and click on them, you can create menus, make pages mobile-friendly,  you can make… [Continue Reading]

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Reddit Admins are planning to remove custom CSS from subreddits. That’s stupid.

Ah, good old CSS. Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is beautiful. It can do so much stuff. It’s what makes the internet a beautiful place. CSS allows the customization of pretty much any site, works mostly the same on the majority of browsers (and almost always has workarounds for backwards bastard browsers like Internet Explorer) and that’s all it does. CSS makes things pretty. CSS is the language of style. Unlike HTML, Javascript or anything else, 99% of the time CSS keeps its coding claws out of actual content and focuses solely on looks. CSS allows me to make the Night… [Continue Reading]

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Twitch Plays Pokemon: A Legacy

Who remembers Twitch Plays Pokemon? It was exactly three years ago and one of the first massive online events I remember personally participating in. For those who weren’t there, here’s a quick rundown: on February 12 2014, a new Twitch stream opened up called “Twitch Plays Pokemon” that challenged the viewers to work together to beat the classic Pokemon Red. The game would recognize any commands input into the Twitch chat like “A”, “Up” or “Select” and would execute them in the order they were received. As TV Tropes put it, it was “over 100,000 people fighting over a controller.” And it… [Continue Reading]

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Why You Should Make GIFs

It’s fun to watch the internet evolve. Back in the early days the best way for gamers to show each other sick plays was through screenshots or YouTube videos. The problem is that screenshots aren’t terribly good at displaying exciting events like headshots or near escapes, and videos often require the viewer to navigate away from their current social media of choice to go watch the video. I know when I’m surfing reddit I often don’t have the attention span to click a link to YouTube and wait for the video to buffer in order to see the content. So… [Continue Reading]

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On Upvotes and Downvotes

At 1am the other day, I got into an argument with someone online, in a video game forum. Someone had made a post saying they had cancer. Whether that was true or not, no one knows, but someone in that thread was advocating not seeing a doctor and treating cancer with orange juice and turmeric. Of course, this set off my angry button as someone who goes around calling himself Medic. I replied to this insane person, saying that, whether the person really had cancer or otherwise, their suggestion of unproven food fads was fucking retarded, they should have been… [Continue Reading]

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On Reputation

SPUF is what one would call a forum or a bulletin board. Steam Community User Discussions (SCUD) is less of a bulletin board, more of a discussion board – it is a very trimmed down version of your standard forum software. Reddit is, well, um, something else. A strange, messy thing that has really taken off. Then you have a combination of the two, a bit like the League of Legends ‘boards’. Many forums just have basic features. You can make a thread. You can reply to threads. If you’re lucky there’s a personal message system. Some allow you to… [Continue Reading]

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