Everyone wants a demon bursting through the ground in an explosion of lava. There are classes for that. Nobody has ever asked for a scarf in our game, and our code doesn’t even know what a neck is.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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“Yikes”
Ended up closer to several departments and 10.
My head canon is that this comic made people work harder on image recognition.
First Dev: "Oof. Uh...hm. Ok. So...no, give me a second, I'm thinking...So, the player character already has an attribute for a familiar that we're not using, since we removed familiars from the game. We could use that as a scarf, I think. One of the options was a tiger that walked next to the character, we could translate that up and around to the neck. Animation would be tough...could we come up with some reason why the scarf sticks to his shirt? ...no? How about a reason why it's always fluttering behind him? ...ok. So yeah, that should work...I think. We're a month out from code freeze, so we won't be able to do much with it other than put it in."
After launch
Project Manager: "Hey, people on Twitch have discovered that some of the player's clothes disappear randomly if you lose to the lich in level six...?"
Second Dev: "Weird. I'll take a look..."
Second Dev, in Slack: "Hey, does anyone know why all of the neck-slot customization items are coded as cats? Turns out the Dog Lich still deletes cat familiars if you lose to it."
Been there, so many times.
Late in Perfect Dark Zero’s development (a complete shitshow to get launched for X360 day 1) we added something called “kill planes”, behind which all entities would get nuked. The aim was that you would physically move through the world and eventually get to “no turning back” points, behind which we could remove all entities to save some cycles.
Turns out there were a large amount of places that assumed that once they had a pointer to an entity that pointer would remain valid.
So yeah, code that was like “I’ll just flip this bit on this entity I kept track of” was now flipping random bits on memory.
These were fun to chase down.
In the end we inplemented NoTaD pointers (“notified on target destruction”, essentially weak pointers but this was back in the day when weak pointers and smart pointers weren’t really well defined) that would discover when the thing they took a precious pointer to was actually no longer valid.
I want to hear so many more of these stories.
In the end we inplemented NoTaD pointers (“notified on target destruction”, essentially weak pointers but this was back in the day when weak pointers and smart pointers weren’t really well defined) that would discover when the thing they took a precious pointer to was actually no longer valid.
It's weird to me that programming practice has changed that much in 20 years. That's still closer to today than to Dennis Richie doing his thing.
Also a cautionary tale on adding and removing features without plan or controls. Every 'hey could we add...? It's what everyones talking about!' is another step taken away from the design.
removed familiars
:(
Oh man, this has really cracked me up. You made me laugh so hard I was at risk of waking up my housemates
I still remember how much of a game changer it was when they had that glass of milk poured in Shrek.
I have also since accepted that "flowy" textures are really hard and that's the reason every character in every video game ever sleeps without a blanket or a duvet. It always annoy me, even though I understand that having a separate object move with the character is fucked. I get it. Completely. But my brain still goes: how are any of these characters healthy enough to go running around town when they should have severe pneumonia by now???
I had a client who thought I was a miracle worker for changing the color of every link on the site in under an hour.
Then he got mad because it took me three days to add one field to a form.
Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.
Dotcom days, my company charged a venue $30k for an "emergency change" to disable a form and all links to it.
The dev already had a system switch for it. $30k, 10-second change.
My ex brother in law is a commercial refrigeration tech. He did a emergency call to a restaurant that was losing temp on thier walk in freezer. Loaded with food that needed to be kept under freezing. Time was of the essence or all the food would be tossed due to health codes.
He came out diagnoses it. Qoutes a few grand to fix it. Approved. Then he fixes it in like 15min. Just tightened a single screw.
The owner was pissed he paid a few grand for 15min and a single screw tweak.
Tech looked at him and said he paid for it to be fixed. The fact that the fix was a single screw and which screw needed tweaking was specialized knowledge. He paid for the knowledge not the time.
I took that lesson to heart working in IT or really any field. Even when hiring people to do stuff for me. Sometimes it's not just the labor it's also the knowledge.
Isn't this like an urban legend with a guy tightening a screw? Pretty sure I heard this exact thing but in a factory of some sort
Edit: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/#1bbd5dce-72dc-448e-ac5e-9b48059cef66
In software as long as its not rushed you can quote something, fix it in 10 minutes and deliver it the next day and people will be amazed you finished it in under a day.
Foresight FTW.
Design mock ups are the bane of my existence.
What do you mean it’ll take 6 months…you have almost all the work done in your demo.
I made some buttons that navigate between pages that have laid out controls on them. Other than those specific navigations…nothing works.
a {
color: pink;
}
And then you realize that the previous programmer abused the anchors to build all of the buttons.
And 50% of the styles are marked as !important
Hey it's not my fault, this project was started in 2018 and they choose to use bootstrap.
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Not important? Sounds good to me.
(I hate that notation)
To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.
I once just asked how long if would take them to swap the chair and the table, and how long it would take to swap the window and that pillar. After all, it's just moving stuff around. They understood after that.
Careful, that table is critical for getting airflow over that server in the corner. If you move the table it will overheat and cause a cascade of failures and bankrupt the entire company.
And that’s a load bearing chair.
You've just reminded me of a funny time when playing the game Eco with friends. It's sort of like Minecraft but themed around ecological sustainable technological development, and the specialised labour necessary to make that happen. There were about 8 of us in total, and we would drop in and drop out over the course of a month
The way the electric power system worked in Eco is that in addition to dedicated objects you could place to expand the electrical grid, objects that use electricity could also act as repeaters, albeit with a much smaller radius. They didn't even need to be physically connected up to power for this to work. They weren't intended to be used as repeaters; the radius thing was just an artifact of how the electricity mechanic was implemented, to ensure that it wasn't too complex to build an electric grid.
When we were short of materials and expanding our settlements, I ended up implementing a kludge solution of just placing a few unconnected water pumps between our power station and the place we needed to connect to the grid. It was only intended to be a temporary solution — but there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
nipped off the server for a little while, and when I came back, everything had gone to hell due to massive outages across the entire grid. After a while of fruitless troubleshooting, I happened to walk past one of the places where there had previously been a water pump, but there was no longer. I discovered that someone had removed it as part of routine tidying up the world.
Surprised and exasperated, I asked my friend why they removed it, and they (justifiably) responded indignantly with "Well I'm sorry! I didn't know that it was a load bearing water pump!". "Load bearing water pump" ended up becoming a recurring joke in my friend group, persisting long after we finished playing Eco. The situation really captures the absurd inevitability of this kind of change
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Reminds me on how they had a single person (I think?) doing Batman’s cape for the Arkham games. That was their position, the person who makes the cape seem like a real piece of cloth.
I still think about how good the cape looked when flowing or in movement. They did an amazing job either way!
I love the capes in Helldivers 2 for some reason. That thing gets blown around, there must be some serious draft on the Super Destroyer. Best is when it gets blown over your head and you can't wiggle it off. You can also wiggle it over your arm and walk around like an ancient roman diplomat.
allegedly, Helldiver's armor has small fans that keep the cape flowing at all times.
I find cloth physics so fascinating. It's either really good or garbage. They never got it in destiny or destiny 2, it was always just a mess and they would've rather ditched it.
For Assassins Creed Black Flag they had an entire team of like 14 people just making sure the ocean looked pretty.
In very early 2000s my friends and I used to comment on water appearance in games. If I saw Black Flag ocean then I'd have probably shit myself. Really water was a benchmark between us still recall it on the amd 9500
and then a decade later they did Skull and Bones and somehow it looks way way worse
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I'm sad that the relevant xkcd is kinda obsolete now (because it's been long enough for that research team to finish going its thing).
Google photos is alarmingly good at object and individual recognition. It'll probably be used by the droid war killbots to distinguish "robot" from "human with bucket on head."
Immich blows Google photos completely out of the water on this, and all locally.
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The difference is: the demon wants to be summoned.
Consent should matter, you know!
I appreciate the joke, but the rules are exactly why they go "oof". The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.
You could make them go "oof" on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.
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