BPFA's fans have probably been wondering where I am for the last few months. Well, I didn't want to advertise the fact but a fellow DF player I know offline roped me in as a playtester for "OpenDF". What I didn't know at the time was that their "free and open source clone" was using quite large chunks of the original source code.
There's no point breaking out the torches and pitchforks though. The code was... booby-trapped.
I'm typing this on my laptop in a cupboard in the Hackspace where we were working. The door's barricaded and the police and paramedics are on their way; I hope I can hold out long enough.
I don't know how he did it, and I don't ever want to know; I'm not good enough at maths to understand the details. But something in the code... Oh Armok help me I can't believe I'm typing this... It did things to them. One of the coders started talking in a weird language I've never heard before, and bleeding from his eyes. His eyes... There were... Things, inside them. Like little worms. The other one just... froze in place. I didn't stay long enough to see if he was breathing because the other one tried to grab me. I had to hit him with a fire extinguisher or he'd have gone for my throat! Someone else came in, a night-shift cleaner I think, and she looked at the code and it started happening to her too; I didn't feel like hanging around to see what happened next, but I could hear the screaming.
I think I know a little bit about what happened. There are lots of odd rumours out there about certain shapes and patterns that do something to the human mind. You've probably heard of Snow Crash, or a David Langford short story called BLIT. Well, apparently there's a grain of truth in it. Only catatonia, cardiac arrest or destroying your target's ability to comprehend language are not the worst thing you can do to someone's brain, it seems. And guess what Toady One has his doctorate in? Maybe that's why he quit academia to make videogames; either he was scared of what he'd realised he could do or it was drawing attention from the wrong sort of people.
I didn't think you could do it in ASCII art though. Or that he was protective enough of his intellectual property to use memetic weapons as DRM! And he got up in arms about Mermaid Farming...
Hang on, the cavalry are here. I hope I get a job with the Laundry out of this fiasco.
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Topic: PSA: Do NOT decompile the DF executable under any circumstances (Read 5038 times)