Bay 12 Games Forum

Could you link me to this I want to fume angrily at it in solidarity.

It's part of that other Podcast I mentioned repeatedly, they have episodes on a variety of topics, also in the link in my bio.

QAnonAnonymous episode 95 was about Andy Ngo, while episode 97 was about General Flynn.

Now the interesting thing about Flynn is that the Q-tards love him, and he's been amplifying some Q slogans, but in an extremely aware sort of way compared to the oblivious way some other Republicans retweet Q stuff.

Flynn knows what he's doing. My real fear now is that Flynn will hijack the entire Q thing, since Q is supposedly a high-ranking military intel operative, Flynn could very easily just jump up and say "I was Q all along!" and he'd instantly have a literally brainwashed army of goons and opportunists jumping onto the bandwagon for Trump 2: Flynn Q Boogaloo. Flynn gave a "digital soldiers" speech where he really hammers down on this stuff. They're not keyboard warriors, they're the good type: digital soldiers, spreading memes to own the libs in the Great Meme War. We ask how it could get more fucked up than Trump, and i present my answer to that.

Q created a special oath, and this was spread on social media, it's a mutation on the normal oath of office, but with Where We Go One, We Go All at the end. Flynn videoed himself doing the oath:
https://www.news8000.com/i/michael-flynn-posts-video-featuring-qanon-slogans/

“This is absolutely pro-QAnon,” said Mike Rothschild, who recently published a book examining and debunking some of the most prominent conspiracy theories.

^ very unfortunate surname for a conspiracy debunker.

I remember a few videos I saw that showed it messing with the right half of the screen but not the left half, like the left half looked normal but the right half was corrupted infinitely generating dots and very very pixelated, not even looking like a maze

What's happened is it drew 256 fruit into a buffer that's meant to hold the symbols for 7 fruit. This then overwrites the right hand part of the screen going downwards. Why would it do that though? Traditional Japanese writing flows in the same direction as the gibberish symbols seem to be in Pac Man level 256. So in other words it feels weird that that's the direction of the screen buffer they went with, but only if you're taking an English-centric view of how things are supposed to be. It's reasonable to assume the designer laid out the map like that because that's how Japanese writing works.

The reason most of the symbols are gibberish is because not only does the bug over-write the part of memory they're meant to be writing to, it also reads way past the part of memory it's meant to be copying from. After all, it was only expected to copy 7 symbols for one place in memory to another, but it reads and copies 256 "symbols" instead, which is basically reading random memory contents that have nothing to do with symbols. And, similar to glitch pokemon, those values could exceed the number of actual symbols the game knows about, so when it comes to draw the screen, it's drawing some real symbols, but also copying blocks of pure gibberish and putting those on the screen.

However the NES version got to American shores far later and in far smaller numbers.

They sold 7 million copies of Atari Pac Man.

EDIT: I'm having to re-edit this on reading closer.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/nes/pac-man/release-info

The American NES owners didn't get Pac Man until 1988, and that was a bootleg version. The licensed version actually came out in 1990. So it was literally a 10 year old game before any actual NES owners saw that. It missed the boat by a decade.

So, year Atari Pac Man isn't as faithful to the arcade as NES Pac Man, but it had the advantage that you could play that in 1982 vs 1990.

It's a coding error, because there is no check to prevent further increment, which then corrupts the next byte over.

That's not actually what happens.

What happens is that there's a test for level number for displaying the fruit in the bottom right, there are three if-statements for cases of levels 1-7, level 8-18 and level 19+. From level 19 onwards it always draws the same thing. The notable part here is that on levels 1-7 it draws a variable amount of fruit (up to 7), but from level 8 onwards it always draws the full 7 fruit. The "draw a variable amount of fruit" is important for how the bug works.

The internal level number is always from zero, and what the game does is add 1 to that number, then use that value for the if statement. On level 255, it adds one to this, giving level 256, but since it's only a 1-byte number, this is treated as zero. Then the if-statement, it says "hey zero is less than 8!" so it runs the code for levels 1-7.

So, what does the code for levels 1-7 do? It starts a counter at 1, draws a fruit from the fruit table, increments the counter, and it stops drawing when the counter equals the level number. Since the level number is now zero however, it counts all the way up from 1 to 255, then loops back to zero, then says "hey zero, right, ok I'll stop now!"

So, instead of a maximum of 7 fruit like it's supposed to, it draws 256 fruit to the screen, but this overflows the part of memory for the fruit and starts overwriting the map.

EDIT: it's actually far more interesting than just saying a value overflowed, which isn't what's going on, since the number of stars that had to align and overlapping edge cases involved here is pretty interesting. If they never did the add-1 trick before the if-statement then it would have been fine, the first level would have been level 0, and the game would seamlessly wrap around to level "0". Alternatively, if the fruit-drawer had used "less than or equal" instead of "equal" to test when to stop this bug would never have appeared in the first place, or it would merely have drawn no fruit on that level.

I really do recommend the QAnonAnonymous podcast for this stuff, they cover the real stuff they believe, the QAnon news/drama etc, related conspiracies, but they do it in a comedic way rather than dry. Overview episode
https://podbay.fm/p/qanon-anonymous/e/1534028538

But this stuff is literally seeping into everything now. I mean, I hear related conspiracies just down the street.

To give an idea, here's a Guardian article from October saying that 1/4 Britons believe at least some QAnon related conspiracies.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/22/one-in-four-britons-believe-in-qanon-linked-theories-survey

The research for Hope Not Hate also found that 17% of people questioned said they believed Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan” by the UN or “new world order”.

It found that QAnon, which originated in the US where the FBI has designated it as a potential terror threat, is making particular inroads among young people.

While 6% of those polled claimed to support QAnon, larger percentages supported broader, linked conspiracies. A quarter (25%) agreed that “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”. This rose to 35% among people aged 18-24. A similar proportion (26%) agreed that “elites in Hollywood, politics, the media and other powerful positions” are secretly engaging in large-scale child trafficking and abuse.

There was more support (29%) for the claim that there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together” regardless of who is in government. This was believed by 42% of 25- to 34-year-olds.

Note here that a full 1/3 of Gen-Z are buying into the satanic cults thing. The always-online generation seem well and truly unhinged. Perhaps people who've grown up in the Trump years don't have a good compass on what normal actually is. The worrying part is that people who believe that also tend to be Trump people.

Here's an example of a soft-pilling video, designed to ease you into the crazy. A lot of the stuff is subtle so you won't know how you're being played into believe a fascistic cult conspiracy unless you read up a lot about this stuff. This guy is a new age idiot but the people behind all of this are actually full on neo-fascist types.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CF1eqDLdts

Early on he says "do your own research" and "go down the rabbit hole", this is a common set up, they say to do "your" own research but then they prime you for the things you're supposed to look for which will lead you to where they want to manipulate you.

One point to note is how he slips in how people don't want the "Bill Gates Vaccine" for the Coronavirus, as if such a thing actually exists. So this is slipped in matter-of-factly so you can do "your" own research, entirely not influenced by the video, right? There's no such vaccine and the whole bill gates vaccine thing is based on misinformation. The conspiracy claim is that Bill Gates wants to "depopulate" the world with a vaccine. i.e. Bill Gates = killer vaccine. However, the actual basis for that is that Bill Gates promotes vaccination for third-world countries because this will decrease child mortality, and if child mortality decreases, people there will have smaller families. He's on video saying this exact bit, and that statement is the entire basis for the conspiracy theory. So Bill Gates says it's a bad thing that poor people have 20 kids but 15 of them die, so we should take better care of the living ones and that would mean people don't have as many kids anymore, and they decided this means Bill Gates is history's biggest monster.

Note that Bill Gates is said here to be "controlled" by someone else. You know why they say this? Because Bill Gates isn't Jewish. So (Jewish) George Soros is called the "puppet master" by these people yet Bill Gates is said to be a "controlled" or "manipulated" billionaire in this doctrine, despite Bill Gates being an order of magnitude more rich and powerful than Soros. You dig into a lot of this stuff and it turns out to be Elders of Zion type conspiracy theories just modernized.

He skirts around the whole child-eating thing too, pointing out blandly that powerful people do bad things, but he's been careful to only mention Hollywood and the CIA here. So the secret evil rulers are in fact Hollywood actors. That's very convenient for dumb people since you can identify the evil overlords since they're in all the movies. The QAnon phrase is "your watching a movie", many of the slogans come from movies, and Q often references movies to explain what's going on, and conveniently, most of the baddies in this conspiracy theory are well-known movie actors. It really is a conspiracy for dumb people to think they're smart and found something else nobody else knows about.

EDIT: another video. QAnon for newbies, but from an insider. This would be a good companion vid for QAnonAnonymous Episode 1, which also explains QAnon but from an outsider / skeptic perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etDXZoW7dkA

Ah, ok so I thought this one mom blogger who was doing QAnon stuff but as meditation / ASMR stuff wasn't too bad, she had a very soothing voice. But, now she's yelling about 'pedovores' and explaining how that means they eat children and how she used to be left-wing but now she's Woke to the fact that Donald Trump and the military are fighting against these literal baby-eaters.

This is the shit we're dealing with, this is what this shit does to the brains of liberal hippy moms after only a couple of weeks of exposure.

Hint for anti-Q'ing people is to tell them the most crazy stuff first and explain to them why it's crazy. QAnon's have some guides for 'pilling friends and family and they have a set of talking points to ease people into it while avoiding the "crazy sounding" stuff which "we know is actually true". Tell people how QAnons believe in time-travel and that Hillary Clinton literally eats children in a secret underground lair.