Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️one of the problems with being a mad scientist is that you can scope creep really fast
I haven't written line one of code on this project and I'm already thinking about how much dedicated hardware powered on and monitored I'd have to have to support indefinitely
but it would make my mastodon and blusky posts at least 5% cooler
so I recently did a lets-call-it-a-poem about (specifically Windows) computers loving us back:
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276073266480193
and I was thinking I want a way to do this automatically, specifically I'd like (almost) the first one.
and this post describes the behind-the-scenes of how I made these. (tl;dr it was manual screenshots)
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276567994297740
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276567994297740
and I was thinking about automating it so I could do another thing: make a mastodon instance that renders every post on it as pixel-accurate windows 95 dialog boxes
and the OBVIOUS answer for "how do I do that" is "extend the death generator to do windows 95 dialog boxes and then automate it".
I've done the second half before, automated the death generator. It's a pain and is ugly (the death generator is written exactly wrong to make this doable) but I've done it before, I can steal Foone's code for it
but "I've done it before" is kinda boring and also windows dialog boxes have a surprising number of edge cases that I am unable to escape being autistically perfectionist about.
so adding win95 to the death generator, while it would be cool, is probably not happening any time soon
but I'm a Mad Scientist.
So what's the Mad Scientist way to do this? Well, how'd I do it before?
I wrote a line of code in my Visual Basic 6 IDE and ran it on my Windows 98 VM
Buttered Jorts@foone Mad Science means never stopping to ask "what's the worst thing that could happen?"