Cohost was a social media site I was on. It shut down in 2024, becoming read-only at the end of September and closing entirely at the end of the year. There were some things I posted there that I felt fit into my main site somewhere as their own page, but a lot that didn't (mostly small observations or short jokey things), so that's what this page is for. (There's a possibility at some point in the future I'll move some of these to their own/other pages as well.)
Many of my posts there are replies to other posts. In general, I've either quoted the post I was replying to (or the relevant part) or tried to summarize it. Some posts I felt only made sense in the context of an image or a longer post; I've left out those posts.
Subpages:
Posts that have their own page (and therefore aren't on this page):
I'm felidoptera (cat butterfly). Until now I've used the username chridd or chrideedee (@chrideedee on Twitter), but I've decided to use a new username for reasons. I'm not sure what more to say here.
Meow.
(in response to one of those "today is the only day you can post this" posts posted the previous day, specifically the Phoenix Wright "Almost Christmas" meme)
I've been tempted to keep a list of all these "this is the only day you can post this" posts and just rewhatever them all at once on some random day.
@wffl: "normalize types"; @lunasorcery: "makes your types unit-length"; me:
(Either Int Int, 1/2) -- Either = sum type
(Either Int String, 1/√2)
((Int, Int), 1/Int) -- tuple = product type
(This is what people mean by linear type systems, right?)
me, if I tried to play football, kicking a football as hard as I can: I'm going to score a point!
football: you LIGHTLY TOUCH football? you lightly touch football like the miette? oh! oh! jail for player! jail for player for One Thousand Years!!!!
@frieze: "Who decided the adjective version of fire should be spelled fiery"
me: "Who decided the noun version of fiery should be spelled fire"
Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe, a.k.a., Kirby's Return to Dreamland
(in response to a post comparing Baba from Baba Is You, Eggbug, and the "soweli" character from Toki Pona)
(I originally posted this on Tumblr, in response to a different post.)
Original [post this is a response to not archived] posted . Permalink
(in response to a Twitch clip from ZandraVandra about Mega Man: "I just want people to stop bringing back the devil, that's all I ask. Please stop.")
Aw…
*blows out the candles*
*erases the inverted pentagram*
*looks up how to summon boobeam instead*
(@zandravandra posted a manga panel where someone is thinking: "I can't let myself turn into a girl at school anymore..." with the title "tfw")
If not at school, then transform when?
(@lunasorcery posted a one-star review of Hilbert's Hotel)
Um, hi, I booked an infinitely long stay, and because of all this shuffling around I've decided to leave early. Could I have a refund? Doesn't have to be the full price I paid, just any fraction at all of the price for my remaining nights (not that that would make any difference in how much I get).
(After a line of edited logos, @pervocracy posted the Walmart logo edited to say "Waaaaa")
Walmart, the evil counterpart/rival to Lmart.
Or maybe Malmart. That would at least be pronounceable.
(Lmart = one more than K Mart?)
(in response to a comment on a picture of a cat sitting on a laptop)
![HUMAN-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: To protect other programs, PawSense is diverting keyboard input. Click the button below to close this window. You can also exit this window by typing the word "fffffgfg". [text field where the word "human" has been typed] If you want to terminate PawSense, type "I will feed the cat whenever she wants"](handsense.png)
(edited from https://www.tumblr.com/radwolf76/697406965344763904)
@softfennec: "What are some cool css ideas for a website"; @lexyeevee: "green"; me:
me (in an ask to Zandra): "meow? meow? *paws at the door to the catgirl machine* meow?"
@zandravandra: "I'M CUTTING YOU OFF"
me: "meow meow? (Then how will I become girl?)
meow meow 🐾 meow. (I hear humans have an easier time typing.)
meow mew meow, mrow? mrow mew? (Your catgirl machine *can* turn cats into catgirls, right? Not just the other way?)
(in response to a post from @unicode showing the HTML entities ­ (soft hyphen) and ‐ (unicode hyphen), saying "i’m sorry this question got me distracted researching hyphens and all i can think about here is fluttershy and rainbow dash.")
🦋<ZWJ><soft hyphen>
🌈<ZWJ>—
🌇<ZWJ>✨
🍎<ZWJ>🂫 (or <ZWJ>🂫 if you only want to work on Macs and iPhones)
π
There should be a rainbow dash emoji. By which I mean, an em dash with a rainbow gradient.
signedSomeone handed me 65,535 legal documents that they said I needed to sign. *Ugh*, I thought, *this will take forever, but at least they're all short*. But then I signed all of them, but now they've all mysteriously disappeared, and now somehow I'm holding one illegal document??!?
@iliana: "what’s the ICD diagnosis code for when you are upset whenever a QR code is oriented the wrong way despite it not mattering to anything capable of reading it"; me:
Now imagining if there was a QR reader app that does this. (and if you give it one of those codes where the middle has been replaced with a logo it superimposes the logo onto the website)
@bobbi: "aslr is when you talk kinda quiet and breathy so your libc gets all tingly"
me: "I thought it was an expensive camera used to take pictures of sign language signs."
@lexyeevee: "honestly? it's kind of fucked up that i went to the trouble of going back in time and killing valatrax before his reign of terror could begin, and no one even seems to care"
Story idea: Murder mystery about who killed this one artist named Adolf, where no one suspects that one crazy guy wearing weird clothes who doesn't even know what year it is and keeps talking about "not-sees" whatever the heck those are.
duchess /ˈdʌtʃ.ɛs/ n. A woman from the Netherlands
me (in an ask to @pervocracy): "Tricker treat! (I'm dressed as a cat. This is totally my Halloween costume and not just what I look like.)"
@pervocracy: "243 Ida is an asteroid in the Asteroid Belt that is only about 20 miles across but has its own tiny moon named Dactyl, about one mile across"
me: "Tiny moon…
Wonder if any weremice live on that asteroid"
(response to a video game screenshot, presumably taken while text was in the middle of appearing, saying "Light and peace were restored to the EAR")
(Source)
@nex3: "Samus Aran is really fun at parties but it sucks how she always blows up the host's house as she leaves"; me:
At least if you donate enough money to charity, she'll make sure to let your pets out before the house blows up.
And by "enough money", I mean more than the people donating to keep her from doing that, because it's faster that way.
(in response to @zandravandra actually attempting xkcd's "Label the States")
(starts with "can you add to this post, avoiding that glyph following ABCD?")
ABCD… F? As in marks on a thing from school? I should add to this post without using F? I can do that. Oh wait…
(What I call my account having that glyph is still okay, right? If not, most of us can't avoid using it.)
crepe with the long blue hair @crepe 42 min. ago [responding to a picture of "worlds biggest chease"]
reading "worlds biggest chease" in the voice of that one text-to-speech voice saying chimichangas
Unfortunately spelling it "chease" doesn't cause it to pronounce it any differently. (Original, with my response where I figured out the voice)
(in response to a post saying to tag your posts)
Am I doing this right?
(in response to a post complaining about a site that redirects to a different article when you scroll to the bottom)
This reminds me of an idea that I had a while ago for a UI-design–themed super hero, who would spend all their time fixing buggy websites and bad design (like this), and battling their evil nemesis, a dark-patterns–themed supervillain who spends all their time getting people to see more ads, get more spam, and "agree" to pay for things they don't actually want.
@Ehksidian: Xena Snowscale: "y'know i don't get why so many stories are like "oh no! i've become a beast and i still feel like me! i must return to human at once" like why would you ever wanna be human i do not understand"
me: "Oh no! I've become a (bipedal, furless) beast and I still feel like meow! I must return to feline at once!"
(response to a post by @zandravandra about the Catgirl Machine, mentioning "[…]aside from that weird flaw where the door closes when it's jostled. or the quirk where the activation button's on a bit of a hair trigger...")
Patch notes: fixed issues with the door and button, by making everything automatic. The door now closes and the machine starts when sensors detect that someone's in there.
@jkap: "apparently i got shorter (i am now exactly 172cm)"
me: "Take some of my height. I don't want it."
@lunasorcery: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Great, so now I have to get my fashion advice from floating aberrations?"; me:
Ugh, now I'm going to have to figure out which dungeon and/or boss that's referring to.
@gaelicgalpal: "clearly, we have to put on the best dang talent show this site's ever seen,"
me: "*gets up on stage and does some CSS crimes*"
(in response to a drawing of Mega Man drinking "estrogen tank (Roll's)" instead of his energy tank)
Idea that I had a while ago (after something I saw on Tumblr): Mega Man and Samus are the same person; the Metroid games take place after she's been taking E tanks for a while.
I found this in my room last summer, I think before the Eggbug plushes were even announced, and kept meaning to post these pictures here. I've had this since I was super young (*way* before Cohost existed), but it's an interesting coincidence.
(@nes-pictionary posted "OLD EGGBUG" with a comment "I love you, eggbug. I wish we could've grown old together.")
Most insects live for less than a year because they are cold blooded and don’t survive winter.
(in response to a post from @dante about minor differences in alternate universes)
Posting my drafts
Oh like that thing where people thought the Berenstuin Bears were called the Berenstein Bears, and people thought that was evidence of parallel universes? Pretty sure people were just misremembering.
Think it was called the mandala effect, or something like that, hold on, let me look it up…
…why can't I find anything?…
Wait, it's Berenstain in this universe?
I was trying to go for "alternate universe where the minor difference is that the specifics of the Mandela effect are different (but still different from what the Mandela effect people thought it was)", but I didn't feel like I conveyed that well enough. (Looking back, I think having it be "that thing where people thought the Berenstain Bears were called the Berenstine Bears" or something like that might have been better for what I was going for?)
@jkap (on November 1, 2023): "who's planning on doing No Post November this month"
Posting my drafts
I might.
…wait a minute.
I was going to post this in November (hence the joke of not observing No Post November by posting this)… but it has very different connotations now.
Emoji bake sale! 🍩 🍪 🍰 Click an item to buy it, but don't shake the table too much! Emojibake sale! 🩠🪠🰠Nooo! You shook the table, and ruined everything! Original posted . (I fixed the animation for my website using JavaScript.) Permalink @lexyeevee: "we're winding down. you can do whatever you want now. block people who only mildly annoyed you once a year ago. start unhinged discourse. […]" (emphasis mine) me: "Make all doors sliding doors!" @zandravandra (at the end of 2023): "I'm so tired. I hope next year will be better." me: "😢" Are we making little pixel art buttons for our sites? I might do that, but I don't think I'll get it done in time. If I do, it'll be on my atom feed, which is linked on my site. Also I hope that my feed actually works properly; I haven't tested it in an actual feed reader. If there are any problems, leave a comment somewhere (there isn't yet a proper place for it, but I can see comments for all pages). (responding to a post by @pervocracy about the way culture treats neurotransmitters and hormones) Posting a mental draft (I thought about responding to this post at the time and didn't get around to actually making a draft): Doing this makes more sense to me with hormones (although, like, you said, it's probably still more complicated than "oxytocin is love" or whatever), but it always annoys me went people do this with neurotransmitters, since my understanding was that the point of a neurotransmitter was to transmit information through a specific synapse. …which means that they'd be responsible for conveying things like "I am looking at something red in the bottom-right of my visual field" or "I am remembering that the last digit of my phone number is a 1" or "I'm trying to move my right index finger up" (depending on the specific synapse or combinations of synapses), things of that nature, and that "more serotonin" would be similar to "more instances of the letter c in a text". (At least, the brain has to convey that sort of information *somehow*.) (in response to a long post by @lexyeevee about different types of nonlinearity in video games)
Posting mental drafts (I was thinking of writing a big response to this back when it was posted and never got around to it and maybe a shorter response would be better anyways): I think one way of classifying different types of non-linearity would be: is the point of providing choices to provide multiple ways to successfully complete a level/game (like in your "branching" way); or is it to make it a challenge to figure out where you should go (like in your "leaves" way, and I think most lock-and-key games are like this, though multi-locks could easily be the other one)? (I kind of feel like this is a thing where when I've seen stuff from various places about game design, it sort of feels like people tend to assume one and not really acknowledge the difference… including me, in the past, when I was thinking about Super Metroid's design and noticing that, if you don't know about walljumps etc., it's actually pretty linear, since I was thinking in terms of being-able-to-complete-it-multiple-ways.) (Also a game can have both, both by providing more than two choices, some but not all of which are correct; or by having multiple paths that can win, but a challenge of which path to choose if you're trying to make the game easy enough/get 100%/go fast.) (@zandravandra posted a screenshot of a bunch of asks, including mine: "What happens if a cat goes into the catgirl machine? Do they become a catgirl (and thus mostly human), or more cat-like somehow, or what?" and she answered them including "the catgirl machine makes anything placed into it more cat and more girl".) Finally! The most important thing I lost during the hard drive corruption last year (a screenshot of that ask) has been restored! (A lot of files weren't affected and I had backups; I'm not saying that's anywhere near the most important thing on my hard drive.) Anyhow, meow meow? *paws at the door to the catgirl machine* meow meow meow? *paws some more, hoping to become girl in addition to the cat I already am* meow? (@lexyeevee posted the "sickos" meme, but he's just saying "yes… yes… yes… YES!, and he's labelled "/bin/YES")
me: "why? why? why? why?" Cohost has never been the social media platform I was most active on. But I like stability, knowing that the things and people and places I see on a regular basis will still be there... or at least don't like instability... so it's upsetting for a place like this to go. And I don't like when things are deleted from the internet... when there's something I remember that I want to refer to or link to and I can't, when there's something I wanted to read or would have wanted to read but can't, when I want to look back and remember a particular time but can't... Maybe those aren't the things I "should" care about, but I do... But also, even if "no numbers" isn't a thing I care about, it's still a site by someone who's trying to make something better, and it's being shut down... And I don't want Eggbug to die. And I was thinking this morning... I should have posted more. I should have followed more people. I should have been more active here. I've been crying on and off all morning... @debutniverse: "Anyone looking for forums to flee to? The webcomic xkcd used to have its own official forum, which unceremoniously shut down one day in 2019. There are some people I've still never been able to get back into contact with. Some of the survivors later gathered on a spiritual successor over here, so if you like xkcd and/or silly forum games, please join us over there! I'm there as "ratammer"!"
me: "I'm there too (chridd)" I thought about posting this to Cohost as a CSS crime, but never got around to it (and it uses non-inline CSS so I'd have to put some effort to convert it), but other than the play button https://chridd.nfshost.com/xkcdsw/205# is entirely CSS and could in theory work here. (response to @lexyeevee's CSS crime saying "happy hallowtober") Haunted by the ghost of Eggbug hoping I wake up and think, I had a nightmare cohost was ending but whew it's still fine, just as it ever was
Unhinged
😢
Pixel-art buttons
Neurotransmitters and hormones
Nonlinearity
Second catgirl machine ask
Yes
Goodbye, Cohost
And numbers weren't really a thing I was very concerned about on other sites...
and also when longform posts and artwork that people spent effort on is gone forever...
In theory, it should be on the internet archive, but I don't know how many people will delete all their stuff, or make their stuff private, and I worry that due to the site dynamically loading stuff things won't get archived properly.
Someone could make another social media site with the same ideas as cohost... no numbers, allowing CSS... maybe even this backer, whoever they are, who gets the code could make their own clone with the exact same code, or open source it so others could do that...
But it still wouldn't be the same.
It still wouldn't have the same people...
and it's not just the people who I followed... there were times when I noticed that people who, at least in the niches I'm in, seem like a big deal celebrities important (I don't know what word to use here)... and it kind of felt like even the average user might be the sort of person I like and want to be in a community with?
Even if I follow the people I've been following elsewhere, it just won't be the same.
(but that would mean having even more taken away from me now...)New xkcd forums
Off-site CSS crime
Happy Hallowtober
zzz
