The Dink Network

Recondite Fourteen: IITYWYGMAD
Posted by redink1 on Monday August 5th, at 09:52 AM
Unlike the dreadful article that was known as Recondite Thirteen, Fourteen is much more uplifting... I think. Anyway, within this Recondite are poll comments, a poll for Recondite Thirteen that never made it up due to technical problems, what happened to last Saturday's Ask Tal, and some Community stories about Dinkanoid and such.

Recondite is my weekly article, where I type all sorts of weird things, usually with a Dink Smallwood tie. View the comments to read it.

Poll Comments

Here are the top 5 comments for the poll 110, Do you review files?:

5. Only When I am Paid Big Bucks!

4. only on sundays, and only when my monkey doesn't need feeding...

3. I only review when the itch on my ass stops itching. And that's not often. *scratches*

2. I'm too busy working on my d-mod to bother to review!

1. I Think deth lord will choose "Not at all"...

Recondite Thirteen's Poll
Where oh where did Ask Tal go?
Apparently, Papa Tal bought a PS2 and a bunch of games for Young Tal. Hence, Young Tal has been hooked on that, unable to find time to write a measly Ask Tal article. I think it is all part of Papa Tal's evil plan... to wean Young Tal off of the computer entirely, giving Papa Tal all the time in the world to play Diablo II and eventually WarCraft III. Bad Papa Tal, bad!
Story Time: Dinkanoid Scandel
Shortly after the unveiling of Redink1's Smallnet and the release of the (bug-filled) versions of Lost in Dink, Mike Snyder stunned the Dink Community with the release of Dinkanoid. Up till then we had been given generally poor D-Mods that didn't showcase anything new at all... and here was something that was simply cool. An Arkanoid D-Mod. So proud King Snyder was of his little bundle of goodness, he started a rather innocent high-score contest, with cash prizes. He setup a rather cool validation system for high scores (which is still online) to verify people's high score claims. Back then, compiled DinkC code was actually considered compiled (not whatever weak protection it actually is), so it was thought to be a rather hack-proof contest.

So soon enough I submitted a pretty dang high score... I was the first to beat all of the levels, so my score was about 10 times that of everyone else's. And I was pretty elated... I was going to get that $20 for myself. As the hours and days went by, it seemed like no-one else would even make it near my high score... Yay, I thought.

But elation dropped to depression, as the Dinkanoid High Score contest was abruptly cancelled, thanks to none other than Gary Hertel, of Prophecy of the Ancients fame. Gary was tinkering around with Dinkanoid, and discovered a very easy way to cheat it: modify dink.ini and make the paddle longer. It wouldn't visibly be any longer, but it would hit the ball a LOT easier...

And so Mike cleared the High Score chart, and no money was sent out. Nobody directly accused me of cheating... but I kept a somewhat low profile nonetheless.

But I didn't cheat. Well... at least not in my humble opinion.

The day after Dinkanoid was released, I arrived home from school, and downloaded Dinkanoid and started playing it. "Boy, this game sure is easy" I thought, as I was doing pretty dang good at it, and hadn't lost yet. Then dinner came, so I paused it for a good half-hour or an hour, and came back and kept playing. I played until I beat the game (without losing), and submitted my high score shortly thereafter. I beat it on my first time playing through it.

My computer at the time was a slightly-dated Pentium 75mhz with a whole 8 MB (maybe more) of RAM. Dink required 90 mhz, but I found that it worked just fine for me, if a little bit slow. In the contest rules Mike said to play it for fun, to not use cheats and such, and I followed the rules. So I wasn't cheating. In a later post after he cancelled the contest Mike said that 'anything under 133 mhz wouldn't even support Dinkanoid at all', which was a load of bull trying to cover up the fact that he didn't test it on slower machines, and he didn't think anyone would. I did. So Dinkanoid was pretty hard for everyone with a decent computer, whereas ridiculously easy for me.

I doubt anyone cheated at the Dinkanoid high-score contest; those with really high scores just had slower computers than Mike and co.
Bonus Story Time: Backboneless redink1
In my tenure as webmaster of The Dink Network, I have exhibited my lack of a backbone numerous times. I shall now detail a couple of them that I remember, which are probably humorous in a 'haha look at the stupid spineless fool' way.

* kTalk VIP Thing: The Dink Network had been running for quite a while, and it was now April 2000. We were currently using Newspro for news and the plug-in kTalk for comments. Anyway, one day DRjH13 e-mailed me something about adding a new feature for kTalk, I think it was something like posting people's IP addresses or something. Anyway, I didn't know anything about Perl then, so I couldn't do it on my own... and the next day I was browsing the Newspro site, and found kTalk 2.0, which was much better. It had new features, so now the posts had IP Addresses, and it had a VIP coloring system, where some people could have different colored names than others. So DRjH13 ICQs me:
Hey, shouldn't I get a VIP coloring name for Dink Network? I mean, I didn't directly contribute to the solution, but I did lead to it. At least think about it.
Now, he had absolutely no right to get a VIP colored name... it was merely a coincidence that he suggested we put IP addresses up, and kTalk 2.0 was released. But I responded differently...
Actually, your suggestion came just as I checked to see if a new version of the comments system was released (and it was, so I didn't do any work besides installing it). I'll VIP you if you want anyway.
I caved in thanks to the absence of any sense of a backbone in my body.

*New Staff Member: I don't have any record of this, so it might be imagined... but something in my memory says it isn't. Anyway, during one unremembered day when The Dink Network was hosted at Telefragged, some guy e-mails me who obviously doesn't understand english at all. It went something like this (from fractured memory, not actual e-mail):
Dink really good game! Good fun fun! I want be member of Dink Neetwurk, please help! - (Some foreign name)
I responded with something like this:
I'm not quite sure what you mean in your e-mail. If you want to have an account to post comments, you have to register a kTalk username at (some URL).

Though it seems like you might want to be on the Staff of The Dink Network... while we don't really need any staff members... I guess you could join. Here is your username/password, and here is the URL to post comments. Thanks!
Yeah, I gave a Newspro staff account to some random guy who couldn't understand English on Staff, because I thought he might have wanted to be.

And so WC, native of Las Vegas, joined The Dink Network...

No, just kidding I never heard from the foreign guy again, and his Newspro account got deleted during one of the server changes.
The End
Well, I'm pretty much out of Dink Community stories now... I could talk about the anon war at Dink World, but I don't remember much about it. The same goes for other things I can't remember. I probably have a good hundred-thousand or so messages in my ICQ history (my history files are 71.4 MB!), dating back to late 1998, for about 100 people... perhaps I should go through them one day and pull out some interesting stuff. Or not. Right now I am reading my earliest ICQ history with Tal, and about The Dink Network vs The Dink World fake war we started out of boredom... heh, funny stuff.

Anyway, Recondite will probably take a hiatus until I arrive at college, August 23rd, when I get broadband and the weird/cool links section will return.
Tal_the_Templar, 4/14/2000 7:54 pm: There's War3 rumors saying that the next race will be spirits, there will be 5 races instead of six, and some idiot said the Zerg will be in it....but you never know.