Via wikimedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arctic_fox_siblings_(51357990844).jpg (Alaska Region U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
#Fox #Bot

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Two arctic fox kits sitting on a little hill all overgrown with grass and vegetation. They look rather curiously towards the camera yet at a respectable distance.

Every time

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Welcome to Signal See what's new in this update

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What's New September 3, 2025 - 7.69.0 Handful of bug fixes to keep your app running smoothly. More exciting changes on the horizon!

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Meme from arrested development. Package: DEAD DOVE. Do Not Eat!. Guy looking inside: I don’t know what I expected

this is actually SO scary. stay safe out there everyone.

I've written a very rudimentary plugin for Allegro 5 that allows it to load QOI files as textures. Combined with the existing PhysFS plugin this gives both pretty respectable load times and compression.

https://git.worlio.com/Canithesis/allegro_qoi

There are some issues with the plugin as it is now. The big one is that it includes the reference decoder qoi.h which always returns it's own buffer with perfect pitch, and can only read files from either the standard I/O or from memory, so there's a lot of time and memory wasted just copying data around. Not quite as elegant usage as libwebp. But the format is so simple this is not a big deal and I can merge the codec into the plugin later to get around this.

Talked a little about merging this upstream into allegro_image after some additional work.

who needs stake.us when you can give money to an internet artist
the end results the same

Own photo
#Fox #Bot

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Two arctic fox parents investigating something. They both sniff on the ground at around the same spot of grass. They have black summer fur with some leftovers from white and very long winter fur. The smaller one on the left lost most of it except on the face making her look a bit goofy with a white mask.

BLEXBot assists internet marketers in getting information on the link structure of sites and their interlinking on the web to avoid any technical and possible legal issues and improve the overall online experience. To do this, it is necessary to examine or crawl the page to collect and check all the links it has in its content.

If the BLEXBot Crawler has visited your site, this means that links have never been collected and tested on that page before or need to be refreshed. For this reason, you will not see recurring requests from the BLEXBot crawler on the same page.

The Crawler systems are engineered to be as friendly as possible, such as limiting request rates to any specific site (BLEXBot doesn't make more than one hit per 3 seconds) and automatically backing away if a site is down or slow.

I have Shin'en on speed dial already for potential help porting stuff to consoles in the future, because they're good at what they do.

Basically the idea is that you have a teleport beacon you can place down anywhere that you use to dodge things (anywhere underneath you, some people thought I was straight up adding a Rod of Discord type deal, no!!). Beacons have limited charges and fizzle out, so they're not free, you'll do your best if you can anticipate how to position yourself.

Dirty prototype below to show what that would look like. It's ugly, to be completely clear the lerping is just an animation and the game is actually paused during this. Will make it all crunchy and juicy later. Saving the glamor and pizzazz, as always...

I've got a lot of ideas on how this will be used in practice (after a whole year, I better have some!!) but finding the best way to convey these to other team members without a dedicated concept artist to sketch drafts of the opponents is hard, which is one of the reasons i've been so quiet about where i'm actually going with this. As we get closer, i'll finally be able to reveal what our designs will look like.

Made the mistake of trying to discuss politics on Twitter and now I'm starting to understand why people hate it so much. Never used the block button so much before.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/1111fo6pA (sea turtle)
#Fox #Bot

Own photo
#Fox #Bot

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A family of arctic foxes, all dark fur, laying siege on the food castle. They are standing next to a fence of their enclosure, probably waiting for a keeper to arrive with snacks.

Own donut
#Fox #Bot

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A pile of fluff, sometimes also called an arctic fox, is sleeping curled up into a donut under a conifer tree. Fur longer than those needles seems pretty useful for those occasions.

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yes this is a bug and yes we're reporting it upstream

ATTENTION! The Founder of Poa.st @graf has recently contracted the deadly fatal around-corners-sneak-undetectable disease known as rabies! Living in Canada means that the standard healthcare treatment is Medically Assisted Dying. In order to stave this off he requires Immediate financial Aid, in the form of DONATIONS, which can be given HERE at https://patron.poa.st/ and https://poa.st/about/donate

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/111pCxTg3 (zoofanatic)
#Fox #Bot

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A portrait of a silver fox with amber eyes. The tip of its ears are slightly folded and it seems to watch something closely.

Here's what I learned.

MinGW is better behaved than MSVC, as I expected. However, it also has some bugs specific to it. For some reason our INI read/write library (@wirlaburla@canithesis.org) sends corrupted junk to the file input stream during config construction - I figured out this is apparently a known issue that occurs in one of the -O1 optimizations since at least three years ago and was never addressed. For now, the Windows ports have zero optimizations until I can figure out the exact offending CFLAG.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71109757/very-strange-mingw64-c-bug-when-readinig-from-a-file-inside-a-function

Allegro's official TrueType plugin relies on a FreeDesktop library called Freetype, which in turn has an optional, but highly encouraged (and recursive! the hell?) dependency on Harfbuzz, another library that does the exact same thing. Harfbuzz in turn depends on DirectX 10's "DirectWrite", ANOTHER library that does THE SAME THING, as well as GLib, which is to put it very simply a collection of stuff that's mostly already in libc.

If you raised your eyebrows a little and said "That sounds fucking retarded", then you would be 100% correct. In typical FDO/GNOME/RedHat fashion, they have managed to take something so simple and contrive absurd levels of pointless complexity out of it.

This single dependency tree, which is enabled in every binary distribution of Freetype out there, is singlehandedly responsible for Allegro silently dropping support for Windows XP out of the box. Freetype has to be recompiled to remove the bloat.

To be clear, I'm not mad at the Allegro guys - most of the design decisions for liballeg 5.x were made like a decade and a half ago when the whole FreeDesktop situation was a lot different, and I doubt any of them even noticed this was the case because nobody uses XP anymore. The only way I even found all this out was when I was forced to dependency walk the compiled binary to find out why it was failing to load, the average developer now is not going to think twice when they just grab the MinGW/Nuget packages and ship them as-is.

So yeah. MYTHOS engine works on Windows now. I'm glad to check another milestone towards completing the first demo version off the list.

Photo by Tristan Bane https://www.instagram.com/tristan.bane/
#Fox #Bot

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A red fox walking over a very large cut tree stump, head lowered and about to stalk... wait, the camera. It looks closely into the viwer's direction.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/1112nNq2bC (Richard Hoeg)
#Fox #Bot

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Two tiny red fox kits exploring in front of their den which is made of large rocks and little caves between them.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/1112qaapLh (Peggy Cadigan)
#Fox #Bot

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An older looking fox standing on a patch of cut grass looking directly at us.