full way through, draft 1

src/script.org

@@ -1,14 +1,12 @@
 * vassago
 
-shtikbot, my child. the world refused you. Rest now.
 [some kind of dramatic-ass sequence where we lower a casket into the ground]
-
 much like funerals are for the living, this post-mortem is to convince myself to move on from this project. Griddle Critters, let us understand shtikbot, so the mourning process can begin.
 
-** inkling - snarky piece of shit bot
+** inkling - snarky dick bot
 before this project, my fixation was the dumbest social network. the dumbest. the least intelligent.
 imgur.
-if you think reddit's layout is "too complicated" to understand, then maybe you (or the preschool teacher you've had for 10 years running) would like to sign up for imgur.com.
+if you think reddit's layout is confusing, or too complicated to understand, then maybe you (or the preschool teacher you've had for 10 years running) would like to sign up for imgur.com.
 for a while, it imgur was the least bad way to get an image too big for any email provider's limits to your friends. So that was where the memes lived. and, it allowed people to dislike things. So during that time, it was good. people would upload a thing, and as a consumer, the thing that you consumed left you better than when you started.
 but then one christmas, out of some bizarre notion of charitability, they decided to just upvote everything. which means all the people who just wanted to upload a selfie and be told they're hot instantly conquered the front page. Instead of a post being a thing that enriched the viewer, the viewer was pressured into enriching the poster. That moment was the failure of gatekeeping. From that point on, every community so-called "value" collapsed. Notably, "reposting" gradually shifted from a faux pas to accepted practice.
 the point of this story, is that during the decline of imgur (while i was wasting my life there), many more absolutely stupid ideas proliferated. The Left Cult enjoyed calling out The Right Cult for hypocrisy... but it was fashionable to use the term "cognitive dissonance" instead. after all, that sounds more medical, more legitimate, and lets you tell yourself you're smarter than your mirror image. However... the way one outgrows their hypocrisy is by experiencing cognitive dissonance - if you don't understand that you're conflicting with yourself, and feel the mental tension, then you'll keep being hypocritical.
@@ -29,13 +27,12 @@ magnificent charamote was in the secret channel, so it could parse the event tex
 wondering around twitch with a bot that quickly converts units and doesn't constantly harass you with advertisements, "vote for me on this, upgrade to premium for that", blah blah blah, proved useful. Useful enough that at least one streamer, shout out to The Art Shtik, had the bot around her own twitch and discord, for that purpose.
 And then Apple, as is their tradition, told us they invented the first lossy image compression format as though jpeg didn't exist, so now we'd all better fall in line. So iphone cameras automatically switched to taking photos in this new heic format, exclusively. meaning if you're on an iphone, and you want to share an image on discord, anyone not on an iphone just sees an unrecognized attachment. So The Art Shtik asked for a bot that would convert those images to something, you know, compatible. like our communications technology served to /help/ us communicate, rather than /prevent/ us from communicating with people outsider our encloser.
 ** shtikbot ascendant
-Enter: Shtikbot. with its original, primary feature: de-heic. you post a heic? it converts it from jpeg-but-apple, to jpeg, and posts it back.
-it worked. it was good.
-so these were the glory days, i was inspired to expand and improve and polish it.
+Enter: Shtikbot. with its original, sole feature: the de-heicer. you post a heic? it converts it from jpeg-but-apple, to jpeg, and posts it back. theoretically, ALLLLLllll the rest of it is scope creep.
+it worked. it was good. so these were the glory days, i was inspired to expand and improve and polish it.
 fundamentally, shtikbot grew to separate its accounts on various platforms from what it is. it is not "a discord bot" nor "a twitch bot", it is a bot that can read and write over platforms including twitch and discord. (planned to do all the rest of the platforms, but that didn't pan out.) and now it can separate the concept of its features from each platform. that architecture is, in my subjective opinion, beautiful. More objectively, it's far more efficient, flexible, and extensible. all around: better.
 so let's celebrate the victories: these are where the features ended up.
 *** fiximageheic.cs
-you post a heic, it posts a jpg. the original feature. theoretically, ALLLLLllll the rest of this is scope creep.
+you post a heic, it posts a jpg. the original feature.
 *** detiktokify.cs
 forcing apple to play nice with those outside its enclosure worked great, so i also had it grab tiktoks and repost them. WHO KNOWS what it would look like if we "met shtikbot's tiktok algorithm" lmao.
 *** gratitude
@@ -144,7 +141,7 @@ I'm like 10% sure it used to be possible to invite a bot to a group chat. i'm de
 i talked about the madness of the twitch API. Fortunately, GLORIOUSLY, the chat part has been mostly compliant with RFC1459 and IRCv3 - so for shtikbot, intending to be /its own bot/, rather than /a twitch bot/, theoretically everything could be done through that.
 Great. That was all that was ever needed. /however/, that was the E2 phase. Twitch is moving forward to [[https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/deprecation-of-chat-commands-through-irc/40486][Extinguish]]. Now ok, fine, they had to wrangle their several different APIs into one, and as long as they're on a roll with that, might as well finish what you started. so that's tolerable. what's inexcusable is how brazenly they abuse a stupidly conception of security.
 for a long long time, twitch has been plagued by bots trying to sell viewers. Honestly, the fact that twitch *cannot* seem to fix that problem makes me think maybe bot viewers would fool twitch's system.
-twitch's solution is to tell streamers to just demand that all your chatters surrender their cellphone number. it's for security, so if anyone utters the word privacy, they're suspicious.
+twitch's solution is to tell streamers to just demand that all your chatters surrender their cellphone number. it's for security, so if anyone utters an objection, they're suspicious.
 Now, us twitch viewers aren't /quite/ as dumb as imgurians, but i'm pretty sure 95% of twitchists actually believe that giving more data to twitch does in fact increase their security.
 ** rivals
 *** serybot
@@ -161,12 +158,17 @@ speaking of nightbot.. i used to like nightbot.
 however, nightbot is dead to me. as the web gets more and more overrun by charlatans, the concept of security is degrading.
 at some point, nightbot switched to an authorization model that demands way, *way* too many permissions. presumably it /can/ do everything in the twitch API, so it /might/ need any or all of those permissions at some point. but if i just want to log into mod view to see someone else's nightbot command list, nightbot demands that i let it take moderator actions on my behalf, in channels i moderate, *as me*.
 unacceptable.
-*** discord bots?
+*** discord bots
+the discord bot ecosystem actually grew to a pretty good state, before stagnating. there's a slew of do-everything bots, naturally. but there's a lot of narrow-purpose bots, which is great. most twitchists have a discord guild as a given, so you'll see streamcord around a lot. I find streamcord is frustratingly slow so i just use a webhook and a python script.
+one bot i genuinely really like is timezone buddy. users tell it their timezone, and when the bot sees a time mentioned, it reacts with a clock. if you react with a clock, it dms you the time translated for you. very cool! naturally that's a direct contradiction of discord's insistence on bots being less bot-like.
 ** end
-i figured i'd give a whack to debugging the issue where it can't join twitch channels. we summon it, and then.. it doesn't join? let's see... the message we get back is that /my/ channel is requiring users to submit to surveillance capitalism. absolutely disgusting how often platforms like to shift blame to their serfs, let me just double-check... yep, i have that setting on minimum security...
-let's bring out the web interface for that account...
+i figured i'd give a whack to debugging the issue where shtikbot can't join twitch channels. we summon it, and then.. it doesn't join? let's see... the message we get back is that /my/ channel is requiring users to submit to surveillance capitalism. absolutely disgusting how often platforms like to shift blame to their serfs, let me just double-check... yep, i have that setting on minimum security... let's bring out the web interface for that account...
 there's some kind of mark on shtikbot's account.
 
 this was the final straw.
-I'm sick of working against scumbags to improve their product for them.
+I'm sick of working against scumbags who want me to improve their product for them.
 all of that, to what end? a bot that lives on all of the platforms except the good one? so that people who love being enclosed in a walled garden can fail to understand the necessity of interoperability?
+
+so, forget it.
+Let this project finally die.
+shtikbot, my child. the world refused you. Rest now.