Randoms on Eric's Site

Nov 12, 2026

ericzhang456@disroot.org (Eric Zhang) — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 11:10:23 +0800

A while back I came across PR #7305 on the Mumble repo. And holy fuck just look at this

623 insertions? Just for “falling back to a writable runtime directory”? And when you look at the PR it’s even more ridiculous. Why is there a unit test for this? If it doesn’t work it would just crash on launch, you don’t need a unit test to tell you that, and obviously you also get all the comments that tell you what the code does as typically seen in code written by a clanker. You’ll also notice that the return value is a struct with a warning message simply due to the fact that I left a comment suggesting it when the chance of a warning being required being so low that it probably doesn’t need a warning message in the first place!

Nov 8, 2026

ericzhang456@disroot.org (Eric Zhang) — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:50:34 +0800

How do you view video games? The average video game player is probably the one who just plays the latest Call of Duty or whatever shooter that’s popular these days, and that’s probably all they will play. And this is especially true if you’re in a third-world country. Most people I know who “play video games” don’t even know major video game franchises outside of their competitive shooter niche and even if they do know they exist, they probably haven’t bothered to sit down and, say, play a single-player campaign from start to finish.

Nov 7, 2026

ericzhang456@disroot.org (Eric Zhang) — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 19:54:12 +0800

There’s a new bot wave going on in TF2, bots are now sending reservation messages to the matchmaking service without joining the server, which leaves empty slots on the server. While Valve has fixed this issue relatively quickly this time, I don’t think TF2 players (myself included) can handle yet an another server fuck up like this.

Valve has clearly given up on TF2 when they made the game source-available. I mean, if the game is still of any value to them, they would’ve kept the code to themselves. And to be honest, I can’t believe I am saying this, but the easiest thing Valve could’ve done about the game is ending all official server support and this will give a massive boost to community servers which have always been better than Valve servers anyways. But obviously they wouldn’t do that as doing so would generate a lot of bad press for Valve. So if Valve were to actually maintain official servers for TF2, what would a new Quickplay system look like?