It’s no secret that game journalists have always held a controversial place in the gaming community, from IGN’s famous “too much water” controversy to the colloquial dubbing of easy difficulty settings “game journalist difficulty.” Ethics in journalism at large is also a hotly contested issue, with neutrality clashing with morality more often than not when covering sensitive topics. IGN, one of the most famous and most controversial gaming news outlets, recently found themselves in hot water when one of their editors, Filip Miucin, was revealed to have plagiarized the YouTube Channel Boomstick Gaming’s review of Dead Cells, along with his
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Angular Multiple Inheritance (How to Destroy a Codebase)
This is not a tutorial; please don’t do this. A Brief Primer on Inheritance A common school of thought among programmers is to reduce repetition wherever possible. Usually, this is a good idea, as if I need to change something, I only need to change it in one place. We usually accomplish this using inheritance, like this simple example: This way, both an instance of Animal and an instance of Dog have the name property, but Dogs also have the bark method. If we need to later add a property to both Animals and Dogs, we can just add it
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The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad PHP Stock Functions
A lot of defenders of PHP will say that the language has improved immensely in later versions with better support for OOP, which it has! However, PHP is fundamentally broken in its implementations of its stock functions, even compared to other dynamically-typed languages such as JavaScript. Let’s look at some examples: PHP – Functions of a String Function Prefix String is first parameter? Descriptive Name explode ❌ ❌ Sorta ord ❌ ❌ ❌ strstr str ✅ ❌ str_pad str_ ✅ ✅ substr ❌ ✅ ✅ There’s a great amount of inconsistency here, especially with how the functions are named. For
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Implementing WebP Conditionally
What is WebP? We use a lot of images when we build websites nowadays, and while some might disagree with this, I doubt it’s going anywhere. As a result, we have to invest a lot of work into optimizing those images as much as possible, often resorting to ugly and dated compression techniques. WebP is a new image format designed by Google for the modern web. According to a Google study, the average WebP file size is 25-34% smaller than a JPEG equivalent . What’s the Catch? The advantages of WebP seem obvious: lower file sizes with a negligible change
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Minecraft and the Automation Fantasy
One of the greatest things about Minecraft is the variety it presents to the player. Its multifaceted nature allows almost anyone to find something to do, even if they aren’t interested in the rest of the game’s offerings. What interests me the most and what brought me back to the game recently is automation. Specifically, the possibility of complete and total factorization brought about by mods like ComputerCraft and Mekanism. While vanilla Minecraft has a good deal of automation now with Hoppers and other Redstone devices, crafting still has to be done manually, sorting items automatically into chests is a