https://rose.systems/animalist

134 animals listed
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the polycule fursona designer has turned me into a pangolin

My cat Easóg is so cuddly and needy. I wonder where she gets it from? (I know exactly where she gets it from.)

how I spent the evening

I have made it through another year in spite of the horrors. I am doing a lot better than I was this time last year but then again that is a low bar. If I wasn’t doing better that would be very, very concerning. But I am genuinely doing very well at the moment. As little selfish plug if anyone has developed a bizarrely intense parasocial relationship reading this bog and want to make my birthday even better I have a Throne wishlist that you can use to buy me things.

But I recently moved in with Caoimhe³ and it has been really lovely. It’s broken me out of some bad habits, it’s helped motivate me to cook a lot more again, and it’s just really lovely to wake up next to someone and nice to have other people around rather than being on my own with Easóg so much. And now even when I am the only human in the house there are two more cats keeping me company: Muffie and Sandy. Easóg is not well socialised with other cats but she has acclimatised to the new place faster than I expected and is tolerating the strange cats quite well, though not without some bapping.

I am looking forward to spending my birthday with Caoimhe and we are using it as an excuse to go on weekend trip to London. The only thing we have booked, other than the travel and accommodation, is restaurant reservations, and we will structure the rest of the trip around those. I don’t love excessive amounts of sightseeing and I adore food, so I am enjoying this strategy and may use it for further trips.

A month ago I saw this this Tumblr post screenshotting a Twitter thread about Bump and was enthralled by both its maximalist aesthetics and how utterly evil it was. Now, before I continue I do what to emphasise: Do not install Bump. It is horrendously evil.

Do not install Bump.

The linked post gives you both a good idea of how invasive Bump is and also what is repulsive but also potentially alluring about it: It records as much as it possible can about everything you are doing through every means it has available to it as a phone app, which is quite a lot. This is, as the thread says, shared with everyone that you have linked with on Bump. That of course means it is also recorded and sent to Amo, the company that makes Bump. People often have a very defeatist attitude about privacy, that so many companies are already tracking everything you do anyway, but Amo really go above and beyond with trying to hoover up everything they can about you and with the way this app works I doubt that internal safeguards are much of a priority. A reminder before I go on: Do not install Bump.

Myself and Caoimhe³ both installed it, added each other, and then deleted our accounts after a couple of days. It was even more of an invasive nightmare than I was expecting.

• If you do not allow access to your contacts straight away it repeatedly badger you to do so. I think it asked me five times before it reluctantly allowed me to continue without doing so.
• It obvious asks your location permission to work. The basic point is broadcasting your location to people, but even if you grant it location permission it will display constant red warning signs on the main map screen and lock you out of features until you grant Bump permission to read your location at all times, even when the app is closed.
• It will then also repeatedly ask you to disable power management features for Bump so that it can always keep monitoring you even when your battery is dying.
• It has a feature to add live widget to your phone’s homescreen that constantly tracks a specific person. Like, stalking your friends at all times is kind of the selling point in the first place, but bloody fuck.
• It doesn’t just want your raw location it is also interested in what places you hang out in and business you frequent. It locks features behind adding a certain amount of favourite locations that it can log you as being at. Each location also has public leaderboards that shows who is there most often, potentially showing where to find you even to people you never linked with in Bump.
• In its quest to log and display everything it goes as far as to display your live battery percentage to everyone (so you can’t feign low battery as an excuse for not replying or wanting to go out).
• Features are locked behind linking with enough people, so even if you were fine with sending all this (live, at all times) to a few people, it will push you to expand that circle.

And yet, I do see some of the appeal. The dwindling of third places gets talked about a lot and I think that something that facilitates spontaneous gatherings by being able to see when friends are nearby or in a group could have value. Back in the day this would be having a local pub where you would go without a plan in the hopes of running into people, but the cost of drinks are so goddamn expensive these days and most people do not want to be functionally alcoholic in order to have a social life any more.

Do not install Bump.

I think a non-evil version of this is possible, thought it would not be straightforward or easily. Something that provided some of this openness, at the discretion of the user, with many safeguards, that did not store any data, and was end-to-end encrypted, could actually have benefits. But it would also never, ever be profitable and would never have the backing that it would need to push it to large-scale adoption. And of course the intersection of people who are safety-focused enough to want these kinds of safeguards and people who are lax enough about privacy to want something like this in the first place is probably quite small.

The other thing about Bump is its maximalist aesthetics. It’s like a ’00s Nickelodeon children’s sitcom’s idea of what smartphones would become. A partner thought that it was aimed at young people who may not have been around for the Y2K aesthetic old web but have seen it evangelised through nostalgic lens. I do find it genuinely quite charming, especially its chat, which allows you to not just customise your textboxes in garish, clashing fashions but allows all elements to be freely moved around, rotated and zoomed, creating an utterly nightmarish form of communication that I kind of love.

I do kind of want this as its own thing. Give me the secure, end-to-end encrypted, privacy-focused, overstimulation nightmare group chat. I would probably get bored of it relatively quickly but I feel like I would have a good time for a few days and then again every few months when I’m feeling particularly silly and whimsical.

Do not install Bump.

Easóg is going ballistic because there is a bug on the ceiling that she wants to kill but cannot reach

Have some cat photos.

cuirim isteach uirthi

maybe cats bury their poo because they’re embarrassed about shitting

Hey

I tried to put a batman mask on your cat on your webpage, refreshed the page and it… did not save most of the attempt, so it looks like I just scribbled over the top of its face, im really sorry, I cant see any way to undo it.

What planet is Sonic the Hedgehog from? That depends on which version of the character you’re talking about. The earliest bios from Sega imagine him as simply living on more or less the Earth as we know it, giving his place of birth as Christmas Island. When the series was published outside of Japan a more elaborate background was painted, putting him on a planet called Mobius inhabited by mobians—anthropomorphic talking animals—and ruled by the evil dictator Dr. Robotnik. Sega were similarly lose with canon when it came to licencing, allowing the details of the world to be filled in very differently in the various adaptations.

In Archie Comic’s Sonic the Hedgehog Mobius is a post-apocalyptic Earth in the far future, a background shared by Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie’s Land of Darkness, while in Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic the Earth as we know it exists as a parallel dimension to Mobius, with characters sometimes travelling between the two¹. Sonic X and later the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film also feature Sonic travelling from an (unnamed) parallel dimension but then have him be taken in by a human family on Earth, where the bulk of the action takes place.

But this divide between Earth and Mobius never really existed in the games, at least as far as the Japanese versions were concerned, and starting with 1998’s more narrative-focused Sonic Adventure Sega started trying to unify things a bit. The English localisation featured almost nothing from the previous Western Sonic canon: No mention of Mobius, badniks or roboticisation² and with Sonic and friends being just a few talking animals in a world made of mostly of ordinary humans. This depiction of the world and Sonic’s placed in it held in the games for the next decade, as far as Sonic Unleashed in 2008.

The Sonic games of the 2010s, though, shied away from narrative focus and tried to steer the series in a more cartoon-y direction. These games vastly cut down on the size of the secondary and incidental cast, not only dropping background NPCs entirely but also vastly trimming the size of recurring cast of mobian³ characters, sometimes only having Sonic himself and Tails have any major role. Still, one could imagine those teeming human cities just off-screen somewhere. That depiction of the world was not seriously challenged until 2017’s Sonic Forces.

An big selling point of Sonic Forces was that it had a character creator, finally allowing you to play your own Sonic OC in an official game⁴! Your avatar in the game starts off as an ordinary, frightened, mobian who rises up from the crowd to fight against the Eggman Empire alongside Sonic and his friends. For this narrative to work then, your furry OC must start as someone ordinary. Therefore mobians must be ordinary. There wasn’t really such a thing as an ordinary mobian in previous games. Barring the ancient echidna tribe shown in flashback all the way back in Sonic Adventure there had never really been furry background NPCs. No generic anthropomorphic animals. They were all important, named characters. For the avatar character to rise up as part of the masses and become a hero they first need to fit into the masses, and thus Sonic Forces came with a colossal shift in how the world of Sonic the Hedgehog was presented: A world of animals under the thumb of Ivo Robotnik, the sole human in the game - something that aligned closer to Sonic the Comic than any of the previous games⁵.

While the text of Forces itself doesn’t address this change directly series producer Takashi Iizuka made comments to the effect that the there are two different worlds: One that is home to humans and the other that is home to mobians. This, frankly, does not remotely make any sense if you try to fit it with previous games and this was not some sort of reboot, either! Sonic Forces directly references several earlier games. This was coupled with another retcon where the game tries to reframe the younger version of Sonic, returning from Sonic Generations, as actually being from another dimension⁶ rather than being from the past, suddenly putting Sonic Mania and by extension all the Mega Drive games into a different continuity to everything else and making a complete mess of everyone’s understanding of the series. The people who maintain the Sonic the Hedgehog Fandom wiki started splitting off every character into two different pages: One for the primary version and one for the “classic” universe version. It was, in short, a complete disaster if you cared about the canon of a series of children’s computer games.

Something good did come of this, though: The long-running Sonic the Hedgehog series published by Archie Comics had ceased publication in 2016, one year before Sonic Forces was released, and in the year that followed Sega negotiated a new line of comics with IDW Publishing instead. And while Ian Flynn returned as head writer, having helmed the Archie comics for a decade, the new series abandoned the continuity (and legal baggage) of the old comics and started fresh with a backstory much more closely aligned with that of the games and a plot following on directly from Sonic Forces, keeping its status quo of a world full of mobians.

And the IDW comics are really good! Ian Flynn, Evan Stanley, et al. have a deep love for the series and are able to consistently deliver endearing, interesting and fun interpretations of the characters. It has made me warm up a lot to parts of the cast I previously disliked and introduced wonderful new additions like Whisper and Surge. It also strikes an amazing balance in tone, managing to deliver just the right amount of self-serious edginess in its stories while maintaining its warm, bright, colourful world. It successfully managing to keep the good parts of the ow the Edge 2000s without whollly abandoning the cartooniness of the 1990s and without the layer of ironic detachment and self-cringe that haunted the series in the 2010s. I maintain a reading order if you want to have a go at them yourself.

And as the comics became more aligned with the games the games have in turn became more aligned with the comics. Characters from the IDW comic have started appearing in mobile games and Sonic Speed Simulator (the official Sonic Roblox game) and were mentioned in 2021’s Sonic Frontiers. This is because with the success of the IDW comics Sega have more and more let the lunatics run the asylum. Flynn has been writing more and more for the series, from promotional material and animated shorts to eventually being the writer for the games themselves, penning the scripts for Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations. And being someone who does care about the canon of a series of children’s computer games he has taken upon himself to sort out the lore mess.

Under Flynn Sega has put out a series of in-character Youtube shorts called Tailstube, which act not just as promotional material but also an ongoing lore-clarification series⁷ with the very first episode trying to lay out as plainly as possible while staying in character: All games take place on the same planet. Humans and mobians⁸ just mostly live in different parts of the world. The Mega Drive games are part of the main canon. Please forget those retcons. Please go fix the wiki pages.

And the games have embraced talking about their history again, acknowledging backstories and characters who hadn’t been mentioned in a decade. The extended human cast, particularly those related to Shadow’s backstory, exist again. Maria and Gerald Robotnik feature in Shadow Generations and the GUN commander⁹ was in the game’s promotional short Dark Beginnings. But the IDW comics, their timeline seemingly stuck in a pre-Sonic Frontiers limbo, has yet to feature any human characters outside of Eggman. Even when using locations that were shown in the games to be populated by humans the comics will show them as being full of mobians or simply empty instead. There still seems to be a reluctance in the series to portray a wider human cast, but that might be changing!

Sega recently licenced a new manga series called Sonic and the Blade of Courage where Sonic returns to the world of humans and teams up protagonist Yuuta, an ordinary boy, to fight Eggman, who has been going around using an ancient cursed idol to turn (human) people to crystal. In the third chapter Sonic takes Yuuta to Spagonia¹⁰ to meet Tails, the only mobian character in the comic so far other than Sonic himself. Spagonia is, like Yuuta’s home Metro City, full of humans. This stands in contrast to the last time Spagonia was shown in the IDW comics, with Sonic and Blaze the Cat on a sightseeing holiday running through empty streets.

Does this mean Sega is open to portraying more humans in the series as a whole again or is it compartmentalising aspects of the franchise to different media? Will any new Sonic mangas barred from having background mobians while IDW stays devoid of other humans? It would, I suppose, contribute to giving different parts of the series their own identities.

That said they have also introduced a new human character in the most recent Tailstube (which is also set in Spagonia): Professor Victoria¹¹. And Sage, Eggman’s AI daughter from from Sonic Frontiers, is joining the IDW cast in issue #84¹² which means that that status quo is finally being moved forward as well.

In any case I really enjoy the direction that the series has gone in recent years and I’m looking forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.

I have posted about how one of Dracula’s funniest moments is from it examining its own format as an epistolary novel but a another amusing use of the format is the inclusion of newspaper articles that give a perspective of some of the events of the novel from the detached perspective of (absurdly verbose) newspaper clippings whose writers have no inkling of the broader events of the story.

A correspondent from The Daily Graph recounts, on the 8th of August, how a freak storm crashes the schooner Demeter into Whitby Harbour with the only living soul on board being a great, black dog¹ that leaps from the ship as soon as it beaches and runs straight to a cliff where it “disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.”

The reporting continues the next day that the cargo of the ship (boxes full of Transylvanian soil) being consigned to a local solicitor and, more importantly, the Whitby SPCA putting out a desperate search for the poor dog who fled the ship, who is imagined to be terrified and hiding in the moors and definitely not a murderous vampire in the guise of a gigantic, ferocious, black wolf.

The newspaper clippings end with the paragraph:

No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so will end this one more “mystery of the sea.”

I am meant to monitor my blood pressure but the sound of the velcro strap scares the cat and she is currently sleeping on my desk and I do not want to disturb her

getting into this print photography thing

this video has loud distressed cat noises

heard this from the bathroom and genuinely thought that my cat was dying but another cat had just managed to get to the outside windowsill

teaching her about her heritage

I don’t watch game streamers much but one of the few who I have enjoyed a lot is Videochess (a.k.a. Chess). She doesn’t stream regularly at the moment but she has wonderful chaotic energy and a propensity for “crimes”, a term she uses for playfully exploring the mechanics of and pushing at the boundaries of games and seeing what is possible if one strays from the designated path. This can manifest as things like impromptu sequence breaking but not for the purposes of speedrunning or anything like that, just to see where it goes and tease out the foibles of a game. And sometimes she does things like collecting every star in Super Mario 64 while playing the game with a DJ Hero controller.

There are two main places to find her videos, her own Youtube channel that has her streams up until 2022 and another unofficial but endorsed channel that has archived more recent streams. One of her most popular series is an Ocarina of Time randomiser with GGDG but below I will share some of her videos that have had the largest influence on me.

Snolf

Her truly Sisyphean streams of Melon’s Snolf hacks inspired me to make my own Snolf Robo Blast 2 mod for Sonic Robo Blast 2 as well as a chat control mod that Chess ended up playing herself.

Discovering new games

I have also learnt about games and mods that I have since played or are now on my (long) list of things I want to get around to.

Robot Alchemic Drive I still have not gotten around to playing but seems fascinating. I love games with weird controls and especially when there is a diegetic basis for them. Having to remote control a giant robot from the perspective of someone on the ground who has to watch it from a distance rather than getting a camera from the perspective of the robot itself or even a cockpit is an incredible concept. You may be familiar with the game from clips that get shared online showcasing the best value greengrocer or Nanao having a miserable time.

I had only vaguely heard of Cave Story before watching her play “Cave Story Normal Regular”¹, i.e. Sonic Story, a mod that replaces the main character of the game, Quote, with Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, I know this is a massively important and influential game. No, I never bothered looking into it at all despite having had the Steam version in my library for years from some Humble Bundle or another. I have played both Cave Story and Sonic Story since and I can attest that Sonic Story perfectly replicates the feeling of how Mega Drive Sonic games control. It’s not just a reskin it is is playing as Sonic the Hedgehog in the wrong game in a way that is wonderful and silly.

For the opposite she has played Mario put into a Sonic game with the SM64 Generations mod, which uses libsm64. She has also played some other games using libsm64 as well as other regular normal Mario 64 mods.

Willy Wombat

I also became obsessed with Willy Wombat for a while after watching her play it. It is a fascinating, experimental 3D platformer with an isomorphic perspective with maps that have the same limitations as a Doom level: There are no slopes and not only are there no floating platforms but it’s impossible to have a floating platform in this game. Like Doom the levels are defined by floor sectors with designated heights. There are pillars and walls that rise out of the ground for vertically, but you can never go under anything. It leads to some unique level design, especially as the game progresses to areas were the developers had clearly gotten much more comfortable with their tools. The only thing I can think of that is similar (though lacking the top-down perspective) is older versions of Sonic Robo Blast 2 and that is literally a fork of Doom.

It’s also one of those bygone ’90s games that is fully voiced in English with a script penned and directed by a Japanese crew, giving it a surreal quality that is aided by a post-apocalyptic setting with jarring name choices and very little up-front exposition. Above is a fan animation I adore of a cutscene of Notes and Mail talking about “the peace and eternal life of Prison.”

I have a page on this website dedicated to my cat Easóg where you can see a video of her trying to kill Willy while I am watching Chess play the game and mushroom32x made a fun little Neocities webpage for the game’s 20th anniversary.

There’s plenty more

That’s enough for now. If you want to watch more check out the official and unofficial Youtube channels to dig through yourself.

I have to take my blood pressure a few times a day at the moment and the cat is absolutely terrified of the velcro strap. It’s because of the noise it makes but she runs out of the room when sees me so much as get out the blood pressure monitor.

Easóg has helped customise the window blind.

we should extend the International Phonetic Alphabet to include all the noises cats make

I am getting cold but there is a cat asleep on my lap so I cannot get up to put on a jumper so I guess that I am just going to die

I added a page to the site dedicated to my cat, Easóg

Easóg

Easóg is the Irish word for stoat and also the name of my cat. There are a couple layers to this name. The first is simply I find it funny to call animals by the wrong species and I have a fondness for the Irish language. The second is she is a thin, white thing and I think sometimes she somewhat resembles a stoat in its winter coat (though stoats in Ireland don’t actually have winter coats).

The final layer to this comes from the medieval Irish law, commonly known as Brehon law, or at least a little titbit about it in a book I read by Niall Mac Coitir titled Ireland’s Animals: Myths, Legends and Folklore, which says that for the purposes of determining legal penalties by offences commitid by a pet, a stoat was legally considered to be a type of cat. I sometimes amuse myself thinking about some exasperated judge who had to decide the original precedent about how to calculate damages when someone’s stoat killed a chicken.

I adopted her when she was, I was told, about eleven months old, though I never got a birthday for her. She’s a very timid creature and the morning after the first night I brought her home I couldn’t find her. I searched my flat top to bottom but she was nowhere to be seen. I was worried that she had somehow gotten out but suspected that she had found a hiding spot in the space under and behind the kitchen cabinets. I did have a look around outside and put up a few posters with my number on it in case anyone spotted her, but inside I left out food for her, sprinkled flour around it so that I could see any footprints she left if she went for it, and set up a webcam with some software to automatically capture video if it detected motion. Here is the first video captured of her.

This worked but sadly it was the only way that I saw her for three weeks. She would hide during the day when I was around and only come out at night to eat, use the litter tray that I had left out, and slowly start to explore her new home. There was no real way of getting to her hiding spot without dismantling the kitchen and that would have terrified her more anyway. Eventually she started to venture out when I was around and would explore other parts of the flat during the day (I left the doors open for her) but would keep her distance and flee back to her hole if I motioned towards her or even moved very quickly or made any noise at all.

Once she was tolerating my (distant) presence more I decided to try and make myself as unthreatening as possible. When she stepped out into the hallway I lay on the floor of the living room and waited for her to come back. When she did she very, very slowly and very, very carefully stalked up ot me then sniffed my hand before running away. Then she slowly came up again and sniffed my hair and ran away. I continued to lay still to not scare her but she very visibly relaxed at this point. She had been deathly silent in those weeks but now started to meow and take some experimental swipes at a mouse toy that I had left on the floor and rubbing her head against the furniture.

She left the room again and I decided to sit up with my legs crossed and wait for her again. When she came back again she sniffed at my hand and experimentally rubbed up against me before running off a short distance. When she came back to me it was like a switch had been flipped. She started rubbing up against me in earnest while purring loudly before headbutting my hand affectionately and licking the hell out of me as I pet her. When I eventually moved over to my desk she jumped up in my lap and settled in. My clothes were absolutely covered in white hair that evening.

To this day she is extremely affectionate (and vocal) and while she is still quite timid and doesn’t like sudden noises or movements she has gotten much more used to people.

I do spoil her a bit, though.

Also a friend pointed out to me that the character I made in Sonic Forces several years before adopting Easóg, who I called Blitz, is also a white cat with yellow eyes. Perhaps they are sisters.

The rest is just a photo dump.

animals I am according to my partner:

• deer
• cat
• pangolin

Which animal am I the most?

going to discover a new animal and name it a sergal to fuck with furries

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.

A different GIF will displayed below depending on your browser’s prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme settings. There’s four different possibilities:

I hadn’t used prefers-reduced-motion before but I saw a chost from Kore linking to a blog post about accessibility and GIFs and decided I wanted to follow it but I also didn’t want to have to manually write the HTML code for it each time. Thankfully programming is the art of being tactically lazy and I can put some effort in up front and solve an interesting problem once and then let my site generator handle it automatically from then on.

Also thankfully I had done something like this before after taking inspiration how Luna’s blog handles images. I don’t have high DPI images but I do have different dark and light mode versions of images for the The “the Ring” Podcast series tracker chart and the Dracula International diagram I made.

The way I had initially done that was, characteristically, a mess. I wrote a custom custom Liquid tag to handle it which meant that instead of actually using the existing, basic Markdown syntax I had to put images into my posts with something like this:

{% image /bog/images/easóg.gif %}

So revisiting this to include prefers-reduced-motion options I decided to do it differently this time. A way that would allow me to just type the normal Markdown syntax and let my code handle everything else.

![A white cat](/bog/images/easóg.gif "Easóg")

The next step was to look into how to extend and customise Jekyll’s Markdown parsing and output but that sounds hard and I didn’t want to do that so I just used a regular expression¹:

/((!!?)\[([^\[\]]*)\]\((.*?) *("([^"]*)")?\))/

This runs against the raw Markdown before it’s parsed into HTML and pulls out the link, alt text and title. That last part is also a big improvement over the custom tag I previously made as that didn’t support alt text or titles at all.

The code then takes the link and checks if there are any alternative versions listed in the site’s static file list like easóg.dark.gif, easóg.static.gif or easóg.dark.static.gif. when writing a new post now I don’t have to do anything extra other than have those other versions with the right naming scheme in the same folder as the original image.

From there it it compiles it into HTML and replaces the original Markdown in the document:

<picture>
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.gif" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.static.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" />
  <img src="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" alt="A white cat" title="Easóg" loading="lazy" />
</picture>

Well, actually it does something else too. You might have noticed in the regular expression up above I am actually checking for an optional, second exclamation mark at the start of the image tag. That’s my own extension of the syntax. If I’m doing my own parsing I might as well go wild with it. If there are two exclamation marks at the start of the tag it also wraps the image in a link to itself and adds an extra class:

<a href="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" class="dynamic-image-link">
  <picture>
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.gif" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.static.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" />
    <img src="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" alt="A white cat" title="Easóg" loading="lazy" />
  </picture>
</a>

The classes are to enable a little bit of Javascript² to swap out the destinations of the links on the fly when swapping if the user’s media preferences change. Whichever one you currently see in the browser is the one you’ll go to if you click on it.

I might review the double bang syntax if I can figure out something that could be added to the tag that would get stripped out and ignored by a normal Markdown parser for better compatibility. If only Markdown had comments.

Is this a robust solution? Absolutely not! Will I eventually run into annoying weird cases that make me bang my head against the wall as a result of this? I already have! While writing this very bog post! Because the regular expression cannot tell that the markdown code example I have above is not meant to be parsed and turned it into HTML, making it impossible to show the before part of the before and after. Did this make me go back and implement this in a better way? No!

I added some metadata to this post telling it do disable my custom image parsing, made the parser skip doing anything if it finds that metadata on a page and then hardcoded the example at the top of this page. That’s right: This post isn’t actually using the one thing it’s meant to be demonstrating!