Xenocartographer: Aww, thanks! I guess I'll have to do more pages like this in the future~ edit delete reply

Quintus: That makes me wonder: what is an object rogue administrator modifies to add his comments? At some points that was obviously public logs, but when he was trying to stop EP from opening the door that should be a private log - like one of these perspectives. But where exactly exists 'private' message without second participant, neither'/query', nor simply 'pm'? And what sort of actual privacy that message could have - obviously it is available to GoO and rogue administrator, but what should be 'hacked' for that message to be revealed? edit delete reply

Xenocartographer: The rogue administrator, by virtue of being a rogue administrator, doesn't quite conform to the usual rules. The simple answer is that there's no way to tell whether one of the rogue messages was sent to a single user or a channel, but other admins can see them regardless. edit delete reply

Marlowe345: I think that also begs the question of who are we? Are we extra-dimensional time travellers who just happen to not have anything better to do than read logs in the 2080's? Speaking of which, I'd really like to test how time passes for us, on Unichat and in-universe. Who knows, maybe Ubuntu can break dimensions.
So, here we go.
First, local time
for i in {1..3}; do date -u +%Y/%j/%H/%M/%S/%N; sleep 1; done

Unichat time - not sure whether Unichat supports delaying commands or parts of commands, I suppose you could assume a script is issuing these commands on a 1s delay.
/channel stat -time
[sleep 1 local time]
/channel stat -time
[sleep 1 local time]
/channel stat -time

As for the in-universe time, this might be the hardest to get. Ostensibly, the command would go along the lines of this:
sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z" -u +%Y/%j/%H/%M/%S/%N; for i in {1..2}; do date -u+%Y/%j/%H/%M/%S/%N; sleep 1; done

but I doubt it would show anything other than our time. As far as we know, our only window into this world is Unichat. Perhaps we could try some sort of connection over Unichat? Maybe SSH through it to a computer on the other side? Good bet would be Algernon University, as it might have an atomic clock, or perhaps something even more accurate we haven't invented yet.
Though I doubt anyone's going to do that just to figure out whether or not time passes at the same rate. (Also, the date commands include the year and day of the year, which would give us the current in-universe date as well)

P.S. This might or might not be in response to SecundaSonja's and future pwnz0rz's 20 minute to christmas remark and DeepDark's supposedly long delay, which didn't turn out to be long after all. edit delete reply

Arbiter: Yeah, the question of who we canonically are in-story is a good one. Are we time travellers like you said? Or are we just people who live in the time period in which the comic is set who have some sort of weird, selective form of omniscience? Or are we canonically what we are in real life: the readers? In-story, are we intruders from the other side of the fourth wall?
~
Clearly there are time shenanigans of some description going on, since it's canon that the amount of time elapsed from DeepDark's perspective was different from bloodshoes' perspective, but that doesn't seem to be something we can actively control. I don't think there's any sort of constant relationship between the flow of time on our side and the flow of time on theirs, aside from the fact that directionality seems to preserved for the most part (we can't send a message back in time and save bloodshoes, for instance, since that's in the past from both perspectives and always will be.) Then again, the weird thing that happened with Sans' message to meta might be an exception...
~
So whatever we are, I doubt we exist at the same time as the characters, because if we did we'd expect time to flow much more linearly for us. Whether we canonically exist in their world is another question. I mean, in-story me is on record as referring to himself as "the best fan" and asking if DOGFOODLID wants to be "plot-relevant", but as the foremost expert on Arbiter I can confidently say that those are the kind of things he'd say even if he weren't talking to fictional characters.
~
There's also the possibility that we might not even all be the same thing. It seems pretty likely, actually. Xeno is canonically in a different dimension than the rest of us, DeepDark and Delta are readers who've interfered with the plot but are not affiliated with the council, DeepDark's account was said not to exist but endsoftime's got banned, and if the A.D.D.R. Online thread on the forum is anything to go by Delta might be an inter-dimensional traveller too. Maybe Xeno and Delta are from another dimension, I actually am from the real world, Sans is a time-traveller, and ends is actually someone who exists in-universe.
TL;DR ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. edit delete reply

Seabiscuit: Haha, relatedly, it amuses me how it seems like me and Xeno are still dating in universe, yet I still don't know what he's up to



just like real life edit delete reply

Arbiter: Oh, geez, yeah, what would that even be like in-universe? He's in another dimension, and seems to know a lot of really useful information but refuses to ever tell anyone. Oceanography might actually be Unichat's weirdest canon relationship, and that's saying something. (In-universe, obviously. I'm sure you guys are great IRL.) edit delete reply

Xenocartographer: The ship name is "space bagel", haha~ 'cos I like space and bagels are kinda like biscuits, I guess edit delete reply

Seabiscuit: "Oceanography" Omg haha that's a new and amazing one gosh


I mean, we're pretty ridiculous IRL too, but I suppose nothing quite tops appearing to be suddenly possessed or something and having ?? time stamps edit delete reply

Xenocartographer: Who are you in-universe? Hmm... edit delete reply

Xenocartographer: Hey, Marlowe, it hasn't come up in canon, but you can mix Unichat commands with regular shell commands. /channel stat -time; sleep 1; channel stat -time (etc) would do what you want. /for i in {1..3}; do channel stat -time; sleep 1; done would also work.

The short version is that, originally, Unichat didn't have any shell functionality, and /whatever was just handled by pattern matching. Later, as Unichat's capabilities (cough) expanded, Gods decided it would be helpful to give it a scripting language, so he added a bizarro bash variant (obviously not POSIX-compliant, heh) called bush (the u stands for Unichat). An initial / sends the rest of the line to that shell; it's not a path separator in that context, so invoking a regular bash shell is either /bash or //bin/bash (ick), and running foo.sh in the current directory is /./foo.sh (mega-ick). This makes Unichat more than a little impractical for any serious computing, though that doesn't stop our characters from doing so when it's convenient for the story. It does mean that Unichat has a very rich plugin ecosystem, which is where things like Hades' Realm come from. edit delete reply

Xenocartographer: It also means one could invoke screen, tmux, or similar to be active in multiple channels. I haven't yet figured out an aesthetically pleasing way to represent that, unfortunately. edit delete reply

Arbiter: This comment chain is basically just S~U~P~P~L~E~M~E~N~T~A~R~Y M~A~T~E~R~I~A~L now and I love it. edit delete reply

Seabiscuit: gosh edit delete reply

Arbiter: /message ((Delta)) Obvious comedy value of UR freaking out at someone for saying too much aside, I have to ask why you're sending me this. I thought that, with the exception of games night at Tempie's, our screaming matches negotiations had pretty much come to a screeching halt.
/message ((Delta)) Should I know who this Ashley/__RSPTN__ person is?
/message ((Delta)) ...Wait.
/message ((Delta)) OMG Delta, do you have a crush on her? Is that why you commented on her name?
/message ((Delta)) I'm flattered that you're coming to me for relationship advice, but I'm sorry to tell you that I don't think she's a good choice for you. She seems really into that whole Gaian scene, man. Trust me, you do not want to get mixed up in that. You go on one date, and the next thing you know she's asking you to come with her on a three-week trip to Russia to go blow up a monument.
/message ((Delta)) Besides, your buddies might think you're cheating on them with another cult. That would make games night awkward. edit delete reply

Wildcat: New ship! ((Delta)XAshley!
I propose the ship name ΔtoAsh edit delete reply

Arbiter: The Scheme Team. edit delete reply

Seabiscuit: Hahahaha
Noooo


Rasputin/Vampire otp ;~; edit delete reply