Years ago, I wrote in-depth about Twitch being a complete trash fire. As a response to it, I made a bot which I shared with about 40 different streamers that addressed Twitch’s shortcomings.

For about a year and a half, this bot ran largely uninterrupted and had all sorts of features such as predictive bans, exemptions, algorithmic bans, and so forth. It was far more advanced than whatever Twitch had out there and I believe it probably prevented a few hate raids against marginalised streamers.

In February, Twitch removed the ability to perform bans via its chat interface and instead shifted everything to requiring a user access token in conjunction with its HTTP API.

On the surface, this is fine in the grand scheme of things, but it required me to completely rejig the entire authentication model from just simply using a /mod command on the bot and then me joining the channel to asking for everyone to sign in and pass me a token. This is a piss-poor design because it would be just easier to assign the permissions via legacy means, but nope, you have to re-authenticate that bot.

I might be overthinking or misunderstanding this, but the bot also has become more onerous to update and is also costing me CA$40/month of which I largely pay out of pocket–not complaining, but it is a personal expense that would have not occurred if Twitch had made good tools years ago. Combine with increasing living expenses, I have decided that it’s not fun to pay for this anymore.

In any event, because of the cost and Twitch finally has tooling that makes it easier to deal with bullshit after much, much yelling in their direction from all sorts of groups, I feel it is time to officially state that I have sunsetted the bot. I hope that it did benefit those who needed it most and I am always willing to provide a hand should anything come up in the future. ❤️

In case you’re wondering: all data is being deleted from the database and backups are going with!

It turns out that in the Ultimate Talkie Edition of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, touching the model lighthouse in Phatt Island but not retrieving its lens creates a softlock condition. When returning to Scabb Island, Dredd leaves to go “do errands” and consequently makes you stuck without the ability to get the map reassembled. The cartographer in Scabb needs that lens but you have no boat to go back!

This bug does not exist in the non-Talkie versions as far as I can tell. I did some searching in various places and it appears that I am not the first person to run across it.

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Approximate location of the former station, Connaught Hill (Google Street View)

When riding down the Expo Line from Edmonds to 22nd Street, one may notice that it is a rather lengthy ride. At nearly 2 KM, it’s nowhere near the longest distance between stations, but when it was the interurban Central Park Line, there was a station in-between the two.

The BC Electric Railway (BCER) had a station around what is now 9th Avenue in Burnaby or simply situated south of a SkyTrain maintenance facility. Connaught Hill, named after after the western province of Ireland named Connaught, was a small station serving the now-residential area straddling the Burnaby and New Westminster border.

Station location in New Westminster (Google)

Back then, it was a large gravel pit. The hole created conveniently ended up becoming the SkyTrain maintenance facility we have today.

Connaught Hill as it appeared in the 1950s (TransLink / BC Transit)

Today, there sits no station but you can visit its old location when travelling along the BC Parkway.

Stopped to take a photo as I cycled on by. You can see the remnants of the old tracks left behind.

I just came back from Boston and ended up riding each line that the MBTA provides in the Boston area except for commuter rail and some heritage railway I didn’t need to use. Because of how weird the entire network is itself, I have a thought on each line in a sort of roasting-like manner.

The whole network is weird to me because no single line runs the same type of vehicle as another. This is a bit baffling coming from a city where there are three lines and two of them use the same train types. That and the headways between trains just makes it so awkward.

At least this visit to Boston unlike the last one had all of the lines as functioning although on the weekend one line was running with a shuttle bus between two stations.

Red Line

Braintree and Alewife are termini? These names are just wild. This is probably the most normal of the lines I rode

Blue Line

Wonderland is the name of a terminus? I have never been in a subway where not only do the platforms curve upward but also to a side. That is some impressive engineering.

Orange Line

Nice to know that trains can catch fire and not manage to kill anyone. Why does this line run so slowly again?

Green Line

Good lord. This line is weird. Level-crossings for pedestrians isn’t so weird, but it is extremely weird when they’re inside of the subway itself. Also, is this a subway or a tram? The use of low-floor trains kind of remind of Brussels’ tram network, but these cars are nowhere near as elegant.

The theme of Expo 86 was transportation and many, many countries took advantage of the show to demonstrate their developments in this field. Of course, the star of the show was Canada’s SkyTrain, but Japan showed its maglev train, America its cars, and the United Kingdom showed its conventional rail.

British Rail, the then government corporation behind operation and development of rail transportation in the United Kingdom decided to send one of its Class 142 train sets (aka “Pacer”) diesel trains (dubbed as “railbus”) to tour Metro Vancouver.

They regularly ran service from a temporary station in Abbotsford to New Westminster during the summer months of 1986 along the railway once referred to as the Fraser Valley Line during the BC Electric Railway days.

It did make an appearance near the Expo grounds at Pacific Central and was given a largely lukewarm reception by locals and government officials. The common critique of the train was the one shared by those back in the UK: it was an uncomfortable ride.

The reasons behind the uncomfortable ride are known: unlike most trains, this was based on a bus made by British Leyland. A rail chassis was fixed to the bus body and then some slight modifications were made to the cab to make it “rail-ready”. Unlike a typical train, the wheels were fixed in place which made them noisy. To add to this, there were only two axels per car unlike the typical four you’d see on other trains including all of the ones used by SkyTrain today, which resulted in a rougher ride.

After the summer, the train set was sent back to the UK where it operated on various different services until all Pacers were retired at the end of 2020.