(no subject)

[landofspaceandrainbows]

 

geromykyle:

so lets talk about caliborn’s symbol. obviously it’s one of the signs of ophiuchus the serpent bearer and all that, but this part of the flash just made something go click with me.

the other cruxtruders had a countdown on those panels, but cal’s is his symbol. except the tilde and the U are seperated, so we have ~U.

now bear with me because im about as shitty at coding as karkat is, but

i’m sure we all remember ~ATH, the programming language used to code Karkat’s curse and the unhackable program that Sollux found which started running when the universe was destroyed, allowing Lord English to already be here.

~ATH has a class called universe, as seen here.

import universe U;

a class is just a blueprint. once it’s imported into a program you can make copies of it and use them at your leisure. so basically, that line of code means “make a new universe and name it “U”“.

now here’s where the interesting part starts.

affixing a tilde to a class in the C programming languages (which ~ATH very closely resembles) creates a “destructor”. these are used to destroy instances of a class after it’s served its function and is no longer needed, in order to free up memory and resources so the program can run faster.

~U /  U̴  means “destroy universe”. it is the ~ATH symbol for Lord English’s entire purpose.

the cruxtruder was/is counting down until the destruction of a universe. thats probably why caliborn was a little peeved - who knows how long that could take? but what happens right after this panel? the kernelsprite goes nuts and creates a black hole, apparently paradoxically fulfilling it’s own requirement for the session’s entry. that’s paradox space for you!

Reblogging this; it sums things up nicely.

The ~ATH destructor reference was pretty obvious to me since the mobius double reacharound code, me being a programmer and all (though I didn’t recognize UU’s symbol as quite that until the Calliope reveal).  I didn’t mention it because I didn’t realize so many others wouldn’t get it!  Stupid programmer bubble; we have a tendency to not realize how obscure our career’s language is to everyone else.

2012-7-28