Four Island

Speedrunning is neat because it offers an incentive for replaying a game. Often, a second playthrough loses some of the charm of the first because you already know what to expect. You've already had the epiphanies. But speedrunning gives you an excuse to play the game in a different way. Now you make the rules (or, well, a community that manages a leaderboard makes the rules). And then there's the fact that many games have multiple categories to do runs in, giving you even more ways to look at the game and practice and have fun.

The Witness is no exception. It's a versatile game, and there are plenty of goals you can come up with, which exist on a sliding scale of "reasonable" to "how did you even think of this". It all just depends on how creative you are. I've been known to set bizarre goals in games before, like when I basically turned catching Raikou and Mewtwo in Pokemon FireRed into puzzles.

yr dedication to making games rly hard awes me

— 🇰🇷3 springrolls please✡️ (@shirAdrenaline) March 20, 2020

Today, I'm going to talk about a category called Minimum Right Clicks.

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Happy third day of the new year! It's time for the annual post I'm most likely to be consistent at doing because it's not very difficult to write: the roundup of the best quotes from last year. Last year's was fun so I hope you like this one too!

There were 78 new quotes this year! We had an average of 6.5 quotes per month, with March and November having 11 each. Most of the quotes are still submitted by me and most still contain me but I'm always happy when other people submit and when there's conversations that don't include me! And we got a lot of upvotes this time too, so we have some pretty clear winners.

As a note: there were 12 quotes tied for tenth place with 4 votes each, so I chose my favorite for that position. Also, if you've never seen the quotes on this website before, most of them are pretty NSFW so keep that in mind.

With that, let's get started!

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Happy New Year, everyone! It's 2026 now, and you know what that means: it's time for me to try to revive my blog by writing nostalgic posts! My aunt and I made a pact to blog more this year, so we'll see how well I can stick to that. In the past, I've done annual goals or silly predictions on the first of the year, but this time I think I'm going to cut in early with my music review post.

2025 was a great year for me in terms of music! It's been a goal of mine to listen to more new music (especially since the Great Debacle of 2023 when I only listened to two albums all year). I purchased or received eleven CDs since Christmas 2024 (but only ten albums, as I got one album twice!), which is improved from 2024 when I got five. While I did not reach an average of one album a month, I still think I kept myself occupied with songs I enjoyed listening to, rather than being stuck in a hole of listening to Memory Reboot and nothing else over and over.

This was also the year that I implemented the silly box on the sidebar of my blog that shows a random song I've been listening to lately. Just some fun with the last.fm API! It's been spoiling the names of some of the songs on my upcoming album, which I find amusing.

Once again, I've created a playlist of some of the songs I'll be talking about. Feel free to follow along as you read the post!

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(TL;DR I made a short Pokemon fangame that gives you the experience of catching a certain Mythical Pokemon! And no, it's not Arceus.)

What? Who's this?

It's Arceus!!

And it's a real, not-at-all-hacked one. I got it back in 2017ish (holy hay that's eight years ago now) from my ex, when we were still close. They had been talking with one of their coworkers and found out that that coworker had an event gen 4 Arceus from Toys 'R' Us way back then. They weren't interested in Pokemon anymore so they traded it to my ex who traded it to me, because Arceus is my favorite Pokemon (tied with Swoobat). And I'm like omg I have a legitimate fateful encounter Arceus![^2]

One of the reasons this is Awesome is that, well, back in 2017 you could not get Arceus without attending an event. Nowadays you get one for fully completing Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and then another one in Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl if you've finished PLA. But there's another reason this is Epic, and it's because having an Arceus in HeartGold / SoulSilver actually unlocks a secret area that cannot be otherwise accessed.

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Back in 2018, I was really into Celeste. It was pretty decidedly my favorite game at the time; the gameplay is fun, the music and art are beautiful, and the depiction of mental health issues was very striking. I highly recommend it, in case you've somehow made it this long without playing it.

One of the things that I got pretty invested in was the Golden Strawberries. Once you get far enough into the postgame, you unlock a special golden strawberry at the beginning of each stage, which you have to escort to the end without dying. In the past, I've tended not to enjoy deathless challenges because they felt like pointless difficulty padding, but there was something about Celeste that made it feel achievable, like you'd be able to get there if you just practiced hard enough.

There were 24 levels in the game at that point, and I made it my goal to get all 24 golden strawberries. I wrote about my progress as I went, and posted little video clips when I could. One of my favorite moments in this was practicing 6-a while sitting on the sofa at the office on my lunch break, and then suddenly realizing I was almost at the end. I can still remember the befuddled face my coworker made at me when I collected the berry. I managed to conquer all of the A-sides, all of the C-sides, and the first four B-sides, which meant my next task was 5-b.

So, a little time has passed. Seven years, in fact. Trying to get the 5-b golden strawberry proved too difficult for me back in 2018. The cycles and the spinners and the Theo section are all pretty intimidating. I even learned the spike jump skip in the second checkpoint so I could skip a room, but I still barely made it into the third checkpoint most of the time. I gave up on it eventually, and took a long break from Celeste.

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The Witness was released on January 26th of 2016 at 5pm UTC, and by the end of the day, it had already been patched twice. It would, in fact, receive another 7 patches before the week was up. None of these updates changed the content of the game, of course. They were all about fixing bugs.

This is not uncommon when it comes to video games in the modern era. No matter how much you test software before release, there are always issues that quality control misses. Sometimes this has to do with the different technical environment that release puts your game in, and sometimes it has to do with gameplay bugs that only a wider audience can reveal for you.

Speedrunners have an interesting relationship with game updates. A game is usually updated in good faith, with the goal of bettering the casual player's experience. Stuff like lag reduction and increased leniency in difficult portions of the game are generally considered positive by everyone. But there are some changes that are beneficial to casual players which hinder speedrunners: most notably, the removal of useful glitches.

Today, on the nine year anniversary of its release, I will be talking about how The Witness has changed for speedrunners over time, and the history of New Version vs Old Version.

Disclaimer as per usual that this post contains a lot of spoilers for The Witness, including major mechanic reveals and also some full puzzle solutions. It's also long; I'm talking 13,000 words long. It got so long I had to widen a database column and split part of it into a separate post. Have fun!

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Well folks, I really did it this time. My propensity for prolix loquaciousness and overly comprehensive tutorialization has aggrandized to a heretofore novel level. I was working on a post about the history of updates to The Witness and how they affected speedrunners, and it got so long that it overflowed the database column (it had a max of 64kb, which I hit at about 11k words). I've resized that field now, but I had been considering breaking out some of the content into a separate post anyway, and I took this as a sign that I should get on that.

Old Version has a bunch of cool quirks and glitches, but there's one trick in particular that I spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about. It makes use of a glitch that no one thought was useful, it prompted discussions about whether you could mess with game files during a run, and research had to be done into the game's internal workings, the results of which ended up being important beyond just this trick. And also I was "at the scene of the crime", as they say.

Today, I'm going to talk about Force Bridge Skip.

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Continuing with our jaunt through last year: it's time to talk about music! Historically I've been a bit of a music aficionado, and I've written album reviews on this site in the past. However, I've been listening to much less new stuff than usual in the past like, uh, ummm, uh... six years? Which, I suppose, makes this musical drought the new normal.

When I say drought, I mean that I believe I only really listened to two albums in 2023. Two! Granted, they were 終焉 Re:write by 150P and EPHEMERAL by Mr.Kitty, which are both long albums that are packed with bangers. Sort of. But still, I've been wanting for a while to get back into listening to music more often, and not just idly while I write code. I did listen to more music in 2024 than I did in 2023, although not as much as I'd have hoped. Still, progress is progress!

I've created a playlist of some of the songs I'll be talking about, in case you want to check them out or listen along with the post!

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It's day 2 of the new year! And you know what that means: well, actually, you probably don't, because I haven't done this in over a decade! I'll tell you what it means, though: it means I get to talk about the top quotes of the last year!

I started up the quotes database again in last 2023, and it's exploded quite a bit, with ~250 quotes submitted in the modern era! Most of them were from conversations between 2019 and 2023 that I submitted all at once when reopening the quotes database, but we've still had an average of 8 new quotes a month this year, which I think is pretty fun!

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Hey, it's me again! That guy from the other time! Yes indeed, I'm Hatkirby and I'm here to revive yet another old Four Island tradition: the annual predictions post! I first did this in 2008, because a decade-old Linux humor blog I liked to read had done it before. The start of a new year is one of my favorite events, and I love doing little things to ring in this changing of the season. And thus was born: this!

Now, I usually like to post these on New Year's Eve rather than New Year's Day, but I got a little carried away with this one and did not end up finishing it in time. But that's alright! Obviously, the purpose of this isn't to actually predict the future. It's fun to imagine, though! And if any of these predictions do come true, well, my lawyer will be contacting the spacetime continuum for violating my intellectual property. Let's get started!

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