PaJoFo Ponderings

Scratch

Created: Modified: 4 min read

Scratch. Yes, the block-based programming website. The website that introduced me to the concept of forums, online multiplayer games, and digital friends. I was in fifth grade when we started doing Scratch in AAP (the gifted program where I once made an aluminum foil boat that fit so many pennies we ran out and needed to get some from a kindergarten classroom1). While most of my other classmates had limited interest, a whole new world opened up to me as I developed, tested, and illustrated projects of very limited use outside of the fifth grade. While my class stopped posting after the unit was over, I continued, developing calculators, clocks, games, and more, again, all of dubious quality.2

In eighth grade I programmed a random number picker that removed the number selected from the list, an actually useful function that ought to have been easier to find than to program but wasn’t.3

My time on scratch was also when I chose my first online moniker, doodlebob2, which I stuck with for years before shifting to my more modern name.4 (No I didn’t realize doodlebob was a Spongebob character when I made the name.)

I created Virtual Extra-Large Bubble Wrap and thus provided classroom material to hundreds of thousands of students.5

I started a contest, then realized that the prize for the contest was uninhibited access to anything I made on Scratch without credit and decided that I didn’t actually want to go through with the thing.

Most importantly though, and to tie this all back to the previous random thought, I was an active member of the forums and really enjoyed posting, reading others’ stuff, and watching teams attempt to collaborate on projects.6I even joined a collaboration to try and make a Star Wars game that was both beyond my capacity and also in no way going to ever happen because it was beyond the capacity of the Scratch engine itself.7 At the same time, I imbibed the forum culture, and I found a trend that I could join:

(\__/)
(=’.’=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste Bunny into your
(“)_(”) sig to help him gain world domination.

Bunny never did gain world domination, but I like to think that I did my part to give him his best possible chance.

In other words, the first time I used ASCII Art was in my Scratch signature. Wow!

Footnotes

  1. I won’t flex about being a gifted elementary school student, but I will flex about that boat. ↩

  2. The most beloved of all seems to be Candy Clicker which has been incessantly remixed. Some make literally no changes(?), others change the candy to something totally random, yet more inexplicably automate the game for reasons that I cannot comprehend.

    Seriously though, what is this

    My favorite part: the people still asking for updates 10 YEARS after the original release of the game. My friend, look at my profile activity, there will not be another update to Candy Clicker.

    Case in point:

    Bonus screenshot because the comments section on this particular project is nuts:

    Someone else probably but the project in their studio. Tbh I have no clue. ↩

  3. I would go on to discover, years later, that the program was flawed, and only kind of worked as intended, but even so, it was neat. ↩

  4. I was recently informed that I do a bad job of existing as a real-life version of my internet alias, but that’s a conversation that I need to have in person ↩

  5. I still have no idea how I managed to become a part of the SEL curriculum, but here I am with 124,609 views on the project where literally all I did was upscale the size of another guy’s work (with credit obviously) ↩

  6. The vast majority of these collaborations were doomed from the start and far too broad reaching. Even so, a few genuinely impressive projects have managed to emerge from that graveyard of fallen dreams that is the “Collaborations” section.

    Update after actually looking at the modern collaboration section: Scratch has fallen, the collaboration section has been taken over by weird roleplayers.

    Well, that and this:

    Bro, what’s even going on here? ↩

  7. We also named the thing and thought it was a great name. A couple weeks later someone googled it and found out that it was also the name of a tabletop game, so we had to rename it. ↩

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