GNOME.BAS

I was browsing the internet one late night, after having just beat pokemon crystal. It was real though. for one, it wasn't a legit pokemon crystal, it was from the internet and it was yellow and while it started out like any other copy of crystal things seemed off, it used to forget my save data constantly, reset me to places in the past and screw names up, things like that. it also had pokerus EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME I played, like even on new games. eventually it stopped saving altogether and all the PC boxes were incredibly corrupted, sprites had portions of other sprites jammed onto them, it was creepy

Anyway, so I was looking for addons for my GNOME desktop, but didn't find anything good. Then I went to check my email and noticed something very strange. There was an email, but there was no name, or even address, all it had was a link to the official gnome servers. I clicked on it, it took 5 whole minutes to load (nothing unusual there), but when it loaded I was really weirded out. it didn't look like the normal gnome site, it was all black with just a big yellow link in the middle that said "FREE (BETA)". I wasn't sure what it was, but it was for gnome, so it must have been good. I downloaded it, as soon as the download finished firefox crashed (again nothing unusual), but when i reloaded the page it was gone! just 404'd. I thought the gnome devs were busy donating their servers to feminsists so I brushed it off and went to check out what i downloaded. it was in a zip file, which I thought was kinda weird, but extracted it, and I got a file called "GNOMEBAS". I thought "wait a minte, BAS? BASIC? can't be, gnome doesn't have basic". I thought it was preposterous, but I decided to manually install it anyway. instantly my screen flickered and a burning smell came from my PSU. I thought it was gnome's fault in general so I didn't blame it on the addon.

so I decided try using the --help flag on the addon, which worked fine and shown me how to use it. It said it was totally compatable with Visual Basic. I was trhilled! I loved VB when I was a wee tot and was overjoyed at the prospect of using it again! I kept reading, and notuced something funny about the license, it said "THIS SOFTWARE DOES NOT COME WITH ANY WARRANTY, DO NOT USE" I thought it was kinda weird how it outright said "do not use" instead of "use at your own risk" but I guess they were in a hurry. I decided to open up my favorite editor Gosling Emacs and write some Visual Basic, just a hello world. I loaded up the program, but instead of saying hello world it said "hell dlo" with some random unicode characters. I thought it was just buggy, so I understood, if not disappointed that it wasn't ready to use yet. but when the program finished I notice my hostname was changed from "DELL-INSPIRON-7782-POKEMONGOKUFAN" to "GNOMEBAS". I was really confused and upset about it, I wanted to file a bug report immedately, but when I went to look up gnome basic I only got dead end results.

I decied to talk to the gnome staff themselves, so I drove up to the gnome headquarters as this was a really pressing matter. I met with one of the gnome staff, and he asked if I was looking for a job or to donate my penis to needy women. I said no to both and asked about gnome basic. he froze, and just stared at me. he said he didn't know anything and that I had to leave, and he had his crew of JERK COPS throw me out. I wasn't going to let this go this time, something was up here and I was gonna find out about it.

I asked around the internet, going to newsgroups and chans and anywhere else you can think of. I finally got an answer on /prog/ named Mark who gave me his email ([email protected]) so we coul talk more. He right away gave me proof that he used to work at the gnome foundation and was on the staff of the gnome basic team. he told me how Gnome Basic was going to be a huge part of gnome, because they really wanted VB support at the time to be compatable with Windows as a viable alternative. unfortunately something really bad happened, one day a member of the team got up from his computer, grabbed his boob mouse pad, and with no expression on his face ran towards the window and broke through it, 9 stories down to his death. after that another team member was found a day later, hung himself in the closet. after that more members kept dying. the team members who remained kept writing sloppier code. Mark himself said he still has to take antipsychotics to this day himself. I asked him how that happened, he said he doesn't know, but what he does know is Gnome Basic was something that was outside human comprehension, something that mortals shouldn't tamper with, and the heads of the gnome foundation themselves decided this was something that had to be kept secret. they buried all the compuetrs used to make gnome basic in a field and made sure nothing was left of it, anyone who asked about it was to be told it never got out of planning.

but, Mark did have a copy left, and the source too. he gave me the source in a download. I saw how terrible it was. I asked why the code was indented like that and if it was the insanity but he said that was just the GNU coding standard and they used that for everything. I kept browsing, and I could see what he meant. the code started to make less sense, the comments started talking less about the code and how the devs could hear things or kept seeing things in the corner of their eyes when they worked. I finally got the start of the interpreter when I saw this comment:
//I AM THRUBAASIC.. I FEEL RATFOR. .I AM HERE.

I didn't know who or what thrubaasic was, but just seeing it sent shivers down my spine, and then my computer shut down and wouldn't start. I deccided to send it to gnome, with a letter telling them to bury it with the others. I had St. IGNUtius bless my house and never touched basic again.

and then a skeleton popped out