Glossary


So, you've seen words with asterisks after them across the site, and you clicked on one, or came to this page manually? Well, just look below for my definition of the word you're looking for.

Flame

An extremely harsh complaint, retort, or comment, that tends to be very insulting and angry. Back-and-forth flames are called Flame Wars. Flames often contain expletives and people who flame others often are called Flamers. Just remember: The 'F' in Flamer is optional...

Recolour

A video game character that has had the colours changed slightly, and nothing else, and is then called original. A blue Samus, for instance, would be a Samus recolour. Yoshies, wearing next to no clothes, tend to be hard to create without making a recolour, but you can still try. Even if you don't make all your characters incredible and new, at least try to make your avatar a little different.

Spriter

Someone who makes or edits sprites, or makes sprite comics.

CG'd

Computer Graphed. A loose term for either art that has been hand-drawn then coloured on computer, or drawn from scratch on computer but isn't a sprite.

Copyright

When you create something original, it is copyrighted to you. You are the owner of whatever it is, and you own the copyright. Like the name suggests, you are the only person with the right to copy that material.

JPG/JPEG

Image file format, "Joint Picture Experts Group". It makes sprites 'fuzzy' and so is only used for photos where this effect is not noticable.

GIF

Image file format, "Graphics Interchange Format". Uses only a small number of colours compared to a BMP, to cut down on file size. Animated image files are also stored as GIFs, though they can become very large. Most files on this site are in GIF format.

PNG

Image file format, "Portable Network Graphics". Compresses images but isn't supported by all internet browsers. Any browser made in the last decade or so ought to work with it.

Hentai

Japanese word meaning 'pervert', used on the Internet to basically mean hand-drawn or CG'd pornography. Don't send me any.

Leet

A way of typing that replaces letters with numbers and symbols. 17 k1nd4 100k5 11k3 7h15. ("It kinda looks like this")

Hacker Caps

Alternating lower case and uppercase letters. LiKe ThIs, YoU sEe?

Avatar

A picture or character used to represent you on the web. That brown Yoshi with the black fins you see on a lot of the pages is my avatar. It can also be used to describe any person's display picture on, say, a forum.

MP3

Music file format. Compressed sound file that needs to be decompressed before it can be played. Very popular, widely supported.

MIDI

Music file format. Digitised sound file with pre-defined instrument definitions that is very small but is only good for instrumental music. Used to be popular back in the days of 56k modems because MIDI files are very small.

SWF

Flash file format. If you have a sufficiently up-to-date Flash player, you can view any flash file. The Flash player is free.

Ripping

"Stealing" resources from a game via the use of emulation. Ripped graphics or sounds are easily found on the internet. Other methods exist for ripping game resources, particularly music, that involve programs specially written to do so.

Line Art

A picture where the pencil lines have been inked, but there is no colour, shading, or major detail. The pencil lines have been erased, making a clean picture.

Source Code

The programming code used to make something. This page's source code is in HTML, viewable via "View|Source". Games and such are in languages like Pascal, C++, and so on.
Depending on the language, the source code may be Interpreted, where the program simply looks at the source and runs on it. HTML is an example of an interpreted language.
Other languages have to be Compiled, which takes the code and turns it into a bunch of 0's and 1's that tell the computer what to do. This makes compiled languages faster than interpreted ones.

Hexadecimal

A "base 16" system of counting. Decimal (our system, "base 10") counts as follows: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Hexadecimal, however, counts like this: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F. Hexadecimal is used for colour definitions in HTML code, among other things.

WIP

Work In Progress. An acronym stating that something is partially completed, and that work is actually being done on the game or whatever.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. Starts with 'http://', 'ftp://', 'file://', and so on. If you omit it by just typing in 'www.', your browser should add the http:// bit automatically.
Used to locate a file on a computer or across the internet. Some people pronounce each letter ("Ewe arr ell"), or pronounce the whole thing as one word ("Earl"). You can right-click on an image, and then left-click on "Properties" to find out the image's URL.

Scratch

Scratch refers to certain types of sprites. Scratch Sprites, as you might guess, have been made entirely from scratch, as opposed to being edited from an existing sprite.

Fan Fanfiction

Fan Fiction of Fanart, fanfiction, or fan characters. Like, if someone who wasn't me wrote a Cursed Yoshi related story, that would be fan fanfiction. Other people doing my characters would be fan fanart, etc.

Newbie/n00b

Someone new to the internet. There is a difference between a newb and a n00b; newb(ie) refers to someone who is generally new and inexperienced, and should be dealt with patiently and taught so they can mature into a good member of the community.

n00bs, however, are people who not only haven't a clue what they're doing, but will also deny it, pretend they know everything, hurl (misspelled) insults and just generally act like retards until they turn into newbs, leave, or get banned. n00bs tend to type atrociously, often in leet or hacker caps (I have never seen leet hacker caps and I hope I never will). Flamers (see above) eat n00bs for breakfast.

Everyone was either a newbie or a n00b once, no matter what they may say, and yes, I am included in that.

Other n00b activities include:

  • Starting forum polls like "What's your favourite Yoshi colour?", especially if they've already been done before.
  • Starting utterly nonsensical forum polls with random words as the selections.
  • Starting forum topics about each and every single thing they do.
  • Having those annoying "What color Yoshi are you?" quiz result banners in their signature, or similar online test things.
  • Bad grammar in general (I mean SERIOUSLY bad), including but not limited to confusing "you're" and "your", never capitalizing anything, never using apostrophes, etc.
  • Massively spamming forums with new topics.
  • Stealing sprites, characters, pictures and ideas.
  • Having ALL their characters' names ending in "-oshi"
  • Drawing abysmal things in Paint and calling them art (the best examples are on Lemmy's Land). Remember, the Airbrush tool is not meant to be used, ever, for anything.
  • Making Comics and Flash Movies where nothing really happens.
  • Sending you an IM the instant you sign on, without having anything to say other than "Hi"
  • Putting at least five exclamation marks at the end of a sentance.
  • The list just goes on. You'll know one when you see one.

If I alienated you with that list, my apologies, but the truth hurts.

Cosplay

Cosplay refers to having someone, real or imaginary, dress up as somebody else. For example, if you dressed up as Mario, or Darkmark dressed up as Link, that would be cosplaying.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets. Basically files that specify the 'style' of a page, such as the background, how particular paragraphs are aligned, the font size of different sections, and so on. More than one can be applied to a page (that's the "cascade"), and the benefit is that if you make a change to one sheet it can affect many pages at once, saving time.

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