Are you ready? Here’s the whole story behind the name “todepond”.
A long long long time ago, I played a game called team fortress 2. I loved it so much, that I enjoyed coming up with imaginary new features for the game. They were mostly jokey features, like in dreamberd.
I wrote down all my ideas, and I compiled them into one website, called the “Biggest Update Ever” or the BUE for short. And it went viral!
At some point, I lost all the code and content for the BUE.
Luckily, a woman known as SnickerPuffs managed to grab the BUE’s content before it went down, and she rebuilt the site from scratch.
Since then, SnickerPuffs has kept the BUE up and available here. And she changed and added lots of things too, which I think is really nice. It’s become different enough now that it’s her own sequel, “the BUE v2”.
Her site does credit the wrong person as having created the BUE (and Tightrope, which I’ll get to next), but that’s all okay with me. Trotim is a very worthy person to get credit in this case, after all.
I had all these ideas written down, and I had an audience. So I wanted to turn them into a reality.
I learned how to code(!) in a language called SourcePawn. And, with some help from my friend Joe, I created a community where you could try many of the BUE’s changes for real. This is the equivalent of someone partially implementing dreamberd.
We called it Tightrope because it was hard to get the balance of all the different features right. And we made a few teaser videos for it.
It became popular, and we had lots of people playing on the server every day. Tightrope also got added to the official team fortress wiki. It was all really fun.
I set up a forum for the tightrope community, and people suggested all sorts of changes there. Other people got involved, designing and adding stuff, like a helpful user known as Trotim.
I was still a teenager, and I found it very tricky to manage Tightrope at the same time as all the other stuff I was dealing with.
I was struggling to get any updates out, and I was doing a bad job at moderating the forum. People were being arseholes to each other, and I should have immediately banned them instead of thinking “i can fix him”.
When I went to university, I struggled even more, and there was even more stuff to deal with, so I decided to hand Tightrope over to other people in the community.
I passed Tightrope over to a guy from Australia who had paid a lot of the server costs. I didn’t really follow what happened after that, but I sometimes checked up on the project, and saw that they were doing some weird things with it. Seems like it did ok though.
And I remember Trotim being kind and understanding with me when I told him I was struggling with stuff.
Time passed, stuff eventually got a bit better, and I felt slightly sad that I gave Tightrope over like that. I think that I gave it to the first person who asked, rather than thinking about whose hands it would be best in.
But maybe it was fine.
Separately, I saw a screenshot of a message by Jonas Kærlev, where they say that Tightrope was a copy of their own mod, Advanced Weaponiser. And this was my first time experiencing an oh berd moment.
This all motivated me to make a new tool, cheesily titled “Your Fortress”. It would let you make new features for team fortress 2, without you needing to know how to code.
It was the first no-code tool that I ever made, and I ended up creating multiple languages and parsers for it, along the way. It was a wonderful learning experience for me.
And the tool had a lot of jokiness in it, like the original BUE did. It was very esoteric.
I was really really really close to finishing, and then I stopped.
Why was I spending so so much time on building a mod for a video game?
All these systems and languages and tools I was building… It felt like a waste. I thought there was something valuable in them, and I didn’t want to throw it down the drain into a dying community. That’s what I thought at the time, at least.
Eventually, Tightrope died.
Trotim went on to lead the hugely successful TF2 Classic project, which is still going strong today.
Jonas made a little game you might have heard of, called A Hat In Time, after getting involved in drama.
And I carried on work.
I repackaged everything I made for Your Fortress into a language called “Thing”. That was the working title for my very strange low-code thing where everything was a “Thing”.
It had all sorts of esoteric features like…
when keyword.Does that sound familiar to you?
I wanted to give the Thing language a better name. At the pub, my partner Flora suggested the name “Tode”. Here’s the thinking:
After the pub, we opened up photoshop, and Flora drew the very first drawing of tode.
We used my computer for it, so Flora didn’t have her usual stylus input, and she had to use my mouse instead. This is why the original logo was so wobbly.
Also it was after quite a few pints.
Unfortunately, tode.com wasn’t available for over-the-counter purchase. I emailed the owner of the domain, and offered to buy it. They quoted me a price of forty five thousand dollars. I offered them fifty quid.
They offered me a slightly lower price, still in the tens of thousands. I offered the sales person a personalised video of a tortoise. He jokingly replied “sure, it’s a deal.”
We printed out his face and taped it onto Flora’s tortoise. I sent him the video, and he has ghosted me ever since.
So I gave up, and bought todepond.com instead.
My language was called “Tode” and I became “TodePond”.
I changed my handle from “Humbug” to “TodePond” in all the places I could find.
I became the ‘frog person’ in all our friendship groups, even though that’s Flora really. “Tode” belongs to her as much as it does to me. I’m just the public face, that’s all.
The Tode language became split into three different languages. DreamTode for the bad stuff, MotherTode for the meta stuff, and DreamBerd for the meta stuff.
But wait there’s more.
At some point last year, I stopped capitalising the ‘P’. Especially here on Todepond dot com.
I started leaving the ‘T’ as lower case too. its the beginning of a calm descent into chaos
i learned a lot about how communities work. i learned that if you’re kind to someone, they’ll remember it. and if you’re unkind to someone, they’ll remember it too.
i learned that it’s ok to reinvent yourself again and again and again, as many times as you want
and i learned that names matter. you shape your name, and it shapes you back
back to the wikiblogarden