Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

Post by wlonkly » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 11:36 PM UTC

smokel wrote: post #96

There's an interesting easter egg in semantic.cpp, line 77: if (CheckWord(words, "OXio")) { Apparently, if your text contains the word "OXio", it triggers the following riddle: What's round on the ends and hi in the middle?

Post by vollmond » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 12:07 AM UTC

JeremyHerrman wrote: post #42

Comic Chat has a special place in my heart because it inspired my first startup back in 2008, a comic creation web app called Chogger. The site grew to 30K monthly users, mostly K-12 educators who wanted to give their students a fun way to write stories. The comic creator app itself was adobe flex (flash), actionscript 3.0 (like a typed version of javascript), and I remember spending so many hours getting the balloon…

Post by z500 » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 12:12 AM UTC

art0rz wrote: post #70

Athas wrote: post #19

Comic Chat is a piece of Internet history, but I remember that it was somewhat reviled when I first started being active on IRC. This was around 2002, so it was probably due to some cultural memory rather than anyone having actually used it in years. The issue, as I remember it, is that Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with support for explicitly indicating the appearance and emoting of your comic character, rath…

On the IRC servers I managed I always set up an automatic kick when one of these messages was sent anywhere on the servers. It would ban after 3 kicks, which was a necessary change from the immediate ban as legitimate users got curious sometimes and installed Comic Chat. It was fun messing with these folks, though, since they were often oblivious to IRC and internet culture in general. Or they were just completely te…

Post by userbinator » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 12:33 AM UTC

markun wrote: post #104

When somebody inevitably LLM this to rust/zig/bling/zork/vupt; please drop a link!

Post by duxup » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 12:51 AM UTC