It looks like Minecraft stuff (like so much online). “GravityScore” is some sort of Minecraft plugin/editor, Lua is a common language for game scripting (but otherwise highly unusual), the penis stuff is something of a copypasta from a 2006 song’s lyrics (which is a plausible time period), ZudoHackz the user seems to have been an edgelord teen… The gibberish is perhaps Lua binary bytecode encoding poorly to text or something like that; if that is some standard Lua opcode or NULL, then it’d show up a lot in between clean text like OS calls or string literals. So I’m thinking something like an easter egg in a Minecraft plugin to spam chat for the lolz, or just random humor it spams to users (“Warning: Logging in will make you a nerd”).
The identifiable code chunks look more specifically like they’re meant for ComputerCraft, which is a Minecraft mod that provides Lua-programmable in-game computers. Your link corroborates this: it’s within the ComputerCraft repository itself, underneath an asset path that provides files for in-game floppy disks containing Lua programs that players can discover as dungeon loot; GravityScore is a contributor with one associated loot disk, which claims to be an improved Lua code editor. The quoted chunk is slightly different, as the “availableThemes” paragraph is not commented out—probably a different version. Lua bytecode would be uncommon here; ComputerCraft programs are not typically stored in bytecode form, and in mainline Lua 5.2 it’s a security risk to enable bytecode loading in a multitenant environment (but I’m not sure about in LuaJ).
The outermost structure starting from the first image looks like a Lua table encoding a tree of files containing an alternate OS for the in-game computers (“Linox” likely a corruption of “Linux”), so probably an installer package of some kind. The specific “!@#&” sequence appears exactly where I would expect newlines to appear where the ‘files’ within the tree correspond to Lua source, so I think that’s a crude substitution encoding of newline; perhaps someone chose it because they thought it would be uncommon (or due to frustration over syntax errors) while writing the “encode as string literal” logic.
The strings of hex digits in the “etc” files look more like they’re meant to represent character-cell graphics, which would be consistent with someone wanting to add logos in a character-cell-only context. One color palette index per character would make the frequency distribution match up with logos that are mostly one color with some accents. However, we can’t easily determine the intended shapes if whitespace has been squashed HTML-style for display.
The specific “!@#&” sequence appears exactly where I would expect newlines to appear where the ‘files’ within the tree correspond to Lua source, so I think that’s a crude substitution encoding of newline; perhaps someone chose it because they thought it would be uncommon (or due to frustration over syntax errors) while writing the “encode as string literal” logic.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was unsure about the opcode guess because if it was a Lua VIM/JIT opcode from bytecompiling (which often results in lots of strings interspersed with binary gibberish), why would it be so rare? As I understand Lao Mein, this is supposed to be some of the only occurrences online; Lua is an unpopular language compared to something like Python or JS, sure, but there’s still a lot of it out there and all of the opcodes as well as their various manglings or string-encodings ought to show up reasonably often. But if it’s some very ad hoc encoding—especially if it’s an Minecraft kid, who doesn’t know any better—then choosing cartoon-style expletives as a unique encoding of annoying characters like \n would be entirely in keeping with the juvenile humor elsewhere in that fragment.
And the repeated “linox”/”Linux” typo might be another nasty quick ad hoc hack to work around something like a ‘Linux’ setting already existing but not wanting to figure out how to properly override or customize or integrate with it.
It looks like Minecraft stuff (like so much online). “GravityScore” is some sort of Minecraft plugin/editor, Lua is a common language for game scripting (but otherwise highly unusual), the penis stuff is something of a copypasta from a 2006 song’s lyrics (which is a plausible time period), ZudoHackz the user seems to have been an edgelord teen… The gibberish is perhaps Lua binary bytecode encoding poorly to text or something like that; if that is some standard Lua opcode or NULL, then it’d show up a lot in between clean text like OS calls or string literals. So I’m thinking something like an easter egg in a Minecraft plugin to spam chat for the lolz, or just random humor it spams to users (“Warning: Logging in will make you a nerd”).
The identifiable code chunks look more specifically like they’re meant for ComputerCraft, which is a Minecraft mod that provides Lua-programmable in-game computers. Your link corroborates this: it’s within the ComputerCraft repository itself, underneath an asset path that provides files for in-game floppy disks containing Lua programs that players can discover as dungeon loot; GravityScore is a contributor with one associated loot disk, which claims to be an improved Lua code editor. The quoted chunk is slightly different, as the “availableThemes” paragraph is not commented out—probably a different version. Lua bytecode would be uncommon here; ComputerCraft programs are not typically stored in bytecode form, and in mainline Lua 5.2 it’s a security risk to enable bytecode loading in a multitenant environment (but I’m not sure about in LuaJ).
The outermost structure starting from the first image looks like a Lua table encoding a tree of files containing an alternate OS for the in-game computers (“Linox” likely a corruption of “Linux”), so probably an installer package of some kind. The specific “!@#&” sequence appears exactly where I would expect newlines to appear where the ‘files’ within the tree correspond to Lua source, so I think that’s a crude substitution encoding of newline; perhaps someone chose it because they thought it would be uncommon (or due to frustration over syntax errors) while writing the “encode as string literal” logic.
The strings of hex digits in the “etc” files look more like they’re meant to represent character-cell graphics, which would be consistent with someone wanting to add logos in a character-cell-only context. One color palette index per character would make the frequency distribution match up with logos that are mostly one color with some accents. However, we can’t easily determine the intended shapes if whitespace has been squashed HTML-style for display.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was unsure about the opcode guess because if it was a Lua VIM/JIT opcode from bytecompiling (which often results in lots of strings interspersed with binary gibberish), why would it be so rare? As I understand Lao Mein, this is supposed to be some of the only occurrences online; Lua is an unpopular language compared to something like Python or JS, sure, but there’s still a lot of it out there and all of the opcodes as well as their various manglings or string-encodings ought to show up reasonably often. But if it’s some very ad hoc encoding—especially if it’s an Minecraft kid, who doesn’t know any better—then choosing cartoon-style expletives as a unique encoding of annoying characters like
\nwould be entirely in keeping with the juvenile humor elsewhere in that fragment.And the repeated “linox”/”Linux” typo might be another nasty quick ad hoc hack to work around something like a ‘Linux’ setting already existing but not wanting to figure out how to properly override or customize or integrate with it.
Thanks, this helps a lot!