“I need you to throw that envelope away. You know it’s bad”

“Well, maybe it needs a little TLC, but there’s nothing a little elbow grease cant fix”

“You were going to compile your shoddy runtime to LLVM IR and paste it before your generated LLVM IR. Even if you got that to work, the generated binary would be bloated. It doesn’t make sense to compile Grib.”

“You know what you stupid sea bug? You’re jealous that I didn’t write the runtime in your language. I wrote the parser with you, but that wasn’t enough, was it? I should write it all in C.”

“C is elegant, but what you’ve written here is a rat’s nest. You wrote your core library functions as typed functions with very specific argument types. Grib literally treats params as untyped arrays.”

“I was going to wrap them in Grib friendly functions! Then it would be no harder than passing around function pointers! Loads easier than FnWhatever(crap) -> piss if you ask me!”

“So you were going to write each function twice for no reason? Stop defending what you know is trash.”

Buster narrowed his eyes. The crab had made a critical hit.

“You know what? It might be trash. But you know what else is trash? A language that claims to interface with C ‘safely’ but never delivers. The LLVM bindings for Rust are just a minefield of raw pointers and unsafe operations. Safe? More like STUPID!”

“You could have just used the Inkwell cra-”

“It wasn’t mature then and it isn’t mature now!”

“At least it runs. That’s more than you can say for Grib. But then you’d still be in this crappy runtime predicament, wouldn’t you?”

Budster collapsed. His heart had endured too much. He knew Ferris was right, but the truth pained him.

“I’m not gonna write a damn interpreter!”

“And why might that be?”

“Interpreted languages are icky! Projects written in them are hard to maintain. The only people who like interpreted languages are children who write JS and use modern lingo that I think is stupid!”

“Are you sure this isn’t just an imaginary demographic you get mad at to feel better about yourself?”

“Positive!”

“Are you sure your description of this definitely real demographic doesn’t sound like a bad SNL skit demonizing Gen Z?”

“What kind of question even is that?”

“And do tell me: what does the fact that Grib is basically ES5 but stupider say about you?”

Ferris pulled a mirror out of hammerspace and handed it to Budster. His visage horrified him. Budster was wearing a G-fuel flat top cap and donned a hospital gown that read “I LOVE JS, FORTNITE, DREAMSMP, AND EVERYTHING THAT IS SUPER MEGA UBER CRINGE”.

To say that this destroyed Budster would be an understatement.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! You’re right! You win!”, cried the dingo.

“I thought sniff that if I distanced sniff from interpreted languages sniff I wouldn’t be post ironic cringecore sniff. But I was.”

Ferris crawled onto Budster’s shoulder and patted him on the back.

“It’s okay! It really is! We’re all a little post ironic cringecore, and that’s what makes us based and cottagecore boomer tradpilled return to monkey.”

They shared a hug. Ferris scuttled onto the floor and clicked his pinchers three times. He vanished on the third click, leaving Budster with nothing but his own thoughts.

Once again, there was silence. And once again, that silence was interrupted. The door crashed open and Hunter walked through the threshold wielding a wooden bat

“Hey, so, Dogecoin is really cheap right now. It’s obviously going to go to the moon when Papa Elon gets to Mars and reigns over his legion of debt slaves. So what I’m going to do is cave your head in like the doge horny jail meme. That would be low key bussin.”

The invisible audience roared with feverish laughter, and Hunter ran forward with the bat. Budster rolled off the bed just as the bat crashed into the old bed. The bed snapped in two and the boy stumbled forward. Budster ran to the poster and tore it off the wall. He draped the poster over Hunter while he was still down,

“I CAN’T SEE!”, screamed the child. He wasn’t used to having covers over him. That kid never sleeps.

Budster ran through the door. He was greeted by a live audience of screaming millennials. The box had “GEN Z HOSPITAL 2 printed on it in big, blue, sans-serif letters.

“HOLY CRAP, LOOK AT IT! IT ESCAPED!”

Budster ran out of the studio and jumped through the first window he saw. Thank goodness he was on the first level of the building.

Budster kept running. He knew what he had to do.