Cyberizer

One stop shop for glitchy text markdown for Discord.

The future is now, why don't we act like it and cyberize our conversations a bit by introducing glitch effects when we want to emphasize a particularly cyber word or phrase? Normally this would be rather tedious to do by hand, but not anymore because now there's a tool for this.

My friend Frost Sheridan and I like to be cyber when we can, and this involves emphasizing cyber phrases. Since we use Discord, he'd usually be cyber by putting single words or phrases between backticks (`) to look like code and I would do it by alternating the casing on my words or phrases. An example of this would be like `aesthetic` or CyBeR, but I wanted more cyber to happen, so I thought it would be fun to have the casing be more random.

Then I thought that making it randomly italic or bold or struck-through would give it a more glitchy effect which would only add to the cyber aesthetic. Being a programmer it was a trivial task to make a small Python script that would read text and apply these random stylings using Discord's markdown (also I had no choice since doing it by hand would've taken forever). While showing Frost the results of my script, he suggested making all letters uppercase except for i, e, and n, which according to him would give it a more Y2K vibe. This would be referred to as Sheridan™ casing.

I figured it would be cool if this could be a general tool that anyone could use and easily customize the probability settings for how the glitch effects were applied, so I made a simple mobile friendly bare-bones webpage where you can type in something, "cyberize" it, and then copy it to your clipboard. The settings are easily changed, it's probabilistic, so they accept anything from 0 (never) to 1 (always). This way the text could be customized in a fairly wide range. A text input containing the current settings was also included in case ideal settings were found, this way they could be saved/shared and easily restored by pasting it into that input and hitting load.

Since it's probabilistic, it's also possible to keep mashing the cyberize button until the text looks sufficiently "cyberized", a preview of what it should look like in Discord is also included. Discord's markdown parsing isn't perfect, so it's recommended to keep the padding spaces to separate markdown characters because sometimes it has trouble with separating them and will render the markdown as text. Plus, it looks more cyber with spaces.

Frost was the first tester of the tool on a mobile device and he instantly found that copying didn't work on mobile; so much for mobile friendly. That was fixed and the styling spruced up just a tad (don't want it to look too modern, do we).

In the end, it became a no-fuss, client-side text cyberization tool coming in at just over 7KiB. How's that for instant downloading and rendering? ;)

Cyberizer can be found here on my personal website.

(CREDIT) koppanyh12