New Feature: Time Warp

Last Saturday night I was capping and I got the screengrab you see to the right. I made a joke about clicking on it to pause that Saturday night cap session, so I could rejoin it Tuesday morning when I'd be better rested. Ha ha. Then that got me thinking about how cool it would be to do exactly that, since we can't always be there when our friends are capping and they're often not there when we have time to cap. To me, that's the biggest weakness of capping as a pastime: the level of fun is very dependent on who's in the room.

By now I’ve learned that whenever I have one of those “Wouldn’t it be cool?” thoughts, I’m in for a shitload of coding, since usually I won’t put the idea down until I’ve figured it out. And that’s all the segue you need to introduce our newest feature: Time Warp.

Let’s say you enjoy capping on the Saturday night shift, but last Saturday night you were busy getting a handie behind the Walgreens and you missed out on all the fun. Until now, all you could do to deal with that pain was work your way to the bottom of a bottle of Cuervo in the bathtub. But not anymore! Turn on the Time Warp feature, select the date and time you want to warp to and boink! Like magic, the site will display the caps and chat that were in the gallery at that moment. And then it will progress in real-time. If you set the Time Warp to last Saturday night at 10pm, you’ll see what was in the gallery and chat at 10pm. If you refresh two minutes later, you’ll see what was in the gallery and chat at 10:02pm.

And here’s the cool part: if you make a cap while you have Time Warp turned on, it will show up in the gallery as if you made it in the past. Aside from those ghost cappers from the past not clicking your caps or chatting with you, it will be exactly like you had gone back in time to caption. Your caps will go into the normal gallery at the actual time you made them, but while you’re in your little Time Warp bubble, you’ll see them mixed in among those past captions as if you were really there.

You can Time Warp to any moment from just a minute ago all the way back to our oldest Inventing Situations cap session archives from 2006. And if you choose a Friday or Saturday night from the last two years, the regular feed will even give you the screengrabs you would have received at that time. If you choose another time that we don’t have records for, you can still cap along with the ghosts of the past by clicking on screengrabs or using the catalog. Just right-click a screengrab in the gallery and choose “Cap This Show” to start capping along with everyone else.

To turn Time Warp on, right-click the title graphic on any HCC page and choose “Time Warp” from the menu, then select a date and time. Or you can right-click any caption’s screengrab and choose “Time Warp” to jump straight to when that cap was made.

Have fun! I think this feature will make off-hours solo capping a lot more fun than it has been before. Did you miss HCC's fourth anniversary because you were giving a tugger behind the K-Mart? No problem, go back and cap it. Missed the huge Inventing Situations going-away party from back in 2007 while you were on safari? Boink! Crapped out mid-way through the movie last Saturday night because of that questionable taco salad you ate for dinner? Go back and finish out that cap session and see what you missed. Showed up at midnight to find your friends had already been capping for an hour, or you just missed them? Same deal. Hey man, time is your bitch now.

Or let's say you really want to cap Crocosaurus vs. Mega Gonad but you don't want to cap it by yourself. Just find a grab from the movie, choose "Show History" from the right-click menu, pick who you want to cap it with, and Time Warp to one of their caps. Viola!

In unrelated news, I've made a few improvements to our caption-linking setup. Unless you have old-school mode turned on, now when you click on the link inside a caption, it will open a small popover window that will display both that cap and the one it links to. This should be smoother than the previous set-up which loaded a whole other page in another tab.

Likewise, if you right-click a caption's screengrab and choose "Link to Cap," it now opens a popover showing that caption and the ID number you need to use to link to it. But better than before, now the <L> tags are already included, and I've coded it so left-clicking the ID number once will highlight the whole number plus tags for easy copying and pasting. If you actually wanted to email someone a link to that caption, just click the screengrab inside the popover window, and it will load the caption in a separate tab with a URL you can use.