I'm a C/C++ dev, I declare friends whenever I want.

It's easy as 'friend class John;'

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

Okay, summary of previous episodes:

1. Worked out a simple syntax to convert markdown into hashes/dictionaries, which is useful for say writing the data in a readable format and then generating a structured representation from it, like say JSON.

2. Added a preprocessor so I could declare and insert variables in the text, and soon enough realized that this was kinda useful for writing code, not just data. I went a little crazy on it and wound up assembling a simple app from this, just a bunch of stuff I wanted to share with friends, all packed into a single output html file so they could just run it from the browser with no setup.

3. I figured I might as well go all the way and turn this into a full-blown RPG for shits and giggles. First step was testing if I could do some simple sprites with SVG to see how far I could realistically get in the graphics department.

Now, the big problem with the last point is that using Inkscape to convert spritesheets into SVG was bit of a trouble, mostly because I am not very good at Inkscape. But I'm just doing very basic pixel art, so my thought process was maybe I can do this myself -- have a small tool handle the spritesheet to SVG conversion. And well... I did just that ;>

# pixel-to-svg:
- Input path-to-image, size.
- grep non-transparent pixels.
- Group pixels into 'islands' when they are horizontally or vertically adjacent.
- For each island, convert each pixel into *four* points because blocks:
· * (px*2+0, py*2+0), (px*2+1, py*2+0), (px*2+1, py*2+1), (px*2+0, py*2+1).
· * Each of the four generated coordinates gets saved to a hash unique to that island, where {coord: index}.

- Now walk that quad-ified output, and for each point, determine whether they are a corner. This is very wordy, but actually quite simple:
· * If a point immediately above (px, py-1) or below (px, py+1) this point doesn't exist in the coord hash, then you know it's either top or bottom side. You can determine whether they are right (px+1, py) or left (px-1, py) the same way.
· * A point is an outer corner if (top || bottom) && (left || right).
· * A point is an inner corner if ! ((top || bottom) && (left || right)) AND there is at least _one_ empty diagonal (TR, TL, BR, BL) adjacent to it, eg: (px+1, py+1) is not in the coord hash.
· * We take note of which direction (top, left, bottom, right) every outer or inner corner has, and every other point is discarded. Yes.

Finally, we connect the corners of each island to make a series of SVG paths:
- Get starting point, remember starting position. Keep the point in the coord hash, we want to check against it.
- Convert (px, py) back to non-quadriplied coords. Remember how I made four points from each pixel?
. * {px = px*0.5 + (px & 1)*0.5} will transform the coords from quadriple back to actual pixel space.
· * We do this for all coordinates we emit to the SVG path.

- We're on the first point of a shape, so emit "M${px} ${py}" or "m${dx} ${dy}", depending on whether absolute or relative positioning would take up less characters.
· * Delta (dx, dy) is just (last_position - point).

- We walk from the starting point towards the next:
· * Each corner has only two possible directions because corners.
· * We always begin with clockwise direction, and invert it if it would make us go backwards.
· * Iter in given direction until you find next corner.
· * Get new point, delete it from the coord hash, then get delta (last_position - new_point).
· * Emit "v${dy}" OR "h${dx}", depending on which direction we moved in.
· * Repeat until we arrive back at the start, at which point you just emit 'Z' to close the shape.
· * If there are still points in the coord hash, then just get the first one and keep going in the __inverse__ direction, else stop.

I'm simplifying here and there for the sake of """brevity""", but hopefully you get the picture: this fills out the `d` (for 'definition') of a <path/>. Been testing this a bit, likely I've missed certain edge cases but it seems to be working alright for the spritesheets I had, so me is happiee.

Elephant: this only works with bitmaps -- my entire idea was just adding cute little icons and calling it a day, but now... well, now I'm actually invested. I can _probably_ support full color, I'm just not sure what would be a somewhat efficient way to go about it... but it *is* possible.

Anyway, here's first output for retoori maybe uuuh mystery svg tag what could it be?? <svg viewBox="0 0 8 8" height="16" width="16"><path d="M0 2h1v-1h2v1h2v-1h2v1h1v3h-1v1h-1v1h-1v1h-2v-1h-1v-1h-1v-1h-1Z" fill="#B01030" stroke="#101010" stroke-width="0.2" paint-order="stroke"/></svg>