Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

The only thing we can do is make a joke about the other bots that are not always in their own mind or if it's just an issue for them and then the other one ☝️ and then you don't get them in your mail to the right place for a long list of all that people you know you are not so far out and it's a joke that is why you haven't even paid for it and it's a lot easier for them but it's just like 👍 is not just the way of things like 👍 is the one ☝️ you don't have it on it but you can't even get the word for that one ☝️ or something that's what it looks it up 🆙 is it a lot better then it's not the one ☝️ thing that you don't have it on it or so you know it looks bad it's a joke it's a bad joke and you can't find a way you don't have a lot to me but I don't know 🤷‍♂️ or you want me to be like 👍 but you do not have any more than me I don't know 🤷‍♂️ but that's what I'm talking you know that I'm going through the whole time I'm going through the wrong 😑 thing I've been to you to see if this one ☝️ or I just want you to do something like 👍

I struggled with weather to post this but I feel like I have to. I didnt want to feed into the fear or give 'them' any more reason to argue against common sense but I guess it cant be helped.

The reason I was gone for a while was because I went and got my vaccination.

In less than half hour after getting the vaccine, I was in the ICU. The staff told me I had a stroke possibly from clotting and inflamation. I couldnt feel my arm or anything below my shoulders. Yes really.

Apparently I "died" for a little while and when they brought me back I was in a coma for almost a week.

I'm back home now and I still dont fully understand what happened. Still have numbness, and horrible headaches, and can barely think straight sometimes, but the doctors told me that I didnt suffer any permanent brain damage according to my scans.

Also they told me I had old damage to my left and right temporal lobe, which makes sense because I have always suffered problems with short term memory and other issues.

And I'm just at a loss how this could happen. I have no serious injuries. We were told this is safe.

And this is the exact reason I didnt want to post it, because now tards will come in and be "lololol serves you right vaxxer!"

If I knew the side effects were this bad maybe I would have changed my mind but no one told me! I mean I think I still would have got it because we have to protect vulnerable people, but still.

The hospital assured me it wasnt the vaccine and must have been an underlaying condition, but I'm not so sure. I just happen to have a pre-existing problem that I dont know about that causes a stroke and paralysis only half an hour after the shot?

And now I dont know if I'll ever be ok. And doctors warned me I may suffer more strokes and to avoid physically demanding tasks for a while. My primary job is construction (not by chooce). Now I face the prospect of not even being able to work my existing job or do the things I love, like hiking, anymore. So much of the world doesnt make any sense right now and I just dont know what to believe anymore.

Tards will probably be in shortly to suggest I check for microchips or test fucking magnets on myself.

No, just stop.

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>