• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Had a relatively quick morning with my toddler on Monday, so decided I could afford to be 10 minutes late getting into work and had a special breakfast with her at a new little bakery/deli/breakfast-and-lunch spot that opened up nearby.

    No idea if she’ll remember it, but I know I cherish little moments like that from my childhood so I do what I can to make them for her.

    One of the things I didn’t really expect with having a kid is that even without going out of my way to make special memories there are small wonderful moments almost every day.


  • Holy shit this is some primo conspiracy shit. You’re reading meanings from character encoding quirks?

    Is that really necessary given everything that’s just in plain text? Is there any evidence that this is actually encrypted Chinese text at all? Do you have any understanding of Chinese or are you just trying to find meaning character by character?

    Have you checked your technique against random chunks of other text data to ensure it’s not just a coincidence?

    And most of all, why the fuck are you doing this work and sharing it through google if you think there’s even the most remote chance you’re actually onto anything?


    I honestly don’t have anywhere near the kind of knowledge in encrytion and character encoding to even begin to say if you’re on to anything or not. I doubt you do either, or else you wouldn’t be asking here.

    Considering there were csam images as unencrypted images in the files, I find it hard to believe they even cared to try and hide anything. Especially not under a reversible encrytion with some character encoding shaningans. More likely they would have used one of the many standard methods that rely on secure key exchange through a separate channel and asymmetry.





  • Surprised that no one has suggested the .hack (dot Hack) game series. They were PS2 era single player RPG games, set in a virtual reality MMO. So it really tries to simulate the MMO experience of that era. There’s even an entire fake computer OS you can explore with news articles, forum posts, email, etc that all contributes to the world building and sometimes unlocks stuff in the “MMO” as you learn stuff ourside of it.

    The plot is… ok. Kind of a tired one now and quite trope-y. Mostly because it came first and a ton of anime since “copied its homework”. The series is one of the first instances of the now semi-common plot of “players get stuck in VR MMO”.

    The first group of games in the series is pretty easily emulatable, and carrying your save across the games lets you keep your progress and unlocks some extra stuff in subsequent games of the first batch.

    The second batch of games in the series (widely believed to be considerably better in gameplay) got an official PC remaster with additional QoL and what amounts to a free story DLC. Probably better to start there, just know there’s some weird plot stuff with a semi-prequel anime. It was the style of the time to make these multimedia projects to try and cross market shit.

    They just announced that the series is going to get a reboot/continuation too.


    It’s also worth noting that there are some “pay once” MMOs like Guild Wars out there which have been running for a decade or more.