the blanket on top is red, soft, velvety. i don’t know what it’s made of. it’s the kind of
material that isn’t especially thick, but feels warm. too warm under it and you sweat easily
for some reason.
i think it came from kairi, it rather, that she brought it with her with belfast and then
didn’t want to take it with her when she moved out. almost everything like that i’ve gotten rid
of, donated, given to a friend. but not this. not because it reminds me of her. it’s just a really
nice blanket.
there’s a purple blanket underneath it. same size, purple not red, and just a slightly
different material. i’ve been snuggled up in it in many different places; couches, chairs, beds.
it doesn’t mean anything specific. it’s just a nice blanket.
under that, a sheet. i had no idea you were “supposed” to sleep under a sheet for most
of my life. i didn’t understand the concept of flat sheets whatsoever; fitted ones worked
better, so why did they exist? it’s microfibre or some fancy word like that, which is another
way of saying $20 at woolworths.
this place feels like something i’ve slowly reclaimed.
hypomania: “a mood state characterized by persistent disinhibition and elevation
(euphoria). […] According to DSM-5 criteria, hypomania is distinct from mania in that there
is no significant functional impairment; mania, by DSM-5 definition, does include significant
functional impairment and may have psychotic features.”
this is kinda a thing that keeps occurring to me on and off, as you’re aware. i wanted
to try to describe the subjective experience. because it’s a mood state defined by a set of
symptoms, i’ll do so according to the list of criteria.
pressured speech: i’m fucking talkative lately. i can’t stop expressing myself. i tweet a
lot and i talk a lot, but inside my head when i’m alone it’s like a freight train. the thing is, it
feels good. it feels like i’m putting together some unified theory of the world and psyche and
essentially every damn thing i’m talking about, like it All Makes Sense™. the desire to keep
talking and theorising is fuelled by this sense that i’m making sense of things, and that if i
keep doing so, i’ll have made sense of everything.
inflated self-esteem or grandiosity: my self-image is really good lately. this isn’t a bad
thing in itself, but it contrasts to my baseline of “this is fine”. i feel much more associated
with my body, much more accepting of it, and i’m much more willing to express the idea that
i’m good or even excellent at certain tasks. similarly, i have less qualms with putting myself
out there.
decreased need for sleep: this is pretty simple. lately i’ve not been tired, have had
trouble falling asleep if i’ve gone to bed early (e.g. with you), and still not been tired in the
morning when i wake up.
flight of ideas or the subjective experience that thoughts are racing: see ‘pressured
speech’. it feels like everything is related.
easily distracted and attention-deficit: this one hasn’t hit me as much, subjectively,
though i have struggled to accomplish much work-wise lately.
increase in psychomotor agitation, or occasionally in some, increased irritability:
maybe.
hypersexuality: from ace to 8 hours of fucking in 48 hours. yeah.
involvement in pleasurable activities that may have a high potential for negative
psycho-social or physical consequences: yes. there’s the whole 8 hours of sex with someone
you just met thing, but i’m willing to excuse that as simply queer life sometimes. but we
didn’t use any protection! hello disinhibition. :/
i need “elevated mood” plus three of those for the DSM-IV-TR definition. i have
elevated mood plus six, so …
today i’m looking at my laptop. it’s covered in a variety of stickers and there’s a lot of
history recorded in them.
honestly, i’m not a fan of keeping history around; i don’t mean “delete or trash
everything a day after it’s gone” — i like to hold onto things for as long as they’ve held their
relevance. but in a habit i picked up from marie kondo, once something has served me in
life, i appreciate it one last time and then move on.
i used to hang onto everything. starting from when i was 12, i’d hang onto every text
document i wrote or acquired, every picture i downloaded, every project i worked on, every
piece of music, everything. when i’d get a new computer or reinstall an OS, i’d collect them
all into a folder (usually called “old” or “archive”), and stick in my new, empty documents
folder. next time, i’d do the same. up until last year you could go through the onion layers of
“old” folders, reaching further and further into my history, right back to when i was 12.
preserving this was an effort, because i’ve had how many new computers, how many
reinstalls in the last 15 years? but it felt like something had to do to, like throwing that away
would violate a sacred principle i lived my life by. turns out that principle was OCD.
so, this laptop. the cats in the top-left corner were sent to me by my coworker aaron.
he’s kind of a Big Deal in the ruby and rails communities, so when he tweeted about sending
these to anyone, i DM’d him on slack and was like “omg would you??” and he just mailed me
out an envelope full of them. i was ecstatic, so they went straight on my laptop. (there’s one
in the front cover of my diary too.) now it’s kind of surreal that we’re “friends” who video
call every week.
there’s a variety of work related stickers without much backstory: the four big octocats
along the middle line, the vinyl octocat covering the apple logo, the pride octocat. they are
what they are. this is a work laptop and it seemed appropriate. same with the git and the
datadog (purple woofer up top) stickers.
there’s a bunny sticker on opposite corners. they were from a sticker set i got to give
to kairi. there were others but i removed them because of all the negativity they were
associated with. but i couldn’t bare to drop the bunnies.
the bottom-right corner is the logo of my favourite band, school food punishment,
now disbanded. it came with a limited-edition cd release.
“gender is not binary” is actually from a member of parliament in nsw (!). she sent
them and a bunch of other stickers out. that was pretty cool.
idk why i have the slack pride one. whatever. more rainbows on a laptop is always
good.
there’s two stickers from github constellation, an event held last november in
melbourne where i attended as staff. they were handing those stickers out. one is the
octocat “constellation” on the bottom of the laptop. the other was a grim reaper (!?), which
i’ve covered with the “invasion day” sticker. i covered it because it was actually really grim:
that night was the one i was raped. a bit too much to leave a literal grim reaper sticker from
that night on there, y’know? whereas i support indigeneousx on patreon.
“be pawsitive”. cute furry artist put these together. my keys have a little charm of the
same design on them.
finally, the bunny girl drinking a milkshake. it’s from a LINE sticker set i used with
emma a lot.
there’s a lot i’m ready to move on from with this laptop. it kinda documents the last 2
years of my life, the 2 years i’ve had it. i’m giving it to a friend when my replacement laptop
arrives, which is pretty soon.
There’s my diary on the desk. It didn’t start out that way; it was a bullet journal
originally. It’s a Moleskine, since those are the fancy diaries with the dotted grids suitable
for bullet journals. I think the covers are leather. Oh well. I bought this years ago. At a
guess it has .. 180, 200 pages? I’m up to page 158 right now. I number them myself. I’ve
only ever used two different types of pens in it, both made by the same Japanese pen
company, Zebra. I can’t say I know for sure why I’ve chosen that pen company as “my” pen
company, but I have.
It has a little tassel attached to it to use as a bookmark. I keep the current day
marked.
The paper is slightly yellowed, with a grid of light dots, maybe 8mm apart in both
directions. It’d probably be good for playing grid-based paper games, but that’s not what I
use it for. At a guess I’d say it was 70~80gsm. Good, strong paper, without being bulky.
For a while I maintained an index on the first page, in true bullet journal fashion, with
page references for months, and a yearly overview for each year as it happened, three
months to a page. Turns out that wasn’t actually useful to me. Likewise, it was purely a daily
todo list and short bullet points on things that happened in a given day, if I felt it was
exceptional enough to mark it.
The beginning was November 2016. I wasn’t doing too well then. “Diazepam helped
alot.” “Fucking chill.” “chill” “relax about life a little” “Feeling a bit underappreciated” (NB.
this was almost certainly the understatement of the year.) The tone is rarely positive, and
when it is, it feels fabricated. There’s a lot of self-reassurance that things will be okay, and
reminders to try to provide reassurance to my partner that things will be okay. “Panic attack
all morning.” “Didn’t get any work done.” Sometimes there’s an upturn. “Feel better as the
day has gone on.” Then there’s a downturn. “Last night she was very suicidal.”
If I jump 60 pages ahead, the tone has changed significantly. “Sun feels so good!!
aaaaaaaaaaa” “GOD I LOVE BUNNIES” “feeling pretty fine w/ new hair”. The style of the
journal has changed, and it is much more a diary. Short dot points of a day’s events give way
to entire pages of solid prose, feelings I can now express.
Further months pass and days wax and wane, grow thicker and thinner. Sometimes
it’s thin because I’m too busy to write, other times because I’m too depressed to. Sometimes
it’s thick because I have too many negative emotions, other times too many positive events to
detail.
Note: this is a pretty long article which does a deep dive into breaking some amateur crypto. I go on for quite a bit. Make a cup of tea before reading, and get ready to read some code!
This, then, is a post about a broken homegrown cryptosystem; namely, that used in CodeIgniter, pre-2.2. This version was current until the release of CodeIgniter 2.2, on the 5th of June, 2014, and you can still find sites on it today.
The attack described in the post depends on a lot of things to go right (or wrong, if you will); it’s not just that they used a bad cipher, but also the fact that they rolled their own session storage, and implemented a fallback, and a dozen other things. This is probably typical for most bugs of this class; a bunch of bad decisions which aren’t thought through find their logical conclusion in complete insecurity.
I use Snapchat. It’s an app where you can take a
photo or short (< 10 second) video and send it to your friends who use the
service; they’ll then be able to see it, once, before it disappears forever.
My circle of friends use it basically as an extension of weird Twitter – most
snaps I send and receive are strange angles of weird objects; the completely
mundane but somehow therapeutic (7 seconds of the camera pointed outside the
window of a tram, pointed at the ground moving below); or just closeups of
Curtis Stone’s face,
wherever we see him.
Of course, the promise that they won’t get retained is just that: a promise.
Since your phone receives this image and shows it to you at some point, it must
be downloaded by your phone. If it can be downladed by the phone, it can be
downloaded by something else. We decided to find out how.
As programmers, we spend a lot of time just carting data from one place to
another. Sometimes that’s the entire purpose of a program or library (data
conversion whatevers), but more often it’s just something that needs to happen
in the course of getting a certain task done. When we’re sending a request,
using a library, executing templates or whatever, it’s important to be 100%
clear on the format of the data, which is a fancy way of saying how the data is
encoded.
(computing) The way in which symbols are mapped onto bytes, e.g. in the
rendering of a particular font, or in the mapping from keyboard input into
visual text.
A conversion of plain text into a code or cypher form (for decoding by the
recipient).
I think these senses are a bit too specific—if your data is in a computer in
any form, then it’s already encoded. The keyboard doesn’t even have to come
into it.
