Blog

It’s been two weeks since MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend ended, but I haven’t had a chance to sit down and collect my thoughts until now. It was a really great experience; it was my first taste of college and also my first time in Boston.

Thursday was actually quite underwhelming for me. It was raining pretty heavily for almost the entire day, and walking outside was a dreadful experience. Sure, I packed an umbrella and my jacket protected me from the elements, but my shoes didn’t keep my feet dry. Walking around with soggy socks was awful – I did pack a change of socks but it didn’t take too long for those to get wet too, even though I was extra careful not to step into any puddles. The best part of Thursday for me would be the Speed Friending event: it was a lot of fun meeting new people, even if I’ve probably forgotten the names of all the people I talked to there. Also had my first taste of liquid nitrogen ice cream, and it tasted pretty good.

Last week, I participated in LASACTF, a national high school CTF competition. Unfortunately, the competition ended half a week earlier than it should have because a hacker released the flags for all the problems. I was on team Second Semester Seniors, and we placed first.

Since I’ll inevitably be doing more CTFs in the future, I figured that I should put problem writeups on my blog. So, here goes. I chose to cover this problem because I thought it was a nice little web exploitation problem, and web exploitation is one of my few strong suits.

Coffee Maker
Category: Web Exploitation
Description: Make an Espresso.

Etsy finally approved my outside manufacturer application.

Here’s a link, you could probably buy them from me in person if you know me in real life or can find me at Otakon but Etsy is your best bet.

Sometime early last month, I felt the need to get a deck of playing cards. There were multiple occasions where I thought to myself how much nicer it would be if I had some cards on me, so that was my reasoning. Being the disgusting weeaboo I am, I wanted to get something related to anime. I remembered that the card designs in No Game No Life looked really neat, and became dead set on getting a replica of those cards.

But sadly, nothing of the sort existed at the time. The NGNL poker cards available for sale were all just standard cards with anime characters lazily substituted in for face cards, and the two efforts I discovered to recreate them both appeared to be inactive. The only option left was to make the cards myself, and that’s what I set out to do.

New year, new blog! Third time’s the charm, right? Hopefully I’ll be able to actually maintain this thing instead of leaving it to rot for years. I’ve got a lot of fun things planned for 2016, so I’m not going to run out of things to blog about; the hard part is actually writing it down. But hey, it shouldn’t be too difficult, right?