Emblem 3

Looking back, I realised that I wrote an entry explaining my first icon, but have not written anything about the change that I did in 2015, and the more recent one in 2020. So I suppose I should rectify this here.

And that's why this is entitled Emblem 3 instead.

Anyway, here is the relevant description from then as reference:

It is sort of the placemarker for me in the digital realm, I suppose. The significance is simple: M, MT are my initials, and the dotted image in the lower right corner is the Glider, a configuration of cells in Conway's Game of Life---a hacker emblem.

This means that I identify with the concept of the ``classical'' hacker (not the media-bastardised version that means breaking into computer systems and such).

Alright, enough of random thingamagigs. That said, it is only an emblem/coat of arms---I do not guarantee that everything that contains that symbol is indeed from me---please be discerning.

The new icon from 2015 is basically this:

The symbology is the same, but this time, we have a new negative space region that takes up half the viewable area. This symbolises the change that I have undergone, moving from a purely overly naïve believe-in-the-good-of-everyone type of person into one who knows of the Dark Side. But notice that the hacker emblem is still in the white---it means that no matter how the Dark Side occurs, I will not sacrifice my hacking ethics to it.

Some time after 2015 was when the whole ``circle cut out'' profile pictures became a thing. Naturally, it screwed up my emblem---it's decidedly square. The ``circle cut out'' damaged my emblem by just chopping random bits off---I find it deeply offensive that with all the talk about inclusion, that the trend of excluding people who don't really like to use their real ``human'' pictures as profile pictures. Eventually annoyed, I started looking for ways to transform my square emblem into something that is more circular, settling for a formula that maps all points of a unit square into points of the largest circle that can be inscribed within the same unit square. Naturally, I wrote a program to do it, and fine-tuned it more carefully so that it can generate the 16×16 favicon image more precisely than I can ever do by pixel art.

The end result in 2020 was this:

It looks a little funky because there isn't a border that circumscribes the circle, but that's usually not a problem---it is only one here because Blogger's manner of inserting images does not encircle things, and I am too lazy to attempt to fix it. Symbolically, it means that while I retain all the characteristics of what I wrote in 2009 and 2015, I am also starting to become more well-rounded as a person on a whole, carefully trying to adjust the sharp corners into rounded ones, becoming a person that is less abrasive than before.

To be fair, that last bit is probably going to be a work in progress. But it's okay!

I think that's all I would want to write for now. Till the next update.