August Update - Life Got Away…#

General Overview of The Last Three Months#

Not gonna lie…I have been pretty lazy the past few months. I feel like I have not been getting anywhere with the different things I am trying to do. Tasks from work all the way to random hobbies I wanna pursue, I fail to be more productive than I know I can. I do think this could be due to my own mental state changing around with new hormones being introduced but who knows. That being said, I think I am trying to work on myself and not only my weight and discipline but in gender transitioning and figuring out what the heck that even means for me.

June#

June sort of came and left. I did spend this time being able to spend a weekend with some friends a couple times which was nice as well as begin exploring more feminine styles. I bought some skirts as well as a shirt to go with them. My hoodies seem to generally go with them but as much as I love that comfy/cozy style, I would like to go with a more victorian or corporate gothic look. We will see where the wind takes me though as far as styles. I thought I wanted to have a cut like what Sombra from the First-Person shooter Overwatch has, but I don’t think my face shape would allow for that lol.

In June I also ended up getting my ears pierced and nails painted! Not necessarily that big of a deal but to me it was kind of a big thing. For one I have never had any piercing in my life and on top of that, having my nails painted and walkin around publicly was a big step. I think this leads from a lot of my own personal dysphoria from my father with how he thought about what made someone “girly” or made someone “manly”. Things I have wanted to do in the past he looked down heavily on and now it is almost liberating! Getting a tattoo, ears pierced, growing my hair out, nails, all amazing things. He has no idea I am transitioning but he just seems to be going with my style changes which is nice. That being said I am mainly boy-moding around him and not even trying to wear blouses or dresses. That is tbd.

Aside from this, June was also a fun month for me to get obsessed with more anime and manga. I ended up getting into ”Chainsaw Man” and ”That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime”. Then while I picked up those books, I ended up just re-building my collection of ”Spy X Family” and ”Beastars”. All these manga are amazing pieces of art and stories if you have not read them. Short synopsis:

  • Beastars: Zootopia if it had an actually good plot. The art is very expressive and follows a Grey Wolf named Legoshi who struggles with his desire for being a carnivore and his love/obsession with a rabbit girl, Haru.
  • Spy X Family: This is a super cute manga that follows a spy, Twilight, who is undercover by the name Lloyd Forger, an assassin who fake marries Lloyd who goes by the name of Yor Forger and their adopted daughter, Anya Forger who is a telepath but neither parent knows. I am not normally huge on slice of life anime or manga but this one is one I absolutely fell in love with.
  • Chainsaw Man: Simply put…a teenage boy who promises his demon pet that he will see and grab some boobs at some point. Sounds like a silly premise but this leads him down a wild route of becoming half demon, landing himself the ultimate demon hunter role, and bonding with some amazing fellow demon hunters. This manga has a crazy plot in its first arc and also has an amazing movie coming out this fall.
  • TTIGRAAS: I am personally a fan of isekai anime and manga, and this is a great story of a man who dies and gets reincarnated as a slime in another world. He befriends a dragon and slowly befriends a goblin village and more! This manga plays on a lot of tropes from home building, power scaling, big boob anime girls, big stronk anime guys, adventure, and amazing fight scenes as well as overall being an amazing slice of life.

Near the beginning of June, I also picked up tarot. This was something not 100% new to me but I also never took the time to truly learn how to read and interpret the cards. The main thing stopping me from venturing into tarot was my worry of being a poser. I would had to be that gal who wanted to get into it but am really just waddling my way through it. Though then after talking to some folks, I got over this and got me some books and did what I do best and start to research the culture and how to interpret/read the cards. The tarot experience has been a fun one to learn and really appreciate the idea of divination outside of tarot. This helped me give better meaning to the tools I am using to better understand the world around me as well. I do still need more practice but this will happen as time goes on. For now I am sticking with the Rider-Waite tarot format so I got the standard one for practice and one I personally connect with. The personally connecting with one is a fun one called “Crow Tarot” which has some beautiful designs that all have some sort of Crow or Crow symbolism in them.

The end of June was nice. My family was out of town so I had some time to myself in my abode. You might think I would perhaps pick up the blog and write something.

… Nope!….Sorry… lol

Instead that was my time to go hang out with friends, go shopping for more things, and just enjoy being out of the house and drinking. I did get a report I had been working for ages on out for work which was super rad and that made me very happy to get that done! There was some cool malware I was analyze that honestly I would like to do a bigger blog post on some of the techniques here. I am planning on making a framework to bully some kids for WRCCDC that uses a lot of the same architecture and persistence decisions. This is as a means to give the students some fun malware to combat but also give them real world experience from real malware I saw used in the wild :3 . Also if you want to ever support WRCCDC, you should definitely come and help. If you want to inquire more….idk go @ them on X or something lol. I may throw a volunteer form somewhere here.

July#

July started with a banger. I ended up having an amazing trip out to Oregon with some friends. This consisted of a 5-day trip which we had a whole bunch of people gather at a house a friend of ours owns in Eugene. I think we had something like 13 or so people all coming from different states like Washington, California, Arizona, and Oregon included. This was probably one of the biggest friend gatherings I have ever had! We did lots of planning before our travel allowing us to have a more optimized trip versus people sitting around trying to figure out what to do. Here is a list of the awesome stuff we got to do:

  • Magic the Gathering - A classic
  • Group painting canvases with Acrylics
  • Table top games
  • Hiking
  • Saturday market
  • Drink … a lot
  • Explored the coast to Portland - Thor’s Well and The Devil’s Punchbowl
  • Portland Funtime! - Powell’s Bookstore and Mox Boarding House
  • Tom-foolery at the local BJ’s and Red Lobster

I would say of note was our trip from Eugene to Portland and the ride up there where we got to see some amazing coastal sites. We collected items from the beach as well as got to see Thor’s Well and the Devil’s Punchbowl. Admittedly I thought the Devil’s Punchbowl was pretty mid. Like it was quite grand and had some cool things such as baby birds migrating near it but as far as sites go I would definitely agree that Thor’s Well was more worth the trip. It has a lot more to take in and explore along as well as some pristine photography opportunities near the Well as well as up a bit towards the bridge. On the ride up to Portland, we ended up stopping at a place called Tidal Raves which I would highly recommend if you like Sea-Food. I normally do not go for clams or oysters and I tried both this time with great success! I also had the Key-Lime pie martini (I think it was a martini…) and that was a banger of a drink. 10/10 would recommend.

My favorite part of the trip had to be the foray around Portland. By suggestion from a good friend, who also met us up there, we ended up exploring Powell’s Bookstore. If you have never been, imagine any used bookstore, then make it about 4 stories tall and full of used and new books as well as throw in a coffee shop and community areas for people to sit and read. It is central to Portland and there are only 4 that exist in the city. If you are there, I would highly recommend visiting. I ended up finding a cool research book on Intelligence from the late 90’s, a couple poem books, a neat fictional spy book, and the Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I think I also got a light novel as well that looked neat but I have not gotten around to reading that.

Also on suggestion from our Portland friend was to hit up Mox Boarding House. This place was absolutely amazing. It is like if you had a Hard Rock Cafe but instead it was for TTRPGs and board/card games. This was first and foremost a restaurant with amazing food and drinks then secondly was a place that let you have tables for playing games at. We would sit at dinner, enjoying our honey mead and delicious bites while destroying each other at some games of Commander Magic The Gathering. What was even cooler was some of the waiters and waitresses were official judges for MtG as well as Pokémon and other table top games. What an amazing environment. Aside from all of this, the building was beautifully crafted and stood out like a stylish city building with welcoming arms right in the side of downtown Portland. There are apparently some in different states as well. If you live near any of their locations I would highly recommend trying it out and taking some friends there to play games and eat good food. Each location does have a slightly different menu featuring local dishes and creations from the local town.

As the moth has ended…it ended with a little bit of a bang. My dad ended up in the hospital due to a cardiac arrest. He is recovering surprisingly well which I hope it keeps moving in the positive direction that it is. He should hopefully be fully recovered by the end of August if not by the middle of September. I will be unfortunately missing DEFCON 33 this year due to this so I can be there for him. I will still be participating in DEFCON CTF with my CTF team so stay tuned, I may have a write up or two for that >:).

Music Ventures#

I have always been into making and digesting music. Once I got into university though I fell out of playing music on instruments since none of my apartments could support the style I wanted to play. I also spent more time focusing on my education and improving for my career vs taking time to improve my own personal interest in music whether through a DAW or some online software. That being said, around May-ish I decided to pick up a DAW and start making my own music again!

The first DAW I decided to try is a free and open source one called LMMS. This is a really good software to start in the space of DAWs to figure out if that is even something you want to do. Pairing it with other FOSS software such as Audacity and you can chain up some amazing mixes and recordings. It has a decent starting library of sounds and plugins but it has full VST support if you have other paid or free plugins you would like to use. Downside I ran into with using LMMS on Windows was if the project became too big, it would end up crashing. That and the interface as well as some of the plugins are a little clunky but you can still make some amazing things with it:

IwantedtomakelofisoIdid:

This is my first attempt at Lo-Fi. Not too bad if I do not say myself.

stupid:

Idk…I was just feeling a vibe and made this.

ropchains:

This audio was the first song I made in LMMS. It samples audio as well from the famous Pwn College which I would highly recommend checking out if you have not.

I have now recently pivoted into a different DAW which I have been a lot more happier with but it does cost unfortunately. Guess what it is?

…….Drumroll…….

Yeah.. it’s FL-Studio by Image-Line lol. If you have never used FL-Studio I would recommend playing with it. There is a decent free trial you can use to understand the software and even make some arrangements using the default plugins and sounds that are included in the trial. I have also paired this with a plugin called Serum 2 which allows for some amazing synthesizer creations akin to having a giant patch board with different signals. It is quite an amazing piece of software honestly, both of them are. Together you can make some amazing masterpieces. I also ended up grabbing an FL-Key 49 MIDI keyboard to help aid in the music creation process. It is specially made for FL-Studio which is a nice benefit but otherwise acts well as a MIDI keyboard with sliders and pads which are programmable to whatever is needed. I got it refurbished for about 50 dollars cheaper than what it was originally sold for which is what got me in on purchasing it. Here is the most recent boop bloop I made. It is nothing crazy and by no means complete but I thought it was a pretty fun song to play with samples as well as making instruments in Serum 2.

Froggy Woggy

I am planning on making more music in the coming months and I think I will focus on one to two songs per month. I would like to make some music for the videos I am making for GuidedHacking but we will see where I get with making music that sounds good as background music :p

Making of GameHacking Videos#

There is this amazing service called GuidedHacking. They deliver top of the line content on Game Hacking from basic understanding of assembly and memory scanning to doing deep-dives into the kernel to understand how these anti-cheat drivers work at their core. I have joined the team of mighty content creators to start making videos! I have so far only really made two but I plan on making at least one a month. My first one did amazing but the second one did not do as good. Unfortunately YouTube is quite unforgiving. That being said the real meat and potatoes of the content is the articles that the videos are paired with on the Guided Hacking website. This site is a paid for service but the videos on the YouTube can be viewed for free. Though if you enjoy the content and want to get fully involved in the content and learn a BOAT load of new skills that are applicable to malware development and malware detection as well as the standard Game Hacking development pipeline, I would highly recommend investing at least a couple hundred dollars to access the content. Here are the videos I got out so far:

Onto August#

That is it for now. While pops is recovering I will be going through August with some more goals of finishing more videos, reports, and music. I will also plan on writing more as long as I get around to it. I have been doing some voice training on the side as well so hopefully I will be better about doing that so my voice can sound a lot more feminine <3

Love y’all. Hope you have a good August!