[spam][crazy][fiction][random] Non-Canon MCBoss Spinoffs

[Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many]

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for some years one of my small project ideas to try to relearn to code
has been an ascii-based graphics renderer. the fact that it does not
seem very useful to me helps me have comfort around it.

i had an idea of mapping the font shapes and using matrices of
similarity to pick the best character for any particular area of the
display and point in time. maybe libcaca does something similar, i
don’t know.

it was very hard for me to daydream this because my inhibitions had
transferred heavily to software development, and because one of the
major inhibitions is data visualization which would be aided by a
terminal graphics library. so the ideas have come, had dissociative
amnesia triggers developed around them, and had to redevelop
differently, repeatedly.

recently a concern i’ve had is representing vague shapes and
vector-like imagery well. i’m imagining a naive metric of similarity
based on pixel difference might work well for some things but fail,
for example, to identify that a slash (/) character is similar to a
diagonal line offset by a few pixels or at a slightly different slope.

it would be nice if it would generate ascii art similar to what an
inexperienced hobbyist might generate (here is a triangle: /_\) when
it was appropriate to do so.

i’m thinking, maybe a very simple approach to that could be to
convolve the imagery with disparate translations, rotations, scalings,
to find similarity that has spacial difference. [further thoughts
include imagining a possible theory for how far a pixel or set of
pixels must move to become identical, and how that motion is similar
to that needed of adjacent pixels]

it can be a bit of a confusing puzzle space because what a viewer
would want is the greatest subjective similarity, for the human visual
pathways, which is completely dependent on how humans process
information (for example a picture of a stick figure is similar to a
drawing of a human even if the poses are different, because we
recognize it as meaning a human). that seems like a separate, maybe
more modern challenge, to represent imagery in humanly clear and
pleasant ways. but here i was thinking something more rote.