Author: Chastity White Rose

The new and improved Hour of Polygons using Allegro to display the text of the current frame number, variables defining the polygon, the title, and my name in the bottom part of the screen underneath two different views of the image on the right and left sides.

After creating the video file, I used the Microsoft Photos app to add the music from a set they let you add to any video.

I also uploaded the original video without music along with the source code to here.

https://archive.org/details/1-hour-of-polygons

Here is a screenshot that shows the size of the video file, the source, the archive of frames, and also the window showing the size of the frames uncompressed. That is some seriously large disk space used compared to the source code used to create it!

This is a new and improved video which has only one polygon at a time instead of the target of multples. This makes it take less time to produce the frames. The framerate has been lowered to 24 and so now the total frames are 24*60*60 == 86400. This means both less work for my program as well as smaller file size while still similar quality. Also, I fixed a bug in my code that previous made it skip certain star polygons. The error involved integer division.

The problem was that the step variable was set to be reset to 1 whenever it was greater than or equal to the number of points divided by 2. The problem is that in the case of a regular pentagram, the points are 5 and the step is 2. But since 5/2 equals 2 because of integer division(instead of 2.5), my program failed to account for this situation. The source code(I have many branches of source code which use different libraries or programming languages) can be found at my sourceforge project here.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/binary-bit-map/

This is a video I made with my programming. There were 108000 frames in total. The framerate is 30 per second and the total number of frames was designed to be 30*60*60 or 108000 to be exactly an hour long. The result was that it took the program a long time to generate the frames but then they were encoded to a video with this command.

ffmpeg -r 30 -f image2 -i o/%08d.bmp -vcodec libx264 -preset veryslow -crf 23 -pix_fmt yuv420p o/v.mp4

This one does target polygons including stars. In the future I will do a similar one with only a single polygon XORed with the checkerboard.
What impressed me about this one is that the resulting video file was only 200MB. This is because monochrome images compress so well!

There are infinite ways to create a checkerboard and I do so both with my programming as well as in games like Minecraft.

Here is my gigantic 32x32x32 checkerboard in Minecraft made with heavy use of commands. It would be possible to build it in survival mode as well although it will take me much longer.

I also continue my Binary Bit Map project as I find time. Here a few samples I’ve posted previously on this blog of what I can do.

Tonight I found a genius way to do star polygons by drawing several smaller triangles to a temporary image, using the scan fill function, and then bitwise ORing them to the destination image. This gives me the filled in pentagrams and hexagrams exactly the same as they would look when I create them in inkscape but also allows for the gif animations I uploaded to my social media tonight. Here is what happens when I draw a single pentagram and then XOR it with a checkerboard background.

And I also have a video I uploaded to YouTube as well showing the same process for ordinary regular polygons.

The infinite beauty of black and white comes not just from how it looks but also how easy it is to make and the efficient compression of images and video when there are only two possible colors. My year’s worth of work on my Binary Bitmap project has enabled me to no longer rely on external C libraries written by other people but instead  draw anything I like as long as I take the time to code the exact coordinates of the polygons.

I don’t believe all this hype from the media about the Coronavirus from the media. I’m not saying there is no such thing as the virus or that people haven’t died from it.

But I do think that it’s an attempt by the pharmaceutical companies to sell another vaccine. This happens all the time. People are fed information designed to scare them until they are willing to do whatever the “experts” tell them to do.

I’ve written elsewhere about why I am against vaccination. Primarily because of animals used for ingredients and in testing of vaccines before they are used on humans. My position is that vaccines cannot be morally justified even if they do save human lives.

Of course my opinion on this does not prevent anyone else from receiving vaccines. However I am greatly concerned by those who want to make vaccinations mandatory as they already are in some circumstances.

I have chosen not to receive any vaccines myself. I just worry about the future where the government may force us to be vaccinated with the Coronavirus and other viruses.

Vaccines contain the very virus they are supposed to “immunize” you from. I know the claims that it causes your immune system to build up a defense to it.

However this only works if you have a strong enough immune system in the first place. If you have a healthy diet and lifestyle you will be able to fight off the disease whether it is injected into you with a vaccine or whether you were infected with it some other way.

In short getting a vaccine is really no better than just encountering the virus through other means and your immune system fighting it off.

I believe vaccines are just a way for the producers to make millions of dollars while providing no benefit that your body would not give you for free.

And on top of that the animals that will be killed in the production and testing of vaccines makes it impossible for an ethical vegan to receive vaccines without being a hypocrite.

That’s my statement on the matter for what it’s worth.