Encoding Jake Gyllenhaal into one million checkboxes (2024)

Summary

How I encoded Jake Gyllenhaal into one million checkboxes on the internet Okay.. first real blog post, and something interesting DID happen. Let's see how this goes, I'll start from the beginning. About 2 months ago (June 2024), one of my friends showed me an image of checkboxes. Then an image of some base64. I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. About a week later, it leads to me drawing animated Jake Gyllenhaal on a hidden canvas shared with a small group of teens, also inhabited by millions of unknowing internet users. So. How did it happen? Well.. I honestly started out not really into it. My friend had embedded a series of bits into the site that represented what each checkbox was set to. They put in a link to a discord server that people start joining. Unfortunately I had some other stuff going on, like arcade (hack club shout out!); I was mostly an observer for the first few days. Yet, it was quite interesting watching them do this, and my friend even put an image of Edna Mode on the board for me. Eventually I couldn't help myself and jumped on the bandwagon. this was quite inspiring I started with just a static image of Jake with the text "Jake Gyllenhaal my beloved." This gave me WAY more trouble than I thought it would, for many reasons. At the time I started work on it, Nolen, the creator of one million checkboxes, had rewritten the site in go. So, I had some sort of standard to work off of that others had figured out. The first bit (or byte, if you will) is how bits were transported: two arrays of bit positions were sent, one setting bits to true and one setting bits to false. This was easy enough (right?). Well, that's when I figured out how weird binary in python is. The second bit: images were written on a 1000x1000 map of the checkboxes (because 1000x1000 is a million, so one checkbox became one black or white pixel) I started with a basic script, it took in bits and projected them onto the map, then toggled bits on a specific rhythm...