archenemy blog

So, TJIC reports on a bit of thoughtcrime committed in the presence of university stooge, and, in my opinion (see comments on TJIC’s post), shines his light on the wrong politically-correct cockroach (actually, to be fair, we don’t get to see any of [Redacted]’s writing - he may not be a cockroach at all).

The PDF posted by FIRE was created from a 1-bit bitmap - all the pixels are either pure black or pure white, which makes it a little tricky to read the poorly-redacted RA names via the usual method of cranking up the contrast. Since the scribbled ink was less dense than the ink of the type, I tried treating those pixels as noise, but Photoshop’s noise-reduction filters didn’t do much (I think they need different noise pixels on multiple color channels to work effectively?). Then I tried applying a gaussian blur to push the pixels out of their pure black and white states to get me some grayscale, which worked fine. After playing with tonal levels a bit, I got the following image:

Click for a slightly larger version. If anyone wants to see the process repeated on an image rasterized at a higher resolution I’d be happy to make another. Anyway, it may be difficult to read, but I think it’s pretty clear that the name isn’t [REDACTED].

UPDATE: BTW, the subject line is just intended as a mashup of Orwell and college stoner-speak, the sort of thing an RA might say if versed in these things, not anything directed at TJIC.