CTF! (Stands for: Capture The Flag)

Now what is this? Are we in a war where we need to capture the enemy's flag? Or are we trying to win the space race? Or are we in that brawlhalla game mode? ( iykyk :p).
Well not quite that, but its like a game. You use your knowledge in different fields to find hidden messages and prove your worth. How does that work you ask? See, people use computers in their daily lives ( Someone: But I don't use computers daily, Me: mobile phones are also computes, dummy!) and when people use something daily, there are people who would try to take advantage of this and make some money for themselves.
When you drive a car, you'll have car thieves. Now when you use computers, you'll have data thieves ( again, dummy answer for saying computer thieves ). So when there are thieves, we need people who protect you from thieves, in normal life they are called police but in the virtual world, the security engineers do this job. Now these people need a certain skill set and to practice ( or show off >.<) their skills they do CTFs!
So there are many categories of CTFs, the categories increase in number as soon as a new technology is introduced, but to list the major ones:

Now, I've come across a few others while in competitions, which are:

Now I know, all these big words can be a little overwhelming but this will soon become very interesting, let's start with some cryptography:

Do the above line look like some randomly clicked keys? Well, someone who knows cryptography would think otherwise.
Now I'll let you know that this is base64 encoding.
What? What base?
Calm down child! Base64 is one of the many encoding techniques used. Here's a website that would help you find the type of encoding and also in decoding that, its called: dcode.fr
Its not always as simple as this to decode encrypted messages, sometimes you stumble across custom made encryptions and you have to figure out the code and see how to decrypt that message.

Anyways, try figuring out these encryptions:

• Aol ilsvd zlualujl pz EVYlk dpao "😂😉😭"


• 🙦🙨🙀🙬😨😍🙶🙡🙌🙶😮🙞😢🙪🙟🙣🙳🙔😢🙠🙋😢🙰🙂🙷😩🙚🙰🙦🙙🙧😩🙙🙪🙬😍🙡🙦🙉🙧😩🙔🙭🙼🙟🙱🙬🙁🙤 (if you can't see the things between the emojis, try opening this webpage in a laptop)

Okay, solving the second one might be a little challenging, so I'll help you. This is where we learn about OSINT and some Web Exploitation.
OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence and it basically is about gathering information from sources that are available freely to everyone. So, what we are going to do is simple, you need to find a link hidden in this webpage, to a github repo where the code for solving our second cypher is hidden.

CTFs can get very tricky, I've participated in a few with my friends as a team and everytime we learn something new, if you enjoy something, its always fun :)

And for your final challenge, here's a cute kitten: