progress

so i spent the 2 weeks after coming home isolated in my room. it was not hard at all; apart from wishing i could play cello (which i don’t keep in my room and didn’t want to have to sanitize) and wishing i could go on runs outside i basically did not miss anything.

some things i did during quarantine and after:

• caught up on a ton of music i never got around to listening to. including: all 15 hours of ring cycle, a lot of other classical music (mostly new bartok + mahler), some kodaline, a lot of minor artists, etc. 
• got started on a urop! it’s some mix of combinatorial and algorithmic topics related to linear programming; i spent more or less the entire second week of isolation reading up on lp’s and it was fun 🙂 it’s also cool that the topic ties in lp stuff from 6.046, polytope stuff from 18.218, and a ton of convex optimization from my drp. definitely a good fit and it makes me really happy when we actually have productive calls together (we includes the prof and a grad student)
• did alibaba global math contest rounds 1 + 2 (with scores of 66 and 57? which makes no sense i was expecting like 70 and 80..) and apparently i qualified for the final round so we’ll see how that goes. also did google code jam qualifying round. this might be the first year where i finally have motivation to actually try on subsequent rounds, who knows
• read the bell jar. would definitely recommend 🙂 it was the most unnerving and painful book i’ve read in a long time, possibly ever. the majority of the book is literally paragraph upon paragraph of hopelessness, more subtly at first but growing more severe as the story progresses. there are so many memorable descriptions and hints of insanity everywhere like just look at some of these quotes
• now i am in a virtual orchestra so i have new music to learn! and i think i’ll try to actually learn franck sonata this time
• some friends wanted to do the andrew ng coursera machine learning course, so i am now doing it as well. supposedly it’s like 6.036 at mit but better, and so far it looks like that might be true. 
• my amazon internship got virtualized so i’ll be at home all summer i guess. i was originally hoping it’d be virtualized and i would be able to ditch work for a bit and go to places like sparc but that looks unlikely too
• writing another essay for 21w.022; i somehow talked myself into writing about bio/immunology and it’s a complete disaster at the moment; i’ll post a link when it’s less bad

watched a bit more stuff (though after binging death parade i definitely took a large step back):

1. rise of skywalker was very solidly average. there were occasional good scenes, but it was largely incoherent / didn’t live up to what you’d expect as the finale of the entire series. and honestly anyone given ownership of the franchise would be able to write a script with at least a few good scenes, so that’s really not saying much.. i think my ranking of star wars films is now 3 >>> 3.5 > 5 > 4 > 8 > 6 > 9 >> 7 > 2 > 1 (3.5 is rogue one; haven’t watched solo and don’t ever plan to) idk the movie “works” but just feels so lacking in comparison to all the things a star wars episode IX could be i suppose
2. garden of words was great 🙂 another super short anime movie about relationships hm im starting to like these a lot 😛 too bad shinkai doesn’t have that many films; they’re actually brilliant in the choice of frames and details he leaves in. the ost is very simple but also pretty good eg. here the instability is what makes this one work
3. (fake) i think im looking to finally watch looking for alaska sometime. i enjoyed the book a while back and have been told the show is decent, but it might be slightly hard to find online at the moment. i also simply have no time at the moment, so i suppose i can wait

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ive been feeling sadder than usual lately. part of it is definitely from reading too much news, not just about covid but also about the 2020 election (eg. wisconsin last week was extremely concerning) and some other garbage. i also think by interacting only via text i’m also starting to internalize the main downside of going to mit (should’ve been obvious a long time ago, but somehow it wasn’t..), which is that the spectrum of people i talk to has become much more compressed than in high school- it feels like the number of people of fundamentally distinct “types” i interact with has decreased a lot compared to high school. i suppose i wish i was friends with more people whose primary interests were drastically different from mine. i think there were also some people i was devoting an unhealthy amount of brain space to (probably not you; i’m pretty sure they don’t read this blog) so i’m changing my social media/texting habits for now and maybe this will help as well. essentially i realized that because of the presence of the internet as a barrier, at the moment i have greater-than-usual control over who i socialize with so if i want to make any changes now is a good time to start