all the little things

i feel like i’m slowly forgetting all the info i ever knew about people whom i don’t talk to frequently. historically i would just remember everything i observed about people but it’s possible i no longer have the bandwidth to keep doing that anymore. forgetting is a bit sad, but i guess this is also what i was signing up for in moving to new mexico and i was conscious of that when deciding to. sometimes i look at chat histories with people i was in close relationships with and they confuse me because we somehow communicated at an impossibly frequent pace and i no longer understand how that was ever possible. i don’t know where all that energy went, or where it came from, or if it amounted to anything. all of it is fading and whenever i get back on campus i’m barely going to remember anything about anyone but i don’t see what i can do about that

in other news i made a twitter! you can find me at vvhuang_ as vvhuang was taken 😦 i decided there was lots of niche news that mainstream media and mit people never talk about, especially very recent updates in tech and research, and twitter seems like a pretty good news source if you use it properly. things like instagram and fb and just regular news outlets are better for following public figures anyway so i don’t feel like there’s much point in following them on twitter, and i think my feed has been relatively clean as a result, for now at least

i was averaging 7-8 hours of sleep but last week and this week that plummeted to around 5 hours per day. most of this was because i decided i was doing fine in school and needed to spend a lot more time with people, so i went on a large number of 1-3 hour walks. the most interesting one was when we just laid down in the middle of a highway for a solid 5-10 minutes and looked at the stars would recommend 🙂 (this was around midnight so the road had no traffic). on a separate night someone convinced me to wake up at 5am to watch the sunrise and listen to thus spake zarathustra and work on projects together, so yeah it’s been great and i haven’t really felt tired yet

we had a mini-hackathon two weekends ago but i didn’t have time for anything too serious so i helped jonathan write a discord bot which scrapes musenet generates new music in user-specified genres constantly; it should be ready soon! i also added a minor feature to curius, which took way too long because i had to re-learn a lot of react and css and how to integrate them in a way different than what was taught in weblab? in general it seems like writing chrome extensions require a surprisingly large amount of work to accomplish simple tasks

we also did another pair teaching session! i taught someone about applying debugging strategies in personal problems, so we touched on rubber duck and pair debugging, premortems, and some concepts from therapy and had a really productive debugging session which made me happy 🙂 i’ve never taught real-life debugging to anyone despite thinking about it quite often and now i’m starting to believe i should try this more as it’s probably one of the most useful things i am capable of teaching? for the other half of the teaching session someone talked to me about their experience cycling across central asia, which was super cool. a lot of conversations i’ve had here touch on how western values have helped destroy communities and have created lots of societal and mental health problems by promoting the individual eg. we ended up with suburbs which are great for small family units but kind of awful for society, and traditional eastern philosophies have a more sustainable outlook. i’m still struggling to decide the extent to which i believe this but it seems reasonable (traditional eastern meaning traditional, eg. not modern-day china or korea or etc.)

ive been crying somewhat more than usual and i’m not really sure why. it could be that my mental stability is eroding or that the change in environment is allowing me to feel everything more freely. i think it’s probably the latter but it’s hard to tell. like, i generally have a good read on my feelings but you never know what parts of the spectrum you’re missing out on until you pick them up for the first time, and maybe that’s what’s going on now. anyway i cry a lot more as a result of impersonal things like current events and interesting quotes than i used to, and during my cooking shifts i find chopping ingredients oddly cathartic

i’ve been spending almost no time on class, which feels great but also very strange and means i’ll probably be extremely overwhelmed the next time i take difficult courseload. 5.12 (orgo) has been chill on pass/fail ever since i passed the class a week ago and my other classes aren’t very hard. sometimes i regret dropping 6.849 but i’ve been using the extra free time here productively and i think i just need to learn how to trust having free time and the responsibility of choice and such

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more things i’ve watched, both for film music class and for house activities: 

1. coco- the day of the dead was a week ago and tiago is from mexico city so we all watched coco together and he explained all the relevant cultural references in the movie. turns out the movie is incredibly consistent with real mexican culture and knowing that makes me appreciate all the work that went into the movie a lot more 😮 we also talked a bit about how mexican culture inherited a mockery and destigmatization of death from the aztecs which is cool. i previously watched coco on a flight in 2018 meaning the audio quality wasn’t very good, and i liked it a lot more this time around 🙂 in the past 2 years my favorite song has probably shifted from remember me to proud corazon
2. get out– this movie is… interesting. i’m really not sure why external forces are conspiring to make me watch more more horror and thriller movies but for some reason people here decided it was the best movie to watch. it’s definitely interesting how they incorporated racial themes into a horror movie, which made it feel more meaningful than the genre usually is? 
3. the mandalorian– a bunch of people here are space fanatics which maybe isn’t too surprising. i haven’t even watched mandalorian season 1 but we decided to watch mandalorian season 2 episode 1 an hour before episode 2 was released so that we could watch episode 2 immediately afterwards. the following week we watched episode 3. i don’t think i have a particularly strong opinion on the show yet — obviously it’s not as interesting as the main star wars movies due to shows generally having slower plots than movies, but it’s still a quality non-intrusive addition to the star wars universe in a way that the sequel trilogy wasn’t, and i guess i’m happy about that
4. rashomon– this was an cool concept. the plot is not particularly eventful but still pretty interesting. prof marks pointed out that the sound designs of all 4 anecdotes are different in meaningful ways that reflect how true the narratives are and that’s something which i didn’t pick up on but is pretty intelligent
5. the graduate– so apparently this is critically acclaimed but i found it exceptionally boring. the characters all seem pretty silly and don’t really do much, but maybe this is just my prejudice against romcoms showing. like, i got bored early in the movie and decided to read the summary and every single plot point i read about took ages to transpire i don’t think my brain has ever been this numbed by a movie. the simon and garfunkel songs were cool though
6. not a movie or tv show but we had a massive election night watch party. we kept switching between cnn abc fox etc. and eventually decided that fox was genuinely the most enjoyable network to watch for more than 10 minutes at a time. like, we’re waiting hours for results we want entertaining opinionated commentary and predictions, not meaningless numbers from obscure counties over and over. so i probably watched more fox news on that night than i had for the rest of my life combined and i guess i understand the appeal of fox better now.