short post

six months after buying the domain i now have a personal site! it’s http://vvhuang.com feel free to point out mistakes or design improvements and i’ll probably address them in august. i thought it’d be good to consolidate my online presence a bit and make it slightly easier for internet strangers to get to know me. my current theory is that you can become internet friends with anyone if your website is sufficiently cute, but unfortunately mine does not meet that threshold and i didn’t really have any better design ideas. i am mostly happy with the current state of the site though; the initial drafts had very little spacing and the panda picture instead of my face, both of which ali rightfully attacked me for, so just getting to this point has been pretty instructive. blogging will stay on wordpress for now, primarily because i haven’t set up any kind of email notification system on my site yet and haven’t decided how public i want this blog to be going forward

i’ve gotten back into occasionally playing chess. somehow i spent the past 10+ years exclusively playing normal e4/d4/e5/d5 openings and this week i finally decided to read a bit on queen’s gambit and sicilian defense and it’s honestly sort of ridiculous that i took this long to get around to it. these are still not very comfortable openings for me but it’s nice to finally begin learning how to use the c-file properly

upon recommendation from several friends i watched the alphago documentary. unfortunately as a go novice i did not find it that compelling eg i did not understand why any of alphago’s supposedly unusual moves were out of the ordinary, and i thought the documentary was generally quite slow with little technical content. i also watched the premier of rick and morty season 5, which adult swim kindly made available on youtube and thought it was cleverly written. maybe i’m forgetting some obvious examples but i can’t actually recall the last time i saw this type of time acceleration used to drive a story? what i mean is that lots of sci-fi has characters experiencing life at different speeds, or some kind of hero / messiah figure who visits a timeline at regularly spaced intervals, but i think it is quite rare to have differently paced timelines with relatively balanced plot development

the anthropocene reviewed chapter on the mountain goats recommended listening to the tallahassee album so i’ve been doing that. it’s been good so far; not great enough for me to understand why it’s john green’s favorite band but i guess i’ll listen to some of their other music next (suggestions please)

i would write more but i’ve been abnormally tired lately, especially in my upper body. not sure why. it could be doing too much work or not stretching enough or something