- so far two people have stayed at the hotel. one was an mit student who came briefly so that they could say they were the first hotel guest, and the other was one of my friends from penn who stayed for several nights. one of cj’s friend’s friends from new york also booked a few weeks ago only to cancel two hours before arrival, and someone who i don’t know dm’ed me on twitter asking for details, so it seems like the day when a stranger stays over might come sooner rather than later 😮
- my life for the past week has been taken over by writing a new ohms arrangement. it’s essentially a mashup of a bollywood war chant with a german anime song, which is unlike any a cappella arrangement i’ve seen before, so i’m excited to hear how it sounds live 🙂 though i’m also a bit scared that ohms might just not have the vocal aggression necessary to sing it. unfortunately this took up literally all of my free time, but at least i am finished now
- reading and writing short stories is going well! i am hoping to finish the first draft of a story by mid-october. it’s very difficult though; my professor says “i hate writing. i love having written” and while this is not true when i write blog posts it is definitely the case when i try to write my short story. also, we analyzed the swimmer recently, which is now probably my favorite short story of all time. it’s an extremely well-executed blend of surrealism with commentary about suburban america and aging; i recommend reading it if you have 20-30 minutes
- robert and i had our first 🚀🦠⁉️ club meeting last week (this is the name we decided on for the club where we try to make viral content). we spent a while planning club meeting structure but not many people showed up, so we will try to recruit more aggressively and restart this week
- hackmit is trying to disqualify our team, supposedly because the project is based on rustpad, which is open source but problematic because it was developed by a member of our team? i don’t really understand the reasoning here and this constraint was not specified in the rules but they don’t seem willing to compromise on this (i think the argument is something like: using software you wrote yourself before a hackathon is akin to starting the hackathon project early, even if you made the software open source; this is a dubious claim in my opinion but whatever)
- i bought dr k’s guides to anxiety and depression recently and started watching some videos. so far they seem reasonably informative! i’m very excited to finally see a more systematic view on these topics, especially from a professional who is familiar with both clinical and spiritual traditions. the cognitive augmentation class i’m following talks about objectives like helping people learn faster or remember better, but doesn’t focus much on improving mental health, so i’m hoping to find something interesting at the intersection of these topics. the probability of this actually happening is quite low, but i think it has the potential to be very powerful
- i’ve had a ridiculous number of meetings lately, which is the main reason why i haven’t been writing much. they are almost entirely optional, like, i attend the mit ai club’s reading group meetings where we talk about an ai research paper for an hour each week, and i show up for miscellaneous one-time events like brian gu’s zero-knowledge crypto / dark forest talk, and then there’s a lot of catching up with mit/harvard people and calls with people i lived with in the past year. it seems i have finally hit my max social capacity and need to create some more alone time now
- recently i realized i have taken 15 mit classes, 4 of which were on grades and 11 of which were on pass-fail. which, idk, i’m not complaining about, but it feels a bit strange especially considering i’m a junior and might only have 1-2 semesters of college left after this one. i guess i feel like a somewhat fraudulent mit student in the sense that i definitely avoided the brunt of the mit hardness that most people experience? and i think this was the right choice in that replacing potential hard math/cs classes with bio was good and taking a light load semester was good and capping myself at 5 classes per semester is good and not double majoring is good, but it does feel bad that my education has not been as “rigorous” as other peoples, whatever that means. but then again, most people who take more difficult course loads seem to not be internalizing the subtext they’re supposed to understand anyway, like, every 6-3 (computer science and engineering) major takes 6.004 computation structures but most of the ones i’ve asked still have no idea how a computer actually executes code or accomplishes anything really, so who knows how much class selection is actually reflective of knowledge. i think the tldr is that i am still somewhat insecure about feeling dumber than other people even though i objectively know a wide variety of things and do a lot of independent learning, and i will probably write a longer post about this later
A Slice of My Mind 
“not many people showed up” smh i’m worth at least 5 ppl combined
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LOL yes ty for coming 😛
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