summer update ii

~ tastymath
  • i met several people whom i like a lot and feel inspired by 🙂 unfortunately they all live in places that are difficult for me to commute cheaply to (ie. they are either not in south bay, or in south bay but not close to caltrain, or are no longer in the bay area) so i haven’t gotten to spend as much time with them as i would’ve wanted; i wish i tried harder to talk to them back when we were actually in the same room. i keep thinking about this line from circe – “in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth”. i am learning that when you find people you really really relate to you should hang on as long as possible and breathe them in as deeply as you can. this is something people have been telling me for at least a few years so maybe i should’ve figured it out earlier, but i also don’t think i was prepared to understand it until now. anyway, now is always better than later
  • last weekend i visited a maker space called noisebridge! it was my first time in any maker space and i found the experience slightly overwhelming and very mindblowing. overwhelming because i didn’t know how to use most of the equipment, mindblowing because there was so much creative energy there of a very different flavor than what i’m used to. eg there was a guy there whom you could put an arbitrary set of electronic parts and sensors in front of and he would immediately come up with ideas for projects to build using those parts. i ended up making some improv music with the guy, me on the drums and him on the piano and vice versa. it was my first time doing improv music with someone else and it was very refreshing 🙂 
  • i also tried poke for the first time and was absolutely disgusted. every bite felt like i was poisoning myself and i had to drink a lot of soup afterwards to make my stomach feel better. i simply don’t trust supply chains to handle raw fish in a way that makes it safe to eat directly
  • i wrapped up my first internship project and moved on from doing more traditional systems engineering to working on compilers / language development. it is quite interesting but also a bit tedious – compilers are basically just pass after pass after pass through intermediate representations to transform source code into something executable, and i didn’t realize the sheer number of passes involved until this project. it’s honestly a miracle that high-level programming languages exist and work properly
  • the previous post was an absolute slog to finish. i don’t enjoy writing content where every statement requires verification and every sentiment needs to be checked for tone and bias, but a lot of the more worthwhile posts i could write fall under this category so i will try it again sometime. a friend once told me my admissions content more closely resembled propaganda than blog posts, and i can see why – i’m not very comfortable with talking about my everyday life on the admissions blog (those posts usually end up here) but am comfortable with talking about my ideologies, so a lot of my admissions posts are essentially arguments wrapped in first person so that they feel like narration. maybe this is why i don’t really get along with the admissions office
  • someone recently asked me if i’ve figured out how to be happy, and the question confused me because it presumes that there is a solution to being happy. i guess i would say i’ve figured it out for now – i’ve figured out how to enjoy time at mit without feeling the pressure and stress most undergrads feel, and i’ve figured out how to enjoy living alone in south bay over the summer despite there not being much to do. i don’t think these strategies will translate into the future and expect to have to figure everything out again after college or after any other major life changes, and i think that’s fine
  • there was a weekend where i was pretty tired so i stayed home and watched tick tick boom, violet evergarden and also speedwatched (on the equivalent of 4x speed) euphoria. spoilers ahead
    • tick tick boom was decent, though my favorite song was the opener, 30/90, and i thought it went downhill from there. my main issue with the musical is that i don’t like how the composer writes lyrics – too much cleverness and wordplay that gets in the way of the actual message
    • violet evergarden was pretty cute. i liked the character progression and premise and would be down to watch or read or maybe write a longer story built around the same idea (main character goes to different peoples’ homes to ghostwrite for them and learns about her clients / life / herself in the process). my favorite episode was the one where violet helps a washed-up playwright get over the death of his daughter and begin writing again. very beautiful depiction of loss
    • euphoria was well-produced but way too long and also felt targeted towards teens, which is why i sped through it. the show didn’t feel very realistic, but it had good cinematography and character development and montages / dreamy sequences of people high on drugs. also season 2 contains an absolutely terrifying depiction of human trafficking (and that arc in particular, i’m told, is actually quite realistic) which was very chilling
  • separately i also read and watched the perks of being a wallflower. i liked the movie much more than the book – it felt like a wholesome version of catcher in the rye but with a much more passive narrator, and that doesn’t make for a compelling read in my opinion because the strength of catcher comes almost entirely from its narration. and of course the movie bypasses this problem by depicting scenes as they are rather than from inside the narrator’s head. i think that is enough movie/show watching for at least a few months; next i want to read either order without design or atomic habits or finite and infinite games or on earth we’re briefly gorgeous but haven’t decided on an ordering yet
  • i had a strange encounter with an uber driver who kept talking about how he misses his kids and only gets to see them for 2h/week because of divorce. he cried throughout the entire trip and repeatedly apologized for crying while driving and said a lot about parenting, how the thing that makes him happiest is when his kids tell him they love him, how religion was the only thing keeping him sane after he found out his wife was cheating on him, and so on. i tried to help him feel better but he had a strong accent and couldn’t understand anything i said 😦
Unknown's avatar

Published by tastymath

5 thoughts on “summer update ii”

    1. yeah these are exactly my thoughts about violet evergarden (see my anime list) » your myanimelist barely says anything about violet evergarden -_-

      Like

      Reply

  2. -“hang on as long as possible” how does one even begin to do that

    -“it was my first time doing improv music with someone else and it was very refreshing” i’m too much of a coward who doesn’t remember/know enough of any music theory to try improv by myself, much less with someone else. that sounds like a cool experience i want to have one day though.

    -“moved on from doing more traditional systems engineering to working on compilers / language development” oooh since i am going in reverse chronological order i do not actually know what you did with the former but both of these sound like things i’d be very excited to do

    -“said a lot about parenting, how the thing that makes him happiest is when his kids tell him they love him” this line really hit me idk why

    Like

    Reply

    1. how does one even begin to do that » by doing things together when possible or something like that

      i do not actually know what you did with the former » like, threads and cuda/gpu programming and memory management stuff

      Like

      Reply

      1. “doing things together when possible” sounds challenging :((

        “threads and cuda/gpu programming and memory management” wait i want to try that what

        also objectively cj’s reply style is very good and effective and you can see me slowly sliding towards it

        Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment