- i finally watched mit regressions (a documentary about mit that two students put together over the past 2 years)! super impressed by the creators’ dedication and the quality of footage they were able to find. i wonder if i will ever, in my entire life, produce anything of this caliber; i certainly hope so, but it hasn’t happened yet, and that is scary to think about. anyway, it was very interesting to see how various historical events shaped the institute, and it’s something i appreciate a lot more as a senior than i would have in previous years (simply because i had significantly less knowledge of mit in the past; i think i acquired a lot more after becoming an admissions blogger). unfortunately i think this isn’t something many people care about; i get the sense that most students only see themselves as members of specific friend groups or clubs and not as part of a larger organization or society
- there’s a small artificial creek next to my house, presumably built as part of plano’s water and runoff management system. the other day i went on a walk and realized i didn’t actually know where the creek ended since the lack of sidewalks makes it difficult to follow, so i went on google maps and followed its path southwards. i watched as the creek meandered through different parks and nature preserves before eventually reaching a large lake, and on the other side of the lake there was a thin blue line which i thought was another creek but it was actually a tributary of the trinity river, and as i followed the river south it became thicker and thicker until suddenly i reached the gulf of mexico, and then i started crying because my entire screen was blue and i live 250 miles from the coast and nobody tells you when you’re growing up here that if you wanted to you could follow the water from the outside of your house to the ocean
- read the webtoon annarasumanara. it was a pretty short (~1.5h?) and enjoyable read about magic and becoming a boring adult, which inspired parts of my previous post
- i watched alice in borderland and enjoyed it so much that i read the manga immediately afterwards. they are both quite good – the show excels at action and pacing, while the manga fleshes out some characters. i was very surprised by how much i liked it, since i usually am not a fan of the survival game genre and assumed from the synopsis that it would just be a japanese version of squid game, but it turns out the characters here are actually very thoughtful and have interesting perspectives to communicate, especially in season 2! if you need convincing, my favorite chapter of the manga is chapter 53 and my favorite scene in the show is the king of spades’ death (none of these are major spoilers)
- hacklodge starts tomorrow in menlo park and i’m probably going to work on something related to zero-knowledge parsers. i spent the past two days in sf doing an onsite with an ai startup; i completely failed the technical component of the onsite but had some very enjoyable conversations with the ceo, so i think it was still a worthwhile use of time even if rejection is likely. tldr the ceo is around ten years older than me, incredibly good at reading people, and was quite similar to current-vincent ten years ago, so she had a very accurate model of me and also had the life experience to see what kinds of paths i might take in the future. it was my first time meeting a single person possessing all of these attributes, and i felt more understood than i had in a long time. i’m still processing everything we talked about so details will have to wait for a later post; i truly did not know people like this existed in the world until now
A Slice of My Mind 
Thanks Vincent! Shoutout means a lot
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