I hate doing things under time pressure, but I have to admit I do a
lot more things when time pressure exists. One of the things is writing.
Another is posting the things I write. They aren’t very good, but
they’re better than writing that doesn’t exist.
(in case you forgot, I’m still posting this pretty much only because
I made myself post once every
weekend)
It’s interesting that I can impose time pressure on myself by
declaring commitment devices by fiat and it works. Other people have
developed other methods of doing this — I recently discovered
The Most Dangerous
Writing App, which puts time pressure on you to type every five
seconds or it deletes everything you wrote. There are many other ways
it’s done.
content warning: death, existential dread, the usual
I have this memory —
I was a tiny kid, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, and I
started thinking about death and nonexistence, and I thought about how
one day I wouldn’t exist any more, that there wouldn’t be a me
thinking my thoughts and perceiving my perspective, and suddenly I was
terrified.
I got up and knocked on my parents’ bedroom door and asked them about
this. Maybe. Or maybe I didn’t because the fear was less crippling than
the social awkwardness of randomly knocking on my parents’ door in the
middle of the night to ask them a question like that; I don’t remember.
It was a long time ago, okay?
When I first made myself commit to posting weekly, I was trying to
make myself spend a little time every day of the week thinking and
writing and whittling away at old drafts. Instead I’m here at 10:40 PM
basically starting a brand-new post. Oh well.
I last blogged about music in
2013. I tagged two other posts with “music” since then, but neither
is particularly deep: 8 Songs for 18
Years and Drop-In Filler.
Let’s continue the tradition of self-analysis part IIs from nowhere…
I meditated a little bit in
Conversations about “lacking
experience or interest in a lot of the commonly discussed culture.” I
think this applies to me and music as well, although not as fully. Back
in Taiwan, when mentally bracing myself for coming to the U.S. for
college, I sometimes worried about not knowing enough about pop music
and bands and not listening enough to popular albums, and having trouble
integrating into the culture for this.
Turns out, among the communities I wandered into and friends I made,
it was a more frequent obstacle that I didn’t know enough about
classical music and composers. Whoops. Some of the names rang faint
bells from either music class or conversations with high school friends
who did do classical music, but I could not identify or remember any
styles or eras, and would remember composers only by unreliable first
letters or unusual substrings of their names.
It’s another weekend, isn’t it.
I’m out of deep things to say. I don’t usually have deep things to
say. Sorry to anybody who subscribed hoping for more things like the
last post. This is basically going to be a personal stream of
consciousness post. But it’s a stream with a long ancestry, since I
apparently wrote 400 words about it in a WordPress draft four years ago.
This was way back before I even started writing post drafts in Markdown
on my computer instead of directly in WordPress, so I guess it must be
an interesting topic.
Four years ago, Brian2012 was suddenly struck by how many
of the people he knew were such serious gamers. But let’s go back even
earlier, shall we?
A long long time ago, when I was in elementary school or so, my
parents had some sort of reward system where I had to do productive
things, like study or do chores or write diary entries or practice the
piano or something, to earn time on the computer for games. “Gaming
time” was a currency. I enjoyed saving up lots of thirty-minute
increments and knowing I had the freedom to using them slowly.
That much I remember; the details of how it worked are very fuzzy and
I’m not sure what I played in those thirty-minute increments either. I
think there was Neopets and Runescape and Club Penguin. (My Neopets
account still sees sporadic activity, because I get really really bored
sometimes…)
This post’s topic might be the most controversial thing I’ve posted
here ever. I hope the points I want to make aren’t.
One of the excuses for not blogging I came up with and then deleted
while rambling about not
blogging was that I’m getting more feelings about real-world
real-person issues, things that people take heated positions on — it’s
not topics like what food I ate or what games I’m playing in fourth
grade any more — and my identity is pretty public here, so who knows
what’ll happen. Oh well. I’m probably just paranoid.
It’s also delayed, as the articles I’m talking about are old; the
latest two news items are the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando
Castile and then the police shooting at the Dallas rally. That was also
really sad, but I don’t think I have anything insightful to say about
it. Let me point you to the
MIT
Admissions post, “Black Lives Matter”, and then for something a bit
more optimistic out of a huge range of possible choices,
this
Medium article.
Although after I started writing this post, the story about
a
Muslim man preventing an ISIS suicide bomber came out, so now this
is mildly relevant again. Anyway, I guess the delay is no different from
how I put up life posts weeks after the life event happens. So today, I
bring you two old news articles about Islam that my friends shared and
discussed:
The second one first, whose argument is, to be frank, weak. I think
this piece from The Atlantic by Wood,
“What
ISIS Really Wants”, is a better-researched overview of ISIS while
still being pretty readable. One caveat is that it’s somewhat old. But
its central claim is quite the opposite:
One of the most unexpectedly different facets of life during my
internship has been the meals.
I’m not talking about the food; it’s certainly different in a
fantastic way
(Dropbox’s
food (link to Facebook page) is like something out of a high-end
restaurant), but I knew that before coming already. Also of note is the
way I started eating ∞% more ramen over the weekends than I did over the
entire school year at MIT, because here I can’t buy that many groceries
without them spoiling and am amazingly lazy in this new environment.
No, this (deadlined, so not that well-thought-out, but whatever) post
is about conversations at meals, which happen basically every lunch and
some dinners when my team eats together.
I’ve never had any regular experience like it. Of course I’ve had
many meals at home with family, but they feel different because, well,
it’s family and we have so many topics in common. I went to the same
school for twelve years and we didn’t generally use a cafeteria; we just
ate at our desks in our classrooms, or while doing things like attending
club meetings or taking makeup tests. Sometimes if people felt like it
they would push desks together to eat, but eating by oneself was totally
normal. (At last, I feel like that was what it was. It seems so far away
now that I don’t trust my memory, which is pretty sad… I faintly suspect
I would have this experience in a more stereotypical American high
school. But this is mostly just based off the cafeteria in Mean
Girls, a movie I only watched in its entirety on the flight here,
which is weird because I know I’ve seen the “The limit does not exist!”
part much much earlier. /aside)
And at MIT? “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
I am glad for these conversations over lunch because I get to know my
team more personally (and don’t have to awkwardly eat alone in the
bathroom), but they’ve also given me a lot of time to ponder my (lack
of) conversation skills.
(I’m making random short posts to entertain certain people during
spring break.)
Since air-dropping into this crazy cultural salad bowl of a place,
I’ve met a lot of people whose names get mispronounced. All sorts of
long vowels and short vowels and consonants and word boundaries that
jump across languages unpredictably. As a result, people often acquire
nicknames or alternative names to get called by, whether actively,
passively, or somewhere in between.
In contrast, my name is easy and boring. Now, I rather doubt I’d want
an exciting name, in the sense of a name that everybody mangles in
excitingly different ways. I’m not exactly dissatisfied with people
calling me “Brian”. It just strikes me that I think I’ve gone my entire
life without a meaningful nickname or even meaningful derivative of my
name.
(I’m ignoring the transposition. Why am I ignoring the transposition?
I’m not sure I can rationally justify that, but thinking about it makes
me cringe, which is the reason I’m delicately avoiding explicitly
writing out what nickname I refer to by “transposition”. I will just say
it is rather uninspired… and also, perplexingly to me, used by accident
a lot…)
(So. It’s spring break. Two-week-late post, and somehow by the end
it’s all aboard the angst train again?)
Two Sundays ago, I mobbed with a small group of MIT furries to watch
Zootopia, the recent highly-reputed Disney movie.
(Before anything else, first there were the previews. I was impressed
that every single one of them — there were six or so — was about an
upcoming movie featuring anthropomorphic animals front and center. Let
me see if I can remember all of them… in no particular order,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Secret Life of
Pets, The Jungle Book, Storks,
Finding Dory, and Ice Age: Collision Course.
edit: Oh, also Angry
Birds. Wow, I said, they know their audience.)
I went into the movie with a vague impression that
Zootopia was more adult-oriented than most Disney films —
not in the naughty way, but in general making a lot of jokes and
invoking a lot of parallels that I think only adults might have the
experience to get. My suspicions were confirmed a few lines into the
movie, where there was a joke about taxes I cracked up at but can’t
imagine that children a few years younger would have found funny. If you
the reader haven’t watched it, I hope that was vague enough not to ruin
the start for you.
(To be fair — and, uh, some parts of the internet are kind of big on
this fact — the film also at one point enters a nudist colony.
Fortunately (?),
Animals
Lack Attributes.)
Humor aside, I think the movie also deals with some weighty and
nuanced themes, ones that would take more life experience to fully
appreciate than the themes of most Disney movies. The social commentary
is very clear. Possibly bordering on too blatant for my tastes — even
though the whole movie is kind of Funny Talking Animals, there are some
animal species for which it’s really easy to guess which human
demographic groups they might be symbolizing, to the point where I can
already imagine the other side of the debate. You won’t need a PhD in
literature to figure out the parallels; you wouldn’t even need an AP
English Literature class. But, I think, it still works. It’s like
Animal Farm on training wheels.
There are 30 minutes until my laundry finishes.
It is 2:30 in the morning as I write this. Normal people are not
awake at this time of day. It’s possible that normal MIT students are,
though.
I’ve been meaning to blog for a while, but things happen and other
things happen and still more things happen. From a state of total
inexperience in the kitchen, I’ve already managed to single-handedly
cook six six-person meals for my co-op, not to mention all the weird
meals I make for myself (which is just as well, I don’t think they are
of typically mentionable caliber.) I’ve already taken two exams in three
of my classes and the big midterm for my fourth. Four puzzlehunts —
Simmons, aquarium, Palantir, ΣUMS; five if you perhaps include Next
Haunt. Six SIPB meetings. A few bottles of Soylent; I lost count and
don’t want to check my room because that’ll disturb my roommate. Θ(3000)
zephyrs. And after many weekends of eye-opening group practice, tonight
I have to catch a flight to Rochester, NY for ACM-ICPC regionals.
As readers of this blog probably know, I am not an MITAdmissions blogger. It was kind of disappointing at the moment, but now I rarely think about it except when I come up with good reasons why I shouldn’t be an MITAdmissions blogger. One reason is that I am not very good at coming up with advice that could generalize to a wide audience, even an audience only as wide as people at or coming to the ‘Tvte. (There can be only one!) This by itself probably wouldn’t be so bad because there’s plenty of generalizable advice to go around, but I also don’t like repeating well-known stuff. Don’t skip class, except when you really know when you’re doing, which you probably think you do when you skip class. Get enough sleep, maintain good study habits, set aside time to keep up with old friends, back up your zarking data, alternate alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks, do not forget the factor of one-half when computing the area of a triangle. You get the picture.
There’s only one piece of advice I can say that I believe is generalizable to any degree, and in particular I think my past self would have appreciated and also had not heard, even in passing, from any other source: Get a Sharpie.