Blogging is weird. I’m still nervous when I post stuff because I’m
concerned I’m wrong, and end up looking unprofessional or attracting a
bunch of Cueballs or something.
Before I told people about this blog, during the time when 100% of
its traffic came from its coincidental placement in search results, I
didn’t have to worry about this. Now, I choose my words. Because some
Important Person™ might show up. Maybe even misinterpret something I
said and/or get furiously offended at a badly phrased joke.
I also fear that I’ll update my beliefs quickly; maybe I’ll change my
mind or discover a much better argument for the other side really soon.
But the blog post would still be there, displaying my old belief, giving
the reader an inaccurate or misleading impression of myself. People
might even chat with me to argue about it, and then I have to admit
I’m wrong oh no! It feels a lot better admitting I’m wrong on my
own turf, in my own time.
This passage from Lord of the Flies comes to mind (I had
hurriedly reread the book as ammunition for the AP Literature test and
noticed that my past self had marked it):
It is more than slightly intimidating to go into the room through the
big sliding door and see everybody dressed up in full-on green surgical
garb with masks and hair nets. I don’t remember this part. Feeling a
little vulnerable, I change my clothes.
I ask to listen to my iPod during the operation — I remember being
able to do this during the operation four long years ago when the
subject of today’s surgery was inserted into my shoulder — but the
nurse(?) says it’s best not to do that because they’ll be using
something electric to stop the blood. Instead I can listen to music
played from a computer in the operating room. Well, okay then.
She escorts me through a bunch of twisty little passages to said
room. The computer is a dual-screen Windows XP. The nurse shows me that
there is a folder with random albums sorted by year. I poke through the
folders and create a playlist in Windows Media Player interleaving
1989 with a collection of classics from 五月天(Mayday).
Then I get on the operating table and wait. One of the nurses
compliments me on my choice of the latter band. A few tracks later, I
deduce that my interleaving had been to no avail because the media
player was set to shuffle. I spend a lot of time on the operating table
at first not doing anything except stare at the ceiling. There is a
white three-legged contraption there, with each hinged limb ending in a
large blue-rimmed circle of surgical lights. There are white sans-serif
letters inscribed on the rims, saying Chromophare® E 668 and
Berch-something. I think the “something” was a synonym for “say” or
“tell”. An after-the-fact search says it’s Berchtold. Typical human
memory.
Later I am covered with lots of green cloth, which blocks out the
ceiling. Instead, I can only see a clipboard and random paper forms on
the left side of my peripheral vision, presumably propping up the cloth.
The clipboard is a highly translucent pink. The form on top is yellow
and has a box saying something about somebody paying; the form on bottom
is white with a black-and-pink-striped right border. The clipboard’s
clip also has random streaks of black marker across a white sticker.
Life update: I got my driver’s license from the place where I learned
to drive. Then I drove home from there with my mom, and it was zarking
terrifying.
Also, WordPress says it has protected my blog from 38 spam
comments.
Early in the morning tomorrow, I have a small surgical operation, so
I can’t sleep too late. (Well, it ended up being pretty late anyway.
Darn.) Therefore I think I’m going to do something unprecedented on this
blog for the daily posting
streak: I’m going to post an incomplete non-expository post.
Yes, the only purpose of the title is to get initials that are four
consecutive letters of the alphabet..
One of the more argumentative post sequences on my blog involved
ranting against standardized tests.
My very first stab was probably the
silly satire directed at the
test everybody has to take that takes up two hours per day of an entire
week. Once college became a thing in my life, I wrote a
humblebrag rant after I took the
SAT and then a summary post
after I snagged this subject for an English class research paper and
finished said paper.
It should be plenty clear that I am not ranting against this part of
the system because it’s disadvantageous to me.
But it should also be said that I’ve read some convincing arguments
for using standardized tests more in college admissions
(Pinker,
then Aaronson).
Despite the imperfections of tests, they argue, the alternatives are
likely to be less fair and more easily gamed. The fear that selecting
only high test-scorers will yield a class of one-dimensional boring
thinkers is unfounded. And the idea that standardized tests “reduce a
human being to a number” may be uncomfortable for some, but it makes no
sense to prioritize avoiding a vague feeling of discomfort over trusting
reliable social science studies. Neither article, you will note,
advocates selecting all of one’s college admits based on
highest score. Just a certain unspecified proportion, one that’s
probably a lot larger than it is today.
And although I wish the first article linked its studies, I mostly
agree with their arguments. So this puts me in a tricky position. These
positions I’ve expressed seem hard to reconcile! So, after arguing about
all this with a friend who told me things like
I think you fail to understand how anti-intellectual american society is
(comments on this statement are also welcome) I think some
clarifications and updates on how I feel are in order.
(Part of a daily posting
streak but for once I don’t think I need to apply the disclaimers to
this. If you thought for even one second that the title was a
palindrome, I’ve succeeded. It’s not. I don’t have a good title. Okay,
maybe slap the disclaimers onto that part.)
The first time I drove a car was on 5/18. I think. I might be off by
a day or so. Most of that day’s lesson was spent learning to go forward
and backward, accelerate and decelerate smoothly, and turn the wheel
without getting my hands tangled up. My coach made me count out loud how
many circles I was turning: 一圈半圈半圈一圈etc. It felt kind of stupid
when I was doing it, but I guess in the end it helped, and eventually
once I got the hang of turning the wheel, I just subvocalized it and my
coach also tacitly stopped bothering me about it.
The first time I activated a turn signal light was probably on 5/26.
That was the day I wrote in my TIL log that, when you turn the steering
wheel back from the direction you were turning, the turn signal lights
turn off automatically. After you think about it, this is a pretty
sensible thing for turn signal lights to do, but when I first learned
this my mind was utterly blown. Wow!
It’s like when you’re turning and you turn on the turn signal and it
starts clicking this steady beat to increase the dramatic tension, like
you’re doing a trick in a sports driving game and you have to quickly
hit the right sequence of buttons on the controller. Then you actually
turn the corner and then turn the wheel back, and as the wheel makes its
smooth sliding sound back to its upright position, the beat stops like a
resounding V7 to I resolution, as if to congratulate you on executing a
beautiful turn without crashing into another car or driving off the side
of the road.
That’s what it feels like, anyway.
On slow days, when you’re halfway through a turn but the drivers
ahead of you are waiting in a queue that stretches on forever on the
practice track, you can shift to the parking gear and use the turn
signal’s beat as a metronome and sing along to it too. I do.
That’s the name of the text file that comes up in MacVim when I hit
option-shift-Z. I use it for quick notes and editing stuff to
later be pasted into webpage forms, especially complicated JavaScripty
ones (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) that don’t play nice with Pentadactyl’s
popout editor functionality. The keyboard shortcut is set in
Quicksilver, although I was doing
something similar even on Windows with AutoHotKey.
Over time I tend to hoard stuff here. Vim says it has more than
40,000 words and 300,000 characters. It contains seeds that never grow
into blog posts, planned tweets I later abandon out of embarrassment,
preemptively composed comments that never get posted, carefully written
text I’m paranoid might get deleted by the Internet, and more. For
today’s frivolous post (part of a
daily post streak, standard
disclaimers apply, etc.), here are some excerpted context-free
highlights, like a personal extended game of “What’s in your Ctrl+V
right now?”. The task of interpretation and/or guessing the context is
left up to the reader. Have fun! See you tomorrow!
(Something something something
daily posting streak something
something standard disclaimers. My schedule is tighter than usual
because IPSC is tonight and runs right up until midnight. Anyway, here’s
my logic with posting this: given how long I’ve committed to posting,
I’m probably going to have to dig deeply enough into my reserves to
include it, and to be authentic I can’t edit the story more anyway, so I
might as well do it now. (Also maybe this will pressure me into
finishing and posting one of the real short stories in my blog draft
folder, the same way I feel pressured to make a good puzzle after
posting a bad one.) I’m not even going to reread my story because I
don’t like cringing at my own writing without being able to edit it, but
hopefully that makes it bad enough to be entertaining. If you didn’t
know, this was for an MIT preorientation program application. Tell me if
it’s bad to repost application stuff. I hope not.)
(Oops this introduction is about as long as the actual story
now.)
Tell us a short story in the available space below. Your inspiration
is only one word: nuclear. Go!
At some point I thought, hmm, maybe this blog would benefit from some
more sentimental, memory-capturing music/videos, like I chose for my
end of 2013 post or my
end of 2014 post. (Yeah, I link
to my own posts alarmingly often. I think that’s kind of weird. I don’t
know.)
Obviously, because you’re reading this already, I decided to follow
through with that idea. There’s no particular significance for posting
this now — it’s not my birthday or anything, as the title might suggest;
it just has a nice ring to it — except of course that I’m starting to
get mildly desperate for content for my
daily posting streak exercise.
Standard disclaimers apply.
This is mostly for my future self. I should note that, although I
like these songs, this is not a list of my absolute most favorite songs
ever. You can tell because there isn’t any Coldplay or fun. (the band.)
Instead, each of these songs was chosen to be meaningful to myself and
my life in at least two different ways that generally don’t overlap with
the other songs. This was difficult but I think I managed it — you know,
how constraint breeds creativity and everything? Also, they’re arranged
by approximate chronological order of impact. But it also means that
this list isn’t going to be that meaningful to anybody other than
myself.
Also, I have a long list of class-of-2015 sentimental songs, which
I’m not including here because I think there are so many that they
deserve a separate post. Will I avoid procrastinating and feeling
awkward for long enough to make such a post? Stay tuned!
shrugs Whatever, enjoy the music or stop reading now if you
want.
This essay was partly inspired by but mostly orthogonal in purpose to
dzaefn’s essay on a similar subject,
Humans,
Photographs, and Names. I agree with many of its points, although I
deviate in that I think it’s more important for my Facebook picture to
identify me than to inform about me (there’s the rest of Facebook, plus
my maybe half a dozen other sites, for doing so). Part of the problem
for me there, and part of the reason I hang on to my nine-letter random
handle from fourth grade, is that my names, first and last, are so
commonplace. Among the people who share them (according to DuckDuckGo)
are a New York Times tech writer, more than one computer science
professor, a photographer, a couple doctors, and some guy who did some
sort of graphics work for a short clip and two movies. This means that,
to somebody not already in my social circles trying to match me to my
account, my Facebook photo is my primary tool for disambiguating myself
from all these other people, and I don’t think there is anything that
could do that job quite as precisely as a picture of my actual face and
body.
Still, I agree enough to be bothered by having a profile picture
suffering from “the whole extent of photographic informational void”. I
always planned to add some GIMP layers to the photo to indicate context
and content more precisely. Except I procrastinated and it got more and
more awkward to do this as time went by, since as far as I know, normal
people update their profile pictures only to reflect more recent events,
especially when they’re important. Like, you know, graduating from
high school? So yes, I’ve been waiting to do this for an entire
year now.
Eh, to hell with awkwardness. That’s the spirit of this daily-posting
exercise.
(Fun fact: The code in what I’m about to set as my profile picture,
if I don’t procrastinate even more, is real IOI 2014 code I submitted
successfully (for
rail,
as previously featured; the visually selected fragment was the key
fix for the final bug I fixed). Except I actually had to manually retype
my code printout to get the picture because I lacked the foresight
(sound familiar?) to save an electronic copy of my IOI submissions.)
Also, I’m glad this isn’t a smiling photo because I feel like it’s
easier to appreciate happy posts from a person whom one associates with
a serious face, than serious posts from a person whom one associates
with a happy face, and I want both types of posts to impact people when
I post them. I could be overgeneralizing from my own feelings though. If
you are reading this and want to chat me feedback (as way more than one
of you has been doing), I’d welcome more data points on this issue.
That’s not what I really wanted to rant about in this post,
though.
For the interested, I wrote a
post
summarizing issues in copyright and patent law on a new
blog for a school club. Actually, if you’re reading this post, you’re
probably already interested enough / bored enough to read that post, so
go read it. I think the videos are worth watching despite their length,
but I tried to summarize the key points in text, so decide how much to
read or watch depending on how much spare time you have.
I don’t know if that blog will work out, but anyway WordPress tells
me I have 8500% more followers on this blog than the other one, even
though I have doubts about how many of those followers actually read
anything I post at all, so I thought I should link to that post here.
Also, by publicizing the blog, I get to shame my friends and fellow club
members into posting so that it doesn’t look so empty. Social media
expertise, you know?
