Second year, term 1... ig

I'm afraid that I'm in a nash equilibrium

I don't have that mullet anymore unfortunately.

School

Another term failed! I don't really even have an excuse. I just did BADLY. I think the antecedent to my downward trajectory in grades is my decreasing care about them. I used to care A LOT about them. I was never motivated because good grades means good job though. Back when I cared intensely, grades were solely for competition. But now I don't really have anyone to compete with. So its less embarrassing to perform badly and less motivating to perform well. I also don't see grades as something even worth being competitive about anymore. I can do cool things that actually matter now. Its not necessary anymore for me to learn skills so that one day in the future I can use them. I have skills now and I am using them now! At this point education is only useful for credentialism and that's not all that compelling to me.

Still, my grades ARE important. I'm not 100% sure about what I want do as a career yet but a path I've been considering A LOT is academia. But to do a graduate degree I need very very good grades. And remember, I'm still in the math program because of the math honours fuck up from last year. Even if I just wanna be a software developer, I'd be much better if I had the grades to switch to the computer science program. My parents who are paying for my education were also pretty concerned. I really cannot afford another failed term.

Here are my courses this term:

• Mathematical proof - Math 220

• Computer systems - CPSC 213

• Decision theory - Phil 321

• Algorithms and data structures - CPSC 221

I have to really really try this time. I've heard CPSC 213 is really difficult but the rest seem easy? So um... mid 90s please? ha ha...

Friend things

Here are all the friend things I did

EML lab and Mall

UBC has this thing called the Emerging Media Lab. I saw they had tours of their project and was like !!!! Thats so cool!!! But then I was like, wait it sounds sorta sad and less fun to do it by myself. So I asked one of my friend(from edmonton)'s friends. The tour was really cool! We were shown this project where we could explore a 3D model of the UBC campus in virtual reality. That was the first time I had worn a VR headset so it was very impressive. After that the guide talked about some of the other projects and the explanation of one made me very scared. It was for a thing called the Tapestry Tool which arranged information into nodes on a graph. Terrifyingly similar to my Brambli project. As we left I picked up the info sheet for the tapestry tool and wondered what to do with it....

I also went to the Metrotown mall with that friend which was really fun! Its the only thing I had done outside campus so far except go to several BestBuys.

Cafes and Economics seminars

A friend from my economics class last year messaged and asked to hang out at a cafe! That made me really happy cause thats a thing friends do! It was really really fun! We talked about a lot of nerdy things. It feels really good when someone is interested in your interests. I feel like I don't talk to enough people like that. After that I invited him to these economics seminars I had found on the ubc economics website. The first one was cancelled last minute and we went to a cafe again. The second one wasn't though! But he missed a lot because his coop overlapped with the beginning so afterward we went to a cafe I summarized it!

The economics seminars are interesting. I've been to three so far. Historical economics study on the gender gap in the US before and after WW1, historical economics on the indirect lobbying against national health insurance, and a behavioural economics on how people assume others have the same information that they do. My understanding is that after an economist has made some amount of progress on their research, they go around to other universities to present it to other economists for feedback? So the room was all ubc economists and maybe some grad students but no other undergraduates like me. Its been fun to immerse myself in that kinda environment and learn cool stuff with a group of other people more knowledgeable about the cool stuff. My favourite parts were when the presenters in the historical economics seminars introduced the historical context for what they were researching and discussed datasources that they digitized. Once they got to their mathematical models of the problem I ended up getting lost (its very difficult to keep all the notation they just introduced in your head) and when they present their results I'm always so confused I can't tell if they were positive or negative.

Valley Lining, French Art Gallery, and Ikea

I went back to Edmonton during the winter break and hung out with my friends. The valley line opened recently so I wanted to ride the entire length of it with them. One of my friends SOMEHOW thought that "spending all our time commuting" wasn't "the play" so we instead only rode it part way to this cool French art gallery. An artist was setting up her exhibit while we were visiting and my friends talked to her about it (while I watched). Hearing the story of the art's creation definitely lets you appreciate it more!

On another day we went to Ikea+bowling+cowboy store+my friend's house to see his new cat and dog. It was pretty sad not being able to eat the ikea meatballs cause vegetarian. I was surprisingly competent in bowling (at least for the first game). The cowboy store was AMAZING. The boots, the vests, the hats, THE SADDLES, the belts, the boots, the hats, the toy horses, the boots... AMAZING! My friends baby dog and cat were overwhelmingly cute. Like it didn't seem real. I thought reality would have some kinda cute-limiting barrier. The cat was so small and the dog was so playful. I'm not usually one to fawn over people's pets. I'm the coldest guy ever. My gaze is chilling. My demeanor: frozen. I posses a frigid aura and an icy worldview. BUT THE DOG AND THE CAT MELTED ME!!! When we had to go and the dog sat on the doormat as we approached the door I even made the dumbest, most aunty and uncle leaving the house party joke ever: "looks like she's coming with us!."

Vegetarian

I said in my last post that I would eat meat outside of the apartment but I didn't do that. I just went full vegetarian (except for shrimp, I'm actually a big supporter of shrimp murder. The more brutal the better. My favourite method is to coat them with gunpowder and then ignite from the tail. The meat ends up totally charred and inedible so its just for fun.). For some reason I expected to either drop dead or go insane with meat lust but its been weirdly easy. I was happy about that at the beginning. But now its annoying because it feels like I could do it forever. But I don't want to do it forever!!! Its very rare that I'm upset about not being able to eat something with meat but sometimes it does happen. Like when I read the words "bacon" on a menu or when I'm at a Chinese restaurant. I think I might relax it slightly in the summer? Then start again next September. Whatever I do, I think for the rest of my life eating meat will be a novelty, rather than commonplace (no more cans of Chef Boyardee Beefaroni).

The reaction when I reveal I've been eating vegetarian is strange to me. I've always had respect for vegetarians and if someone told me they were vegetarian before I tried it I would have said something like "omg thats so cool! I've always thought about trying that but it sounds so difficult!!!" But it seems that this isn't a mainstream opinion. Zero people so far have sung praises to me (what the heck!). Most people seem uncomfortable when I have to mention it and then change the conversation without comment. When the one of my roommates (the perfume one) heard he appeared to get defensive and said some dumbass thing about how being vegetarian is bad because the economy can't handle it??? because plants are less efficient than animals (literally the opposite lmao).

I think some people might think that I'm trying to adopt some holier than thou shit by not eating meat. I'm actually not at all judgmental about it (which is surprising as I'm a pretty judgmental person. I don't drink alcohol either and I AM judgemental about drinking). I've been trying being vegetarian for intellectual reasons rather than emotional. Intellectually it seems wrong but I could watch someone eat meat or even eat it myself and not emotionally feel bad about it. As I know how difficult it seems to cut off meat, how easy the environmental impact and horrible cruelty in industrial farming is to ignore, and how specific things about me make it easier (don't care about food that much, rarely eat with other people, etc) I don't at all expect other people to do the same or even have an interest in convincing them to.

A cool thing I've noticed through doing this is that most food places DO actually have vegetarian options which is really nice. I'm thankful for that because I feel like if I tried this in a different decade or country it would be much more difficult.

Brambli

Meeting with Tapestry tool researcher

So remember when I mentioned the tapestry tool? I had just found out that the groundbreaking idea that I believed to be completely original to myself was also being developed by MY OWN university! This was initially worrying but then I saw potential ways I could take advantage of the situation. I tried a few times to reach out to the Emerging Media Lab in person to see if I could somehow collaborate with them but I got scared so instead I sent an email.

A researcher on the project got back to me a few days later and we arranged an in-person meeting! I was hoping I could somehow get the university involved with my project. There are a few things I knew I probably couldn't do myself such as:

• Run experiments to measure the effectiveness of using Brambli for learning

• Get user experience data

• Get users (it is INCREDIBLY difficult to even convince friends to TRY it. And I don't have many friends.)

• Handle hosting costs if it does get users

It turns out the meeting was more for introducing my project, rather than a discussion about collaboration. I didn't do particularly well pitching the website. It was still a good experience though! At the end the researcher asked if I wanted to "stay in contact" which I still don't really know what means. I haven't messaged them again since, maybe I should do it soon?

Brambli Progress

I've done some cool things on Brambli since the end of the summer! Here are some of them:

Styling Change

I made the navigation a gradient from white to transparent so that the viewing area for the graph feels much larger. I also removed the borders from the nodes and added dropshadows to the whole graph. This was inspired by an aesthetic I read about on wikipedia called neumorphism. I'm somewhat worried that the shadows add to visual clutter and might make memorization more difficult, but I also think they make the graph standout from the grid and look cool. I definitely need user experience testing.

Quiz Feature

I'm planning more quiz types but I've only created the one imaged above right now. I also really want to have some sorta spaced repetition system for the quizes but I don't know the right way to implement it yet.

Drag and drop for controlling the order for the guided view

Drag and drop was surprisingly easy to use! You can now control the parent and order of the nodes in the guided view! I want to allow you to exclude some node's descriptions from showing in the guided view and also allow a way to edit the guided view text as a whole - separate from the node description text.

Guided view style changes and table of contents

I added a floating dynamic table of contents to the guided view which is something I always appreciate on other websites. My friend wanted a way to hide the guided view so that you can see more of the graph. I agree with that idea because the guided view definitely takes too much space on some screen sizes.

Ubyssey

IT IS SO COOL to have an office in the Nest!!! Its such an amazing place. Sometimes I walk out my office and the jazz club is jamming in the egg thing. Sometimes there is a boxing class and it smells terrible. Sometimes there are people in the incredible Kendo equipment practicing with swords. Sometimes there is ballroom dancing. In the Nest, you are always surrounded by other students doing cool things! And I get a little part of that building to myself! If you ever get to visit UBC in the future, go to The Ubyssey Administration Office at room 2009 in the Nest and appreciate that a desk behind that locked door once belonged to the Great Sam Low. It is truly the most impressive thing I have right now.

I haven't been able to accomplish much on the website during the academic year. I only get paid for five hours a week so the rate of weird bugs showing up is quick enough that a lot of my time has to go to fixing things rather than making new things. ALSO I didn't have a computer for a whole month cause it got stolen out of my office. I was frustrated all of November for that. Even when I do have time and a computer, its difficult to make new things because I need approval from editorial and they are super busy with the actual journalism during the school year. Also I've never been shown how to do migrations so I have to wait for the extremely useless other person to do that.

Pender Island

The Ubyssey has a yearly retreat to a place called Pender island and I attended! To get there from UBC you take a bus then train, then bus, then ferry. The journey was very enjoyable - ESPECIALLY the ferry. Out the window were waves and winds and clouds and rain and sun. Inside were families, groups of friends, nice chairs, and waffles. It was incredibly fun to just walk around the boat. Something about the environment was so enchanting.

The retreat was in this large house that was far away from any other people. I took the last ferry because I missed the first one I booked (epic) and arrived in the house feeling very out of place. Despite working for the Ubyssey since the beginning of the summer, I still barely knew (and continue to still barely know) the other people involved. My desk is in the business office which is separated by a wall from the journalism office. I attend the staff meetings with them every week but I haven't accomplished much in terms of interpersonal connection through them. I also feel a bit unworthy as although I changed the website greatly in my time so far with the Ubyssey, I have yet to write a single article for the paper. So there I was, confused at what I should be doing, unassuredly standing slightly to the left of the couch (which was taken), desperately striving to not attract attention and especially not make eye contact!

The horrified anxiety that I exude in social settings (like this) commonly leads to some others that notice trying to talk to me and make me feel included. When I was younger and proud of my aversion to other people I would have disliked it when this occurred but now that my goals have changed I appreciated and was grateful for it. I do really hate that people have to do that for me though. I'm not a child anymore. It is ABSURD that I'm this far into life and still can't handle myself during social events.

We all played disc golf through this beautiful wooded course. I was pretty good at the distance throws but once I got a few meters away from the target I would miss over and over for eternity. Everyone else turned against disc golf and was cursing its name by the end but I thought it was really fun! When we got back we played this game where one person hides and everyone looks for them. If you find them you have to hide with them. The game ends when the last person finds the hider (which is usually quite easy due to the mass of other people hiding with them). We also did this thing that was apparently a Ubyssey Pender Island tradition. We all sat in a circle with our eyes closed. Each round a subset of us was selected by the coordinating editor and instructed to open our eyes and tap some of rest on the head based on prompts like "who is someone that made you laugh?". That was nice! I forget what head taps I received but I think it was all stuff you would say about someone you had no impression of like "who is someone you'd like to get to know better." I really liked giving out the head taps though because its rare that I hand out compliments. At the end of the day we went up to the roof to look at the stars. Stars were pretty. Also it was so dark that no one could see my face so I felt comfortable singing along to Riptide when someone played it on their phone. Everyone else kept claiming to see shootings stars. I did not see any and joked that I was "convinced everyone must be lying about them" to prank me. People laughed (major win!).

Eventually I decided to go to bed and slept on the couch without a blanket (not fun). We all woke up in the early morning to leave for return ferry. The return trip, including the ferry and being driven back to ubc with the whole party, was the best part of the trip for talking with the rest of the group! I definitely feel like I know all the editors better now. Not as much as I'd like though to be honest. I'm excited to go again next year!

An interesting thing about the Ubyssey Pender Island retreat is that it has happened every year for many years. One of the volunteers of the website is an alumni who worked in my position eight years ago. He also went on the trip to Pender Island then and stayed in the same house that we did. His day was probably spent very similarly to ours. And so could have many other web developers before and since him. I like being part of traditions like that.

End

So that was term 1 of second year. In terms of grades I guess it was a failure but I also did some cool stuff. So yeah... talk to you in another six months?