2 Pretty good months + Final exams

Fish who love the air more than the water will never be happy

Sorry for not posting a November blog. I know many people depend on my monthly blog posts to keep them going through their emotionally desolate lives so the extra long wait must have resulted in a lot of deaths. I am so very sorry for that.

Alright lets get to it!

Friend visits!!!

Universities have "reading break" in early Novemeber (atleast ours do) so my friend came to UBC to visit!!! It was by far the most fun week I had in Vancouver. Hes really fun to be around and after two months of interacting with exlusively new people it felt SO GOOD to let loose and hang out with someone I have a familiar relationship with.

Its completly impossible to act exactly how I want to act when meeting someone for the first time. Our ideosyncracies and individual senses of humour are just too shocking and strange to be acceptable. And also I'm a coward. At UBC I've been a sort of partial Sam Low. I haven't fully been able to feel like I'm being myself unfortunately. Right now I'm saying things like "oh cool", "yeah that sounds nice", or "damn." instead of things like "MOTHERFUCKER", "Actually, I think what you are saying is dumb and I hate it..." or "You see THIS is the problem with meteorologists..." It hurts to hear myself providing such boring responses but so much of what I say to my friends isn't funny if you don't see me the way I see myself or is offensive if I'm not close to the other person. A lot of my jokes depend on the perception of me as being a sort of pathetic but egotistical younger brother??? I have established this with my friends from junior high for like SIX years so now if I said something about wanting to be a basketball player so that I could palm their cranium and rip their head from the muscle which attaches it to the rest of their body, it is obviously a joke and not a genuine desire to comit brutal murder. Or maybe I'm just retroactively rationalizing all of this to avoid facing the plague of social anxiety which has controlled me for all my life. Ha Ha Ha!

Anyway, seeing my friend was very very fun!!! We went to the UBC art gallery and viciously mocked the absurd exhibit, we went to the anthropology museum which was EXTREMELY cool - I definetly reccomend going, we went to Granville Island which is now the best place I know of outside of campus (food in the Granville Island Public Market is SO good), we walked around the university, we went to the nude beach at night and lit a shitty fire, and we recorded a half hour instant grammer live in my dorm which was new and fun. He also introduced me to a friend of his that also goes to UBC. Having a friend present in conversation is very effective at transfering over views of yourself to other people. They are prompted to follow how the friend addresses you and reacts to you which quickly aligns them to viewing you the same as how the friend does. Or maybe thats more retrospective rationalization to explain quirks of social anxiety again!!! Anyway, that week was truly in the top ten, I am very happy he visited!

Moved to Mastodon

I stopped using twitter in early November, moved to Mastodon, and wrote a huge post about it. A sad thing about leaving twitter was realizing that all the people who I used to talk to there didn't give a shit about me LMAO. The announcement of my departure was completly ignored by everyone who followed me. I don't understand why people are still using twitter. Like, I know humans don't like change and that habits are hard to break - but I'm a human and I had twitter as a habit and I was able to leave just fine.

I really do not have an interest in returning to twitter. Mastodon is legitametly so much better. All the posts I see feel worthwhile to me, my posts actually get attention some times, and most things I see aren't people being outrageously rude. I REALLY like mastodon.

I shared my post about leaving twitter on mastodon and a few people actually read it!!! Someone even referenced my post in their own blog post!!! That felt REALLY cool. Its the first time something like that has happened to me. I hope I can write more long form articles about topics I care about in the future!

Bald

Early December I shaved my head. My hair was long and going bald was the funniest way to cut it shorter, so thats what I did. It really was funny. I just had no hair. It was all gone. Sometimes I would see my reflection in computer screens or windows and being reminded of my totally smooth head made me smile everytime. Shaving my head was a bit of a internal statement about disregarding appearances and fully valuing humour and joy above all else.

My hair has grown back though. Now I just have evenly lengthed short hair which is maybe the most boring of all hairstyles :(

Final Exams

Except for honours Math, I did kinda good (-A). I'm just happy I passed Math 120 - I got a 55 as the final grade. It was such a mistake taking that course. I just wanted to challenge myself and learn more about math and the university PUNISHED ME FOR IT. I'll have to do really well in term 2 in order to get into computer science now.

One of my exams (cpsc 110) actually got pushed into term 2. The reason was that it SNOWED. It was so ridiculous to me as someone from Edmonton - the most northern metropolitan city in the world (I think). The snow wasn't even that high and it was much warmer than I was used to it being at that time of year. Now I've got to spend the first week of the second term studying for a final ackkk...

Winter Break

I flew back to Edmonton for the winter break. The airports were going crazy (because it snowed I guess) but luckily I was able to get a flight after my first one was canceled. It was my first time flying alone. It was much easier than I thought it would be.

I did a few things with friends during the break. Went to the mall, went sledding, attended an improv show (it was by the Scatterbrain Improv Company and it was SOOOO FUNNY), and watched the first few episodes of Chainsawman (then I watched the rest on my own - it is good).

Through the break I was also working on a programming project!!! I've been dreaming of a tool that allowed me to take school notes in a way that optimizes for the associative nature of human memory. I had read about knowledge graphs on wikipedia a while ago for some reason and thought they would be a really useful tool for memorization. There are definietly knowledge graph tools somewhere but I decided to make my own website for it. This is what it looks like:

Creating the knowledge graph with markup. The nodes automatically arrange themselves based on physical laws (repulsion between all of them and springs between connected ones)

Once finished editing you can inspect the knowledge graph

I'm pretty proud of it. The physics works well and you can manipulate the canvas super easily. I hope to host it on my website someday but I don't think I'll have time to do that for a while. I'll be testing it out for note taking this term locally though! You can download it for yourself on the GitHub if you want.

Its sad seeing the break end. When you have no obligations you can spend your time actually doing things you believe are worthwhile. Also I really don't want to start studying for the cpsc 110 final!