Not looking good this year and it’s only January.
Either as a product of my poor memory, a recency bias, or because the first half of the year actually was truly uneventful, the most memorable parts of the year mingle together in the latter half. However, it would be remiss of me, and unlikely of me, to neglect the biggest accomplishment from the first half of the year–hitting my gym goals.
Trying to be better than last year.
It must have been early 2020 or 2019. I would blame COVID for warping my awareness of time, but truth be told, time and I were fickle acquaintances pre pandemic. At any rate, it was in the Lupine house. We were chatting about hair styles, which prompted my roommate to say to me, “You look like a noob”. Not maliciously and not jokingly. Just simply and honestly.
Trying to keep this up.
Early in the afternoon, on the rare day when the morning fog lifts, you can look west from Cahill Ridge and see Half Moon Bay. There’s a valley that cuts across the peninsula and opens up to the sea. On the good days, when the air is serene, I think that you would have liked this place. On other days, when the wind blusters and blows and it is impossible to light incense, I think you would have questioned it.
Is this the year we finally finish Lolita?
Dear Future Self, if our poor memory now is any indication, we will have a hard time remembering 2020, as unbelievable as that sounds now. The year that disease, COVID-19 and cancer, controlled. We stopped going to work, climbing, and going outside. But with all that changed, so much remained the same. And in no way is that more evident in what we consumed. I wonder whether our taste has changed much since.
I have always been terrible with numbers and trivia. But I have noticed that this year, I have found myself reaching back to one number in particular as a reference. 300 million or a third of a billion. That number is roughly the population of the United States.
I was pretty good about keeping up reading last year. Let’s see if we can keep it up this year.
I investigated a memory bug in Hack’s code that brought me back to school and fiddling with pointers. But interestingly, more than just being a bug where we get tripped up by pointer arithmetic, this bug also only caused us major problems on weekends.
At the 2012 debate tournament in Indianapolis, I began to realize that something was wrong. We were winning debate rounds that we should have lost - easily. The topic was
You have to be in a certain state of mind for Salinger to hit you. Otherwise, the blows bounce off and you end thinking that he’s “Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.”
One of my goals for 2019 is to keep better track of what I do with my time. Because I like curating my anime list so much, I figure I could do the same with books.
During my first work trip to London last year, I decided to spend some of my evenings after work and go bouldering to try and stick to my typical climbing schedule. It turned out to be a good way to spend the evenings, when most tourist attractions were closed, and explore the city more than my usual inclinations. At Vauxhall West, after I signed the usual sign-your-first-born-away terms and conditions sheet, I was given a little keychain card. This was a bit surprising, since I was only there for the day and would likely never be back. But when I was given another one at The Castle Climbing Centre, it became a neat souvenir for me to keep. So this time, when I came back, I decided to try to see what the variety of gyms around London were like.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” Before reading The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren’s 2003 book about bankruptcy in the United States middle class, I had no understanding of what the “economy” means in the famous campaign slogan. The only economics course I took was in high school, and while it was taught beyond reproach, the course was only designed to convey the basic mechanics of economics - supply / demand curves, the definitions of terms in monetary policy. Not only did Warren’s book help me understand what the economy looks like for others, it gave me invaluable perspective on how little I actually understand the “economy” and how much time it would take to understand it.
At the turn of last year, I made a resolution to read a book a month and write about each one. So, as the year winds down, I wanted to take some time and review my progress. While I did read twelve books over the year, I did not manage to complete the latter half, though that was not for want of trying. I struggled to write notes that I considered coherent enough to stand alone. But, looking back, I have collected some haphazard thoughts that I wanted to gather and put in one place, as a way of wrapping the year up.
When spring turns to summer in Moscow and Anna and Vronsky’s relationship turns frustratingly unbearable, Anna’s behavior becomes increasingly driven by irrational jealousy. I sympathized deeply with Vronsky’s frustration over Anna’s behavior - especially when every action Vronsky does seems to irritate and enflame Anna. Every single story, every letter, every comment sends Anna down a spiral rooted in a reality powered more by emotion than truth. After he agrees to Anna’s demands that he leave the city for the country two days early, Anna’s response is to burst into tears crying:
A friend from college and a beloved source of recommendations who I haven’t talked to in a while alerted me to The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, a film directed by Masaaki Yuasa. Years ago, I had watched Yuasa’s Tatami Galaxy series under the compulsion of an art friend. In an effort to fit in with my expectations of their refined artistic palette, I came to describe Tatami Galaxy as an art student’s senior thesis. I hoped that description would do the anime justice - capturing the wild, frenetic, nauseating experience of watching it as an uncouth viewer while leaving room for the meaningful interpretations and analyses by more sophisticated critics. I would not say that I enjoyed watching Tatami Galaxy, at least not in the same way that I would say I enjoyed watching a standard film like Crazy Rich Asians, but I definitely liked it though I could not say precisely why. So early Saturday afternoon, despite the cold and sore throat I had contracted the previous night, I took the Caltrain up into San Francisco to watch Walk on Girl at the Roxie, the only theater in the greater area showing it.
“… God, yes. I simply told—but you know: made it sound like an agonized confession—simply told her I was a dyke.”
My brother organized a mini Banff film festival screening.
I was recently tasked at work to functorize part of the Hack ecosystem and I ran into a learning opportunity regarding extending and overriding modules in OCaml. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the solution through a google search, perhaps in part because I do not know what to enter as search terms. After a nontrivial amount of time, I found something that, in hindsight, should have been relatively straightforward. Because it was not, I’ve decided just to make a note of the problem and the route I took to find the solution.
I think younger me would have loved Steve Martin’s Shopgirl with its pithy, sharp characterization of interesting, racy relationships.
Richard, a friend of mine, gifted me Paul Kalanithi’s posthumously published memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, for secret santa. As a young neurosurgeon faced with his own mortality in the form of lung cancer, Paul reflects on his life, his experience as a doctor, and confronting mortality. When I was reading his account, I found myself thinking most about Paul’s musings about the relationship between language and humanity.
As the year comes to an end, so too does Facebook’s PSC (Performance Summary Cycle), a biannual review process where you evaluate yourself and others at the company for their impact on the company. Unfortunately for me, all signs point to my project being a resounding failure. While the formal self-review I will submit will discuss the details, I just wanted to dwell for a moment on my failure a bit more abstractly-a bit more emotionally.
If I had known at the end of my internship that, were I to return Facebook, that I would be working on the same project as I had during my internship, I would be working at Microsoft.
I just finished a ten week gameplay programming internship at Infinity Ward working on IW8 (which I am very excited about). As I am leaving, I am left with some still-coalescing thoughts about that experience.
My friend Caroline finished her final project for her Animating Science class. This being that final screening of the year, it featured all of the final projects of the three different animation classes.
I’ve always told myself that one month I’d sit down and make the grind to legend in Hearthstone. This month marked the release of Journey to Un’Goro and I ended up playing a bunch of Hearthstone, to the expense of homework, and ended up hitting legend. I’ve really enjoyed the post-release meta this month, from the experimental phase to the meta finally stabilizing a little. The meta’s diverse and that gives the game a feeling of additional complexity, even if none of the core mechanics have changed very much.
There was no animation screening this week, as people are working on their final projects. Instead, I wanted to take a note of two animation related items. The first is a behind the scenes DVD extra about the making of Community’s stop motion Christmas episode, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”.
Today Derek Hoffman, a sound designer and associate professor came to give a short talk on sound design in lieu of an animation screening. Part of his talk concerned the classification of sound.
A selection of animations from today’s animation screening about Telling Stories.
Today’s animation screening program about animation and commercials with a presentation about his experience in the commercial industry by Paul Bush
A selection of animations from today’s animation screening about altered states and inner space.
Today’s animation screening program about film techniques that can be used in animation.
Pixilation Animation Screening Program
Today’s animation screening program about conveying Information and Persuading.
Today’s animation screening program about animation and its place in the art genre. All such screenings were organized by Ruth Lingford and Paul Bush for classes they taught at Harvard that I sat in on.
A program from an animation screening from freshman year about storytelling with Ruth Lingford
A program from an animation screening with Ruth Lingford from freshman year.
A screening on evoking emotion from freshman year with Ruth Lingford.
A program from an animation screening from freshman year with Ruth Lingford