Blog
Unedited and specific to the time they were written. Atom feed. For more evergreen writing, see my essays!
Reactionaryism
12 Apr, 2024
I recently read a piece of writing that infuriated me. In my view, it was full of inaccuracies, yet the tone was authoritative and prescriptivist. The worst combination: someone being confidently wrong. My immediate reaction was outrage, then an overwhelming desire to send the article to a friend who I knew would share my opinion.
My platonic ideal romance novel
2 Apr, 2024
I've read probably a hundred romance novels at the point, if not more. I got sucked into reading romance novels during the pandemic, maybe in 2021 or 2022. At first, it felt nearly indecent how happy they made me. Unfortunately, I feel like I've hit crazy diminishing returns on romance books. The first ones I read were the best of the best, and it's been steeply downhill from there. I think, at this point, after at least two years of reading romance novels, I favourably remember only four of them. And all of them were read at the beginning of my descent into the romance novel rabbit hole.
Returning to linear algebra
14 Mar, 2024
My undergraduate degree was in pure mathematics. After a rocky start, I really grew to love it, by third year regularly writing a math blog that documented the cool things I was learning. I definitely was pretentious about it, and it would be untruthful to say that some part of my enjoyment didn't derive directly from feeling intellectually self-important, but most of my enjoyment really was inherent.
I hate mega evolutions
4 Mar, 2024
With the announcement of Pokemon Legends: Z-A last week, there's been a lot of excitement about mega evolution returning. All the reactions to the news that I've seen have featured the classic YouTube thumbnail o: face. Never have I felt more "old man yells at cloud" as when I think about mega evolutions. I hate mega evolutions.
Atom feed intricacies
4 Jan, 2024
Somehow I'm on a kick of writing a whole lot right now, and specifically on nerdy topics it seems. I can't help myself. It's just what's going on in my life currently. Around two weeks ago, I had a manic (colloquial) moment, wiped my computer, and installed Linux. It isn't the first time I've run Linux as my primary operating system, and, every time, it just consumes my life. I think my brain is very susceptible to getting hooked onto nerdy neuroses. Anyway, I downloaded a command-line feed reader and noticed that my own blog's feed was showing up totally weirdly. This observation triggered a (nearly) full day of reading the RSS/Atom specification and fixing my feed generation script. I'm not going to write anything new here, since RSS/Atom is very well documented, but I just couldn't let this event pass by without noting it somehow.
Update on Helix, the modal editor
29 Dec, 2023
Hey, look at that! Maybe my last post of the year won't be so negative after all!
Unsubscribe me from the IG mailing list
28 Dec, 2023
My (likely) last post of the year, and I'm going to spend it raging. Oops, sorry.
An integration between producing and consuming
18 Nov, 2023
This quote is from Erling Kagge's Silence: In the age of noise, which a friend lent to me. He thought I would get a lot out of reading it.
What to practice
20 Sep, 2023
Today, I was thinking about what people choose to practice. Often, we practice things that leave easily externally visible marks: our strength to build muscles, or our professional skills to build careers and promotions. Most self improvement starts at the gym or studying.
Convenience Store Woman
30 Aug, 2023
I have recently been trying to read more, especially in place of watching YouTube videos (yes, the habit ebbs and flows). Browsing through my library's available books, I found Convenience Store Woman, written originally in Japanese by Sayaka Murata and translated to English by Ginny Tapley Takemori. The description drew me in right away: a woman reflecting on her purpose, questioning ambition, and trying to dissect the rules of society with almost alien-like confusion. I have struggled to unknot these exact topics repeatedly, once even on this blog.
Julia, Revise, and DrWatson
27 Dec, 2022
So the blogging about Julia continues. I didn't really anticipate I'd blog so much about Julia (or crosswords, for that matter), but here we are, I guess.
Tokyo Night
10 Dec, 2022
While this blog post is titled Tokyo Night, it really is about a bunch of things. I guess I should just start from the very beginning (a very good place to start).
Advent of code
9 Dec, 2022
I solved this puzzle with CartesianIndices. Though I'm not sure that was really necessary, I chose to because I wanted to get more familiar with them. I still don't totally grasp the point of them, but I have a nebulous feeling that they could be very powerful, if only I understood them deeply. Indexing always kind of scares me since it isn't super intuitive (and I know there's a whole debate about 0-indexed vs 1-indexed, which arguments on both sides about being more intuitive).
Advent of code
4 Dec, 2022
I've done the Advent of Code off and on the past few years, but I never made it to the end. Let's see if I can do it this year.
Getting back on the horse
12 Nov, 2022
Over this summer, I spent a lot of time reflecting on digital life and the larger question of what I wanted to do with my time. At that point, I had already felt for several months that I was wasting my life away, and not in a dramatic way. It was just slipping by, mundane moment to mundane moment, as I absent-mindedly watched YouTube videos. So I made a directed effort to cut YouTube, trying to be purposeful with the time it freed up. I might even have said that I was doing well. I stopped compulsively going to YouTube's homepage, instead using an RSS reader to only gather new videos from a pre-curated list of channels. I spent time walking around, trying to be present rather than listening to a podcast episode for the fifth time just to avoid the silence. I wrote and edited essays. Maybe I was even more focused with work.
Keyboard update
7 Aug, 2022
I previously wrote that I was using the Cooler Master SK622 keyboard. When I bought it, I choose it for a few key reasons:
Today's crossword
22 Jul, 2022
Hey look, I said that I wouldn't just blog about crosswords but I also said that Friday crosswords just tend to be good. What can I say??? Plus, today's crossword had a FART in it.
Today's crossword
15 Jul, 2022
Today's crossword was cute! Once again, I had fun with the Friday puzzle while Thursday's (yesterday) was a total joyless slog.
De-Googling, and more in general
13 Jul, 2022
De-Googling is not uncommon, especially among people concerned with internet privacy and the slow web. I'm not going to make the argument for de-Googling in this post. The fact that a single company is so huge that we all struggle to free ourselves from it says it all. Because Google (and Facebook, and Amazon) are so pervasive in standard life at this point, everyone has their own strategies for separation. I will just describe what I've done. My hope is that it's at least partially helpful for someone else on the same journey.
Today's crossword
3 Jun, 2022
There are enough crossword blogs without needing another! I'm not becoming another crossword blog! I'm just very excited and happy about today's crossword!
On writing
24 May, 2022
When I was younger, I tortured myself over the purpose of my life. What did my life contribute to society and what did my life bring to myself? When I was younger still, I wondered why everyone questioned the meaning of life. It seemed a lofty yet useless question, when really I did not understand its meaning. The truth, I have come to discover, is that eventually one can't help but to reflect on the question.
My computing setup
6 Nov, 2021
I spend my fair share of time cranking through theory, but I spend an equal amount of time coding quantitative computations, mucking with data, or (recently) even teaching online. My computing devices are a central determinant to not only my work's success, but also my happiness, since I spend so much time with them. I therefore approach choosing my setup with appropriate seriousness!
Writing a package in Julia
3 Nov, 2021
In tandem with one of my projects, I wrote a Julia package implementing its central solution methods. This undertaking was the first time I wrote a Julia package (the larger project itself the first time I really used Julia).