microblog

My research conference is next week and I am worried about somehow making a fool out of myself. People are either going to ask me too many questions I can't answer, or won't ask me any questions at all. Both outcomes are awkward. I don't even care about winning any sort of award--I just want it to be over, frankly.

Afterwards, I am returning home to face another battle--my parents. Distance does not make the heart grow fonder, or however that saying goes. At least I will be in my childhood bedroom again. I miss that the most.

Deltarune Fan Cafe is going to be my school's legacy forever. Oh mein gott.

As for other news, I recently went down from 100mg zoloft to 25mg zoloft. I felt that the higher dose had more negative side effects (e.g., night sweats, shaking, apathy) than positive ones. I tried to go cold turkey at first. Do not go cold turkey.

Is the Odyssey (2026) by Christopher Nolan a faithful adaption? Not particularly. Is it one of the best movies of the year? Perchance. I have quite a few gripes with Mr. Nolan regarding some of his characterisations (e.g., Agamemnon, Menelaus and Helen's relationship) and some casting choices (e.g., Odysseus, Agamemnon, again) but overall, everything from the sound, cinematography, and atmosphere feels "epic". I would certainly like to see him try his hand at an Iliad adaptation, as the only one we have at the moment is.... Troy (2004).... featuring Brad Pitt.

I am so indecisive about my layout, I fear. Hopefully this one lasts longer than 8 months.

If you are reading this, check out The Transfeminist Manifesto by the late Emi Koyama. That's all.

I forgot just how much I loved JJK. I rewatched season 2 in the psych ward and it has reawakened my love for this anime. Life is perhaps worth living, after all.

Uh I tried to take my own life whoops.

My allergies are killing me. God please have mercy on my sinuses.

I feel very hopeless about my future, even moreso seeing the lives older generations get to live while we have to struggle twice as hard for little reward. I think I should just swallow all of my anti-depressents and die. I can't see myself ever being a normal, functioning adult with a good life.

Almost lost my phone for good today, but thankfully a kind stranger returned it to the campus library.

With my new room, I finally have a proper set up. Right beside it is all of the artwork of Dillon (my beloved) that I commissioned at a convention. After years, I think I've finally made a place that feels like my own completely.

I'm finished with my exams and currently cleaning out my dorm for move-out. It's honestly quite unbelieveable that it's been an entire school year since I started. I feel like I have entered and left as two different people. However, I certainly won't be missing this musty, gross room and the nasty food I was made to eat.

I hope second year will be better.

I'm hoping to migrate my professional site over to Obsidian, as I find it's much more friendly for writing. We'll see how that goes.

I hope I never have to manually remove malware with a jankily-coded fixlist ever again. All this bullshit over Tomodachi Life. It seems utterly ridiculous the more I think of it.

New "of the month" entry probably won't be out until May when I'm done with finals and moving out of my dorm. Dear God please let me pass my exams and not have to think about these courses anymore.

My laptop got malware in the midst of finals season, which is just great. I got it handled now, but boy was it a pain.

Happy Easter. To quote Pope Leo:

Death is always lurking. We see it in violence, in the wounds of the world, in the cry of pain that rises from every corner because of the abuses that crush the weakest among us, because of the idolatry of profit that plunders the earth's resources, because of the violence of war that kills and destroys.

All of my upper-year friends are graduating, and even though I've only known them for two semesters, I don't know how I'm supposed to go without them. Most have found industry jobs, close friend 1 is starting a start-up company in healthcare, and close friend 2 is doing a MASc at the same uni. I've got to learn to get used to their absences in the faculty common room and design team meeetings. It makes me oddly emotional.

I feel like that one Haikyuu! manga tweet where it goes: "why do people in sports anime talk about graduated seniors like they're dead. Senpai is furthering their education."

As for good news, I won the Engineering Faculty Dean's fellowship, so now I'll actually get paid for full-time research in the summer. Bad news is that now I can't kill myself or it'll make my supervisor sad.

Organised my room in my aunt's basement, and I finally have a PC set-up. It consists of an older Dell 23" monitor, and a wireless logitech keyboard and mouse set. Now I just need to find the actual PC.

Oh mein gott bro.

I've been neglecting this website recently, since I've been busy with midterms and webdev for the Engineering Society and my own "professional" site. I hope I can dedicate more time to Wriorango soon though my list of "to-dos" seems so daunting.

One of my major complaints with the Neocities community is how irrationally protective many people are of their code. I've seen plenty of sites that block right-clicking and CTRL-I commands--which not only hinder accessibility, but also are quite easy to work around. I get it, it sucks to see your work getting "stolen" by someone else without credit. That is just the reality of making your work accessible to the public. If you can't deal with that, why are you here?

In addition, how can we condemn people for "stealing" code, taking inspiration from other peoples' sites, etc. when many people are unwilling to help beginners? Gatekeeping sucks. Copyright sucks. If the goal is to separate ourselves from the corporate side of the web, we shouldn't try to recreate the same rules of ownership. The net is yours forever.

Calc II midterm soon. If I fail this I am going to riot.

Anyways, I don't really think mech is for me so I'm switching into industrial/systems engineering instead. We had a good run.

Excerpt from an up-coming essay:

"[The anti-AI art] phenomenon, in my mind, is so deeply tied to the idea of artistic degeneracy—of the Nazi idea that disabled and socially or mentally 'sick' bodies produce art, they produce degraded and degrading representations of the human body and of the world. This was their explanation for cubism, surrealism, and so on. That the anatomy was wrong because it was produced by a degenerate force actively infecting and corrupting culture. 'Gutter paintings' they called them. Very similar to the sense in which 'slop' is used today. It should not be surprising that the current use of slop is yet another term popularized and heavily used by right-wing extremists before being ported over to mainstream use.

The point is to create and protect a category of 'real art' that stands apart from the degenerate expressions of those who have been degraded by modern decadence. They were mad at cultural relativists and surrealists and progressives and sexual deviants in pretty much exactly the way that people are mad at the rhetorical category of 'tech bro' today."

I want to be a professor just (/hj) so that I can be that One Professor with an unhinged Tumblr account that the entire student body knows about.

It's reading week!!! Finally!!!

I'm barely holding on for reading week. These past few weeks of school have been a humiliation ritual. But we will ball regardless.

Tomorrow I'll be talking to a prof about a research position--not this summer, as I already have a position--but possibly part-time in the fall. His wide breadth of work is quite diverse and very interesting; he focuses on behaviour and failure of materials at-large, but his applications range from batteries, nuclear reactors, hydrogen fuel cells, molecular dynamics, to neural-networks (AI). He also seems like a really cool guy.

I recently caught wind of Kanye West's apology letter for his past anti-semitism and promotion of Nazi ideology. His bigotry was, of course, not acceptable, and he is not entitled to anyone's forgiveness. But the whole situation also revealed to me that no one understands mental illness at all. Mental illness can make someone bigoted and say/do things that do not necessarily reflect their personal morals--hell, mental illness can even make someone kill themselves (surprise)!

It seems no one is willing to offer even a little bit of sympathy to someone who is clearly suffering. No one believes that mentally-ill, or disabled people in general, deserve humanity and dignity. They will call themselves advocates for mental health (only in abstract), but ultimately just want us to disappear from society so they won't have to be bothered by our ails.

Dynamics quiz was absolutely dogshit; embarassing. Despite that, I ate two Jamaican patties afterwards, which were quite nice given the general poor quality of the university cafeteria's food.

Sometimes I have to reckon with the fact that my dreams of a career in academia will probably leave me just as burnt-out and soulless as a job in the industry would. Both suck. Both grind people to death. Both are full of bureaucratic, archaic structures. I should just become an unemployed NEET after I finish my PhD.

Everything I've been drawing looks terrible to me. It's unbearably cold outside. I can't think of a proper research proposal(s). I'm worried potential supervisors and scholarship programs will reject me. I have no motivation to work on my shrine pages. I don't understand calc. Microsoft OneDrive keeps trying to get me to pay their stupid subscription. Fuck my stupid chungus life.

On the bright side, I got my Sims 4 game up and running again.

The enormity of my desire disgusts me. I wish I could eliminate this wretched desire for others, and for others to desire me.

I had leftover truffle waffle fries (topped with parmesan cheese) this morning. They were pretty good. It was from this Asian-fusion brunch place I've never been to before.

Back in the trenches (school) again. I hope this semester will be better, since the courses I'm taking actually seem interesting this time around. My statics course from last sem got a massive curve, apparently. I am praying that it will apply to me if I get an assessed mark for missing the final.

Coming back to school has made me feel sort of awful about my social life. I'm getting these irrational feelings and thoughts that everyone hates me, no one will ever want to date me, and I'm at the bottom of the biological hierarchy. I can't seem to fit in with either sexes, even if I try to force myself into gender and social conformity.

I don't know. I guess I just have to accept that women are disgusted by me and men want to hurt me.

To anyone reading this, happy new year!

2025 has been probably one of the most difficult and best years of my life. During these past 12 months, I lost people, graduated high school, was admitted into my top choice of university, became and adult, started anti-depressents, watched several new shows, struggled with my mother and grandmother's failing health, and generally just felt vaguely stressed about everything at all times. The year felt long, and that is certainly an understatement.

Despite it all, I feel somewhat hopeful for 2026, even if a year ending in '6' feels unsatisfying or kind of wrong compared to '5'. Even if I'm scared and uncertain of whatever is ahead of me. I guess if I could survive everything that happened in 2025, I can make it through greater challenges--as cliche and cheesy as that may sound.

Anyway I'm going to keep watching The Pitt. Maybe this year I should start and maintain a media log on this site.

I am home from university for winter break. The flight was terrible.

Is the DOJ genuinely this stupid. Are they not aware of how easy it is to unredact shoddily-censored text in a PDF.

Sick as a dog and I couldn't take my mechanics final as a result. However, Jake Paul got the brakes beaten out of him in his heavyweight fight against Anthony Joshua--God is good!!

Finals season has made me feel so incredibly stupid. No matter how long or how intensely I study, the exam environment causes me to completely blank out and I make so many mistakes. I don't think I failed any finals (yet) but my GPA is genuinely pathetic. I am at least a tiny bit reassured by the fact that this is just an engineering undergrad canon event.

I am excited for winter break. I'm going to spend every waking hour drawing, writing, and coding for this site and my characters. Speaking of, I'm planning to order custom keychains and stickers of my OCs, Dio/Dillon and Lys. I'm going to put them everywhere so when people notice, they'll ask, and I get to start info-dumping about them >:D