Kia (yearly) diary

Hello everyone! You know, before starting to write this entry I skimmed over my previous ones, and noticed that I always tend to start each "blog entry" or whatever you want to call it with "Hello everyone". Up until now it has been purely coincidental, I never put in deliberate effort to start them that way but I think I'll make it a standard practice from now on :D. It makes me wonder just who that "everyone" is - how many people read these posts as I write them. Are there people I haven't interacted with that remember my birthday to check this page on 22nd of July? I doubt it but that would be very cool.

Regardless of all that, here I am, celebrating my 22nd, GOLDEN birthday. Ironically enough, this is probably the worst I've felt on this date so far. Aside from just not feeling very great mentally, my tinnitus + hyperacusis combo came back yesterday. For those unaware, tinnitus (in my case) means hearing constant "ringing" with no external source, and hyperacusis (again, in my case) means sensitivity to noise, making basic everyday stuff, such as talking to another person, anything from unpleasant to downright awful. I've experienced episodes of these conditions twice before, each time the ringing in my ears was constant, but this time it seems to be reactive - in complete silence I can barely hear any ringing, it only appears to increase in volume to "match" other external sounds, which is pretty chill since that means I get to sleep fine, at least. "Your body is a temple" they say XD! Quite a solid temple! Can't even manage to listen to Klangkünstler's divine music at proper volume without having to deal with/worry about this shit. I'm assuming listening to music may cause harm to The Temple, which is what the Bible meant by "taking care of it", among other things. The craziest part is damage caused by noise is usually irreversible. There is no "cure" for it, at least. I assume this is because the process of evolution didn't deem it necessary for these things to have regenerative capabilities since humans back then didn't have access to good Techno, which meant less hearing damage, not to mention the questionable amount of impact minor hearing damage would have on survivability. All in all this is fucking stupid.

Besides that, as I mentioned above, I've not been feeling great mentally. I look back fondly on the days when I was a kid, playing World of Warcraft with friends and listening to Mt Eden. Have you ever thought about the feeling of "being at home"? I don't mean that literally, it's just a certain feeling that I can't really put into words exactly. I associate those kinds of memories, or "states" rather, with that feeling. The only worry I had back then was the holidays ending, but it wasn't a big deal since they seemed to last a very long time. It was just a constant sense of stability and well-being. Don't have that anymore though. I guess those things just disappear as you grow up, and all you're left with is a completely unpredictable future, full of worries and stress. The realization that that feeling of "being at home" might not come back in any shape or form, leaves me with a feeling I can only describe as wanting to vomit my soul out. I do realize I sound like a boomer rambling on about "the good old days", which I assume isn't normal for someone my age but it is what it is :D. I believe this feeling led me to develop a need for avoidance towards change, or rather the need for change. The natural thing to ask in that case would be how anyone or anything can function within that framework - the way my brain seems to rationalize these feelings is by believing that by going through enough drastic changes a given system will converge to a point where it doesn't need to change anymore. Basically the equivalent of "refactoring" in programming. So in my mind change is necessary, as long as it leads to a point where it isn't. That's the most pragmatic definition I've come up with for the word "perfect". A program whose only purpose is to print out "Hello World" on the screen is easy to make perfect by that definition. For systems that are far more complicated, such as life or "the world" or whatever else, that state of not having to change would be hard to define, let alone attain, but that's just the price you pay for having a complex system. Ironically enough these feelings led me to become more open to change, since every time it happens there's a slight hope that this might just be the "final" state, so I welcome it with open arms, but that's never the case nor do they make the process of change any more pleasant. If anything they make it more clear how far I've gone from that feeling of being at home I mentioned earlier. All I can do is just hope that given enough time life will bring those feelings back one way or another, and never change again.

Now on to the less depressing parts of our post! Starting with the usual programming-related part. I didn't work on any super interesting projects this year, but I still did program a lot. Wrote a simple disassembler for RISC-V in Haskell, and mostly wrote C, (C-style) C++ and Rust for various small projects, including a small but (mostly) usable debugger for x86_64 Linux. Writing one from scratch was a lot of work, even when automating the DWARF info parsing by using a library! Lots of platform-specific quirks you have to look out for, alongside managing general performance of the application. Rust was also a very interesting language, the first couple of days of using it were pure misery, constantly filled with feelings such as "I JUST want it to let me get this shit done" - I noticed that my programming style is a lot messier - I tend to implement a wacky solution at first just to get a feel for the overall architecture of the part I'm working on, then refactoring and refining it, but that kind of approach sometimes appeared to be locked away in Rust with it's compiler-enforced rules for safety. As time went on though I rarely found myself in such situations, I guess it's just a matter of getting accustomed to the language, and not having anxiety about random segmentation faults is pretty cool.
I also discovered Casey Muratori's channel which has been extremely helpful. I remember when I first started programming I used to have a thought along the lines of "I'll keep it simple for now and THEN perhaps the time will come when thing XYZ (OOP being the easiest example) that I don't understand why anyone would want to do will start to magically make sense". Needless to say that time never came. Looking back on it now even the thought itself is nonsensical, since simplicity IS what I should be striving for. Casey's channel was eye-opening in that regard, seeing someone 44 times more experienced and smarter than me have this approach of pure pragmatism in regards to programming was very reassuring. It's kind of sad that this seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the field, but it is what it is. With these new approaches/ideas I'll very likely end up rewriting some of my older projects (again), which will be very interesting!

You might have also noticed I made some changes to the website's overall design this year, I found that I didn't really "resonate" with the old one's "intro" part anymore, it felt too shitposty. The new one is arguably even more shitposty but I still like it more :D. It's basically a collection of random cool images I had saved on my PC over the last year, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - it's bright, happy and colorful :D!

Aside from that I've been doing the usual, playing League of Legends (hit a new peak of 450 LP this season (EUW)), watching shows (Time Machine Blues was fucking awesome, past me would have been very happy with it), and stuff like that.

I also noticed in my previous entry that the me a year ago apparently felt that "adding a post required way more effort than it should have". I still have no idea what he meant by that. It is basically as easy as it can be for a pure HTML/CSS website. I think I made some changes to the website to make it a bit easier but forgot about it/did it after writing that post maybe? I have no idea. At least compared to last year the weather was pretty chill on my birthday, constantly sunny and all that good stuff, which is good.

I'd prefer to avoid making comments such as these as much as possible so as to not sound like a YouTuber going "YOOOOOOOO what the FUCK is up YouTube!! Thank you SO MUCH for six point nine TRILLION Subscribers! Means a lot to me!" - but I noticed that this page passed 200k views last year which is pretty wild, I still have no idea where people keep finding it. Regardless, if you're a new person finding this page, welcome!!!

I think that's all I wanted to say for now! Hopefully future me will look back on some parts of this post and think "it's not that deep brother". We shall see next year :D.

>Why no updates?
First of all let's get this out of the way.

My interests have changed. I just didn't enjoy writing static webpages anymore. I still program, arguably more than ever, but writing pure HTML/CSS/JS burned me out.

I still do front-end webdev, but mostly using React.
Will now consider AI direction

>What's changed?
Well, considering I somehow gathered up the motivation to update the site, just writing a 100 line long paragraph wouldn't have been enough. I updated the code for all of the site, because it was atrociously bad. I've seen lots of people use my site as a template for their personal own, and I just felt bad having people use the abomination that the code my 17 year old self cobbled together was.

>What do you do now?
Nowadays I mostly work on dumb personal side-projects some of which you can check out on my GitHub.

Programming language-wise, I mostly interest myself in the Lisp family (primarily Scheme and Racket), TypeScript, Python for Machine Learning, Data gathering/analysis, etc. and currently have a growing interest in functional programming. Basically, any language that isn't strictly Object-Oriented like C# or Java I usually find awesome.

Other than that, I'm also "passionate" about ganoo linucs.
For anyone curious - my setup:
Distro: Arch
WM: Xmonad/i3
Terminal Emu: urxvt
Shell: zsh

>Where may I find you?
Considering some people have had trouble contacting me in the past due to my past Discord tag being outdated, I thought I might aswell put some contact info here aswell.

My social accounts:
Twitter

If you want to talk to me about anything, by all means feel free to dm me right away. im lonly.

>The future of this webpage?
I plan to just leave it be. I'll for sure post more updates in the upcoming years, but nothing too major will change.

And no, I'm not going to update the title each year from "the ramblings of a 17 year old fanatic" to "the ramblings of a ${my current age} fanatic." Not going to happen. I was 17 when I designed this page, so it'll stay that way :^)

Lain community related thoughts and shit

I've had an interest toward Lain and the fanbase around her for a while now. For the past couple months it's developed into more of an obsession.

This obsession comes with the urge to create something so fucking good that it would unite every separated Lain fandom into one big community where people could collaborate and create Lain-related stuff. Currently the situation is quite shit. You want to be a part of re:wire? Join their telegram, discord server, whatever. You want to be on Arisuchan/Lainchan, etc? Go post there. You want to worship some 17 year old schizophrenics fantasy that uses Lain as a mascot? Go to SS. You want to go against that 17 year old schizo? Go to Apollo. Most of these communities have personal relationships with each other, drama, friendship, you name it. It's difficult to acquire/give/manipulate information and ideas between some of these communities since they're so separated. Therefore collaborating for potentially good Lain projects becomes tougher than it should. I want to create a service that unites every Lain fan into one.

I look at Lain religiously. She gives me motivation to do anything, be it study, code, breathe, what the fuck ever. I want to do her justice.