Spam Blog #1

I have decided to start writing here weekly (hopefully). I have correspondingly named these "spam blogs", only somewhat jokingly. I don't really know Anyway, there's a couple of reasons for why I have decided to start writing, and I'll talk about them here below.

Factorio

Factorio kind of took over my life for a couple of weeks. I was a little bored hanging out with friends, and legitimately thought to myself: "why am I here, when I could be playing Factorio?"

Type ♥♥♥♥, game is awesome. Haven't even gotten the DLC yet and I've put 200 hours in it.

Anyway, they write a blog once a week. They are great blog posts if you like Factorio. Not much else for me to say about it, but it made me realize that I could write weekly. That's much more maintainable than "once per day" or "whenever" (never).

This Ancient-♥♥♥ website

This one: http://memex.org/welcome.html

Holy ♥♥♥♥ this website is old.

This website is honestly a treasure trove. It's kind of incredible reading some of its old posts, because the landscape at the time was completely different. The standard web browser was Netscape. Apple almost died. Sun was still around.

I also looked around at https://www.gnu.de/index.en.html, and you see an ancient-looking page about the GNU project. Now, every document on this site was replicated from elsewhere, and has been copied over the internet many thousands of times, surely, so there's no piece of truly unique data here. It is nonetheless interesting. Here's an excerpt from the GNU Manifesto, published literally 40 years ago.

I think it's a really nice quote, and it's amazing for still being relevant an eternity later. Thanks to all of the neckbeards in their basements, making our lives better. Long live free (as in free speech) software :D

To close out my rambling: My point is that historical artifacts are cool, and that we should make some effort to preserve our thoughts-- even if the majority of them end up not mattering.

What Were They Thinking?

I just bake all of the blog text into the HTML files. I could have some sort of database that does it all dynamically, but I can't be bothered. I mention this because in making this file, I copied it from a previous one, and subsequently saw the date in the file... and damn. A year ago, almost.

I can't really imagine what I was up to a year ago. ♥♥♥♥ that, I can't remember what I was up to yesterday. What'd I even eat? I like to think of the forgetfullness (or really, a lack of care) as consolidating data. I have a vague idea of things that have happened to me recently, but not every little thing that happens. It's like how in a function, you may pass over and process many thousands or millions of bytes, just to return a 32 bit integer, which only vaguely represents the actual data.

Anyway, I think it's good to have a snapshot of some of that data every now and then. That's a big motivator for me wanting to write. And not only will I archive my state for myself, but also others will get to peer into my thoughts (if I give them the link ^_^).

Also, what the ♥♥♥♥ was I thinking when I was designing this website? My code blows!

A Tangent

To go off on a tangent, as is the point here, I don't get it when people ask me hypotheticals placed years in the future, and then are surprised when I don't really give an answer. The classic one is, "will you get a dog?", or some variation -- and it's like, how the ♥♥♥♥ am I supposed to know that? For some people, maybe that question is easy. Some people really like animals. But, to be honest, I really just don't know. I'm on the fence. It depends on way too many things, years ahead in the unpredictable future, and... maybe I could give an answer with 70% certainty if I really thought about it.

But, like, I don't care that much. It's a decision that I cannot even make for at least a couple of years. I can make it then, or maybe think about it the month before. But, right now, I don't know. I think that it is acceptable when not having a good enough answer, to just say "I don't know". But, I digress.

My exact position on this kind of thing is hard to communicate. When people ask me what my life goals are, it's hard to answer. I am working towards things-- professionally, personally, whatever. The reality of it, though, is that I am completely willing to drop any one of my many 'goals' if something better pops up. Of course, some things I am much less willing to drop than others. My 'goals' are not set, I prefer to treat them as variables that may actually be changed. For me, it's not only unrealistic, but limiting to lock in on something unless if it's really important to me.

Another aspect to it, is that many of these things don't require thought over them until the time comes, in my opinion. Realistically speaking, my day-to-day actions don't change based on my long term goals. For example, consider the question: "What kind of job are you going to get when you graduate?" Well, the question doesn't matter yet. I have very little agency in changing my prospects in that regard in this moment, except for the obvious of making sure that I do well in school. Such a question mattered before, when I was choosing my major, and had the ability to change my path. But, for now, I trust that my past self made the right decision, so I no longer need to worry about it.

One way I think about it is to view it as optimizing away the amount of required stateful information in working memory. That is, less ♥♥♥♥ on my plate at one time. Maybe it's why I don't have such persistent anxiety that many of my peers deal with. I just don't think about my future or whatever stressors for >99% of my time in the day (since in my view, it's functionally pointless), so I also happen to not get anxious about it. There is perhaps a certain bliss, when all you need to think about most of the time is just how you are going to spend the rest of your day.

The End

that was long