26 Sep, 2024
Pomegranates are so Good Actually



This is your sign to buy a pomegranate and eat it seriously 10/10 experience tbh like idk how persephone only ate 6 of them little seeds I simply would not have had the self restraint and would've been stuck in the underworld for forever. It's just a very fun experience start to finish tbh like the feeling of cutting open a pomegranate is very nice the skin so easy enough to cut without too much effort but think enough that it has the substance to be extremely satifying when pulled apart also pomegranates are just a very pretty fruit like i would argue one of the prettiest tbh when you pull them apart and see all those lovely red gems of goodness set in the pale skin of it very cool very swag. Then you get to start eating it :D and it tastes pretty damn good the seeds are also very fun to crush between my fingers I feel like it makes the juice even tastier. And you get to pull the thin skin off to reveal even more pomegranate sick as hell actually. And in the end you're just left with a pile of discolored flesh. Anyway yes buy and enjoy a pomegranate, appreciate the world's small beauties :).

29 Aug, 2024
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood



No One is Talking About This tells the story of our unamed protagonist a chronically online women entrenched in iront and the humor of the "portal"(sort of like an internet 2) finally touching grass (casting aside irony and reconnecting with the world) because of a tragedy that brings her closer with her family and life itself

. I finished this book yesterday and boy was it a wild ride! The first half was kind of a slog to get through the choice to have the story told through short vignettes of our protagonists daily life and things she sees on the portal is interesting but leads to a difficult and unsatisfying reading experience for the first half. Albeit with some fun jokes that made me chuckle. The second half of this book elevates it to the point I almost think it should be mandatory reading in school tho. It becomes this touching and tragic story of a chronically online women reconnecting with reality and embracing the beauty of life unironically and it's honestly just beautiful storytelling and you can tell Lockwood based a lot of it on her own experiences because the emotions of it were so vivid and thoughtful it even penetrated my thick shell. While I'm tempted to say skip the first half I think doing so wouldn't give you the full experience of the work the context set up in the first half of the political situation is important in the second half as it transforms from background info to incredibly real and impacts the story. I also think you need the first half to set the tone so that the second half tone shift hits as hard as it does.

Spoilers beyond this point but like you should really read this book like omg its so good

I spent the first half of this book waitingfor the story to start from the back of the book and the bits throughout about a dictator and doomsday prepping I expected it to be some sort of wide reaching apocalypse instead it was our protagonists niece being diagonosed in utero with proteus syndrome her being born and her too short 6 months and one day of life. The soft but still real way our protagonist describes her and her surroundings are some of the most beautiful writing I've read yet. This event instantly brought the world into focus for both the protagonist and for me it casts the world in a sense of both beauty and tragedy and Enya's death is made no less sad by the fact it was a certainty. I've used the words beautiful and tragic like a gajillion times but like it is all just so beautiful and tragic. It's all just so real as well our protagonist scrolls through Jason Mamoa pics in the hospital her sister wears pink at the funeral stupid jokes are made and it just elevates it even higher in my opinion, the showing of an not-so-picture-perfect world filled with not-so-picture-perfect people. I don't think I can like accuratly explain how the second half generated such emotion in me but like omg this book absolutely deserves to be on all the top 10 lists it got on dear god.

15 Aug, 2024
Woah New Blog Layout Would You Look at That



So this website has been uh languishing for a fun term but I wanna dedicate some more time to it now that I'm in college and wanted to spruce it up a bit starting with this page because it was kinda the most scuffed and bad. But now look at it there's like colums and a nicer title and soon hopefully a nicer background and fun decor. So yeah tryna get back into the swing of things will probably right quite a few short litle things just to hopefully start the habit of writing and fill out the space a lil. Cus yeah with just this one post(?) it's going to look quite lame :(. But yeah finally some more work on this site and even updates who woulda guessed!

?? ???, 2023
Dishbrain



So i just wanna ramble a little bit about my faborite scientific study DishBrain so basically dishbrain is a unch of neurons that scientists grew in a dish and they taught it to play pong that's the tldr version but what I personally find really interestig is how thye trained the brain. So like with like animal training the best way to do it is reward the dishbrain when it hits the ball in pong and punish it when it misses. But how do you reward and punish and bunch of neurons? well neurons seek to make their enviroment more predictable so when they hit the ball they get a nice predictable pulse across its input chip but when they miss the ball they get 4 seconds of random signals across the input chip. And with just that the Dishbrain was able to double it's rally length in only 15 minutes! if you want more detail the full study is here. I just find it really ineresting how some of the researchers think that this will reach general itelligence level befoer traditional AI definetly is a strange version of the future if that's true. (You may have noticed this is a different format than the other blog posts i like this better so this is how it'll be from now on)

20 Sep, 2024
Why The Minecraft Movie will be Bad



I like millions of others have had the displeasure of watching the minecraft movie teaser trailer and like pretty much everyone else have come to the conclusion that it will be bad. This might be unfair as the movie hasn't come out yet but I am a little hater on ocsasion and think from the trailer alone you can such fundamental flaws in the movie that I feel safe in my conclusion.

The trailer shows an immense lack of care for the aestheticssource material and it's just so frustrating like minecraft generation doesn't look like that!! the first landscape we see and it just doesn't look minecraft-y it feels like whoever designed it just heard miecraft took place in a "blocky world" and went solely off that like the massive blocks of blocks just don't occur in minecraft and it's so jarring. Other prominent imagery is also just not minecraft-y like the portal at the beginning! I get it being blue but it doesn't has the distinctive swirl pattern it's just half assed noise looking more like a generic "video game portal"rather than a minecraft specific one. I also despise how realistic it is tbh the trend towards realism has been a scourge on media and I think this is a prime example of it being applied poorly and carelessly.

I also have a problem with the plot. It seems to be a jumanji-esc plotline about people being transported into the minecraft world and I think that's so lazy and just doesn't fit with the vibe of minecraft. This runs contrary to the loose story of minecraft for me. Minecraft has always been about carving out your niche in a world and just like affecting your surrounding enviroment and that just doesn't fit with like the temporary nature of a jumanji plot. It just reeks of a lack of real care or knowlege of the source material like you know these writers have never read the end poem and just think "haha blocky world goofy".

I'm just really disapointed tbh, a movie based on minecraft could've been great but it's just not gonna be good and the rights will be forever held in Warner Brothers greasy palms.

28 Aug, 2024
Hills and Biking



I have moved from a place with no hills to a place with quite a lot of hills for college and I have mixed feelings on them. I usually bike around campus and biking down hills with a large gear is a joy like no other just a nice clean adrenaline rush with only minimal risk of grevious bodily injury. But dear god biking up hills is hellish especially before I started changing my gears frequently like why is it like that. Long gentle slopes are the worst cus it's just non stop ya know? But biking around campus overall is such a joy especially at night when there's no people so I don't have to slow down although weaving around the people walking is fun.

15 Aug, 2024
An Introduction to my feelings on Wasps



Guess what it's wasp time baby. Wasps are like my favorite animal (if I had to narrow it down it would either be cuckoo wasps or paper wasps). This is a controversial choice unfortunetly as the litle guys tend to get such a bad rap by both the general populace and in media :(. It's like a side quest in my life to try and change as many people's minds as possible about wasps. Like wasps are framed as uniquely malicious animals. People make so many "memes" about wasps being evil, wasps just stinging humans for no reason, how we should get rid of all the wasps, and on and on which I think is very unfair and mean. First of all wasps don't sting humans for no reason like from an evolutionary perspective how would that even make sense. They don't get food from stinging humans and it's a pretty big risk of getting squashed. They do it because they see you as a threat to their nest and consequently their larva. Because of this it's only really social wasps that will sting (which is such a small percentage of wasp species overal!). Also their just really cool and pretty cuckoo wasps will just lay their larva in other insects nests and let them raise it like their namesake (some species are also so pretty and shiny you should look up pictures). Theirs also fig wasps and parasatoid wasps which just have such cool lifecycles.

I also just think it's unfair to judge a species on it's annoyingness to humans. I see people joke about the extinction of wasps a lot and I think thats so tragic. We here a lot about the threats to honeybees but we hear less about the threats to solitary bees and I hear practically no concerns about wasp popualtions. They don't get as much research as bees even though their likely facing the same threats and experiencing the same population loss. I just think as a society we could be a little more kind to species that don't give us a direct monetary benefit (although wasps do!!!! No one talks about wasp pollination but they're really important!!!!!) or "look cute". Basically you should think more kindly of wasps and make sure to respect their space. I'll get off my soapbox now lol.

10 Oct, 2022
4 Day Weekend



lil blog post about the most recent 4 day weekend and it was great :D except for the verystressful time Friday morning where I had to turn in a couple government homework sheets like an hour before grades were due which was not fun I will tell you. My end grade for the class that quarter ended up being a 90 tho with the homeworks so I can'r complain too much lol. I also got to work on my eye cardigan which I've been crocheting for a while now I have 5 squares that I sewed together (and it looks like it's gonna fit me properly! :D) and i have to make like 20 of em so it's gonna be a long way to go. I've also gotten the time to well work on this website so that's been very nice. Then yesterday I gt to hang out with one of my friends! Fae has a lot of work so it's a bit tricky to schedual hangouts but she had yesterday off. We made some friendship bracelets drank some sparkling grape juice and watched breaking bad. We then went to go get ice cream with my siblings and it was just a very lovely day.

16 Sep, 2024
World's Chillest Accident Victim



Over the weekend I got into an accident while riding on my bike was going down a hill truck didnt't look oth ways couldn't stop in time so I smacked right into the side of it. Honestly it din't hurt to bad tbh although that might just be because I have a pretty damn high pain tolerance I looked like absolute shit tho. My largest wound was a cut right above the eyelid of my left eye (it is annoying as hell now that it's scabbed thank you for asking) and it was bleeding like crazy down my eye plus I had a bloody nose. However once I stood up and the people came out of the truck to see if I was okay I immedietly started being like "oh im fine don't worry about me I'll just walk to the med clinic lol" while looking like an extra in a horror film. They did not take this for an answer and the girl in the car took me to a nearby bathroom and helped me clean off the blood and I did take a picture cus I looked sick as hell tbh. But like I was joking the whole walk there and was being very chill and glass half full about the whole thing. After that they drove off and I walked up to 2 girls like "not to be concerning but how do I get to the med clinic lol" they saw my nose bleed and general just got fucked up look to me and offered to walk me to the clinic while holding my bike (she's fine btw) and were overal very nice about the whole thing. But tbh I got out of the ordeal very consequence free nothing broken no concusion just a minor black eye, narly bruise on my thigh. and and annoying as scab on my face. Is there a lesson to this story? no

27 Aug, 2024
Does art have to be enjoyable to be good?:



I personally don't think so. I think a lot of people have a instinctual reaction to art (be it music visual or writing) that when it's not appealing or enjoyable or digestable to rebuke it as being bad. That's a bad reaction in my opinion but it's one people have to unlearn. I think that's one of the reasons people disregard classics these days, they're not as enjoyable to read (at least to the degree modern writing is imo) so people disregard them as highminded nonsense. On the other end it leads to people disregarding more experimental stuff as well for example experimental music that isn't as "pleasing" to the ear or art that's grotesque and makes people feel uncomfortable. I've especially seen this veiwpoint espoused from more conservative minds that art that makes people feel bad is bad and I think that especially is a dangerous idea as being uncomfortable challenges are preconcieved viewpoints (I wonder why this idea is had by conservatives lol). However i see this on the other end of political spectrum as well where people again refuse to engage with things that make them feel bad and trying to come up with a moral argument against it. Is this anything or am I just saying words. But overall I would like people to examine their feelings when art makes them uncomfortable and still try to engage with the art rather than turning away from it.

?? Mar, 2023
Three Bank Collapses in One Week?:



if you haven't been following american news three banks collapsed recently icluding the second and third biggest bank collapses in US history so that's pretty interesting. Imma just ramble about this because no on ein my life keeps track of the news and they don't really wanna talk about it but that's what random internet blogs are for I suppose. Pus if this does turn about to be the start of the next financial crisis (although I don't thik it will be) this will be fun to look back on. The first bank that collapsed was silvergate and that one collapsed becuase it lent money to crypto investors and companies and when the crypto market collapsed (and thak god it did I despise crypto) they lost a lot of money and had a bank run becuse people lost trust in it. Second up on the chopping block was Silicon Valley Bank which was the biggest of the 3 and this one is a bit more complicated. So from what I understant SVB invested heavily in treasuery bonds which are a very safe investment because as log as you hold onto them you are guarenteed to make a return however the US raised interest rates so the Treasurey bonds that SVB held lost a lot of value and now they had a lot of unrealised losses but this was fine cus they could jus hold onto them but then a credit rating company dropped them down a rank and the people who had money in the bank panicked ad withdrew so they had to sell their treasury bonds at a loss and thye ran out of money :(. signature bank (the third one) is basically the same as Silvergate so i aint gonna type it out. But yeah the US government is bailing out all the banks and goving everyone their money which I suppose is necessary but they would never do that if it was't all rich people who lost money :/.

8 Sep, 2022
Queen Dead



QUEEN IS DEAD LETS GOOOOO if you can tell i didn't like the queen although I don't live in the UK or the commonwealth countries soo i don't get to much of an opinion tbh. My great grandmother has officially outlived the queen (she's older by a couple months) so congrats to her! it was definetly an interesting vibed cus some people were joking about it and some people were actually quite upset. Yeah school has been a tad stressful and I'm very tired my sleep schedule hasn't quite adapted even after a couple of weeks but it's manegable for now. One of my friends birthday is coming up and I need to make a gift for him and I would usually crochet something but they crochet as well so I think I'm gonna make them some rainbow mushroom earings.