Homesweet
“I feel completely refreshed, like I just put on fresh underwear on New Year’s Day.” — Josuke Higashikata
Feeling Artsy
I’ve been drawing with Pentel brush pens and it’s been quite interesting because it requires a lot of control but also it’s been very rewarding with its ability to control the emphasis on the subject.
It’s much more fluid than using a typical pen or pencil and requires stronger intuition for the gestures. You’re allowed to mess up though, because you can just cover it up.
I borrowed my brush pen to my friend I and they thought it was quite nice to use as well, so I might have created another brush pen fan.
Shine Bright
I have the unfortunate habit of playing League of Legends, a 5v5 game with ranks. Fortunately, I hit diamond three days before I am going to leave for winter break. Last time I hit diamond was two years ago, also playing jungle.
Jungle is by far the strongest of the five roles, followed by support, and then mid, top, and adc. The thing about jungle is that everyone else needs to stay in their part of the map, more or less, so the jungler is the one who gets to create numbers advantages in fights.
But also, junglers can mostly safely get gold, while other players are always at risk of being attacked by the enemy.
How to win?
I reached diamond from emerald 3 because I went on two incredibly long win-streaks which I got by playing Jax and Volibear. Before that, I was playing kind of random champions in random roles, but settling down for just two champions makes it easy to be consistent.
Basically, full clear if nothing is happening, invade if your laner is ahead, and do objectives. That’s all you need to do to win jungle.
A message
Before finals, I had a disastrous loss to an Aatrox jungle, who completely smoked me by invading level 2. So, that’s when I decided I would stop playing and prep for my finals.
Champ selection
Why did I choose Jax and Volibear? They were at the top of the tierlists. I think there’s a good reason for that too: they are both extremely good in skirmishes of 1-2 people.
They both get shutdown by CC, but when there’s only ~1 source of CC in the fight, you can just dodge it and win the battle because they have basically undodgeable CC and high defence + damage.
Discrete
Part of the reason why I think bots cannot beat people at League yet is because League is techincally a continuous input with huge variations. It’s like driving, but way harder.
Playing League can feel like driving a car with babies crying in the back while trying to avoid meteors and catching fish at the same time.
However, if you can internalize the mechanics of the game, then the decision-making becomes very discrete. At each time, there are only two or three options to choose between.
Smells like Home
Memories are tied to smell more than any other sense, even more than taste. When people say that something tastes like home, they actually mean smell because taste is 50% smell.
This blog from ICE (Institute of Culinary Education) states that
Every person has between 5,000 and 10,000 taste buds, and each taste bud has between 50 and 100 specialized sensory cells. — ICE
If you want to calculate the expected number of sensory cells, you need to use a bit of probability. If you assume the number of taste buds ($X$) and cells per bud ($Y$) are independent, and you know that those two give the number of cells ($Z=XY$), then
$\mathbb{E}(Z) = \mathbb{E}(XY) = \mathbb{E}(X)\mathbb{E}(Y)$
So, we get 7.5K times 75 which is $100 (4900 + 700 + 25) = 562500$.
Vegetable hack
I don’t know if there’s any kids reading this but if you don’t want to taste your vegetables, just hold your breath and then you won’t be able to taste it anymore.
Korean
I’ve been learning Korean, and reading the characters is quite doable because there’s a very simple mapping between the shapes and the sounds, and it’s far more segmented than Japanese characters.
To read Japanese text, you usually need to read a very long string from left to right, but for Korean, a greater focus is on each character because within each character is usually three components that form the sound.
For example, Jap-chae, or glass noodles, is written as 잡채. The left character makes the “Jap” sound, and the three components are the “Juh” consonant, “Ah” vowel, and “Puh” consonant.
The right character is “Chae” sound, where the left half is “Ch” consonant and the right is “Ayy” vowel. So, it’s quite intuitive.
CIA @ Caltech
My mom’s cooking is so much better than the school food that it can’t be compared. However, the one thing that school food does well is desserts, all thanks to a recent hire last year from the CIA1.
I don’t know what it is with food-related things having the same name as government organizations, but CIA stands for Culinary Institute of America. They should just have this person redesign all of the food.
Reflections
Citing my first post of the big ‘25, let’s see if I accomplished any of my goals.
- Watching less reels and YouTube and Webtoons 😔 (No)
- Learn something new and meaningful every day (Kind of)
- 100 pushups, 100 situps, and 100 squats every day (No, but exercising more)
- Healthy sleep schedule (No)
- Fun machine learning application (Yes)
- Fully produced song (No)
- VSauce-style YT video (Close)
- Mobile app available for download (Kind of)
- At least one blog post per month (Yes, on average)
- Cook for myself a few times (Yes)
So, it seems like I succeeded on roughly 5/10 goals.
This seems like a bad result, but it just means I did more stuff not on the list, like my drawing/observational skills, and probability-based thinking.
SmarterEveryDay
As for learning something new every day, I don’t think I directly succeeded because some days I really don’t learn anything new. But, by reflecting on those days, I learn about the things that prevented me from learning something new.
Also, there are certain days where I learn things that are worth much more than a single day’s worth of learning. Often, useful lessons are clustered together rather than evenly distributed.
SmarterEveryYear
My dad used to ask me the question of whether I feel like I’m smarter than I was a year ago.
Currently, I can’t really say I feel it the same way I did years ago. This year, I feel like I learned a lot more “common sense” type of skills than technical skills.
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