Nothing Batter

“A post about talking about writing a post?” — W

Deja Vu

In HK I was shocked by Shek O Beach because I saw a scene straight out of an art book from a middle school art class. The rocks, beach, and coastline looked exactly the same as a drawing I did back then.

2019 landscape color pencil drawing of coastline.

It was kind of magical until I realized that there’s probably hundreds of coastlines just like the one at Shek O with big red rocks and a mountain on the right side of the ocean.

Shek O Beach coastline.

DJ Vu

My friend T was hosting DJ lessons for everyone who was interested in DJing for Ravery and I signed up for a quick lesson.

I didn’t expect that I would become good enough to DJ at Ravery, but setting up my own transitions and being able to explore nostalgic songs from the 2010s was actually a lot of fun.

Me DJing at Ravery.

However, one issue I have with Ravery is that there’s so much going on with food and games that there’s no one on the dance floor from 10 to 11.

Despite my complaints as a new DJ, this was actually the best Ravery I’ve been to.

Hollow Knight

is a great game that is quite difficult for people who are not used to movement-based games, but once you figure out how to pogo¹, it becomes very fun.

The music and art are also amazing, and I really appreciate the cute/creepy insect aesthetic.

Silksong

felt a bit more clunky when getting started, but I eventually got used to the movement.

Old Habits

I seem to explore more than I’m supposed to and end up going into late-game fights when I’m severely undergeared. For example, I went to fight some ants, which was one of the most terrifying things ever.

They all have their own complex attack/dodge patterns, even though they aren’t boss mobs, and also take 20 hits to defeat without any damage upgrades.

This also happened when I played the prev game because I would find bosses before I found any upgrades, like there was some kind of jumping spider that also spit lava which took me about 20 attempts, and I don’t think there was even a good reward after that.

New Habits

I’ve been trying to do 100 push-ups and 100 squats every day and it’s gone decently well so far, since I feel much more healthy every day.

I even set up a website to let me keep track of it, where I have a counter for how many glasses of water I’ve drank so far, and whether I’ve played guitar/drawn/written.

Down with the Sickness

I may have mentioned this before, but since I don’t get sick that often, I get nostalgic about the last time I was sick, which was right after I got back from Japan last spring.

My hypothesis is that it has something to do with the loss of smell and the way that memories and smells are intertwined.

Orange Car

I visited Prof. W’s house and they have 3 very nice cats. The orange cat seemed to really like me because it kept coming up to smell me. However, I was too engrossed in eating chocolate chip cookies to pick it up. Maybe next time.

Thankful

One thing that I’m really thankful for at Caltech is that the lights in the hallways are always on, so there’s probably not going to be any scary monsters chasing me to my room at night.

Also, the beds are all lofted, so there’s no room for monsters to crawl under and hide in.

Tubers

I was talking to W, M, and J at RD earlier and we were talking about my blog.

Sometimes I think about making YouTube videos again but perhaps more in a artistic way kind of like VSauce or Solar Sands with some overarching narrative but with interesting ideas throughout jumping between topics.

I think that if I went to any other school, that it would be possible to spend a ton of time on this and perhaps have a successful channel, but as of right now, it doesn’t seem like a possibility.

If I did

I would probably make a video with the theme of perspective, the central question being, “Are attractive people bad people?” as a bit of clickbait, and then incorporating humor, science, and art to make a broader point about the importance of perspective.

Frieren

There’s been a bit of a meme in the art community about how to draw portraits from the 45 degrees below and to the side angle, with a pretty funny drawing of Frieren from the anime of the same name.

This reveals how art strives to portray subjects but artists don’t focus enough on perspective. Too often do people draw from the exact same perspective, head-on or 45 degrees to the side. Some might say this angle has been perfected, but future artists may see it as backward and uncreative.

ARTificial Intelligence

Then, I’d use ChatGPT and have it rate the attractiveness of 100 prisoner mugshots from 0 to 100, and compare the ratings to 100 images of random people.

Depending on the result, I’d make some sort of point about confounding variables but I can’t be certain until I actually do that.

Morality

Then I’d ask, “Was what I just did moral?” Perhaps an excuse could be that I wasn’t the one who placed judgement on the prisoners on their looks nor actions. But is handing judgement off to an AI moral? Is it okay to judge the appearances of random people?

Then I’d reveal that the picture of “random people” are actually people that do not exist from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com.

Stories

Many children’s stories revolve around concepts of the correlation between external and internal beauty, including:

• The Ugly Duckling
• Beauty and the Beast
• The Frog Prince

Blind Leading the Blind

Perhaps a segment about being blind and how they avoid the concerns of appearance, interjected by a scientific sequence on how blind people can hear better than others, maybe something about echolocation.

Nothing Batter

“There’s nothing better than some flatbread and honey butter.” — Outdoor Boys.

I’ve been binging YT vids from the channel Outdoor Boys a lot lately.

Here’s a video tutorial:

Something Batter

I was trying to make some dough before Thanksgiving dinner and a fire alarm got set off!

So, I was outside with my hand in the ziploc bag with the siren going off and everyone watching me was giving me these weird looks.

Turns out I didn’t put enough flour into the bag because the correct ratio of flour:water is 5:3 but I had some sort of concoction/solution where it was like 10% flour and 90% water.

However, after adding flour and mixing, I placed it in a bowl in the fridge and waited a few hours for it to expand (yeast produces gas).

Underrated

I cooked some on a pan around midnight with my roommate T and dipped it in honey butter and let me just say that it was DELICIOUS!

The day after, I made some for the other people who stayed over Thanksgiving and I think most of them really liked it.

I was trying to convince C to eat it and they asked, “What’s in it?”

“Dough!” was the answer.

Footnotes

1. Pogo: Downslash in mid-air at an enemy/obstacle to go upward ↩