In April 2017, I was invited to give a brief talk at the Georgia FIRST Robotics Super-Regional thanks to Jeopardy fame. Of course, I went, because free trip home and I was also very curious how my team was doing 4 years after I had left. The Super-Regional was at UGA, which I had been to before over the summer, but not during the school year, so that was an interesting experience as well.
Category: observe
WWE
In August 2017, I went and saw Monday Night Raw at TD Garden with my meme friends on Destiny purely for the meme. The tickets were a lot more expensive than what I expected and the stadium was also way more packed than I would have guessed as well! Although I went mainly for the joke, it turned out to be a lot more informative than I imagined.
Although most of my friends here just for irony (you can see trueluis holding up a John Cena cardboard sign right above the BRAAAAUN sign – notably John Cena does not fight in Monday Night Raw), I was lucky that my friend Erons was actually a HUGE WWE fan and watched it growing up as a kid. He was very hyped about the whole thing and nearly shouted himself hoarse. He also explained a lot more of the rules and lore to me, and by the end of the night, I was actually really excited to see how Summer Slam 2017 was going to end.
Perhaps the most important thing that came out of the night was the realization that having finite time means that you can’t take on every project. After talking to Erons, when I got home, I was very excitedly researching professional wrestling, finding the CMS class that had been done about it. Somewhere between finding Jenkins citing Roland Barthes and TV Tropes arguing whether Professional Wrestling Fanfic is Real-Person fanfic or not, I realized that I didn’t actually need to do a deep dive on pro wrestling, even if I could. It sounds sort of obvious, but it was actually a really powerful realization to me that I could just leave the pro-wrestling rock unturned and keep it as a blog post – acknowledge that several of the themes it brought up were definitely related to my primary interests and move on. It’s definitely been a hard thing to manage, but as called out in my meta post, it’s been an important refinement for me.
Below are my raw (Monday Night Raw?) screening notes — because I am incapable of experiencing any media anymore without pen and pencil in my hand
Observe: MIT Libraries Pt. 2
I continued working for the Annex Manics into graduation and graduate school. (Hayden’s hours were a bit too restrictive for me for graduate school). I wanted to work over the summer, but unexpectedly got a job at the Toyota Research Institute so that put a kibosh on it.
Cool Call Numbers (Library of Congress system):
- CC165 – Archaeology
- PN212 – Narrative theory
- PN1997.O – Screenplays
- PN1997.77 – Analysis of popular TV shows
Interesting Print Magazines:
- In Theory Only – a surprisingly very cool music journal. There are music crossword puzzles, music trivia games and a shout-out to the first ever electronic music conference (naturally, happening at MIT). The internet tells me that this journal is noteworthy as one of the first grad-student-produced journals in the US.
- Japan Quarterly – See 5/18
- Journal of Popular Film and Television – ayyyyyyy
- Lakota Country Times, Navajo Times – I’m really surprised that MIT gets these because they are very reservation-specific, local newspapers. I guess I’m pretty glad though if this helps the newspaper stay in business. The Lakota one unsurprisingly has a lot of articles about DAPL
- Meanjin – writing on a variety of topics, but the print version is super interesting and strange
- Otaku USA – I have no idea why we get this, but yet, here we are.
- Sing Out – folk song magazine. Booklet / handout style with a lot of songs within it
Forgotten Observes
Part of my new year’s resolution is doing some spring cleaning to my inbox. Unlike the other observes, these have fermented for so long that I don’t have a strong date for these although I can guess:
Observe: Summer 2016
Written up in 2/2/2018. All of these are from the Summer of 2016, when I was working at Apple in Cupertino, California. It’s been a while, so some are left unexpanded from the initial thought
- My close family friend’s daughter, Jackie, is still wearing the silicone wrist band I gave her when she asked for one for a “good luck charm” for getting into colleges since I had done so well on my cycle
- Saw a car with a Cheesy Poofs 254 sticker. Meanwhile, Jackie’s mom told me about an armed robbery that happened in the parking deck. (This mom is particularly good at tact; she was the one who told me how Luchang died)
- oooooomg the pokemon go craze is insane. The mountain view park used to be completely empty, but now it’s completely swarmed with people ._.
- I SAW THE SQUARE R12 IN PUBLIC!!! Kinda freaked out the bubble tea lady when I was like “YOO!! I WORKED ON THIS!”
- Kevin Morrow and Evie are working at the same drone company, huh.
- After watching old cringey E3s, I finally found the game that I had seen in a Taiwanese arcade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Evolution
- mailbox shadow moved to ghost
- I was walking home and saw a guy biking without using his hands, yelling “I feel so alive!!”
- “Make apps not war”
- Played through Ada’s game from Interactive Narrative. Not sure how I feel about my former advisor, John Hart, literally being God >_>”””
Observe: Maine
Written up 2/2/2018.
In March 2016, James and I took a “spring break” trip to Maine, which ended up being more of a winter break trip.
3/20
- Still find it weird that New Hampshire advertises its liquor stores on official government highway signs.
- Weirdly there was a road sign reporting distances in kilometres
- I was just telling James how the best road trip food was Cracker Barrel and LO AND BEHOLD WHAT SHOULD COME UP IN THE NEXT EXIT SIGN BUT A CRACKER BARREL!!!
- We stayed in Ellsworth, Maine. There was a Shaw’s right across the street. We happily took advantage of not being in Puritan Massachusetts by buying wine.
- Overall, people were really nice and friendly to us – making small talk with us at the supermarket or gas station. Everyone made a big deal out of James’ Texas driver’s license.
Protected: Jeopardy: ToC Edition
Observe: MIT Libraries
This term, I became a student library worker in Hayden and the Library Storage Annex – making me a Hayden Maiden and part of the Annex Manics! Below are some compiled observations of my time there! Some are transcribed from Zephyr.
Cool Call Numbers (Library of Congress system):
- GV1469 – Games and video games!
- QA76.9.C66 – cyberculture (which is amusingly surrounded by books about database structures and algorithms, as QA usually means “mathematics”)
- P90 – new media overview
- PN1988.3 – film studies
- RC489.C – cognitive behavioral therapy
- TX800-ish – food books, including the entire El Bulli catalog
Interesting Print Magazines:
- Comics Journal – has lots of comics and does cool things with the medium, including printing upside down
- Prairie Schooner – gorgeous bound literary journal
Protected: Observe: Jeopardy – Post-NDA
Whimsical Map of the Institute
This is an old post – I took the picture on Feb. 4th, 2016 and only have now gotten around to doing the write up for this. I was in 38-4, the EECS office, in order to get some paperwork signed and found this really cool map posted on one of the cubicle walls – […]
