RC Week 2

15 Nov 2024

Mon

ehehehehe it’s late but I really wanted to have v1 of my personal website done (after thinking more about it, i realized i wanted to just have 1 site for personal/professional/blog). here it is: https://gracekwak.me/ It’s nothing fancy (it really looks like my obsidian theme HAHA) but I like it and it gets the job done! i also have my first blog post up, for rc week 1 (which is literally a copy-paste of my daily check-in messages) (https://gracekwak.me/blog/2024/11/11/rc-week-1) I wanna add photos, finish migrating stuff from my old Notion portfolio, and get jekyll working locally (thank you to @Maura for your help!) if anyone else wants to know how I did it (I’d previously had 0 jekyll experience), I followed this awesome guide: https://jmcglone.com/guides/github-pages/ and I got some help by looking at the code for @Michael ‘s site https://github.com/msgtn/msgtn.github.io

also hci meeting was super cool! nice turnout and i’m honored people were on board to read the jia tolentino essay :D

Tues

another day!

now that i have my personal website (basically) done, i want another project to work on in parallel with arena+missingsemester! I want to work on something that’s at the edge of my abilities… something RL? hashlife algo for game of life?

Weds

anyway, two new ideas that fit my 3 points above:

ya girl has written WAY more words than code so far… but trust, it’ll happen

(what’s also fun is that when i did my first check-in, i like, didn’t hold back because i didn’t think people would read other people’s check-ins. but then i saw several people react to my check-in and from then on, i was like damn ok well it’s too late now, this is happening and here we are!)

Thurs

phew. yesterday was bad but I think i had to go through it in order to feel better (today I feel much better). growing hurts sometimes. but now I’m in a headspace where I’m thinking of more silly project ideas and i’m happy!

Fri

like sometimes i just got unlucky. and it’s easy for me to focus on the things that i got unlucky for and feel like the dice are weighted against me and i start to feel deeply resentful toward the universe and others; but when i actually think about it, i do have a lot of things i’m immensely lucky for and wouldn’t trade for the world.

i’ve made some decisions that other people can (and do) judge/criticize me for because yeah they don’t follow the well-worn formulaic paths of success (not that there’s anything wrong with following a formula, i love math). i think it’s actually not that hard for me to make these decisions in the moment (i love the exhilaration that comes with taking a leap, it’s part of what brought me to RC!) and trust that my future self will be able to handle any potential consequences; the real challenge is standing by these decisions after the fact, to live with the now-tangible present consequences of my past decisions. (and it’s always the consequences, not the good stuff, that the brain naturally focuses on…)

there’s a common perspective of like “every experience (good and bad) that i’ve had in my life has brought me to this very moment. it’s hard to say whether all the good things would have happened if I hadn’t gone through all the bad things, and right now i’m very happy/grateful with all the good things, thus i am at peace with all the bad things.” this doesn’t work for me. because of course, if you had magically avoided the bad things that happened, you would be in a completely different place with different everything (good and bad). your bad things might be equally as bad or maybe even worse – but they might be not as bad; similarly, your good things might be equally as good or actually worse – but they might be even better. you just don’t know! sometimes i feel like i’d take that gamble because given the option to exchange my worst bad things for the chance of less-bad bad things and better good things, i’d take it, because i feel like my bad things are especially bad while my good things aren’t especially good ok this is another instance of me feeling unlucky when it’s not actually true… but! but! i don’t feel particularly attached to any of the good (or bad) things in my life; while i am immensely grateful and happy to have them, i don’t think there’s anything unique/special about them – but that doesn’t detract from their value because replaceability is on a totally different axis; in fact, replaceable-ness makes life feel a little less tenuous because “if I weren’t in this particular circumstance, I’d simply be in some other circumstance” / “if i hadn’t done this, i simply would’ve done something else” / “if I weren’t me, I’d simply be someone else.”

things I wanna do this weekend (but might not be able to because my partner is coming to visit me from the other side of the country!!!)