Ravings of an Undead Cheese Minion

Lifting, engineering study, and 18 mile long run done. Then time spent outside, going to Rowley's and Splash Summit. Then cybersecurity, music, art, and reading/writing, all done with relative depth. Cleaned while listening to audiobooks. Dinner, code, games, internet, maybe watch a quick show or movie, then sleep.  Sleep. After a week of only sleeping 6.5-7 hours a night, my body can finally sleep in as long as needed. As a result, even despite 240mg caffeine that morning, I slip into rest. Maybe in the morning, I will explore lucid dreaming and astral projection, but tonight I rest.  The cool sheets sink into me, and I sink into my soft mattress. I hold a pillow and rest my head on another pillow. My earplugs combine with the brown noise from Alexa and the hum of the ceiling fan to block out everything else. I'm in my comfiest clothes, light as possible for summer. The air conditioning is coming through.  Nothing matters anymore. None of all my fears, like: We're all go...

Freshman year: Imagine falling in love here! Imagine taking a walk with her - whoever she may be - hand-in-hand by the duck pond under a starlit night, listening to the stream. You could work on assignments together and be in love and know you'd spend eternity together! I'd practically skip around the campus just thinking about her when we're apart!  Senior year: I am going to blast ICP and ignore everyone because I am completely out of energy and this place is hopeless. Love my coursework though. But I relate to absolutely zero of these people. I'm done. CHECK OUT.  

I'm so sick of waking up, I just might fucking stop I've got red on my fingertips, and I'll stay cursed 'till I fucking drop  - Ghostemane

Or in the case of the Osmonds, put your entertainment complex somewhere else.  Not in Provo Canyon. Come on, really? I practically live up there. The peace of my summer Saturday long runs up there is one of the few things that's kept me going the past few years.  I didn't even know there was a "gravel pit", but it doesn't matter. The construction and traffic will ruin it. Hopefully, the groups keep fighting. Holy hell I hate politics.  Previously my opinion of the Osmonds was "yeah, they exist I guess" and now it's "who the hell are these people? Get away from our canyon." 

We interrupt my final coding block of the night (and I really need to wrap this up, I'm wiped) for a quick WTF moment.  Dude has been whining about TADC for weeks, but whatever. I love animation. I can tolerate it. I like the page overall.  Finally, this person watches the finale at the theater -- so they've watched all of TADC -- and they freak out about it. They hate Gooseworx, they hate the voice actors, and apparently it's a show for white queer people who don't care about anyone but themselves.  My brother in Christ. You watched the whole series. The entire show. You are just as bad as those of us who you are slamming.  Also, you're not progressive if you mock queer people. It doesn't matter what race they are. You cannot mock queer people as a whole, for being queer, and that's what you are doing.  LMAO  Unfollowed.  And I'm still a TADC fan and I like my little Gummigoo keychain plush.  What the hell? Unhinged. This person needs a job. And ...

I dropped Duolingo Japanese because they didn't integrate kana well. I hated having it as a separate tab. I also wasn't learning any grammar. I kept duo for Spanish though.  I tried Airlearn and thought it was good at first. Actually, it sucks. It advances too quickly and does NOT review well, if it reviews at ALL before testing. Terrible design.  Now I'm trying HeyJapan. So far, it makes sense AND you can watch anime clips, and I'm only on the free version rn too. 

First off, re Oliver Tree: I never had a strong desire to ride in a helicopter and I'm probably just going to avoid them forever now, barring a medical emergency.  I love airplanes though. Well, maybe not how cramped economy is, or how dry the cabins are, or how people always close their windows now, or that one time I got stranded overnight in Vegas.  But generally? Planes are enjoyable to me. I like when they drop in the air! And I like the uninterrupted study time (unless the person in front of me almost destroys my laptop by putting down their seat while I have my tray table up. Dude, really? Breeze extra legroom, here I come.).  I also love roller coasters, water slides, and carnival rides...obviously.  Carnival rides are actually statistically just as safe as fixed rides. Why? They've got to be inspected, by LAW, every time they're constructed. People blow out of proportion the rare incidents of negligence.  Two helicopters colliding? Miss me with that cra...

Think about the type of people who post deeply within coding communities. Not just lobste.rs (hell, I don't even have an invite and I'm just focused on lurking) but even stuff like Freya Holmer's YouTube channel, or open source projects, or various code forums.  Now think about LinkedIn bros. It is impossible to log into that hellscape of a site with your desire to live intact. Increasingly, Hacker News too, though it tends to have both types.  I'm with the lobste.rs crowd all the way. I would unironically rather get paid less and never climb the ladder at all, even stay at L2 forever (though I should HOPE I can become a senior) if it meant I got to dive deep into code every single damn day of my life.  I'm never going into management, unless it's designing and building my own theme park resort. I want to forget that LinkedIn even exists. I want to be so wrapped up in whatever I'm coding that the outside world fades away. 

or is it just not going out for dinner? Lol though. Not giving that up. If my friends are going out for food, so am I. They just weren't today so I doordashed some Rancherito's and DQ.  Ghost at 5:20 AM today. 100% daily value vitamin C and yep, 200mg caf.  But seriously, I studied engineering for 30 minutes, did Yoga with Adrienne for 6 minutes, lifted at the gym for about 45 minutes, then ran 18 miles with the last 2 miles under 7 minutes, then went to Lindon Aquatics Center for 2 slides and the lazy river, then went to Oremfest with a few friends, then studied cybersecurity on TryHackMe and did a few clarinet scales, then went to the church to practice piano for church tomorrow, then did Duolingo, then did art for 90 minutes, then did an hour of reading/cleaning and writing, and now I've only got two work blocks left, one which is 10 minutes of mind work and the other is coding, maybe an hour MAX, probably more like 30 minutes...ending with gaming.  And I haven't fal...

I used to have a spotless apartment in 2019 -- it was a resolution I made to myself. Got out of the crappy Avenues, into a brand new fresh luxury apartment, and kept it spotless. But, I did this in an unsustainable way, cleaning for hours a week. It was often 3-4 hours on Wednesdays and 3-4 hours on Saturdays. Wednesdays I'd get to bed way too late. Saturdays I'd often lose a huge chunk of the day to cleaning, not getting out of the house until the shadows were lengthening. BUT, it did feel pretty amazing to live in such a clean place.  Grad school happened, and I could not hold it. I slipped and it became messy, and it's been that way ever since.  When I read Atomic Habits, I started cleaning a tiny bit every day. When my friend recommended to me the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks, I realized that I could both read (for improving my writing and for fun!) and clean at the same time. Every single day.  But it still stayed messy. I was cleaning every day, sure, but it wasn...

No seriously. They're not wrong that the theme parks will likely improve underneath Josh, but the dude still laid off a bunch of people from Disney. So he's not some saint.  Even so, and even when they insist you can't tour epic in one day (you can), I like that website a lot. It's my favorite source of Disney parks info. DFB is also good but it's more clickbaity. 

Still upset over losing one of my writing groups.  My other one is fantastic, so I'll be just fine, but I still keep spinning over this. Did those six years mean nothing  to you people? I thought we were friends.  I guess not.  But the weak will purge themselves. If you weren't dedicated, and you quit when it got hard, then you didn't care enough and you will reap the consequences of that.  When you love something, you dedicate yourself to the pursuit of excellence in it. There is no other option. There is no other choice. You do not bend or break when it gets difficult. It does not matter if you suck. It does not matter if you fail. You pursue and you charge forward and you do not make exceptions or excuses.  In the end, the ones who did not quit are the one who will achieve their dreams.  "It's not the tree that forsakes the flower, But the flower that forsakes the tree."  I don't have a lot of patience for quitters. There is no forgiveness for ...

The hardest part was honestly the ordering of various steps, such as the steps of TLS. I feel that I need to review it a lot more, especially for when I do CompTIA. Since unlike THM, it is fully closed-book and closed-internet. RIP.  TIME BREAKDOWN Part 1 12:10-12:25 Part 2 1:00-1:15.  Part 3:  1:26-1:36  Part 4 1:41-1:58 (17 minutes, RIP)  Part 5 2:09-2:28 (19 minutes; oof)  Part 6 2:35-2:55 or so SCORE: 580/600

I can't do the Serpentine Slides anymore. The backscratching is worse this year than ever before. All the duct tape is gone, replaced by what appears to be new caulking that has not been properly sanded. It cut into my back and left me with welts all across it. It hurt to lay down shirtless, but having a shirt on made it generally okay.  I don't know what the hell is going on, but it looks like it's going to be just me, the speed slides, and the pipeline tower from now on.  Oh and Pipeline was only running ONE. SLIDE. What the heck? Two of them were totally dry. 

Before the Farmington Half, both the night before and the morning of, I drank a packet of LMNT electrolyte drink mix. My mom had gotten me them for Easter.  Cramping? None. Calves felt a tiny bit weird last 2 miles so I didn't pick up the pace that much. But I still cut down from around 6:50/mile to 6:40/mile. No feelings of being faint either, which is huge as someone who can't really eat a lot before races and has to eat everything after finishing.  They are REALLY salty, and that's the whole point. I'm converted. 

every time I listen to "Flashing Lights" by Kanye and he goes I'm more of the Trips to Florida I think about how I'm going to WDW in January and want to go to Orlando as much as possible. This pushes me to work harder. So, yay I guess? Let's feed the machine of CAPITALISM, apparently.  But the morning sun over Epic Universe or walking through the trees in Animal Kingdom or walking into Fun Spot on a starry night...or eating at the End Zone food court, browsing the menus, figuring out which line is the shortest, standing in MK mobile ordering cheeseburger spring rolls and a volcano dole whip... Hell yeah.  And the weather's so breezy Man, why can't life always be this easy? 

I'm sticking with Duolingo for Spanish and Norwegian, but with something like Japanese, Duolingo was just NOT working. The kana writing was disjointed and the grammar was not taught. I could not intuit it.  So even with the weird AI voice and AI generated images, Airlearn is legitimately better than Duo for Japanese. I might even try it for Tagalog just because I was burning out on Mango. Mango is super dry and I am pretty sure it's also  AI-generated. Or spoken by the most bored voice instructor known to mankind.  I need bite-sized, tiny tiny TINY lessons that fit into a busy day. I'm in no rush with language study, whereas I kind of am with other stuff, like art, writing, and code. Hell, I might even use AirLearn for chess instead of chess.com, but we will see. 

This starts tomorrow after lunch. So the 8 AM start and time requirements stuff do not count for that first day.  If I get a job this week, awesome. I'll accept it. But we cannot plan on such things.  Continue morning engineering block pre-gym, but make it a little bit longer. Focus strongly on PLCs, math, and Arduino.  Must start at 8 AM, but can do CYBERSECURITY first! Extreme focus on Leetcode/DSA/System Design/SQL (at least 3 hours) Bonus: Kaggle Bonus: Data Engineering upskill cloud certs? Then: Daily CS studies (at least 1 hour) This is our actual curriculum, AND we will do it AGAIN in the evening Secondary focus as a “Bonus personal projects block” Then: Daily graphics studies (at least 1 hour) again, do it AGAIN in the evening Yep, you guessed it. Daily games studies. (at least 1 hour) 1 hour only for job apps, but MUST do 5: 3 hybrid, 2 remote OR vice versa STRONG PRIORITY with GOVERNMENT When I say "again in the evening", it's because 7...

Each time I do this, I tell myself it's the last time. Hopefully, this time I really mean it.  What do I mean by this? Art, writing, coding, music, and such should all be done with extreme consistency and high duration, just like fitness. Sometimes I am forced to cut them short in order to interview prep, but I hate doing this, because my coding self-study should keep me sharp enough to not have to. And I think it would -- if I had mastered the routine a lot earlier.  I hate cramming and that's what it feels like I'm doing. I think after this one, I just want to stop. I want to study MY way. Concepts building on concepts. Nice and slow. No derails. Daily blocks as non-negotiable. I wouldn't skip the gym so why do I skip creating?

May and June are my favorite months of the year.  Taking a 1-mile walk at Lakeside Park, 80F. I am physically incapable of going at a fast pace. Instead, I feel weirdly calm and sedate. I feel like everything is going to be all right. I watch the lightest of warm breezes rustle through the flags and windcatchers of the nearby houses. The trees are all light or deep green, their flowers mostly gone. The first bits of cotton blow by, but only one or two.  I look at the pavilions of the baseball diamond, their blue cloth mostly still, and feel so at peace. It reminds me of kites at the beach. It makes me feel like I'm okay. I walk through a patch of shade and it is euphoric.   Soon, in two weeks or so, I'll be walking to Cherry Hill and looking at the little white flowers in the grass. I'll feel the rush of cold water pouring down on me as I sit on my tube and board Kodiak Canyon, with over 5 months of beautiful summer and fall ahead.  I just wish I knew why it felt so ...