I placed third All-Around at Nationals!! Just got back from Daytona, Florida for an intercollegiate gymnastics association's nationals tournament. There were a hundred other men in my division. I got third on high bar, too! Other developments: My plan is to take a coding bootcamp in the fall--Lambda School, you may have heard of it since they're blowing up right now. That leaves this summer to build up a runway of some cashola. And I just got a job as a gymnastics coach! They're extremely excited for me to work this summer with their recreation programs and competitive teams. Additionally.. I'll get to practice with the competitive boy's team, for free, up to 16 hours a week. I cannot overstate how excited I am. I'll be training with the best gymnasts in the region, with my old coach, at a top facility. I'm starry-eyed. I'll basically be living in the gym this summer. Now just have to graduate college in five weeks.
That's so cool! I agree they're definitely onto something. They have a pipeline of software developers going right to Facebook, Stripe, myriad startups upon graduation. There's probably a bit of a low-hanging fruit/selection bias with their early success--a horde of would-be engineers with pent-up desire to enter new careers--but I think their income share agreement is a great idea. $30k is a bit steep, though. But for 9 months of intense bootcamping? Plus the final 3 months of job search assistance? I think it's the best way to develop the skills that's available right now on the market, given that I learn best with a commitment device such as regular class and meeting time. I see the program as a way towards developing hard skills and becoming sought-after. A medium-term goal is to use my communication and people skills and become a killer group or project leader. Then maybe start a business. Things get fuzzier the farther I look in the future. And I'm not without my doubts--a friend who owns an online marketing business with 20 employees and knows how to code thinks I could get into the industry without a paid coding camp. What do you think?
insomniasexx did it. She bootstrapped herself into web dev, then started solving a problem that she found obsessive. IMO half of what you are buying is the discipline that financial obligation brings. Do you have anything like classmates in Lambda School? Building connections is a big part of the career track as you know. You can definitely get into the industry without a paid coding camp. You just need to code like crazy.
It's not even the financial obligation that would be committing me. In order of importance/utility to me, it's the schedule and structure primarily, then the sunk financial cost, then the faculty support, and then the credential. When I think on my own about it, I convince myself that a bootcamp is the way to go. When I talk about it with people, especially experienced folks, I start to think that self-starting is the way to go. Would hiring managers really be convinced if I told them, "The ~yearlong gap in relevant work experience is because I taught myself" and then coded them FizzBang?
I know NASA people. I know Caltech people. I know physicists, I know scientists, I have had a truly blessed interaction with marvels and mysteries so profound that I couldn't be sussed to ride my bike a mile to watch Endeavor truck through Compton. You know what science always needs? OUTREACH. That wonder in your head? The exultation that muted the voices? That is what launches wonders. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. We live in an era where scientific discovery has been so annihilated by jaded cynicism that not one, not two but three billionaires have said "fukkit I'll do it myself." Know who the last person to visit the Mariana Trench was? James Fucking Cameron. We killed the Superconducting Supercollider because Tom Delay needed to be punished - fuck science. You know what you should do? You should get a couple hummin' telescopes and sit 'em out where little kids and vaguely-interested parents can look at the universe through 'em. You should figure out how to get your locals enthused by the mysteries all around 'em. You should let everyone you meet know what a miraculous universe we live in because we can see it with our own eyes. You should channel your galactic fanboi every chance you get because every time a cynic sees a dreamer flying their flag high, their cynicism melts a little more. And when the cynicism is melted away the miracles can flow. ...Oh, you're already doing that? Well carry on, then. Because all the shouldas in the world aren't worth a single WILL. Why the hell not? Why the hell not? But you can inspire those who will. I suspect you already have. The longer you stick around, the more people you will inspire. Not gonna lie. You inspire me and I'm one of the most jaded cynics I know. I mean, shit. I didn't ride my bike a mile to see Endeavor truck through Compton.I'll never fly a plane.
Or build a satellite.
Or work for a space company.
Or do work that is going to make a difference.
At least I have the thought that I'll be dead soon and it won't matter anyway.
Was thinking all of these things while reading what you wrote, but of course, KB expresses them so much better than I ever will. I feel all of these same things, but at least you are doing space outreach work. My sorry ass just works in an office and wishes she could even do that. Sometimes I think about volunteering at the observatory here. Maybe this post is the impetus I need to actually get off my ass and do it.
I can relate to your second-to-last paragraph a great deal. It's something I've struggled with a lot. I can't help but think about what I could be doing if i'd been put on meds back in elementary school. Of course, it may not have made a damn bit of difference. One of my big revelations over the last couple days is actually how little treatment has changed me. And also how grand my expectations were for myself, which is taking some re-adjusting. I think the Internet fucks up our perspective, in that we lose ourselves in the crowd, and can often fail to see the little successes and positive ripples we send out. I don't mean you should be happy with less, necessarily, and that's the part I'm still trying to deal with: how to be more realistic without feeling like I'm settling or giving up.
Nothing interesting has happened to me in about a year. By interesting I mean catastrophic. This after being arrested four times in 18 or so months and sleeping in the woods behind a grocery store for several days at one point. Part of me wants to give a full rundown of October 2016 to June 2018 and a larger part thinks that's some form of weird bragging about how bad I let my life get. There's also a big narrative hole in the beginning of September 2017 because I don't remember what the fuck happened
And now I will take you to... the Weather! Sounds like it should be part of a Welcome to Night Vale episode.She was described by police as "armed" and "extremely dangerous." Later she was described by the FBI as "dead," and "no longer a threat."
I thought I was taking "lost wax casting for jewelry" class this quarter. Turns out I'm taking "beat the shit out of it with a hammer" class. This is not particularly useful from a watchmaking standpoint. From an aesthetic standpoint it's bullshit too as my instructor is fond of copper for banging the shit out of, as well as lots of visible toolmarks. Monday we listened to a guy who went from being a touring MMA thug to being a "hammersmith" - he makes "vessels" out of copper and silver by banging on them with a hammer. He brought some. Including the white cotton gloves you need to put on to handle them. He had a "vessel" that took him a year to make. He's trying to sell it for $21,000. Fuck everything about that. There's a country called Global Blue whose whole world is getting you a refund on the taxes you paid while on vacation. They have a 40-year, 50-country history of what people from where buy on vacation and what they pay for it. And while the 1%ers buy an average of five luxury items a year, the global middle class buys something they can't afford, purely because they think it's cool, every year. According to RBC, one in ten Americans who make over $100k a year are planning on buying a Rolex in 2019. Seems awfully specific, doesn't it? But that sort of specificity is readily available. And I'm in a program that thinks you should either (A) make things that any schlub can buy without having to justify it to anyone or (B) exhaust countless hours into your "vision project" that you schlep around to art fairs that you're not being paid for so that you can make things that any schlub can buy without having to justify it. She taught us how to sharpen #11 blades once. Which are ten cents each, Amazon Prime. I appreciate frugality. But when you're selling sunk time, the less time you sink the more you're paying yourself per hour. a year in the making. $21k. I've been busily hammering nickel silver into a ball, one hemisphere at a time. I'm about 20 annealings through the process at this point and I have about 2/3rds of a ball. I'm to the point where a sandbag and a ball peen hammer decreases my radius about a 32nd of an inch each time... because we don't have dapping blocks big enough to do this for some asinine reason. I nearly bought that dapping block yesterday. $130. Because then the problem would be solved and I'd have perfectly mirror-smooth hemispheres in about 30 minutes. But people already resent me for being able to afford tools and materials (my instructor said that a hand-faceted synthetic sapphire I have "almost made her stop hating gemstones") and then I'd be stuck with 15lbs of dapping blocks which are mostly useful for hammering bottlecaps into beads. Got a buddy. Takes 130 hours to make a watch dial. Buys a movement, buys a case, buys a strap, buys a box, sells it for $30k. As my cousin pointed out, that's "lawyer money." He's sold ten of 'em. And I don't know what would offend my class more - the fact that he's selling his work for $30k or the fact that he's only putting 130 hours into it. Or the fact that the reason I don't have a rose engine is I'm working on programming a CNC machine to do it in 130 minutes. I've triangulated myself to a peerless corner of the world again. It's lonely here. There are no signposts. But people I haven't talked to in a decade are looking me up and asking me what watch they should buy because I posted a picture on Instagram and that was all it took to remind them that watches are cool and they should buy one. I've got three "daddy wore it 'til he was dead" watches in my drawer right now, to be refurbished for others, that together aren't worth $5. The proletariat has been cowed into believing that only the most ostentatious asshole on the planet pays more than a hot meal's worth for jewelry but then they hang onto it for fucking generations. Unless it's a fucking Apple watch. That shit you'll buy every other year for $500 because we haven't punched each other down on consumer electronics for some asinine reason. It occurred to me yesterday that when you start virtue signaling your allegiance to the social strata above yours, that strata commends you while your current class castigates you. Your boss will say "nice watch" and mean it; your friends will say "nice watch" and mean "...douchebag." I'm quick to point out that my Schadenporsche cost Prius money but a friend invited me to test drive his $170k i8 roadster yesterday. And when I wore the 14k Omega I fixed for a friend to pick up my daughter I could feel the eyes of all the teachers on me while knowing the guy who arranges the money for the school would love to see it. You know who's paying to rebuild Notre Dame? LVMH and Kering. Cheapest brand in LVMH's stable is Sephora. Cheapest thing Kering owns is Saint Laurent. That 300 million euros you heard about? 200 of it is LVMH, 100 of it is Kering. And on the one hand, it's horrifying that a bunch of luxury marketers can just throw a third of a billion euros at a reconstruction project. But on the other hand Kering cleared 3 billion euros last year and Renault cleared 57. You know what everyone in the watch world is mad about right now? The fact that Timex is assembling watches in America again but they're using quartz. TIMEX. I've got a Timex movement. It says "no jewels unadjusted." When you wind it it makes a sound like tinsel being crushed between your teeth. Because on the one hand, who on earth would buy a $500 timex when that will get you a beautiful made-in-Shenzen Apple watch? But on the other hand who on earth would buy a $500 timex that doesn't have 21 jewels and COSC certification? This is why country clubs exist - so that both sides can hate each other without having to think it through. And I'm not in one and I don't want to be and the amount of opportunity being buried in prejudice makes my heart heavier than a useless $130 dapping block I don't want to be judged for buying.
$62,000,000.00 Sixty-two million dollars That's what my company will get paid for the next 5 years of work, if the proposal I wrote wins the government contract. Now I have to get to work on six more bids that are due before the end of the month, none of which are worth as much, but all of which we need to win, and require a similar amount of work. Government contracting is stupid. And lucrative. Sometimes.
I’m zonked. I’m in SF. We had a VIP client today and it went really well. Pretty exciting stuff. Someday I need to write an account of my Forever Labs journey. It’s been full of ups and downs. Currently we are in an “up.” Turns out a good childhood friend is filming here in SF (he’s an actor) and we are grabbing dinner. I have a 5am flight. Doh! Be good, Hubski!
A short list of great ideas that I've had over the years that have been preemptively stolen from me by other people. Breakfast sandwiches. Finger moistener for counting money/sorting papers. Recordings of nature sounds to help people fall asleep. Hugelkultur. My genius only goes unappreciated because clearly, I was born too late in history.
I independently developed horseshoe theory in a friend's filthy bedroom that smelled like cat shit when I was 20. It wasn't as robust as the real one but it was kinda cool when I learned about horseshoe theory this year because apparently I was on to something the same summer I smoked a bunch of weed and realized left turns on that city's weird access road/overpass system were the same as regular right turns everywhere else because the yield rules are similar
Did Hugelkultur with my housemates in a cool Burner house I ran for a few years. Holy crap that produced a LOT of food! Worked really well. The six of us in the house had a common budget and common meals every day of the week. Most of our veggies came out of our yard. That shit works, man.
I was just thinking it'd be a great way to create a small hill for a flower bed, something where you don't have to worry about whether or not you can accidentally mow the flowers. I was telling this idea I had to my friend, who works at a garden center, about how it probably wouldn't be too hard to build a mound for flowers over the course of about five years. Every time there's a windstorm, collect the branches into a circular pile. Do this all year. Then come spring, when you're dumping out any excess and leftover soil, dump them on the pile of branches. Add leftover mulch, buy more soil, do whatever to better fill in the mound. Rinse and repeat every year until the mound gets to the diameter and height you want, and then convert it into a flower bed. "That's a thing," he said. "People need to stop thinking of my ideas before I do," I said. "It's called hugelkulture. Look it up, you'll really like it." So I did, and I do.
Remember Slaughterbots? I had a vision of a Chuck E. Cheese watching workmates and patrons falling around him as he grabbed his big head in disbelief. I then had a vision of mascots with machine guns strafing slaughterbots. Sorry, but I had to share this vision.
I remember being annoyed at the Slaughterbots video. I can't remember why. Perhaps because the dystopian future presented in the film would pretty much immediately usher in an era of fashionable ski masks a la Vance's The Moon Moth, perhaps because when it came out, killbots were already a multi-year reality and the only thing the Future of Life institute gives a shit about is the "AI" portion of the problem. I'm required to do a presentation on a "ritual object" - something with much pomp and circumstance associated with it. I chose to do automata. What turned out to be interesting is that the history of automata dates back to 900BC and aside from a short proletariat window, it's always been about luxe toys for the ultrawealthy to impress their peers. That short proletariat window? Full of nightmare fuel. Shadowy forces have chosen to kill political bloggers, therefore the future is dark because AI for some reason. Yet it's not the "chosen to kill political bloggers" that bothers people it's the "AI." It's as if the intelligentsia are saying "trust us - we know when someone is worth killing randomly but if you inject AI into the equation, Skynet is gonna murder John Connor." Your vision is interesting. It's the automata protecting humanity. Asimov would be proud.
You say that like you don't want to live in CV Dazzle world where everyone looks like Aladdin Sane.Perhaps because the dystopian future presented in the film would pretty much immediately usher in an era of fashionable ski masks a la Vance's The Moon Moth
I googled "worst David Bowie cosplay" to see if a picture of myself looking like Chris Farley in KISS makeup came up. Not because such pictures exist, but because the idea of me attempting to pull off Bowie was so evocatively bad that I figured it would conjure such an image into existence. It did not. It did, however, reveal the "rebel rebel princess."