Got up pretty late! Was initially going to go to Levels Cafe with Mulan, but eventually decided to go home. Before I called Akaash, I was running kind of late, but I went to Poundsavers (which was pretty cool, they have absolutely every household/kitchen supply that you could ask for, for a seemingly reasonable price to boot). I also wanted to go to Lidl afterwards, but didn’t end up going—ran back home and called Akaash. The call went pretty well, but didn’t seem like we got some significant clarity on the work we were supposed to be doing, but I guess we’ll see in our meeting later today. Afterwards, I wanted to give myself a bit of a break, so I loaded up Hearthstone—it was a pretty big mistake, because I ended up playing for a long time. At this point, I should just know that I’m good enough at arena that if I ever decide to play, it’s very unlikely that I will lose, and so I will keep playing. Therefore, when I play arena, I have to set myself a limit of like 3 games or something, which should take 15-20 min at most. I think that’s a good enough break!
After I was done playing hearthstone, I replied to everyone, including Mulan, and didn’t spend time on my essay (which was the primary urgent task that I wanted to work on), but I read this cool article by BurntSushi (the creator of ripgrep) about how to use FSMs (and by extension tries) for implementing an OrderedSet and OrderedMap.
Also read Trisha’s audiobook, which was really interesting!
Afterwards, Mulan came and I talked with her for a while, then went downstairs to hang out with the Sciennes group. We talked for a bit, played Secret Hitler, tried to figure out what to do next, did a “feelings circle” where we started talking about siblings and family-related stuff (and I brought up that Mulan recently realized that her mom is narcissistic to Kas which I probably shouldn’t have done, I’ll be sure to ask her before I do that next time. Then I played pool with Farsan and ping pong with Lorenzo (I beat him in the first game but he beat me in the second game, with two lucky shots at the end but it was pretty epic and a lot of fun).
Went back up, and sat with @mulan for about an hour while she told me different absolutely shitty experiences and stories that she could never forget, about how her parents treated her while she was younger. Something that really stuck with me was how they expected her to be an adult at such an early time in her life, which might have affected her life in more ways than you might expect (puberty, emotions, personality, etc). The story where she, as a five-year-old, didn’t look after her newborn sister enough, and her mom literally kicked her because she was so angry, is so fucked up in so many ways. I’ll remember to always consider that whenever I’m thinking about certain characteristics that she has or why she is a certain way—that kind of thing scars you for life, and I’ll never undermine the struggle that she goes through every day to put that side of things behind her.
uid: 202003100000 tags: #journal #edinburgh