apt-get's journal

Hello from the other side of this 3-year gap! ^^

This journal deserved much better. I haven't been very honest with myself when it comes to my feelings on holding down such a personal diary; the idea itself is quite entertaining, but sitting down and writing is no easy or automatic matter for me. There's a baseline of sloth and laziness I have to get over in order to drag my hands to the keyboard and start monologuing inside this lonely textbox, but it's not very sexy to both express the desire to write while also subconsciously acknowledging it's not always fun for me. I'm not a natural when it comes to weaving words, and that's okay.

And so it comes down to this: three long years without uploading a new entry. And yet many things happened —

First off, I've gotten engaged! Probably the best thing that's ever happened to me. Everything's shining differently now even though everything's the same; hard to explain, but it's definitely rose-colored. n_n

I graduated uni, officially earning the title of software engineer! Gonna be honest, I was pretty tired of the whole studying thing during my last couple years of university. Kinda happy covid was there to ease the academic burden, and I'd gotten pretty much everything out of it that I wanted by then. I'm still super eager to learn more when it comes to computer science and general STEM stuff, but I'll be better self-studying all that now. After that, surfing on my graduation internships, I found a pretty nice job, building software infrastructure for public infrastructure. Earning money is pretty nice, and I've been learning quite a bit there. The 9-to-5 does get on my nerve, especially since I've been juggling quite a few project responsibilities, and I will eventually transition to becoming my own employer, but for now, this is fine enough.

Thanks to that, I moved to Paris! Living in the metropolis was a BIG upgrade in quality of life after all these years in my isolated dorm. I haven't really been exploring the big city that much in these last couple years, but the convenience of having all the Culture right nearby is already bliss.

On the hobby side of things, I've gone pretty far with the whole DJ livemixing thing. It's been an awesome creative outlet: figuring out how to best combine sound and visuals, combining everything collage style, working on setting up my multimedia manipulation pipelines... all of these are super fun, and the results are something I'm quite proud of. Plus I'm playing live soon!!! (kind of nervous about that one...)

I also actually went ahead and made a stream archive! It was on my project backlog for so long that I'm pretty ashamed of not getting around to it earlier... but it's got everything I wanted to implement for it: proper tag listings, so that it is actually browsable and searchable, along with commentary for every single one of them. I consider each of these streams its own little artifact of a theme or idea I was going for, so it's really important to me that they live in a proper home online, wrapped up in all the context and ergonomics they deserve to shine. The archive was built with SvelteKit, a pretty damn good web framework, which I might just use to rewrite the whole site (this blog included).

There's many more things I'm forgetting to list right now; three years is a long time...

I've changed quite a bit since then, for the better. Three years ago had me tangled up in fear and anxiety, doubtful of my own abilities to live up to my own ambitions and interests. Was I broken? Doomed to a life of torpor and melancholy, unable to accomplish anything, out of focus and left behind? Well, turns out you can get medicated for attention, and it actually helps.

But more importantly, I started working on myself / ourselves ^^ it helps immensely when you've got someone else to support you, whether it's in timekeeping, staying motivated, planning projects, throwing ideas around... loneliness did a number on me back then.

The path ahead is bright, filled with all the things I want to do. And yet I'm scrambling for time! Frustrating, but not a wholly bad feel -- I can see how far I've travelled to get here.

Today's tunes: manzo - My Pace Daiou. Certified genki banger for a show that consistently pulled way above its weight in describing otaku culture, both as it manifested itself 20 years ago and in its deeper, timeless values.