p̸h̴o̸⁴c̵e̴ₓa̵ @pho4cexa@tiny.tilde.website

hello for like 10 minutes Minneapolis, Minnesota, you seem nice

"braintree?" why the heck did boston area people name a town after some irrationally arrogant eBay/PayPal shit? from what i've been hearing they have self respect around here and don't like the silicon valley tech bro scene, good people move here from there to escape it

wait

it was settled in 1625?

and named after an even older place in England https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braintree,_Essex

fuckin silicon valley bros ripped off their good name!

it's so nice to be back in an environment where casual cussin' is totally acceptable at work, in meetings, from the boss and the very nicest of my coworkers

i'm glad i did not say the words "alley wiffay" or "alooeef," that my brain suggested, aloud to any boston natives, while looking for the red line train to alewife

surely this town alewife is not pronounced "ale wife"

holy shit it is

soo

fuck it

imma do what i should have done in high school

put maximum effort into the computer shit that i'm okay at, and enjoy it

"specialization is for insects"
insects like me fuck yeah
(and by the way most of your scifi sucked old man)

but even in middle school i knew that i wasn't smart like the other "gifted" higher-ed-track kids in advanced-placement classes were

they could stay awake in AP european history

i could never be that. i'm just clever with computers sometimes

as i tried to tell the school guidance counselor but she didn't listen and put me in advanced classes i gave no shits about that i'd fail and had to spend every summer vacation retaking in summer school

why wonder about MIT when i still get apprehensive about the thought of attending a mere state-school grad program

maybe i'm feeling impostor syndrome, like the likes of me who barely escaped state school with a bachelor's shouldn't be anywhere near this city containing 52 institutions of higher education, some the oldest and most revered in the world

i think maybe MIT is pretty fuckin awesome but academic achievement was poisoned for me and that's something i just get to accept

so now i'm tourist-ing around boston and cambridge and it's nothing like the impression i had of it. i kindof love the city so far

maybe i'm just projecting but it feels like the atmosphere is charged with young peoples' hopeful yearning to achieve things

so i have my personal angst about MIT plus other good (ladyada, opencourseware) and bad (aaron swarz, star simpson) impressions

could i have attended MIT, if my life were different? does that really matter to me?

for the first time in my life i find myself in and around the MIT campus, and having many feels about it

because it was such a keystone of my childhood

in that my guidance in childhood for my future was the phrase: "you'll get a full scholarship to MIT (or else.)"

it was a verbal cudgel, muttered and roared, hundreds of times, that my psycho parent used to mold me

even if depression hadn't tanked my grades, even if i was somehow MIT material, i wouldn't have gone. out of pure spite

i've been at my new job a week and i'm about to get on an airplane to the opposite corner of the country for it and i still feel like if i talk about enjoying it, i might stumble, or get caught out as a total impostor, or wake up

maybe it will feel "real" when i find a discomfort that i must struggle to adapt myself to, but so far not even Java or Mac hardware is that

is the job as nice as it feels or are my brain pills working really well? lol idk

i want a super high resolution 24x36 poster print of this except with the recursive centaur