october

rip lady liberty

justin scawful • 29 October 2019

i just woke up and i had a few pretty vivid dreams last night. the main event of my slumber was a dream about a penthouse party in new york where the statue of liberty (which was for whatever reason deeper inland in the city) came crashing down in front of our eyes while people recorded the disaster with their phone and continued to party despite the chaos. this says a lot about our society and i believe symbolizes the slow collapse and nihilistic onlooking we take towards the end of our democracy. it also managed to finally debunk the idea that we never see our phones in our dreams since at the very end of this section of my dream i got my phone back from the ruins of lady liberty and only lamented about the small crack in the screen and not the destruction of an american icon.

yeezus is (no longer) king

justin scawful • 28 October 2019

so jesus is king dropped. and it was a hot mess. not in a cute life of pablo kind of way either. in like a super undercooked and rushed vibe. we waited basically a whole year after all the yandhi hype and build up and got a really poorly done gospel record that mostly just concentrated on kanye's hyper religiosity as a means of communicating his own ego and grievances as he usually does but without the same level of polish and artistic flair as he usually does. and while i'm not really convinced this is actually the direction he will continue to go because the man changes moods like girls change shoes but i definitely see this as a turning point in his career. at least, in my opinion he has done nothing but create amazing albums for the last 15+ years but this was just so mediocre and uninspired.

granted i didn't like yeezus when it came out either but i was also younger and didn't give it a chance like at all. looking back now it's one of my favorite projects of his and i listen to it cover to cover pretty regularly. giving jik several listens i'm really just left disappointed. there's a few good songs on the record like selah, follow god, and use this gospel but they are padded out by some of the worst vocal performances and struggle bars of kanye's career. when i rated it initially i gave it a 6/10 so i'll stand by that for now but that's a very light 6. with tyler, chance, and kanye dropping mediocre ass records this year and just annoying me with their evolution and public persona i think it might be time for a new generations of titans to emerge and save the rap industry.

post modern title

justin scawful • 21 October 2019

i've had a very busy week. working on top of school is definitely setting in now halfway through the semester. it's proving to be quite the challenge but i am determined to get through it. i had a few panic attacks this week, one of which tuesday i actually thought was a heart attack and called 911 during my irrational episode. the ambulance came and took my blood pressure and oxygen levels and reassured me i was fine. i didn't end up going to the hospital or getting charged for their arrival. in fact, the first thing the paramedic asked me was if i had anxiety. evidently it's really common for people with anxiety attacks to call 911 thinking they're having a heart attack. the next day i panicked in class worrying about the shortness of breath i had while walking up the stairs. i ended up eating some sushi after school and drinking water and being able to calm down.

so now i've got a doctors appointment scheduled for tomorrow to make sure im okay and all, and i also saw a counselor friday to talk about this new kind of panic attack i experienced. i'm feeling positive today about things and am doing my best to do healthy things to avoid triggering another attack. i've been cleaning my room, disposing of old things, reorganizing, and staying productive. i skated for an hour today to get some coffee and do tricks. i really threw away a lot of junk papers and old things i had hoarded from my apartment which i was proud of.

i didn't do well on my logarithms test in math. i made more silly arithmetic mistakes while somehow managing to get the radioactive decay and compound interest problems right, as well as the extra credit. im trying to shift my thinking away from it since the lowest grade gets dropped at the end of the semester. so far i'm enjoying the trigonometry fundamentals we've moved onto more than the advanced algebra skillset we spent the first nine weeks building. a lot of factoring and polynomials. blegh. it helped me think about variables but it's just such a pain keeping track of sign changes and reciprocals for rational expressions.

i just caught an error in my programming assignment i submitted last week for c. the function required the array to be passed to it but instead of updating the array inside the function i just determined the result and returned the array subscript for a control variable like a dumbass. i've done really good on all the other programming assignments so far but i'll definitely get some points docked for this. whoopsie.

scary szn

justin scawful • 11 October 2019

i figured i needed to get a blog entry in before it gets too late in the month. i always have ideas of what to write but then when it comes to sitting down and doing it i kind of have a loss for words. i think i want to work on my personal youtube channel and do an update video on all the projects i'm working on. i'd cover the website, the zelda hack, the podcast, and anything else i can think of really. it's just with all the stuff i'm trying to do, the process of logging it all kind of falls to the wayside. i need to get the discussion board for zelda running so i can start uploading discussion content from the podcast, but i also want to get the comics/quests going since that will be more creatively involved. perhaps i can abstract the posting and image concept to create one set of convenient functions for it. right now a lot of the posting is still handled very crudely.

i got an 80% on the last math test which made me feel a lot better. i was worried i would not do well, so as long as i can keep up a B average i will be at peace and that bad test from last month will get dropped. now we are working on exponentials and logarithms which was a lot easier than i expected but the process of graphing them can be a bit abstract. i also got an 82% on my first western civ test so i'm not upset with that, i still have an A in that class and all the others. my c programming midterm is coming up monday so i really should do a quick refresher on the language but i did so much reading over the summer i am confident in my ability. i've gotta figure out what topic i want to do for my main argumentative essay that'll be do at the end of the semester so i can start researching it as well.