Life Stuff

Graduated about 4 months ago (May 2025), I've been mostly resting, visiting family, and working on smaller projects and grad school applications since. I applied to RPI in august, I'm hoping to hear back soon. Hopefully I get accepted and can start towards a PhD this spring semester (January 2026).

The last month or so has been a lot of change for me, primarily with me and my former partner going our separate ways in life. I've latched onto the motto of "things will be different and that's ok" but it has been hard to adjust. In general, I feel like I'm in a weird limbo/transitionary stage of life, where I don't really have structure in my day to day life and the future is incredibly uncertain, we'll see what happens I suppose.

Working on

I haven't been working on too many projects lately. I started doing Swordtember 2025 but with tools instead, but I've only done a few days and haven't worked on it in a while. In August I was working on a prolog based solver for the game Is This Seat Taken? that works on the first few levels so far.

Most recently I've started doodling a bit in a square mini sketchbook that fits in my purse. I've been saying for years that I want to draw more, so it's nice to finally be spending some time on it. There's something nice about just moving a pen on paper without worrying about the result or overthinking what I'm going to make. I went to the park the other day and sketched some buildings and trees and leaves and stuff. It's a good way to force myself to really look at the world around me too, so I think I'll keep doing it.

Clothes

I've also been thinking about clothes a lot more recently and how I want to present myself. I've narrowed in on 3 major pillars of style that I am attracted to: formal, witchy/nature-y, and punk/goth-ish. I think describing each of these, what they mean to me, and how they relate to each other is out of scope of this now page entry, but I might write a changelog post about it, maybe. In general though, a lot of it is driven by a desire to have more whimsy and fantasy in my life, especially in a way that relates to my passions and values.

Being able to present exactly how I want will require acquiring some new clothes though, so in an effort to be more deliberate about how I wear the clothes I have now and to know what gaps there are that I want to fill, I took photos of my clothes and catalogued them in an app called Whering. I do have some issues with the app, but it mostly does what I want. My profile is @samsthenerd, if you want to look at the outfits I've made on there.

Media I'm Enjoying

Playing

I've still been playing animal crossing on and off, but mostly New Leaf now. I was also playing Is This Seat Taken? I quite enjoyed it, but was mostly thinking about the solver and how to model different constraints and setups.

Most recently, the silksong excitement got me to pick Hollow Knight up again. I stopped at Soul Master when I last played years ago, not sure if I got frustrated and gave up or just distracted by life. I've played it a bunch this week though, I think I have most of the upgrades now and I'm on the boss inside the egg temple. My favorite part of these sorts of games is the recontextualization of areas that comes with new upgrades (one of my favorite things about gen 4 pokemon btw), so I'm not sure how much more I'll be playing this game before moving on to silksong. I'm told there's a lot of secret areas but I might not have the patience to search the map for them, we'll see.

Is This Seat Taken? for Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Official Site

Hollow Knight for Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Official Site

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Listening

I've been listening to a lot of Quinn's stuff recently, mostly lowlife but also some of her older EPs. Also Dazegxd's stuff, mostly Don't Be Stupid, but I had all their stuff on loop for a bit there. I'm very excited about jane remover posting dariacore adjacent stuff on the leroy account again too, very fun music. I've had xaev's to the core and album.leak playing often too.

Reading

I'm in the middle of far sector (few chapters/issues left I think?) and just started planeta. I've been wanting to refamiliarize myself with spanish and figured a graphic novel would be a good way to do that. I also want to start witch hat atelier soon, not sure if I want to read it online or get it physically though.

Far Sector #1 | DC Comics Issue

Planeta - Ana Oncina

Witch Hat Atelier - Wikipedia

Watching

I binged frieren season 1 the other day and I think it may be one of my new favorites. I'm a big fan of using the fantasy trope of elves with long lives as a way to explore human connection being difficult and learning to be more present in your relationships with others. The magic is fun too, I really like the whole "it didn't have to be magic" thing and the idea of enjoying and finding purpose in the process of whatever it is you choose to do. I enjoy that frieren is an unimaginably powerful mage but she's still full of whimsy, always sleepy, and has a hard time waking up early.

I've also been watching dandadan, I like that the main characters are both dorks. The art's cool and I like the character designs. I also watched the superman movie and, like everyone else, quite liked it and the more hopeful take on the character.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

DAN DA DAN

Superman - Apple TV