Category: Blarghing

There is a section in American Gods which detailed the early slave trade in a gruesome fashion. It follows a pair of twins as they were transported from their home, onto the slave ship and finally as they were separated in the New World. They never saw each other again, with the brother dying in the slave revolt of Haiti and the sister eventually finding a semi-fulfilling life (maybe?) in New Orleans.

I’m not sure why this particular passage hit me so deeply. Part of the reason might be my personal interactions with twins, and seeing how they can be so intertwined. Forcefully separating any family is a travesty, but destroying the bonds of fraternal or identical twins seems somehow worse. The chapter reminded me of Three Identical Strangers, and how even though the triplets were separated, they presented similar personality traits when the reunited years later.

Maybe it’s how Gaiman described the entire affair. While he did write about the physical tortures that characters had to suffer through, he also detailed all the new names that the character had assigned to them. This little detail really made me pause. I guess I’ve never really thought about how humanizing a name is, how an identity is so important to self worth.

If I write enough, hopefully I can better express how poignant passages touches me.

Sort of inspired by the video by GMTK,  I spent a few hours last week making the following graph, showing synergy between the Silent cards. The arrow between card A and card B means that A makes B better.

Some of them are pretty obvious, but others, less so (example: Piercing Wail and Well-Laid Plans is quite good). There are also other cases where a card is “good” with anything: Burst is obviously “good” with any card, but particularly good with Catalyst and After Image can be procced by any card for example.

This definitely isn’t complete, and the Silent is my worst character in terms of heart kills so I would appreciate feedback.

I’m the only one in my village wearing a mask. And the mayor isn’t even social distancing??? Tsk tsk.

On the very long drive down to Florida, I listened to the Crazy Rich Asians audiobook. The whole time, I just couldn’t understand how the movie made such a big splash when the book just felt was so unrelatable on so many levels, with a prose that is simply… adequate. I honestly thought “shit, how did this book get turned into a film. I don’t want this book to reflect Asian-Americans.”

The main plot between Rachel and Nick was, in most ways, a standard feel-good romcom variations, but subplots involving Astrid and Eddie were jarring. Were we suppose to sympathize with a multimillionaire heiress  who suspects her husband was cheating on him? What about a conceited “family” man who’s main purpose in the plot is to further magnify the fact that money doesn’t buy happiness? Like the people in the story, it just seems to me that there’s too much fluff between the covers, and not enough substance

… which is probably why the movie was such a big hit. The math is simple: glamour + good actors = pretty decent film.

 

I’ve learned a new word to describe an incredibly specific event:

Mondegreen: mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning

Surprisingly, the Wikipedia page never mentions the Taylor Swift song where people all think it’s “Starbucks lovers” instead of “list of ex lovers.”

And here I was for a few weeks thinking it’s a love song about selling out and corporate greed.

Otherwise known as a SMURFETTE, and unwitting namesake for a principle describing how in many popular culture “a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined.”

Honestly, what a great name for an absolutely terrible trend in media. Maybe Joe Biden can learn something about this.

The recent Sunday crossword puzzle had a clue relating to the source of bay leaves, whose answer was LAUREL. I was curious afterwards and stumbled upon two horrifying uses:

1. They’re used in entomology as an “active ingredient in killing jars.” Apparently, the tender leaves releases vapors which slowly kills small insects. It turns out, the essential oil concentration is the active ingredients and not some intrinsic mechanic property, which really begs the question of why people fall for those MLMs shelling oils.

   Speaking of…

2. Maybe burning a bay leaf does have noticeable effects on the human body as this website suggests, but it seems there’s a non-zero population in the world who like to think that burning this dried plant leaf can also bring fame and fortune. Maybe it’s because it’s the color green? Maybe because bay leaf sounds somewhat like bay life, and San Francisco is part of Silicon Valley? Maybe it’s just humans wanting to believe in the supernatural? Or just an attractive person able to convert superstition into a successful YouTube career?

On the issue of using them in cooking, I firmly believe they are overhyped and doesn’t really contribute much.

 

 

The year started off like any other year, with the exception that there were significantly more ophthalmology based puns, until a little virus blossomed into a pandemic. The resulting quarantine is messy: toilet paper became a commodity worth it’s volume in gold, Zoom overtook Skype as the de facto way to FaceTime people, and the Baskin-Robbins logo is associated with Joe Exotic.

Another tragedy is my haircut. I’ve never really liked how my coiffure looked after an appointment, and I always say “it’ll look better after a few days.” This was a lie. The truth is, my hair didn’t get better. It was moreso I settled. It was (and still is) basically an unhappy relationship.

The barber always asked me how I wanted it cut, and I always replied “It was four weeks ago since my last haircut” then they trim off four weeks worth of hair and happily take my twenty dollars plus tip. The problem is, I usually never liked what my hair looked like four weeks ago, nor that haircut from eight weeks ago ad infinitum. Just a reminder, my hair looked like:

Please ignore the Transition glasses.

Within the last few months, I actually became more comfortable with my hair. And now, with this stupid quarantine, I’m going to stroll into the barbershop looking like the Geico caveman

and telling them “It’s been … two months since my last haircut. Please save me” and they happily take my $20 with tip.

This nice problem was in the analysis section of Putnam and Beyond: prove

\begin{align*}
\lim_{n\to \infty} n^2 \int_0^{1/n} x^{x+1} \, dx = 1/2.
\end{align*}

The solution is quite nice, and simply relies on the fact that $\lim_{n\to 0^+} x^x = 1$, hence for $n$ large enough, we can approximate the integral with $\int_0^{1/n} x\, dx$ instead.
There’s an easy generalization of this problem:
\begin{align*}
\lim_{n\to \infty} n^{k+1} \int_0^{1/n} x^{x+k} \, dx = 1/(k + 1).
\end{align*}

Generalizing this fact, we don’t even need the composite exponential as the proof just need a $f(x)$ to be a function such that $\lim_{x\to 0^+} f(x) = 1$ with an integral bound approaching $0$.