It occurred to me that perhaps readers of the blog might care about me as a person, and don’t just want a really terrible Cliffnotes of basic neuroscience. It also occurred to me that maybe the reason no one is interested in the things I like is that I never talk about them.

Putting aside all feelings of big-headedness, here’s some cool stuff about me.

I Play The Clarinet

Yeah, Asian guy who plays the clarinet. Surprise!

But I guess that can be interesting. I play jazz clarinet mostly, like Benny Goodman. I also play bass clarinet. In high school I did a couple re-arrangements of big band classics as ballads, and I’d usually put the bari part for bass clarinet. Really interesting sounds you can get out of that.

I think there should be more classical instruments in jazz. Imagine a bassoon playing the lick in Moanin’. Or a French horn playing Blue Trane.

I Have Never Actually Taken A CS Class

I tested out of a bunch of them when I got to college and I just haven’t had to yet. But I’m planning on taking Computer Engneering II next term.

Hopefully you don’t need too much knowledge of electronics for that class. I am so bad at electronics and electricity. I just can’t figure it out at any level of abstraction below, oh, C or so.

I found a torrent of all these old video games about programming a few years ago and it has thoroughly proven to me I should probably not touch assembly under any circumstance.

Man, those games were weird. I looked up spoilers for some of them. In one of them, the final level is you getting an AI to map all of your neurons so it can simulate you cause your body’s about to die, or something like that.

… hm, maybe there’s a reason that’s the game I tried the hardest to beat.

I guess I do have an affinity for wanting to upload my brain. Like, I know you can’t really do that cause the brain is too complicated and so integrated with your nervous and endocrine systems and all. But still.

I can’t put my finger on what it is. It would just be neat to be virtual, I guess.

I Made A Famous Minecraft Mod

It got 1.2 million downloads! Cause it was included in a modpack.

Doubt anyone’s heard of it anymore but it was called VCC, it was about low-level computing. I released it for 1.20.

Minecraft modding has some interesting history. Around 1.20 pressures in the communities for both the major mod loaders kinda boiled over and everyone gave up developing them. So there were several versions after that with next to no modding support. And then asympl0 sort of got it working again and now we have mods again.

Not that I like Java … ugh. If Clojure wasn’t such a nightmare to get up and running I’d use that.

Speaking of Clojure,

Lisp Is My Favorite Language

Or rather, it is really close to my favorite across most categories.

For example, the Lisp I use most often is Racket. I concede it’s kind of irritating to get running, and difficult to keep everything straight in a largish project…

I guess the thing I like about Lisps is how … I don’t want to say “elegant” cause it’s just a cliche. But they are.

It kinda reminds me of higher math, in a way? Like those super elegant math videos that start with some wild premise and over the course of 30 minutes you feel like you ascend to some higher plane of Pure Math Enlightenment. Lisp is like Pure Code Enlightenment. In both cases, you feel so smart you kinda ignore how it’s not actually that useful to tighten loops to points on n-dimensional manifolds or whatever.

I read about experimental all-Lisp operating systems, which sound REALLY cool. Like, imagine being able to rewrite everything about your computer on a whim.

Actually. Imagine being able to do that to yourself. Like, with a BCI you can just do that. You could practice activating like, 8 signals, and then use code to turn patterns of that over time to control your computer or whatever.

I have lots of thoughts about this. I will write them later when I don’t have two essays due Sunday.