because adulthood is lonely

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#187 — Mar 5, 2026 by Evan Chen

Played through For Love is Heartbreak on a whim and was unable to discard or put away a single item in the room.


#186 — Mar 5, 2026 by Evan Chen

… I actually find this rutabaga situation pretty funny.


#185 — Mar 2, 2026 by Evan Chen

can't the IRS learn to use email or something

i swear it's either postal mail or holding on the phone for forever


#184 — Mar 2, 2026 by Evan Chen

Seems like repeatedly pressing the center autosuggestion on my phone currently gives the following sentence:

The only way I could be happy with the fact I can be a good friend is to have you in the corner and I will always love it when I can see your face in my life again

Dunno how to feel about that one.


#183 — Mar 1, 2026 by Evan Chen

Me realizing that the daily database backup script has been broken for two months and I didn't notice. Whoops.


#182 — Mar 1, 2026 by Evan Chen

From Crying in H Mart:

Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.

I envied and feared my mother’s ability to keep matters private, as every secret I tried to hold close ate away at me. She possessed a rare talent for keeping secrets, even from us. She did not need anyone. She could surprise you with how little she needed you. All those years she instructed me to save 10 percent of myself like she did, I never knew it meant she had also been keeping a part of herself from me too.


#181 — Feb 22, 2026 by Evan Chen

So I know xkcd makes fun of tar flags but I have even more difficulty with rsync. I think my default flags should be something like rsync -zhvaxPAX.


#180 — Feb 21, 2026 by Evan Chen

Answering emails at my desktop feels like clearing a field.

Like, I imagine I'm outside surrounded by grass that's taller than me, and I'm holding this farmer scythe (Vim + Mutt). And I just keep swinging it around wildly, until the emails are all cleared away and I can see in front of me again.


#179 — Feb 21, 2026 by Evan Chen

Look, kids, "I'm just being honest" is not an excuse for being mean. Believe me, I can tell the difference between someone who is being honest because they're trying to help, versus someone looking for an excuse to be mean.


#178 — Feb 18, 2026 by Evan Chen

One of the most surprising things you'll discover, if you start writing essays, is that people who disagree with you rarely disagree with what you've actually written. Instead they make up something you said and disagree with that.

Yeah, that sounds like what I remember on the few occasions I see people talking about math contests on Reddit.


#177 — Feb 17, 2026 by Evan Chen

Messenger.com won't be available after April 14, 2026

fml


#176 — Feb 16, 2026 by Evan Chen

TIL I learned that 않다 is a contraction for 아니하다, so -지 않다 is another example of a grammar pattern in Korean that is actually just the composition of simpler principles. I think that's the thing I find really nice about Korean grammar… so many constructions are actually composed from other ones.


#175 — Feb 13, 2026 by Evan Chen

oh wait I did not know that sl even has command line options. that's cute.


#174 — Feb 13, 2026 by Evan Chen

I'm going to miss having access to eduroam.


#173 — Feb 12, 2026 by Evan Chen

If anyone wants to follow the T-Mobile struggle bus, here's the link. I think at some point I'll make it into a blog post just for comedic effect.


#172 — Feb 10, 2026 by Evan Chen

I finally got around to cleaning up INSTALL.sh in my dotfiles and it feels so much better. That file was an utter mess for the longest time.


#171 — Feb 8, 2026 by Evan Chen

EWD 854 and EWD 1036 talk about the dangers of trying to make predictions about the future by using analogies to the past. Actually I feel like I haven't heard many other people say the same thing.

What happens if I tune out all predictions about radically new territory which are justified with a comparison to the past? Is that ignoring history?


#170 — Feb 8, 2026 by Evan Chen

TIL the story of Čech and higher homotopy groups. Bit of a sad story.


#169 — Feb 8, 2026 by Evan Chen

Nobody told me about tmux being able to detach (like nohup). I'd always assumed it was just something like a window manager inside the terminal. Glad to learn something new.


#168 — Feb 6, 2026 by Evan Chen

Achievement unlocked: file complaint with FCC.gov.