Happy Father's Day!
Trust me when I say I'd actually written part of the post last week, but it was put on hold because it was Darkrai's b-day, and, well... That's more important than getting to finish a diary entry. And, of course, I had it copied just in case, but then I lost it all again because of copying and pasting song lyrics. Ugh. That happens way more often than it should.
I don't think there was much besides talking to Darkrai and mentioning that he has a pretty cool story called "Wander" on Wattpad, so at least it wasn't like I lost hours of work... but it's still frustrating!
Okay, a lot's happened these past few weeks, so I'll get right to it and hope I get everything down.
The biggest thing has been the summer math program. It's definitely not what I expected. I mean, I'm not entirely sure what I expected, but I guess it wasn't this.
For one thing, the subject matter's actually more about cryptography than pure number theory, so most of what we do is actually related to using or breaking ciphers. There's been plenty about theory, of course, but we put it in practice through quick games and ciphers and codebreaking competitions! In fact, since all our tables are teams, practically everything's a competition. I'm not quite so big on this sort of thing as a lot of the others, but it's still been fun.
In fact, the girl who's pretty much been my best friend (I'll call her Ani) thrives on this sort of thing because she loves sports. We have a lot in common, but there's certain things like that where we're opposites. (She's a dog person!
NOOOOO!...) She keeps saying we're half-twins due to that.
Really, it's surprising to see how different everyone is. No one's a pure nerd. She's straight-up tomboy, some other people are LotR geeks, and some of us (like me) suck at chess (yet Ani and I have ended up playing 4-player chess with these two other kids a few times during lunch anyway)... Then there's all the different races, and a surprising amount of kids that were literally born in China. But all of us are united in that we are good at math, and most of the kids there love math. I don't know, I think it's pretty cool. (I'll admit, though, we all kinda have dorky laughs.)
The loving math is probably the weirdest for me, because these kids' brains are basically mathmatically-oriented instead of I-hate-math-oriented, so most have taken way advanced classes at school and can understand the new concepts like that, while I'm here often struggling to keep up. Nate, a kid that's been part of my team twice now, is absolutely insane. You can almost always expect him to have the answer first. Like, sometimes he only takes a second after the question's been posed to have the answer ready. Tons of multiplication and exponentiation problems he can figure out mentally with no trouble at all. He has a way of making you feel a bit inadequate... But at least I'm not alone in that. *nervous laugh and sweatdrop*
There's also been a lot of coding on computers, which is also related to the cryptography stuff, cuz we use them to make codes to encrypt and decrypt messages. I've literally only done half an hour of coding before, and that was practically copy-and-pasting instead of being taught properly. And so, I certainly didn't have it as easy as the kids like Cameron (I guess I'll just call him that since he's been going by his middle name instead of first around here) who have taken actual programming classes before. Ani apparently had a bit more experience, but she struggled just as much. It's awesome that the TAs help you as much as necessary, but I wish I could just catch on fast enough to get at least most of it done on my own. Gah.
What I've learned from this besides te material itself is that mathematicians are probably cooler than you think, and that I'm not quite as strong in math in comparison to other things as I expected. Like, I find it easier to just write out the rules and other notes instead of equations (I don't know how these people came up with the equations sometimes!) while Ani actually thinks equations are easier to write than explaining in normal sentences. I'm more writing-oriented, I guess? So, I mean, that's not horrifying, especially since I hadn't planned to get a math major anyway, but it's still a bit concerning considering I planned to go into science, which basically goes hand-in-hand with math. Would I have a hard time studying and having a career in this stuff? I was already worried cuz I don't feel like I'm as smart as some people and perhaps not smart enough for a career in the scieces, and this experience has kinda emphasized that gap. Would it really be better to be an author and proofreader instead?
Ugh, there's this divide that's been tugging at both ends of me ever since 10th grade. I thought I'd fixed it by saying "I'll do Genetics and have a Creative Writing minor, which should satisfy both pathways", but I don't think that's enough. Like, I'd want to do that anyway if I decided I really did want to go for genetics, but I don't want to go through all the trouble of a degree in genetics and then end up not using it. If I really did do just more write-y stuff, I don't know if I'd even want to bother with some sort of degree. That field is a lot harder to get into, though, and I've already said I don't want to bet on my writing skills for my wage. I'm a bit inconsistent, and I don't think I have enough inspiration in me to complete all the books I'd need to write to make a living off them, so I'd really rather not risk it. And, well, most proofreaders are free-lance, and would require really good knowledge of grammar, which would mean you would need to have some sort of degree, and taking classes about the fine points in written English does not sound fun at all. There's very worrying things about both paths.
So what
do
I
do?
Whatever the case of my career path, my parents think my "sales pitch" to colleges should be being a writer, since everyone knows I've done a pretty decent amount lately (though my mom and dad don't know it's mainly fanfics...), which I understand, but that also means... Well, I need to have work that I can actually show to colleges. Completely original stuff. Allí está el detalle.
If I actually manage to get WFAM written at the end of this year, that's definitely a point for me, cuz it'll show I really am passionate about writing and I can get stuff done. But just in case, I should have some short stories done by the time I do my college application.
That's why I'm so happy that I found the inspiration for a possible short story I could make. And I can say it's original because the inspiration's actually from stuff I wrote 2-ish years ago. I read through a few of my old works two weekends ago, including one I'd titled "Anticlimatic". That was basically the first draft to "The Shortest OC Story Ever". Not sure if I talked about it on here... Probably not.
Anyway, the idea starts out basically the same as the one-shot I actually posted: Truth comes to the OC, asks if she wants to go to Amestris, she says no, and she wakes back up in her original world. There's changes in how all of that came to pass, but the basic plot is in both. However, near the end of "Anticlimatic", it's shown that the OC actually has some sort of power that was able to overcome Truth's grasp, rather than him just letting her go, so it leaves you wondering how she was actually capable of doing such a thing and whether she'd ever make use of the power again. Though I'd cut the story there, I'd thought that it was rather interesting, and I could possibly make something out of it in the future.
I told Carter about it, since we were texting, and he voiced how cool he thought the idea was. I then remembered that a short time after that I'd started on the story I'd tried to write in Spanish, which was supposed to have a similar premise but never got past the exposition, which is quite a disappointment. (If you're curious, I'd gone digging for when I'd written about this story, and finally found that it was in the post titled "Bratja" from October 2014, and I also talked about it in "He's Not Truth" sometime last year.) He also thought that idea was fascinating, which kinda boosted my self-esteem (about my ideas for stories, at least, since I'm generally embarrassed about my old stuff), and I really got to thinking about whether I could really made a second attempt at this sort of plot.
It finally came to me late on Friday how I could convert "Anticlimatic" into an original short story, so I started writing for it after I finished with this one-shot called "Food Fight" I was asked to do by one of my favorite fic-writers, so I'm really hoping she likes it!
Since I pretty much have framework already laid out for the basic idea, cuz this is based on a complete one-shot, I think I'm more likely to manage to finish it and thus be able to use it as an example (though I'm worried about whether a dream demon is an acceptable main character for something I wanna show Stanford, Duke, and BYU? *sweatdrop*). And, well, if I managed to come up with more complete short stories over the summer, that'd be really awesome!
If I may return to the math program real fast, I'm gonna mention that they've made us do two scavenger hunts around the college campus twice now... I'm so completely incapable of withstanding all this running around. At least the last one they'll give us will have the smallest amount of distances to travel, but the clues will be harder to solve.
Also, I've basically been dared by a TA to make 1,000 origami paper cranes by Monday, and, um... I kinda only have 10 so far. The problem is that I tried to make the squares as small as I could to not waste too much paper, and that means I have to take longer to fold them properly in comparison to the typical sizes of paper people usually use. I'd planned to aim for a hundred over the weekend, but I procrastinated more than I should've (along with taking so much time just to do those tiny 10), so I think I'll try for a hundred by the last day of the program. Wish me luck.
There's also that I'm thinking of trying to write my own way of encrypting. I mean, I'm gonna base it more on classical ciphers rather than modern (like the public key cipher) since it's funner, but that means it's more likely to be broken. Oh well.
So far, I've gotten ideas about how I could remove or add letters to the cipher alphabet so it's a little harder because frecuency analysis won't be as useful and it'd confuse someone over whether they were actually decrypting correctly. Besides that, I figured autokey or Vigenére and columnar transposition would be a decent combination. We'll see how that goes.
Oh! I finally remembered something that I'd talked a bit about last week that got erased! I mentioned that that week there were less Young Women at church for some reason... and that actually made church a bit more enjoyable, as bad as I feel about saying it. There's a few girls that just make me feel a bit more uncomfortable about talking in front of than they should... and, well, since they weren't here, then it was easier to goof off. In fact, probably a little too easy. I ended up letting slip a few more surprising things about me that they didn't know before, like how I dance... (At that part, one girl was like "I knew you weren't as innocent as you look!" Um, how am I supposed to respond to that...?) And how I say "Savage!" and do the whip and stuff like that far more than I should, considering it's popular stuff from a year ago or older. I still Doge, in fact, when that's more like three years ago. I should not be Dogeing.
I think pretty much all that's left to mention is that the Open House thing our ward was trying out two Saturdays ago... was basically a fail. As far as I could tell, no one besides actual members of our ward showed up. And so, all the lessons were being given to us instead. It was actually kinda fun, honestly, but I felt bad about the sister missionaries coming all the way here to teach and only getting us instead. We tried!
"ROTARY DIAL" and "BLACK & WHITE" by Ghostie are really weird but cool, by the way. I've actually been trying to figure out a dance for the first song and if there's a cool way to mashup the two together. The latter would probably be best if I waited for her to come out with the third that completes the case and put all three in one. Of course, it's not like I'll actually post any project... And not just cuz I don't have the equipment not the bravery, but Ghostie's against anyone fiddling with her songs and posting the fiddled results. Doubt the dance would've been interesting enough, either, cuz I'd imagined it would be better if it was, like, one of the corner cameras in an acapella cover so there's more going on than someone just singing, but... How are you supposed to manage to acapella those songs?
Alright, I think I'm done here... Gotta go work on those cranes. Again, Happy Father's Day! K bai!
No comments:
Post a Comment