Computer difficulties

Story time.  So the other day, my computer crashed and then it wouldn’t restart.  I’m not much of a hardware person, but my brothers are, so I spent a long phone call with one of them opening it up and inspecting the hard drives.  The hard drives are fine.  Great.  It’s probably a software issue, and the Windows installation was corrupted.

Anyways, I decide it would be easier to bring it into a shop rather than fixing it myself.  I put it in a suitcase and roll it over to the repair shop across the street.  I tell them Windows needs to be reinstalled, and they say they’ll take it in for advanced diagnostics.  It’s free, provided that I register as a member–so actually it’s not free, it’s $60.

A few days later and they say it’s fixed.  Not diagnosed, fixed.  They say that they needed to reinstall Windows, which is what I had said.  So I roll the computer back to my apartment, and guess what?  The computer works, but the hard drive is wiped.  Specifically, just one of the two hard drives was wiped, the other hard drive is fine.  It’s just… that was the hard drive I was using.

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FIRE

Sorry if this is obnoxious, but I have some rich people thoughts. I think a lot about retiring early. I figure it’s a ways off, but it seems eventually correct. I’m a tech worker, married to a tech worker, no kids, with fairly frugal interests and habits. I live a very savings-positive lifestyle.

On the internet, this often goes under the heading FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early). I’ve read a bit about it, although a lot of it is financial advice, which I haven’t found too helpful. My biggest concerns are not financial.

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How I developed a game

I made a video game. I have not published, but I’m currently looking for playtesters.  In fact, I’m trying to get playtesters right here and now, please let me know if you’re interested!

It’s a small puzzle strategy game titled “Moon Garden Optimizer”. I’m sure say more about the specifics of the game design at a later time.  Today I’m sharing my development process up to this point.

moon garden optimizer, recent screenshot

A screenshot of my game

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Macroeconomics with Peter Navarro

Back when I started working in finance in 2020, I remarked to a colleague that I felt pretty ignorant about all this finance stuff. So they suggested a basic online course in macroeconomics. That course: “The Power of Macroeconomics: Economic Principles in the Real World” taught by Dr. Peter Navarro.

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, Dr. Navarro is currently the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, in the Trump administration. He is seemingly the only economist in the world who thinks universal tariffs are a good idea. That guy. Even at the time I took the course, Navarro had been the director of the White House National Trade Council during the first Trump administration. But I swear, I didn’t realize who he was until 2022, when he was arrested in relation to the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

No deep dive here–I’m not going back through the course to sift for oddities. This is just storytime, recalling what I can about Dr. Peter Navarro from several years ago.

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My academic career finally ended

I didn’t talk about it much, but until recently I was technically still involved in academia. I participated in Project Recognize, a research grant to improve survey measures of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI) for public health research.

The project was particularly interested in measures of asexual and intersex groups, because there is a gap in the academic literature. For example, this NASEM report has hundreds of pages on SSOGI measures, but barely anything to say about asexuality at all.  We were filling that gap by looking beyond academic literature, such as exploring grassroots community literature.

We were funded by an NIH grant, but as you can imagine, this is exactly the sort of research that’s getting targeted for being too “woke”.

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That time a cozy game triggered me

Gather round, it’s anecdote time.

Unpacking is a critically acclaimed indie game from 2021 that asks the player to unpack items from boxes, as if they had just moved. From this basic idea, a low key narrative emerges, following an off-screen character as they move from place to place at different stages of their life. And you can track their interests and circmstances by the various tchotchkes they bring with them.

Perhaps it’s a bit hyperbolic to say Unpacking triggered me. However, I did find it so unpleasant that I DNF’d it, despite its short run time.

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A Chinese-Filipino family history

My grandfather died, so I read his memoir.  It had been published when I was 11. You will not be able to find this book, and anyway it’s not the sort of thing that is of interest to people outside of his family. But I found it valuable to understanding my heritage, and there are some interesting historical bits I’d like to share.

My grandfather was born in the Philippines in 1929. He was part of the Chinese-Filipino minority, which entailed going to a separate school that used Chinese as a primary language. Like many Chinese-Filipino people, he came from a Fukien background.

When he was 6, he moved to Shanghai. This was because of Chiang Kai-shek’s “New Life” campaign, which (among other things) sought to attract Chinese expats back to China to build its industry. My great-grandfather owned a tobacco company, so he moved to China to start a Chinese branch. The cigarette packs explicitly advertised that they were made by returning overseas Chinese—a patriotic cause.

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