Great page on the World Wide Web Consortium website about "providing text alternatives for emojis, emoticons, ASCII art, and leetspeak".
In osu! news, the first round of summer beatmap spotlights is out! Each playlist has nine maps of increasing difficulty, which I'll have fun with seeing how far I can get. Also, it amuses me that there's a Peter Gabriel song on here.
Today was the first day of the fall semester. Last fall and spring I took fewer classes because I was working full time, and over the summer there were only a couple classes I needed that were available, but now I'm back to taking five classes this semester and it feels like I haven't done this in so long, it's gonna take some getting used to. I only have three different professors though, so that definitely makes it less chaotic.
Reading Thinking, Fast and Slow; amused whenever I arrive at the right conclusion through the same heuristics they claim most people get the wrong answer by. "Steve is a meek and tidy soul with a need for order and structure, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or reality; is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?" Well, the librarians I know are excitable geek girls, and farming seems like a more solitary task anyway, so probably a farmer. "Is the letter K more likely to appear as the first or third letter in a word?" Well, I can think of words with a K anywhere in them a lot more easily than I can think of words that start with K, so probably the third.
I've been journalling offline a lot lately. A lot of it's been organized into articles I may want to publish, but I've also been thinking about what kinds of ideas I really want to share and why. I think writing is something I really enjoy, and I think it can add value to the world. I thought about being more open with people offline that I'm a writer and quickly got embarrassed about my messy approach to writing, where I would deliberately post unpolished writing and fix it up as I went along. There's value in letting people see my thought process, in sharing things without worrying so much about how good they are, but I feel I've been doing that at the expense of actually "completing" my writing and making it pleasant for other people to read. So, my focus with the site right now will be on making the pages I've already written nicer, then I'll post some of the drafts I've been working on.
I found out that when voting on the Locus competition (see previous post), in order to clear every beatmap in a difficulty, you're allowed to use a difficulty-reducing mod on one of the five songs you were assigned. I'd been practicing in hopes of being able to beat that one 5.08 map, but started to feel like I really wouldn't be able to make it before votes are due. Thankfully, I was able to beat all the other four on Hard with no mods, so as long as I can beat that last one slowed down, I can vote on the Hard difficulty!
Unrelatedly, I wonder how many people have quoted themselves, then attributed the quote to "Anonymous" to make it seem more timeless.
For any osu! players out there, you can vote on your favorite beatmaps from the Locus 2025 competition! Voting is open until Saturday the 16th. It randomly assigns you five of the submitted songs, and you have to pass all five of them on the same difficulty before voting. If you pass them all at a higher difficulty, your votes will be weighted more heavily, which is really making me try to get good at the songs I was assigned lol. Specifically, I've passed some of the songs I was assigned on Hard, but those difficulties range from 3.36 to 5.08, and I have not yet passed a 5-star beatmap.
Free idea: a mashup album called "Original Reseach by Synthesis".