An Open Letter

I played two games with an Udyr smurf, and he played in such a hyper-aggressive beautiful way. We were on blue side, and so level one he invaded into their jungler's topside. In this game they ended up killing their Sion, but what his game plan was, is ward their raptors, and full clear their redside. After that he bases and buys a dark seal. With a ward on their raptor entrance, you now have info about enemy jg pathing. If the enemy walks over your ward, they’re fucked and you get ¾ths the jg. If you don’t see them, and you know they’re on your red, then you have options to either base and collapse, or just full clear and they have a bad timing. With this advantage, you will be lvl 4 before them and you can fight them on their crab, and then take double crab for a consistent advantage to start the game. He’s showing me on a call several different cases, but this really just is a beautiful game of strategy.

I'm glad I did CBT yesterday because the tricks that depression plays on my mind are not reality. I need to remind myself that I'm not consciously being excluded, but it's just that people are busy with other things in life and don't understand that these are things that would be very helpful or important to me. It's my responsibility to ask and advocate for myself.

I cleaned up my apartment and almost fully unpacked everything now, tomorrow I start FLL volunteering and also I get my internet router thank God. I think everything will work out.

I drove past old town coffee today, and I got upset when I saw it. For a little bit of context, a (close?) friend S started working there a few months ago and found some friends from there. I instantly noticed how that first gut reaction was that, and tried to pry apart why I felt that way. I think it’s because I feel like I’ve been cast aside as a friend by S and L, and I just don’t feel like they’ve really tried to keep me in their lives. Honestly, typing this out just kinda depresses me. I had an automatic thought pop into my head earlier today, of “you may lose me”. I wanted these friends to know that I’m not just someone who can be forgotten and then resumed whenever, but at the same time I know that being that person would probably be more healthy. I may be wrong about this but in my eyes that behavior of being a low maintenance friend is only when a friendship doesn’t mean that much to you. Like there’s no aspect of really wanting that friendship, because you’re content just going to whoever is more convenient at that time.

I do feel kinda sad that neither of them have been even tangentially excited about my new car, like when I saw S last she didn’t even ask to see the car even after it was brought up several times in conversation by others. This isn’t really a massive thing to me but it’s just the fact that I’m realizing of how little we are compatible as friends. We don’t really share interests, and once the convenience of things stop they’re pretty quick to stop putting in effort. I know I’m kinda just depression-convincing myself to self-isolate, but I do feel hurt by how one-sided trying to stay remotely close has felt.

I guess it’s a little bit weird, I jumped a few thoughts kinda quick but I did want to at least notarize the thought of how many of my days are done privately. I kinda just wish I had enough friends who were connected enough to be able to tell people something daily. The person I feel most comfortable just interacting with is S (different S), but even then he’s kinda stopped responding as much. I think he’s busy, but it does kinda start to get to me how he doesn’t text me. I sometimes feel like if I went quiet or disappeared the world wouldn’t notice. I know that’s a cliche, but it’s a very real, almost terrifying thought for me. I don’t say terrifying because it feels more like a grim, dread-inducing reality. I get jealous of others, because they have so many frequent interactions. But no one asks or shares anything of meaning to me. As a result I just feel like I’m a short little video to be scrolled past, and instantly forgotten. I’m a human. But I don’t know what I’ve been feeling like in periods like this. If I stopped texting people I don’t think they would really notice. Instead we would just drift away irreparably. This feels horribly unfair to me, I feel like someone just trying to hold onto 4 different strings that are slowly pulling away from me. Am I not someone worth staying around? I wish my friends would text me more, and I can only fantasize or speculate about people asking about how I am or what I’m doing or anything else to really just acknowledge that I’d be missed in some way.

Wow that got depressing, and something else to add onto the list of things to feel immeasurable shame at when I look back at it. But also I feel like I need somewhere to put these feelings. God knows I don’t really have anyone right now close enough that I could ask to talk to for support, I’m on pause right now for pretty much everyone.

If I’m being a hypocrite, I don’t want to defend myself – but at the same time I just want to be thought of and wanted.

Situation – I feel like no-one would really notice if I disappeared. I think I’m a little bit transparent about what I mean about that.

Thoughts – I think I should test that out and prove myself right.

Feelings – Resigned, depressed, alone, and suicidal.

Behavior – Who knows.

I wrote down thoughts below, but it’s been a few minutes and I’ve stopped writing.

Thoughts – Everyone’s busy with their own lives right now. Depression is just incredibly loud because you’re horribly stressed, a lot of things have gone bad in life right now, and it’s one of those periods where you’re very lonely because everyone’s busy or gone. But this will pass.

Feelings – I feel like breaking down and crying, but partially because I can think this is temporary.

Behavior – I don’t consider suicide.

Anshuman is a highly motivated and hard-working engineer.

In his 3 months, he completed an end-to-end software/data project which involved planning

and creating new database tables, building and validating a pipeline to pull data from multiple

data sources, populating tables, and deploying a new tab on Shortstop, all in production. Each

one of these, on their own, could have been a 3-month intern project.

Anshuman has proved his ability to pick up technologies / systems very quickly (e.g. database

migrations, bring up a new tab on Shortstop) and execute rapidly when given clear goals. He

has also demonstrated a high degree of initiative for parts of the project that were largely

ambiguous (creating testing infrastructure for the ccl-efficiency package pipeline, creating

plots using visX library).

Overall, I am impressed with Anshuman's progress this term. One growth area for Anshuman

to consider in future positions is focusing on comprehensive design reviews at the beginning

stages of larger projects. Meeting with customers to understand user stories and solidify the

design architecture could further accelerate the implementation of these projects.

I always get horrible ranked anxiety with league and since the season is ending right during a very hectic period I went on el dorado to hire some random booster to just duo a few games to get diamond. I know that choosing the violently cheap booster is obviously not going to be great, but the person I got did worse than me 90% of our games, and inted several of them. Like I know that I’m good at the game, but every game I had to carry them which was insane, because I was supposed to be paying them to win for me lmao. It sucks because my WR is kinda trashed because of them, and they apologized a lot and refunded the order, but at the same time I guess I now do have more confidence in my jungling around d4-masters level now.

Tomorrow morning is my final presentation, and I don’t have any lines written down. I am going to be speaking naturally and I am incredibly nervous. I hope I get a full nights sleep.

I’ve put in 13 hours of work today, and unfortunately that’s been more likely rather than an 8 hour work day for this last week (and weekend). My project works however, and today it was fully deployed. I’m just finishing up my presentation, and by that I mean starting the slides today. I present on Thursday and holy fuck I’m nervous. Home stretch.

I don’t think anything is bad enough to warrant being upset to be honest. No one near me has poor health, I don’t have drama right now, and realistically I don’t have insane stress right now. I think there are some things that cause some stress, but nothing bad enough to make me discontent in any meaningful way. This experience is coming to a close this week, so I should enjoy it and experience completely.

Just before I pulled off the highway on my exit for home, I got flashed down by a police officer and told to pull over. He said he was following me for about 3 miles, and I was going around 95 and he gave me a ticket. Since I was honest about it and respectful, he dropped the official speed to 84 mph, so I would be able to get it struck from my record by doing driving school. This won’t affect my insurance premium, since I can get it struck and so the only real consequence is the fine and the fact that this is now in the system so if I get pulled over again they will know this has happened before. All things considered, this is a fairly good outcome as it is more of a slap on the wrist, and it’s not like I got pulled over for going 130 yesterday lmao.

Honestly, the thing that affects me the most is how someone honked as I was getting pulled over. The cop said that person honked because he was happy I was being ticketed, and that made me really reevaluate my actions. I’m definitely not cutting it up or anything like that, but I do change lanes fairly frequently when I have a sizeable open space to go through, and in my eyes I am not inconveniencing anyone or affecting them since I am changing lanes without cutting someone off. But the fact that someone was upset and frustrated by me is something that really affects me, and I don’t want to upset or inconvenience others. I guess if I’m driving at the speed limit and I see someone who looks like they’re driving in a rush with changing lanes and so forth, I would see myself somewhat frustrated because they are doing something very different from what I’m doing. It probably doesn’t help that I got a Tesla, which people aren’t huge fans of already. I think I’m going to be a lot more conservative with my lane changes going forward, and it’s not even because of the fear of a ticket (which is another factor of course), but more because I thought that by changing lanes when I have plenty of space it wouldn’t affect others or upset them, but I guess it does. It’s probably for the best, but I do feel sad because driving fast is something I really enjoy. I guess I still can drive fast, just have to do it at the pace of traffic, and be a lot more sedentary with my driving. I hope I can find like a track or something like that near UCSB.

The first and last game I ever played was pokémon Platinum. It was somewhere around the fourth grade, and I had a small Nintendo DS lite. The day I got it, for the first time in my life I stayed up. I hid my DS under my pillow, and would quickly close it and put my head down and act asleep if my parents walked by my room. That first night I got all the way to Erika, with my trusty turtwig: Turdy. A few months later my best friend would tell me turd was the word for shit, and I damn near lost my mind denying that was true.

When I finally reached the end dimension to capture giratina, I remember being lost. For nearly a week I could not find my way out, and the end dimension frankly scared me. The most hope I had was being able to talk with my friend at school with only my memory to guide my questions. When I finally saw giratina, I used my master ball on him after getting him low enough and not capturing him with 20 ultra balls. When the ball finally closed shut I kept shaking from joy.

That small Nintendo DS cartridge contained a world. Since then every game, no matter how powerful of a system I run it on, has fit within a 3x7 screen on my phone. Every piece of wonder and magic has been distilled into a prepackaged video or walk through on my computer screen. In that Nintendo DS, those struggles were as real as these new ones are fake.

Since then I have not played a game. When I played Minecraft for thousands of hours, that was wonder went instead to some name on YouTube, showing me how to make a nether portal. When I killed the dragon, that was someone else figuring out what the crystals were. There was no magic, no wonder, and no triumph at the end.

As an adult I don't think I'm alone trying to chase a familiar nostalgia of the magic that games captured when I was a child. In an age of information where any questions can be trivialized in a matter of seconds, I have forgotten how to struggle. But I truly believe there's nothing great in this world if it is not worth struggling for.

Don't read any reviews, Don't look at any other content. Don't even read the description on the game. Just buy the game, get a controller with vibration if you can, and play the game fully blind throughout. You can only experience things for the first time once, do not squander this beautiful chance.