8/26/2023
Goodbye Summer...
Tomorrow marks the beginning of the last week of my summer vacation. Well, this week was the last full one, but you get the idea. I think it's absolute bullshit that school starts on Friday, because we literally have a three day weekend right after, but whatever.
I wanted to spend my last week doing fun stuff outside, but one of my sisters got Covid out of absolutely nowhere -_- luckily I'm feeling fine right now, but it's starting to make the rounds around my house. At least I'll have time to finish my summer assignments, I guess? They're really easy, which surprised me given that they're for AP Lang, but the only problem is that I've gotta find the motiviation to do them. I'll figure it out eventually, I hope.
8/2/2023
August, my favorite month in Spring
...Erm. Well, welcome back to me apologizing for disappearing and then disappearing for an even longer period of time.
I don't have it in me to make an entirely new page at the moment, so I guess this is the Spring AND Summer 2023 diary now. My site my rules or whatever. But hey, I changed the icon so you wouldn't get too sad.
Just because I don't feel like coding doesn't mean I've been unproductive——I've just been held captive by my annual summer hyperfixtation. Every year (since 2021), if I get into something at the start of summer vacation, I'll get REALLY into it. 2021 was Metal Gear, 2022 was Saw, and this year it's Les Misérables. And this phenomenon has been hitting a lot harder this time around than it had in years past. As in "I wrote more last month than I ever had in my entire life and it's all fanfiction based on Les Mis" harder. I've been bewitched body and soul by this stupidly long book from the 1860s about miserable French people. (and the ten million adaptations it's gotten throughout the years don't help either...)
5/16/2023
The Home Stretch
Sorry for disappearing again, but hopefully my next entry won't be another month away -_-
Last week was my AP Exam (World History), and I think I did a lot better on it than I was expecting to! Of course, the scores won't be released until July, but I feel confident, and that's pretty good. Unfortunately, the set of FRQs that I got weren't released publicly, so I don't think I have any way of being extra sure until I get my score ;-;
With my AP Exam out of the way, I truly feel like I'm in the home stretch for the school year. I still have other finals to prepare for, but I think I'll do okay with them.
...And hey, this site is already a year old, huh? According to some file dates, I started this site on May 11th (give or take a couple of days) last year. I feel kinda bad that I missed the exact date, but since Shiroganes 1.0 wasn't complete until early June I think that's okay. So much has changed for me over the past year... it feels like a lifetime ago and only yesterday all at the same time. Even as many of the things that happened last May became corrupted in my mind due to the shitshow that was the end of the month, I'm grateful I was able to hold onto some of the positive stuff that came out of the days before everything collapsed--this website is a prime example.
4/18/2023
Spring Vacation! (I wish)
Hi! Took a couple weeks for me to get back on here, I was just being lazy :P Spring vacation has come and gone, and while I wish it lasted longer, at the same time it made me realize how short a month really was. I mean, I was only off for a week and a half! Why is April almost over?!
The end of April brings along the start of May. And the reminder that I'll have my first AP Exam in three weeks.
I have mentioned on here in the past that my AP class isn't exactly my best one in terms of my grade. I spent much of the third quarter with a failing average for the class, though it was primarily due to missed homework. But even as I've been keeping up with that work, it won't help me a whole lot during the final battle... after all, my fatal flaw in this class isn't forgetting some homework, at the end of the day. It's that I struggle with writing essays(￣ ￣|||)
I enjoy creative writing, and I've been told that said creative writing is really good, but I tend to fall apart when writing essays. I know my stuff, and I've gotten a lot of praise on the occassions where things such as my thesis statements really stick the landing, but I have trouble with connecting everything. It's like a puzzle in a game where doing one action undos another one, and you gotta figure out the right way to go about the puzzle so that nothing comes undone. I can write a really good thesis, but then my evidence fails to connect to it. I can have good evidence, but then my thesis didn't answer the prompt as I had hoped. It sucks! I just hope my luck with multiple choice tests saves me...
4/2/2023
The Whole "Not Understanding Mean People" Thing, I Think
Welcome back! I don't plan on this diary being an Updated Every Sunday thing, I just had time to kill and things I wanted to write about.
In last season's diary, I uploaded an entry about not understanding people, though I was unable to get out was I was trying to say, mainly because in the middle of a meltdown while writing it. Ever since then, I've been trying my best to sort out in my mind what was going on, because it didn't feel normal. Yes, a lot of people have trouble understanding others, but my issue feels... a little too extreme.
The main source of these problems is people being mean to others for no reason. Now, I can be mean myself--I'll happily get behind being a little shit to a bigot or someone who tries to hurt me and/or those I care for. But the people who call themselves "haters" and talk about how they love hating things (which are usually anyone or anything that's "annoying" or "weird") and stuff like that... that confuses me. A lot. I don't have any ill will against people like this, because on some level I can understand it, as contradicting as that may sound. But these behaviors themselves distress me.
And so, I poked around my brain to try to find reasons why I'm like this. My current theory is this: trauma. Of course, I won't get into details, but since I was bullied a lot as a kid, usually because of how "annoying" and "weird" I was, it's not hard to connect the dots and see that I can easily become distressed by people who are doing many of the things that I was subject to. It also creates paths for other, more specific reasons why I freak out over behavior like this, the top two of those reasons being (A) I'm scared that I'll be subject to this sort of bullying online as well, and (B) I want to defend people who seem to be like me (in that we were both ridiculed for not being Good Enough to please those who see themselves as better) out of impulse and the wish that people had protected me during bad times.
Though the trauma theory brings along something else: the feeling that the consequences of the things I've gone through haven't turned me into the person I'm supposed to be. I feel like I need to be more blunt, more aggressive, because that's how I've seen others explain the effects that trauma had on them. There's a lot of stuff I've seen about how people whose trauma didn't make them "soft" are valid, and I 100% agree. But what if I did become soft? What if I'm a sensitive crybaby because of the things that have happened? I don't think I've ever seen something validating those effects. I'm not upset about it, though, because I'm fairly certain that people who developed things such as anger issues from trauma are stigmatized by most people a lot more than people like me are. The conclusion here is that I just think it would be nice to feel like I'm not broken for becoming a crybaby.
There is another aspect of mental health that may be involved in my issue, that being autism and how I can feel like I still have to mask around my autistic friends. I mean... they don't seem to be freaked out by mean people as much as I do, so surely there's just something wrong with me. If you're one of these friends in question, please don't feel like I'm maliciously trying to be vague, I don't think any of you guys are making me feel bad about this--it's me who's making myself all worked up about this, I think.
3/21/2023
What A Week, Huh?
Hi! It's been a while... I've been super busy with school stuff and got stuck in a mental slump for a bit as well, but
at least I have the motivation to update this site.
I intended to update a few days ago, but a lot of stuff happened this week... how about I go through the highlights?
On Tuesday, I ended up spending much of my evening going down a rabbit hole in search of anything related to... erm, a series of doujins based around Bill Gates. Nothing sexually explicit--in fact, I'm not the kind of guy who would be into this sort of stuff, and yet something intrigued me about it. Maybe it was the fact that only the fourth volume of the series had any sort of genuine documentation on places like MAL, or maybe I was just trying to comprehend that somebody sees tech billionaires the same way someone in bandom would see their favorite band. Who knows?
I honestly don't remember what happened Wednesday, but on Thursday I took the PSAT. I think I did pretty good. I was put in a room by myself to do it because of the accommodations I get, which I didn't mind much, but because of it I somehow ended up finishing the test and getting let out a whole period before everyone else did. Since I didn't know that everyone else was still testing, I got so confused...
Yesterday, I participated in the annual concert that the school district holds. It's auditioned based, and I didn't get in last year, but obviously I was able to get in this year. It was fun! Oh, yeah, and So Much (For) Stardust got released... but I haven't listened to it in full yet, because I'm waiting for my CD to arrive x_x
So that brings us to today! There's not much going on today, but I'm trying to watch as much Succession as I can because the final season premieres tomorrow. Despite how much the show's taken over my brain, I'm still on season two... I kept telling myself that I'd have plenty of time to watch it all before season 4, but suddenly it was today! Whoops...