Today is Thanksgiving! I'm home for the holiday after a quick flight change from Wednesday night to Tuesday morning thanks to my manager. It's always weird being back, but it's nice spending time with family. So far since I've graduated Purdue I've moved to a new state, started a new job, and took care of everything in between like decorating, legally moving myself, and getting situated at work. Work is good. WLB is very good since most of the company is parents or older adults. Pay is solid, especially given that the Chicago suburbs are far cheaper than the New York suburbs. The work is fine, healthcare claims, but I'm on a team that acts more like a startup so I've had the opportunity to learn and explore a ton. I also get to work alongside senior managers and the director of software engineering, which would've never happened at a large company like my previous internship. Liam, my roommate from college, also works with me here on the same team so I have a little bit of familiarity in the area, thank god. Life is kinda slow, but I'm enjoying it. I've spent most of my time working, like most adults, but unlike most adults I'm still getting into the routine. I'm usually exhausted after work, even though I sit at a computer all day, which kinda works out since it's pitch black outside once I close my laptop. So my evenings usually consist of me feeding myself and hanging around my apartment the rest of the night. Not that I'm doing nothing though, quite the opposite. I've really learned to lean into my hobbies during this transition period. I started playing Summoners War fairly seriously and I've gotten quite good at it too. I recently joined a top 100 guild and we just finished our siege season at G2, exactly rank 100, putting us at the top 3000 people playing Siege on the server. I hit the lottery 5 times this year, pulling incredibly rare, highly sought after monsters for the first time since 2018. I know most of this means nothing to people, but I've enjoyed it tremendously. It's also pushed me to improve my programming and Excel skills. I've since built a tool in Java to combs through all of my runes and monsters and stores them in a MySQL database. This database then is linked to an Excel file that I can then run analytics on my runes which lets me get a good look at how and where to improve my runes. I've also started learning how to play the drums. I have drum lessons weekly at a local music place and I recently got an electronic drum kit to play in my apartment. So far I haven't had any noise complaints but I'm sure if I got an acoustic kit that I would have pitchforks at my door. I don't have much progress ot share since it's only been about 2 months but I can say that I'm better than I was when I started, which I guess is the goal! Now I want to get into writing a bit. I've always wanted to create content. I have so many ideas in my head and if you've ever taken a peek at my TikTok profile, you'll know I love injecting my opinions and thoughts into every conversation I come across. With social media at a very uncertain tipping point, I've started this website as a place for me to take control of my work. More and more we see that social media sites are great for reaching an audience as they have the largest audiences on the planet, but they are terrible if you want to have any control over the information you share on the web. Elon Musk just argued in court against the Onion's purchase of InfoWars that his Frankenstein's monster, X, owns all accounts on the platforms (but not the content! bc then he would liable for the child porn posted on there). We are also learning that the internet is not forever. According to Pew Research, 38% of websites from 2013 are no longer accessible. Information from just the previous decade is lost to the ether. Since then, the online population has doubled and AI is resonsible for almost 60% of online content, only 2 years since ChatGPT came out. We are inevitably going to see link rot accelerate and lose access to more and more information, so I'm working to create my own little corner where I can immortalize the things I care about, like my work. Welcome to the project.