#next time will be a shitpost and i can breathe easier wanting to get stuff done

[pan-magi]

IDK what I’m doing but I’ve had this idea for months.

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[leviaju]

𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝚝𝚘𝚘 𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚢 𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚔𝚢𝚞𝚞 𝚋𝚘𝚢𝚜 𝚋𝚊𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚘𝚗 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚘𝚛 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚒 𝚠𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚔𝚎𝚢𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚖𝚢 𝚑𝚘𝚖𝚎

incl: sawamura daichi, sugawara koushi, azumane asahi, nishinoya yuu, tanaka ryuunosuke, kageyama tobio, hinata shoyo, tsukishima kei, yamaguchi tadashi, kuroo tetsurou, kozume kenma, oikawa tooru, iwaizumi hajime, bokuto koutarou, and akaashi keiji

shitpost/crack

1.4k+

no one asked for this, no one wanted it, and no one’s gonna read it, but here it is anyways! my friend and i were discussing this and,,,,,, i couldn’t help myself. it’s too good. i love these characters so much. god.

also i’m very behind on haikyuu and don’t know when or if i’ll ever catch up, but i love these boys so much. so much. i just did the characters i really know about! 

𝘬𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘯𝘰...

ꜱᴀᴡᴀᴍᴜʀᴀ ᴅᴀɪᴄʜɪ

10/10 absolutely

would not ever abuse the power and come over without asking

would only use it if you asked him to grab something from your place, or if you were doing something when he came over and couldn’t get the door

absolutely would not ever overstep his boundaries

and always asks if it’s okay to come over before he does

daichi is so amazing and i love him

ꜱᴜɢᴀᴡᴀʀᴀ ᴋᴏᴜꜱʜɪ

another 10/10 

doesn’t always text you to ask if he can come, but he’ll text you to make sure you’re home

you’ve come to learn that’s just his way of asking for permission

he’s also come over secretly and surprise you with snacks and drinks while you’re studying

will respect you 100000000% if you want to be left alone, but will leave a little note for you in your mailbox telling you that he loves you! and even though you may not want to talk right now, he’ll always be here for you 

ᴀᴢᴜᴍᴀɴᴇ ᴀꜱᴀʜɪ

8/10 you can trust him but he’ll never use them

he’s way too nervous, and doesn’t want to take advantage of your kindness

even if you tell him you want him to just show up sometimes, he’ll always ask at least a day in advance if he can come over

(even then you have to invite him over, he doesn’t want to overstep any boundaries)

honestly, to him, it’s the thought that you trust him so much that you’d give him the keys to your home that matters to him

ɴɪꜱʜɪɴᴏʏᴀ ʏᴜᴜ

6/10

he absolutely has no worries about using the keys

he’ll show up at your place early in the morning before practice and pull open your curtains

if you’re not a morning person… good luck

other than that though, he’s pretty good

after the initial excitement over receiving the key, he would come over pretty regularly to just… talk

either talk out the adrenaline from a good game or practice, or vent the stress if his day wasn’t that great

of course he has no reserves about coming to your place unannounced if you’re not feeling well, too

even if you want to be alone, he’ll come over, but stay out of your way

he just wants to make sure you’re okay

but god forbid he and tanaka are over at the same time

ᴛᴀɴᴀᴋᴀ ʀʏᴜᴜɴᴏꜱᴜᴋᴇ

2/10, no

boy will barge into your house no matter the time of day and t a l k

it could be the middle of the night, but if he wants to talk to you, he’s coming over

you can’t stop him

he also comes over whenever he wants hugs or cuddles,,, which is pretty often

especially after practice

it’ll take every ounce of persuasion you can muster to get him to take a shower before he latches onto you and doesn’t let go

although… if you tell him that he can use your body wash, he’s a lot easier to persuade

ᴋᴀɢᴇʏᴀᴍᴀ ᴛᴏʙɪᴏ

5/10

won’t use it that often, but when he does… he just kind of shows up

if you’re not there when he comes over completely unannounced, he’ll also complain to you nonstop about it

if you are there, he won’t be too clingy

will definitely distract you if you have any work to do though

he just wants to hang out! why else would he come over? what do you mean you have stuff to do? not anymore!

also if you don’t have milk in your fridge he’ll complain

ʜɪɴᴀᴛᴀ ꜱʜᴏʏᴏ

7/10

he’ll just show up whenever

can also be pretty distracting

but overall a nice house guest!

if you stress that you have stuff to do, he’ll be a bit pouty, but will stay out of your way

honestly, if you’re working, he might end up doing homework himself

he just likes being around you!

if you’re not busy, he’ll probably come over to drag you out somewhere

ᴛꜱᴜᴋɪꜱʜɪᴍᴀ ᴋᴇɪ

9/10

swears that he won’t ever use it

and honestly, it takes him a long time to actually use it

even when you’d invite him over, you’d have to go unlock the door for him

(“why do i need to bother taking out the key if you’re already home?”)

but after a particularly hard day, you’ll receive a text from him, asking if he can come over

as soon as he gets a yes you hear the sound of keys turning in your lock, and he comes in and just sits on the couch

he doesn’t particularly feel like talking about it, he just wants to be near you as he sorts himself out

after that, whenever he’s feeling upset, he’ll go over to your place and just take the time to relax

ʏᴀᴍᴀɢᴜᴄʜɪ ᴛᴀᴅᴀꜱʜɪ

10/10

so respectful

he’ll come over to cook for you honestly

will always ask first, and will totally respect your boundaries

if you ever need anything, he’s there!

want to talk? he’s on the way

need a hug? already at your door

just want someone in the room with you? of course!!!!

he also loves coming over to study with you!!!

𝘯𝘦𝘬𝘰𝘮𝘢…

ᴋᴜʀᴏᴏ ᴛᴇᴛꜱᴜʀᴏᴜ

2/10 he just barges in whenever

he doesn’t care if you’re busy, he’s over now! he wants to talk to you

will definitely complain if you have stuff to do

and will cling to you until you give him the attention he wants

honestly just like… kiss him on the cheek every now and then and he’s okay

but he’ll still annoy the hell out of you until you pay attention to him

unless you’re genuinely upset, in which case he’ll back off… a bit

but he won’t leave

if he comes over, he’s over for a while

ᴋᴏᴢᴜᴍᴇ ᴋᴇɴᴍᴀ

0/10 he doesn’t use it

he loves the thought, but it’ll just sit uselessly on his desk

when he comes over, he’s already been hanging out with you, so there’s no need for him to have a key

he’s never going to just show up

honestly, you’re probably at his place more than he’s at yours

𝘢𝘰𝘣𝘢 𝘫𝘰𝘩𝘴𝘢𝘪...

ᴏɪᴋᴀᴡᴀ ᴛᴏᴏʀᴜ

1/10

don’t give him your keys

he’s coming over and he’s bringing iwai

you can’t stop him if you try

he just wants to hang out with you! what do you mean, you’re busy? 

too bad! oikawa wants to spend time with you now! 

why aren’t you excited? he has people lining up for this chance

yeah don’t give this obnoxious loser your keys

you’ll regret it

ɪᴡᴀɪᴢᴜᴍɪ ʜᴀᴊɪᴍᴇ

10/10 

you need him to get oikawa out of your home

honestly, that’s the only time he’ll ever use it

but he’s over very often because of it

honestly… he’ll use the excuse of trying to get oikawa out of your house to be with you

“... shittykawa isn’t here? i could have sworn…”

“anyways, since i already came all the way here, do you mind if i stay a while? i’m tired from dealing with his ass all day”

another really respectful dude

𝘧𝘶𝘬𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘪…

ʙᴏᴋᴜᴛᴏ ᴋᴏᴜᴛᴀʀᴏᴜ

0/10 this boy will come over and watch you sleep

you’ll wake up at 2am and just see 👁👁

honestly terrifying

he’ll also bust into your house at all hours just to yell

he’s excited and wants to tell you about it! why are you upset? it’s 4am already, be excited with him!

if he’s feeling more emo, he’ll just come over and flop face-first onto your bed

he’ll groan constantly until you suggest cuddling

honestly, he’s whined for a half hour before you were able to devote that time to him

because once he gets a hold on you, he won’t let go

he’s holding you close, he’s holding you tight, and you better hope you don’t need to get up for the next few hours because you’re stuck there

good luck breathing

ᴀᴋᴀᴀꜱʜɪ ᴋᴇɪᴊɪ

10/10

you have him on speed dial for whenever bokuto wakes you up by staring at you

also, if you can’t pry bokuto off of you and you need to get stuff done

other than that, he’ll only come over when he knows for sure that it’s okay

respects your boundaries! 

even if he really wants to spend time with you, he’ll only do so if he’s sure you’re 100% okay with it

honestly an angel i love him

[rulay]

I (20m) am getting jealous of my boyfriend's (19m) fictional crush

tl;dr My boyfriend is obsessed about a video game character and may as well be mentally dating him. This isn't a joke, I seriously need help.

The story begins approximately two to three years ago when I introduced my boyfriend to a video game I was playing. Prior to this my boyfriend hadn't really been interested in video games, even though I had asked it to play with me and offered to buy it games. It seemed disinterested at first, but as soon as a certain character showed up it immediately pointed to him and went "ooh, who's that?" Suddenly it wanted to know everything about the character, what role he played, what the game was about, and if it could play after I was done.

And thus began my one sided rivalry with Mikleo.

Ever since that day my boyfriend lives and breathes Mikleo. Its constantly showering me with trivia about him, what it finds "interesting" (or attractive) about him, and talking non stop about general tales lore. Its played every single tales game it could get its tiny little hands on, and our conversations are dominated by its observations and thoughts on him. And of course, because its an artist, there's the fanart. So much fanart.

I'm not gonna lie, at first it was pretty cool. It was always disinterested and vaguely disdainful of me playing video games, so it was awesome to see it jumping into a hobby that I loved. It actually apologized to me over dinner one day, saying that it had never understood why I liked video games so much, but after playing some itself it finally got the appeal. We pooled money together to buy a better TV. I bought it a gaming PC for its birthday and it cried out of joy. It got us matching video game t shirts and bought me cool new games whenever it came across any. It started playing other games that I recommended as well. My friends told me how jealous they were because my boyfriend was "so cool" and played video games with me. For the next few years we raved over cool new games that came out, bitched about the bad ones, spent our evenings playing video games and challenging each other, and had a hell of a good time.

And throughout all this prevailed Mikleo.

I'm not gonna lie, I was a little bit jealous when my boyfriend jumped into her "crazy crush on Mikleo" phase (did I mention the fanart?) but when it started picking up different games I thought it was something it would move on from. I mean, there are lots of other good looking twinks in games, right? But its love for Mikleo was pure, and it only grew bigger as it started playing other games. This boy wasn't as feminine as Mikleo. This character was too sarcastic and rude. This one just wasn't good looking enough. At the end of the day, it was still drawing weirdly flattering pictures of Mikleo, and writing stories where it would somehow "bump into" him and madly fall in love.

Now I'm not one to complain about a harmless fictional crush; I had my own imaginary affair with Tear Grants back in the day. But I guess what bothers me is how much my boyfriend's "relationship" with Mikleo leaks into real life. It posts its art and writing onto some fan website and asks me to proofread/critique its stuff, for example. I have to admit, it does make me crazy jealous. Its never drawn or written about us in cute couple situations, but suddenly its portraying herself as being in a relationship with Mikleo. We don't have any pictures of us around the apartment, but "its side" of our gaming room is plastered with Mikleo or tales related posters. It fucking talks about him in its sleep. Its asked if we can do sexy stuff while roleplaying as Sorey and Mikleo. Keep in mind that I'm what you would find on the first page of Google images if you looked up "haha what a fucking nerd." I don't have the cute ponytail or adventurous spirit or snarky attitude. I weigh barely more than my boyfriend, still shitpost about children’s card games online, and only learned yesterday that it's easier to put on socks before pants.

I love my boyfriend, I really do. I love how it gave video games a chance and is supportive of my hobbies. I love how it puts so much passion into its art. I love how compassionate and romantic it is with me (and Mikleo). I just can't help but feel like I'm second best to a video game character, and I've even dreamed of situations where somehow it actually does run into Mikleo while coming home from work and just elopes with him. I get that this is probably a "me" problem, but I have no idea how to even approach it. I don't want to flat out tell it that I'm jealous of Mikleo because, well, I don't want to come across as a controlling freak and possibly ruin video games for it. But at the same time, I can't help but feel that I've been sharing the last few years of my marriage with a fictional character.

(edit) Shortly after writing this post I felt kinda pathetic for not just telling it flat out, so I did. It says it'd have stopped crushing on video game characters if I'd been more romantic and spontaneous towards it in the first place, and it just resolved to having imaginary relationships because it pretty much gave up on me being more vocal/active about my emotions. It also called me a fucking idiot for being jealous of a video game character. So yeah, any advice on how to be more romantic/spontaneous would be appreciated.

[thisnerdsadventures]

this summer

I just wrapped up my internship and established that i really liked my team this summer! We played Among Us on my last day for like two or three hours and it involved a lot of screaming and betrayal. I am so blessed to have spent two summers in a row with two really great teams who I had so much fun with. I’m sure that if I was in person, I’d have had even more fun with them, so hopefully I can go back :) I also lowkey committed to New York, so that’s kind of locked in now, so maybe part of it also me mentally committing to liking my team because at this point I don’t have as much of a choice LOL

I only posted a few times this summer because there was honestly a lot going on outside my internship. Actually, my internship was the only part of my summer that went well consistently, without a lot of ups and downs. Everything else???? absolutely a mess. I’ll share a bit of a rundown of all the shit that went on [warning major depressing shit goes down lol, it is a lot, but dw! it turns out ok :) Honestly posting this so that one day I can look back at this and remember how much I had to overcome and also reflect on what I was able to achieve in my internship despite the circumstances.]

June

June 1st started out already disappointing when I didn’t get grad housing. I was really banking on it, so I was really unsure as to what I was going to do, and it didn’t help that I had to wake up at 6am to enter the lottery. This started the apartment squad document, where I tried to convince several of my friends to room with me in an apartment. [start: bunker squad fiasco]

additionally, i was still working on this nonprofit called Amplify that my friends and I started. We were going really strong in April, but by June, we had run into some timing issues and I felt like all the time I had poured in doing development was going to waste. Thus commenced the anxiety related to this project. [start: nonprofit anxiety]

at around this time, we also had a lot of police brutality/racial justice things arise, and I was reading a lot and spending a lot of time on Twitter. My friends and I talked a lot about what was going on and how we felt powerless or struggled to have conversations with our families. [start: current events anxiety]

somewhere around this time, my internship started. It was a lot of figuring out expectations, setting up remote work environments. For some reason, I actually didn’t code until week 4 or 5, which was why i felt kind of discontent with what I had been accomplishing so far, and I was nervous I wouldn’t get anything done. Throughout this, I was struggling a lot with keeping up motivation through the day, esp when I had 3-4 hour blocks of meetings in the mornings and waking up at 8am, courtesy of west coast time. A lot of my exhaustion was also attributed to housing drama in late june when i was trying to figure out whether my friends would commit to an apartment, and what the chances of them returning to campus were. [continue: bunker squad fiasco]

i think the pandemic quarantine isolation caught up to me and my friends because everyone was struggling on a personal level and it leaked a lot into how we interacted with each other. so a couple of us got in a fight and we had to split up the group for two weeks, and I got really frustrated wondering if any one of my friend groups would ever stick together, especially when I kept getting put in the middle. [start: friend drama] Around this time, my parents were pushing me to apply to grad school when I really didn’t want to, and it got to the point where I had to pay for the GRE, and then I simply decided to /not/. [start: home drama]

July

Trying to work my 9-5 job with this (gestures vaguely to the aforementioned) was difficult, and in early july, we had to deal with the impending MIT announcement of whether they would let students back to campus [start: MIT plan anxiety]. Our (aka my) housing plans [re: bunker squad fiasco] were contingent upon these plans. Somewhere in this, Harvard leaked their decision and said they basically weren’t letting seniors back, which threw me into a loop, and the next day, our school said they were only letting seniors back onto campus for the fall, and unless something changed, they wouldn’t be let back for the spring. Moreover (super shit for me), offcampus seniors wouldn’t be let back onto campus. [bunker squad fiasco explodes in my face. end: bunker squad fiasco, start: solo housing spiral] So tl;dr everyone was screaming and sad for like two days, and then we just had to deal with it and adjust.

The good news was that more of my friends decided to go back to campus, but on my end, I was stressed out of my mind for the next week trying to figure out housing on my end. I was super nervous that I wouldn’t be able to find an apartment if everyone was going to try to live offcampus in Boston/Cambridge for the fall, so I frantically tried to find a place. [continue: solo housing spiral] I ended up finding a place within a few days, mostly out of panic, but also playing the “sometimes you gotta make a move and deal with the consequences later” card. 

It was mid-July, so it was also one of my best friend’s birthdays, so a bunch of us stayed up to plan her birthday gift. I timed everything super well so that the art would be done by Friday afternoon, FedEx booklet would print on Friday night, so I could put it together and send it Saturday morning, so it would deliver Tuesday. That was one of the bright spots of my summer. There is truly nothing better than putting in the work for someone or something you love.

In classic quarantine fashion, I strung together a stable 48 hours before I had a huge mood landslide and then got triggered by another conversation until I decided to ghost everyone and go to the beach. Watched the sand and the waves. Felt a little better.

And then things got worse, and I got in a nasty fight with one of my friends [continue: friend drama], and my dad told me to give up on the nonprofit [continue: home drama], and then everything kind of exploded in mid/late July, but then my other friends tried to make me feel a little better. Throughout this whole ordeal of a summer, my friends really were the only thing that were keeping me afloat, just through checking in, surprising me with boba, and keeping me laughing with conversations joking about anything and everything, from backyards to Rhodes scholarships. 

August

AUGUST. was a mess. An entire mess. It started off with when I cracked under some more friend drama and unresolved old drama and then I decided I could not handle it anymore. It spiraled very quickly and blew up into flames and then the flames lit on fire tl;dr. [continue: friend drama, but abysmally bad] My anxiety was sky high this entire week, so my productivity hit near zero and my sleep hit near zero. Around this time, a lot of schools were also either exhibiting huge spikes in COVID or were outright cancelling campus returns, so we all had to hold our breath, praying that our school wouldn’t backtrack. [continue: MIT plan anxiety] I would’ve broken my lease.

Something interesting that happened this summer was that I think I actually started subscribing to journaling and being in tune with my inner spiritual self. I keep thinking to myself “this is some hippie shit”, but when I was at my lowest, the only thing that really kept bringing me solace was the words and poems that my friend recommended to me. When every day seemed impossible to get through and when every waking moment was filled to the brim with anxiety and instability, I had these words and my friends checking in on me.

I slowly started finding a little more peace in my life, but felt, for a lack of a better term, bored? But I called my friends a lot, I distracted myself with Model UN things, I started recruiting. I made it to mid-August. and then I got kicked in the face by more friend drama repeatedly for an entire week, and hit absolute rock bottom where it became difficult to not only get through days, but even hours, as I got friend broken up with..... somehow twice in a week! [continue: friend drama, but got even worse] The nonprofit team essentially put stuff on hold to reevaluate what we were doing. [continue: nonprofit anxiety].

From the friend drama spawned a lot of anxiety about the fall [start: fall anxiety]. At this point, a lot of the rules started popping up about offcampus/oncampus rules and campus access, and I started recognizing the need to get campus access, for my own mental health and easier life things in the fall. So thus commenced my long struggle to get campus access via my PI, which was like 12983192839182 oz of stress on top of what was already a very stressful existence. [continue: fall anxiety]. Also was fully in recruiting season at this point. Also was getting anxiety not knowing where my on-campus possessions were. [continue: fall anxiety] Also was unsure as to whether I had a lease or not because the guy never emailed me back? [continue: solo housing spiral] I had never felt such stress and anxiety levels before.

September

This brings us to the last week of my internship (early September). At this point, August had really brought to my knees. My friends were moving back to campus and I was fully prepared to have soul crushing FOMO for the next two weeks. I think I shitposted on my main “god I wish something would go right for once.”

And all of a sudden.... things started to go right. By some act of God, the friend drama magically dissipated into thin air [end (for now): friend drama], and everything was normal again. I got campus access, which means I can see my friends and play tennis with them and work in lab every now and then [end (some): fall anxiety]. My RLAD confirmed that my belongings still exist. My apartment was indeed still my apartment, they just didn’t send the lease documents to the right email [end (to an extent): solo housing spiral]. My internship ended up really well and I vibed really well with my team. Recruiting had been going well for me and I was getting positive results. I just bought some furniture today for my apartment. Sure, some things are still in the air, like the nonprofit thing that never got resolved and also general fall anxiety about timing my furniture deliveries and timing my COVID tests, but six days out of arriving in Boston for the fall, and things are really looking up. 

Somehow things just..... worked out. I’m honestly shocked my internship actually ended up going really well because my life was an absolute mess this summer lol. lessons learned here are that i ended up hitting rock bottom and i found peace in words and my friends, and my relentless pivoting and crashing through obstacles ended up working out and the decisions i made along the way maybe weren’t the best ones, but they’ll suffice to get me where i want to go, or at least to the place i think i need to go.

anyways, i’m going back to campus in a few weeks, so I’ll continue with semester 5.1!