snapshot diary 2.0 by Waly N. '24
an image a day keeps the psets (and workday) away
1/14/24
A while back, just over 2 years ago, I wrote a similar blog to this one, in which I recounted the days of the semester through images. I love photos & photography since it feels like life is in many ways a video, and you don’t get to see still images all too often. Unless you are looking at photos of course.
During one of my classes this semester, my lab partner decided to read that blog in front of me, to my mild horror. Being perceived for what I willingly post online is a weird feeling o_o, but it was also cool looking back at that blog showing the mundane, interesting, and surprising parts of everyday life. So I set off to do that style of blog again, except I decided to torture myself by including even more days. And putting more images into WordPress. And including the summer and my life away from MIT. I almost gave up twice, but eventually, got it done. So, here is a day in the life, from May 1st till November 15th.
5/1/23
A poster for the Spring ’23 Rambax show. I was taking the Rambax music class over the spring, which was a 6 unit humanities class. I had barely touched any form of Senegalese drumming before, so it was really cool to take the class. I had a class conflict with it this Fall, but I’m hoping to maybe take it again in Spring ’24.
5/2/23
I bought my first camera lens :). I bought my first camera back in sophomore fall using my money from TA-ing, and it came with the standard 18-55mm lens. I wanted to get a new lens to be able to try out new things, so I chose the 50mm f/1.8 because it wasn’t too expensive and would let me play around with lower apertures.
5/3/23
My friend was looking for housing in New York over the summer for his internship, so I drew out where I recommended he should consider living. His office was in Manhattan, so I mostly circled the areas around there. I’m from the Bronx, and though I love the Bronx, it isn’t the most convenient place to live in cause of… [goes on rant regarding public transit and Robert Moses]
5/4/23
One of my classes last spring was 6.4200/6.141 Robotics Science and Systems. For the class, we needed to “reserve” the robot for our team to use for testing. We had a reservation spreadsheet and would enter our team’s number to claim the car. I liked the class content-wise, though I found the organization of the class left a little to be desired.
5/5/23
Classic red line. I was at Kendall, running late to somewhere as I usually am, and the red line had to screw me over even more.
5/6/23
Same class as earlier! I asked a question on Piazza (basically a forum for asking questions for classes) and got a pretty quick response :)
5/7/23
Rare Senegal mention. Reminds me of a funny story. I went to Montreal last February with some friends, and someone asked me something in French and I said I don’t speak French… in French. Oops.
5/8/23
A really cute note was left in the Banana Lounge about the hermit crab needing a bath. The Banana Lounge is basically a space where there are free Bananas that provide me with 90% of my potassium intake.
5/9/23
I was pretty sad to see this in my newsfeed. Stromae is one of my favorite musicians and I skipped a day of class last year to go watch him perform at Madison Square Garden. It was such a great concert (set my standards way too high cause it was my first one).
5/10/23
The pain of getting older. I was set to leave for Seattle in about a month for an internship, so I was reading up on Sound Transit. Sound Transit honestly is a pretty interesting urban transit system, and I could talk about it for a long time.
5/11/23
Another class I was taking was CMS.595, which is Development of Games for Education. For our final project, we were designing a web game that was meant to show how relationships between nations can work out and how wars/conflicts can occur. We were designing this game to be used within the context of a lesson, so for our final paper, I was doing research on relevant content standards, which led to this screenshot.
5/12/23
I love subject lines with no context like this :D
5/13/23
I was going up the stairwell in EC (East Campus) and there was a very curious squirrel perched on the ledge. I wonder if it is related to the squirrel that snuck into our fridge a year or two ago.
5/14/23
I think this was my only photo from that day, which was a picture from a food delivery person of where they left my food. This door leads (led?) to Talbot, which was (cries) basically the lobby of EC.
5/15/23
For Robotics, we had a final project that required us to have our robot race around the Johnson track. The project involved making sure our robot stayed within the lines of the track, followed curves, did not hit other robots cause that would be mean, and was fast enough to meet the time criteria. We had some malfunctions getting our code onto the robot, but we were able to get it to work at least once.
5/16/23
My friend and I had an idea. What if we go to TD Garden and try to get Celtics playoff tickets that no one could sell/resell. We didn’t end up doing this and watched it from campus, but the idea might have worked. Ticket prices violently dropped after the tip, but we were too far away to make buying any of the tickets actually worth it.
5/17/23
I really got into playing this online game called BasketBall GM, and I kind of created a dynasty. We (Dallas) were unstoppable.
5/18/23
I read this monthly manga called Jibaku Shounen Hanako Kun (the English name sounds weird but I promise it’s not) and found this panel pretty funny. Someone attempted to kind of take out my knees on the street 2 days ago, so I now find this panel less funny 🙃
5/19/23
I was finalizing plans for an end-of-semester trip I was doing with some friends. This idea came about freshman year, when one of said friends and I were thinking “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to like Amtrak across the country.” So we did that, after about 2 years of trying.
5/20/23
I was looking up cool boba shops in Seattle, and this one was pretty cute. I never ended up going though 😶
5/21/23
It was time to start packing up my room, so I took some pictures of my room decor before I took it all down. Some of the items here include my posters, a BMO blade box I made in 2.00B Toy Product Design, and an aardvark I got from ESP somehow.
5/22/23
I was still packing and feeling a bit sentimental at this point. I had been living in this room for about 4 semesters and it was going to be my last time there. EC was getting renovated starting in the fall, so it was kind of the end of an era.
5/23/23
And, with that, I was off on my way home. I took the Amtrak home to New York, which brought me to South Station early in the morning lugging like 3 suitcases. 0/10 experience, do not recommend lugging that many suitcases.
5/24/23
I was at home this day, and didn’t take any photos :O
5/25/23
After a short stint at home, my friends and I met up at Penn Station to take our 18-hour long train ride down to Atlanta. Featured is one of my friends accidentally posing like a model for this photo.
5/26/23
One of our first stops in Atlanta was the Aquarium. I have been wanting to go to this Aquarium since I was roughly 10, so it has been a long time in the making. It was so huge and I enjoyed it so much. I really liked this photo cause of how all the people looked like silhouettes in front of the tank
5/27/23
The following day, we went to a few different areas downtown and also the World of Coke. This experience was deeply traumatic for some of my friends. At the World of Coke, there is an area where you can try roughly 100 different sodas from different countries. We tried all of them, leading to some people swearing to never drink soda or coke again. One of them bought a coke two days later.
5/28/23
Our next train ride was an 11-hour trip from Atlanta to New Orleans. We made a few stops along the way and if I remember right, it winded up taking longer than 11 hours. The fun thing with Amtrak is that they don’t own much of the rails they operate on, meaning that if a BNSF railway train needs to get by, that train will get priority over the inferior passenger train. This photo was taken during a night walk on Bourbon Street.
5/29/23
I wonder what mentally scarred the owners so much that they needed to put up this sign.
5/30/23
We were in the elevator of our hotel when we started talking to two other hotel guests. They told us we HAD to go to Neo’s, so we decided to listen to them and make the trip to the restaurant via the Streetcar. We got oysters and shrimp po’boys which honestly slapped. We also saw a photo on the restaurant’s wall that seemed to be of the store owner with Zendaya? If you are reading this Zendaya, please confirm.
5/31/23
Our next leg was New Orleans to Chicago, which was another 18-hour trip. I realize I haven’t mentioned this, but no, we did not have beds. We are not bougie like that. Anyways, this train had an observation car which was really nice. Only Amtrak Trains that don’t go to New York can have observation cars, because whoever designed Penn Station just couldn’t let us have good things.
6/1/23
Viewer Discretion Advised
This part may be controversial.
We came to Chicago and we were like, oh we need to see what all this deep-dish pizza talk is about. So we went to a place and got a deep-dish pizza. Which, from the first bite, I could tell, is not a pizza. It is a stupid excuse for a pizza. It is a pie. And not even a good pie. For those in the audience who like deep-dish pizza, I am sorry. For you. But yea, otherwise Day 1 of Chicago was good.
6/2/23
We walked around a lot of Chicago, and got to the pier in the afternoon. It was nice. I honestly didn’t know much about Chicago before going there, but I liked it a lot as a city except when it came to pizza.
6/3/23
One last, long train ride later, we were back in New York. Where I stayed for a very long time.
6/4/23
You might be wondering why tf I would come back to New York just to fly out the next day. Well, I had company-booked flight tickets from New York and planned to leave my luggage at home so it kind of just… worked out this way. One of my friends was also interning in New York, so he needed to make it back before the 5th too.
6/5/23
It was my first day at work as an intern :D. I took the generic photo in front of the Microsoft sign. We mostly just had an orientation that day, which meant I didn’t do too much “work” and mostly learned about policies, culture, benefits, etc.
6/6/23
In my building, there were some cute drawings on whiteboards where I was first placed. I then got moved to a different floor, so I never really saw these drawings again :(
6/7/23
This was not my building. I wish it was though, because the lobby was stunning and looked so cool. I think the plants were actually real plants, though I never got to check.
6/8/23
A friend and I got some food! We originally were planning to go to another place for dinner, but we got turned away cause apparently it was 21+ only. But honestly, this place was a great bang for the buck so their loss :P
6/9/23
After work, my roommate and I went to the A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie concert near Lumen Field. I’ve been listening to A Boogie for a while, so I was pretty hyped for the concert. This mans started the concert so late though because he was stuck on a plane (allegedly), so we waited like 3 hours for him to actually start playing.
6/10/23
For our earlier rail trip, we used the USA rail pass, which allows you to take 10 Amtrak segments for a flat price. The problem was, we had only used a few of those segments, and we didn’t want to let the rest just expire. So the 3 of us who were in Seattle for the summer decided to make a trip to Portland for two days. Two of us got screwed over by the Link (Seattle streetcar/metro) so bad we missed our Amtrak train, so we got to Portland later than our timely friend.
6/11/23
A cool sign :)! I don’t really know what else to say, Portland was nice, but it did feel a bit sleepy, to be honest.
6/12/23
After the weekend, it was back to work. I didn’t really like working in my office because there was… no natural light, so I went around different buildings on campus, finding new spots to work each day. This day, I found a cool relaxation space.
6/13/23
Cute doggo brought to an intern cohort meetup :D
6/14/23
When other people are getting their lives together and making breakfast in the morning, I am simply contemplating my existence and girl-rotting in bed. Which means that I usually did not have the time to make breakfast. There was a cafe in my building at work, and I got a breakfast burrito every morning.
6/15/23
Dinner :). It seems like Seattle has a pretty big Ethiopian/Eritrean community, and for a meal, my friends and I went to an Ethiopian restaurant. I really like injera, so I enjoy Ethiopian food a lot :). When I am desperate for Senegalese food, it is often the next best option.
6/16/23
I was walking through Capitol Hill on a rainy day and noticed that the crosswalk was painted for pride month. Looking at this picture now, Capitol Hill looks almost… suburban.
6/17/23
Very expensive lemons and limes. Can’t believe what inflation is doing to produce prices.
6/18/23
My friend’s apartment had a rooftop with a nice, unobstructed view of Seattle. I lived pretty close to her, though my view was not as nice.
6/19/23
Me when I have to go into work on Juneteenth.
6/20/23
I messaged some friends and was like “Hey should I make a sticker order on Redbubble?” They said no, which I took as a yes, and ordered some different stickers. I don’t know what to put them on, but I’m hoping to get a new laptop after I graduate someday, so maybe they can go on it. A lot of the stickers were Avatar, Spiderverse, Omori, or Hanako-Kun related
6/21/23
After work, my friends and I went axe throwing. None of us had done it before, and the axes may have come flying back at us once. At the end of our session, we got to try throwing two axes at once, and this photo is proof of my natural prowess in axe throwing. It took around 10 attempts to get this photo.
6/22/23
I bought a beanbag for my summer room. It was a mildly angry shibe (beans sold separately) that I stuffed with the help of a friend. I brought it with me to MIT after the summer so that we could have a beanbag in our floor lounge, but it was stolen early in the semester under mysterious circumstances.
6/23/23
My blogger picture is not that accurate anymore. My hair is actually kind of long. This picture was taken while I sitting in the stylist’s chair, I promise I don’t walk out looking like this. I had twists for the end of the Spring semester, took them out, and was getting them redone. This stylist was lowkey extremely painful with how they dealt with my hair and I thought I was going to pass out like 5 times.
6/24/23
Another concert :D! A friend of mine was like wow Louis Tomlinson tickets are only $8. I asked them who that was. They said it was one of the former One Direction people. I was like ohhhh, that sounds cheap might as well go. I never heard any of his individual songs before this, but the production quality of this concert was pretty good.
6/25/23
At the Seattle Pride Parade, some funny cheez-its were handed out to spectators, so we took a picture of the bag
6/26/23
I used to play soccer more as a wee lad, so I wanted to get back into it a bit over the summer. I used part of my internship wellness stipend on shin guards, socks, and (not featured) cleats. My existing pair of cleats were size 7 and from when I was 12, so they… didn’t really fit anymore.
6/27/23
We went to the Chihuly Glass Museum in Seattle. It was really pretty, but a bit expensive considering the size. I was a bit scared walking through it cause there was no way I could afford breaking anything there on accident.
6/28/23
I was very sleepy on this random Wednesday and felt this meme…
6/29/23
One thing I wanted to get over the summer was a new pair of shoes. I walked into Foot Locker and saw these Lego-ultraboost collab shoes and fell in love. Like any sane person, I knew not to buy them at Foot Locker because they tend to upcharge a lot, and found them online for a lot cheaper.
6/30/23
My stickers came! But this one was a bit too pixelated for my liking, so I got a credit from customer service for a future order.
7/1/23
One of my good friends asked me if I wanted to go to Canada over the weekend, so I joined them for the car ride from Seattle to Vancouver. It was Canada Day, so downtown Vancouver was very busy. After the long day, we went to a night market in Richmond, where we had Big Bird watching over us.
7/2/23
I was playing 2K and put Cauley-Stein on a nice poster with the staredown. If you follow basketball, you probably are like, “Westbrook hasn’t been on the Rockets in years,” which is true. I’m playing NBA 2K20 because that is the one I have and it does the job just fine.
7/3/23
A derpy-looking crab that I have joint custody of. We adopted him in Vancouver. My friend and I debated how to split time with the crab, which included potentially cutting him in half horizontally or vertically and each of us having a part of him. Don’t fear though, he is still all in one piece. For now.
7/4/23
Interesting take.
7/5/23
I really love this frog. It’s a frog for a Korean Soju brand and it is adorable. There was a pop-up store actually when I was in Korea for IAP (January term), but I never got to go :(. I really wanted dakgalbi, basically stir-friend chicken in a spicy sauce with veggies and cheese (this description does not do it justice), but the restaurant ran out of it for the day >:(((((((((((. So I got some sort of jiggae instead, which was also good but not dakgalbi >:((((((((
7/6/23
Lots of museums in Seattle offer free admission on the first Thursday of the month, so I used that chance to check out the Museum of Flight in Seattle. I really loved this museum, but it was so big that I didn’t have time to see the whole thing. It was fun to go on old planes and see that there is somehow less legroom now than there was then.
7/7/23
Ah yes, a meme that makes fun of my pain and suffering
7/8/23
Went to watch Romeo and Juliet performed in a public park :). The parks in Seattle have a Shakespeare series over the summer, so they also performed on other dates Macbeth and one other play I forgot. I only got to watch Romeo and Juliet though
7/9/23
boink
7/10/23
Another day, another day I get ready for work. I lived in UDistrict while my office was in Redmond, so there was a bit of a commute. It wasn’t too bad, especially since I would carpool most days with my roommate and another friend
7/11/23
I don’t know
7/12/23
what happened here
7/13/23
More food + actually visible friends. I do not remember what the restaurant was, but the food was good
7/14/23
I do think Messi is a great athlete, but he made a major mistake going to Inter Miami. He should have come to New York instead :(, it is time for New York sports teams to finally have something good happen for us
7/15/23
Talking about soccer, I went to a Seattle Sounders game with a fellow intern. It was at Lumen Field, which is also the Seahawks stadium, so that was pretty fun. It wound up being a 1-1 draw against FC Dallas, so a fair result.
7/16/23
Seattle had a lot of festivals over the summer and one of the ones I liked the best was the Black Arts Festival. There were some pretty interesting booths about Black history and Black engineers.
7/17/23
I was taking the Connector (a Microsoft employee bus) and a full-timer started a chat with me. He was working in a Finance role at the company and wound up giving me some recommendations on where to go in the city. It was nice of him and though I didn’t see him again before I left, I appreciated it a lot :)
7/18/23
A cafe-not-in-my-building had a cool menu. I got a horchata latte, but I didn’t realize latte meant… coffee. I’m not quite sure what I thought it meant. I was shaking for a few hours.
7/19/23
Not sure how I got to this point, but I was reading up on my congressional district and got to this page that had some basic info about it. Kind of funny how my district has roughly the same population as all of Boston…. and all of Seattle…
7/20/23
Our intern cohort got some sporting tickets, so I got to see the league-worst Seattle Storm. They have not been doing so hot since Stewie left to New York (finally something good happens to a NY sports team), and they got cooked in this game as well. Their mascot was pretty scary…
7/21/23
Ah, what a time to be a New Yorker who can’t drive anyways.
7/22/23
I went to a Pow Wow Festival in Seattle held by a local Indigenous foundation. I’m not too familiar with Native American culture and traditions, so I thought it would be interesting to check out. It was in Discovery Park, and required going uphill a lot to reach the venue. While I was there (with a friend), we tried wojapi with waffles, which was the best food I had in Seattle the entire summer. Honestly, the best thing I’ve had this year, perhaps in this life. It was… so good.
7/23/23
There was an art festival by Aiki Beach, which wasn’t too busy but was nice overall. On the beach, there was a group of people playing giant beach volleyball
7/24/23
Great order number, I’m sure this isn’t a sign of anything ominous.
Also, there was a price hike on my burritos. A 17% price hike. Burritos were starting to seem like an unaffordable lifestyle choice.
7/25/23
Cute cats, one of them was my MBTI so I liked this image :)
7/26/23
Let’s not
7/27/23
worry about this
7/28/23
EAST CAMPUS LIVES!
And in this universe, is also under construction…
7/29/23
A crow in not-Seattle. I was in LA for the weekend, which was surprisingly humid.
7/30/23
By being in LA for the weekend, I narrowly missed the 2023 earthquake in Seattle.
7/31/23
Another sporting event! I got to go to a Mariner’s game, which I surprisingly liked. I’ve gone to Yankee’s and Red Sox’s games before, and usually… baseball just doesn’t do it for me. But T-Mobile Arena was actually pretty fun to be at, with good vibes and music. I’m still not a baseball fan, but my opinion improved a bit.
8/1/23
Happy August?
8/2/23
I tend to form very random interests or fixations on things. One of these things being Pocoyo for a solid two days. It appears I have not mentally aged since preschool. I just found the animation style cute, so I watched an episode. I was surprised by how good the… plot was. Like… it actually was kind of interesting. Peak entertainment. I watched a few more episodes before going to bed.
8/3/23
As the WWC kept progressing, my sleep schedule kept getting worse. I had Japan going all the way… but it was not meant to be.
8/4/23
Big dinner :D! I made a reservation for dinner at a Sichuan restaurant with a few friends and older alumni of a scholarship program I’m in
8/5/23
After two months in Seattle, I finally went to Pike Place Market. It was nice and cool to see the fish-throwing actually happen. I got some apple cider from (you would never guess) an apple cider vendor. They had flavors like lavender, which slapped.
8/6/23 
The Blue Angels were doing an airshow over a part of Seattle, so some friends and I went. It was way too loud for me ngl, so I did not have the time of my life. But hey, some of them enjoyed it…
8/7/23
Oop overly relatable music lyrics strike again
8/8/23
Yes, the trumpet is literally on fire. There was a musical performance in Capitol Hill I was walking by, and I had a double take when I looked at the man’s trumpet.
8/9/23
Concert :D! I went to NF’s concert in Seattle, which was a pretty good one. The production quality was nice and it was pretty long. He managed to trick everyone while letting a guest perform and make it to the back of the audience (and get on a different stage somehow), which was pretty neat
8/10/23
In Seattle, they call lots of the towns east of Lake Washington the “Eastside”, so when this song appeared in my queue, I was pretty amused
8/11/23
At a friend’s apartment, we had a kimbap and crepe night. We made kimbap and crepes. Lots of kimbap. So much kimbap that we had lunch ready for the next day, when most of us were going on a trip together.
8/12/23
A very pretty rock. My friends and I drove (I did not drive) to Olympic National Park, which is about 3 hours away from Seattle. It was my first time in a National Park :D. We first went to a very pretty lake, which had extremely clear water. I wanted to taste it, but a hint of restraint stopped me from doing so
8/13/23
Our visit to Olympic National Park coincided with the Perseids meteor shower, so we went to a beach near Forks, WA to be able to see them at night. I had my camera and tripod, so I wanted to get pictures of the meteor shower and Milky Way bands. It took a long time for me to figure out manual focus, but I eventually got some good photos like this one. Fun fact, the ocean water there is bioluminescent at night during some times of the year :D. Also, here is the actual photo I took (I am very proud of it, so I am breaking my 1 photo per day rule):
8/14/23
I stayed late at work one day. I’m pretty big on trying to keep a work-life balance at places not named MIT, but there was something I was reallllly trying to finish. The office was a ghost town by the time I left.
8/15/23
I made plantains :D! I didn’t show much of my cooking earlier in the post, but I actually cooked dinner more than I ate out. This was not dinner, it was just a snack so that I could go back to playing 2K.
8/16/23
Directions home :O, I no longer live there, so good luck trying to visit me
8/17/23
Why? Just why? Who thought up of this…
8/18/23
Bingsu :P
My friends and I went to get dessert after dinner, and there was a bingsu place nearby, so we chose to go there. The serving size was pretty good, so it was solid
8/19/23
How comforting.
8/20/23
It was a bit unfortunate that my “final” weekend day in Seattle was one that I couldn’t go out for. There was some pretty bad smoke coming over from Canada, so I just stayed home and watched the sky get more and more grey as the day went on
8/21/23
A friend of mine from both work and school told me that her manager brought her team out to this really good Indian restaurant. So during our final week as interns, we decided to go to that place. It was pretty good, kind of wish we got a second dosa
8/22/23
I presented my project and mentally clocked out
8/23/23
Someone dropped some Lego creation and the sidewalk was just covered in legos :(. Poor fella
8/24/23
I fell in love with this poke place by my housing during my time in Seattle. Their fish was nicely marinated, and considering the usual prices of poke bowls, it was a very good deal for the amount of food they gave. I got lunch from there one last time since I was working remotely that day
8/25/23
My last day interning .-. I turned in my badge, my work laptop (my only good laptop), and some other things. It was a pretty good ride, I felt like I learned a lot and gained a better understanding of what the tech industry is actually like
8/26/23
And I was off from Seattle… at least for now. I planned a trip after my internship ended with some high school friends, so I was flying to San Francisco to meet up with them. The flight was surprisingly cheap, so it worked out well. I watched the Mario movie on the flight, and fell in love with this luma :))
8/27/23
Seal lions (not seals) :D
As a tourist, I really wanted to see the famed sea lions that SF has on that one pier. I was lucky that it was the right time of year, because there were so many of them just chilling there. I wound up buying a little sea lion keychain to commemorate my time in SF
8/28/23
I grabbed dinner with a friend at Stanford. I have known her for about 3 years, but we never got to meet in person. It was cool finally getting to do that after so long.
8/29/23
We went to the Palace of the Fine Arts :O I was pretty surprised that something this existed in SF, it felt pretty majestic
8/30/23
My friends and I took a short flight down to San Diego for the second half of our trip. Out of the 3 cities of been to in California, I think San Diego was actually my favorite. I liked the vibes, their public transit was not nearly as bad as I expected, and the Mexican food there was so good.
8/31/23
I forgot to mention the architecture in San Diego was also really pretty!
9/1/23
And the nature! The nature was also really nice! I took this picture at La Jolla Cove, which was a bit difficult to get to, but worth the trip
9/2/23
After San Diego, I returned to Seattle for a day before my flight back to campus. I went to see Green Lake with a friend, and it was really nice at sundown :)
9/3/23
I am a big window seat lover, so I enjoyed this flight a lot. I think I rewatched Across the Spiderverse, which has had a chokehold on me since I first watched it in theaters. The ending song was my top listened-to song for 2023 o_o
9/4/23
I knocked out.
9/5/23
I arrived back at MIT’s brick oven (Macgregor during the summer) and realized that I needed some command hooks to hang stuff. I should have known better than to go to Target right after move-in, because I had to leave empty-handed.
9/6/23
First day of classes for the Fall :O. I screenshotted my schedule to make sure I knew where to go. My classes at the start of the semester were Strobe Project Laboratory, Inference, Controls, and Japanese 3, though I dropped Japanese 3 a few weeks into the term.
9/7/23
I hate Northeast weather sometimes. Really the worst of both worlds.
9/8/23
I somehow wound up on a crochet artist’s shop and saw a baby yoda plush. A friend of mine likes baby yoda a lot and has a giant one in her room, so I think I sent a picture of the crocheted one to her
9/9/23
o_o
9/10/23
As a member of class council, the beginning of the Fall semester meant planning for our signature Senior event was in full swing. Since alcohol was going to be available for students at the event, we had to fill out a share of forms as a part of the event proposal.
9/11/23
No photos :(
9/12/23
This was a picture taken during the first lab for Strobe lab. In this lab, we were using strobe photography to record the evolution of a balloon being popped. We finished early, so we got to play around a bit with extra balloons, leading to my team drawing a nervous face on a balloon, spraying it with water, and popping it. We got a pretty cool photo from it, so his sacrifice was not in vain.
9/13/23
A meme that resulted from a rather long zoom call I will not discuss further.
9/14/23
My phone lockscreen :) The background is a photo I took, but it is cropped quite a bit in this screenshot. I like to keep count of how many steps I take a day, so I have it right on the homepage. I usually aim to walk around 7,000 a day, which is pretty feasible with classes, unless I happen to be a potato on a certain day.
9/15/23
I do wish I had a river view in my dorm, but it is nice to face the sunsets as well. Boston has some of the prettiest sunsets I have ever seen, so this is something I will miss a lot :(
9/16/23
Just two weeks into the semester and I was already sleep-deprived. It was mostly self-inflicted, but at least a long 15 hours in bed was able to help
9/17/23
I was walking by a lab room and saw this funny sign outside. I think this is a class I actually want to take… someday. When that day is, I don’t know
9/18/23
I saw this MIT news article and thought it was cool to see DynaMIT featured. I worked as a mentor for DynaMIT for two summers, and I really enjoyed my experiences each year :). I also found this article funny since they labeled two mentors as DynaMIT students, which I only realized cause I know one of them.
9/19/23
I wanted to go to this event so badly, but it conflicted with my lab for Strobe lab. I highly debated skipping that lab and switching to another section for that week, but someone in my 4-person group did just before I planned to…
Pain.
9/20/23
Sometimes, I walk around campus and find the weirdest things going on. I was walking to my Controls class in Stata, and saw that there was a table with a bunch of caterpillars. I went to check it out, and they still had some caterpillars out hanging around on different branches. I don’t quite remember why there were caterpillars there, but it was interesting.
9/21/23
This was a sad day, as Senegal fell in the FIFA world rankings to the 20th spot.
9/22/23
In a rare showing of me being mildly responsible, I made dinner that night. I didn’t make the pasta from scratch, but I at least boiled it. I did though cook salmon and season it, and I feel it came out rather good. I like to pan-fry salmon, but it can be hard to find time to do that during the semester
9/23/23
Two of my friends and I ventured out to Watertown to go to Kura Sushi. We wanted to get conveyor belt sushi for dinner, so we made plans to Uber there together. This store also had a robot that delivered water to your table, which is pictured. It was cool and very polite :)
9/24/23
I had/have no intentions of triple majoring (I am just trying to finish one), but I searched this up to explain something to someone.
9/25/23
An interesting poster for an event. I’ve been trying to make a more conscious effort to look at posters on campus since some are for really cool stuff. It can be easy to look at a poster and immediately forget about it though…
9/26/23
Another night of strobe lab! This week we were doing milk drop photos, which is basically taking pictures of what happens when drops of milk hit a petri dish. We used a high-speed video camera for this lab, along with lights and a macro lens.
9/27/23
Outside my window, there were a lot of soccer games that were held last semester. They weren’t MIT games, so I’m not too sure where they came from. It was still fun to watch, except for the one time I saw a team get cooked and could only feel bad for them.
9/28/23
Oooo spooky
9/29/23
Disorientation! We held our major Senior event at the Museum of Science in Cambridge, and I would say it was a pretty solid event if I do say so myself. It is nice to see months of work come to an end at events, and we (almost) avoided any issues during the night.
9/30/23
I got addicted to this Kdrama called Moving over that weekend. I watched all 20 episodes, which were about 40 minutes each, over the course of 2 days. You may be wondering how this is possible, and that is because I simply barely moved. Though I loved the show, I’m not too sure if I agree with his statement here…
10/1/23
Actually, that was a lie I guess since I did move a bit that weekend. My entry had a bowling event I went to, which was fun despite my lack of bowling prowess. After the event, I walked to Matcha Maiko, which is a place my old GTL (Global Teaching Labs) teammate introduced me to. I got an ube-something float with boba, which was probably terrible for my health but tasted really good so…
10/2/23
I noticed these pretty reflections of light near Stata, and had to take a picture.
10/3/23
Another Tuesday, another day of strobe. This week we were assessing how well strobe photography can help us find the value of g for a falling ball. We had a strobe that flashed many times and a DSLR camera. Since we needed to write a report that included quantitative data, we used a meter stick to find the position of the ball at each flash.
10/4/23
Idk man it is kind of giving toxic workplace environment
10/5/23
A good friend of mine was having his birthday on this day, so we went to Yamato’s, an all-you-can-eat sushi place in Boston. We had a cake to cut, but the cake kind of disintegrated as we tried to cut it, leaving a slight mess by the end
10/6/23
The African Students Association had a Fall retreat, so I joined the trip to Cape Cod. I had never gone on their retreats before or to Cape Cod, so it was a new experience. I really enjoyed the retreat and getting to know some new people, so it was very worth it.
10/7/23
At the retreat, I saw this pretty strand of leaves :)
10/8/23
A friend and I considered going to this game, but we winded up not going because, again, I had strobe lab at this time :(
10/9/23
My worst fear.
10/10/23
Dormcon, which is a committee of students from all the dorms, ran an apple-picking event for students. I never had gone apple picking before, so I thought it would be cool to try out. I think for me, it was kind of a one-and-done experience, but I’m glad I went. I liked the pears at the farm more than the apples o-o
10/11/23
I just processed that… that is a lot of years of schooling
10/12/23
I really like Kendrick, so I think I must have been listening to this song and accidentally screenshotted it. I think I know this song by heart
10/13/23
A graph from Controls. I don’t remember what lab this was from, but the orange was our desired behavior for our system, while blue was the behavior we were having. It got smoother after some time, so this probably was one of the better controllers we had during this lab
10/14/23
Bruh it is not that deep Damian please calm down
10/15/23
I found it funny that my professor commented on the heading of my paper :)
10/16/23
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
10/17/23
Another strobe lab photo! We did bullet photography that week and used strobe techniques to take a picture of a bullet going through 3 candles. I found it really cool how the second candle looks like a ghost candle
10/18/23
Fall foliage outside Macgregor :) Around this time of year on campus, you could find every leaf color imaginable. I took a leaf off a tree somewhere else on campus and dried it out cause it was so pretty that I wanted to keep it ;-;
10/19/23
A funny LinkedIn post for once :O
10/20/23
For controls, we used Matlab a fair bit for simplfying calculations. We were using it during a lab, so I took a screenshot of my screen for some reason, maybe to remember the values we were using.
10/21/23
New tunnel mural! I don’t know when exactly this one went up, but I think it was pretty recent. As I said earlier, I loved Across the Spiderverse, so I was pretty hyped to see this mural.
10/22/23
This is a hallway I know all too well. It is the 5th floor of Building 26, which I often use to get to the 5th floor of 38 (or 36, I honestly don’t know which one it is) since I have had a lot of classes there. I think I have had 6.08 (Embedded Systems), 6.002 (Circuits), and 6.302 (Controls) in that same area over the course of 3 semesters.
10/23/23
A cute sign that I saw, you will never guess it, on my way to the 5th floor of Building 38 (or 36)
10/24/23
I don’t find myself on the second floor of the Infinite much, so when I do, it reminds me that Lobby 7 has some cool architecture. I’m not the biggest fan of the current banners that hang there, but the building itself is nice.
10/25/23
I’m in a fantasy league with some friends/acquaintances, and that week was looking to be a close one. I don’t remember if I won that week or not since I have had my fair share of losses. I think I’m currently sitting at .500, so I guess it could be worse.
10/26/23
More pretty foliage :)), this time outside of E38
10/27/23
I binged another show. This time I watched Pluto over the course of 2 days, which was about 8 hours of content. I saw this panel in the manga that resonated with me because of all the equations in the background and the character’s (Atom’s) look of O_O, so I drew myself into the panel.
10/28/23
A few friends and I went to a frat party for Halloween, which was fun, but I was way too sleepy for it. My friend was dressed up as Emo Jimmy Butler, if you get the reference
10/29/23
Juice WRLD still be hitting with these relatable lyrics all these years later…
10/30/23
I went to a faculty-student dinner event! We went to the Mad Monkfish, a restaurant in Cambridge that specializes in sushi. I got a cool roll (for free >:)))) and got to hear about the professor’s research, work, and path to MIT
10/31/23
For strobe lab (again), I designed and 3D printed a drill attachment for our final project. Our final project was dealing with making educational material for Magnetism classes, so we wanted to spin magnets using a drill and see how they interacted with iron filings & ferrofluid through the use of imaging techniques.
11/1/23
Me :O, I wasn’t lying when I said my hair is longer than in my photo
11/2/23
I have no clue what the context was for this, but I do recall I sent this to someone.
11/3/23
An equation from Strobe Lab that I needed to reference. I am off from class, so I refuse to elaborate on what this equation means. I may have also forgotten what it means o_o
11/4/23
My friend and I went to Newbury Street and got boba on a nice day. The place we were at had a nice angle with the Prudential building, so I took a picture that lined up with the street lamp.
11/5/23
I got a food delivery, and the driver sent this picture to confirm my order arrived. I got my nourishment successfully :)
11/6/23
If you didn’t get the Jimmy Butler reference earlier, this was what I was talking about. He basically trolled and wore an emo look to NBA Media Day so that we only see this picture for this season.
11/7/23
On a board in Building 26 3rd floor, a group wrote this note. During the fall semester, we had an unusually high number of South Korean tour groups visiting MIT, which was very interesting to see
11/8/23
I discovered a bug in Spotify, somehow. Also, I forgot to submit my information for the Blogger’s Spotify blog this year…
11/9/23
Look how they did my boy momo dirty…
11/10/23
The milk drop photos from earlier! We colored some of the milk to make it more visible, which led to some cool shots.
11/11/23
Another cool poster! Found in the Z center (the gym), featuring two beavers duking it out.
11/12/23
My friends and I went to Quincy Market for fun, which was a nice way to get off campus. I had gone to Quincy Market only once before during my Sophomore year, so it was interesting to see the place much busier than it was during COVID times.
11/13/23
A cool event that I forgot to go to until after it past :/
11/14/23
A senior tradition is Senior Sunrise, which is when the class gets up early to watch the sun rise over the Boston skyline. A surprisingly large share of our class came out, and as Class Council, we bought munchkins to share for the occasion.
11/15/23 – Fin
This day was my birthday :), which means I turned __ years old (I did not forget to type it in)! My birthday is right before Thanksgiving, so I usually am pretty busy and don’t celebrate it too much cause of courseloads :/. I still got to have a good time with some friends and mess around for a bit though. I wanted to treat myself to buying these kicks, but I could no longer find them on the Nike store :(. I did wind up buying a different black and blue pair a few days later, which I guess counts as a present to myself still :)
And with that, I’ll close the shutter on this blog :)