When I was 21 years old, I had about 3 months left in my senior year of undergrad. I had a job all lined up, an apartment picked out, and the love of my life, 15 feet away from me, kissing an ugly friend while I fought chills, hot flashes, and a night of vomiting thanks to the stomach flu. We had been very lax about inappropriate attractions in a committed relationship, we were both cool pointing out pretty people to each other, she had had some passing flirtations that I didn't mind or even encouraged (the latter never went anywhere), so in many ways, a kiss wasn't out of the ordinary. What was, was that she spent the following weekend texting back and forth, while my ugly friend did everything in his power to win over my girlfriend, and she streamed her regrets back to him. So, for 2 days she kept a secret. I had no idea that happened, and she had no idea what to do.
The greatest regret of my life is multi-fold in this moment.
As a result, I pointed the blame at my ugly friend. I sat him down, and told him, point by point, how he is a predator, and how he preyed on another mutual friend. I really tore him apart, I cannot properly emphasize the depths of psychological cruelty I am capable of when given the opportunity. He ended up moving to New Zealand to marry a girl he met online, so he could bring her to Massachusetts to raise their baby and get divorced. I did him no favors. The only change to my relationship was a new rule, the "day after rule". "You can do any stupid shit you want, cheat on me, kill a guy, anything you have to tell me immediately." This, I think, is a good rule, but in context is a way of attempting to apply a technical fix to a relational problem. It's effectively, "You have to trust me." which isn't a rule, it's an inherent property of the relationship's ability to exist. Momentum/spin kinda deal. Another inherent property of every relationship is that we don't hit each other. That's why I was so devastated throughout the divorce was that, to this day, she has never admitted to hitting me. I'm sure he says it was a push or a shove or whatever but it was taking away my physical autonomy and that is a one and done kind of decision on her part. Going forward, we only do nice touches.
I'm divorced. It's a pretty shocking fact to those that know me, I am, after all, obviously a catch. That, I think, was a really core problem with my marriage that was exacerbated to the point of obviation with my last-ditch effort poly boyfriend. He liked me. A lot. And he let me know it. A lot.
Women truly cannot comprehend the fundamental difference between having ones interaction with sex and sexuality being "a thing that people did to me before I was ready" and "a thing nobody will ever do to or with me". I say this because walking down the street, you'd see me, and think, that's a good looking dude, and then you'd think, I bet he knows it, I mean, look at him, but I did not. I did not receive any compliments or attention from any women or girls my entire life, until my high school girlfriend, "I actually had a huge crush on you" *why didn't you tell me??*, and again, obviated by degree with my ex-boyfriend. It is very nice to have a much more concrete idea of how I am perceived by society at large.
My marriage was not good. It was in fact a bad idea to even get into a relationship from the beginning and that much is obvious for one simple fact. She was not in a good place when we fell in love. In order for a relationship to be healthy and sustainable, both parties need to come in at a good place, so that they may maintain and grow from there. Of course, there's the flipside as well, which is that I was only seeking that relationship because I knew that I was completely and utterly uninteresting to every woman that's ever lived.
Media really screwed my up in that regard. I grew up in the 90s, and the characters that I identified with were the weirdo nerds, so I simply accepted, I'm a nerd, so girls don't like me. Simpler times, the 90s.
This brings us back to the story, I tear this ugly man apart, graduate, with my eyes boring laser holes into the back of his head the entire time (he was sat in front of me), and move in with this woman who kissed my ugly friend then hid it for a weekend. Within 6 months, she expressed her interest in exploring her bisexuality, since she got unlucky only dating one person, and therefore was unable to explore her sexuality completely with me. So the dating profiles began, and I was fine, encouraging even. The rule was, "no running off into the sunset together". She met an afab enby and figured, eh, good enough, and they started having sex. Which might have been fine, maybe, but they were indeed falling in love with each other, as people who has sex together tend to do, and my paranoia got the better of me. I started reading their emails, not realizing then, but in an attempt to find proof that she was, in fact, emotionally cheating on me.
My first girlfriend cheated on me. It was especially hard because it was emotional. She, rightly, did not feel comfortable or attracted to me as she got to know me better and caught feelings for a
crew boy. I learned what the red mist of rage feels like, seeing myself know I shouldn't type what I was going to type, typing it anyways, and hitting enter. We ended up breaking up for a while,
then getting back together until I went off to college. The most memorable bit, which made its way into a poem was
"We have fun, don't we?" she asks
"No.", I think
"Yes.", I say
As I said, I found the cheating I was looking for, and so we went to dinner. Me and her, them and their shitty abusive partner foil for me. It was polite but uncomfortable. I didn't even like this afab enby. They were cool, but, this is who you're picking over me?
"I didn't even like him", she once said, about kissing my ugly friend, and that was the worst part. She wasn't trying to get to my ugly friend or this online rando, she was, rightly, trying to get away from me.
Fast forward a pandemic, a wedding, and a house purchase in Cutesville, Western Massachusetts, and I am working for Pave. We have had our ups and downs in the 10ish years we've been at it, but the last few years felt like more downs than ups, and it's hard to tell what's us and what's the world falling apart. She starts to get close to one of my groomsmen, and they trauma bond over her becoming a bridesmaid. Their love grows, she moves in down the road (lol uhaul lesbians amirite), and I am given an ultimatum. Either this bridesmaid, and her cat, moves in with you, and your rabbit, or get out of your own marriage.
I'm a pretty logical person, usually for the worse. I was under the impression that marriage was intended as a declaration that the other person is more important to you than every other person, until you die. That was the contract I signed, and when things were falling apart, she was genuinely surprised to know that I would cut off a pinky for her, without a second thought.
That's the two genders. Men are disposable, which is awesome because you fit in with everyone. Women are special, which sucks because you can't just fit in and be some dude whether you like it or not.
However, it became readily apparent to me that I was not the most important person to her when she couldn't ask the bridesmaid for a 10 minute ride down the street in her brand new truck.
"She was probably just being friendly" was the response I got every. single. time. a cute girl obviously flirted with me. The thing about women is that they know men are clueless, so when they are
interested, they really are not subtle at all. The biggest tell is seeking my approval, something I get a lot more of than I want, but which I'm grateful for relative to the alternative.
Kaelan
Naeun
Many years ago I had a thought as I was falling asleep, "Could I pick apart a bunch of images to recreate a particular target?" This thought lead to one of my most successful projects yet, pixel-matcher. Once I had it in a good state, I posted to Reddit which made it to the frontpage, and resulted in quite a bit of discussion.
One post that jumped out was someone who had recreated the effect in ShaderToy. To my astonishment, this in-browser implementation was able to run in real-time with multiple video feeds. In contrast, my program took seconds per frame, many thousands of times slower.
I immediately got to work implementing the algorithm in OpenCL to parallelize the work, and see if I could get close to real-time. This wasn't a huge issue, I've done a bit of GLSL work in the past so I was familiar with the implementation. However, once I ran it, the results were completely different and not just that, they were utterly boring! Whereas my CPU native version would twist and pulse as it made its way to the final image, this new version was bizarrely utilitarian. It grabbed exactly the pixels it needed, only ever working towards the optimum solution.
After a huge amount of debugging, I finally found the issue, or rather, lack of issue! It turned out that the CPU native version had the distances calculated using an unsigned 8-bit integer, because of how I initialized the Numpy array. 8-bits gets you 0-255, so if the difference found was negative, or if it went over 255, the value would either overflow or underflow.
With this knowledge in hand, I intentionally introduced the overflow and underflow bug and all of a sudden, everything was back how it was before. Pulsing, twisting, ripping and rending, constantly evolving, and ever hypnotizing.