2023 Fall Semester Update
This was ported over from an email I sent out in 2023 to some of my Minnesota friends <3
To my dearly beloved baby girls,
Thank you for your patience in this issue. This has been a particularly STEM-pilled semester and it’s been hard to find space to do fun stuff or catch up. In week 1, I saw this tiktok where a doll head continuously bashed its head into a brick and I felt so much kinship I screenshotted it and analyzed its degrees of freedom. That’s been… a pretty accurate description of how it’s going. Please giggle and enjoy basically my 2023 fall semester update.
Hiking Highlights
It’s been a big touch grass semester, surprisingly. Unfortunately to graduate from this disgraceful liberal institution, I have to take two PE classes like it’s high school again. It was pretty chill though, since I only had to do 3 full day hikes, and I got to make a fun little day trip with my friends out of it for one! Here are some fun pictures I took from them:
For my fall break, which was over election day weekend, some friends and I took the train up to Poughkeepsie (pronounced poo-kip-see, she keep pooing on my c til i-) to borrow my friend Sahil’s sister’s car, and then drove to the Kaaterskills! We of course, had a lot of antics, played the Wii, darts, and pool table our airbnb had, and also played some smash because unfortunately, Cindy, Kyle, Abishek, and Sahil, love to grind smash. We only stayed for two nights, so we basically just gamed and hung out but went on one looong all day hike that was a nice long loop and included some views of the waterfall, and even climbed behind it!
And of course, if anyone was caught sleeping near me, they were, of course, subjected to pictures.
I am an archivist first and a person second. And also a fucking winner because I was never caught lacking!!! (I definitely paid for the lack of sleep in the following days after the trip)
Engineering Design Team
This is what’s been the big time suck of the semester unfortunately. I’m in two design classes this semester, Machine Design and Senior Design, and I have the same group for both that was picked before the school semester even started because we’re all crazy (but in a cunty way I promise). I’m going to mansplain what those classes are in the next paragraph as context, but you can definitely skip it and ask me again when we’re drunk or whatever if that’s more bearable.
Machine design is a fuck load of work, unfortunately, since it’s a full on class alongwith a full on project. You have to build an entire machine (FROM SCRATCH. EVERY THING IS MACHINED AND CALCULATED. FROM SCRATCH.) to press a series of buttons as fast as possible, but there are a ton of silly constraints like you have to use a linkage or you can only press the buttons with one tiny acrylic piece. It’s so much work. I will literally machine for hours on end after doing hours of calculations and then I will have to do hours of code. But we’re at least putting fun little hearts on our thing so at least it’s slay. Senior design is basically our capstone project, and that’s been more fun to ideate, and we’ve had to do a lot of prototyping and making a lot of presentations for it. My group is improving whale tags!! A quick spiel: whales are pretty important to the ecosystem as a whole, they can sequester a lot of carbon and nitrogen and can provide a good indicator as to how the oceans are doing. BUT they’re dying and it’s stupid hard to track them without shooting them with invasive barbed tags that can often lead the whale to get sick or die. Literally the non-invasive state of the art tags for whales are so stupid- researchers will literally take a tag with suction cups and put it on the end of a 25 foot stick, and just SLAP it on the whale when it breaches. And get this– the fucking tag lasts for 24 hours… AT MOST… like that’s PRIME data… absurd. And there’s a whole plethora of other problems that come from that. So my group is working on a bunch of ways to make this better, with bio-inspired tags and biocement, energy regeneration, and re-orientation.
I love my group very much and it’s actually crazy that working in a good group motivates you. We’ve done some silly things together, like go to trivia, happy hours at bars, and Chinatown food crawls.
We have a discord channel of course and there is a little too much meowing and calling each other discord kittens. One of my favorite bits is that we all have villain names- I’ve labeled them for you. I’d say it’s a pretty cunty group overall and I’m thankful for them! A lot of the extra work that we do is because we’re inspired and we want to be extra. I’m coming up on the last few weeks where everything will probably come together at the cost of my sanity. Here’s hoping I get the projects done by the end of the semester </3
“Parties” & Concerts
I moved to a real apartment this year as you all know! It comes with the New York essentials such as cockroaches that have increased my kill count exponentially (my current KDA is now 39/0/5), one mouse that keeps evading me (I have since sealed my room off), and some loud ass upstairs neighbors that are “musicians” and play “music” at literally both 3 AM and 7 AM. I do, unfortunately, have 3 roommates, but they’re all pretty nice. One is my good friend Kyle (pictured in the hiking section), the other two are people I found randomly- Avery who hangs with Kyle and I occasionally and is the resident switch owner, and Valerie who I literally only see at 2 AM in the kitchen or hear playing league with her bf. We’ve managed to host a few parties though, and that’s been pretty fun! I don’t have that many pictures of this, so you’ll just have to imagine. (1) Mid Autumn Festival - We drank shitty Chinese beer (tsingtao lol) and listened to old Chinese ballads. Got a big takeout order from a local place and also ate some mooncakes. Cute and fun and a good start to the semester. (2) Housewarming - This one objectively went crazy, since Kyle got a very nice paying job (one of THE CS trading jobs people want) and gave me a big wine budget lol. We bought three red wines and three white wines, covered them up, and had people do a blind taste test to see if they could rank it from cheap to expensive. Winners (or those who got the best score) got little champagne bottles. There was also a charcuterie board funded by Kyle & Whole Foods. Very bougie but fun :) (3) Hot Pot Friendsgiving - This has been a staple for the past 3 years, since a lot of my friends and I stay in NYC for thanksgiving. It was cute and I overbought groceries like always, but that just means leftovers!
Aside from that, Cindy & Ellen’s suite held a Halloween party and we went as Eeveelutions. Before you fret, I explicitly said I would only do it if vaporeon was banned. I thought we pulled it off!! It was pretty cute, I made my ears out of paper mache and sewed the ends on the ribbons, and then also made Ellen and Cindy’s ears 30 minutes before the party started lol.
As for concerts, I went to exactly one (1) this semester. Genesis Owusu! It’s a band that Mel (melissa!) and Michael introduced me to separately but around the same time haha. The new album was very roach based and had a lot of fun biblical & literary references (Gregor Samsa, Godot, Sodom and Gomorrah, and a good ol’ God complex), so of course someone went to the concert dressed as a roach and got on stage.
No one wanted to go with me or really knew the artist, so I dragged my ass all the way to Brooklyn alone (2.5 hrs total travel time </3). I was pretty tired that day and kind of worried I wouldn’t have fun alone but luckily it was SO much fun! I managed to push my way to the front on the side because I was by myself and didn’t really have to worry about anyone else, and then got swirlied by the mosh pit magically to like the second row from the front. If you see above I made it onto the insta!! So cool & fun. The only L’s that night was one lost press-on nail and the fucking $15 yuzu seltzer I accidentally got tricked into buying :(
Arts & Crafts
I haven’t had the most time to do all the craft stuff that I want to do, but I have been able to do something! Like usual, I needed deadlines to motivate me to do anything. I started learning how to use the sewing machines here for one, since I realized it’s my last year here and I’m about to lose access to a lot of expensive machines. I’m also currently working on figuring out the embroidery machine! The goal for sewing is to crop some shirts I don’t wear, maybe make some of them into tank tops, and also finally make a tote bag and matching top out of the indigo dyed fabric I got for secret santa last year.
I also tabled for Night Market again with my friend Yingjie, just like last year. Night Market is hosted by the Chinese Student Club (collectively ew, but I have a few friends in it), and it’s a big night with lots of vendors, tables, and performances! Lion dance also performs but aside from my first year doing lion dance, I’ve been doing live drawings and selling some little things since. This time, I made some crochet coasters! The concept was I wanted to make some blind boxes to play into people’s innate desire to gamble. The coasters also went inside these blind box milk cartons that I designed, which was super fun! I basically took a foldable carton design, did the art I wanted on the sides, and then had to cut each one individually and fold and glue. For the coasters I made bears, chickens, and animal crossing leaves. Three of each, so not that many, but they all sold out!! I probably should’ve made more, but tbh it was already a looot of work and I did probably half of all the work in the 12 hours leading up it (ofc). Some of my friends keep asking me to make more so they can buy them… maybe one day.
I even managed to get over the fear of starting new sketchbooks and filled out the first page of a MTA notebook that Chloe got me, pictured above on the right! I found some pretty pictures and some silly connections as I was looking through magnolia Wikipedia pages. Everything on that page is related to magnolias somehow, ranging from budding magnolia fruit to Giant leopard moths (eats magnolia) to the Shanghai skyline (official city flower is the Yulan magnolia, which is in the top right). Very fun and done with some silly colored pencils.
One last thing that’s not exactly a craft, but definitely artsy- I’m taking a global theater class for one of my general requirements to graduate. The 6 theater traditions that we learn about are Yoruba Ritual, Kathakali, Wayang Kulit (shadow puppets!), Kabuki, Noh, and Jinju Opera. The class and theater traditions themselves are very cool but I unfortunately lowkey highkey dislike the professor. She’s not white but you can tell she wants to be soo bad, and everything she says feels like yt feminism to me… anyways. One of the things I had to do for the class was work in a group and perform for one of the theater traditions, and I picked Kathakali! It was nice and early in the semester so I could get it out of the way but not first, and also it was martial arts based so I thought that would’ve been fun to do. It’s also very costume oriented- the face make-up tells you exactly what the character is like, and there are specific ways to dress like head pieces to show heroism/importance and coke bottle boobs on evil characters that get cut off to show that they were defeated. The story that we decided to turn into a “Kathakali epic” was Little Red Riding Hood! I did my own make-up day of (had to get there 1.5 hours early), and made most of the costume props that I mentioned earlier.
My next goals are to figure out the embroidery machine, sew that mf tote bag, and try and make any progress on my crochet picnic blanket. Also to hopefully keep doing these newsletters, they’re fun :)
Final Thoughts
Unsubscribing is not allowed, especially if you’ve gotten this far in this email.
I am finishing up this email on the day spotify wrapped dropped. Somehow, it got worse, but it’s okay because I’ve already accepted who I am. Both hyperpop and whiny white men music is what I study to, and I just can’t control that (but maybe therapy could fix it lolol). Also it is chilly as fuck these days in NYC… the wind tunnels are really getting to me.
Hopefully I will see some of you all very soon back in MN in December, even though I don’t get back until the 24th. Praying the next issue of this newsletter will be less hectic, but for now, I hope everyone is doing well! I miss you all and I hope you are getting sunshine and rest in these trying times.
Love, Tiffany
Leave a comment