2022-02-28

my family is pretty poor - we collectively make less than $30,000 a year. my parents work tirelessly for 10-12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. i recall being paranoid even at 5 years old that someone would notice i was home alone after school for hours before they came home. if any medical emergency or disaster happens to us, i have to say goodbye to flounder 💀 and goodbye to any semblance of a stable life.

how can this be? they never received higher education, and have really poor english, so it's really easy for them to be exploited by employers. but this is still a better situation than many others.

early last year, i joined a server for a record label because i liked some of the artists, even though i wasn't planning on buying any cds or vinyl, and it's insane interacting with people my age with hundreds of vinyl, selling them on discogs or hoarding them. of course, many other online spaces have middle-class teens, but record collecting is such a brazen display of wealth that it really stuck with me. the people in this server have a lot of the same interests as me, and it's interesting to see how different our lives are just due to our income, but having the same internet socialization and goals. and how i've missed out on a lot of opportunities because of it. for example, instruments. my house is so incredibly small that i sleep in the living room, and having a keyboard or guitar would make my space claustrophobic.

here's a quote from someone in that server that really exemplifies wealth and interests:

i finished high school at 16 because of a combo of homeschooling, extremely smart distance ed and shit which allowed my entire high school experience to be a very much non standard few years of programming, music production and doing whatever the hell i wanted

extremely jealous.

my parents plan to rent our house forever. the good part about it is that the total rent for all the years is still under the median house price.

i barely buy any luxury goods or even clothing because of my space and money limit. i guess it's a pretty good spending habit, but it also paralyzes me when i want to buy useful things. like, i want to buy an external sdd and install debian on it. but i don't have a whole desktop computer, because it would encroach on my space. however, my laptop only has 2 usb ports that i'm already regularly using. so i'd have to buy a port hub as well. so there's a lot of decisions to make and a lot of research to pursue this stuff, especially since i can't accept buying a shitty one and throwing it away with limited funds that i also want to save.

i like how gemini is accessible from almost any device, no matter how old or low power they are. how the internet connection doesn't have to be great either - up until last summer, i was surfing the web with effectively 1mbps download, and uploading files at 0.06mbps. lmao. most of the work someone needs to do to get on gemini is just knowing someone who knows about gemini, or being a wikipedia nerd. and that can be pretty tough depending on someone's environment. i hope gemini becomes more of an international, non-western space than it is now, because it definitely has the ingredients for it.

i plan to become a dev because the tech industry seems like the best place to rise up from the lower class and support my family. even without a master's or a phd - not gonna lie, being a phd student seems depressing.

and over the years, i've been doing some coding and enjoying puzzles, so i don't think i'd hate it. or hate it soon enough that i couldn't live off the money, especially with my frugal spending. from 5th-7th grade, i coded in this kid's coding program that doesn't provide custom images. so i only had basic shapes and text to work with, but i was able to make some games and art i was really proud of at the time, including a reign clone with all its animations, a simple 2d superhot clone and an amv segment of a lemon demon song. i'd spend school lunches alone on the bleachers just coding, time at home coding, and just generally loved it. i never dug into how to make guis outside of these types of programs that provide that part for you, but i don't think it would be that hard to learn.

in 8th grade, i made a python program that used the osu! api to find multiplayer matches with specific players (basically, my favorite players: apraxia, digitalhypno, toy... i was really into osu tournaments back then. apraxia was the main favorite streamer i watched, even when his voice was a little high - and dropped in his late teens. the captain of so many teams! the charming mkwii gameplay and the bewildering livestream fails! back then, he explained it away, to perhaps 10 viewers, as being a low-t male that got testosterone therapy. i remember using that excuse on a voice call in 9th grade, inspired by that yet not connecting the dots. years after i drifted away from osu, he came out as a trans guy. interesting how people can just unknowingly group together like that),

=> /enanthate.gmi

iterating through hundreds of thousands of matches just to find them. then i mostly neglected programming for the next few years. so that's the most advanced thing i've made so far outside of that kid's program that isn't convoluted-yet-still-not-gui school assignments.

update: wrote about rent, added quote 2022-03-01, removed typo 2022-03-05, added a sentence about emergency to 2022-03-08, changed link to be relative 2022-05-10