When I began [writing](https://prettyboytellem.com/writing/) in this diary-of-sorts on paper ([later](https://prettyboytellem.com/writing/2017/Feb/February-14.html) I transcribed my writing from paper to Markdown) I never thought I'd keep writing for so long. The pages and feelings buried here span 6 years of my life; many entries only I know what was going on because they are so vague; however when I go back and read my own writing I feel so distant from the mindset woven into those pages, as if being separated by time has separated us both in some other dimension as well. Yet at the same time I don't feel like such a different person at all.
Somebody... somewhere...
The main difference, I think, is that when I look left and right the things around me have changed from the things that were around me then. I'd never tried VR before last Summer and here today I am in the ether nearly every night. I used to fanatically track my inflows / outflows in a GNUCash spreadsheet when I was on a tight college budget; now I haven't touched that sheet in over a year. I used to drive a shitty '03 Accord daily, now I drive an even shittier ['97 BMW](https://prettyboytellem.com/writing/2020/Aug/%2797%20BMW%20318ti%20Adventures.html) albeit I now do the routine maintainance myself. And though the things around me have changed fundamentally I feel as the same person that whimsically shaved his head one afternoon in 2016, took a Summer job clear across the country just to get out of the apartment, studied in Japan despite how irrelevant the coursework was, and ran (what I understand is) the first [college imageboard](https://howler.space/archive/) at my uni, among other things. And you, diary, will be pleased to know that I have never ceased being the jackass, risk-eater, why-the-fuck-not person I once was and will always be. I know this because recently I left my cozy salaried job to work in a space far more uncertain and far more given to change than I was ever prepared to jump in to. Since making this decision only a year-and-a-half after I graduated college I've had people tell me I'm "making a big mistake" or "throwing away my potential as a software developer" (lol) by entering a field so new and so unfamiliar, that I could do well instead by settling in with the company I was with and finding my niche, taking flight between big-name companies when the time was right or when things looked uncertain. And had I continued to live my life proceeding-as-if and had never discovered the field I'm in now I would have upheld that tradition. And I have no problems with people who choose to do that; so long as they are happy doing so. I was not, so I left. Now I'm building the future of France and I couldn't imagine myself doing anything else. Obviously leaving of one's own free will is luxury reserved for people who (1) have a plan and (2) can stomach the uncertainty; finances be damned so long as you are getting paid enough to live. The point is to not get comfortable for its own sake but to guard against that kind of thing. If you're cooking-in for every meal and avoiding name-brand things to save money so be it; as I was in college, as I would so-easily do again. In addition to this change-up I've started writing under my real-name more often than here; likely this alias will phase-out over time. I may come here still to write more-raw thoughts than what I permit myself to write there. You can find that other site easily because it's hosted on the same box which hosts this site O(#￣▽￣) I also enjoy writing over there more than here because it's formatted as a wiki rather than a strictly-linear diary (to be fair I wrote the script that builds *this site* myself) which lets me link and group together ideas far easier.
Anyway, [it's time to say our goodbyes](http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/How_the_Web_was_Lost.html) at least for today.