worth documenting in livestream

from:

the kid i had when i was 18.
the kid who went to jail and rehab.
the kid who almost died.

(received today, via FB group chat)

Sean
Love all of you and miss you all, have been busy as fuck and didn’t want to let another day slip by in a blur without sharing my affection for all of you. I’ve also been hesitant to elaborate on what had been tentative future plans, but I finally got some fantastic news: I won a National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA). From May until the end of August, I will be working under the supervision of Dr. Removed For Privacy in his cognitive psychology lab at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, which is literally an eight minute walk from my current house. Just kept pushing myself outside of my comfort zone and with the support of Kaitlyn and of course the support you guys have given me, it seems I’ve made my own luck here so to speak. Specifically, I will be helping him make experiments that track people’s eyes while they use handheld devices to play games (like Asteroids), which means I will be coding super simple video games. Can’t fucking complain…

He’s also been adamant that I will have lots of time to work on my own ideas, which I can dive in to another time. It’s enough money to live off of throughout the summer and it might just be the right door to get my foot in to, in order to keep going in this direction. Long term, I’m basically trying to simulate the brain with computer programs, then tweaking the programs to be closer and closer to things we know about real brains and real thinking, until the program approximates the brain… Then I am going to tweak it some more, (this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs, etc)… and see if I can get it to act the way certain brains act when their owners are experiencing certain ‘symptoms’ of mental illness. That’s the rough shape of where I think I’m heading… For now I am working on a project where I am teaching a computer how to visually recognize chess moves, by simulating the way real people actually move their eyes to feed the info into the computer, and then simulating how people theorize we actually store information… same idea as above, tweak things a bit and see what the implications are. I’m all too excited to show to the best of my ability that humans are incredibly simple and that so much human arrogance has polluted and motivated our theories in the past that we’ve missed key insights due to a lack of humility. Sounds a bit preachy possibly? Oh well. Will know more about time off as of Tuesday night; I would LOVE to figure out a time when I can visit you in Montreal Jake, and to see the rest of you, too. ❤ Gotta go for now. Miss you all!

after i read that, i had all the thoughts.

he’s doing AI-level shit to help mentally ill people manage their lives.
proud of (scared) of him.
want to stick around and see how this shit pans out, tbh

he was a very early reader - like scary-genius smart.
i FUCKING KNEW there was something UP with him by the time he was 2.
my 18 year old brain was all: wtf, man????
this kid was (is) weird-smart.

ive been thinking about gratitude and how i have NONE for current circumstances. (poverty, isolation, mental illness, refractory chronic pain, etc.
but it just hit me:
i am very glad and grateful that i didn’t lose sean. he was so close to death. i know an internet person who actually DID lose her son (same age, same issues basically)
and her kid died.
as a mother, i cannot imagine how she is “surviving” this type of pain.
ANYFUCK.
there’s my gratitude for the day.
for life, really.

and then, just between me an’ peter:

Susan
look what our boy did! not surprised. gurl. we iz smart. no doubt.

Peter
Ain’t that something? Damn, we’re good!

Susan
srsly. kinda proud not gonna lie. also: good job pop-pop.

Last updated April 09, 2017