GT2025

dankblog! 2025-04-17, 1529 EDT, at the danktower

while fruitfully hunting pokémon on georgia tech's environs in recent weeks, i have developed a few GEORGIA TECH 2025 OBSERVATIONS:

first and foremost, where the fuck were all these girls when i attended? or even, like, five years ago? are we doing some kind of Brave New World thing on hotties with a thirst for Industrial Engineering? it is important to remember at all times that one is 44, and interaction with them, no matter how suave one plans it, is likely to result in confusion at best and devastating blows to the ego at worst. she can also probably out-calculus your senescent mushy brain so go back to tapping at dynamax mons, champ.

the frats seem to have stopped playing country music. this is a Good Thing.

kids are talking about all kinds of advanced shit at loud volumes. well, mostly boys are. girls seem to be talking about the same kind of shit girls talk about all over the world when i listen in, except for biomedical engineering majors who are gung-fucking-ho about growing tissue. but the boys? nerdy as hell. a Good Thing.

atlanta is canopied by a dense, dank cloud of weed. this is a Good Thing. but it ends at GT's perimeter! this is a Dispiriting Thing. that relation used to go the other way. what's up kids?

more rich kids, casually discussing money that they clearly aren't earning working nights at the north ave BP. this is a Bad Thing in terms of the soul but probably a Good Thing analyzed dispassionately. still, it's gross. fuckers.

most distressingly, these kids just look too fresh, too clean. there is little evidence of brutality. there is confidence but not the confidence earned under test. in my day, by this point in the semester, people would be huddled in twos and threes, staring at the ground with cigarettes and a general sense of quease. though it might not be raining, it would seem as if it were raining, the air punctuated at times with screams of rage and wailing despair, always solitary. if you yell twice, They can figure out where you are. people looked not just like they feared failure but that they feared death, that they might be taken in a steam explosion or dragged by a backhoe, untergang, with nothing marking their grave, their last words buried under the roar of some machine. you probably ought have at least one death per semester. sacrifice one of your number to the Land, that it will bear fruit and grain and project partners with half a clue. the Land will do no such thing. i overheard suicide pacts related to Emag on two distinct occasions. this is not a Good Thing per se but an Unfortunate Necessity, and someone's gotta play Collateral Damage.

all in all, the Kids Seem Alright, as epitomized in an interaction i silently beheld from about a meter behind:

• A [gibberish at high pitch and speed]
• DANK [silently] i don't think any of what that kid is saying is right
• A [comes to some kind of conclusion]

...delay of about five seconds...

• B i'm tired of your erroneous bullshit.
• A [immediately] oh

...delay of about five seconds...

• B are you even really asian?
• A [immediately] yeah, yeah, i am
• B i bet your parents say you're not
• A [immediately] yeah, yeah, sometimes

A & B trudged on in silence at least until i turned. this was As Good a Thing as They Come.

previously: "a case study in full-stack development: the dankdryer" 2024-09-29