2024-02-26 Update

Work Stuff

It’s actually been a few weeks since I started, but I’m working at the IRS now! I’m on the Taxpayer Experience Shared Services team, working on improving common web services for the IRS, stream lining efforts and improving code quality.

Now that I have a solid footing in my career, I’m gonna focus on developing a lot of connections, working on networking and how to best socialize technical proposals and changes around a lot of different groups that I might not work closely with.

I waited a while to post so I understood what exactly I could talk about. And I think I’ll keep quite about most of it for the moment. But I still plan on posting here, it’ll just be about more of what I do in my free time outside the IRS. Still technical content, but might mix in some fun posts now and then.

Personal

Doing

I got married! It was wonderful, and I love my wife. :) That’s all. Here’s a few pics from our wedding.

Listening To

Weird shit. One of spotify’s recent recommended playlists for me was called “Rollerblading”, and I absolutely love it.

	Song	Artist
	Sneakman	Hideki Naganuma
	Waters of Nazareth	Justice
	Let There Be Light	Justice
	Doritos & Fritos	100 gecs
	Traffic Jam	Louie Zong
	Run	Blank Banshee

Gaming

• Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. While I did put 60 hours into it and had a pretty good time, I felt conflicted about it. I think it just boiled down to me not gelling with the new mechanics as much as I did in Breath of the Wild. Absolutely a great game though, well worth it’s slightly steeper price.
• Inscryption. I’m not usually a deck-building game person, but the core gameplay of a rougelike deck-builder was extremely satisfying. Understanding the deck mechanics and slowly figuring out how to build power decks consistently was the most fun I’ve had in a rougelike outside of Hades. Play it, and play it blind.
• South Scrimshaw, a wonderful little nature-documentary / visual novel. A wonderful premise, had me hooked with the world building and characterization immediately. I love it.

Reading

• The Overstory: incredible work of fiction, wonderfully evocative prose, compelling narative, and subtle weaving and intersecting of stories, theme, and structure in a way that I still think about every day (my roman empire).
• Hack Your Bureaucracy: one of the more useful and immediately applicable books I’ve read about working in an organization with > 30 people. I’ve literally already used several of the hacks in my few weeks at the IRS (notably, “Try the normal way first”, and “Pilot is the password”) to great effect.
• The Three-Body Problem: everyone really seems to love this one, (including Obama, lol), but I was more conflicted on it. At the worst of times, it’s like reading a Less Wrong post (derogatory). However, I’m still invested enough that I want to read the remainder of the trilogy.
• How High We Go in the Dark: I went in thinking it was going to be a science fiction Overstory, and while it was still wonderfully written, the stories didn’t intersect as much as I expected them to. Which is my fault! Don’t make my mistake! Treat this as a series of short stories all in the same world, and you’ll absolutely love it.