Last night I was having some trouble falling asleep, and at some point the question came up, “If I had to choose five shows to ‘represent’ my taste in anime, which ones would they be?” After thinking about it for a bit, I am pretty happy with the list I came up with. Here are five shows that highlight most of what I like in the shows I watch.

I am going to try to revive this site and also make it something I can use “professionally.” For that to happen there are quite a few things I still need to do.

I discuss a new problem I encountered through my brother, the bounded random walk. I found that naive physics intuition gives reasonable intuition about expectation values, but I wanted to learn more about how to formally deal with such a system. In the end, I arrived at a result through some methods from stochastic processes, which I showcase here.

When I visited Takayama, I noticed how unclear the literature surrounding going to Gero to bathe in the hot spring baths there was. In this post, I will very briefly explain how to optimally do a day trip from Takayama to Gero, taking advantage of the “Yumeijin Yumeguri Pass.”

For some inexplicable reason, I managed to find myself rereading old answers I posted on ask.fm, and I got to thinking about my time fansubbing yet again. I’ve more or less explicitly stated somewhere (probably on Twitter) that fansubbing was a pretty positive thing for me; I got to know a bunch of great people, make some good friends, and learn some skills that I hadn’t picked up before (including social skills that are fairly broadly applicable, I think). And yet, something about the whole thing feels incomplete, and I think this incompleteness is what brings me back to thinking about fansubbing so much. I want to walk through how I thought about fansubbing and how those ideas were reflected in my actions, a story I will tell in three parts.