Hello World! Last I posted I believe I was talking about how work was
going and whatnot. Well now I have even more significant news.

I have been laid off! Due to financial mismanagement by those at the
head of the company, 20% of the workforce was laid off. 20% including
myself and the other ex-interns that received return offers. So, we
are back on the job hunt. And man, it is considerably more difficult
to find work now than it was immediately post-covid when I was
applying for internships. Gotta stay on the grind though I suppose.

In related news, I have a bunch more free time now so I've been
trying to think up project ideas to work on. One idea that I've been
kicking around for the longest is something 'pan-chat'.

At the end of 2020 I was living in a 200 sqft studio on campus and I
was having a horrible time. Though it was cool to go to my friends'
place and drink/smoke, I felt like I was going crazy. Pan-chat was a
nice distraction from that. It was going to be a cli game where your
character would be represented by a single char, a la rogue. It would
be used as a way to chat with others when you couldn't do so due to
pandemic restrictions. It's main feature would be 3D audio, so others
would be quieter the more distant they were, and vice-versa if they
were closer.

I worked on this during a 1 credit hr self-study course w/ my faculty
mentor Professor Levchenko (awesome guy btw). I got nowhere with it
due to a lack of motivation, and frustrations getting C++ libraries
to work on my windows machine in WSL2. However, the idea for this has
been sitting in my mind. And now that I have atleast a teeny bit of
industry experience (+ 2 more years of education), I think I'm in a
much better place to write this application.

So, I'm going to use this post as my flag planted in the soil. Onward
to Pan-Chat Redux!