So you clicked on something called "Can't be arsed". You already know what you're in for. Let's not waste each other's time pretending otherwise.
I'm in the middle of exams and I cannot be arsed. Not tired. Just cannot be fucking arsed.
I've also never once bought the sacred little gospel everyone recites at you, the "just study the material and you'll pass" one, like it's some ancient secret and not the most boring instruction ever handed to a living human. I despise it. There's nothing in it. Nothing to make, nothing to solve, nothing to crack open and figure out. You take a block of theory, you shovel it into your skull, you shovel it back out onto an answer sheet two weeks later, and you forget most of it by August. That's the whole holy ritual. And we all sit around nodding like it's the pinnacle of human achievement.
The procrastination has been, and I say this with my chest fully out, world class. Elite. Olympic. If they handed out the diploma for THAT I'd be writing the valedictorian speech right now instead of this.
Except it wasn't nothing, which is deeply inconvenient, because I had such a good excuse going. While I was heroically not opening my notes, I cracked two programs and a game. Wrote a keygen for the first two. Clean, elegant little things, I almost teared up. Unpacked and patched the third. (No, you're not getting the names. I don't wanna go to jail. Nice try feds!)
Honestly, that is roughly a thousand times more interesting than anything on my exam timetable. You sit down with a binary and you work out how the thing thinks. Where it checks the license. Where it branches. What it's guarding and how embarrassingly badly it guards it. It pushes back. It could not care less how many hours you "studied", either you understood it or you didn't, and it tells you on the spot, to your face, no curve, no mercy.
My reverse engineering has leveled up beautifully over a stretch where, officially, on paper, I have achieved nothing. The thing I am SUPPOSED to be doing bores me clean through the floorboards, and the thing I am "wasting my time" on is the only thing in my life currently teaching me anything. Somehow I'm still the problem in this story. Sure. Okay. Noted.
I have huge projects queued up. Loads of them. And yes, I KNOW, I need the diploma, I'm not pretending the piece of paper means nothing. But these two, three weeks feel like a black hole where nothing gets built. Doesn't sound like much said out loud, "two or three weeks". Try living inside it as a hole.
A day that goes by without making something is a wasted day. Studying old theory isn't making anything. Therefore exams are a tall stack of wasted days. That is what I have believed for as long as I can remember. Clean. Simple. Case closed.
First half I'll die on. The second half turned out to be bullshit, and I only figured out why recently, so let me correct myself before some smug researcher does it for me.
Creativity, the actual research kind, does not fall out of the sky. Nobody has ever invented anything out of an empty skull. Every "original" idea is a remix. You cram an obscene amount of what already exists into your head, and THEN, only then, you spot the gap nobody noticed, the contradiction, the question nobody could be arsed to ask. You cannot find the hole in a field you have never walked through. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" isn't a humble little fridge magnet quote, it is the literal mechanism. The boring intake IS the raw material. No intake, no output. You can't fire a gun you never loaded and then stand there looking shocked at it.
Theory itself was never the enemy. Cramming theory to vomit onto an answer sheet is NOT the same animal as learning theory because some problem you actually give a shit about is standing over you demanding it. Research wires the theory straight into a live question you're chasing. Exams rip it out of every context it ever had and make you memorize it for a Tuesday. One of those builds something. The other is storage and retrieval with a deadline stapled to it. They feel completely different because they ARE completely different.
Summer. For real. To mess about, go to the beach, switch the brain off for five consecutive minutes... and then go completely feral on these projects. Things have to move. Stuff has to ship. I'm sick of it all living rent free in my head.
Uni has to move too, which drags me to the one part I can't just swear at and walk away from. But fear not, dear reader, I have a workaround: build an actual schedule for next semester. Not a fantasy timetable I'll have abandoned by Wednesday. A real one. One that survives contact with my own attention span, which is, frankly, the hardest exam they've never set me. Whether the workaround holds is, as ever, a problem for the next build. But that one is mine to pass or fail, so I can't exactly tell it to go fuck itself.
Anyway. Back to not studying.
