Me words

Things that I could try making a habit of doing 1 hour a day

...since change seems best done incrementally over a long time span.

• Speaking/Reading
  • To train speaking more loudly (since I'm generally more quiet and it's getting annoying having to repeat myself)
  • To get better at speaking/pronounciating english (since german is my primary language and I'm afraid of speaking to strangers (like on Discord) with my english)
• Hobbies like drawing, making music
• Projects
• Revising/Learning useful/basic Linux command line commands

Three ways of rating something

An abstraction to rate the quality of something depending on three factors:

• The quality of the thing itself
• The time spent making the thing
• The effort spent making the thing

One adjacent wholesome observation to make is to not beat yourself up for something even if you took a long time and it didn't come out as decent, because you still spent a hell's worth of work into it.

Hurt through nostalgia, an ever-distant childhood & loss of frienship

🎵 strawberry jams vol.3 - Ohm 🎶

This morning I had this fear again of being anti-social, of not having friends and loosing out on life, fun and fulfillment for a tradeoff that doesnt feel too fulfilling this moment - spending 99% of my time only with myself.

This fear started to appear during the ending years highschool, when I feared about not seeing my classmates (who I all liked) never again.

In that sense its a deep emotional wound that has existed for some years, a deep fear Ive never quite sated and that strucks some to most times when my mind wanders into the thoughts and feelings of nostalgia, childhood, friendship, lost opportunities and loneliness.

Random thought: Is social media a replacement for friendship?

One thing that adds to this feeling of hurt is that its theoretically still possible to build up friendships with some people at the cost of a lot of effort, and that by choosing not to everyday, the precious friendship I so worry about slips through my fingers

One adjacent saddening observation is seeing that most classmates on instagram seem to kind of hang out with new people. Before, most time was spent with people I mostly knew in places most likely around me - now it's all these new people in all these new places as they travel, with only the occassional old friend replying or being in a post when they planned to meet up again.

One new and interesting angle to take are the questions of "why my childhood memories are so valueable to me? What makes me feel as though nothing will come close to have friends in that particularly close way again (even if it wasnt that close to begin with)?". Its the false view(?) of life never being able to reach the high it once had, but that seems false.

Thoughts that disprove that are about the fleeting nature and intensity of emotions, and how emotions make everything seem way more significant than they actually are.

I feel like I havent solved this issue and Ill still feel hurt when thinking about this topic sometimes, but Im happy to have made the connections to other thoughts as I did and feel a bit better, simply because I feel like I progressed in something and that naturally causes nice feelings.

Visual/Painting ideas

• It's Raining Inside.

  A riff for something I think people commonly hear ("We can't go now - it's raining outside!") and a potentially on-the-nose metaphor for feeling depressed.

  You're outside on a sunny looking straight at the wall of a building. At the center of the image is a window where you can look inside and see that it's cold, blue and raining inside. As contrast, other windows could be visible at the edge of the image that are normal and brighter colored.

Mentally backtracking what soured my mood this evening step by step

It all began while finding this link while browsing and looking through the last example in particular.:

• I felt dumb because I didn't understand what they talked about and bad about the fact that I probably don't have the determination to get to learn it
• I felt inmature for imagining that I'd probably be emotionally knackered if I were in that group chat

Watching a video about Fourier series

I felt dumb because I didn't understand what they talked about and bad about the fact that I probably don't have the determination to get to learn it (doubly so because I sucked at theoretical math at Uni - especially compared to anyone else there)

There really seems to be nothing more efficient at making me feel as dumb or stupid as possible than (theoretical) math or the technicalities of linux. The most strong offender for the math thing is trying out studying mathematics at university while the one for linux is snippets of help-channels where the person helping seems snide or unfriendly, or how technical things like the man pages are. If you're in the know about many Linux, it's probably helpful and a quick way to find info you're familiar with, but since I kind of suck at learning about theoretical maths or linux that isn't really easy to do.

When learning about stuff like math in school, it just kind of came intuitively (meaning I didn't really need to put any effort into learning it) and in a different form of delivery - usually more sequenced to build upon one another in an more easily digestable way, with parallels to other stuff to help us remember and learn it more easily.

Music: The Music of 3Blue1Brown - Reflections

Edit ~22:00

So now that I have a silver medal performance by feeling a better after venting these feelings out, it would be a gold medal to then think about what to potentially do about these feelings when they arise again in the future. I should probably be wary of the major pitfalls that prevent me from learning from these sort of situations - that seeming to be

• Too much time between stuff so that I forget most thoughts I had about it
• The thoughts themselves being too abstract to really grasp, think about and keep in mind for too long
• Nothing triggering the useful thoughts I extract out of this in the future. This indirectly ties in to the first point about forgetting most thoughts the time the thing rolls back along.

It feels like I can't think about what potential solutions to these problems could be without my thoughts straying off instantly and essentially achieving nothing...

It also feels like I'm repeating the same sentiment about how difficult it is to learn how to handle these situations in multiple cards/writings.

When is physical strain exercise?

I've commonly heard of construction workers ruining their body through extreme strain, leading to stuff like broken hips or something. What is the difference between that and exercise (where your body improves)? Is there a way a construction job can turn into exercise, or how anything can have a positive spin on your body?

A list of stuff I should not mess up on

• Proper Body Care
• Regularly brushing our teeth / showering
• Moving regularly (both in a variety of ways and for long stretches of time)
• Eating well (Varied and in measure)
• Making sure to not stress out too much
• Taking care of the eyes
• Good posture

Being Stuck

I have thoughts and plans about how to potentially solve my shortcomings, but forget them as they're as fleeting as any other thought I have. I sometimes write some of those thoughts down, but am also too lazy to really do that and also just never really revise on what I write because of laziness.

I constantly feel like something about the previous thing I've written just has something wrong with it and don't really want to publish it now, but I'm doing so anyway to document it and maybe see how I feel about it in a different state of mind, even if it still feels like something I'll regret/feel ashamed of later.

God, do I feel slightly-to-somewhat not good right now. At least it's nice just singing out my feelings of frustration with the music I'm listening to, just as it was kind of slightly freeing writing this down somewhere (but also not really).

Ideas on what to memorize using Mnemosyne

• Timezone stuff
• 12 AM vs. 12 PM
• Common timezones and how I should convert them to my time
• What timezone Nintendo's midnight releases fall under
• Basics of first aid
• What to generally keep in mind in emergency situations
• Falling elevator
• Wildlife predator
• Near someone with a gun who's willing to use it
• During a fire
• Is it safe to keep windows open?
• Is it safe to take stuff with you? And if yes, what kind of stuff should I prepare to get? (Backup Drive, videogame consoles(?))
• Phone numbers
• Emergency numbers
• Numbers of family members & friends
• My own number
• My list of hard english words I can't remember/keep forgetting

The fear of work

Ever since I started my job at the bakery, I've often felt a bad feeling on the day leading up to that saturday where I go to work. Sometimes this feeling carries over to the job, leading to me being variably anxious or down, while other times I have fun learning and mastering and managing my time and the things I need to do, even if I do minorly fail from time to time.

• One philosophy my brother abides by is that if he wakes up and dreads going to work, that's the time he'd switch his job because something like that just would not fundamentally work
• One potential counter-argument that I keep clinging onto is that just because you feel dread once isn't a kill-all argument to just give up instantly. I'm flawed in many ways, and these flaws ruin many opportunities and situations that, without them, would probably work fine, well or even great! It's just a matter of resolving those flaws to get rid of that dread.

Edit - 12. August:

One interesting thing that resulted from this is that often during the night/morning before work, I made it sort of a ritual to watch certain videos like the newest PyroLIVE or VOD's of LongLiveQuebec playing The Long Dark to help calm me down/distract my mind a bit and it's quite pleasant!

"Do you want friends to begin with?"

This was a question my school therapist asked when we were talking about my troubles with keeping friendships and it's a question that I to this day have no clear answer for. I neither want to fully commit to having friends nor commit to never having any friends at all.

Sometimes I want a group of friends to casually play online games with. Sometimes I want someone I'm romantically attracted to to cuddle with. Sometimes I want to vent to someone and just feel like someone understands me. Other times I want to teach or show someone something I just learnt or did. Sometimes I'm curious about how other people perceive certain stuff; other times not. And sometimes I just want to entertain people - play with them, make jokes, see them smile. This makes it difficult to answer the question of if I want friends, because I both want to and don't want to (like times where I just want to be alone and have time to work on my own stuff). Sometimes friendships would feel like they would take too much time - time that I desperately need to work on myself.

Sometimes I want that people reading this write me an email just to socialize, and othertimes I probably wouldn't really want to respond to them. It's like 😭.

It seems like this indecisiveness is a pattern that roots itself in my emotions being all over the place.

Telephone Game Booth

A dream I had where I wandered around a weird city/mountain amalgimation with two friends from my school. The wandering ended as we came to a tent set up in a plaza-sort of area. Similar tents were set up around the place as there was some kind of festival happening during the early of night.

The booth/stand/tent me and my friends arrived at was a unique game you could play with three people. Essentially, each one of us would sit next to each other while being seperated by noise-canceling walls so that we couldn't see nor hear each other. Every person would have a small desk in front of them, with one of those oldschool phones in front of them with which they could either call the other players or other numbers they discovered. To start the game off, the people running the stand explained that to us and required us to each try to call one other person to get the ropes of calling someone.

I don't know the next details, but there are some things that I can imagine could happen next:

• Either there are different clues on each person's table that leads to a phone number
• Someone other than the players would call one of the players

One speciality of this game is that the people calling the players are the ones running the stand. They themselves are a sort of "gamemaster" that can dynamically adapt and change the story. So for example, if the players talk too much amongst themselves, they could decide to initiate contact to bring a bit of suspense into the mix.

There are many potential ideas I have that could make this experience cool:

• Let's say you know that something bad might happen if a bad party calls someone and you know it will call them. You then try to call your friend as quickly as possible before the threat calls them first and blocks the call.
• The phone is ringing and you have to quickly decide if it's a trap of a friend calling you.
• Something's tampering with your connection, making it harder for your friend to understand what you're saying
• A threat convinces Player A that Player B is in danger. Player A calls Player B to warn them, but the threat flunked and is actually calling Player C.
• Someone is on a call with someone they can't call back and they have to decide if to abandon that call, but loose out on potentially important information in favor of calling another player because of a time-sensitive reason.

Game Design-ish note: One way this game would build tension is through the fact that you can't instantly clear up any misconceptions. You would first have to stop the call with whoever you're talking with (which could lead to lost important information) and need to call the other person (which couldn't work because they're on call or don't even take up the phone because they don't trust it).

News Excerpt

On the 6th of April, user SquaredPancake has simultaneously opened 4 different NeoCities pages that were chock-full of buttons while he was working on a page for his website. This caused computer-wide panic as the internet browser began to struggle with loading his own webpage. Even after closing the four tabs in question, the browser would still huff and puff to load any webpage and was essentially unusable for an hour or two, during which SquaredPancake took a break from his "binge of working on his website".

During this event, most pages of his website refused to load in his browser, but one particular page, the "Miscellanea" page, gave SquaredPancake a particular headache. Even days after this incident, this page refuses to load, spitting out an 403 error if he dared attempt to.

"Y'Know, at first I was kind of laughing because it's dumb, b-but then I was also dumbfounded because I was like "How is this possible?" *cut* Like I've never seen something like this happen to anyone."

*cuts to new scene*

"And you know what's even weirder? It only blocks me in the browser on the PC that it happened on. I can access the page on my phone, on others PCs- Hell, it even works with other browsers on the same PC. It's just that one Firefox program that has that page blocked.".

Some speculate that NeoCities automatically detected a DoS-Attack and enforced a little ban - did a little bit of trolling - but even then "it wouldn't make sense to just ban one page for one particular browser". Some even go so far to say that SquaredPancake opened those page with the intent of overwhelming NeoCities' servers, and that the ban was a right thing to do as to "show that bast*rd a piece of what he deserves".

- Part of the transcription of an broadcast of "Really Real News"

EDIT - 02nd May, 2023 (3AM): I was now able to access the page again. Maybe it automatically expires after a set amount of time?

EDIT 2: I also noticed that now I can't access the Misc page with my phone, like my computer just tranferred it's ban onto it.

EDIT 3 - 10th Aug, 2023: Now it's back to normal and I can access it on both phone & PC.

Three ways to rate output

According to this thought, you can seperate some output after three factors:

• The time it took to get to that output
• The effort it took to get to that output
• The quality of the output itself

For example, at school and work, the time and effort put in usually don't matter - it's the actual quality of the output that matters. You could spend 10 hours or one hour on a text for school - what matters is the text itself, not the cost you paid to get there.

I haven't really found a use for this thought yet, but it seems to always hold true.

How do I do stuff I don't want to do?

I still haven't figured out how to do stuff that my emotions don't want me to do, so for now this is just a collection of advice I've heard on the topic until I found something that worked for me:

• Doing something besides the thing you don't want to do The most brought up example (from what I've seen) is brushing your teeth while watching the telly if you can't bring yourself to brush your teeth on your own.
• Motivating yourself by giving yourself a reward afterwards (this never really works for me)
• Do the first 5 minutes and the rest won't feel as bad I've encountered this phenomenon before, although not reliably and it rarely motivates me by itself alone to do the unwanted thing

Supporting YouTubers via watching ads

• Does muting an ad, skipping ads after five seconds or switching browser focus reduce the income for YouTubers?
• How can you tell when money goes to the creator instead of a copyright claimer?
• Is watching ads really effective compared to donating money monthly via something like Patreon
• How much money does a YouTuber get from ads? Does YouTube get a cut? Does the amount paid for an ad watch change on factors like how important YouTube considers the YouTubers or the company that displays the ad?
• How much money would I have granted with the given amount of ads/year of regularly watching a YouTuber?
• Does the money earned via ads on the sidebar / recommendations also go to the YouTuber?

Desire for time to stand still

Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed, I just want time outside of my room to stand still. To have a bubble to where I can retreat infinitely long and be comforted while trying to solve the problems ahead of me. A place of comfort in which I could be forever without any negative repercussion, just being while doing the things that feel nice (like work on this website, play video games, cuddle with my stuffed animals and think).

One example of a thing that sometimes causes this feeling is me feeling bad the day before work

Would I be ashamed if my brother saw what I was currently doing

This seems to be a perfect question to make me stop the thing I'm currently doing instantly and reflecting on it. It feels like most of the time the answer would be yes.

Hearing in moderation

• How hurtful is it to listen to music for a long period of time? Can our ears withstand constant sound? Do they rest when we sleep (doesn't seem like it since we can get woken up by sound)?

Seeing emotions as short-burning fuel

To me it seems that emotions don't last for too long without something causing that emotion.

Just stopping the cause of the emotion without handling the source of the thoughts (such as a problematic life situation making you worry whenever you think about it) seems to be bad since the problem is not fixed.

But it can seem helpful seeing that bad emotion as a trigger to stop your current train of thought and try to rethink the problem from a new perspective that doesn't make you feel like shit.

This card feels a bit like a rehash of "Resetting your Emotional State". I should probably merge them someday.

One interesting thing to contrast this against with is when people say that single things ruin their entire day for them. Is it because they let it occupy their mind the entire time (well, it seems like this would more be involuntarily as random things make us remember that thing randomly throughout that day)

The duality of emotions

Emotions are the greatest things to seek and the greatest thing to avoid.

At it's best, emotions fill the things we do with a fulfilling sense of purpose. It makes our actions feel aligned with our life's purpose. It brings joy in the time we spend with loved ones. They're the things that make life worth living, at the very least to some degree.

At it's worst, emotions make things feel empty, fruitless and hopeless. Life is in this way the most miserable of all. To me (and it feels a bit extreme for me to publicly say this), emotions in this way seem like the only reason a person would kill themselves (And in regards to that, imagine this: Could you tell a happy man to take his own life? Would there be any chance that he would do it? Any scenario where anything but his happiness would cause him to willingly do it? (Well, maybe in extreme faith..?)).

It's interesting how emotions both give life the best highs and lowest lows. It aligns with a thing from "Principles For Success by Ray Dalio" about how everything in life that has benefits also has it's risks.

Purpose in Life

My current stance on life's purpose is this:

Life has no objective meaning except maybe reproduction. It's like a sandbox game where you're free to do whatever you want and the world reacts to your actions as you would expect.

The highest things humans can strive for are emotions. They are the thing that make our actions feel purposeful (which itself is something I think most people strive for, like when they're at their death bed and looking back at a life they can be proud of).

Resetting your emotional state

If you don't want to feel anything, sit around without a thought. It seems to me like thoughts are the things that cause emotions. Learning to have moments where you don't think anything and just objectively observe the environment around you to me are somewhat effective at neutralizing feelings of any sort.

Of course, this isn't an entirely valid way to handle emotions since emotions usually stem from some problem or conflict you have to fix or resolve. It's just helpful when that isn't the case (like when you just feel sad through seemingly random happenstance that you can't solve - or in the case it's something you can't really fix like with world politics, it's either shifting your way of thinking to not cause bad emotions (or you making your actions feel like they help), ignoring it or suffering any time you think about it) or if it's more helpful to have clear thinking instead of thoughts and actions generated from anxiety/anger/sadness.

1. Update - 17th Mar, 2023

I think it might be useful asking these two questions from this point: How/By what are the thoughts even caused and/or why do they evoke that strong a emotional reaction?

Two core reasons of failure

According to this thought I've had during the beginning of university, my two core failings lie in my inability to plan and my inability to execute those plans.

• My inability to plan partly stems from...
• Not knowing what my purpose in life should be
• Being unable to handle conflicts. What should I choose when there is no right choice - Where everything has advantages and disadvantages?
• My inability to execute those plans partly stems from...
• It seems like it's mostly emotions.

Standing

• Standing for a few hours(~4?) causes my feet to hurt. Is this normal? (The time where I was in a choir as a child and I was the only one alternating my feet because they hurt a bit. Did the other 100 kids just not feel pain at all?)
• What ways are there to counteract my feet hurting?
• Is it dangerous in long term?
• Can I train my feet to withstand longer amounts of time?
• Is alternating the foot I stand on a good way of dealing with this? Or rotating my feet with my ankles?

Posture

• What exactly is the natural position of the spine? How can I know when I overcompensate?
• Does having good posture hurt if you hold it longer? Does good posture require frequent switching to prevent the short-term pain that comes with good posture?

• Can I pivot around the hip area and still have "good posture"?
• How should I handle working on countertops that are lower than me? I kind of need to look on them and thus bend over, but that creates pain in my neck relatively quickly...

The Tug of War

Basically, if there is a conflict or choice where there is no right answer, my emotions tend to pull back and forth on my two options. Sometimes I feel like I should just pick option a, and sometimes it feels like option b is a lot better right now.

Visually, it's like my emotions pulling me towards them with a tug of rope. Sometimes they manage to make me stumble towards their side, but then there is always the other side making me unable to truly commit to their option.

The three requirements for talking

I originally got this thought years ago, but it stuck to me since then as something that feels like an surprisingly accurate way of seeing the question of why I don't talk a lot. It's basically a way of categorizing why I don't talk in any given situation. I either...

1. ...have nothing to say
2. ...have no motivation to say it
3. ...am too afraid to say it

"People overestimate what they can do in a week and underestimate what they can do in a year."

I remember that quote from somewhere, so I've thought up a list of some of my personal projects I have in hiatus that feel like I would make good progress towards finishing if I worked on them consistently in the span of a year.

• Stuff for this website like fleshing out the Music Library or Links section, making web tools and screensavers, potentially some "professional" long-term writing
• Several projects in my list of project ideas, like...
• Small to medium sized programs
• Mods, texture packs and in-game maps for video games like Minecraft or Terraria
• Getting kind of good at a skill or hobby, like singing, music-making, dancing, making art etc...

I originally got reminded of this thought by playing the Strawberry Jam Collab and seeing how much cool stuff was made in the two years it was in development. It feels like it would be possible to create a fully-fledged Celeste chapter in a year, with custom art, music, storywriting and gameplay (Probably even more since Celeste was developed in 2-3 years-ish, and that includes 8 chapters besides all other stuff like game controls, UI, etc.).

This thought kind of goes hand-in-hand with the advice of doing a little bit of something every day and slowly, but surely getting tangible improvements.