Everything. I’ve always been a night person, and doing everything is much more enjoyable when there’s peace, no one is going to bother me, no one is going to call on the phone. Whether it is work or studying or watching movies or playing video games or exercise or anything… It is always much better late at night.

I’ve started trying to replicate this in the day. I leave most calls unanswered and most messages unreplied till I’m ready and free. I go to work in a shared office and put in earphones immediately. I try to go to work late and stay late. It isn’t very effective.

No one taught me how to study and I struggled for a long time too. Universities are getting better at it, but high schools still aren’t great in my experience. It is worth spending some time reading about how to study well. It pays off to spend a few hours studying about how to study, and then all studying will take half the time and stick better.

Learning scientists have some fantastic resources that really helped me. Their advice can take any form that works for you: make notes, make flash cards, learn and try to teach your group of friends, make exam questions for your friends.

It is important to see when you are not using these strategies. Understanding a topic and making notes yourself is one thing. Just seeing something online and copying it directly is absolutely not the same. Understanding a topic and teaching it to friends is good, just hanging out to waste time and skim through material and skip the parts you didn’t retain is no good.

The other thing to get around procrastination is to plan out so you know what you’re going to be studying. This makes is more manageable than thinking in your mind “I need to do all of physics”. Instead it becomes “of I could just read the 1st law of thermodynamics today”, then it’s a lot less of a scary mountain to climb. The school syllabus maps out your learning for you.

Part of the challenge is getting your foot in the door. If you’re struggling to start then start with something you can face without scaring you. “I’m going to read this specific topic for 20 mim today” is a lot less likely to scare you away than “I need to study for 8 hours today”. The process builds on itself. Once you start, you’ll find it’s not scary and easy to carry on. Once you know a couple of things and build on that to learn the next thing, then it is quite satisfying for it all to start making sense.

Good luck. It’s not easy. But intelligence you’re born with really doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is if you’re willing to work. There’s no such thing as people who study 30 min and get straight A’s. This is a myth people like to propogate to make it look like innate genius… It’s bullshit.

Livng in the woods is a bit much. But tiny (off grid) house videos are looking very appealing, especially when that lets people get to FIRE.

But wait, there’s more:

Houses cost so much that people don’t have space to do hobbies they used to. There’s no garage or shed to set up as a maker space or studio or to setup drums or a weaving loom or painting canvases.

Intensive parenting is now the norm and the expectation. Kids can’t play in front of the house like they used to. They can’t go out and knock on friend’s doors and go to the playground without a parent from every household going along. The only time children can be left is with a screen, and you’re a villain if you do that.

Expectation from romantic partners also comes into the mix. After all the time and energy drain from the things above, there is nothing left in the tank. My wife would then not be a happy camper if I told her I’m going to be in the garage for an hour for my creative hobby.

Some disposable income is also required (variable amount depending on which hobby you take up).

Fucking love everything about this comic. And I’m sad that I can’t find an RSS feed of the artist’s content without looking to shitty social media platforms.

If you can’t repair or use that, it will still sell for quite a lot these days on eBay.

I don’t have many alerts setup, but I use Mattermost anyway and I send alerts into a Mattermost channel. Sonarr and Radarr report when a download is complete. Jellyfdash reports when someone outside my home starts streaming something over Jellyfin.

I’m going to walk into my organisation and pose as an executive and cuss out everyone there. Thanks for the idea.

I feel bad for anyone building now. I built my gaming setup + NAS and server PC and upgraded my Steam Deck in the past 2 to 3 years. Going to get as much milage out of these as I can till things settle down. I’ve changed all my Docker services to lower resource alternatives to keep things running on my existing ram.

Then in 5 years when things have only gotten worse and this is the new norm then I’ll cry alongside everyone else. Or maybe China will get their fabs up and running and swoop in to undercut these bastards to save us all.

This is not mildly interesting. This is a pretty big deal.

Most things. I like stuff that isn’t mainstream (not in a hipster way, I just tend to like indie things), and it is very rare to meet someone who is willing to try anything that’s not mainstream or something they haven’t heard of.

Music: metal, hard rock, or “odd” things like The Hu or videogame instrumentals.

Movies: some of my all time favourites are things like Calvary, The Whale and Gully Boy.

Games: Indies that are well loved online, but hardly ever by normies IRL. Roguelite mostly. Dead Cells, Balatro, Ballionaire, etc.

Making things: Ikea hacks, or making custom mechanical keyboards or hitbox fight controllers.

Home server: obviously a common interest within a rabbithole like Lemmy, but normal people in my life (including my wife) still can’t comprehend why I would put in this effort when “you can just get Netflix/Spotify/Gdrive”.

I don’t think my interests are weird or unusual, but people aren’t interested so I don’t recommend any of them to people.

It is good. That’s a lot of radiator heat dissipation.

Ending RSS support really sucks. But I guess it’s a bit of a blessing to remove that last bit of reddit from my feed.

I switched to Linux so it seemed like the logical choice to move to the home of Linux memes.

I still follow some webcomics and search for things occasionally on Reddit. Using Redlib has been fantastic. Don’t need to worry about their interface changes. Don’t need to worry about having an account. Just input the few subscriptions I need into the Redlib docker container. All my devices are setup to redirect Reddit links to my Redlib deployment.

Anna Karenina principle

“for success to occur in a complex endeavor, all key factors must be present and work correctly. The endeavor does not succeed when even one essential element is missing, meaning there are many different ways to fail”

Having reliable standby is a huge deal.

I already play some indie games on my Retroid Pocket 5 with Game Native, but I’ve almost abandoned using it for short bisects of gaming because waking from sleep will mostly shut down the game.

I will be at home that evening in my tracksuit bottoms and hoodie.

Need to think of something for my kid though.

Everyone uses their phones while eating or pooping. Those activities don’t take long either. I choose to listen to something while showering.

It’s ok if you don’t understand it or do it yourself, but some people take their phone into the shower. It is a thing.

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