I have a note where I’ve written down a few ideas for blog posts. One of them is to draw a comic strip. I tried to do it for the current post. But the result was so atrocious that I decided against unleashing it on the Internet.
I have nearly zero experience drawing. But it is one of those skills I would like to acquire. I have watched a bunch of tutorial videos about it, but watching them won’t make me draw any better. Actually drawing, regularly, would though. The secret to learning how to draw (or many other skills) is just to practice a lot, so that your brain acquires new neuron connections which allow you to coordinate your imagination, eyes and hands in a better way.
These neuron connection pathways allow you to perform complicated tasks, if trained correctly. But they also determine your personality and your whole life. It is possible to retrain them, update the way your brain works, but it takes time and effort – regardless if you want to change some personality traits or learn how draw.
I’m having a hard time approaching the whole drawing thing. I’m setting myself really high expectations – I want to immediately be good at it, but the results are not so good. That’s probably a pretty common problem for people. If not immediately good at it – just give up.
15 years ago Furamo was my own personal fully featured Facebook clone. I spent hundreds of hours adding all kinds of useless features to it. And then there was nothing here for a while. Now that I’m writing more blog posts again, it’s also time to continue the overdevelopment of the site’s features.
Proudly presenting – videos as the cover picture (the blogging engine WordPress doesn’t support that out of the box)
Also, I looked at some statistics and it seems like the only people visiting my site are the bots trying to hack into the admin panel and the bots sending spam comments. So I don’t even have to delete the posts I’m too ashamed of as I’ve been doing so far. Because nobody gonna see them anyway. It’s nice, makes me feel more relaxed and removes anxieties and societal pressure to censor myself.
Humans are super selfish and most things in the world are driven by capitalism – things happen to make rich people richer. But there still are some nice people and companies. Who do things for the benefit of others, not themselves.
When I visited the grocery store today, I got a huge surprise at the self service checkout. The checkout machine had a newly, comically enlarged user interface element. Those checkout machines have a checkbox to check in case you do not want a receipt. So far, the checkbox had been small as fuck and I always had to push the screen six times with my fat finger to get it checked. But now that checkbox is so big you can hit it on the first try. Amazing progress and improvement indeed.
Here’s a little continuation to the previous post.
When I met my friends back then, we talked a bit about life goals. Like, when you are in high school, that’s what is motivating you, finishing it is a goal to work towards. After you graduate, the next goal will be getting your university degree. My friend had just finished his master’s degree. After that is done, you are left with a sense of purposelessness – up until then you had specific milestones to achieve, but now you are left with this uncertainty. You just keep living, a day at a time.
I’ve been in that spot for so long now. I am guessing some others find their new goals – in work, family or hobbies. But I have my depression and stuff which certainly don’t help in that. Regardless, for a few days after writing the previous blog post, I did feel a certain drive. To write more blog entries. And to look for interesting things to do, so that I have something to write about.
Not sure if blogging really is gonna be this huge motivator for me, but I gotta admit, writing is pretty fun sometimes. Even if having a goal to write regularly kinda makes it a chore too.
I have been studying Japanese for a few years now. Haven’t had too much progress. The rate of acquiring new kanji 漢字 and vocabulary is low, but the progress is steady and I’m slowly learning more. Meanwhile, I have a friend who got really good at Chinese, even got his master’s degree at it. I’m impressed he got so well into this totally different culture and language. So last week, to renew our bonds, we had a Chinese night out with him and another friend.
We had some food and beer at a Chinese restaurant that he is working for. Surprisingly, another of my old acquaintances was working there as a waitress. It kinda made me feel sad and nostalgic, that I’ve hung around with like a 1000 different people in the past, and now I don’t even remember their names anymore.
My half Chinese friend told us some stuff about Chinese culture – explained that the way you know someone is a real Chinese person is that they are spitting, farting and burping loudly in public. He added jokingly that this was exactly why he got into Chinese culture – because he felt that you should be able to do these things freely.
To finish off the meal, we had some shots of Chinese rice vodka. The guys warned me it would be horrible but I thought it was nothing too bad, so we continued the evening by going to a bar in town that actually specialized in that Chinese rice liquor and got some more shots of it there. I initially thought it was weird we have enough money in our small town that a bar as specific as that can function, but the place was actually extremely nice so I ended up getting why it can stay in business.
Finally we went to my place, it was sort of my house warming event for them since I moved a few months back. On the way, the half Chinese guy farted loudly, which confirmed that he is a real half Chinese person.
My whole life revolves around video games, so of course when we arrived here I instantly whipped out some controllers and put on Puyo Puyo Tetris. That game is a sort of a tradition for me, every time someone comes over I gotta play it with them. I win every time and feel ashamed that I put them through that, but traditions must be continued.
I felt like the half Chinese guy was not all that impressed with my videogameyness, but the other guy kinda saw the appeal in it. Overall it made me rethink my life for a moment – should my whole identity consist only of games or should I rather do something else with my time? But that thought faded soon.
I think that the best format to write blog posts is to end it with a surprise, a punch line. Otherwise it ends up feeling like the ending is abrupt, the post unfinished. But I didn’t manage it this time. So therefore, to make this more of an educational article than an entertaining one, I’ll give you, the reader, some more insight into Chinese culture – here is an illustrative picture of the booze mentioned before:
