I’m Extremely Online
Hachi machi, it’s been 18 real-ass months, eh? I did pretty much everything except for anything having to do with Internet content. So here I am, writing something of a year end summary. Not really, but y’know, I was recently asked if I picked up any new hobbies and figured it’d be good to have an account of those along with habits that were developed during this nonsense.
Electronics
I wanted to sharpen my soldering skills a bit, as I’d put together some keyboards in the past but not much else. I got a TS100 and some helping hands and got busy. I whipped up another keyboard (whoops), assembled a pwnagotchi, repaired a cheap handheld emulator, started a Circuit Shield, and started a 3trinsRGB+1c.
That last thing is a glitchy little video synthesis gadget. I wound up ordering one of those after scraping together the parts for a Waaaave Pool and r_e_c_u_r, both of which are RPI-based video synthesis tools. Now all this is for naught without some DoPe ScAnLiNeS, so that means I hit eBay hard for a few weeks until a nice JVC TM-H150C popped up for me to buy.
While the PVM is absolutely rad for analog video work, it’s also great for retro gaming. Having hit my ‘money I want to spend on antique gear’ threshold on the monitor, I dug out my old Wii, got some homebrew going, and dumped a bunch of ROMs onto it. BAM! A great display and near infinite games to play.
In the process of finding my Wii, I bumped into a handful of old iPod classics I had laying around. Zipped off to YouTube to see what was up with those, as I remembered a little modding scene cropping up and yes, there were a TON of things happening. A few dollars later (whoops, again) and I had some new batteries, CF cards, and all kinds of ribbons and weird this-to-that converters. The end result are some flash-based 256GB iPods that hold plenty of tunes, are super fun to use, and run for hours on end.
The most mundane update is the conscious effort to move all my chargers and devices over to USB-C. It just makes sense.
Health
In the middle of 2019, I started trying a handful of different gyms on for size. Having never been a gymrat, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Tried powerlifting and liked it, but the gym was medium inconvenient for my unpredictable schedule. Tried crossfit and that was mostly ok except for all the early morning human interaction. Finally landed on a conventional gym in my neighborhood, and started a lil' linear progression program. It was going really well! Then COVID hit, and I had to figure out what to do at home. A weightvest, a kettlebell, and some olympic dumbbell handles later, and I think I’m doing ok. I’d still like to get back to the gym whenever that’s safe to do, but this is fine for now. I also decided that jumping rope wasn’t doing it for me anymore, and splashed on a C2 rower, which is the most fun, lowest impact form of cardio torture I’ve thus far experienced. Oh, and the gym I was going to collapsed a few months into lockdown, so I guess I ought to get used to this setup.
Less exciting, but equally (more?) important, I started really watching how much sleep I was getting. Turns out it wasn’t enough! So I started going to bed much earlier to make up for being a certifiable early bird. The blackout shades stay down when I’m sleeping, and all the stupid little lights have been covered with gaffers tape. Nighttime is actually dark, which is for some reason new and novel. Being able to calm down became pretty important too, so I took up meditating. I have almost no idea what I’m doing, but I read Mindfulness in Plain English which makes me feel like it’s worth continuing as a practice.
Reading
Speaking of books I’ve read, I’ve read a whole lot of books. One of my favorite weekend things is drinking coffee and reading. Turns out, you can make time to do that during the week as well! So I did! The topics somewhat followed the news - sociology, race relations, direct action, socialism, sustainability, etc. etc. - with a healthy sprinkling of your usual millennial design nerd stuff - odd cookbooks, technology teardowns, inclusive design, assorted illustrators, art books, so on, so forth. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve been called out for stacks of books on my coffee table while on video calls. Trouble is, I’ve straightup run out of places to keep these things, so a coffee table feels like the second most appropriate place for them to hang out.
Editing
Just wanted to add in that I’ve also been systematically evaluating all the things I own, and trying to own fewer of them. Bigtime chill on t-shirt purchases, medium chill on record collecting, and uh, as previously mentioned, absolutely no chill on book buying. This extends to the digital realm as well. Pretty much took myself off of social media. I say pretty much because I’m most likely forgetting some silly platform that’d be considered social media whose account I failed to delete. But yeah, no more IG, Twitter, or Tumblr. It’s been incredible how much time I’ve gotten back, most of which has been channeled into all the above other activities.
Next!
I mean, I’d like to continue writing in this thing. The URL is so good! It needs to serve a purpose though. I suppose the occasional resting place for all the junk bouncing around my brain is purpose enough. ☯