Habits

“He arranged his things very nicely / and decided to sit in his chair for a while.” — Ezra Jack Keats, Peter’s Chair

Habits

I never thought I would actually click an ad! But it turns out I am also susceptible to content-targeted analytics.

I was scrolling YouTube shorts when I got an ad for Bend, an app for stretching.

Bend

It reminds you every day to stretch and it sets timers and tells you what position to go to.

So, it sounded nice and I tried it last night and found it helpful. However, there’s only a seven-day free trial.

At this point, I knew I was definitely not going to pay for this basic app that just shows pictures and sets timers. A middle schooler could have programmed it.

Time Tax

However, it would cost me time and effort to do it myself and that’s what I weighed in my head as I decided to delete the app just now.

I’m just going to save some YouTube video doing the same thing and I’m going to play that video when I want to stretch.

Smart Watch…

I started using a smart watch¹ recently and it’s been changing my health habits a little bit because of the reminder to stand up and the daily exercise goal.

However, the watch seems to run out of battery really fast and it’s uncomfortable to wear when sleeping.

The only time I wear it is when I’m running, and for the rest of the day after that.

Running

I would occasionally run a mile on the track before dinner while I was at college, but I like to run a rectangular block when I’m at home that’s about 2 km long.

My dad usually does three loops but I try to do two. I learned in a YouTube short that my form was actually wrong and that I’m supposed to try to raise my legs and lean forward instead of trying to step forward.

I just measured my mile time, and it’s actually almost exactly the same as DMO’s average pace for a half-marathon from seven years ago, 7.5 minutes! My time is actually 7 minutes and 35 seconds, so I will work on getting below 7.5 minutes.

I’m not sure how DMO keeps up that speed for 1.5 hours.

Art

I finally caved in and bought a tablet for taking notes + drawing. The stylus acts a bit weird and it’s very sensitive, so I think I will need to take some time to adjust.

However, I am honing my drawing skills every day. I’m currently trying to draw heads/faces. It’s like a whole different game compared to drawing bodies. Also, I somehow lost my figure drawing skills after not drawing for a while.

However, I am learning how to create backgrounds using digital software. In fact, I drew the splash photo for this post over the last two days.

Unscaled

This is the negative progress idea that Pewdiepie mentioned in his drawing videos and I can see how demotivating it is.

So, I think it would be good to try different focuses at different times while getting better at fundamentals so that when I jump to the same thing again, I’ll see faster improvement.

Japanese

In preparation for my Japan trip, I am trying to learn a little bit of Japanese. I may have said in some previous post that I am trying to learn it, but I definitely did not practice after that.

easy, actually is a very nice YT channel that has been trending recently. The style is mimicking that of many other slideshow stick figure videos with commentary.

He made a video about learning languages and mentioned that there are various motivations for learning languages and weak ones like wanting to understand anime will not go very far.

So, I’m hoping that since I have a better reason to learn it now, I will be able to keep it up.

The Algorithm

Recommendation algorithms on content platforms feed users what they want to see.

Recently, I’ve been trying to get better at guitar and drawing, so I’m following a lot of educational accounts. This has completely changed the type of content that I get recommended.

It’s annoying that I don’t really get funny videos anymore and it’s unsatisfying that I must stop following artistic accounts in order to get back the funny videos.

However, one way to not deal with the algorithm is to touch some grass, which I plan to do a lot of.

Footnotes

1. Of an unknown brand ↩