zushi's place

Chatting with some friends recently and reflecting on my past year's experience, there's some general agreement that “outside of a full time job, there's time for two active hobbies at most”.

By active hobbies, what we mean here are hobbies that you are either growing or trying to incorporate into your life. For example, taking skate lessons twice a week or studying one chapter of Japanese a week. I think anything that fits into the sentence “right now I'm working a lot on _____” can be considered an active hobby.

Having two active hobbies outside of work might already be a stretch for a lot of people – I think pulling this off for many requires some sort of social sacrifice for many, unless the hobbies are already social in nature. A reality you notice when talking to people in a full-time job is that they tend to tire out after work as is.
Generalizing a bit more, I think a reasonable approximation here is that a full-time job might account for the time of two active hobbies. So if you are not employed, then you get four active slots.
This heuristic works pretty well, and I think is a good way to keep optimism about how much you can do in check. Reflecting on the past year, I definitely overloaded myself by taking on way too much (1 meeting new people, 1 improv, 0.5 art, 1 Japanese on top of work), and I do believe the quality of everything suffered as a result.
Having that heuristic acts as a good reality check. I now pick up new things much more carefully. I do think the quality of what I do improved as a result, though.
The heuristic of four units of active hobbies (or at most two outside of work) is very counter-intuitive in part because we seem to see other people who can do a lot more. In practice I think there are a few addendums to the heuristic:

• You can downgrade an active hobby to a passive hobby if it's something you can set up a routine for. For example, learning about how to work out correctly is an active hobby. But once the routines are set up, it becomes fairly passive and might only take 1/5 to 1/3 of a normal hobby slot. I don't believe all hobbies are amenable to this, though.
• If one of the hobbies are what you do to recharge anyways, I don't count it within the four. For example, a lot of people play video games to recharge, and I don't consider video games as taking up an active slot. It happens that most of what people do in order to recharge are not considered “productive hobbies” in the traditional sense (case in point, video games). However, some people gets recharged by strenuous and stereotypically “productive” hobbies – say running or tennis. If that's what they need in order to recharge, then it might seem that they actually have three productive hobbies going on outside of work.
• (Hypothetical, I have never seen anyone do this.) With very careful time management and possibly a lot of caffeine, I surmise it may be possible to handle three “productive” active hobbies outside of work. I don't think this is much achievable without some direct introspection on productivity, and possibly a lot of prep/planning work.
  When you drill into the details of each individual's life, I'm sure there will be lots of counterexamples and room to optimize. However, I think thinking in terms of four units (or two on top of work) makes for an excellent reality check against taking on too much.
  As a tiny bonus, I quite like how reality seems a lot more like a video game or board game this way.

— Categorized under: #productivity

One of the things I note daily is [how interested am I in X], where X can be a variety of subjects.

Recently, a curious pattern emerged on one of them – my interest in Touhou sunk really significantly for a while. The above ticks show 7 day averages computed daily.

What accounts for the fall? The answer for that one ended up being pretty clear – I stopped listening to Touhou music for a while when I got into Ghost Club and Deltarune. It turns out that frequently listening to Touhou music had a self-sustaining effect on my interest in the series, and the spike on the right hand corresponded to when I started listening to Touhou again.

Outside of music, one other activity that seems to have a strong effect on my interest curve seems to be the frequency of community participation related to the interest. For example, art meetups tend to temporarily but strongly boost my interest in art, and Japanese meetup does the same for motivations to study Japanese.

It's important to note that this doesn't seem to always happen though. For example, hearing a lot about hacking doesn't seen to boost my interest in that subject much.

Combined together, I think these observations suggest that environment plays a surprisingly strong role in interest – at least it seems so in at least a few areas for me.

— Categorized Under: #psychology, #hobbies, #data

I was chatting with a friend about the murals in Denver yesterday, apparently the street art in Denver is refreshingly positive – instead of “Fuck Society” and “Tear down the Power”, it's more like “Stay Kind” and “Love this City”.

This reminds me a lot a phase that people go through.

A decent amount of people I know went through an ironic phase of fashion, where they tend to dress dark, edgy, and loud. After that phase, the sense of fashion tones down a bit but you can sometimes tell that it's still present. Out of the people I know who went through that phase and came out the other end, it seems that they tend to be a bit kinder and more thoughtful than usual (though usually also less idealistic about the way that society works).

Thinking and talking to people about this, the common thread about that ironic phase was a sort of discontent with the world, a desire to distance from that world (blended sometimes with a desire to be unique), and an expression of both. This naturally make them feel a bit harder to approach while in that phase, but what does that say about people who went through that phase and dialed it down?

Thinking about it, I can come up with the following possibilities:

1. Workplace dress code
2. No longer discontent
3. Better to be integrated with society to change it
4. No longer feeling the desire to stand out
5. Feeling that the fashion choice doesn't express their personality
6. Not wanting the attention anymore
   

I think that outside of the first one and last one, the reasons are all indirectly connected with why someone who went through the ironic phase might appear kinder and more thoughtful compared against the average population. Of course, there are tons of kind and thoughtful people who bypassed the phase altogether, but I do think that someone who has gone through the phase is on average more able to discuss some important topics, albeit the ones that are darker and more personal in nature.

— Categorized under: #fashion, #psychology, #sociology

(Mostly a brain dump of recent thoughts about social experiences.)

Over the past few months I've had success becoming more emotionally self-aware. Applying the same type of learning methodology to social experiences though feels quite daunting.

One of the main challenges here is that even adding a single person makes the experience vastly more complicated. Think of the difference between playing basketball or soccer by yourself vs. playing soccer with other people, and the difference in complexity becomes immediately obvious. In a social interaction, not only do you need a certain degree of self-awareness, but you need to interact based on the emotional state of the other person, the predispositions of the other person, the nature of the relationship, the context of the situation, what the other person knows about you, and each person's interests as well.

Each new person brings an entire copy of these already-numerous variables to track, and I think that's why for the longest time I found hanging out with more than one person to be extremely exhausting. It felt impossible to track what was important for everyone and to satisfy all of them at the same time. It seems like with lots of recent practice, I'm feel much comfortable in group settings. More recently I've been thinking about how to make better social experiences, whether it's in a one-on-one setting or in a group.

Part of the reason is that it strikes me that there isn't really that much time to hang out with people. Unless I co-reside with someone, even for close friends I will probably only hang out with them 100 times or so in the rest of my life. And for other friends, perhaps a few dozen or less than a dozen times total. After that, each of us will get busy and move on with our own lives.

Part of it too is that it seems like such a waste for a hangout to be kind of lukewarm, when so many great experiences are possible out there. A lifespan is pretty short however you look at it, and it seems like we should make every effort to have hangouts be positive, memorable ones.

Finally, I think I'm just kind of interested in experience design in general. From psychological and design perspectives, the problem of “how to make a hangout fun” is really interesting. It's something that I find myself gravitate towards thinking about.

There might be some confidence component to my motivation too. I recently took an interesting study that suggests that I like people more so than my confidence in leading a social interaction. This seems largely true, and I'd like the two to be more on par with each other.

But again, the skill tree of social intelligence is quite daunting. Unlike emotional intelligence, the amount of variables at play feel exponential rather than linear in scale.

To make it manageable, I think I'll probably have to scope my learning. For example, there are various special social interactions like negotiations, difficult conversations, competitions, and courtship. I think I should kind of ignore those for now and focus on making normal hangout-type interactions better.

Thinking about these types of interactions, one particularly interesting part is that I think the vast majority of really positive experiences can be categorized, here are some examples:

• Deep conversations
• Funny bantering
• Spontaneous adventures

I think that this type of experience are monotonically good in that the more an interaction approach that direction, the better that interaction becomes. There's no “uncanny valley” of deep conversations or funny bantering – the deeper the conversation, the funnier the bantering, the better.

Some of these categories require another person (deep conversations), while others can be experienced on one's own (spontaneous adventures). Some of these I feel comfortable with (again, deep conversations), while others I don't have much experience in (yet again, spontaneous adventures). Overall, those that I feel comfortable or can be experienced on one's own are easier to learn, while the ones that require other people or I feel uncomfortable with will be more challenging to learn.

Moving forward, I feel like a good approach is probably to work on one or two at a time. Perhaps becoming more comfortable with certain categories on my own for one, while experimenting with social settings for another.

Anyways, here are the current categorizations I have in mind.

I feel comfortable with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Safety and comfort – Overcoming hardships – Very aesthetic experiences – Becoming better at a skill – Creating something new – Creating a sense of hero's journey

I'm not very familiar with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Spontaneous, fun experiences – Feeling new emotions – Play for its own sake

I have some degree of comfort, but cannot be experienced on one's own: – Deep conversations – Validation and acceptance – Fun bantering

Others that seem out there or really challenging: – Intimacy – Laughing until your stomach hurts – Performing something together (doesn't have to be music, could be any form of performance)

They seem like an okay place to start, but feel free to reach out if I miss anything significant. I'm actually pretty excited to dig into a lot of these more.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications, #emotions, #streamofconsciousness

In a random walk the other day, I realized that the typical fashionability of bisexuals and the typical social awkwardness of neurodiverse people are actually quite related.

One of the important facets of social skills is to understand how people will react to what you do. We implicitly use this skill to avoid doing awkward or offending things. Neurotypical people have an advantage on this because they can use themselves to simulate how most people will react to the situation. On the other hand, neurodivergent people will struggle because they could only learn this from observing how others react to the situation. This has the further effect of making socializing much more painful to neurodivergent people, further reducing their opportunities to get feedback.

The generally-higher fashion skills of bisexual (and gay) people serves as an illustration of the opposite phenomenon. Because these people are attracted to people of their own sex, they are often immediately able to use their own emotional responses to simulate how attractive they will be to others of their sex. This is something that heterosexuals don't have easy access to. Unless there is a way to tap into increasing their own attraction to their own sex, the best that they can do is to either run simulations from other pictures of attractive people of their sex they have seen, or to have friends who are attracted to their sex give tips for them.
In productivity literature, there are a lot of verbiage on how important having an immediate feedback mechanism is. Thinking about examples like those in my life, the salience of that type of mechanism suddenly becomes amazingly clear.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity, #social, #fashion

Recently I was reading a book called What to Say Next by Sarah Nannery. It was a really insightful account of what life looks like on the spectrum, and one of the interesting perspectives from the book was that contrary to the opinion that people with Autism are less emotionally sensitive, they are actually more emotionally sensitive.

The idea is that people with Autism experience certain emotions so strongly that it often causes problems in everyday functioning. For example, people with Autism have trouble making eye contact, and this is because the amount of information and emotions involved in it is overwhelming for them. Similarly, autistic people tend to spiral into negative emotions easily, because those emotions are felt so strongly.

I think the idea definitely has merit, and it actually made me think about what people mean when they use the work “sensitive”. In everyday context, we generally say that a person is sensitive to something if they pick up on it easily or can easily be bothered by it; but actually, this is a side-effect of a more fundamental type of sensitivity.

As an analogy, we can think of sensitivity as having the volume knob turned up on some aspect of life. A person who is sensitive will usually have a easier time picking up differences between different sounds, but this is only true if the volume isn't overwhelming. If a person is so sensitive that everything is incredibly loud, then instead of being more discerning, that person will actually be less discerning because they spend all their time running away from the noise.

So saying that a person is sensitive to something can paradoxically mean that that person is worse at processing that thing. Thinking about it, in everyday parlance, the better word to use to describe when someone is good at processing a certain type of stimulus is probably “discerning”. To a certain degree it implies sensitivity, but either the sensitivity is not overwhelming, or that person has learned to rein in their strong reactions to information, and has learned to direct that energy productively.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #communications, #thinking, #emotions

Based on a friend's recommendation. Saw the Ghost Club in VRChat in a headset recently. It was extremely good. A lot better than I could have imagined. Was lucky enough to see a VJ in action in the 2nd set too, which was really nice.

Seeing what is basically a rave in VR was an interesting experience, especially since I've never been to a rave or something close to it IRL. Making the leap to see it directly in VR was a pretty far-out experience.

One of the things that the experience made me acutely aware of was that the distinction between a “gaming experience” and an “enjoyable experience” is actually quite blurry – drawing a line between them can feel somewhat artificial, in a way. In general, people play games for enjoyable experiences, and if something that's not technically a game can satisfy it, then it is just as good.

From the perspective of game design, I think this kind of non-game, unusual, and enjoyable experience can really take an aspiring designer out of the frame of “designing a game” to “designing an experience”, which opens up space for a lot more design possibilities. Journey and Flower are good examples of this type of design.

Even for it's own sake, Ghost Club was well worth waking up early in the morning for (the Club operates on Japanese time). It's a unique experience that can't really be replicated via a stream or a recording. I highly recommend everyone who has a headset and have an appetite for new experiences to try it out.

— Categorized under: #gaming, #gamedesign, #vr

One thing I've been thinking on and off for the past few days is what really triggers how much I enjoy a piece of media. The answer that I consistently come back to seems to be a sense of aesthetics – the sense that everything in some sort of fictional world feels “just right”.

This type of “completeness” feels really difficult to find in media, and contributes a lot to my peculiar tastes. For example, I wouldn't consider Star Wars to have a good aesthetic, neither does a decent amount of Disney films. Magic the Gathering doesn't really get it right, and Pokemon doesn't either. But Serial Experiments Lain, NGE, and Revolutionary Girl Utena seem to hit it on the spot. And so does Eccentric Family, and that there are four out of five of my favorite TV animations.

JoJo seems to have it, though it's not something I could easily tap into. On the other hand, the Personal series seems to be very aware of it.

Touhou is one of the interesting examples of this. Almost every other Touhou game presents a self-contained, complete aesthetics. This sort of frequency feels unheard of among creators, and it feels like Touhou is in the business of aesthetics much more so than games, art, pretty patterns, or music.

I was thinking a lot about how to concisely convey the feeling of “having a complete aesthetic”, but it feels almost impossible to convey through words. At least currently, I feel like as soon as I define some kind of ruleset, I will find exceptions that slip under the radar.

Of course, the definition could end up being “just stuff that I really like”. But I don't really feel like that is the case. For example, Made in Abyss and Hotline Miami are example of artworks that have a ton of things I don't like, but still manages to fascinate me with its strong aesthetics. On the other hand, My High School Romance is a show that I really like, but doesn't really have aesthetics as it's strong suit (though it does have some of that).

I did eventually stumble upon something that makes the job of articulating what a “complete aesthetic” is to me easier. In China there's an artist named Rei who did a series of pieces for two collaborative music albums themed around mythologies from around the world. The English name of the project is Dream Catchers from Around the World, and almost every image has what feels like a “complete aesthetic”. The pieces probably required a prestigious amount of research, and as a result the pieces feel like they come alive.

This discovery of so many of what feels like “complete aesthetics” is astounding to me equal to Touhou's productivity around aesthetics, and I'm really surprised that I haven't seen the artist referenced at all in the West.

Here's an example of the said images, centered around the idea of the Adam & Eve creation myth:

And here are all the said images:

https://www.pcstore.com.tw/g77shop/M39209915.htm

Though I can't still quite articulate what makes an aesthetic feel “complete” to me, looking at these pieces, I feel like I'm starting to put together some initial ideas. Hopefully one day I can articulate it fully or even better, set out to create a bunch compelling ones of my own.

—

Categorized under: #art, #aesthetics

One of the things I always liked about myself is that I have an interest in people. Looking at the things that occupy my mind the most – psychology, sociology, music, art, writing, reading, culture – there's no doubt that there's always been a humanist bent to it.

The other day, during a meetup, I was chatting with an artist who specialize in doing portraits. She really liked drawing portraits, and her portraits looked really good, but she mentioned that she was always a bit scared of doing full character drawings. The body was really hard to draw for her, she was less interested in the subject, and she had no confidence that she could get the body proportions right. So we chatted a bit about strategies for tackling that.

This episode stuck in my mind for a while afterwards. When I think about it, it's natural to like drawing specific parts of people (like faces). However, the idea of liking specific aspects of people has never occurred to me before. Looking at my own interest in people, it becomes extremely obvious that I'm interested in specific aspects of people, rather than people in general.

For example, most of my interest in people lies in self-help, aesthetics, culture, and social psychology. On the other hand my interest in learning about the life of a stranger, the idea of how to navigate conversations in a selfless way, and my attentiveness in putting people at ease are pretty deficient. There are weaknesses in many other parts too. In other worlds, despite knowing a decent amount about people, my social intelligence is still pretty low.

I have friends who are quite skilled in these areas, and when I talk to them, it becomes apparent that one of the critical skills here is to deeply understand the headspace of the other people, and understand how various ways of interaction affects the headspace. This is pretty often done using yourself as a kind of simulation. Though this is something I do occasionally, I don't really go as far as I would like with it (I feel that it doesn't naturally go that direction), and to me it feels a bit selfish to be so occupied with other things that I don't think about this, especially now that I've become more aware of this flaw.

In my mind, interactions with people can really be a lot more. Instead of two, three, or many people anxious to fill the silence with small talk, it could be a musical duet, or trio, or symphony where everyone gets to pick what music to play, contribute their own interpretation to the mix, and come out happy after partaking in something that was fun, beautiful, and validating.

Right now I'm still pretty far from contributing to it, but at least I'm becoming more motivated in getting there.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy

The other day I was talking with an artist friend about the illustrator I referenced in the aesthetics article. And the friend pointed out something really interesting about this artist's journey.

In the link here (CW: some blood and nudity), you can get a sampling of the artist's works six years ago versus now. It's specifically really interesting to see that the early works are simple but actually quite evocative, while the later works usually expands the technical scope of the work while maintaining the same sensibilities. For example, below is one of their earlier works – very few characters, nearly completely monochromatic, but still interesting enough in the subject matter for someone to pause and take a look:

ナルキッソスとエコー

Here's an example of the most recent picture. The colors are now very varied, there are more characters and they tend to have more dynamic poses, and the idea of “having something kind of surreal going on in the picture” is there throughout.

まとめ18

This progression is impressive because one of the central challenges in pursuing art is the difficulty of making something you would consider “good” compared to all the other really good pieces of art you've already seen. On the other hand, working purely on artistic drills can be really demotivating because they tend to be quite boring, you haven't “finished” anything in a while, you lose a sense of social motivation, and you are prone to start doubting your abilities longer you've gone without making a “completed” piece you are satisfied with.

There's a delicate balance between skill, motivation, learning, and ambition that's challenging to navigate, and in my opinion this artist has navigated it really well. A lot of their early works, despite their simplicity, are something that someone with a trained eye can still find something interesting in. Having this kind of subjectively interesting, educational, and reasonably scoped pieces goes a long ways towards motivating someone to keep pursuing art.

Personally speaking, though some of the art felt a tad oppressive and gazey for my personal tastes, I find the sense of mystery/meaning this artist has in their work to be pretty strong – and this is something I hope to be able to achieve in my own works as well.

— Categorized under: #art, #learning