One of the interesting things about dreams are how different people experience them differently. I have some friends who would often have vidid or epic dreams, and have others friends who barely dream at all. It seems to me that if I squint hard enough, I could see some personality differences between those groups, but since the sample size is small, it's pretty hard to generalize.

I personally sit somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, which doesn't come as a surprise. However, I seem to have some other patterns regarding dreaming that others don't share.

In particular, there is a really strong three-way correlation between the amount of stories I've seen in a day, the amount of dreams that I have, and the quality of sleep I get.

Those who know me pretty well know that I'm pretty into fiction and animations, what they might not know is that these activities are backed by unexpectedly pragmatic motivations – I find that if I don't expose myself to some sort of new story during the day, I will often get less sleep. Without the dreamlike headspace inspired by stories, I would often find it hard to stay asleep.

It's as if the train I'm on had ran out of fuel and stopped dead in its tracks, and the driver could only throw up his hands like “well, I can't really do much about it, can I?”

When I ask others about the relationship between stories and sleep, I usually get this blank stare or something to the tune of “I haven't really thought about it?”, which is pretty surprising.

My theory along this line is that others tend to subconsciously fulfill their need for stories. E.g., they tend to often “feel like” that they wanted to watch a show or read a story, or just default to those activities. Whereas for me, after a certain age, I started to rarely “feel like” watching a show or reading a story, and don't really default to those activities either. As a result, I sometimes go to bed without getting my fill of stories for the day, and this made it easier to correlate sleep and stories over time.

Growing up, I was a pretty voracious reader of fiction, usually finishing a book every two or three days. What caused me to lose touch with the need for stories? I'm not quite sure. Perhaps after life started getting busy in college, story time became the first luxury to be cut. Eventually, when life went back to a less frantic state, I started to realize that narratives contribute to my well-being in an indirect way.

Over time, I started experimenting about what kind of things fuel dreams for me. At the beginning I thought that it would be “new experiences”, but stories seem to most consistently form dreams for me. For example, new music or engaging conversations don't really improve my sleep much, but first-time experiences of movies, shows, or books certainly do it. Having an eventful day in real life seems to work too.

When I have more time, I would like to try and see whether art and various documentaries do anything; but for now, the overarching rule for now seems to be that “if it's something you can tell someone else a story about” then it's good enough to generate dreams.

All this raises more questions than answers. Why do I need narratives? Where do those stories go after they become dreams? Do they somehow become a deeper part of myself, beyond the superficial imprint on my memories? If so, what sort of effect do they have on what I do?

To the extent that one can have answers to these types of questions, I don't really have any good ones as of yet But I'm super curious about what that process is like, and look forward to finding out someday.

—

Categorized under: #irl, #psychology

Early this year, I started rating my days on a scale of 0-10 on various metrics. The one I've been keeping watch the most on was the one labelled “Be Happy”.

Just this week I got a pretty good score...

It's actually a perfect score.

It's not that something really good happened that week, or that things went perfectly well. I actually didn't sleep well for a few days, and felt a bit behind on work for most of it. Regardless, at the end of each day that week I could honestly say that the day went pretty well and put down a 10 for it.

This leads to some interesting questions – for example, what does a 10/10 mean, if I could imagine a hypothetical future that would be “happier”? Would it be worth going down to 8 or even 9, if it means getting everything I think I would want? Some things to think about in the coming weeks.

Also, a side effect of this result means that I have to be emotionally prepared now, since it can only go downhill from here 😅

—

Categorized under: #irl

The other day I was excitedly telling my friend about how I started blogging, and was in the middle of it when he landed this blow:

“So... do you feel like you don't have enough people to have deep conversations with in real life?”

Ouch, I felt that one. Now I feel compelled to self-analyze.

Thinking about it, if I were able to talk about everything to someone, I would probably blog a bit less. There is a component of blogging for me that's like “shouting into the void”, where I just kind of say things on my mind, and it probably wasn't a coincidence that I started blogging more during quarantine.

On the other hand, I don't really think that's the entire point. Looking at blogging purely that way is a bit similar to “lol, aren't diaries just substitutes for human interaction” and “lol, wasn't Henry David Thoreau just writing because he got angsty in the woods”, which just sounds a bit silly. Writing arises out of a varied list motivations and instincts, a lot of which are either intuitive to the writer or become obvious after some thinking. For me, it didn't end up taking that long to realize that I'll always end up doing some form of blogging, both for writing and for the fun and the comfort of designing one.

Not to misrepresent my friend's question, though. It's a good one to ask regardless, and has been surprisingly useful in thinking about my reasons for blogging.

—

Categorized under: #irl, #writing

Assembled a new PC.

The idea to upgrade from the current laptop had four main motivations: screen real-estate, storage, games, and music production. Future VR compatibility was an auxillary consideration. My Dell XPS13 has been chugging along for 5 years now and lagging in all these metrics, and with the quarantine still in full force, it seemed like a good time to upgrade.

This is actually my first time building a machine, so I tried documenting it as a sort of a keepsake for the experience.

  Setup – everything new in box, except with an interior view of the case.

  Opening some things, the motherboard came with some gamer stickers shown in the middle of the box. One of the stickers says “WELCOME TO THE REPUBLIC OF GAMERS”.

  The Motherboard, which is by far the most visually complex part.

  Partially assembled, with the power supply and the CPU chip & fan installed. Installing the fan requires, according to multiple sources on the internet, pressing down on a lever hard enough that you feel like you are going to break it. I can now attest to it. Feels like I could have cracked the fan or the motherboard if I pressed harder.

  Low res image from first boot. I didn't think a graphics card was needed to show the startup boot sequence. But apparently with some AMD units, that's needed. I guess this was a good reason for Intel to provide integrated graphics on their CPUs.

Also, a BMO in the background for size.

  I didn't really have a preference for RGB vs. not and didn't pay attention to which one I ordered. As you can probably tell from the above picture, I ended up receiving the RGB version. After seeing it in action, I can understand a appeal a bit more now.

Close view of the RGB fan:

  I also enjoyed the mesh aesthetic of the case:

  So that's it for the pics. The current spec: – AMD Ryzen R7 3700X – Nvidia RTX 2060 – 32GB DDR4 – 2TB SSD – 750W Power Supply

One weird thing is that good consumer motherboards often seem to assume that I'm a hardcore gamer, so my motherboard came with a door tag that says:

And as if that side wasn't cool enough, the back side says:

This is a powerful and highly formidable door tag. I decided to hang it on the bathroom door for now.

— Categorized under: #irl

Yikes! It's been a long month at work. I definitely put in too much time in July and stopped feeling like I wanted to do anything productive since a few days ago, as a result, I took two days off to recover.

Since the beginning of this year, I've started viewing burnout as an awareness problem. This perspective has helped me out a lot – even in times where I don't feel like I'm burning out, or times when I thought I'm having some unrelated issues, taking a break still usually managed to fix everything anyways. Over time, I feel like I started getting a better sense of what actual burnout feels like.

This particular burnout was pretty interesting though – I did recognize that I was burning out halfway through the month, but the work timeline was planned such that I couldn't really take a break before all the work was done. In other words, this particular burnout not an awareness issue, but a planning one.

I think this type of issue generally comes up as a part of Parkinson's law (where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”) and the fact that the last 10% of work usually ends up being more like 20% instead. Planning for it can be kind of tough though. Even if I channel some wisdom and reserve vacation days in advance, there will usually be a few weeks where I would constantly hear the devilish whisper “it's ok... you can just finish in on your vacation day” 😓.

Maybe I should just always book something out of the city, this way I can't force myself to not take a break?

— Categorized under: #psychology, #irl

The house tulips reached full bloom! I think I got this one ~2.5 years ago from the grocery store when it was a standard 7-flower fare. There was a while last year when it looked a bit sad and seemed like it might be dying, but it instead just branched out and doubled it's bloom. It's really impressive what plants can do with just sunlight and water.

Full bloom:

The bloom ordering was quite interesting. The flowers bloomed starting with the ones closest to the root, and the two branches alternated in who gets the next bloom. It would be the top branch, then bottom branch, top branch, bottom branch, etc.. Each flower took roughly two days to bloom, and it was fun to watch the plant go through that blooming pattern all the way through.

There were a bit of apprehension as well the entire time – fourteen bulbs seemed like a lot, did the plant bite off more than it could chew? But in the end the orchid handled it flawlessly. That's some impressive planning right there.

In terms of the past month, I think this plant was probably the thing that inspired the most joy overall in the past month. Definitely looking into plants more if this was anything like the average experience.

An in-progress night bloom:

(I need to clean my lens...)

— Categorized under: #irl

The orchids in the kitchen started blooming again. I actually wasn't too sure whether the orchid's doing well earlier, so it's a bit of a relief.

Since the plant is dormant for ~9 months, it's sometimes hard to get feedback on whether the routine of “place by window water twice a week” is doing something or not. Being pretty new to taking care of plants, it still feels a bit strange that such a simple formula can lead to such elaborate blooms – like if someone came from the future and told you “the solution to world hunger is pistachios”, you have to scratch your head for a bit before taking that as an answer.

Not that all the flowers are doing so well. There are a few other plants that requires a bit of attention that needs to be looked into.

While the orchid is relatively forgiving, some of the other leafy plants I have do look at bit yellow. There were some that were adopted from a friend, and since there was a period where she couldn't care for them, parts of them have already dried.

I'm actually guilty of this too – there was a small plant I neglected for a few weeks last year, and although it's well care-for now, I think a part of it will just always be yellow.

The lesson learned here is that houseplants are not very forgiving. So now I should try to figure out whether to trim the dried leaves or leave them be.

Around this time last year, I wouldn't have thought much if I visited someone who has a bunch of healthy green plants around the house. My experiences since then have taught me that those people probably have at least a bit of chops to be able to keep the plants happy over time, at least at this day and age. Props.

— Categorized under: #irl

I remember a conversation with a friend about how although both of us like making creative things, neither of us were particularly interested in cooking since it's so temporary in nature.

In that particular conversation, we were talking about cooking the context of art, but I wonder if it makes more sense to talk about cooking in the context of...... well, talking.

A conversation that's not particularly deep could still be nice in the sense that it, for a while, makes both sides happier. This isn't really any different compared to how food makes both sides happier (assuming there's someone to share it with).

So I wonder if those who enjoy cooking see it more as an interaction, rather than a creation – or perhaps something in between. When thought of that way, cooking seems pretty easy to identify with.

— categorized under: #irl, #random