Break my Internet dependent lifestyle

Today is the wrap for my project, so how did it go?

Honestly it went okay. cutting out about 75% of what I do on the internet was no big loss. I mean I suppose it should come as no surprise how crammed full of nonsense social media is these days. No Gacha games and no Netflix shows was mostly to not get into another one since I have a tendency to try to find a new one when super bored. Missing streamers was not too bad either, I have a huge backlog of streams to begin with that I don’t really address because it’s just not that addicting. But there are just like one or two that really have that nice chill vibe that makes me feel better so I did end up watching them. It was mainly the monthly/weekly Manga/Webcomics that made me go “ohhh I’ve been waiting to see that!”.

But along with all that there were a few realizations and other results. Number one, just saying “I won’t do this” is kind of meaningless if you don’t have something to replace it with. I don’t get enough hours at work to fill up the sudden free time, and I’ve always had problems getting other projects started, let alone consistently worked on or finished (hence the DK30 particpations). I’ve got no social life anymore and I can’t even say it was thanks to the pandemic, but mostly because my few real friends all live across country and my only hobby is board games but the nearest game nights to my house are 1.5 to 2 hours away. And anything else just feel like a waste of my very limited income.

Anyway, my whole personality is very systematic, and I live in a country where pretty much every system is broken unless you want to listen to a sociopathic incompetent boss, or become a salesman that just sells things to anyone and everyone all the time. Both of those being things I can’t stand. Maybe I need therapy, but I also think alot about the meme “you don’t need therapy, you need revolution”. Either way neither are really options or me thanks to a) money or b) powerlessness. So that just leaves me, trying desperately to follow ineffective rules with poor results and turning to the internet like the ancient romans turned to the colosseum.

If you made it this far, thanks? I did have a few accomplishments, made some new storage shelves for the craft room (about 8 hours total, but waiting for glue and paint to dry took forever)), finished two anime (Healer Girl and Shokei Shojou) and one and a half game backlogs (dropped Nephilim Saga but finished old snes game Uncharted Waters). Only like one day of progress in the two weeks since i started my game jam project though unfortunately. At least I have some more context to think about my next project though to ultimately become a functional member of society >.>

anyway have some cat tax photos, and thanks for the likes/follows

the new storage shelves constantly annoyed cat I <3 her

pretty little snuggle bug I <3 her too

I’ve been doing alright recently not perfect but alright. But as this project comes to a close I feel like I want to give it a good sprint to the finish line. Unlike week one I currently have a solid project to focus on and a fair amount of preparation beforehand, so after this update I plan to turn on airplane mode for my devices and not turn it off until after the 28th. Let’s give it all we have for the finish!

edit: apparently airplane mode doesn’t do anything on my desktop so I’m just going to unplug the ethernet and turn off the wifi manually -.-

so just like everything, sometimes you need a weekend. Going throughout the day with no real internet feels like having a bottomless pit in your brain where the recreation ideas should be to recover from the working bits. So yesterday I took an internet junkie day with no restrictions. I got absolutley nothing done, but in an ideal world that’s how a weekend should be right? So revised the target again. 6 days a week, no internet during “working” hours (11 to 11 for me) with short breaks during lunch and dinner. On the seventh day activate internet gremlin mode. Normal people would probably go out and socialize or something, but not me! maybe that’ll be a DK30 in the future.

Finally feeling like my cough is subsiding so it’ll be easier to concentrate too. Haven’t gotten much of anything done on my game jam project since the first day, but that’s okay since this one is still going strong, just waiting for the hyper focus to kick in and do what i want (ha!). In the meantime though I’m almost done with the last storage shelf I was making so even if the gamedev isn’t going quite as planned there is still progress in other areas being made.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been too lax again recently. Being sick has messed up my sleeping schedule something fierce, so when I wake up at 11am I’m just like “well, I should’ve had an hour to be online so I’ll just take my hour now”. As I work on coding as well, I find myself coding for 15 minutes to figure out a minor bug, and when that’s set, my brain goes into “i need a break” mode and bam, youtube is right there. Next thing I know I’m watching a two hour zelda randomizer tournament stream replay.

There’s not much to say about it though really, I’ve just got to buckle down, tell myself “self, you screwed up!” and just reiterate in exacting details to myself what the rules are again (or what I’m changing them to now). 11am to 11pm no internet except Pico-8 and background music only (not streams! not podcasts!). 11pm to 11am anything goes. If good and have done something, can have 30 minutes of internet from 1 to 1:30 pm while eating lunch, and another 30 minutes from 6 to 6:30 pm while eating dinner.

On the bright side, I’ve been pretty good about 1am lights out and when I haven’t been asleep easily, the devices were still off at least

Week 3 Start

Week two was okay, taking a step back from “nothing” to “time limit per day” (which generally worked out to be about 4 hours) helped me distract myself from the less than great circumstances in my life, but it still didn’t really force me to really buckle down and get organized like I thought I might with an excess of time that couldn’t just be filled with junk-food like internet browsing. Then again that may also have been hindered by me being basically bed-ridden sick for two days and still uncomfortably sick for another two and counting.

I did end up making a second DK30 project for trying to make a game in pico-8, so hopefully I can use that to help fill time on this project as well. It’s still hard to concentrate since I’m not fully over being sick, but hopefully things can ramp back up in the next day or two. Also I really need to get some dishes done, ugh… at least I managed to keep up on laundry

On the bright side, still being sick means I don’t sleep well so my eyes are pretty sensitive to light which makes it easier to reject internet and return to monke sleep. Hopefully I’ll be better enough by the 14th to participate in DK30 proper, I’d still like to try joining the game jam.

I am sick as a dog today. Got woken up after an hour of sleep to my throat feeling like it’s on fire and had a restless sleep the entire rest of the night. Would’ve been easy to say today could be an exception on account of how little I can do with my body weak and concentration fried, but I’m holding out remarkably well. Then again I spent half the day sleeping more after the pain finally died down a bit so it wasn’t quite as difficult as I thought it might be. Here’s hoping I feel better soon because I already forgot anything else I was going to post about that last day or two, ugh…

Week 2 start

So I did backslide quite a bit in week one, I just took a whole day to indulge and honestly it helped numb depression. So in reevaluating my targets for week two I think I’m going to try a different tack.

So my new restriction will be no internet related activities -at all- from 11 am to 11 pm, but outside of that no real restrictions (aside from the original lights out at 1am). Honestly even with tutorials and stuff, I ended up watching more tutorials but not actually doing the things along with them. Maybe come week 3 when real DK30 begins I’ll relax the restriction a bit since I’m thinking of participating in the game jam. But also by opening up limited time I can at least prioritize some things and get them out of the way before the day proper starts. I’m a slow riser in the morning too so I need at least like a half hour to wake up my brain before leaving bed and this lets me fill that wind up time again.

I did manage a few extra things though at least through week one, got through some game backlog and started building a storage shelf from scratch to help organize the craft room. Might try tackling more since it’s gotten cooler out like cutting back some of the forest out back or taking the dog out more. We’ll see how things work out.

Not sure how well I’m doing. instead of spending hours pointlessly rechecking social and manga sites for something to do, I’m spending almost as much time just laying in bed doing unable to find the motivation to do anything. At least when I was gaming I would move to the living room where the xbox is. Oh and it’s not like I’m off the social sites and whatnot. Like I’ll be on youtube seeing all the things I’m not watching and I’ll still scroll through it to throw things outside of my current scope on to my watch later list. Eventually today I couldn’t stand it anymore and indulged for about an hour in some manga and random videos to assuage my existential dread.

I guess I feel a step better, but I still feel like my stomach is hungry but my mouth is uninterested in eating anything, just like I’m bored but there’s nothing I can think of that would be entertaining. Again, after typing it out a few days ago I’m questioning even more if being “good” about all the things I “shouldn’t” do was ever actually discipline or just depression. Can’t be good about something if you weren’t really tempted in the first place, right? If it’s not hard for you, is it really a virtue in the first place?

Tough going cold turkey, whenever I’m on my computer I’m constantly looking for the links I’d visit obsessively every day (which I moved off my bookmarks bar to a deeper folder marked “No Net November”). Managed to do some extra housework and some woodworking the last two days, but not much else. did some culling on my youtube “Watch Later” lists. With less to distract I just keep going around the same one or two things in my head for hours uninterrupted instead of the previous minutes split up by random youtube videos or doomscrolling. Today I just can’t stop thinking about my character for the RPG group game tonight, even though I normally wouldn’t give it much second thought normally.

I think for this week at least I’ll give myself some small outs: I gave up all non-educational youtube, but I’ll re add 1-2 recreational video(s) of 30 minutes or less per day (Which will probably AngoryTom and maybe the first few minutes of a Cracking the Cryptic). Haven’t used my “Video Game Backlog” out yet, but not sure if that’s discipline or just depression. We’ll see how I feel about more at the end of week one.