The nature of personal writing is somewhat unfortunate. The times I have the most to write about are when I’m doing a lot, which is when I can’t muster the will to write. Right now, I’m back on break and far too relaxed to write anything serious. Instead, I’ll share some distractions that have helped out recently:
1) Wikipedia on domestic items and architecture
The spiraling effect of link-following on Wikipedia is well-documented, but an interesting clique I found was on home architecture. I think it first came up because I was trying to figure out the difference between the family room and game room, and soon learned about ranch-style house and split-level homes. I never thought about layout much, but I geuss there are classifications.
2) Sporcle
If you haven’t tried out sporcle, be prepared for one of the best trivia games I’ve found. The idea is relatively simple: given a theme, list a bunch of items. For example, can you name all 44 US presidents, or all 151 original Pokemon? For about a week, my dormmates and I stayed up late working on various quizzes. There’s something gratifying about doing well on these, but I think sporcle only works because we fail a lot. Topics range from the filmographies of various actors to conjugations for etre in French, so I think everyone has at least one for one of their passions. I myself found it tragic how well I did on Star Wars (it’s actually quite hard) and 30 Rock characters, but the more satisfying ones for me were US court cases and SI units. It’s fantastically addictive.
3) YTMND
YTMND is risky. Basically, it’s one huge inside joke about internet memes. Some of them are quite dirty, some are bizarre, some are nonsensical, some are non sequitur, but some are clever. Basically, there’s some animated gif with a sound clip. Which sounds dumb, since we have youtube and all of its brilliance of streaming video. But the best part of YTMNDs is that they require a certain level of ingenuity to come up with something interesting in 5 secods with that amount of info. I don’t think most people will find it that interesting, but we’re glad to have these as inside jokes.
4) fmylife
fmylife is bad. It’s just a bunch of stories of the form “Today, I … FML” that people post. It makes me feel a little dirty to read, but you might find it good if you’re feeling down and need ot remeber that someone else has it worse.
And that’s how the internet can ruin you. On a completely unrelated note, I’ve recently come into possession of kevinleung.com, so I might be migrating my blog to that. I’ll post again if and when that happens.