Three days ago, I was finally able to roll credits in Animal Crossing New Horizons, and therefore unlocking the terraforming feature of the game. As you can tell, I haven't written anything since then precisely because I have been busy in-game trying to figure out how to craft and hone my island the way I'd like it to look like. (I am writing this midday as opposed to a nightly writing sesh because I know that if I pushed any of this back further, I wouldn't be able to write at all!)

Let me get this out of the way first – the hype of the game slightly ruins your perception of how you think you should be playing. Besides the time-traveling issue, I admit I jumped in the bandwagon two weeks late, so as we speak, everyone else who had the first dibs on the game since day one has had the terraforming option for a while now; everyone else's island looks perfect. They, my friends included, have so much more stuff, are able to freely hunt for dreamies now that housekeeping is out of the way, and their game screenshots feel like an unattainable dream. So when I unlocked this limitless potential, I was stuck and totally overwhelmed. So many possibilities! What to do first? But the thought that struck me the most is – how was I going to make it look like everyone else's, perfect?

It took me a few hours running around in-game and scrolling through endless images on the net to realize that 1) there was no way I could make it look like that with the limited amount of bells I had in my purse, and 2) did I want my island to look like that anyway? My brother, who also plays the game, got fed up with me ranting and said, “Do whatever feels right. Like gut-instinct right”.

So I abandon all previous ideas I had and just went with the flow – I kept my natural river path and just added a bit of cliff, following the original curve. I didn't start with my house, but with my villagers instead – like a victor's village in a sense. Three days down, and I've added a tiny hidden path to an eventual spot for the museum, a bamboo grove at the very top, and slowly working on a private little beach at the back of my island. It looks all very basic and less modern (think of a tiny rural village with more grass than pavement), but this feels just right for me.

It won't be picture-perfect, but I'll still be posting my progress on Twitter! All that effort and time I put should still be up there.

6/100

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I'm currently doing a challenge called “100 Days to Offload” – you can join in the fun too by visiting https://100daystooffload.com

If you'd like, drop me a message here – I would be absolutely thrilled to hear from you!

#100DaysToOffload #Journal

I started out writing a piece about the eco-minimalist changes I've tried to do over the course of a year, but I've deleted all that in favor of talking about how we also need proper representation and realistic approaches to the issue – because, in all honesty, I'm tired of consuming ad and product heavy posts that advocate buying A or B (or C) to help the problem. True, we can argue that these influencers and change-makers rely heavily on their sponsors to earn their keep, but I am done watching a 5-minute video where every 30 seconds you name drop a brand. To be honest, all this really does is to further promote the false notion that zero-waste and sustainability are all about buying certain items, a certain aesthetic, to fit the lifestyle. That is entirely false!

A few weeks ago, I happened to stumble on a YT video that detailed a few key examples of why she thought the sustainability and zero-waste movement were elitist. To a certain point, I agree with most of what she says – the majority of us can't continuously afford to live the “recommended” sustainable lifestyle because of our current social and fiscal limits. The YTers we watch are speaking from their own experiences, and no one can really blame them for it, but those experiences are not necessarily our own experiences and realities. To me, there is a gap between what is considered “ideal” and what one can actually do.

My hope is that one day, more and more people from diverse backgrounds get to share their own ideas about how to live a sustainable life. It doesn't need to be glamorous or well-edited, as we've been spoiled to expect from content creators, but it has to be real and relatable. Sponsors be damned.

5/100

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I'm currently doing a challenge called “100 Days to Offload” – you can join in the fun too by visiting https://100daystooffload.com

If you'd like, drop me a message here – I would be absolutely thrilled to hear from you!

#100DaysToOffload #Journal

True enough, I've finally missed a day of writing, but for good reason – I was able to finally step out and appreciate spring! I've been cooped up inside my house ever since shelter-in-place started in the bay area (roughly a little over a month now), and besides the usual grocery-laundry run, I've never really gone out to admire the scenery and the weather as much as I used to.

Along with the change in temperature, one thing I love about the switch in season is finally being able to hide my bulky sweaters and make way for my thin cotton shirts! Summer has always been my favorite season, coming from a tropical country where you really just play between “hot” and “raining” year-round, so being able to start shaking off the winter cold feels amazing! The sun helps a lot with my mood too.

Other things I've been thinking of doing:

• I feel like I've read so much on De-Googling through other people's post that I've been inspired to do some minimal changes, such as switching to Firefox and DuckDuckGo
• My brother's friend finally surrendered control of his Switch's main account, so Just Dance might be happening these next few days – some exercise!
• Digital decluttering? We shall see!

4/100

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I'm currently doing a challenge called “100 Days to Offload” – you can join in the fun too by visiting https://100daystooffload.com

Welcome to the weekend! If you'd like, drop me a message here – I would be absolutely thrilled to hear from you!

#100DaysToOffload #Journal

Why is it that when you start out doing challenges, you feel so invincible on the first two days, but then on the third or fourth day, you feel like the fantasy of being able to keep up slowly slips away from your fingers. Reality sets in, and you're left with the choice of continuing (albeit a bit meh) or abandoning ship? Is it just me? But anyhow, I'm trying not to break my current streak, so this will probably sound like a filler post than anything.

I woke up to two of my friends from home frantically getting ready for a turnip run on Animal's Crossing – one had time-traveled to the recent Sunday for 99 Bell turnips from Daisy Mae and the other had an ongoing 489 Bell selling price back on their island. Who couldn't resist the temptation? Definitely not me! After an hour or repeatedly hopping from one island to another to purchase and sell, I've finally hit Bellionaire status.

I don't time travel myself, and I play the game as casually as I can (that is to say, Miles streak and fossil run in the morning, greeting neighbors and harvesting fruits in the evening before in-game and physically going to bed) – but this is a personal choice. I can't condone any of my friends (or my own brother) for trying to grind as much as possible in the least amount of time, because it's how they like to play their games. Simple. If they'd like to invite me, of course, I'm not going to say no, but it's another thing if they ask me to alter my Switch's date and time.

I do admit to getting sort of a weird high from being so rich, in-game (think of all the possibilities!), and it leaked over when I was in a catch-up call with my manager; at the end of at least five minutes of me prattling on and describing turnips and saying how it landed a spot on the Financial Time's front page, I had to stop myself from further embarrassment. Turnips! Work! Sometimes I wish I didn't project too much on the game, but I find myself doing just that.

3/100

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I'm currently doing a challenge called “100 Days to Offload” – you can join in the fun too by visiting https://100daystooffload.com

If you're secretly into #ACNH, high five! My island is still shit (pre-terraforming), but if you have tips, drop me a message here – I would be absolutely thrilled to hear from you!

#100DaysToOffload #Journal

Let me say this first – what a title. It feels so heavy that I almost don't want to write anything about it, but it has bothered me for a while, so I might as well trudge on.

When I started coming back to writing two days (posts) back, I was quickly falling in love with write.as, not just for the minimalistic feel it had but also because it was so refreshingly “old” in some sense. There was no like button, and besides the “X views” on the upper left of each post, there was no real way I could tell if anyone else had read whatever I wrote due to the lack of engagement tools. Perfect, I thought. I pass the idea along to a friend who I knew also wrote in secret, and then came the question of how I was going to read his work.

It took some time to figure out. Did I really have to check on his page every day for an update? Is there a way to tie it down to something I use daily, like Twitter or my emails? And then it hits me – RSS Feeds, you dummy. I feel slightly ashamed as I brush the cobwebs off my old Feedly account, but I erase everything anyway and start putting his web address in as a first entry.

I enter my cousin's website in too and check her posts – nothing for the last three months, and the post before that, another four months before. Looking for other blogs to follow from people I knew, I hit up a friend from back home and ask her how her blog was doing, was it still alive? Not really, I'm doing something new on IG was the answer. We talk for a bit more, and eventually, she says something that felt like the huge elephant occupying the corner of my brain -

Sadly, people just don't read anymore. They prefer photos and videos.

It's true. I've put in good money to get a Youtube Premium account to avoid ads to get my content as quickly as possible. I like scrolling and reading 280 or fewer characters worth of updates, but never really bothering to click the news or website link unless I was really compelled and curious enough to. Worse, I'd still hit that heart and RT button even without knowing the full content. I've opted out of good newsletters if I found them too long in any way – they had to be a particular type of short for me to keep them.

To add to my list of “sins,” I no longer read. I used to devour books one after the other, hitting my Goodreads yearly goal, and probably adding a few more for good measure. I loved reading to the point that I pushed my introverted self to join a local book community – Bookbed – and even dabbled writing a feature and a book review for the website. Nowadays, I buy a second-hand book and toss it to my TBR pile but never get to it. My Kindle, which I remember to plug in at least every once a month, has accumulated dust at the bottom of my nightstand. I miss library deadlines altogether.

I just haven't brought myself to try out audiobooks, since my attention span is just way tinier than it used to be.

They say the first step is to accept where you are, and I do. I mourn the books I was never able to read before turning them back in at the return chute. They say that the way you write is a reflection of how much you've read – and it's painful to be aware that the language I use when writing all this is very plain, simple, and limited. My four years in a creative writing club feels like a distant dream. But this isn't all to say that I've lost hope in all of it.

Like I've mentioned, I've resurrected my Feedly account and have been trying to embrace the fact that if I were to do this challenge myself, I'd have to put in the extra effort and read things to get better. I've hunted down my favorite YT channels and checked if they have a main blog – added those to the mix as well. My books will have to wait since they feel very oppressive right now, but I promise myself I'll get a start on them, one way or another.

Lastly, I feel like I have to point out that just reading might not be a long term and sustainable solution to my dilemma – participating actively will. A few weeks ago, I've begun commenting on YT videos that I particularly liked or had a strong opinion about. Although most of them were left (probably) unread, a few people commented back with thanks or comments, either with their agreement or disagreement on my opinion. Being an actual person behind a screen, participating actively, is better than passively digesting media in my opinion. I'm left to wonder why I've never really done it before.

Of course, I won't comment on every single one! That is borderline spam (and we all hate that – I would never wish it on anyone else).

2/100

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That was a lot to unpack! I'm currently doing a challenge called “100 Days to Offload” – you can join in the fun too by visiting https://100daystooffload.com

I'll be writing for the next 98 days, but if you'd like to drop a message (even just to say hi!), get in touch with me here – I would be absolutely thrilled to hear from you!

#100DaysToOffload #Journal

Writing has taken different forms and meanings in my life throughout the years. Last night, as I was writing my first entry to this new platform, I was suddenly compelled to actually look for my older blogs. The search ended at around three in the morning, but at that point, I was passing on screencaps of hilarious content dating back from 2007 to my best friend, who's been with me for far longer.

My first few blogs (1, 2, and a defunct multiply account) were more candid – they were endless transcripts and musings about how my day went, the regrets I had, thoroughly explained DIYs I painstakingly made (and was proud of), and sayings I had wanted to keep and bring with me for the future. My highschool self had no awareness for correct punctuation and grammar, nor did it particularly pay close attention to style and tone. To be honest, I would've been better off writing all of them down in a notebook, but my younger self was definitely interested in shifting to a digital way of writing and sharing.

The timeline cuts off for a bit and my writing self lays dormant until 2013. Blogs 4, 5, and 6 take on a different tone – they read more like a lifestyle, review blog, sprinkled with a bit of my own artwork and photos. They range from beauty to RPG games, and then the occasional life update. Reading them now, seven/three years later, gives me a sense of pride. The sixth one, especially, may have had fewer posts as opposed to the older ones, but I remember how much work I put into them – the photos I took/screen-captured, and the hours I spent drafting and revising before finally posting – they were pretty much real effort that took actual brainpower than a mental dump. The 7th blog was a short-lived affair with just one post, dating back to just last year, but I'm still amazed at how much I've grown.

My recent works have most definitely been influenced by reading too much review and lifestyle blogs – so much so that if I were to be real with myself, I ended writing things not for the fun of it, but for the imaginary audience that I could've potentially acquired. Not that any of my blogs had constant readers either – I may have put so much effort in making them, but I didn't do the actual leg work of promoting them aggressively either, as some others would do.

This is my eighth attempt, and hopefully the last. Maybe more driven by boredom than anything, I started to play around the idea of starting a new one at the beginning of quarantine – I had too much time on my hands, so why not go back and write? It's been a month since the initial idea, but throughout that, I was having mini debates about whether or not I should act on it – what was I going to write? What would be my voice this time? Where was I going to write it?

I was clear about having a personal blog, but the realization that all of my past blogs devolved into a capitalistic and social endeavor frightened me. I had spent a year (or more) being cut off from social media (my only outlet is Twitter now), and my life changed for the better – there was no way I was going back to a world of chasing likes and attention, envying people who had them. I am happy enough, but I wanted to write.

There is still no clear reason for what I'm trying to do now. No exact timeline for my posts, nor any clear direction to where I should go. The term “personal blog” has been so far removed from what it originally is, and the faux idea has been so deeply ingrained in me, I'm finding it very hard to wean off from it. I will probably write about games, review a few things and actually title them “review”, go on a rant about things, and be very critical about it all – and that's fine. But this time, I'll be firm and do it for myself.

1/100

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Thank you for reading until the end! Since I've just started writing after a few years, it was just my luck that I stumbled upon 100 Days To Offload – they've just sort of started, so I'm joining the bandwagon. You can join in the fun too by visiting https://100daystooffload.com

As you've just read, this is still somehow new and experimental, so if you'd like to drop a message (even just to say hi!), get in touch with me here – I would be absolutely thrilled to hear from you!

#100DaysToOffload #Journal