2025-12-28
My sleep schedule is all over the place these holidays. After the temporary move to my hometown, it seems my brain has decided my most intellectually active hours should be between 10pm and 4am and the rest of the time is ideally spent dozing or berating myself for wanting to doze. It’s impossible to get anything done without external routine markers, I have zero willpower.
I was reinstalling Manjaro after a disastrous encounter with Windows 11 when Mono pointed me to ManjarNO and encouraged me to reconsider my distro of choice. I’m not hardcore enough to do vanilla Arch so I’m now running EndeavourOS and I’ve spent the past day Catppuccin-ing it up and trying to figure out how to downgrade VLC to play OPUS audio (unsuccessfully. Please help.)
Succession re-watch is on pause for now, and the Aggretsuko one has slowed down to one or two episodes a day. I’ve cooked very little these past weeks, with family reunions in other people’s houses and occasionally takeout. I played the beginning of Pokémon Violet twice, one on the console and another in an emulator only to lose my saves on the move to Linux, so I’m considering taking a break just so I don’t have to play it a third time so close to my last attempt. I have pesto remorse from League and TFT, the latter particularly, after I spent a sleepless night rotating through them.
I’m excited for the new year; the landmark of the date serves as an external wrangler of certain habits almost in a Pavlovian way. I do my corresponding tarot reading, I start preparing for the big dates at the beginning of the month, I feel like the funk that covers the limbo between Christmas and NYE goes away and I come out with renewed purpose.
I’ve been considering the idea of using my computer and phone as a source of entertainment without being connected to the internet. I feel a huge sense of relief when I toggle off the Wi-Fi, and I know I have some more control about my availability and the things I can get up to are limited to what I already have here.
Is there anything I use my computer for that could be done offline?
- Gaming: Every game I have except League/TFT has an offline mode by default.
- Reading: I should set up my Obsidian clipper and EPUB reader, since RWR doesn’t seem to cache when it’s on browser.
- Watching: I can download movies and TV shows to watch while offline.
- Listening: Ditto about music and podcasts.
- Logging: I could keep my watch logs and to-do lists as notes on my vault.
- Chatting: I can switch to semi long-form, which I can write fully offline and then come online for calls and sending the messages I wrote.
- Social media: There’s no real workaround for this one, it has to be online. But luckily I can catch up on chronological feeds at a set time and call it a day.
The next step to this, of course, would be to start ditching digital tools and make the switch to analog, but I don’t think I can do that without first getting used to not having a connection up permanently. And I would need some digital streamlining, even if it’s online, since it’s the source of most of my social commitments and new-stuff-input.
Something to consider for 2026, perhaps.