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ElectroNugget

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  1. @Xgamer Hey man, sorry for the late reply, I've been going through a rough patch lately and avoided posting. Trying to come back to form now though. If you're still interested in learning programming, I can highly recommend it. It's a booming field in need of people, and a valuable skill to have. It's also about logic and problem solving, which I think suits a lot of ex-gamers. Honestly, books can only get you so far, I've loved learning on www.codecademy.com. You have to pay for a membership but it'll be a lot cheaper than a big textbook, trust me. Javascript is a decent first language, along with HTML and CSS if you wanna do Web development. Otherwise any object oriented programming language is good. I learned Java first. Hope that helps!
  2. Hey man, just wanna say I've been in the same scenario, blockers off, avoiding posting, sorta relapsing into porn and too much Youtube. Happens to all of us. Today I turned my blockers back on and am gonna try get back up again. You can do it too. We all have moments of weakness, just gotta keep trying.
  3. Hey guys, thanks for the responses. @Alexanderle, you are right, I am trying to become someone else. 🙂 I recently realized I am becoming familiar with the idea of calling myself a programmer. Even though I am still very new to it, I can actually make things now. Perhaps in time that relationship with computers will replace my old one. @Timelocker Thanks for the sleep tip man, I'll give it a try this week! Quitting YouTube is something I am on-and-off about. I clearly waste way too much time on it. Buuuut I also find a lot of very useful programming tutorials there. As for my favorite subject, right now it's probably algorithms. I'm not a huge mathematical mind, but I love the idea of writing very efficient code. [ GameQuitters : 53 ] Last week I started using an app called Habitica to try and encourage myself to follow through a little more on my habits. It is quite literally a gamificiation of the idea of habit-generation, with your daily habits rewarding xp and gold for a little rpg hero, and if you fail to perform the habits your hero takes damage, and can eventually die and lose levels. That's about all the game there is to it, but I've found it very motivating. I've studied more this week, been more stringent about prepping breakfast, brushing my teeth, drinking water, etc. For once, my game-addled brain can be tricked into serving much more important goals. In time I'd like to move more daily goals into it so my daily process will become more refined and productive. I think it might just work. In a side-note, my pomodoro app notified me today that I've now spent more time studying in February than I did in all of January. Considering that I was supposed to be studying for exams in January, and that I've had classes (which I don't count towards my study total) on top of social events in February, this feels like a nice sign of a slowly blossoming productivity. Maybe I can keep pushing this number up. The bad new is that I've been absolutely craving videogames recently, with much more powerful urges in the past few years than I've ever had this year. I had to buy a new laptop when my old one died on Saturday, and I even installed Steam and momentarily looked around on it before I got back to my senses and uninstalled it. As usual, I think my life just hasn't really built the new habits I need yet... But I don't really have that much time for new hobbies right now, and my downtime is usually at home alone. Being single means that I just don't have much to do at home without using my computer. It sounds lame to say 'I just don't have the energy' to go out after a long day at ITU, but I really don't. It's fucking cold, wet and dark half the year here in Denmark, so in these darker months I often just go home most of the time. And when I'm home with nothing to do, I seek distraction. Distraction is the keyword here. If my current relationship with YouTube is anything to go by, I will happily continue to waste huge portions of my life just being distracted if I don't eventually get a handle on whatever it is that ultimately drives me to behave this way. My relationship to videogames, the internet, porn and media are just symptoms of a root issue I think. Since I was very young, I have spent perhaps the larger portion of my life on some distraction or another... No wonder things eventually ended up so fucked.With time I hope I can get to the bottom of whatever this problem is.
  4. [ GameQuitters : 47 // Meditate : 2 ] Hey all, just a short post. I really need to get back to posting daily, but I feel like I would just be repeating myself. Same moods, same struggles, same thoughts. I feel a bit embarrassed about how long this fight with porn and games has gone on, and how I seem to cycle in and out of the same phases. Why is it so hard to change? 😄 It makes me not want to post because I will just be repeating myself. I feel foolish. I have been extremely tempted to go back to games recently which has come as a bit of a surprise. I've been thinking a lot about old favourites etc. Luckily with my shitty laptop now it's basically impossible for me to justify buying and playing anything at the moment. At the start of the month I said I would focus on studying and sleep. I think I have been moderately successful in improving my study hours: I am doing many more pomodoros every day and keeping up with the lectures and extra material better than I did last semester. That said, sleep is still a big problem area. I am very bad at getting to bed on time, and I haven't really taken the steps I know I need to to correct this. I have moved my phone and sun lamp across the room so that I actually have to get out of bed in the morning to turn off my alarms, and some mornings that has helped. Other mornings I get up and go straight back to bed. My nightly routine is also still very poor, I tend to stay up late watching crap on YouTube or surfing Reddit... So yeah. Still work to do. Feeling frustrated but carrying on.
  5. Double-post but hell this is my journal, I can do what I want. I just want to write this out separately as I think I need to remember this. I've of course considered something like this before, but it struck me today just how lucky I am to be at ITU, and how strange and interesting a path my life has taken me on in the last 4 years to end up here. A little under 5 years ago, I lost a close friend to terminal cancer and my girlfriend of five years (who I now see as perhaps the love of my life) left me, in about the space of a month. After that, I struggled from one job to another, suffering acutely from anxiety, grief, and overall poor mental health, which was further exacerbated by low job security, poor working conditions and a gradual withdrawal and isolation from the world that I enforced upon myself (thanks videogames :P). For many years, life only seemed to get worse as each month rolled on. Being an artist seemed to be a terrible career choice. I had brief ups, minor projects that seemed to be going somewhere, but they always ended in disappointment, after which I often felt like I had less energy than when I started. Things seemed hopeless and futile. My social life was non-existent and dating life was dead on arrival. My career was in a seemingly permanent downwards slide - taking my self-esteem with it. Money was a constant concern. I felt as though I had zero prospects for a better future. With all this in mind, I felt that ahead of me was only more pain and suffering. And yet here I find myself, today, in Copenhagen, slowly building a life I could never have even begun to imagine for myself even just a year ago. I live in a completely new environment, making new friends, meeting new women, learning a new and exciting trade, opening a myriad of unseen avenues into the future. Oh how quickly things can change! As I just discovered today, even my god awful experience with depression can perhaps now be turned into a tool to help others. Whenever I feel down I must remind myself of this. Of how lucky I am to have a chance to reeducate myself, and start somewhere new. Yeah, it's really fucking hard sometimes. Yeah, my dating life still sucks. Yeah, porn is still really hard to quit. But I am immensely grateful to be here at ITU and meet all these wonderful people, and have a chance to learn all these cool things. In a strange way, no matter how much I regret losing my friend and my lover way back when, they were part of the story that led me here. If all this hadn't happened to me, I would never have met my friend who told me about her depression today. I wouldn't have been here to help her. Maybe that alone makes all the pain, fear and anguish I've experienced worth it. Perhaps with that mindset, I can finally learn to be at peace with the past.
  6. [ GameQuitters : 42 // Meditate : 1 // Pomodoros: 7 // PornFree: 1 // NoFap: 1 ] Today I talked to a friend of mine at ITU who seems to be struggling with severe anxiety and depression. This was someone who, to me, appeared to be a very productive student who had all her life in order. She has been friendly and outgoing in groups that we've worked together in, as well as hardworking and organized. She has a husband and a good marriage going on at home apparently, as well as a part time job and good jobs before she came to ITU. In other words, she seemed to have a lot of things that I wish I had right now. And yet, today she opened up to me and revealed just how badly she is doing, that she missed 3 days of school recently because she's terrified to leave the house, that last year she missed a week or two for a similar reason, and that she has suicidal thoughts. In our discussion, another student from my year joined us and spoke about her crippling anxiety and her recent hospitalization to deal with it. This was another individual who seemed to me to be a student performing to a very high standard. And yet, she's also dealing with something extremely difficult in her personal life. In a long (several hours) discussion with the first girl, I relayed some of my experience with depression and anxiety, and tried to give good advice for dealing with them (we agreed she needs to see a doctor immediately and made plans to do so). As odd as it might sound, this was a great experience for me because even though I still score moderately depressed most of the time (25/100 on a good day on the Beck's Depression Inventory), having - so far - survived the worst parts of depression, I am now able to try and use my experience to help others. I found it a very meaningful and gratifying thing to do. I sincerely hope that I can use my experience in future to help more people deal with this awful condition. Not only that, but I was really surprised by the number of my colleagues who opened up in that moment about their own struggles, and how severe some of them were. It's funny, but I live in this mental head space where I assume that I'm the most fucked up guy in the room, and that 90-95% of other individuals just don't have problems like I do. Obviously, when I see it written down like that the idea is completely nonsensical. But it is something I have clearly held as a rather deep belief for a long time. A belief that is very unhelpful. I really need to remember this day. Many of the people around me are dealing with some really serious shit, but nobody talks about it. I don't tell most people about my struggles quitting games or porn, and maybe to some other people I seem like the strong one, when I feel like the worst individual in the room. It's funny how our perceptions of reality can be so different when we sit right next to each other every day. Lastly, I am still not doing great with the getting up on time, porn, and meditating. A lot of habits have flagged. BUT, my pomodoro technique has been wildly successful this week. I use an app called 'Forest' which has, dare I say it, gameified the process of being productive, and it's really worked! I like to 'hit big numbers' every day in terms of putting a lot of time into studying or doing homework, and as a result I am ahead on my studies at the moment. I guess manipulating those pathways that were once so unhelpful to motivate me to do good things isn't necessarily a bad idea. 😂 Now I just need to figure out how to apply the same technique to quitting porn, meditating and exercising. All in good time. PS: I also got a job offer from LEGO yesterday... That's a whole story. I guess I'll try to write about it tomorrow, but this post is long enough as it is!
  7. Hey man. Oooh boy, we are on exactly the same wavelength with women haha. And I can totally relate to how difficult it makes the battle with porn. I've been trying to quit porn for many years, long before I even remotely began to recognize gaming as a problem area in my life. I've never managed to stay clean longer than 3 weeks, and when I did it was during a relationship with a girl who had a very high sex drive, and who was also very vocal about how my porn use made her feel. In short, it's fucking hard to quit, and I think you should know that you're not alone in that struggle. Well, I'm sure you're aware of it, but it's nice to be reminded from time to time. 🙂 Secondly, my experience lately is that much like videogames, the best way to combat it is to remove it from your environment completely. Sadly, it's a little more complicated and frustrating to do than quitting games, but with the right blockers it can be done, and you can at least enjoy the fact that you don't have to white knuckle your addiction so much anymore. I can highly recommend Cold Turkey Blocker for your PC, where you can setup a permanent porn block that won't be easy to disable. I also use detoxify for my android phone, which has been absolutely amazing, as it can be configured to simply block all potentially sexual content. It does brick your phones internet capability quite a bit, but hey, if you're anything like me you probably need to cut back on your phone use as well. 😛 As for exam nerves, that sounds brutal man. Anxiety is fucking awful. I had very severe panic attacks for a couple of months a few years ago and I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy. I'm sure you've tried a number of methods to combat it, but I'm just gonna throw my hat in the ring with what worked for me... extremely rigorous exercise whenever I feel the anxiety coming on. That means going for a long and hard run, or fucking jumping jacks or whatever. If I felt anxious in bed at 2AM I'd get up and do burpees until I wanted to vomit... But then the anxiety would be mostly quelled, and I'll happily trade the urge to vomit for overwhelming anxiety. I think the 'fight or flight' part of the adrenaline rush can be sated by doing just that, fighting or fleeing. If you can convince your brain you somehow avoided the danger, then it quiets down for a little. It's sitting still when you're anxious that amplifies it. Anyways, I hope that long ramble helped somehow. Stay cool.
  8. Hey man. That sucks, but don't be too hard on yourself. The real dangers of prolonged and habitual gaming are isolation from others and wasting time that could be much better spent on literally anything else. As such, I think if there was any way that you could possibly relapse, doing so to spend some quality time with your girlfriend is by far the least egregious of them. Nonetheless, it is of course potentially dangerous to start entertaining the possibility of playing videogames again within that framework, so I think it's good and noble of you that you want to reset your counter. Take it in your stride but I think you can still be proud of what you've accomplished so far. I've had to turn down a few social videogaming events recently as well, it sucks but I think it is important that we draw that line in the sand very clearly. Good on you for doing the same.
  9. Hey man. We've all been there. @BooksandTrees gave some amazing advice, which I could also afford to follow lately haha. I just wanted to pitch in and say that, for what it's worth, you're not alone in feeling like this. I know how hard it is, I've been there myself and I'm sure I will be again many times before the journey is over. You desperately want to change, but you find yourself in a ridiculous pattern that feels unbreakable, and so you beat up on yourself, and the pattern continues. It's really hard, but in these dark moments you need to try and give yourself some self-compassion, and space to be a bit hurt about things, without also coming down on yourself. And recognize that we are all struggling with stuff. You're human, and humans make mistakes. Therefore, it is only natural that you will slip up sometimes, and make mistakes that you regret. But the important thing is that you recognize that you're going to keep trying to change, and pick yourself back up. That's what matters in the end. Remember, the master has failed more times than the beginner has tried. These failures, while hard, are just a step on your path to the growth you seek. Don't let them defeat you. Stay strong and keep fighting.
  10. [ GameQuitters : 39 // Meditate : 0 // Pomodoros: ~4 // PornFree: 5 // NoFap: 5 ] Hey guys, been a while again. 😛 Sorry about that. This past week has been...weird. I have started trying to get up earlier which has been a real struggle. I also started tracking my daily pomodoros, and to be honest that has been largely quite successful. I'm still a ways from where I'd like to be in terms of daily productivity, but the sort of gamey nature of trying to get big pomodoro numbers daily kinda spurs me to get a lot more done every day, even if it's just a few pomodoros on the weekend for example, that's a lot better than nothing. For some reason I kind of tapered off the meditating, and I can feel that it's negatively impacted my mental health. I'm very preoccupied with a kind of impostor syndrome right now. This second semester is very challenging with four subjects now, two of them even more technical than the stuff we were learning last semester, and here I am still having to study discrete math so I can resit that exam and hopefully not fail. 😕 I am also feeling lonely as usual. I know on a certain level that a relationship won't automatically fix all my problems, but I am not very happy with how much of my 20's I've spent single. I don't think it's going to get any easier the older I get. All that said, pomodoros are going good and I've also made some progress with porn in that I finally decided to just...block nearly everything on my phone. That's gone down better than I expected it to. I also have a 24/7 porn blocker on my PC, and now it's a lot easier to avoid. Both blockers are painful enough to work around that usually my temptation passes as soon as I realize what it would take to actually fulfill the urge. Like gaming, changing my environment seems to be the trick. I've also had some... interesting conversations lately when discussing life with all the other nerds around me. I'm pretty open about the fact that I quit gaming, and being around IT people means that those kind of questions come up a lot, "what are you playing right now", etc. And almost every reaction is incredulity followed by reasoning for why I should get back to playing games. This can be pretty annoying. I like to compare it to someone encouraging an ex-smoker to take up smoking again. People don't take me seriously when I say that the behavior that hardcore gaming encourages is problematic and perhaps even destructive. Instead I get pitches for the latest game, or LAN parties, or why gaming is meaningful to them. In particular I've noticed that some people get very defensive when I start to explain my reasoning... Almost as if they have perhaps suspected the same things, but don't want to admit it (this is far more noticeable when you discuss porn with men). I was in the same space for a long time, so I know how it feels, but it's nonetheless frustrating to have to keep explaining to everyone why I no longer partake in the hobby.
  11. [ GameQuitters : 34 // Meditate : 22 // Pomodoros: ~5 ] Alright, so February I want to focus on studying properly and getting enough sleep. To start with, I figure that I need to try and hit a daily hourly input for studies. So I'm going to be using pomodoros (25 minute working sessions followed by 5 minute breaks) to track that. I'd like to get between 6 and 8 pomodoros of studying done every day, outside of my time at ITU. Lectures usually take 2-4hrs a day, so that should be doable. In order to reach the target I'm going to have to start getting up earlier too. I'd like to be getting up at 6AM, since I have classes at 8AM some mornings, and I need about an hour to get started every morning with breakfast, coffee, showering and meditating to do. This is way earlier than I'm used to, which will also mean moving my bedtimes forward, to about 10 or 11PM... That's going to be interesting. I think I might decide to universally block the internet on my devices at that hour or something to encourage me to get off my phone/PC and read instead. I'll be experimenting with that going forward this week. Hoping I can make this work as it would definitely be very good for me. I'll start tracking my bedtime/morning time and pomodoros each day starting tomorrow!
  12. I passed two of my exams with flying colours! Didn't do so well on the third, but that's OK. First time and all.
  13. [ GameQuitters : 33 // Meditate : 22 // PornFree : 0 // NoFap : 0 ] Hey all, my bad for missing another day, I had an absolutely packed weekend! A short summary: Friday: University, homework ~ 3 hrs, then board game cafe till 1AM. Saturday: Sleep in, homework ~ 3hrs, then Dungeons and Dragons untill 1AM. Sunday: Early morning, Twilight Imperium (6 player space war board game) from 10.30 AM to ~8PM, homework ~3-4hrs. So yes, there was a lot of a particular form of gaming this weekend, but in doing so I managed I spend time with 3 different groups of friends, run all over Copenhagen, and meet my step count every day. Not to mention I now feel massively recharged from all the fun, social energy and friendship I experienced this weekend. Compared to how I normally would feel after spending a weekend alone at home playing video games... Well, honestly there just isn't a fair comparison really. It's night and day. All that said, I know I can't just play board games all the time. I have studies to pursue, weights to lift, and so on. This can't be every weekend. But that's OK, I'm comfortable with that. I actually can't wait to explore some other, more outdoorsy hobbies soon. But this was a very welcome respite and felt like the 'me' time I needed to reward myself with after that brutal exam period and my mini meltdown. It also showed me just how much of a difference it makes to spend time with people you care about face-to-face, rather than through a screen. There really is absolutely nothing like being together in person! I need to pursue more things in life like this. With my batteries up and running again, I think I can start getting my sleep and studies sorted out now in February. I'm looking forward to it! I'd also like to post around on other diaries more again. I didn't really have the steam for it this past week, but hopefully you'll be seeing more of me around here again soon. But now, I must sleep! It's already past my new bedtime. 😛
  14. [ GameQuitters : 31 // Meditate : 20 // PornFree : 0 // NoFap : 0 ] Super late post as is the trend lately, had my first real shift at the boardgame cafe tonight and it was fucking awesome. So many millions of times better than sitting at home playing videogames on a Friday night. Can't wait to do more and get even more great hobbies! Thinking a lot about how I want this year to go and how I'm gonna get there... Will write more tomorrow. But it's straight to bed for me now. PS: One month clean! Woop!
  15. [ GameQuitters : 30 // Meditate : 19 // PornFree : 0 // NoFap : 0 ] So I deliberately slept in and took it slow today, only coding in the evening when I felt like it. It did mean skipping a class, which I want to avoid as much as possible, but this first week a lot of the classes are just introductory information. To be honest, it just felt like I really needed the sleep. And it worked, I'm feeling a lot better today. Basically, I was just stretched so thin on resources between the past few weeks, a busy weekend before the semester started, and all the new information combined with continued sleep deprivation. I've thought a lot about this and yeah, it's just really clear that perhaps the next most important thing to learn right now (if not the most) is how to finally control my sleep pattern and have good sleep hygiene. If I'm exhausted and grumpy all the time, all my other efforts WILL fall apart eventually and I will have some kind of migraine or stress meltdown before I get enough rest again. It was fine to walk around sleep deprived in my teens and early 20's, but not anymore. So next month I think I really need to focus on that, and my studies at the same time, and as some have suggested, perhaps leave the other habits to the wayside for a little while.
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