Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

So far, I’m kind of succeeding and failing at the same time with my plan of scaling down my social media time.

For Facebook, I kind of keep checking it between train rides. Which in itself isn’t too bad a use of idle time. My train ride from Holland Village to Tai Seng is about 30-40mins, so I really need something to kill time. And nope, Duolingo isn’t it. Got irritated by the bird a long time ago. So I use it to quickly check my Facebook and Messenger notifications to see what’s up, or make some innocuous “I’m still here” kind of post. Maintenance time, if you will. If relatives or friends tag me on a post, I had to give the obligatory like back. Maybe a LOL reply as well. Checking my parents’ pages to see if any dangerous nonsense creeps up, and if so to engage for an intervention ASAP. People have no idea that this shit has to be hashed out fast.

Just saying, there’s a thin line between “Johnny Midnight and his toning water” and “lizard people are running the government”. First one is harmless and a tad funny, second one will have your relative making basement bunkers full of tin cans and newspaper clippings. Best spot the signs as early as possible.

But so far also, I only use Facebook while on the train. Not outside. No desire to prolong any engagement in the feed anymore unless the first post I see on top kind of bugs me.

The ad above was kind of funny, just as an example. When did the Main Building at my old university become a “tourist attraction”?

Back to topic. I really want to engage Facebook less than what I do currently, but family obligations (my whole family is on it) and it being my only means to monitor my parents from afar are the sole reasons it’s still on my phone. Well, throw in “my online shopping login means” as a bonus. I lazily used it on a 11.11 sale many many years ago.

For X… well, I kind of still access it. But only once a month to check things and self-promote my blog posts. That’s my self-imposed quota. I access it just once a month, maybe just an hour tops, no more than that. Posting my latest blog links, checking news (for some reason, it’s way better than Google News), making funny sometimes, and liking some posts. Last I accessed it was at the 15th, and maybe on this month’s 15th as well. I kind of like it on the middle of the month. And unlike the curated lands of Zuckerbergville, I don’t see the need for the X app on my phone. No one in my family or my friends in the Philippines has it, so I have no need to keep it on my phone. I just log in on the browser-based version.

I like it that I don’t see any ads on X in Singapore. I kind of dread what the US side sees, but for the Asian side, I asked a Japanese friend to show me his experience with the app last June, and surprisingly it was “decent”. Few ads, more posts. He liked it that the night view for it was good. Well, me too. The quality of the posts seem to be better as well. As the big E said, the algorithm there picks up on what you read/engage with. So I simply don’t engage with the accounts I don’t like, and as a result my feed is pristine AF. I didn’t need to use the “Following” tab anymore as the “For You” tab had been decent for months. I see shit, I block or mute.

I’m of the opinion that accessing X/Twitter in the USA side is like ingesting a slow and acrid poison because of the overall culture of discourse in that country in particular. They’ve become uncomfortably tribalistic and wildly nonsensical. It’s either you’re on one side in full or you’re in enemy lines, and centrists/moderates are being treated as pussies or lumped in with the “enemy flavor of the month”. Nuanced discussions are few and far between, fact is you have to sift theough so many haystacks to find the needle. The platform isn’t toxic – THE PEOPLE ARE. And America seems to be heading towards an unpleasant reality unless they change ways. The people there are caught in this needlessly. Many of them doom-scroll, many of them engage in content they dislike, many of them shitpost, many of them act like purity police that sneer and shout at any person with perceived imperfections, and many were just born with terrible personalities that shouldn’t be on any social media platform in the first place. And in a platform where discourse is central to its identity and discussions are being encouraged, a tribalistic American culture in the midst of an election season is just… well, may God bless America, I suppose. Good luck over there with punching each other, Yanks. Call us when the smoke clears.

Not that it’s just an X thing. I asked one of my cousins over there to verify something for me in his Facebook feed, and sure enough, same symptoms in Facebook. Empowered purity police shivving everyone who doesn’t fall in line to the popular opinions. Old grannies sharing AI pictures as if they’re real. People selling hot shit like it’s some miracle tonic. Lots of people hate-stewing over topics that are completely optional for their life. Again, it’s not really a single platform thing when essentially the same shit happens inside two distinct platforms. America is just in a bad place for moral, intelligent and rational discussions right now, and we and the the rest of the world should keep a healthy distance for now. Let them keep doing their thing, I suppose.

For Reddit, I actually also read it on my phone while on the train. But on a distinct time as well. Facebook on the ride to work, Reddit on the ride from work. I don’t have its dedicated app on my phone as well. What do I read on it? Just /r/SquaredCircle for the most part. It amply covers pro wrestling news I like. I used to keep /r/Splatoon on the rotation, but since the Grand Festival, I started to read it less and less as it’s now dominated by art lovers (in a good way). Other than that, I don’t see any good reason to see the popular pages, not anymore. They’re chock-full of people posting and pushing their own agendas, moderated by unpaid people also with their own biased agendas, and overseen by paid people also with their own greater biased agendas. A human centipede of suck. Try /r/worldnews and view the comments, you’ll tire of the cringe quickly. Or try /r/nba, it’s a festival of circlejerkers.

Oh by the way, Reddit’s moderation model isn’t that sustainable IMO. I feel that it will soon die by either a hundred thousand cuts or Spez going with larger AI moderation with minimal human doublechecking instead of relying on both unpaid moderators with agendas and paid moderators with agendas. Same with other platforms. Likely they’re all headed there already.

So those three at least. I limited my Reddit to just one page, my X to once a month, and my Facebook to purposefully just family relationship maintenance. I wish I can scale back more, but each of these platforms offer me something of value at least.

And oh yeah… top tip of the day – avoid Threads if you can. Basically Instagram with none of the things that made Instagram appealing.

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I took another certification last week, which this time was heftier in terms of significance.

It’s the assessment certification for software developers by Singapore’s GovTech. I took a similar one two years ago, but it’s a differently-titled one. This one basically ensures the company that their software developer is (at the very least) competent and within government standards. That sounds attractive for IT companies in Singapore as well, so they almost always send in their developers to take the test as well.

And with lots of challenges, I was willing and interested. I passed the previous one two years ago with just stock programming knowledge and experience (no prep as well), so this time I kind of expected this to be a bit harder and more technical. I brushed up on the topics suggested by the invite email from the admins, and took a few online free quizzes on programming to see where I stood.

Upon the day of the exam, I left house early to head to the ISS-NUS campus to the building where the examination room was supposed to be. Last time, me and my testmate went there by taxi, but this time I wanted to see if public transport was feasible, as I had no one to split a taxi tab with that day. Sure enough, one MRT ride to Kent Ridge and one free ride on the university shuttle was enough. Well, also a fair bit of walking. The main bus route split off the road leading to the building I wanted, so I had to alight at the nearest bus stop and walk.

The exam itself was nice. 2 hour online monitored exam I finished well under 1. I did finish by 40 minutes, and I spent 10 minutes double-checking to make sure everything was to my satisfaction before I submitted it. And best of all, early work exit on a Friday. So I thought, maybe I should treat myself. Two of my work colleagues who took the exam with me booked a work-paid Grab ride to a bus depot near Bugis, so I figured that I could treat myself to a bowl of ramen and do some Korean grocery shopping there. I asked if I could join the ride as well.

The vehicle was a Kia EV5. For some reason, it got me dizzy. I rode EVs by Hyundai, Tesla and BMW before, and all of them were highly satisfactory. Not with this one. The vehicle had a weird driving feel to it that didn’t sit well with me. I rode at the back, as I looked at the driver and guessed that the guy was a chatty one, so I sheepishly asked one of my colleagues to ride shotgun instead. I was proven right later when the driver had a cheery-toned smalltalk with the colleague that sat in front.

Once we arrived at the bus depot (the guy who sat beside me at the back, Charlie, had to take a bus back to Malaysia that night), I waved goodbye and walked towards the Bugis Village mall to look for the Ramen Keisuke Tonkotsu branch near there. To be fair, there is also a branch of that ramen chain near my unit, but I swore off that one after they stiffed me out of the free-refill green tea I paid for (they only filled it once and they were too busy and understaffed to pay attention to me gesturing for a refill), so I just frequent the other branches instead. That one in Bugis as well as the one in Paya Lebar.

I ordered the spicy miso bowl of ramen with the big chashu slices and firm noodles, and a glass of water. No kaedama for me anymore, that bowl of ramen was easily a thousand calories already. After eating, I went to the Shine Korea grocery to see what I could buy for myself. I bought four 1.5L bottles of hutgaesoo (raisin water), two wasabi almond packs, a pack of seaweed crisps, and a jar of citron tea. That tea definitely helps. I previously bought a smaller jar, and I found that a teaspoon of that jammy stuff helped with making my nightcap teas more palatable (like camomile or black tea Liptons), so I just bought a jar that could last me until December. It also helped that the thing wasn’t cloyingly sweet.

And a couple of days ago, I got my certificate for the exam in the mail, which meant I passed. Yay for hard work and years of knowledge 🙂

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Last Saturday, I embarked on a task to “clear” my room and preemptively decide which things to send back home this December.

I am starting to run out of room space AND closet space. I got 12 shirts I rotate for Mondays and Zoom meeting days (hey, effort – I don’t wear t-shirts to work for days with scheduled Zoom meetings), and a whole-ass load of t-shirts. I have six pairs of pants – four denim and two light brown chinos.

For house clothes, I am in no need to clear any. But I do have a habit of keeping things around longer than they should. For example, I still have two singlets from my 10km fun runs in 2014 and 2015. I still have the white Adidas sleeveless summer shirt my mom bought for me in the local wet market ukay-ukay (the Filipino version of hand-me-down secondhand clothes shops) back in 2010. I was a fat boy back then so these sleeveless shirts are very loose but good enough for only wearing inside the house as is. But I think I need to dispose (to the trash) of the yoga shorts I bought from Decathlon. Their stitchings got loose from the washing machine spins and started to fray a bit.

For t-shirts… man, I have way too many. I regularly buy from Uniqlo the ones that are themed to anime or Japan. I always buy several souvenir clothes from the countries I visit, almost always a t-shirt. I buy t-shirts from anime conventions. I buy t-shirts online too – usually the ones massively discounted from Puma, Under Armour and Adidas (Nike rarely makes mega-discounts). So now, I possess enough t-shirts to rotate daily for at least 3 months straight. I already sent a lot back home last December and June, but I think I replenished half of what I sent back with the June t-shirt splurge I did in June with the Uniqlo and Taiwan purchases.

So now, I want to shorten 90+ t-shirts to just 60. I laid all my shirts (folded) in bed and started looking for which ones I can easily say I can live without by next year.

I started with two shirts I bought in Japan in 2019 – the red Kyoto souvenir shirt I bought in the Fushimi-Inari temple gift shop and the black Full Metal Panic shirt I bought in Kyoto as well. Time to retire, old chaps. Next, I identified two more shirts – the orange Uniqlo shirt for Haikyu!! I bought in 2019 as well as the blue tightfit Nike shirt I forgot to bring home last June. Four down. Next, I kind of winced a bit as I flagged two more shirts to bring home. One was the black fancy ToAru Accelerator shirt I bought in Japan in 2019, and the other was a Puma shirt I bought in the doldrums of covid-time in 2020. I neatly folded the six into a large ziplockable t-shirt packing bag (it’s from Adidas, I saved some of them) to prevent smells and put them into a large container of which I aim to fill.

I looked again at the pile of shirts in the bed.

This activity kind of reminded me of my mom’s habits. For the longest time since childhood, I watched her save every single thing she could – Tupperwares, old books, furniture, etcetera – and stow them away somewhere. Our house attic was full of them at one point before my dad called for a stop. Now her old bedroom’s full of large containers, all filled with lots of things and stuff. The advantage is that she is meticulous about filing stuff away, so for example, if I wanted my original baptismal certificate from the late 80’s, she has it in one of them folders in the cabinet in her room. I bet I could find my high school backpack in that goddamned room. But disadvantage is, we basically have too many things at home. Yeah, she hoarded stuff.

As a kid that grew up just below the line that says “middle class” (in the 90’s the government defined the middle class income brackets, and we fell just a tad outside the margin of error), I kind of got why she did that. We never ran out of food containers, I never needed to buy a pen, I always had access to spares of some things like school bags. We needed the money for school tuition. But as I grew up, I saw it as problematic. She never knew the line. She just kept and kept and kept. Now that I am an adult, I see it now as definitely a result of the time. My mom grew up dirt poor with barely any possessions she could call her own. And when she started our family with my dad, she saw everything that her hard-earned money bought and thought it was a waste to just let such things go.

So when I looked at my t-shirts and thought, what a waste to just let such things go, I immediately thought of my mom and what I was doing to myself. I immediately lit up my resolve to not repeat that cycle. After half an hour, my send-home pile went from 6 to 25.

I also looked at the other large containers in my room to see what should be in the big send-home overseas shipping box I will buy later. I immediately identified the nice mooncake box from the Shangri-la Singapore hotel, and put it in the pile. Same with the nice Year of the Rabbit coin display my boss gave me earlier this year. Nice display for my room at home in the Philippines. Next were three wood slices that were sanded to be like large coasters. I also packed in the IKEA clothes basket I had since August 2018, I had it replaced with a fancy 4-tiered wheeled clothes basket I bought off the garage sale of a dignified Indian gentleman three weeks ago. Also, I packed in the fancy beard maintenance/grooming kit that the bearded gentleman threw in as a bonus. I also packed in the big-ass warm Adidas jacket I bought back in 2020.

I looked at my send-home pile and I already filled like half of it.

I definitely need to fill the other half by next week or by early November, so I could call in LBC to send me a medium-sized overseas shipping box. I’ll fill the rest of the box with groceries and souvenir food.

But man… I’ll miss some of the shirts. At least when I go home for vacation, I don’t need to stuff my suitcase with clothes anymore. Maybe next time, just a laptop bag or my small cabin luggage will do.