Fun Day Out

This saturday(today), I visited an interesting couple of places in Indiranagar which were, surprisingly enough, within walking distance xD

I was hanging out with a friend: booked a couple of hours of access to Paper Crane Labs, specifically, the laser cutting thingy.

We tried to make a few things like fancy wooden business cards with NFC(which failed because the QR was too small LMAO) and a couple of half life 2 NFC wooden keychains. I was talking to NullRequest about this turning into a future fun shitpost project is to make a NFC thing that goes to a website along the lines of “Are we half-life 3 yet?” “No… Probably not :(”

There’s also a card I was requested to make which isn’t in the pic :smile:

Then, I visited the local indie web club meetup for the first time! We spent two hours deciding on what handle a friend should pick for his blogs and just hung out with NullRequest.

One of the writing prompts at the end really called out to me, based around bad defaults that life builds around us and slowly unlearning them.

This is really personal to me as I have struggled with this for years, but it’s never been a “secret”. The people around me know this and are mostly supportive about it.

The Problem

I have never had a reason to “go outside” and “touch grass”(yes, the meme but in real life). As I am slowly exit my teenage years, I have begun to feel the little effects of this. From health to social life, and more.

This is a product of a lot of things, from mostly online 10th and 12th grade, to my current hybrid course that leaves no real time or mental energy for me to step out and “enjoy life”, as my more normal or grass-touching friends call it. This isn’t quite restricted to going outside physically but also being mentally in-the-moment enough to actually care about it, so we ignore soul crushing BMTC commuting.

I know that this sounds discord-mod coded but uhhh I can’t do much about that.

I’ve tried to fix this multiple times: First when I joined my day college, where I met more people than usual(4, family) but then I got depressed as I studied for 12th math retest(really long story, may be a future blog post).

Some improvements over the years

But, things have been looking up! I realized that this is actually a massive massive problem a couple of years ago and decided to fix it. I read about Barcamp Bangalore from Saurabh’s fedi posts and decided to check it out. Since then, I’ve made an active effort to go outside, visit places, go to local events, and just hang out with fellow nerds I met along the way.

Nullrequest also put me on OpenStreetMaps so I also enjoy fiddling with streetcomplete when hanging out in public xD

a silly takeaway

Change is the enemy of complacency and vice versa. Not all change is bad or even disruptive to daily life!