#50/50 TikTok comments are gonna make me want to put my head through the wall

[firbolgfriend]

I didn’t realize fluttershy being a model in like one episode was a staple part of her character

[boneskullravenriver]

I'm trying to get back into reading and less time dicking about on TikTok. Because I want to finally finish words of radiance. And according to a note I have in obsidian (where I have a book tracker thing I cobbled together).... I started this book in OCTOBER (2024). It is now January of 2025. Lmao.

I'm in the later half of the book so... I've had this event thing set on my calendar to remind me to read 50 pages a day. It's a big annoying full screen notification that buzzes when it pops up on my phone at exactly the same time every day. So I put in some ambiance music on my laptop and I set a stopwatch to time how long it takes me to read 50 pages.

Hopefully at this pace I can finish soon. Been trying to Pavlov myself into reading and not going "oh, I'm gonna do this tomorrow..." *Tomorrow comes* "nah, the next day!"

Then I don't read for like a month lol.

It's been going good so far. I have this small, really small notebook that I jot down what page I've started at, what page I'm aiming for, the date.. what book I'm reading, and then really short hand-ish indicators on what pages I find interesting, maybe a brief comment to remind myself why I found it interesting (not too long) so I can go back to my obsidian book tracker thing to expand on it later where I have more space to write.

I also write down the amount of time it took me to read (from the stop watch).

It's a lot and I know some folks will ask "why can't you just go... Read?? Why all the extra shit?"

Well, you see, my attention span is so shit nowadays. Even though I might like whatever book I'm reading, my brain goes "won't it be easier to just watch a video, or spend the whole day scrolling TikTok for cheap entertainment?" Because it's less of mental energy to do that.

Reading means engaging with a story. Understanding what's going on, or figuring out what's going on, and picking up whatever small hints the author is trying to put down. If you're watching a TV show, you get these things from visual or auditory cues.

Like, slightly ominous music or making the POV look like it's from the perspective of a stalker coming up behind the protagonist in a scary movie or something. In books, you don't get that. It's through words. Character actions and other things. That requires you to be engaged, not passive.

I'm also trying to read more because i feel like I wrote better whenever I was reading more. I have this old document of a story I wrote in highschool.. and I was blown away by how much I seemed to have imitated the pacing and story structure of the books I was reading back then. I was crafting a story with plot and struggle for my characters to get through... But also not neglecting their relationships with one another and giving them all different quirks so they weren't all the same.

I was doing all of that without outlining, without banging my head against a wall trying to figure it all out. I was just... Doing it. I remember typing most of it on my phone on Google docs (I didn't have a computer for a long while because my old one became busted) like wtf!!

And I remember distinctly thinking to myself "I'm such a bad writer... I don't know where I'm going with this"

And then I come back, years later looking this over like... Damn... I was cooking something!

Little snippet I found:

I dont mind sharing this since it doesn't really show explicit detail about the story or anything so it's whatever. This is from at least... I think.... 2017 or 2018 I want to say? So would have been 16 or 17 lol.

I even had a trans character before I really understood what that was, which shocked me lol