Hello again! One thing I’ve always found interesting in films, especially blockbusters, because they very commonly have this, is the random details added during the closing action of a film. Usually they serve the plot purpose of setting up for a sequel. Now, as funny as it is when a film has some fairly obvious sequel bait but in fact gets no sequel, it is nice when done well; in fairness, even the funny ones are usually done alright enough. It’s only when you watch a film years later you realize that whatever they were setting up just didn’t happen. Remember how The Last Jedi fully established a trilogy’s identity and left a place to go in Episode IX, but all of it was reversed due to fan reception when they tried something new? But that detracts from the point, the point is this blog post is my sequel bait: things I want to try in the coming days, weeks, and months, and blog throughout the fall.

            The first thing I want to try is a bit of a lifestyle one, but I would like to see just how it goes: I want to try waking up earlier. One thing I hate about school is waking up at 5:30 and then getting ready for school. Now, why then would I wake up earlier? Once I’m actually at school, around 2nd or 3rd period, I’m actually awake! I don’t mind it anymore! It is possible that waking up earlier, and giving myself more time beforehand could mean I mentally wake up earlier in the school day, and that may help the start of the day feel a bit easier. There are two main downsides to this plot, though: I have to go to bed earlier as a consequence, and I have no idea if it would actually work in practice. The first is a logistical issue; obviously, as I don’t know exactly how late my days will go, and even further I also don’t know how much I can adapt by doing earlier in the day to offset that. I don’t want to have life work in a way where I do things until 22:00 or 23:00 and then have to wake up at 3:30. It would just be losing sleep for virtually nothing. The latter is obviously the risk with any idea: maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t! It’s not a stop to the idea by any means, just a note on ideas as a whole almost.

            The second idea is also a lifestyle one: the end of social media. It’s time to kill off Twitter. Whenever I use it, I get nothing out of it and I waste away two to three hours on nothing productive. Why bother with it? I would like to replace that time spent with a slightly more purposeful method to doing things—just using my time on stuff I say I want to do! It’s easier to just scroll Twitter, sure, but writing a blog post or making progress on a game is infinitely more rewarding. So I would like to cut social media out and see the effects.

            Thirdly, I want to try experimenting more with computers. Linux has been monumental in this: it’s given me things to try. I can compare open source apps to their Microsoft or Adobe competitors, or figure out how to run them in Wine. Yesterday I learned to run Word 2010 in Wine, as I do tend to prefer Microsoft’s offerings to LibreOffice, and it was a fun task that I think helped me learn a little more on how Wine works. It too can create little stories to write about and possibly help out ending social media, by giving me a sense of motivation. If I try something, I’ve just given my blog a purpose, and just by trying and writing I feel I would have spent much better for those 2 hours than scrolling Twitter and getting nothing out of it at the end to show for it.

Of course, I could go on forever about all these little things I want to try: listening to new music and writing reviews, focusing on my video game backlog, spending less time procrastinating, trying to somewhat frequently go to the gym, and I do hope to do all of these things as well. They’re just less interesting to write about in my opinion, although all four of these things would lead to longer and more interesting blog posts, which is possibly a greater reward than the three I went into more detail with. You have to first squeeze an orange to get juice, and those are the oranges.

            I hope my sequel bait didn’t seem too insane and this post doesn’t read as an equivalent to the post-credits scenes of the movie Eternals, but I think even so it is good. If I overloaded myself with a few too many ideas and can only get to half of the 7 I listed, that’s still 3 or 4, all of which I think will be fun to try. It would be worst if I got none of it done, and this post really resembled Eternals: insane, and irrelevant! But I shall do my best to avoid so, for my own sake. Thank you for reading, and have a fantastic rest of your day.