in development.

Changing Default Settings

Last Updated: | 4 min read

Status:: wip

Preamble

I feel like this post has good potential to become more but I yet have to figure out what it is, so for now I’ll just tell you this:
Changing your default is an interesting thing to try, for example…

Language Settings

I always really liked the English language and so one I decided that I’d like to get better at speaking it. Unfortunately, I was both not in a social environment where that was an easy option and starting to speak to my friends in English feels really awkward, especially when still feeling very much not confident in doing so.
So, I decided I will just think in English from now on and so I did. Ofc it took a while before I’d developed the mental habit, but for many years now my default language language is English. When I think, when I talk to animals, when I take notes for myself, or when talking to myself.

Speaker: On

In German it’s very common to have run-on sentences, except, they are often nested within each other. For example:

[…] and starting to speak to my friends in English feels really awkward, especially when still feeling very much not confident in doing so.

My German inclination here is to write it as such:

[…] and starting to speak to my friends in English, especially when still feeling very much not confident in doing so, feels really awkward.

This is quite a mild example, in middle school I’ve received a note on my hand-written essay that this entire page is a single sentence; granted, this was just me going to extremes, but the point is that German is quite encouraging of having nested sentences with sub-clauses within sub-clauses.

Since I also spoke w sub- and sub-sub-clauses it’s easy to forget how you started the sentence, which means you cannot reliably end the sentence in grammatically correct ways. Because I didn’t do so much talking to others, one way to get better at speaking grammatically correct sentences is to talk to yourself more. So, I decided to mostly speak my thoughts out loud and force them to be more structured (this was a few years before changing Language Settings).

I think this helped some, but hard to tell what the counterfactual world looks like. One consequence, however, was that now it feels slightly harder to think without either writing or speaking…

Sprint: Shift (Toggle)

For me this hasn’t been an active decision, but just smth I got used to from usually cutting it close enough that I will arrive on time1 if I rush, so I almost always run by default even if I end up having plenty of time left.

The other reason I mostly run places is bc walking alone is so boring! I need more stimulation that that :D
Running gives a bit of that, but ideally there’s also other ways to make movement more fun and engaging:

  • balancing on rails, curbsides (or just white demarcation lines if nothing better is available), etc.
  • skipping
  • or a tech for winter biomes2: sliding dashing!3
    Make movement more fun! Have more play! (It’s also good exercise!)

Not sure where this leads us, but I wanna add some conclusion or broader point to this if one comes up for me.

Footnotes

  1. ideally a few minutes early or exactly on time. ↩

  2. if fast enough this can also work on grit on streets or dirt paths. ↩

  3. the rl game engine actually refunds small amounts of stamina when canceling a slide/dash and going back to running. So if you chain them back-to-back you save quite a bit of stamina. ↩

Speed

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