motion before emotion

Dipping my toes back into my sewing adventures. After decluttering my wardrobe for CNY, I find myself face to face with a pile of clothes that I've been meaning to rework but could not find the motivation to start.

"I feel like sewing today" has escaped the better part of me in 2024. It is mostly emotion led, where I'm waiting for my eureka of motivation to bestow on me the momentum to start. And that has not come often enough...

Which brings me to my 2025's guiding phrase "Motion before Emotion". We act first, then we see how we feel about it later. Versus we feel a certain way than we act. I've actually been using this phrase on and off to get me into the gym. It works well for exercise so fingers crossed to applying this as a guide for the whole year!

Sewing Goals

1. Crop 3 Tops

2. Clone 1 Top

learning javascript for telebot

I used to log all to read/watch stuff in an app called Soon. But it was either shut down or became incompatible with my phone. As a result, I LOST ALL MY DATA. Tragic. Relying on one ecosystem is never a good idea. After going through the stages of grief, I was back on my feet to find a telebot that works similarly as a replacement (mainly to compile film, series and book titles).

Somehow, it doesn't exist. Couldn't find it anywhere, even on Reddit. The functionalities sound straightforward and I thought why not let this be an exercise to ask Chatgpt to spit out the code out for me. I brute forced it for a day, not knowing a single word of JavaScript, and sorely gave up. 

The next day I came back refreshed, Sunk Cost Fallacy in full swing, and decided I no longer wanted this bot, I needed it. Did I spend the next 2 days learning JavaScript just for this? Yes, because Chatgpt can't be used wholesale (yet), it's powerful only when you have some basic idea of the language structure. For any aspiring bot coders with no code background, the key is to test everything bit by bit. Resist the urge to copy! everything! from Chatgpt.

80+ deployments later... A semblance of what I want it to do. Albeit missing a search book title and deleting entries feature. No guarantees the thing is stable and I will most definitely break the code when I update it. But feel free to play with it for now: https://t.me/capturetool_bot

spaced retirement

I decided I didn't want to retire at the end of my life. The Time, Money, Energy Pyramid says as a Youth I have:

√ Time √ Energy X Money, which was true after I graduated from University.

But after 4 years of work I saved enough to fund me 1 year of retirement, YAY. I'm calling this spaced retirement, my generation calls it funemployment, but corporate-speak it's a career break.

Open Quests

1. Pruning my digital garden/second-brain set up to make it easier to maintain. Currently hosting it on Notion. The eventual goal is to publish some stuff here on the website.

2. Editing my travel vlogs from 2022 at kiponi muses. I've been meaning to learn Davinci Resolve and this was the perfect opportunity. I should have ported over earlier because it's so much snappier than Premier Pro.

3. Dancing a bunch, going for open classes, courses and competed in the recent Super24 which we clutched into finals. It's still crazy to me how we were 1 in 4 Singapore teams to have made it. My next dance event is a recital, Ascen(dance), coming up on 20th Sept, Friday, tickets can be found here. I'll be in 2 items, the alumni hip-hop piece and an open genre one.

Closed Quests

• Revamping portfolio site. The previous site wasn't responsive and the fixed breakpoints were creating formatting problems. I feel so much better with this new redesign :')