Slow progression

 I can't believe an entire month as already passed by.  I really tried to stay focus this past month and be more productive.  I finally got into a daily habit of: doing something productive > practice some guitar > exercise > work towards finishing a game.  I've been putting a lot of focus on learning more Korean.  Honestly, I learning way too slowly and yet nothing's really sunk in.  But because I've been focusing so much on Korean, I haven't had the chance to focus on any other language much other than the few days I learned how to count in each of the languages.  I've been making slow progress on guitar practice, but I'm feeling more comfortable playing the song I'm learning.  This past week, I decided to draw and I was hoping to finish within the week.  From the pace I'm going at, it looks like it's going to take me about 2-3 weeks to finish it since I'm being a bit ambitious with it.  I'm making great progress with finishing games, but I'd like to finish more of the bigger ones so I can finally move on from them and play other games.

Overall, I found a good balance to my daily routine, as long as I don't get distracted.  I did get distracted a few times throughout the month playing Puyo Puyo Tetris 2.  I've been trying to improve on playing those two games as well and finally made some break throughs with them.  On Tetris, I'm finally more comfortable doing 4-well combos, setting up T-Spin Triples, and make much more T-Spin doubles frequently in a match.  For Puyo Puyo, I FINALLY understand how to create and utilize the Great Tanaka Renso (GTR) setup and can reliably make a 7-10 chain combo.  After two years of looking at the setup and trying and practicing, I finally understand how it works.  Still, I'm very slow and not very optimal on both games.  It's been fun trying to get better at those two games and expand my understanding of them.  I'm trying to do the same with everything else I'm doing.  I've been still keeping up with exercise and push harder to lose more weight.  Unfortunately, I think I pulled something in my lower back last week and I was barely able to sit and stand correctly the past 3 days.  I'm feeling much better today and started exercising again.

It's a bit disheartening to see my list of completed audio projects still empty after 4 months into the year, but I really am putting a lot of effort into learning new things, and focusing on self-improvement.  I think the big thing I want to finish is learning that song on guitar, make a recording and then I can move on from there.  I'm hoping to finish the rest of the project I started back in October, and maybe do some reading in May.  I was thinking I could do some reading in April, but I've been just too busy with language learning, guitar practice, and exercise (and now drawing).  I've also been focusing so much on playing the lesser games I have for the sake of finishing games that I haven't really been able to ENJOY playing games this past month.  Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is at least enjoyable and something I played a lot of.  I think Katamari Damacy Reroll was pretty fun too (finished over this past weekend).

For now, I just want to focus on finishing this drawing and recording the song I'm learning on guitar.  Afterwards, I can think about how I want to move forward in the following the months.  I'm not sure how big of a problem the Summer distractions (E3, Steam Summer Sale, EVO, Summer Games Done Quick) will be this year considering a lot of the stuff I looked forward last year were all watered down or canceled.  And it looks like Japan is really going through with the Summer Olympics this year in Tokyo.  I really hope everything goes well, for the sake of their country, the participating athletes, and for the rest of the world finally looking forward to something.

Adjusting back to productivity

It's been a very slow transition for me to get back into being productive, and I'm still wasting too much time in the day to get any work done.  I've finally cut down on obsessively playing VR this month reducing it from around 28 hours a week to around 8 hours a week.  I've gotten back into Ring Fit Adventure into my weekly routine so that I get a more balanced workout.  I do Ring Fit Adventure on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for muscle training and harder cardio workout.  I play VR on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for back/sides stretching, arm/shoulder training, and squat repetition with light cardio workout.  And then I try to relax on Sundays to give my body a break.

Having gotten a more normal workout routine in place, I then focused on reducing my time on doing dailies for Genshin Impact and Phantasy Star Online 2.  I stopped doing anything that required resin (stamina points) in Genshin Impact which reduced my gameplay time of 1-1.5 hours down to 10-15 minutes as I only focused on daily quests.  For Phantasy Star Online 2, I stopped doing dailies if the mission pass didn't have rewards I wanted out of them and have tried to progress story missions instead.  I am spending less time on both games daily as a result, but they still take up a lot of time during the weekends when I decide to do a little more.  With more time saved up in the day, I wanted to be more productive.

During my time playing VR, there were a few times I played VR Chat and tried to practice speaking Japanese and ended up meeting people from all over the world who were also learning Japanese and/or other languages.  I've always been interested in learning other languages but never made a real effort to try.  Early March, news made its way to me of Moses McCormick's (also known as 老鼠 - lǎoshǔ 'Mouse') passing.  He was a polyglot Youtuber who spoke 20 different languages and I liked watching him connect with so many different people by speaking their native languages.  It was sad to hear of his passing.  Watching some of his old videos and then transitioning to watching a few other polyglot youtubers, I finally decided that I wanted to learn some different languages.  I knew learning a new language was going to be difficult and that I would likely forget everything I learned if I don't use it, but I fancied the idea of learning just a handful of words and phrases for each of the languages I was interested in.  Besides learning some words, I also wanted to learn how to read and write in Korean and Russian because I realized that despite rarely ever writing or speaking Japanese, I read and hear it a lot which has helped me practice and learn a little on my own.  In the past year, I noticed I understood more words in the animé I watched than I used to and that I was learning new words along the way.  So I've been trying to expose myself to more stuff in Chinese and French, hoping to learn more.  And since Korean and Russian use a completely different alphabet system, I figured I could learn more if I learned how to read and write the alphabet for them.  So for the past 2 weeks, I've started preparing myself to learn the very basics of: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Russian, German, and Italian.  I don't know how far I'll go with learning any of these, but I hope I can improve Chinese, Japanese and French the most.

My main focus this past month has been practicing Electric Guitar and learn a particular song.  I've been making "okay" progress, but I would like to learn faster as I still have a lot planned this year and I'm getting nothing done.  I still feel a bit lost in when it comes to my long term goals as I can't see them coming to fruition any time soon and have no idea how to reach there anymore.  But my short term goals are clear and exciting, so I have no hesitation striving to better myself with them.