If you do this, please keep an eye on how that individual person is reacting. Some people will love this and think you’re a wonderful, friendly person. Other people will be made incredibly uncomfortable. Both are valid responses.

I am personally in the latter camp. I’m autistic, I find eye contact difficult. If you’re being quite insistent about it, I will find it aggressive. As for the smiling, I am immediately distrustful of anyone giving me a giant smile while talking to me for the first time. A little smile is normal, but if you have a massive grin without any observable cause, my assumption is that you are trying to corner me into something. Maybe I’m just too cynical or damaged in some way, but this just sets off my alarm bells.

A few, it was just like any weekend day except I couldn’t go shopping.

Christmas doesn’t have any significance to me or my mother, so we don’t go out of our way to spend time together. In fact she tends to gleefully pick up extra hours at work because they pay her more. If I’m single or my partner is unavailable this results in me spending Christmas alone, which I honestly enjoy. If I’m in a relationship, I usually get sucked into whatever Christmas shenanigans my partner’s family gets up to.

I’ve been drawing ever since I can remember. There are parts of the process I enjoy and find satisfaction in, and other parts that can just be a chore. The feeling tends to vary with time as well. Some days I enjoy drawing/painting, and other days it feels like I’m only doing it because it’s what’s expected of me.

A mid-30s from New Zealand here. Out of my friends and family living in the country that I still keep in touch with, I can only think of 2 households that don’t currently own their home.

One of them was pretty undecided for a long time about where he wants to live and what career to pursue, so didn’t really settle down anywhere. He’s in a serious relationship now though so that might change.

The other one is my brother-in-law and his partner. They’re planning on purchasing a house at some point but it’s not a priority for them - they’re actually renting out our first house from us so they don’t need to worry about getting kicked out without warning or dealing with unpleasant landlords or any of those usual things. When they leave, we plan on selling the house instead of renting it out again. We only kept it to make sure they had a safe space to be themselves.

Out of the homeowners, there’s a quite a mixture of people. Some have come from privilege and got handed money from their parents. Others grew up in a lower socio-economic group and earned all of the initial deposit themselves. One guy has a single dad that’s never owned his own home and has relied on disability income for most of his adult life. My friend had a lot of trouble finishing his university degree and finding work, it was years before he landed his current job at a small store. They’re living together in a house he owns himself now, I thought that was pretty sweet.

New Zealand has had a housing problem problem for a while now, so whenever I think of owning/renting in general it’s usually with negative feelings and frustration. Thanks for giving me this moment to reflect on a more personal level, I think my friends are doing great.

Exactly this. Your brain gets absolutely blasted with a bunch of chemicals during childbirth and your memory of it becomes very hazy, especially the pain parts. This happens with or without pain management.

Length of video doesn’t factor into whether I watch it at all. If I decide to watch the video, I’ll either watch the whole thing, stop halfway, or just skip forwards to various points depending on how well it caught my interest.

What determines if I open it at all has more to do with who sent it to me, why they sent it to me, and what the title/thumbnail looks like.

The who: I don’t bother clicking on videos from most people. Usually I’m away from my pc at the time and don’t have headphones in so I really can’t be bothered. There are a couple of friends that have very consistently sent me hilarious or fascinating content though, and I will either watch those right away or save it to a watchlist for later. This is a very short and exclusive list.

The why: Context matters. I generally don’t bother watching videos that get sent to me without any sort of explanation - if it’s nothing but a link, it might as well be nothing. If the person sending it can’t even think of an emote or a couple of words to add to it, it’s probably not worth watching. In contrast, sometimes friends will send me a video to get my opinion on something, or to share their current special interest, or because it’s something they’ve made themselves. Those, I will always watch regardless of length. If my close friends are invested in it, I am too to some extent.

The what: If the video has a clickbait title/thumbnail, I’m not clicking it no matter how interesting it sounds.

I most cases, the decision is made long before I even notice the length of the video

Background in animation and design sounds perfect for creating assets for streamers/vtubers. There always seems to be some demand for logos, “stingers” (animations that play between changing scenes), looping videos for idle screens (when the streamer isn’t on camera, such a “taking a break” scenes), and emotes. Take a look around vgen.co and see if those types of things might be up your alley.

I think butter would be a very interesting one! Especially for the spreadable kind.

The only other item I’ve done this with was beer. We had about 10 of our college friends all bring one or two kinds of beer each in a paper bag, smuggling in to the designated “staging” room. I wasn’t super into beer so I just did the facilitating on this one - I randomized the order and handed out samples of the beer in small cups to everyone, and everyone gave a ranking and some thoughts, as well as trying to guess what the beer was. At the end, I entered everything into excel and had a little presentation of the results. It was a fun night.

The most memorable part was when our friend who LOVES this one particular (somewhat pricey) craft beer gave it like a 3/10. He spent the entire night ranking everything quite low and waiting for his fav to come up, expecting to immediately recognize it and give it an 11 - to the point where he accused me of missing his contribution completely - just to discover it was beer #4 and he had already made disparaging comments about it.

My husband and I got curious about the variance in canned tomatoes one day, so we got one can from every brand we could find. We had a blind tasting session where we tried each one without knowing what brand it was (palate cleansers in between) and ranked them all out of 10 with some comments. We didn’t share our rankings or thoughts with each other until the Big Reveal at the end when we found out which tomatoes were which.

Turned out we actually preferred some of the cheaper brands, and the most expensive ones got worse ratings. There wasn’t a direct relationship between price and preference, but it was interesting.

It was a fun day. We also did the same thing with soda water.

For good sleep hygiene, you’re supposed to avoid doing literally anything but sleeping in your bed (including sex and just lying there awake). It builds a strong association between bed and sleep in your brain so that you get to sleep easier or something. I’ve always found this one impossible but it’s probably a good tip if you have the capacity for it.

What are your reading habits like?

I read like some people doomscroll - in bed when I’m supposed to be sleeping, when I’m eating my meals, on public transportation, while walking, on the toilet, waiting in line… Basically any time I’m not using my brain for anything else. If the book is interesting I’ll find more excuses to pull out my Kindle, but at the very minimum I’ll read in bed at the end of the day. It’s not a goal or anything that I’ve pushed onto myself, it’s just become habit to read myself to sleep, and I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. It was a real pain before I got a backlit Kindle - I’d fall asleep and leave the lamp on all night and lose my place if I was reading a physical book. I don’t like to have more than 1 book going at once. 1 fiction and 1 non fiction is okay, but nothing more than that. If the book is a series, I’ll pick up book 1 and continue all the way through the series back to back, and then go back to read spinoffs and prequels in whatever order makes the most sense. I also read all the books I can find from the same author in a similar fashion. If the series wasn’t finished and a new book gets released after I’ve already read the rest of a series, I’ll go back and read all of the books before it first. Being in-between books is a feeling I am very uncomfortable with, so I’m always in the middle of something. I will often keep reading books that I don’t enjoy that much just as a stop-gap until I find the next series to get hooked on. It’s a little psychotic now that I think about it.

What do you like to read?

Mostly sci-fi and fantasy novels, but I’ll consume almost anything with interesting world building, mechanics/magic systems, or compelling characters. For non-fiction, I like things that teaches me how things work, usually astronomy or quantum mechanics. I’ve read some great books written from the perspective of physicists as they went through their journey of discovery.

What kind of stage of life are you in, and how does that affect it?

I’m 33, married, have a 4 year old, and work full time. I don’t think it’s affected my reading very much, I’ve been stealing reading time ever since I was a kid. Reading on the bus to school, reading walking around, reading during meals (drove my mother nuts), reading if I finished my work in class… I’ve always had my nose in a book. I have less time overall for reading now, but the way I do it is still the same.

Have you made any changes, positive or negative, to your reading habits?

I honestly cannot think of any changes I’ve made, but maybe I should consider some. Writing this post makes me realize I’m treating books like a drug addiction.

What else?

1. Don’t be like me and read in bed if you can avoid it, it’s not great for sleep hygiene. It’s too late for me, save yourself.
2. Don’t read if you don’t genuinely want to. Don’t push yourself to read a certain number of pages a day, or a certain number of books in a year. Don’t read just “to read”, it’s not sustainable. I think you should just aim to try a book that sounds interesting to you every now and then, and if it doesn’t compell you to read further then just put it down and walk away. You don’t NEED to finish a book, let yourself be happy. As an avid reader, nothing frustrates me more than people treating reading like a chore or some desired goal. It’s just words on a page, don’t put it on a pedestal.
3. I’d be interested to hear how you experience reading. Do you “see” the book like a movie? Is it better than a movie, in that you can smell/feel/taste things? Or do you experience it like someone is reading out loud to you? I was speaking with a friend once, and she asked how people like me could read for hours in end. She asked “don’t you get sick of the sound of your own voice?” and that was such an eye-opening question for me. She heard the words being spoken whenever she read, she didn’t really visualize anything at all. I had no idea it could be like that. For me, I don’t hear the words. I don’t see the words on the page. It’s like I’m in the matrix and the experience gets fed directly into my brain and I can see and feel and hear everything and there’s even this 6th sense sometimes that I can’t describe. When I have to suddenly stop reading a good book, it feels like pulling my head out of a giant bowl of very firm jello. I think this is the main difference between readers and non-readers. It’s not that one is more “enlightened” or have “good habits” or is an “intellectual”. It’s just more enjoyable for some (and more work/effort for others) on a very fundamental level. Not reading is not a shortcoming.

Sorry for the massive reply!

(edit: formatting)