Diet Water's Opinions! :)

Thoughts on physical media

02.06.2024:

I think physical media was once becoming a dying art. With the rise of streaming platforms and video sharing sites, people saw less of a need to own media. You can really see the peak of this in the late 2010's through the pandemic, when everyone was bored out of their minds and watched random shit on Netflix endlessly. Recently, I've noticed an uptick in physical media sales. In 2021, for the first time since the early 2000's, CD sales went up. Vinyl record sales have also been steadily increasing since the 2010's. A lot of YouTubers are also making videos, talking about the nostalgic feelings they get from DVD's as a child, and others demanding that you stop streaming everything immediately and pick up a blu ray from walmart.

Thing is, physical media is slowly rising up again in sales and I'm extremely happy about that. I love physical media, especailly CD's. There's just something special about holding an album, movie, or video game in your hand. You can feel it. It takes up space in your residence. It says that you love this thing so much, you're willing to let it take up space in your room. It's magical. There's a feeling when you find a CD in a store, buy it, and excitedly take it home to play at full quality, hearing every single note and the space between. To clarify, I only buy CD's once I've actually heard and liked the album, but this point still stands. It's a different vibe from blasting your favorite album on spotify than from playing it in a CD player. It feels more real, more special to me. I feel the music way better and actually get to indulge in it's sound, without my phone to distract me.

I just love physical media and hope it never goes away.

Thoughts on Reading

12.20.2023:

The average American reads at a 7th-8th grade level, doesn't even get to high school. My explanation for this is that people just don't find reading to be fun anymore. There has always been people who haven't liked reading, but over the course of the years, more people (especially kids) are abandoning reading for going on social media or doing other things. Lots of people see reading as a chore because the school systems in the United States take the fun out of reading for the majority of children. As early as 3rd grade, I was expected to read a book for 20 minutes and then write a 5 sentence summary for it. Being a junior in highschool, I can easily do this, but a third grade me was put off by it. I used to enjoy reading as kid. I would always read dork diaries or diary of a wimpy kid and some other books, but when reading homework became mandatory in middle elementary, I lost interest. Being forced to read a book for 20 minutes and writing a summary on it felt like the hardest thing on planet earth. This wasn't encouraging me to read, it was making me not want to do it because I didn't know what books I wanted to read because the aforementioned diary of a wimpy kid was banned. Concentrating for 20 minutes on a book as an 8-year-old is a hard task, considering I had "better" things to do such as playing with my barbie dolls.

For me, it turned reading into a chore, as it did for many kids. It was forced upon me and I rebelled, rather taking the bad grade than do the homework. Because of this, I think many people are put off by reading, considering it a chore, something that is inherently boring, when it isn't. People are forced to read boring books in high school and college that can further make them detached. Point is, the fun has been taken out of reading, and the spark for it isn't being lit again. In fact the only reason I picked up reading again was because I was so bored of constantly looking at my phone for entertainment, but this time I seek out books I'm interested in, and the fun is back. I'm not forcing myself to do it, I'm just leaving it as an option.

Thoughts on having children

11.18.2023:

When you're a woman, even if you're still in school, you get asked constantly about having children. Sometimes even your parents might imply automatically that you're going to have children, and even when you state that you don't want any, they still hold on to that idea and get offeneded. My perspective is that it's kind of weird to be bugging your child about having their own children when they're not even out of elementary yet. I've never really wanted kids. I remember as far back as kindergarten being intrigued by the idea, but never wanting to practice it myself.

But even today when I still give my thoughts on the matter, it triggers my mom especially that I don't plan or want kids. I just don't want them. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate kids, but me having to put up with feeding them, taking care of them, having to tolerate their screaming, etc for 18 years is just scary to me. I value my free time heavily; if anyone were to constantly interfere with it I would probably go insane.

Take in case my little half brother: he's 6, and yet he still screams exactly like he did as a baby - like a banshee - and it drives me nuts! He's not even my kid, but since I live with my family right now, I have to deal with it. When I wake up in the middle of the night due to his tantrums it makes me so pissed off. Why would I want to deal with that again but never get an escape from it?

Also, I believe I wouldn't be that good of a parent. Firstly, my mental health is shot to death and probably will be for years into my adulthood. Not a good state of mind to be in while raising a tiny human. I have noticed patterns in myself that I would not want to subject my kids to since I don't want to traumatize anyone. Namely, I'm in patient as hell, can get really mad (not often, but when I do it can get hectic), am not good at comforting, not good at taking care of anything (I can barely take care of myself), and I just don't want to bring someone else into this world.

I haven't even stated the obvious yet: I'm a lesbian. In order for me to have a child I would have to get an artifical insemination or adopt, and am interested in neither. Don't want to get pregnant and I don't want to deal with traumatized children because again, my mental health is horrible. I will happily remian childfree. Life is hard enough without having a kicking, screaming toddler you have to make sure doesn't die.

Thoughts on polynomial division

11.22.2023

I got introduced to polynomial division yesterday in my math class, and let me tell you that it's sheiße.

We learned two ways on doing it: long division and synthetic. Except for the fact that the "long division" is actually the box method, which has become my personal enemy.

I'm on Thanksgiving break right now, but the teacher gave us homework and told us to, "just complete it tonight so you don't need to worry about it", so that's what I tried doing. Except I just can't get the box method down. Synthetic is fine, but you can only use it for when the divisor is linear (think x-3), but some of the divisors are quadratics and that's what pissing me off!

One problem I'm stuck on is the following:

I tried youtube videos, didn't work. I tried mathway, mathpapa, symbolab, and photomath, still didn't work. I posted on a homework help subreddit, and only got a few answers that are helpful. People kept saying "just use long division" and I would agree, except the teacher only wants us to use the box method for this.

So now here I am on Thanksgiving break worrying about homework. I'll try doing some other people's suggestions for the problem once I get back to it. But for now, screw the box method and screw polynomials :)

11.23.2023 Edit: I finally figured it out thanks to this youtube video. If anyone else is reading this and struggling with that, it'll be a great help. What I was missing was adding up the diagonal.