Take a second to think: How much time do you spend on your computer per day? Thirty minutes? Eight hours? In this day and age, using the internet is embedded into almost everything we do.
And if you’re slightly disorganized like me, at the end of the day, you might find yourself having more than 20 tabs open at once. My own tabs range from Pokémon to robotics to pickle Pepsi. By taking a closer look at them, I found out what my Google tabs and digital history say about me.
- Even in my video games, I’m a perfectionist
I spend too much time looking at video game stats — especially Pokémon Showdown, an online Pokémon battle simulator against other players. Although Pokémon is often considered a children’s game, that doesn’t stop me from playing. My Showdown career began in sixth grade when I tried out a team in the “MonoType” battling format — a mode where every Pokémon on the team has to share a certain type.
Although I don’t remember my original team, I remember going against a team of only Bug-type Pokémon, which is widely criticized as the worst type in the game. Yet, I got humiliated in that battle, and from then on, I swore to follow in their footsteps and build a Bug-type team of my own.
Factorio — a game about building factories — seems like a completely different concept than Pokémon, but the perfectionism it brings out in me is surprisingly similar. While the Pokémon TV show is built around making the natural fauna your friend, competitive Pokémon relies on exploiting these creatures and settling for nothing but flawless, just like Factorio.
Factorio is a game about designing, building and maintaining factories. The player crash-lands in a wasteland populated by large deposits of ore and massive carnivorous bugs, eventually building a factory that automates defenses and builds a rocket to get the player off the planet.
Both Pokémon and Factorio require intense calculations and exploitation of the local wildlife. In competitive Pokémon, you breed species to perfection and then relentlessly train them. In Factorio, you poison the wildlife through your factory byproducts and eventually use the wildlife’s nests to produce eggs that are used in various products.
My tab on FactorioLab abstracts this process by reducing it to an easily operable numerical spreadsheet, a godsend for factory perfectionists like myself.
But truth to be told, I don’t even play these games all that much, even after my arduous efforts. I might get obsessed for a few days or a week, determined to master it, but these passing interests always fade. Clearly, I get into random video games very quickly, and it’s a miracle if I find something that catches my interest for more than two weeks.
- I spend work hours perfecting my playlist
YouTube Music has a lot of good music that Spotify doesn’t — dubs of non-English songs, unpublished remixes and original singles. Many people opt to use YouTube Music, but that’s for plebians. Instead, I use the tried-and-true method of downloading the song and uploading it to Spotify as a local file.
However, this has one major drawback: There is no album cover. To fix this, I download pictures off the internet and use an app called EverTag to attach them to the .mp3 as covers. This combines the best of both platforms: I get the song from YouTube onto Spotify and can then play it without ads, thanks to my parents’ Spotify Premium.
Looking back, this makes me realize that I probably spend too little time studying and too much time agonizing over music selections. The atmosphere may be important, but it’s still useless if I don’t get any work done.
- I often read through the ultimate CAN bus ChiefDelphi thread
The ultimate CAN bus thread from the robotics forum ChiefDelphi details information about electronics and robotics that I need all the time. A CAN bus is a series of wires that uses differential signaling to transfer information between closed systems. It’s used in everything from cars to robotics, and I keep this tab open to refer back to if I need a refresher.
Some wires are twisted to keep the magnetic fields aligned, reducing interference and thus keeping the signals as close to original as possible. That’s just one example of something I had no idea about before reading through this thread. Instead of doomscrolling, I find that this is a superior alternative — it’s better for your brain.
I’m easily distracted by random (but interesting) things, like this recipe for Pickle Pepsi
Courtesy of KFC Canada
An ingenious recipe for KFC’s infamous pickle pepsi.
Pickle Pepsi was a drink that KFC introduced as a limited-time drink in August, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: Pepsi with a side of pickle brine and pickle slices for customers to add themselves. Perhaps it sounds terrible to you, but don’t judge a book by its cover; pickles and Pepsi make an exquisite combination.
Make sure not to let the low-quality thumbnail fool you; this video is the peak of YouTube. This man spent his hard-earned money to buy pickles and Pepsi, recording a four-minute video to share his passion with the world. Not only that, his recipe can save you money by making your own Pickle Pepsi!
I found this while mindlessly scrolling through my YouTube home page. As you can see, I can get really easily distracted by the most random things, and this video is a good example of that. Still, without being occasionally pulled away from my work, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate masterpieces like this. I know I’ll get my work done eventually — what really matters is that I enjoyed myself along the way.
What do all of these tabs mean?
A fact that I neglected to mention earlier is that I found I had accessed every one of these tabs when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork. Each one of these speaks to my easy distraction, a core part of me that I had unconsciously known but never fully realized until now.
On one hand, this bad habit is holding me back in terms of grades. But on the other hand, I like to think that my tendency to get distracted means I constantly learn new things online.
Without these constant interruptions, I never would have known that pictures could be attached to .mp3 files or that KFC ever launched the Pickle Pepsi. Looking through my tabs has given me a new perspective in seeing myself. This was like a snapshot of my mind, and I’ll undoubtedly be using this realization in the future to decrease the amount of time I spend on these activities while preserving my spontaneity.
