Being Good Requires Maintenance and Consistency

9:23 PM

Back in my teenage years I would play this game called Warcraft 3 on a daily basis, for 4+ hours a day, sometimes over 8 hours a day, every day, and I was a master at this game. I don't know why I would play it for so long. I even took it extremely seriously, having this delusion that people in school were going to challenge me to it, so I would practice my best playing this game.

At my peak, for one of my accounts, I think it had between a 77% and 88% win rate, something ridiculous like that, out of 30-40 games. It was an extremely competitive game too, many people played at an extremely high level like me. Many people were at my level or even much better than me. My average account only had like a 55% win rate, out of 1000+ games. This smurf account with only 30-40 games was for fun. It was my prime, and I tried my best on every game on that account, but but over the long run playing hundreds more games, it would probably average down to 60% or even 50%. It was honestly a very hard game.

There was this one game I remember. Just some random custom game where two players wanted to team up against a Computer (Insane), which was the highest level computer player. I joined them as the third player, so it was 3 players against 1 AI. Well, this isn't like modern AI, even the strongest AI back then was pretty weak to a high level player. In fact, my skill level was so high I remember having no problem beating 2 Computer (Insane) at the same time, just two of them on the same team against me, and I found it trivial to beat them.

These two players however, had to team up to even beat just 1 Computer (Insane). I helped them out so that we would win in the end, but yeah, at the time, it just shocked me that some players weren't even able to beat just 1 Computer (Insane). Now that it's been several years since I last played Warcraft 3, I admit that now I wouldn't be able to beat a single Computer (Insane). Something that was trivial for me back in the day, I would now find it pretty hard to do. Actually, I probably can still beat one, but it would be difficult, and I'd probably have to have several attempts.

So reflecting back on the past year, my life has basically gone nowhere. In fact I've actually had a bunch of new life experiences, was in a relationship last year, I traveled to several new places, lost 30 pounds, played a bunch of new games, gained hundreds of new followers on social media, and so on, but it all still feels like I've done nothing and accomplished nothing. Isn't that weird?

Life still feels like I'm just treading water, even though I've had some accomplishments and done some new things. I'm very frustrated at everything still. My appearance has gotten more haggard compared to my early 20s. I look better now than in my late teens and parts of my early 20s, because I was morbidly obese those years, but once I lost weight, and got to an overweight level instead of obese in my earl 20s, I looked pretty good. I looked really good. Now I can't look like that anymore.

On RedNote there is a Chinese idiom that roughly translates to "time is a butcher's knife." In fact if you type in that phrase into a search engine right now, you don't get any suggested searches because no one uses any phrase like that in English. However, once you search for this term, it's all Chinese websites that appear. When I search for that phrase on RedNote in Chinese, a bunch of search results come up of people comparing their teens and early 20s, to their 30s and older in appearance. Pretty much everyone looks worse after 30, it's universal.

So I don't know what I can even do about this now. I want to look handsome, but all these posts depress me. I guess I will just keep going and trying my best. Maybe it's still possible to look handsome in one's 30s. I don't have any choice anyway, since I am already this age.

So the title of this entry, being good requires maintenance. If we ever reach a good state, it requires maintenance to be in that state. I was once an amazing Warcraft 3 player, but since it's been years since I stopped playing, I am now back to beginner levels. It goes that way for weight as well. I was at 153 pounds a few months ago, and now I'm 160 pounds. I looked good at 153, and I look worse at 160. If I wanted to stay at 153, I would have had to put in effort to maintain it. So I learned this lesson.

I'm contemplating fasting again. The only reason I haven't fasted these past few days, is because I would always eat an extremely large meal prior to starting my fast, and I would eat a lot throughout the day. Every single time though, I would gain no weight, or I would just gain a tiny amount of weight. From the amount I would eat in a day, I would have expected a multiple pound weight gain, but that still hasn't happened, so I just never started fasting. Today I even lost weight even though I ate a lot yesterday. I ate even less today than yesterday, so tomorrow should be another weight loss day.

If I can just be consistent with this, eating the amount I ate yesterday or less, then weight loss should be inevitable too. If I keep losing weight this way, then why would I fast? The annoying part is that I also exercise every day. It takes effort, but I do workouts daily, it probably helps with the weight loss. If I were to fast, I wouldn't exercise as much. I'd still do some walking, maybe do 1 rep of every workout, but not much more. Doing the workouts is honestly tiring and is why I prefer to just fast to lose weight.

Anyway I'm very tired. I guess I'm going to sleep now, or try to.