Hello comrades and welcome to the third improvement megathread of August! 
Some discussion ideas:
- How was your week?
- Do you have some plans for next week?
- Do you have some tools or resources that you want to share?
Poster caption
Summer vacation activities
暑期活动
Shuqi huodong
Good luck with your goals! 
Tab Watch
In non-tab news—haven’t posted in a while, but my hygiene and sleep schedule has been better in this past month or so than it has perhaps ever. I’ve also been feeling a lot more socially engaged lately; I’m very out of practice, so it can take a lot out of me, but it’s nice to be connecting with people.
On the hobby front, I haven’t been playing/analyzing music much, so that’s something I’m going to focus on this week. But on the positive side, I’ve really gotten back in the swing of things with studying Japanese and it feels awesome. It’s something I had basically put on pause for a few years, and it feels so awesome to be able to see my comprehension improving noticeably over the course of just a few months, and I’ve gained the confidence to finally do proper immersion (reading and watching things without any English subtitles).
Was feeling under the weather this day and decided to rest instead of grind out tabs ↩︎
Didn’t plan it this way, but I’ve hit the precise 1/3 mark down to the tab! There’s exceedingly little low-hanging fruit left, so the last third is not gonna be trivial, but with ~90 days left I still feel confident I can get there by the end of the year even if I may decide to reduce the daily minimum a bit ↩︎
Took this day off but actually for good reasons—spent a lot of time doing productive and fulfilling stuff and didn’t have time left for tab culling ↩︎
Starting on this day, I’m tentatively reducing the daily target to -5, down from -10. Almost everything left is longform journalism, long videos, or other time-intensive categories, so I think -5 is a more reasonable goal that will still have me trending basically to 0 by the end of the year. ↩︎
That’s good progress, keep it up! I recently switched to a new phone so I had to close hundreds of tabs. All those tabs lost in time, like tears in rain. What music are you into?
So sorry I never responded to your comment! I originally had a long comment with a bunch of links and stuff, but my computer crashed before I could post it and I lost the comment, which was demoralizing. But I left this comment marked unread so that I wouldn’t forget to give you a reply, and here I am two weeks later.
I’m not going to try to write a whole long comment again [editor’s note: well, I didn’t intend to…], but I’ve gone through a few different phases. As a kid, I just listened to Top 40 plus my parents’ music (R&B, soul, smooth jazz, salsa, merengue). As an adolescent, I got really into rock and metal, running the gamut from classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, AC/DC) on through NWoBHM (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest) and into thrash and death metal (Metallica/Megadeth/Slayer/Anthrax, Amon Amarth, Carcass, The Faceless). Around uni, I went through a K-Pop phase (Girls’ Generation, f(x), SHINee, KARA). And these days, I’ve regressed to the default nerd music sources: video game, anime, and VTuber music (although I do listen to and play some jazz as well).
J-Pop and jazz might seem like strange bedfellows, but they’re both full of harmonic complexity (i.e. interesting chord progressions), which is something I really love to listen to but also analyze and play. Actually, one of the many tabs I have open is an academic text called Music in the Making of Modern Japan which has chapters that touch on idol culture (‘Manufacturing Identity: Femininity, Discourse and Representation in Japanese Popular Music’) and jazz (‘The Flow of Jazz in Japan: Why Jazz Resonates so Far from Home’) that I’m interested to read. I’ve always found it fascinating that there’s barely any trace of jazz remaining in the pop music of the US, its birthplace, but it’s absolutely bursting from the seams of Japanese pop music, and I’m hoping this chapter will help elucidate that mystery.
also don’t worry I don’t actually expect you to listen to (let alone comment on!) a dozen different songs, I just got carried away
Oh, also, I’ve been recording my progress in the comment you replied to—things are coming along swimmingly! Wrote about my mentality a bit more in this comment. I should probably also make a post in the weekly threads; maybe I can just post that week’s progress so as not to take up too much space and then point back to my original comment.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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