Dima's NonFic Writing blog

    Fear of the dark is something most people grow out of as they get older, or so I’ve heard. However in this age of people unafraid of the absence of light, one man bravely chooses to be afraid of what nobody else is: Me. Unlike most people, I have been consistently afraid of the dark since I can remember. As one might expect, this fear has some consequences, especially for a late night sleeper like myself.     In the modern day my fear of the dark takes place mainly as a consequence of my self-limited sleep, but even well rested parts of this fear will persist. We’re not always the same person, and alternating a different situation you’ll eventually start noticing the differences. Sleepy Dima is a lot more prone to his active imagination running circles around his mind about some threatening situation than Well-Rested Dima. The mental degradation takes root and thoughts that wouldn’t produce emotional responses under usual circumstances become strong eno...

Anyone who’s heard me outside the classroom will know that I’m a pretty big curser. I wouldn’t say I’m ever excessive or awkwardly interjecting expletives but it’s certainly a noticeable part of my vocabulary. Then again, that’s what most people would say anyway isn't it? Like all of y’all I was starting to get onto the internet right at the tail end of what I would call “The Wild Web-st” era. Sites like YouTube were far more lax in their regulation of what sort of content they wouldn’t allow, for most sites it was usually just no nudity, no copyright infringement, etc.. However, unlike some of you I’m what I would call a 1.5 generation immigrant, I came to this country instead of being born in it, but I was also like 18 months old so it doesn’t really count as first generation in my opinion. One problem this created was when, say, a 6 year old got onto a site like YouTube, and heard a word, then started saying it, the parent wouldn’t know that anything bad was actually being said....

     Due dates at a specific time that isn’t 11:59 that day is definitely something I could live without. I’ve always heard the argument from teachers that a later due date incentivizes students to stay up later. I don’t know if this is true for others, but a blog post being due two hours earlier isn’t going to be the thing that stops me from going to bed really late.       Sure maybe for some super-mega procrastinators who really just can’t control themselves, a due date at 10 PM might be the extra bit of stress needed to get themselves motivated to write an essay before they normally go to sleep. But for me, the optimal human on this planet, I’ve already basically decided when I’m going to go to bed. I decide how much of my sanity the next day I am willing to sacrifice to get those precious extra hours of free time. I will not be disclosing that time, but it hasn’t changed in something going on 4 years minimum depending on how you count, so if you re...

     Procrastination that everyone as Uni students is probably familiar with, and has at least at some point in some way decided that, actually, what you need to do that day could wait. We’ve all written something that was due that night just hours before the due date approached. As odd as it sounds for me, procrastination has always been a sort of motivator, whenever an assignment seems as though it would take a lot of effort and I didn’t feel up to the task, I knew that I could always do it later. But once later comes there is no choice but to sit down and get through the assignment. The stress of the deadline allows for a simple and undebatable motivation to do the work, because I can’t do it later. For this reason procrastination has always been in my tool set of strategies to complete work that can’t just be mindlessly trudged through.      For me procrastination isn’t just a result of laziness and sloth, though that is sometimes a reason for holding o...

     Regret is an emotion that, by its own definition, we do not want to experience. To look back at your life and think that it could have been better had you done something different is both a useless but infuriating series of thoughts. Yet, as my life moves forward I can’t help but feel regret for my semi-intentional under-informedness.     As I was growing up the question “What do you want to do when you grow up” was asked of me, a lot. Of course, such a question is unreasonable to ask, as children barely even have a concept of what work is, and making such an opinion is ultimately just guessing. Yet, as a child, I had made a decision, quite fervently even, about what I was going to be doing in the future, engineering.     Did I know what engineering was? Kind of. Was I actually interested in the process of designing? Not really. Did I watch YouTubers like Mark Rober and play with Legos giving me the impression that engineering was m...

     Ever since it’s begun to be noticed by those outside of its own specialized online spaces I’ve been embarrassed by my past obsession with World War 2 tanks. It seems like a weird subject to be obsessed with, but my interest broadly followed the trends of the internet.      When I was younger I was always interested in war-adjacent media, it made up a lot of the games and toys which I played with, but about mid-way through middle school my interest grew more specific. I got a computer, allowing me to play games which I could previously watch only, like War Thunder. War Thunder is a game about vehicle combat, where you begin in the interwar era, as you play you slowly advance to vehicles further along through history. I became more interested in the tanks themselves over the gameplay, and began to consume content about the vehicles I was spending the most time playing, World War 2 vehicles. It started out with a youtube video here or there, but eventual...