Self-care always makes me feel better. I prepare something nice to drink–tea, wine, beer, depending on my mood—and a tasty snack, then put on one of my favourite audiobooks or TV shows and treat myself to a hot bath or foot bath with a relaxing bath essence.
I recently got into making desserts. I end up with something I can be proud of, get to share sweets with my friends & family and satisfy my sweet tooth all at once. With $10 worth of ingredients and zero experience you can whip up a basic batch of fudge in less than 15 minutes and put pretty much anything else you want into there.
Eating something, drinking some water, getting as much sun as possible without getting burnt. Those three will take care of most of it to be honest with you.
At best I can just have a fake conversation in my head. Sometimes I also listen to taxi drivers with SDR. I can only pick up 2 companies, unfortunately. Fortunately though, they are just 0.15MHz apart, so I can listen on to both at once.
One of them even routes phone calls over their radios, so I can hear those as well.
But it's usually boring. Just on new year 2022/2023 one of the 3 companies' drivers were greeting each other. That was nice. Yes, 3, there used to be 3 of them I could listen to.
Actually, even before I had SDR I could listen to one on VHF because they were overlapping with FM Broadcast band. But that wasn't the most pleasant experience. With regular radio I had no squelch option and picking NFM with WFM receiver I had to have volume fairly high. The result of that was faint voice followed by absolutely loud static.
Of course, it would be better to listen to hams. That would be far more interesting. But so far I only managed to pick up the end of 2 contacts on 2m. I don't have much luck. HF is basically unusable where I am due to RFI.
The only stuff I can pick up is chinese AM radio stations, CW (but I've been too lazy to learn morse...), FT8, and the Russian-Ukrainian pirates around 7055kHz.
I don't know how to monitor the 2m band automatically. If I know the specific frequency, in SDR++ I can just set up squelch and turn on recording with "Ignore silence". But obviously that will also not allow me to listen to a real-time conversation because all silence is cut out.
Yeah, sorry, I got off-topic.
I can also play with random stuff in Termux on my phone. Right now I need to update nginx which will require also re-compiling the fancyindex dynamic module. I also want to try setting up Jellyfin and NextCloud in proot at some point.
I also want to download the 110GB Wikipedia ZIM archive and serve that with kiwix-serve after I free up enough storage, currently occupied by DVD ISO files and satellite signal baseband recordings. (Yes, on my phone.)
Of course this isn't always without larger issues.
During one math class I took out my phone from the pocket, because it was starting to get too hot, only to find it stuck in bootloop. I forced it off and tried to boot it up. Thankfully, that worked this time. I found the internal storage nearly full. It seems when I forced it into recovery to turn it off, magically 17MB were freed which allowed it to boot up. Otherwise I'd need to fully reset it, most likely. I can't access the data from recovery, and that's good from security perspective.
What happened? NGINX error log filled up the storage. I am too dumb to properly manage that, so...
Weed generally puts a halt to whatever ruminations are buzzing around my head and lifts me up a bit, then order a kebab and play some roguelike games for a few hours
If my mental/social energy is high:
Drop into a few of my group chats and see if anyone wants to hang out, maybe go to a pub or play some games
Depending on the situation. Simplified, obviously:
If I can actively do something about it immediately or soon enough “<myname>, you know, you can do it and it will really help you”.
If it is more on emotional basis“<myname>, I love you / you are important / I know it hurts / I understand — what would you like to do?” saying this type of stuff often and since I can remember, made me respond automatically, whether it is something simple like “I would really like to have an almond ice cream today” or “I am watching the movie tonight / going for a walk” etc or more advanced like “I will do X, Y and Z — in this order”. Having a self-checkup as a tool is really helpful.
If it is a more complex situation — firstly comes a quick energy level check, followed by looking for the simplest part of the problem as a hook to get the ball rolling or a solid rest (passive or active) to restart the system.
If it is a really overwhelming / prolonged thing, any form of contact / consultation, either with partner, family, friend or a professional.
Talk to a stranger. At the park, at the bus stop, at the dog park. Doesn't matter what we talk about, it just feels good to connect and it takes my mind off my own bullshit.