Something that occasionally pops up on /r/AskMenOver30 seems to be a sentiment of treating life like a generic checklist of "house, job, wife, children" and asking "Now what?". It's understandable, but it makes me wonder about how others view life w/o an existential crisis.

A while back, got stuck on Hollow Knight on my Steam Deck, got frustrated and stopped playing. Resumed on PC, finally discovered the Mantis area. Definitely a testament to my age+circumstances that I don't feel like I have time to just blunder around and figure out stuff 😓

A random reminder (because I did it yesterday) that you can mute certain keywords/names on your social media feed! It's always in Settings/Preferences and under some kind of Moderation/Mute/Block depending on which platform you're on. Always worth browsing your Settings!

Thanks to subtitles I finally know that in the old Iron Chef episodes, Chairman Kaga says "Allez Cuisine!" (lit. "Let's Go!/Hurry!" Cuisine) to signify the start of the battle. Poor me not getting it when young, then watching anime and not recognising it as any "start!" either 😂

If only "mathrel" jobs were similarly in demand 🥲 (I know I know they're maths communciators but I do wish the formally employed ones did more outreach on the internet and general public)

One thing that's fascinating to me is how playing Uma Musume has exposed me to a lot of lore+stories about Japanese racehorses. Whereas back home all I'm aware of is the noise against horse + greyhound racing, especially when the Melbourne Cup comes around every year.

Yesterday I spent like two hours rewriting two slides for a future presentation. Ended up ditching both drafts because I knew they didn't fit right. This morning my thoughts coalesced and I figured out what would fit best and bashed out an outline this morning, ugh.

Dumb Anime Idea: I get isekai'd into some anime world but with (the magic of) maths/operations research/optimisation knowledge I improve the economy of said anime fantasy world 🙃

All the weird things happened today: enough humidity to make me uncomfortable, email replies from various emails sent out over the past month all came in today, no regulars @ communal lunch table, thunderstorm in late arvo. But today, Toby Hendy's (tibees) book came in the mail!

Maths anime where there's a humble genius (probably grad student) that solves select maths problems from Olympiads or known lightbulb moments e.g. Zitang with the comb idea for bounded twin primes conjecture, and both problem and soln are well explained to the reader/watcher.

Regular Hollow Knight progress, feels good. Been a while since a game naturally kept me absorbed 😊 Still takes a while to brave wanting to mindlessly roam, because of the fear of losing a large bunch of Geo. But it is what it is.

Something nice yesterday: I'm the eldest member of a Men's Table (themenstable.org) and in our meetup yesterday I got the chance to uplift others, and also got them to uplift others in a genuine way. Feels like a small part of an unfulfilled childhood healed yesterday 🥰

/r/managers has drifted onto my general Reddit feed and it's been quite interesting to read the stories (mostly vents) of what some managers have to deal with. Hmm 🤔 Also have a friend who's been very distressed by a belligerent employee below her, gets perfect scores otherwise

I've finally succumbed to consulting the Wiki for Hollow Knight. It was fun just blundering around being lost and exploring/discovering new places and younger me (without the internet) would've soldered on, but older me now is like "Grrrr I don't have TIME"

Ugggggh Ruri no Houseki Ep 6 perfectly captures the ups & downs of the research experience 😅🙈 Taking notes, insecurity & lack of confidence, stuffing up, wasted effort due to an earlier mistake, the success and elation after all that work pays off.

I was really happy with my spaghetti bolognese meal prep today that I decided to write it up with a minimal version as well, as per my recipe-writing habit for my blog. Unfortunately no pictures, 4 min read, some cooking discussion in there as well! matthras.com/2025/09/20/pas…

Hollow Knight: Just beat the Soul Tyrant today, beat Failed Champion yesterday. Both took 2 sessions over 2 days. Can't remember the last time a video game has made me feel motivated enough to actually commit to figuring out boss mechanics and just "git gud" at defeating them 😊

Trying to coherently explain something I'm doing in a 9am meeting after waking up at 8am is like putting my brain through a meat grinder: the only thing coming out is mush 😵‍💫