Sugar highs and productivity cows

touch my belly 😈

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?

I’m in Austin for a creator meetup! There are 11 of us and it’s been so fun with lots of filming! You know how you meet somebody in person after being friends on the internet and you’re like whoa. Sometimes people are exactly how you think they would be and other times really different. I think I’m a lot quieter than most people think I am. 😶

Can you name everyone?

I’ll be back in the Bay Area on Saturday! I definitely do miss Beepbeep and Boop. Boop has been booping sadly. 🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🥺

(๑*ᗜ*) Anime

I didn’t have much time to watch anime this week, although I did finish watching Remake Our Life!

I really admire creatives

Remake Our Life is about this 28-year-old guy that gets to be 18 again. He goes to art school instead of choosing the safe path that he had done previously. I quite liked it! Although it turned out to be different from what I expected. There’s a lot of focus on how important it is for artists to fail and how precious creative work is.

Tbh it’s not a lifechanging anime but would recommend!

📖 Books

I’m halfway through This is Your Mind on Plants. It’s a book about the relationship between humans and psychotropic plants: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. He goes into a detailed story about each plant drug and its relationship with humans. What becomes obvious is that humans go to great lengths to seek shifts in consciousness, yet we try to fight this desire with laws and customs.

This is not the kind of book I would normally read and tbh I’m still conflicted about whether I like it or not. It’s definitely interesting and reads like a combination of memoir, history, and commentary. I think I was expecting more like how the drug works?

What stood out to me in the opium section is how fuzzy laws can be. Apparently, poppy seeds are not illegal, planting them puts you in the grey area, but making poppy tea is very illegal (or at least back in the 90s). It’s kinda absurd if you think about it. From a sociopolitical standpoint, the bigger question is almost how much should governments intervene on what people choose to put in their bodies?

Just disclaimer here: I’m not condoning the use of any drugs k #notfinancialadvice

🌻 Learning & Productivity

A while back, I read this book called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and it’s quite interesting. Creatives often have very particular ways of doing things to produce great works. When I say creatives btw, I also mean scientists and engineers in addition to writers, painters, and musicians - basically people who innovate in some way. I think many of them just figured out these productivity habits through trial and error.

Here are some things they do:

Only work a few hours a day, but make them count.

One can be very fertile without having to work too much. Three hours in the morning. Three hours in the evening. This is my only rule. - Jean-Paul Sartre

He’s also really into pipes.

Switch between focused and diffuse mindset (check out the Learning & Productivity section).

[Salvadore Dali] would sit with a key in one hand, poised above a metal plate placed on the floor, and let sleep take him. As soon as he began to slumber in earnest, the key would slip from his fingers and clang against the plate – waking him immediately.

This plate is ceramic though - probably not the most cost effective.

A variety of different psychoactive substances.

Many of them drink endless amounts of tea and coffee. Others have an obsession with sugar.

Soren Kierkegaard preferred his sugar with coffee: Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.

I’m sure it’s very stimulating.

There are some even weirder ones:

💨 Benjamin Franklin was really into "air baths" ie. sitting and walking around naked in the morning. Apparently it is quite refreshing.

🐄 Gertrude Stein depends on her partner Alice Tolkas to get inspired by cows: “If the cow [didn’t] seem to fit in with Miss Stein’s mood, the ladies [would] get into the car and drive on to another cow.”

idk about the cows, air baths, and sugar (I think I would crash so hard) BUT I do use the focused → diffuse mindset shifts and I usually only work a few hours a day, but try to make them count!

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👨‍💻 Coding

I didn’t code at all this week tbh. 😳

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

⚠️This one is hard!

Find the top 3 wineries in each country based on the average points earned. Output the country along with the best, second best, and third best wineries. If there is no second winery (NULL value) output 'No second winery' and if there is no third winery output 'No third winery'. For outputting wineries format them like this: "winery (avg_points)"

Head on over here to answer the question!

*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️

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PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)

-Tina