Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Worthless to anyone but me

An email got through the spam filters to offer me an opportunity to sell this very web domain. That is silly, because I’m pretty sure I am the only Healy Chen on this planet. Healychen.com is absolutely worthless to anyone but me. Not even a nice try. Just stop it.

For the record: I am wiling to let this domain for a few thousand bucks. No sane person should want to buy it for that money, however. But I’ll take it if offered!

You guys remember back in early April when the stock market retreated about 20% from all time highs thanks to President Trump’s tariff plans? Man have we recovered quickly. The markets are hovering near all time highs again.

What does that mean? I hope you bought during the dip, because I certainly did. And that chunk of cash is absolutely hard-carrying my portfolio performance for 2025. If anything, I now have regrets that I didn’t buy more.

Of course, we should not time the market, because most of us will fail. The reason I bought during this recent dip is my investment time horizon is long. It’s not a get rich quick scheme, it’s a get rich long scheme. I plan to hold stocks until well into retirement, so when the market offers a 20% discount to buy more, heck yeah I am taking that advantage.

In the (very) long run, markets will always go up. Let’s say for the sake of argument the American stock market doesn’t grow any (or even declines) over the next few decades. If that were to be true, there would be way greater things to worry about than simply our investments. See: Argentina.

Live your life

I am on YouTube often. I pay for premium so I can watch videos on my large TV without annoying ads. (Word on the street is the Youtube ads have only gotten ever more annoying and frequent?) Hagerty channel car videos look majestic in large format. Shoutout to Henry Catchpole and team for making banger after banger.

I get confused when the algorithm recommends me videos of people’s daily lives (vlogs, in the modern parlance). Confused not at the over-sharing (though I would never), but at the supposed audience size for such content. Think about it: folks are actively watching someone else live life, rather than living their own life.

The platform Twitch has created many millionaires out of people watching them play video games. Watch another person play video games? I much rather play the games myself. Of course, it’s not lost on me that half the time the audience is there to watch a reasonably hot girl, with her boobs barely contained, merely existing. Pretty privilege is exploited to the maximum in our age of streaming.

No hate for the content creators. How a person legitimately makes money is none of my business. Good for them.

I reckon religion is no longer the opiate of the masses. It’s live streaming. The many hours spent watching someone do stuff are hours lost to either productivity, or destructibility. In that way, I guess it’s fine? I’ll take net neutral over net negative every single time. I dare not imagine what would the legion of lonely males do otherwise without the pacifying addiction of OnlyFans.

Me? I’m going to live life, rather than watch someone live theirs.

I am priced out

I was walking through my local Target store when I noticed a 20 ounce bottle of Coke now costs $3.19? And that is before tax! I am old enough to remember when 20 ounce bottles were 99 cent. A dollar bill at the vending machine was enough to obey your thirst.

Talk about things I am priced out of. Buying soda drinks at a store is one of them. Filtered water is just fine, thank you very much.

But then people would argue that saving that three dollar on a daily soda (or four dollars on a daily coffee) is not going to get me to buying a house. The math on that in the San Francisco Bay Area is indeed tragic. Those people are right: keeping that $3 in my pocket is merely pissing in the wind of houses that start at a million dollars.

A better use for that $3 is to buy the lottery. At least there’s a infinitesimal chance!

In the grand scheme of things, buying a soda bottle here and there is not going to monetarily affect me one bit. But it’s the mindset that counts here. We can all agree that spending money is easy. The American credit system is fantastic in that regard. Therefore I think we have to train our resistance muscles (not to be confused with resisting a certain presidency). The calculus has to be more than: can I afford it, if yes, then buy!

Saying no to the $4 coffee helps me say no to a new iPad Air I’ve been eyeing, or a newer laptop to replace this “aging” M1 MacBook Pro. Those are the money decisions that really slice chunks: the hundreds and thousands of dollars at a time. Money that can otherwise grow significantly if put to proper investing.

If I really want to drink soda, I’d go buy in bulk from Costco.

Two months post Accutane

It’s been a little over two months since I ended my (first and hopefully only) round of Accutane medication. I am happy to report that my face is remains pimple free. That’s the main fear, you know? That soon as I hop off the drug, the persistent acne that so plagued me since puberty will return with a vengeance. Irrational, probably, though it’s not exactly uncommon for chronic acne sufferers to need multiple rounds of treatment.

The other fear is for the oiliness to return. One of the only good things about being on Accutane is that my face and scalp were bone dry all the time. It was so nice to touch my face and not be repulsed at the oil slick on my fingers. My hair was no longer matted down with oil the next day after shampooing. While on Accutane, I could have gone a whole week without washing my hair.

In this regard, some of the moisture has indeed come back to the face. It makes sense, because otherwise my lips would still be chapped all the time. You can’t expect to have selective dryness! That’s just not how the body works.

But I glad to say the intense oiliness seems to be a thing of the past. I hope two whole months post treatment isn’t still too early to determine. What’s the half-life of Accutane in the body anyways? (ChatGPT says about five days.) You’re apparently okay to make a baby - something you’re explicitly warned to not do while on the medication - one month after stopping.

Overall I am very happy with the results. The seven months of insular and antisocial behavior - due to needing to avoid being outside during the daytime - was worth it. Having lived with chronic acne for so long before, it’s difficult to believe that this acne-free condition will stick. I don’t think the anxiety of thinking every new odd sensation on the face is an oncoming breakout ever goes away.

So far so good, though.

No more stains ever

Not sure why it took me so long, but I’ve seen the light: the Tide to Go instant stain remover pens are absolutely magic. I finally have had enough of stubborn kimchi stains (I eat Korean food quite often) on my white t-shirts. A three pack of the pens on Amazon is mere six dollars, a real bargain. One for the home, one for the backpack, and one for the car.

Funny enough it was not removing the red dots of kimchi juice that I first discoverd the magic. Instead it’s a perennial favorite: splashed coffee. Against a white shirt it’s nearly as notorious to remove as Korean fermented cabbage. However, a few dabs of the Tide pen completely removed the stains. Couple that with immediate laundry, and there was no trace of coffee to be found.

Next time someone says Proctor & Gamble is some evil corporation, they should turn in their Tide to Go pens forever.

The price of coffee has certainly gone up since President Trump enacted import tariffs of varying degree and size. Sadly for Americans, most of our consumed coffee is grown overseas (like Columbia and Brazil). ChatGPT says the United States doesn’t have the warm and humid temperature conducive for coffee planting. That’s explain why at my local Peet’s Coffee, a medium cup of drip is now over four dollars (after tax). Why would Biden do this?

Even those of us who make coffee at home are feeling the spike in bean prices. But it’s not like we are going to stop drinking coffee. I most certainly will not! A 25% percent tax is not enough of a deterrence for an addicted coffee drinker. The box of Keurig cups I buy would have to double in price before I seriously consider stopping. There’s precedent: the price of McDonalds seemingly doubled since the pandemic, so now I don’t eat there.

In the meantime, I will begrudgingly pay the tariff.

The amazing Amazon

I don’t see how anyone can boycott Amazon. When you absolutely need that one thing quickly and you cannot be bothered to go anywhere to get it, Amazon always comes through in the clutch. Prime free next-day shipping is an amazing feet of logistical engineering. Labor exploitation be damned if I can replace a broken water bottle in less than 24 hours, for the cheapest price, with just a few taps on the phone.

Good luck getting that convenience genie back into the bottle. I have to wonder those who claim to boycott Amazon on Reddit: do they really do it? Often times, people’s actions do not back up their words. Those who rail against higher education have gone to college themselves, and will send (or have sent) their children to college. Those who advocate for leniency towards the homeless invariably do not have mobile homes parked in their neighborhoods. Women who claims partner income doesn’t matter have never dated someone who made less.

Talk is easy and superficial when you don’t have skin in the game.

I returned from Korea late April. The trip marked a two week hiatus from weightlifting. I then got sick the week after - as one does. So in earnest I did not pick back up the weights until the start of May.

It then took an entire month for me to get back to where I was - in terms of strength numbers - before I went on vacation. I guess that’s about normal? (I lift three times a week.) That’s the thing about traveling when you are chasing the gains on a barbell: you have to accept the regression. You work so hard to gradually reach a certain weight for a certain amount of reps. Then, like the Itsy Bitsy Spider, you go back down and have to do it all over again.

I’m not saying don’t go on vacation. But if there’s a target weight goal you’re chasing, it’s going to get prolonged.

Do you even know how?

The best piece of furniture one can have in the home is a chaise longue. There’s nothing better after a long day of work than to plop down on the long sofa and chill. Even in this tiny studio apartment of mine, I made sure to accommodate one. In fact, it’s the only piece of chair furniture in the room. A chaise longue is fantastic for Saturday afternoon naps.

At work we have for checkout some relatively old DSLR cameras (like a Canon 5D Mark III). During graduation time the cameras get checked out quite often, which is rather confounding. The modern smartphone camera is so good - why bother with something so clunky and cumbersome?

Under capable hands, old DSLR cameras can still take superior pictures to the top smartphones. But I seriously doubt the casual users checking out the DSLRs from us have any understanding of the exposure triangle. Leaving the camera in full auto while taking pictures at a live graduation is a recipe for blurred bodies and missed smiles. (Pro tip: when capturing people, a fast shutter speed of at least 1/250 of a second is recommended.)

The latest iPhone would have captured dozens of frames’ worth of information before the shutter is even pressed. The output is going to be sharp no matter what, automatically. For the layperson, the smartphone is the superior tool.

We can talk about perhaps smartphone photographic capabilities have gotten too good. The pictures are too crunchy, too sharp, too perfect. Highlights are never blown, and shadows always recovered. I think the inherent limitations of actual cameras provide a vastly more satisfying outcome. The photographs out of my FujiFilm X-T5 can convey emotion, something largely absent from my iPhone captures.

Judging by how absurdly expensive old point-and-shoot cameras have gotten on the used market, and the fact apps are available on smartphones that take away all their computational trickery - I’m not the only one who feels this way.