Ever since coming to Australia, I've been pursuing my interests more freely since there's less adult supervision. (Hehe.) So, what are my interests? Anime - The amount of anime I watch has grown at a ridiculous rate. I've gone from roughly 1 or 2 new anime per season ( of new anime) to now what is about 6 or 7. Of course, to compensate, I now watch fewer current seasons of American shows. Notably, I've dropped Desperate Housewives and with Stargate SG-1 no longer running, that's two fewer shows (or 4 equivalent anime episodes per week). I'm currently following kimikiss, ef, genshiken s2, yua full throttle, clannad, blue drop, prism ark and ninomiya-kun (fanservice is always fun). While that, I'm still following Bleach and the soon-to-conclude Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai
(Note that I've ignored shows/seasons that have already completed their run - meaning there's actually a lot more I watch besides this. I've recently completed watching the first season of Heroes, Maburaho, Genshiken, Andromeda and Yakitate Japan.)
Video games - Needless to say, recently I've finished Portal, Halo 3, (soon Half-Life 2 Episode 2) and I'm about halfway through Bioshock and Resistance. I've even started picking up music games - for now, all I have is DDR and Guitar Hero - both of which I play pretty often. I'm also slowly working my way through Project Gotham Racing 4 and Motorstorm. My Wii is as usually abandoned outside, being used mostly for old Gamecube games (which pwn most Wii games btw), but the appearance of Super Mario Galaxy might help. I've played about half an hour of Metroid Prime 3, and my initial thoughts are that it's gimmicky and not worth my time. I enjoyed Super Paper Mario for the Wii, but I believe that was rushed, and some small sections were designed poorly.
Manga - I can't really say I'm following any more manga than I did last year though. For one, it's painfully difficult to find scanlations nowadays for anything besides the really popular ones (like Bleach, Naruto and Airgear). So, it's more like an inability to read Japanese that's halting my manga intake, rather than my lack of interest in manga.
I'd say that my studying hasn't really degenerated nor improved since these additional activities actually fill in the gap that was created by moving here - that is the commuting time to and from uni, certain chores and considerably less shopping activity (Australian good are expensive).
So has anything changed? I now remember a lot more Japanese than I ever have previously (at least double from last semester, not even talking about last year). I've obviously taken my tech geek level a little higher, running a Windows, Mac and Linux computer under the same roof - running PS3, XBox 360 and Wii controllers into my PC and Mac.
My math, despite my lack of effort, seems to have improved considerably over the past year.
However, my brain itself appears to be degenerating. The incidences of skipped thoughts, sentence portions, logical steps, and even entire words in my vocabulary are increasing. My short-term memory and studies memory seem to have degenerated in turn. Believe it or not I would likely be unable to remember what I ate for lunch the day before - and I am not quite capable of remembering as large an amount of data as before - and that I'm pushing away data I have no interest in a lot faster than before.