🏖 Life

Shift At Midnight: Who Is the Impostor? I recently saw a streamer playing this game, so I tried it with some friends. It was pretty fun; I wonder whether future updates will add more ways to play. How the game works Running a gas station is hard work. You must keep the shelves stocked, sell enough goods each night to meet the quota, receive deliveries, and keep the store clean. ...

Choosing the East The sun and moon turn, west and then east; amid right and wrong, victory and defeat, we seek different paths toward the same goal. Counting on my fingers, the journey spans twenty-five thousand li; who dares swing the long red cord and bind the azure dragon? Again and again the east wind blows through old trees; ten years of turbulence have been for the common good. ...

Someone answered the question of meaning and value in the last century: The most precious thing a person has is life, and life is given only once. One should live so that, looking back, one will not regret having wasted the years in idleness, nor feel ashamed of having lived meanly and vulgarly. Of course, ordinary people like us do not necessarily possess such a lofty outlook. My own answer is the unity of knowledge and action. ...

Meeting Happiness: In Lingnan People hurry back and forth, rushing south and east; high towers and broad factories fill the horizon, then vanish without a trace. People bustle, cars surge, and our paths diverge. After ten years on a road still unfinished, who is the master of this journey?

Trying Open-Source Keyboards This year I tried several keyboards that offer relatively better privacy: Xiaopeng, Tongwen, Yuyan, and Gboard. Here is a brief account of the experience. Xiaopeng This is my main keyboard. Its strengths include: It imports existing Wusong and other ZY configurations, covering most common words. It supports uU character decomposition; typing uUweiwenchangnv, for example, produces the character li. Its v mode enters special characters and symbols by initials, such as vfjz for “⸺”. Swiping left on Backspace quickly deletes text. Sliding on the Space bar moves the cursor; when candidates are shown, it can move among pinyin syllables for editing. The official documentation recommends two voice-input apps that work alongside it. I tried them and they work, though there are drawbacks below. Swiping up enters a key’s secondary symbol. Weaknesses: ...

My 2024 I made little progress this year. My enthusiasm was spent, my body worn down, and a wretched “industry” left me almost no time for a year to record what I saw and heard. In Such a Hurry, With No Time for Anything Else I will not name the industry. One can infer the whole from a part: under the current employment winter, things are probably much the same everywhere. ...

What Is It All For? “What Is It All For?”—A 97-year-old philosopher rethinks life in his final months | Being 97 | Documentary short | Old age Death is not frightening. Losing things is. When we are young, we naturally possess so much: a strong body, a wise mind, nimble limbs, abundant energy, and endless ambitions. The body is the bridge that makes all of it possible. As the years pass, however, everything begins to leave us. ...

Three in the Moonlight “A 53-year-old childless cat lady regrets it, twenty years too late” — Bilibili Students cannot understand this kind of urban loneliness. There are classmates when you go out and parents when you go home. But when you move to a big city alone for work, with no familiar face anywhere, your phone rings only for spam or work. Loneliness crawls out from all four walls like woodworm and leaves you shivering. ...

My 2023 I started this blog on a whim, never expecting it to last more than a year. I dedicate this post to the year that has passed. I am ashamed to say that it has been a long time since I wrote anything literary. As a science-and-engineering person, I never accumulated much literary learning, and I returned every scrap of classical Chinese I memorized in high school to my teachers. I am now in the state of knowing that some classical line must describe my feelings perfectly, while not remembering what it is. Please bear with me. ...