Preface
This is a record and reflection of my life from 2023-01-23 to 2023-01-31.
I spent most of this week in my hometown, making up for some regrets, simple yet precious. After returning to Hangzhou, I stayed an extra day to meet friends, then hurried back to Beijing from Hangzhou. Upon arriving home in Beijing, I immediately went to pick up Nini from my colleague’s house after barely putting down my luggage. By the time everything was more or less settled, I was in a daze. After a quick wash, I planned to take a short nap and write a weekly review, but when I opened my eyes again, it was already 7 am. Plus, I had to commute to the office during the day, so I postponed writing until now.
On my first day back, Nini immediately irritated me, adding some fright to my first day at work, but thinking about returning to this interesting daily life made me feel more at ease than reproachful (as if I dare). Then I quickly ordered a mobile camera, no wonder friends say I’m raising Nini like a daughter, always worrying about various things. There were many other interesting events as well.
Interesting Things
Mastodon
I didn’t write many blog posts this week, and I didn’t finish several things I wanted to tinker with before the New Year, but I did research fediverse, which I found very interesting.
I originally thought about posting some English content on Mastodon, but later decided to narrow my output platforms. I’ll still post on Twitter and automatically sync to Mastodon via IFTTT, still aggregating on the Telegram channel and Crossbell chain. If you’re interested, you can join me at @[email protected] on the mas.to domain.
There are several interesting articles about these topics that I read and learned a lot from:
- Discussing Mastodon, Fediverse, and ActivityPub - zu1k
- What is Mastodon and How to Play It
- A Fediverse Guide for Twitter Users | wzyboy’s blog
- Decentralized Social Network Mastodon Research Report: Behind the Platform and Protocol Debate, Will It Be the Ultimate Winner? โ Web3Caff Research
- Setting up IFTTT to Sync Twitter to Mastodon. Preparation | by Pei-lun | Medium
Crossbell
Additionally, in the previous article “Weekly Review #25 - Personal Information Output and Synchronization System Based on Crossbell (Refactoring)”, I mentioned issues with syncing Twitter and Telegram historical messages to the chain. Subsequently, I received corresponding solutions from them:
- How to import tweets to Crossbell - Lemon ๐
- How to import telegram messages to Crossbell - Lemon ๐
While using it, I also reported a few bugs. After experiencing it more deeply, I’ll organize and write a detailed article, as well as raise some issues. It’s quite interesting.
Input
Books
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami’s essays or collections are actually quite easy to read. His words carry some sharpness but also convey sincerity and a unique flavor, like a conversation, yet often buried within is a seemingly deliberate humor that makes one smile involuntarily. It took about three months to truly finish reading, as one of the few physical books at hand, it was more often picked up and flipped through when remembered. The first time I went to the cat shelter, although I was moved, I hadn’t really made up my mind to take on such responsibility so quickly. But on the way, I casually flipped to a page that read, “At that time, we were living a very frugal, Spartan lifestyle. We had neither a TV nor a radio at home, not even an alarm clock. There was hardly any heating equipment, so on cold nights, we had to sleep tightly hugging the few cats we kept at home. The cats also tried hard to cuddle up to us.” These few short sentences became the biggest motivation for me to bring a cat home at that moment. It also talks about many things, about hobbies, the purpose of writing, creative ideas and balance, all of which I’ve only begun to understand a little after slowly settling down over the past two months.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt such anticipation from a novel. Perhaps it’s because of the narrative style, or because I read a few short chapters each time during journeys, making it somewhat discontinuous. I always want to know what will happen next, but I don’t want to rush through and miss such beautiful writing. Also, this setting of “another space” reminds me of an old but equally interesting game called “Phantom City”.
TV Series
Silent Snow, I really liked the first few episodes, with Spitz’s songs, the personalities of each character, and the comfortable daily life. Perhaps because I empathized too much with the emotions of the second male lead, Sodo, a kind of gentleness and determination described by Iwai Shunji as “I love you, and it has nothing to do with you”. Later, I became increasingly disappointed with the development of the plot, and even at the end, I couldn’t really understand the basis of Aoba and Omoi’s feelings. It was indeed beautiful, but somewhat straightforward and thin.
The Three-Body Problem TV Series, it has become a series that I continue to watch every day. The plot pace is a bit slow, but from what I’ve seen so far, I still have some expectations.
Anime
- Bungo Stray Dogs, I’ve been slowly catching up during the New Year. I find the setting of using writers and literary works as tasks and skills quite interesting, and I like the personality designs of many characters in the Detective Agency. However, I don’t feel like I’ll immediately want to watch the next season. Maybe I’ll continue watching when I think of it later.
Personal Life Snapshots
Life
Following up on the description of home in last week’s review, I spent nearly 10 days at my hometown this New Year, which is rare in recent years. There are fewer and fewer people in the hometown, and the whole atmosphere seems cold and less lively, but we can set off real fireworks, which is also a kind of special memory.
Because I left when I was young, even the memories of childhood playmates have long been blurred, let alone any childhood friends. So in these ten days, I visited my grandmother, accompanied my grandparents and other family members, which was indeed a rare leisure time.
There was plenty of warmth, but the daily sub-zero temperatures made me can’t help but miss the times with heating and Nini (gradually losing the backbone of a southerner and surrendering to central heating, it’s too comfortable). But it’s okay, I brought the old Intel MBP, which heats up just by running an IDE plus a few web pages.
I brought a camera this year, although I didn’t take it out to shoot much because of cold hands, I did take many family photos. The elderly don’t really like taking photos, but fortunately, we now have tools like smartphones that can record daily life at any time, so there’s not too much regret. But I still miss the times when the whole family went to the photo studio, although it’s already a memory from many years ago. This time I acted as the photographer, taking many photos for the whole family and each small family. Sony’s autofocus and continuous shooting are really praiseworthy.
When it came to my family’s turn, my sister brought a dog as a “placeholder”, saying I could photoshop myself in later. She has a bit of a comedian in her who only teases her brother. In the end, we did take a photo with the dog, four of us neatly arranged, without me, haha. I guess this is one of those “sounds ridiculous, but in my family, it seems quite normal” interesting things.
Of course, for the big family photo, we used a tripod and timed continuous shooting. I plan to edit and print some photos recently.
Nini
This time I left Nini for nearly half a month. Although my colleague was very attentive and often sent me videos, I was still not completely at ease. The first thing I did after returning to Beijing was to go to my colleague’s house. On the way back, I was constantly comforting her, fortunately, she hadn’t forgotten me, still had some conscience. After returning home, there wasn’t much sense of unfamiliarity, she immediately went to lie comfortably in her favorite corner, which is good.
The next day, because I had some things to discuss with the project team, plus I hadn’t been there for a long time, I tidied up and went to the company. I felt that after getting used to remote work, going back to the office to work was a bit uncomfortable. I felt like I arrived at the company at 10:30, exchanged greetings with colleagues I hadn’t seen for a long time, just opened my computer for a while and was called to lunch, after eating it was time for a nap. I feel that when time is deliberately divided into “work and rest”, it’s easier to disrupt the rhythm. I might still prefer the mode of finishing work without eating or drinking, and then arranging my own things with the remaining time.
There’s also another thing that’s both annoying and funny.
Going to the office for the first time in three months, I opened the camera during the lunch break and experienced ten minutes of not seeing the cat, turning on the microphone and calling for five minutes with no response, carefully recalling whether I had closed my doors and windows properly, extremely irritated and anxious, quickly asking for leave, rushing home all the way, and finally arriving home to find her hiding in the blind spot behind the chair, too lazy to poke her head out. I guess the number one reason I want to switch to a fully remote job next time is probably this troublesome Nini ๐.
And there’s a follow-up.
Following up on the previous post. After coming back, I originally wanted to educate her properly, but she quickly jumped up and fell asleep on my legs. When she woke up, she had a confused look, so innocent that I couldn’t bear to scold her. So I gave her the cold shoulder for an hour and let it go. Also, I ordered the ebo mobile camera recommended by @mr_easonyang, thanks! I’ll be more at ease when going out in the future!
In the future, I can control the surveillance robot to tease the cat when slacking off.
Others
Two close friends have some conflicts that are difficult to reconcile at this stage. As a small group of three people who have been like family for many years, I can’t help but feel a bit guilty about whether I’ve done too little in this situation.
I hope everything will be alright.
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