Preface
This piece is a record and reflection of my life from 2023-07-11 to 2023-08-15.
After nearly a month of stagnation, reopening the weekly review document felt somewhat unfamiliar. In truth, many themes I wanted to write about had accumulated, and there were many words I wished to say. Although my output has decreased, my desire to share has not diminished due to changes in my life state. Instead, it has spread into the quiet flow of daily life. As I gradually became accustomed to the new rhythm of life, I also began to adjust (and fill in) some of the plans I had made at the beginning of the year. Weekly reviews and blog posts have also resumed updating.
The Silent Workers
One weekend, I went to listen to a Yixi lecture, which is somewhat like a localized version of TED. There were many interesting people there, including an adorable scholar who had lived in Russian forests for years to save endangered owls, an artist exploring the remnants of ancient temples in the folds of mountains and rivers, and an architect who makes his own books…
The one that left the deepest impression and that I liked the most was a psychologist named Wei Mingyi, who focuses on “seeking brevity”. I bought her book on the spot and got it signed by the author, and I finished reading it quite intensively this week. I really like her self-description as an “apprentice of anthropology”, delving deep into a group of workers who were expelled and confined by the glorious era of the Keelung Port in Taiwan, accompanying them, understanding their inner world and life perspective. The book doesn’t actually dwell much on depicting hardships. They had their glorious times and experienced the decline of being abandoned by the era, still far from many truly impoverished groups.
What’s shocking is that this group of people seemed to be quickly forgotten in just a few years due to some changes in political and economic directions. It’s as if that period of the “sleepless city” never belonged to them, yet they have to spend most of their lives making society accept them again. At the same time, they also have to re-recognize themselves. To the outside world, they seem to be a group of “useless” people who were abandoned for “not working hard enough”. No one has ever seriously listened to their voices, and they have gradually learned to be silent.
History always decides what should be recorded according to its own (or some political) standards. They are the brushstrokes that have been overlooked, yet the true sense of history often lies beyond historical records, in those buried memories. Our current era is the same, with too many things that cannot be spoken of or discussed. Those are precisely the true voices of the era.
The writing style reminds me of a Taiwanese film I watched before, “A Sun”. Many dialogues, monologues, and long shots seem to present many traces of life as they are, probably a unique style of Taiwan, narrating slowly. I’ve become very interested in some Taiwanese lifestyles and era characteristics, and next I want to watch a drama I’ve wanted to see for a long time, “Workers”.
I’m particularly interested in this point because during my junior and senior high school years, due to my father’s work, I had the experience of living in employee dormitories with some of his apprentices. At that time, most of my roommate brothers hadn’t finished or hadn’t even started high school before coming to a strange city to struggle, hoping to learn a skill to seek a place in a foreign land.
In that era when smartphones and short videos were not yet popular, perhaps because the nights were too long, they always needed to find a place to kill time after work. I was also brought into their life circle a few times. Sometimes we would go to an indoor roller skating rink and play for hours, sometimes we would chat in a corner of a bustling square, and sometimes we would just watch Ultraman all night in the room using an old DVD player. I was very young at that time, and naturally, my interactions and communications with them were not deep. Later, with various changes, we no longer kept in touch.
Thinking about it now, more than ten years later, they were only eighteen or nineteen at that time, but seemed to have a maturity beyond their age. At such a young age, they needed to find their place in this bustling city, yet had to face a life of rushing around, loneliness, and a sense of alienation from society. Perhaps only the free time at night could make them truly feel something that belonged to them. Later, I inquired a bit about their lives afterward. Some went back to their hometowns, doing some small businesses; some continued to struggle in Hangzhou, changing from one place to another, seemingly still unable to achieve the life they wanted. Just as described in the book, they wouldn’t blame this era, but rather attribute the unsatisfactory parts of life to themselves, and that’s all.
Personal Life Snapshot
My sister is on summer vacation, so she came to Beijing to play. Together with my senior, we went to Universal Studios. Although it was a weekend during the summer vacation, it wasn’t as crowded as imagined.
We got to play all the popular projects. During the “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey” project, my glasses flew off and haven’t been found yet, so I went to the optical city to get a new pair. I guess coming to the magical world, you have to leave something behind.
Other than that, it’s just the quiet flow of daily life, slow but beautiful. We met with Liangliang and other teachers who came to Beijing for an inspection, and talked about quite a lot of past events; we would occasionally explore some street corner restaurants, and also go to Yonghegong to listen to folk music on weekday nights, finding a moment of rest in the hustle and bustle; I would also pick up and drop off my senior from work during remote work breaks, chatting with the security guard at the door during the waiting intervals…
Perhaps it’s because my mindset has changed, my living state and the way I view life have also changed a lot. It’s hard to describe exactly, but generally, it’s filled with more beauty and kindness.
It’s been a long time since I showed Nini’s daily life. Now her fur is getting thicker and heavier, maybe I’ll take her for a bath and groom her fur next week.
Interesting Things and Objects
xLog
xLog is currently the main synchronization and backup platform for my own blog. Because I’m reluctant to part with the previous data statistics and accumulated Cusdis comments, I still haven’t been able to migrate the entire thing over. After the latest launch of the “Portfolio” feature, coupled with xSync, xFeed, and xChar, it has become a good personal Profile page for me, and I’m becoming more and more dependent on it.
This is my portfolio page: xlog.pseudoyu.com/portfolios
My senior’s blog had been using the Hashnode platform, which is also a simple and easy-to-use platform. But with the evolution of xLog’s features and the freedom given to creators, I still migrated it over. Apart from claiming CSB Token, the onboarding experience is already very good, and things like binding domains and umami parsing are also very convenient. I recommend friends who want to have their own blog to give it a try.
This is my senior’s blog: boyilu.com
During the migration and editing process, I read through everything again, and I still feel that text is the most comfortable and warmest way I can think of to understand and gradually get close to a person.
Personal Information Flow Synchronization System
Due to Railway officially closing its Free Plan on August 1st, the n8n synchronization system was down for two days. After some research, I ended up running it on my own VPS using Docker (a BandwagonHOST ThePlan, 2c2g, coupled with NginxProxyManager for reverse proxy, running most of my services that require data persistence). I also updated the version while at it, and continued the synchronization.
As of writing this weekly review, the Telegram channel has 536 subscribers, and gradually I’ve formed my own habit pattern of input and output. Although I’ve been using Twitter (now maybe we should call it X) less and less, it’s also reached 2000+ followers, which is a small milestone.
Open Source Budget
In a previous weekly review “Weekly Review #30 - Open Source Budget, Writing Intention, and Humility towards Technology”, I mentioned this:
In Randy’s article “I Set Up a Monthly $20 Open Source Donation Budget for Myself”, I saw his concept and attitude towards open source projects, which I found very interesting and inspired me to set up a similar open source budget for myself. The current setting is at least $20 (about 130 RMB) or equivalent value budget per month, flexibly choosing according to my daily use and tech stack. I will choose the following projects for donation:
- Independent bloggers and developers who have inspired me
- Projects that I often use when doing side projects and have solved very practical problems
- Some interesting open source tools and services that I use frequently
Previously, I had been regularly sponsoring reorx on GitHub Sponsor. This month, after Randy released Cusdis Pro and Notepal, I started sponsoring Randy.
๐ I’m sponsoring @randyloop for his passion and dedication to open-source. His products, blogs and podcasts really bring inspiration to my growth as a programmer and life learner.
Nuphy
I occasionally write some efficiency tool articles, and unexpectedly, I was contacted by Nuphy official to test the Nuphy Air60 keyboard. It’s lightweight and has a high aesthetic value, I plan to carry it with me when I go out.
Others
I feel like many interesting things happened, but because they’ve accumulated to a monthly scale, it’s hard to recall them all at once. I’ve started concentrating on learning Japanese, working on a tutorial set, and have many article topics I want to write about. I hope I can gradually fill these gaps in the future.
Input
Although most interesting inputs are automatically synchronized in the “Yu’s Life” Telegram channel, I’ll still select some to list here. It feels more like a newsletter now.
Books
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the description is very beautiful, and the protagonist’s perspective has a kind of detachment from the world that I really like. The ending is calm yet unexpected. But unfortunately, I read this book over several months, mostly on planes or high-speed trains. Coupled with the setting of two parallel world lines, there’s a strong sense of discontinuity in the plot. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to read it carefully again.
- The Silent Workers, I have quite a few thoughts on this, which I wrote in the first part.
Articles
[List of article titles omitted for brevity]
Videos
Here are some interesting videos I’ve watched:
[List of video titles omitted for brevity]
Podcasts
[List of podcast titles omitted for brevity]
Music
[List of music titles omitted for brevity]
TV Series
- Tokyo Love Story, re-watching.
- The Disguiser, because I still quite like this group of people from Nirvana in Fire, I’ve marked it for a long time, and found a weekend to watch it intensively.
Related Posts
