Please note that the opinions in my journal are actually very immature, and most of them have not been rigorously argued. Everyone can just take a look and have a laugh. If you have any resonance or anything to discuss, feel free to bring it up. Generally speaking, after thinking about it for a while, if I find it meaningful, I will write a separate article about it.
Challenge the Game of Reality#
Yes, this article is actually a challenge to real life.
Reality is a Terrible Game - Escaping is Useful but Shameful#
In my opinion, real life consists of 60% boredom, 35% pain, and 5% happiness. Comedy may be 70% happiness, 20% pain, and 10% boredom, while tragedy may be 60% pain, 20% happiness, and 20% boredom. When we cannot empathize with the happiness or pain in a play, that part of happiness or pain actually turns into boredom, making us feel that the play is not good. In my opinion, "removing almost all the boring parts" is the most attractive aspect of storytelling. After all, being not boring means being interesting. (Spoiler: This paragraph was just a casual remark, don't take it seriously 😄)
From a certain moment, I discovered that I am an escapism from reality. This may have started when I was about to graduate from college and was struggling to find a job in machine learning. I found that real life is actually much more challenging than I imagined. So after I graduated and started working, my time for learning outside of work basically stagnated. I bought various game consoles and games, and my free time was immersed in the world of ACG. Now it seems that this is a kind of escape from real life.
Just like many office workers in dramas, they go to bars to drink after work. And my behavior of indulging in reading comics after work is actually similar to "drinking". I am very addicted to the stories in the world of ACG because I find the life in the other world much more interesting than the life I am in. My life is composed of comics, which is not untrue. I have read almost all the comics that everyone has read (Spoiler: I probably have read about 400, the number of subscriptions in Tachiyomi is 415). It should be said that besides studying and working, my knowledge is basically related to ACG.
I have hardly touched apps like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, King of Glory, League of Legends, Weibo, or similar competitive games. I rarely watch TV dramas or movies, and I basically don't follow hot topics or have a lot of offline activities. So much so that I don't have the common sense of a normal person, and I am basically a cybernetic electronic person. And people naturally have many distractions, so when I'm developing, I often think about things in the other world. (Spoiler: I haven't thought very clearly about the solution to this point, maybe the key is to go out more)
Challenge to Earth Online - Setting Goals#
There is only one true heroism in the world, and that is to love life even after understanding its truth.
Yes, I don't want to be a person who uses alcohol to drown their sorrows. This week, I saw so many articles from the younger generation in xLog. They mentioned tools, especially various automation tools in life, such as n8n, toggl track, auto bangumi, and so on. This made me realize that "I have been somewhat out of touch", I am still stuck in the era of IFTTT~ (Actually, I have felt this way since last month, so I have been switching to different tools frequently). But I think I don't need to rush to introduce these things into my workflow, I want to understand the needs in my real life and introduce them one by one. After all, you can't become a fat person in one bite.
The Monthly Random Tasks are my challenge. I originally planned to organize them at the end of the month, but I decided to organize them while writing this weekly journal. This time, I reduced the ACG-related tasks to 7.6%, which used to be as high as 30%. Why "Random"? Because I have quite a few things I want to do, and randomness may sometimes bring some surprising tasks that can be done on the spot. Here are some key points about the Random Tasks:
- Time control within 60 hours: How much time can there be in a month? When I was playing Octopath Traveler, I could squeeze out 80 hours in 40 days. Basically, I would play the game after work. Now, I estimate that I can have 60 hours in 30 days.
- Have clear and measurable goals: It's actually the same principle of "forcing myself to output something to prove that I understand it".
- Tasks that are within reach: It's best to be things and problems encountered in work and life, because there needs to be demand in order to go deeper and be able to reuse and verify.
- Make progress every day: It can be sharing links to related knowledge points or reading comments. Start with something simple. I plan to create a daily repository to specifically store this progress, and then synchronize it to Telegram and Twitter (X?) using GitHub Action or n8n.
(Trello's Random list)
(Achievements in Octopath Traveler in one month)
Action is Key - How to Implement#
Theoretical successful people are not successful themselves. Yes, I am the kind of person who is enthusiastic about making plans.
So far, the framework for my work and growth has been established: Elegant Philosophy + Weekly Articles + Monthly Random Tasks. I probably won't write about these things for a long time. At this stage, I have talked too much and done too little. Now it's time to prove and fulfill these commitments through action. Doing things is much more important than planning. It should be:
- Weekly Reports: They should include the implementation of the Elegant Philosophy. This needs to move towards automation, with data generated automatically every week.
- Reports on Random Tasks: This includes the daily progress and a summary article on one Wednesday of the month.
Regarding the small practices this week.
Random Thoughts#
- I have resumed my streak of GitHub commits this week. It feels like I used to have it? I probably had it in college. After graduation, especially after finishing my graduation project, I stopped. But the slight change this time is that I have found a reason for the streak. I will write one or two small scripts for automation in my work every day.
- One big problem with writing weekly journals is that I can't record the thoughts of the day in fine granularity. Many times, when you finish a week and start summarizing, you have already forgotten some things, especially when you are in a relaxed state on the weekend, you can't empathize with the pain from Monday to Saturday. (Spoiler: But I never had the habit of writing about real-life events~)
- I don't think my diary on LangChain is actually useful. Because I understand that most of the time, my articles only output a small part of my thoughts, and most of them are logically flawed or incoherent.
- "Kamen Rider Saber" is the first Kamen Rider series that I have truly followed. It really is, the first time I felt like "Why hasn't the final episode aired yet? There are new characters again!" It's so addictive, why is the plot so long. But afterwards, I thought, "Oh, the story of that character hasn't been told yet," so it felt somewhat reasonable.
- I believe that my work is more interesting than 90% of the "screwdriver" type of jobs. How should I put it, what we do is actually very interesting. But after two years of regular 996 life, and even if you love something, it will gradually become dull after a long time of being together. So I gradually feel like a robot trapped in a loop in Westworld, and starting a startup is really tough.
- Roughly speaking, as a pure shell programmer, I have been doing it for almost two years, plus some miscellaneous things, can I be considered a small shell expert in China? (Spoiler: It doesn't exist, actually I think my understanding of shell is just a drop in the ocean)
News Reading#
I didn't read much news this week, or I didn't read a few news articles seriously~
- github-production-user-asset-6210df.s3.amazonaws.com: The storage service used in GitHub issues, it turns out to be AWS S3.
- Building Personalized Digital Diaries: Implementing Information Aggregation with Automation Workflows - raye~: Use this tutorial to automate with n8n.
Afterword#
This article turned out to be a bit difficult to write. I feel like I have been a bit incoherent in this weekly journal. It ended up taking a huge amount of time, but the benefit is that I have organized things that I originally planned to do at the end of the month. However, there are still many things that I haven't written about, such as Volume 6 of "No Game No Life" and "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya". These two works were actually the inspiration for starting this Random Tasks.
(Wrote for nearly seven hours with available materials)