About Me, and This Blog

Opening - What are you doing?

Hello everyone, I’m Niracler, and this is my personal blog. My writing targets and audience are as follows:

• My future self in ten years: I hope you’ll exclaim, “How could this person have done such foolish things!”
• Fellow cyber neighbors: To let you know, “Ah, so there’s such a person in this world, doing these boring things and living this kind of life.”

Work & Skills? - Jack of All Trades, Master of None

Standing before you is a wizard with four years of experience, not a software development engineer 😂

• University: Software Engineering. Had no interest in frontend/backend so went into machine learning, later found it hard to get a job.
• Job 1 (1Y): Node.js backend. Learned TypeScript for the interview, but mainly did operations and coordinated with clients on-site.
• Job 2 (2.5Y): Shell development. Called myself a “21st century Shell engineer,” working on the open-source project x-cmd, accumulated quite a few Shell tricks~~ ( As for contributions, probably not even 5%, the BOSS was too strong )
• Job 3.5 (1M): Pure Node.js backend development, but the company laid people off after just one month, and I was optimized out.
• Job 4 (1Y, ongoing): IoT-related application development, mainly writing various plugins. Daily work with Node.js/Python. Solo development, haven’t attended work meetings yet.

What Topics Do I Write About? - Quite a Mess

Classified by Tags:

• Monthly Notes: Stream-of-consciousness entries, making up most of the site’s content. Originally weekly notes, but procrastination turned them into monthly notes, even trending toward biannual notes.
• TIL: Writing short pieces about recently learned configurations, scripts, and pitfalls. Or various command-line, scripting, and knowledge management reproducible practices. Usually very specific scenarios with high temporal relevance and low generalizability. (Recently I lean more toward “DeepSearch + manual fine-tuning” approach)
• Reviews: Mainly ACG works. When I really love something, I’ll write a piece to record it. For short reviews, I usually write on Douban. (But writing long introductory recommendations is too exhausting, haven’t written any in a while!)
• DeepSearch: Marking the dividing point between Vibe-Writing and Myself-Writing. This dividing point seems quite blurry to me.
• Many other tags, welcome to check out the tags page~ (I should probably build tag descriptions into the tags page later)

Classified by Navigation (Header):

• Home: Features a quote from Sasaki from Haruhi series. To make it more impactful, I left only this quote on the homepage. (Though probably 95% of people who only watched the TV version don’t know who Sasaki is 😂)
• Updates: I write serious blog posts when I’m being earnest, but daily musings go on my Telegram channel. So I made a page that syncs to the blog, implementation inspired by the BroadcastChannel project. The advantage is that others can browse without needing a VPN.
• Manga Memes: A manga screenshot collection I maintain with friends. Initially for posting memes on Telegram, later we thought we should make a web version for easy searching and sharing. Data stored in Cloudflare D1 database, managed through the mangashot2bot project.
• Favorites: The true “natural history” part of this blog called “Niracler’s Natural History,” recording various things and resources I think are worth recommending.
• Self-explanatory: Articles, Tags, Friends probably don’t need explanation~ (Getting a bit overwhelming, might add more later)

Present and Next Steps

• This year’s focus is probably “A Cyborg’s Quest to Become Human” - these three months before Spring Festival are the final sprint phase.

How to Interact

• Where to find me: Mainly on Telegram, or email works too? Comments here are fine too? My blog footer has info for all my platforms.
• Welcome to chat: If possible, I hope to chat with someone behind a cute avatar.

Hobbies - Mainly ACG?

Mainly gaming, manga, anime, reading, and chatting with others. Many are outdated and might need updating

Gaming

I love playing games and really want people to play co-op with me. But I instinctively resist competitive games, so I don’t play popular competitive games like League of Legends, Honor of Kings, or PUBG, and I don’t play MMORPGs either. I mostly play cooperative creation/management games like Minecraft. According to Steam statistics (where most of my games are), my gaming hours in college were about 300 hours.

In my working years, I bought all sorts of gaming consoles like Switch/Xbox/Steam Deck. One person can’t handle all of them! I really wish someone could borrow and play them, otherwise it feels like a waste. Both me and my Steam family members are the “buy but never play” type 😂.

• Nintendo Switch: SW-6834-9780-4695

Anime and Manga

For anime and manga, I mainly consume for entertainment without deep analysis. I’ve probably watched most of what others can name. In high school, I watched over 200 anime series and read about 300+ manga. Haven’t kept statistics since college. You can check my Douban records.

• Douban: niracler
• bangumi: nini’s time machine Rarely use this anymore

Reading

Surprisingly, I might prefer listening to audio. In college, I listened to audio for over 800 hours. This came from the distance between our dorm and academic areas - three daily round trips totaling one hour, so I developed the habit of listening to various weird audio content on the road. Though if classmates were around, I’d prioritize chatting with them.

For reading, about one book per month, usually not technical books but mainly literary classics, mostly during the audio listening time mentioned above. I listened to many Western classics like “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Gone with the Wind,” “The Metamorphosis,” “Perfume,” etc. But mainly for entertainment without deep plot analysis.

I’ve been subscribing to Duku magazine (you can find my reviews of Duku elsewhere?)

Character Profile?

Extended Character Profile - Very Casual and Subjective

During my 2024 job search, I did many “priced” self-introductions, constantly emphasizing my value. But after getting hired, my first task was writing an article purely introducing myself. This value-neutral self-introduction actually made me feel more troubled.

How can you see Earth’s shape while standing on Earth? After all, being in it, we often look at ourselves with a microscope, seeing only life’s wrinkles, but finding it hard to summarize ourselves with one curve. I once wrote a self-introduction on xlog, but looking back, even I couldn’t help but complain: “Who is this person?”

I’ve always dreamed of being like a novelist, designing a worldview and the characters within it. Perhaps I should start with my own character design.

I’ve been recording various points along the way. These points may intersect and have causal relationships, but I don’t want to dig too deep for now:

1. Reality-escaping optimism: I inherited my mother’s personality, naively thinking I’m lucky, when I’m actually just foolishly optimistic. Never seriously considered buying cars/houses or finding someone to marry, always thinking things will work out. Five years since graduation, only age has increased. (Diagnosed as living in the moment with no future plans )

2. Inappropriate expectations of myself: Should I say it’s greed? Want to do everything but can’t do anything well - classic case of high expectations, low ability. Being a tool enthusiast is probably a manifestation of this personality. That’s why being a novelist sounds appealing - you can just imagine without actually doing. (Diagnosed as fantasizing about being a manga protagonist )

3. Need to draft before speaking: In face-to-face communication, I pay too much attention to others’ thoughts, causing my CPU to burn out and crash into incoherent speech. I even needed to write talking points before 1-on-1s with my boss, and once scared him by sending the script in advance. (Diagnosed as lack of adaptability and fear of mistakes, too little offline life )

4. Don’t like trends: If I discover a work after it becomes popular, I probably won’t like it. Often I only start watching when the hype dies down. A goddess I really liked recommended “Kill la Kill” multiple times, but I only watched it eight years later. I wrote a related thoughts article before. (Diagnosed as can’t compete with others, can only find niche directions )

5. Love long-form stories: I don’t really like movies because they’re too short - finished too quickly without time to explore interesting points. I have a habit of accidentally spending an entire evening finishing a monthly manga that’s been serialized for over ten years. It feels like taking a cyber-tourism trip to another world. (Diagnosed as want to go to another world, but only want to, don’t want to take risks )

6. Absolutely no concept of money: Hard to explain why, probably related to reality-escaping and greed mentioned earlier. Combined with my previous writing on People X Community X Things, I’m almost becoming a consumerist blogger. Do you get the feeling that my money falls from the sky? Understanding one’s capacity and limits - I never figured this out before (Diagnosed as read too much Shaoshupai, easily controlled by shopping trends )

7. Chatterbox: Once encountering topics of interest, I’ll talk endlessly. Welcome everyone to chat with me. (Diagnosed as lonely, starts preaching endlessly when finding potential believers )

8. Love making things happen: I rarely feel bored. My life is already packed with hobbies and interests, with so many things I want to do that I can only randomly pick what to do. Perhaps this was the source of pain and struggle in my previous job. When hanging out with friends at parties, I always think, “When will this end? The boss at home is waiting for me to fight.” Every day, I arbitrarily decide on many things, then abandon many things. Rinse and repeat. (Diagnosed as only living in my own world, only seeing myself )

9. Acting on intuition: Yes, the type who buys computer parts and tries to assemble them without reading instructions, even for the first time. Always doing things with “I reckon, I think” approach. When gaming, I like to look up best practice guides from the start and copy them. (Diagnosed as empty head with no original thoughts )

10. Poor coordination: If I have to follow others’ pace in doing things, I feel very uncomfortable. Hard to work on others’ projects with them, hard to accept having my thinking follow others. (Diagnosed as don’t know how to maintain distance with people )

11. Super timid: I’m the type who drives slowly and very conservatively, the opposite of courage. Usually only do 50% difficulty tasks when I have 200% capability. So often it becomes using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. (Diagnosed as armchair strategist )

12. All talk: The type who’s enthusiastic about making plans but not implementing them. (Should I say super J personality? I hate when people say “I’ll come over this weekend”)

13. Built-in deception attribute: Though often speaking honestly, this person often even deceives themselves (Diagnosed as hidden barriers of the heart, can’t face the real self ).

14. No sense of responsibility: More inclined to follow personal desires than responsibility. For example, more inclined to slack off a few more minutes than meet work deadlines.

15. Vain with strong self-esteem: Unnecessarily strong self-esteem, plus a bit like persecution complex.

In summary, an otaku fantasizing about getting a manga protagonist’s script. Before job hunting, when hearing news about job search difficulties and economic downturn, I always thought, “That definitely won’t happen to me.” But in interviews, I couldn’t express any advantages. (Diagnosed as just an ordinary person )

Anyway, I think you need to understand yourself clearly before you can change yourself. Just like “you need to start budgeting to gradually see your assets and spending habits.” So I occasionally record my choice tendencies.

MBTI has both criticized and praised aspects. It acknowledges that different people can be different - introverts have their way of living and extroverts have theirs. But conversely, it also seems to say “you are this type of person, you can’t change,” which I don’t agree with.

Afterword

Did I say too much? (Diagnosed as chatterbox)