I forgot to write a wrap-up for October, and somehow it’s already November.
At the end of my September notes, I had naively hoped I could carry that same mood into the school term:
希望开学以后，依然能保持现在这种心态吧。
That obviously did not happen. Since school started, my mental state has been fairly bad. I haven’t had much motivation to write, and more importantly, there hasn’t even been that much to write about. So this is going to be a loose, whatever-comes-to-mind kind of entry.
A new domain
I’ve used several domains over the years, and all of them included yingyu5658 in some form. The good thing about it was that it was casual enough that matching domains were easy to buy without spending much. The bad thing was also that it was too casual. People easily confused it with “English,” and honestly that’s not even a misunderstanding — it really did come from a random game ID I mashed out as a kid. I really don’t want people calling me “English 5658” anymore.
A very long time ago, my blog had names like “yingyu5658’s blog,” “yingyu5658’s Blog,” and “yingyu5658’s General Store.” Looking back, all of them were generic and careless, but the last one is the one I understand the least. It gives me the same secondhand embarrassment as old middle-school social media posts. Though to be fair, I don’t think I really had a chuunibyou phase — or maybe it ended before I turned ten.
Later on, I forced a meaning onto the word “yingyu”: 映屿. At the time my domain was yingyu5658.me, so at least the two matched. I do have to admire myself a little there. Being able to stitch together something that actually sounds visual and elegant out of a random old handle was not a bad save, so I kept using it. But yingyu5658 always felt too conspicuous, especially the meaningless numbers at the end.
Around the twentieth, I was cleaning up my RSS subscriptions and noticed how good everyone else’s domains looked. That was when I seriously started thinking about changing mine.
The first requirement was that it had to be short. A domain is the first impression visitors get. Someone in the blog circle chat helped come up with “inyu.” It was short, yes, but still too arbitrary. I thought it might work better if translated into English, so I settled on a few candidates:
- HueIsle
- ShineIsle
- GlowIsle
First, Hue. It leans too much toward color and tone. It emphasizes “colors being reflected,” so the focus becomes the color rather than the “reflection” part. Pass.
Then ShineIsle. Too direct. It carries a strong upward, energetic brightness that doesn’t match the style I want. Pass.
So in the end, Glow made the most sense. It suggests a soft light, a kind of sheen or faint radiance. Gentler than Shine, and more fitting than Hue.
For the extension, I considered .zone, .me, and .com. I still went with .me in the end, because it fits a personal blog better.
After a lot of messing around with DNS settings and redirects, the switch finally went through. Search engine indexing and rankings are not something you can rush, though, so all I can really do is keep submitting the sitemap.
A new theme
Before this, I was using a homemade theme modeled after Typecho’s default style. I liked the two-column layout and the profile section, but after thinking about it more carefully, I started to suspect that the sidebar itself was just bad design for my site.
For one thing, my blog doesn’t have a structured knowledge system behind it, so categories aren’t all that useful to readers. They don’t deserve their own permanent space in a sidebar. And then there was the recent posts section, which was probably the biggest flaw of all. A user can just move the mouse a little and see new posts anyway, so why waste valuable space on something so redundant?
I’ve seen some bloggers put personal info in the sidebar, and I wanted to try that too, until I realized I’m not actually good at introducing myself, and I rarely take photos. The only image I could really use as an avatar was the favicon, and that looked worse than having no picture at all. Besides, I believe readers care much less about who I am than about what I have to say.
So the sidebar on my old site was mostly unnecessary.
Because I kept adding things, changing things, and patching things over time, the CSS had swollen to more than two thousand lines, including a lot of dead code. Refactoring it would have been a nightmare, so I gave up on it entirely. I was tired of looking at that theme anyway.
I started looking for a truly minimal single-column theme — something like typo. But while trying to modify it, I ran into a bizarre problem: none of my changes did anything. Then I began wondering whether it was caused by how the theme was being imported. Maybe the issue came from a git submodule setup. But if I stopped referencing it that way, some components would no longer render properly, so that idea had to be dropped too.
In the end I chose BearNeo and made a few simple adjustments before putting it into use.
It matches what I think a blog should be: minimal, efficient, clear about what matters and what doesn’t. Readers are not here for a giant profile photo, falling cherry blossoms, mouse-click effects, background images, page-switch gimmicks, music players, trending lists from random websites, or the local weather. On top of that, it also has the kind of texture I want from a blog right now.
The newsgroup
On October 21, I posted a notice saying I would stop maintaining the newsgroup.
I simply don’t have the time, energy, or money to keep it going. At first I built it mostly just for fun, and only mentioned it once or twice in a few places. I didn’t expect so many people to be interested in this kind of internet-archaeology technology, or to actually join the discussions there. The number of posts was already close to two hundred.
If you search for “newsgroup” on Bing and flip back a page or two, you can still find posts and blog entries related to it. Maybe it ranks relatively high simply because almost nobody talks about this subject anymore.
All the posts on the server have been backed up. I’ll start it again at some point — maybe in a few months, maybe in a few years.
A new seat
At school, because I’m so inconspicuous, I apparently come across as a good student — or at least a well-behaved one. I’ve spent a long time sitting off in some remote corner.
Then two classmates got separated after making some kind of mistake that made the homeroom teacher very angry. I was moved into one of their seats.
Third row from the back.
This wasn’t a punishment. If anything, it was a promotion.
The three people in front of me, plus the four in the group to my right, are all near the top of the grade. The best of the best. The study atmosphere there is excellent. But obviously, I can’t blend into that group — not socially, and not academically. They’ve all been friendly to me, but I can still feel a subtle distance between us.
The more perfect they seem, the more clearly my flaws are reflected back at me. The stronger they are, the smaller I appear. Even if they have their own bad habits or shortcomings, those can be treated as quirks, something almost charming. If the same thing happens with me, it’s just a problem.
The two students directly in front of me are both math class representatives, and math is the subject I’m worst at.
One time I was excused from group running and stayed in the classroom to study on my own. I thought I would get a quiet thirty minutes. Instead, those two came back as well because they were helping a teacher and therefore had a legitimate reason not to go running. They were carrying a stack of math papers and started discussing them in class.
One of them is a girl, and whenever she’s happy, the last syllable of every sentence rises and stretches out. “Affected” would be too harsh a word, but it’s something close to that.
It grates on me.
That reminded me of the girl who used to sit behind me before the seat change. She always seemed happy, as if that was her permanent setting. Even when she ran into difficulty or something unfair happened, she would still say, in a voice as bright and musical as singing, with a confident smile on her face: “Aiya! I can’t do this anymore!”
Then all three math representatives were back, gathered around that girl’s desk — the one directly in front of mine — talking about grades. I could only keep my head down and work, because I knew I had absolutely nothing in common with their conversation. I didn’t dare look up. And they, with a kind of unspoken understanding, carried on as if I did not exist in the classroom at all, flipping through everyone’s papers and talking among themselves.
Three cheerful, outgoing people, all excellent in both academics and sports. Any one of them has a level of intelligence and physical ability that feels beyond imagination to me.
And there they were, laughing and talking right in front of me.
At the end
Keep living.
Stay alive.
Live like livestock if you have to.