Small talk before the actual recap
Another year is almost over.
The end of this year felt very different from the last few. Instead of the familiar slogans about fighting the pandemic, what I saw everywhere was people collectively sharing infection stories and recovery tips. It was strangely lively.
I got infected on the third day after returning home from school, so by now I’m already part of that first batch that got sick and recovered.
I had wanted to write this recap sometime in the middle of the month, but first I kept waiting to see whether the platforms I use would release their own yearly summaries. In the end, one platform only put theirs out around Christmas, and a couple of others didn’t show up until the 29th. So this post ended up being written pretty late.
To be honest, this year mostly felt like muddling through. A lot of time was spent just getting by, and much of it didn’t feel especially meaningful—other than learning new things here and there. So there isn’t going to be some grand, overflowing year-end reflection.
Blog and site work
I didn’t do much this year.
Part of the reason was that instant messaging apps swallowed up a lot of my attention—Telegram, mainly. Part of it was the usual habit of opening Bilibili whenever I had nothing better to do. And part of it was that I genuinely didn’t have much free time, especially with how much of the year was spent under school restrictions.
As a result, the lab site—the one you’re reading now—only got two new posts this year.
That said, the drafts folder is still sitting there with 12 unfinished articles. I do intend to work through them gradually.
The main site also went through a rebuild. I moved it away from a PHP-based Typecho setup and rebuilt it as a fully static Jekyll site. The server was close to expiring, I didn’t have the money to renew it, and it also felt like the right moment to delete a number of incomplete posts and low-value filler pieces. The idea now is to turn it into a more focused technical site. Realistically, I’ll probably change frameworks again at some point.
As for the older content, it has already been archived elsewhere, and I plan to make it available again when the time is right.
Since a new year deserves a slightly different look, I also spent the past couple of days tweaking the lab site itself—switching over to a Nord-style color scheme, adding a few sidebar widgets, and generally messing around with the presentation.
Devices I ended up with
One unexpected development this year was getting a laptop.
Originally, I had assumed I would wait until after the 2023 college entrance exam to buy one, because the old ThinkPad I’d been given could still hold out for a while. But after I mentioned it at home, a new device somehow appeared near the end of summer vacation.
The ThinkPad is mostly gathering dust now. I should probably find a way to put it back to work soon.
After about two months of back-and-forth, I also bought a TicWatch Pro from someone in a group chat. It only arrived close to the end of the year, but so far it has been fine.
The bad news is that my phone—the one that had already been buzzing along for three years—took serious damage near the start of December. After being dropped twice, the back cover was basically wrecked, the screen picked up heavy scratches, some parts of the touchscreen occasionally stopped responding, and even the orientation sensor broke for a while. It still works, somehow, but the whole situation left me thinking a lot.
At one point, after a lot of frustration, my parents finally lost patience and smashed the phone onto the concrete. The back was ruined beyond recognition. It had already been damaged before, so this became the worst-injured device I own, and yet it still kept functioning. Honestly, that feels like a miracle.
I can’t deny that I should be focusing on studying. The problem is that I really haven’t managed to control myself very well. With less than half a year left before the exam, I was still wasting time, and I do understand where my parents’ anger came from. There isn’t really any trade-in value left in the device now, and there isn’t spare money at home, nor do I have any myself. So there’s no point indulging unrealistic ideas about replacing it. Better to stay practical and keep using it for as long as it survives.
Games that came and went
I still didn’t seriously commit to any one game this year.
Every now and then I opened Minecraft, looked around the old skyblock builds I had made before, and messed around for a while.
I dropped Cytoid because I no longer had the time to keep working on charts. Early in the year, I also tried Phigros, which kept showing up in recommendations. By around August, though, I quit that too for basically the same reason.
Around that same period, I picked up Project Sekai: Colorful Stage!, partly because a bunch of people in one of my groups were playing it. It was decent, but there was one annoying problem: devices made by Huawei and its former sub-brand seem to have a tendency toward touch input drops in rhythm games, which made things frustrating at times.
Then there was the song library. I’m not especially familiar with Japanese music, so there weren’t many tracks I already knew. Still, for a rhythm game, that wasn’t always a deal-breaker. Most of the time I just played the songs I recognized.
The funny part was the scoring system. No matter how high my Perfect rate was, I never got a grade above B. I only learned from a friend later—after complaining about it in my profile—that the rating system didn’t really matter much anyway.
On the laptop, the only game I installed was Minecraft. Even though the world save could be synced with the Bedrock version, I still never got around to copying it over.
I’ve also been thinking for ages about redesigning my Minecraft skin, but I still haven’t actually done it. Maybe in the next couple of days.
Music habits this year
At this point, my music app has practically turned into an English-song player.
I still listen to some Japanese songs from time to time, and now and then I go back to older Chinese songs from the 2000s or even earlier. But when it comes to a lot of current releases, I usually pass. Older songs are still much more my thing.
The annual listening summary this year was interesting to look at, though it also felt a little questionable in places.
Fediverse: the place I actually kept returning to
One of the more important shifts this year was that I properly returned to the Fediverse.
At first, it was partly a practical refuge—a place to avoid the risk of accounts and channels suddenly getting hit—and partly something more personal. I reactivated an account I had registered back in 2021 and started using it more seriously as a kind of replacement for my Telegram channel. Instead of treating it as an archive, I began posting more day-to-day content there.
I also experimented with a local bot setup using RSSHub and feediverse to forward Telegram channel content to Mastodon. That became my first bot account in the Fediverse.
Later, after seeing someone mention WriteFreely, I impulsively made an account there too. I kept getting stuck on what to write in the profile and never really started posting, though I still intend to move some articles over.
When I had to return home because of a suspected case at school, my Fediverse activity increased sharply. I was checking in almost every day, and after being down for nearly a month, the forwarding bot started working again.
Over time, I ended up with a second Mastodon account on another instance, though I hardly use it now. I also became curious about a Misskey instance I had heard about, wanted to register out of pure exploratory interest, asked around for an invite, and initially got no response.
I began following a number of familiar people who had left Twitter for the Fediverse, which made the place feel more alive and less like a side experiment.
On the client side, I spent a while testing different Android apps for Mastodon and eventually settled on the beta version of Tusky, gradually replacing the long-unmaintained app I had been using before.
With help from a friend, I finally got an invite to the Misskey instance I had been eyeing. After some basic setup and a little exploration, I decided to use that account as a separate space for more technical posts. That also helped me meet some new people.
A few days later, after more trial and error with relay scripts and forwarding tools, I launched another bot on a Misskey instance and separated the Telegram forwarding function from the earlier bot, since the Telegram-to-Mastodon side of things never felt ideal. The old bot is idle for now, with other plans reserved for it.
After that, Fediverse use became part of daily life, which is probably why there isn’t some dramatic ending to this section.
Looking back, what drew me there wasn’t just curiosity. More than that, it was the desire for a space with more freedom, less dependence on a handful of giant companies, and more room to choose how and where to exist online. Watching the upheaval around Twitter only reinforced that feeling. The Fediverse gave me alternatives—and with them, a wider view of the internet.
Tech plans, mostly still plans
I still can’t honestly say I studied anything in a truly serious way this year.
I’ve wanted for a long time to properly fill in the gaps in the so-called front-end trio—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—because my knowledge of them has stayed pretty superficial. But I never managed my time well enough to do it, which meant the React plans I had in mind got pushed back too.
Next year, the goal is to finally work through those basics properly, try out a range of front-end frameworks, and eventually settle on one that feels natural enough to keep using. Time is always the excuse, but like squeezing water from a sponge, there’s usually some to be found if I really make the effort.
Back-end work, meanwhile, remains untouched.
My current thought is to start with scripting languages such as Python, do something practical with them first, and then move on to C++ and Java later. That part may end up being a next-year problem.
Communities, interests, and where my attention went
If there’s one platform that best reflects the circles I’ve been hanging around and the kind of content I consume, it’s probably Bilibili.
The broad categories weren’t surprising: games, technology, and the occasional absurd but entertaining remix content—though not the especially cursed kind. What I still don’t understand is why the videos I watch while eating got classified as “lifestyle.” Then again, algorithmic summaries are never fully accurate.
I didn’t spend much time reading or watching major science fiction works in any systematic way, but I still kept in touch with the scene and had a general sense of what was going on.
For one sci-fi project I’m involved with, I only managed to finish a single commissioned article. I’ve had several ideas sitting in my head, but I haven’t found the time to shape them into something coherent enough to discuss with others.
I also came up with a near-future setting of my own. I’ll probably share it soon.
As for Science Fiction World, I barely see it in the school bookstore anymore. Maybe sales were too low, or maybe the school itself had something to do with it. Either way, the good news is that I found an electronic version.
The TGCN circle, like many others, has its share of internal messiness. But that is also how communities work: once a group gets large enough, all kinds of people show up, and some amount of chaos becomes inevitable.
A smaller internal group I was in has nearly gone inactive after several incidents. Every now and then someone remembers it exists and says a few words, but that’s about it.
Another community space I watched went through repeated cycles of upheaval before gradually settling down. Whether that stability will last is anyone’s guess.
Still, all those changes taught me a few useful things that might matter if I ever help run a community myself:
- Member activity and overall quality matter enormously, because people are the real core of any group.
- Internal rules need to be complete enough to keep things functioning, but not so restrictive that members feel trapped.
- And there’s always more to learn from watching communities fail, recover, and reorganize.
This year I also officially became a Bilibili creator.
It was a fairly bold experiment for me, and by now it has almost been a full year. I haven’t gained much traction, but I’m still glad I tried.
At the same time, the technology category—especially anything related to operating systems, whether Windows versions or Linux distributions—feels increasingly driven by speed. The race is all about who can publish the first review or tutorial. Since I am, unfortunately, an expert at procrastinating, there was never much chance of me winning any first-to-post contest. Instead, I ended up sitting on drafts I was afraid to publish because I worried someone else had already covered the same topic. That left me with plenty of abandoned pieces. Maybe when I have the time, I can salvage a couple of them.
Ending the year
Time keeps moving, and somehow it’s already the start of another cycle.
The past year had its share of bitterness and relief, dull stretches and unexpectedly good moments. Now it’s over.
For the new year, I just hope I can do better than this one.