Musings

This piece of news China detains woman over temple offerings for Japanese war criminals linked to Nanking massacre makes me think of a different story. In my story, the woman who honored a Japanese war criminal not because some religious belief, but simply because she grew up had been told a story by her parents or grandparents, that during the invasion, a japanese soldier saved their family and helped them flee....

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. – George Orwell Over the last several weeks, I have seen different words used in various Chinese news outlets to describe one thing: the lockdown. Of all the words and expressions that are invented, I like “静默管理” the best. It sounds like an oxymoron, but says a lot about the environment we are in. You can’t help but be remined of George Orwell’s concept of “Doublethink”:...

A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there’s nothing to learn. – Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You For people who is in love of the simplicty of Unix philosophy but have to use Windows on a daily basis, every minute of it feels like grinding. The issue with Windows is not that it doesn’t work, it works, for the most part....

The ultimate betrayal is to choose to write in another language. – Ha Jin I grow up reading a lot of books. I interested in wide range of domains and topics and tried my best to be a somewhat polygamous reader, but when I look back today, It seems that my preference of books is heavily skewed toward literature. I read much more literature especially modern Chinese literature than any other books combined together....

Eric Lengyel1 tweeted an incident he came across when updating his own website through FTP. You can read the twitter threads here if you feel like it. Long story short, he was trying to update the content of his site but due to some weird issue with Windows Explorer, he end up with a broken site and worse, without even knowing it until someone told him so. But the detail doesn’t matter here, and he is not trying to bash Windows or anything (although there are plenty of things to say in that regard), it is just yet another story to prove how broken mordern software has come to be....