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Previously on this blog: my objectives / adjustment; actual OKR #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11.
As I said last time, OKR is now much more difficult to write, mainly because those objectives are not that important to me anymore. I wondered whether I should adjust them once again like I did previously. Before I made the decision, I would like to write something about my thoughts about my recent life.
The keyword of my life recently is resist. I said publicly here how I resist social media (narrowly defined) 1. Resisting that basically is the same as resisting a huge chunk of the popular culture. But I am super happy about that. I equate anything trending on social media as banal as best and mass madness as worst. I rather try things that I might like and form my own opinion. I don’t need your opinion to be honest. We are living in a world where we have been constantly under surveillance, either by our so-called “friends” on the social media or big tech companies who are so eager to learn what you like and then ask you to buy rubbish. In this kind of world, I rather be alone. I am not asking for privacy, that’s a luxury in this world. When I was young, even if one were sort of popular, probably one has to tell less than ten people one’s whereabouts. But in this age, we are expected to announce to “the world” our whereabouts. Rather than this nonsense, I rather have some peace with less prying eyes.
There are other things I resist in my real life.
I resist the so-called “AI”. I am quite proud of myself that I have not used ChatGPT or their friends up to this point. I don’t allow myself to make any closed sourced “AI” in my own research agenda. I see more fundamental problems of “AI” (and machine learning in general) after reading Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI. She forced me to think about my role as a quote-and-quote researcher and the politics of classification. Every time I see a YouTube video or article with AI generated images, I skip.
I (try hard to) resist consumerism. In this year, I tried to buy only consumable items such as food and digital things, such as ebooks and game downloads. Even for that, I try to finish one before buying another. In the end, I broke once and brought one T shirt (sorry). I replaced a broken Moka pot and a broken keyboard.
Installing the old keycaps back to the new keyboard
I will be even more strict with my actions. You might ask me why. For one, I reread an old blog post of mine from 2018 and it’s about consumerism and the experience of dumping 95% of my stuff in Hong Kong when I moved to Germany. Five years after writing that, I deviated from what I have written quite a lot and it’s time to rectify it. Next, consumption, even just of food and no matter how the producers whitewash it, is carbon emission. As a person living in this part of the world, I’m already a high emitter. I don’t want to die in a flood or get killed for my little bottle of water.
There are many things that I have spent more time in them than my work and my “open source” things. Acquiring languages is still great. Reading is constantly a part of my life. The biggest change in 2024 was games, both board games and video games. Playing video games is now an easy way to bring me thrill and joy. I know that it is escapism, but it is the kind of escapism that I need. I had a really hard time in my career during the first half of 2024. My mental health sank. And playing video games brought me calm and helped me walk out of that darkness. Now, when I witness sometimes stupid in my work or in the so-called academia, internally there is a voice telling me: “Fuck, I’d rather play a video game.” 2 Then I will not care about that anymore.
I had an accident by the end of 2024 and was injured badly. I don’t want to recall the detail of the accident, but I am still feeling the repercussion of the injury. However, the one of the many things that I fondly remember from that accident is that, after my immediate treatment I went playing a video game. It’s silly but actually it was therapeutic, because it helped me to not think about the injury, the pain, and somehow it drove away the fear about the long term problems associated with the injury.
Another way that video games were important in my 2024 is that I enjoy developing video games. I wrote about it previously, so I don’t want to repeat here. The only update is that I am still developing the existing games (PIKR-033 and MASHINA G) as well as developing a new game. I know the receptions of those games because I have complete information on downloads and plays. I can safety say that my games are hugely unpopular. But that’s fine.
It also seems that I am not so happy with my work. 3 It might be the case, but at the same time I think that I have written one of the most refreshing papers I have ever written in 2024 (hopefully it will be out soon. But it will be presented in a way in mid 2025. If you know what I am talking about, you know when. If you don’t know, you don’t know.) So, it is like life: It’s complicated.
After writing this much, whether I do the OKR or not is not that important. But some would like to know what I am up to, so my decision is to keep writing about them. Here are the lists:
Think out loud
- MASHINA G is released, or a blog post about the German language
- Mastodon: A Consolatio
- A note about a bug in irr::kripp.alpha()
- Ubuntu to Fedora and back
- Miscellaneous talk #44 Without social media, a month later
- Miscellaneous talk #45 reasonable request, Genitiv, otherness, C2, two-leg chair, Leib, Ten Watch, Foreign, Italiano
- How I prepare ICA papers (version 2024): Style
Contribute to open source
- rio 1.2.3
- minty 0.0.4
- readODS 2.3.1
I have also contributed some code to text2vec and icr.
Publish top papers
- Schoch, D., Chan, C. H., Wagner, C., & Bleier, A. (2024). Computational reproducibility in computational social science. EPJ Data Science, 13(1), 75.