4.8

Date: 04/08/2023 Last edited time: April 9, 2023 9:58 PM Weather: ☁️Cloudy

The Internet is becoming our echo chamber. That is true. But anyone who is not satisfied with it, who goes out of their comfort zone to broaden their views, deserves respect, not hindrance.

Twitter does not allow anyone like or retweet Substack’s this tweet, nor my quoted retweet of it.

I felt sad for Twitter. It had to go out of its way to stop people from turning away.

Elon Musk promised it to be ‘open’, but social media can never be too closed — they want to close people inside them. It is a place where people only see what they agree with. If you already agree with it, why would you try to think otherwise? It is such a comfortable cage that you want to stay there forever.

I recall the Eagles’ Hotel California:

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

And all social media want to be our Hotel California.

While I use Twitter from time to time (for cute and sexy illustrations), I do not think it is good to be caged by it.

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Steam banned my review of Glare1more. When I read it again tonight, I thought it might be because I put the link to the developer’s home page.

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I happened to use Substack for a minute or two. I wanted to find a new place to put my writings in, and I searched everywhere.

Hatena, Medium, Note, Substack, Blogger, Ghost, and the list goes on.

Depending on my mood, sometimes I write in Chinese. And when I do, I want it to look good. These blogs share a feature, “What you see is what you get”. So, when I saw Chinese characters stand out like Yao Ming among some kindergarten kids, I knew everyone would see the same. It hurts my eyes so much that I want to cry.

It takes no effort to give Chinese characters a closer look to Japanese ones, so they look good side by side.

But none of them cares.

Or it is just me — my computers and my phone use English because I prefer everything to be in the same language. And being English, they do not know about Chinese characters, so they do their best — which is another way of saying do their worst.

Using English on my phone also hurts me in a way I haven’t thought of:

I bought most of my Japanese books through Bookwalker. But Bookwalker must be unhappy with me using English — it does not want to show the Japanese books but its translated books in stead. I like reading books or playing games in their original languages. And it’s 12pm now. I missed Duolingo’s booster. I will get it tomorrow.

The restaurant that I wanted to visit closes on Saturdays — I will be back…

I had hot pot with my roommate for dinner. Recently we ate together twice, but not in the last two years. That is something notable.

After dinner I went to school — I feel it better than spending time at home, looking at social media. If only I could read books at home.