It’s the end of October again, and the weather has finally started to cool. Even Guangdong, a province that only knows summer and autumn, now calls for two layers of clothing (though it’ll bounce back to the thirties in November). A long time ago I wanted to write one post a month to record life or something “just saying” definitely doesn’t count as an article, but lately I only enjoy reading other people’s pieces; when I open the editor myself I have no idea where to begin. Looking back at old posts, there aren’t really any life-recording ones—mostly just notes on little programs that seemed interesting. This article took a whole day to squeeze out, but it’s finally done. So let this be the start of a new series.

Life

During National Day I planned to go home from school and spend two days on anime, two on American dramas, two reading books, and the last day heading back. In reality my family dragged me out for three days of fun, one day of barbecue, and two days lying on the sofa scrolling my phone. Of the seven-day break, the only thing of value was a handful of photos I took while out. I followed a Xiaohongshu color-grading tutorial at home—turned out okay XD.

Mid-October I swapped SIM cards, from China Un-unable to China Mobile-but-not-really. Just updating phone numbers in all the apps took three days. As for changing the website filing info, although Tencent Cloud says to update promptly, the campus print shop doesn’t seem to have ink pads for fingerprints, and buying a whole box just for one use feels wasteful (I can’t give a thumbprint instead of signing my finals, right?). Besides, the old number can still receive texts, so I’ll leave the filing change for winter break when I’m home.

A few days ago I bought a browser extension that lets you take notes on web pages and archive them. Pretty handy—maybe I’ll write an intro post to pad things out in a few days.

Website

Lately I’ve been browsing other people’s blogs on my phone and noticed that my own article pages load unbelievably slowly. On desktop it’s fine, but on mobile you stare at a white screen for three or four seconds before anything appears. At first I thought the server hadn’t been rebooted in ages or the log files were too big (once before, every asset had a one-second TTFB until I cleaned the logs), but clearing them didn’t help. Eventually I found that a CDN for a certain resource had died, and the whole page was waiting for it. I moved the resource to COS, rewrote all my custom JS from scratch, optimized the logic, and changed code-highlighting and other onload functions to load only when actually needed. Article pages should now open instantly on mobile.

My free Tencent Cloud student server expires on December 15 this year (probably). I still have my Alibaba student qualification unused, but filing again is pure agony, so I’ll most likely switch to Tencent’s Lighthouse instance: 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 8 Mbps for only 74 yuan a year—too good to pass up, slurp slurp.

Games

Last year’s annual summary said I’d finish a horror game this year. After stumbling along these past few days I finally cleared Outlast 2, fulfilling last year’s unfinished plan.

Plans

• Make a New-Year re-skin for this theme (?); folder already created, should finish before New Year.
• Rename all the CSS variables in the theme—the old names are hideous.
• Raise a cat 🐱

Ending

I never know how to end posts, so everyone please stay warm and take care of your health.