2026-04-30 05:55:00
I care a lot about privacy. I always advocate for services that don't collect or sell data. I use VPNs, ad blockers, and am usually careful about sharing too much stuff about me online. This blog goes against that third point, and most of what I write is directly related to myself.
Unfortunately, I love talking about things (and myself). The stuff that I post on this blog could dox me or allow people who were interested to build a profile of me. I think about it often when I see the sorts of stuff that other people post on Bear, and in my head I know that 95% of the time it's probably not a big deal to be a little more specific about your personal life.
This results in a dilemma where I have some super cool and interesting (I think) topics but don't want to share them because it's personally identifiable information. I have my age in my Discord about me, I have my timezone and I have a link to this blog too. Those are things that would make it very easy for people to find out more about me—without me even knowing who they are.
I don't want to be saying that you should never speak about yourself online ever, use a fake name, email, birthday, address, job, etc. However, I'm also saying I think it's probably a bad idea to go around posting pictures of your house, or sharing your daily commute, or videos of your car with the license plate unblurred.
Since the rise of Facebook and its push for using real names and identities online, some people see it as weird to use a pseudonym in place of their legal name. In the past year or so, governments around the world have been increasingly pushing for the removal of digital privacy, and the linking of personal profiles and internet accounts. I don't like this at all, and I feel that people have the right to be anonymous online, no matter who they may be. Any information about themselves that someone chooses to reveal should be the only things you can learn about a person.
Privacy is a human right, and companies shouldn't have the ability to strip you of that right for their own monetary gain. The things I post about on my blog are the things I choose to share, and not things that I have to share. Sure, they may give information about myself away, but I have the ability to remove posts, and more simply, to not write about things that could lead to that.
2026-04-30 05:11:24
as i grew through my adult years, one thought has been running through my head over and over again:
"how much have humans been sacrificing in the name of 'convenience'?"
that word... the word "convenience" has become my least favorite word in the english language. i can't stand it. so many things that are bad for humans' social lives, health, and well-being, are consistently used because they're "convenient". why bother going to the brick-and-mortar store? amazon is more "convenient". why bother cooking a nice meal for yourself? doordash and uber eats are more "convenient". why go out and socialize with people? facebook is more "convenient". why use a digital camera, camcorder, or polaroid? your smartphone is more "convenient". why bother going to the theater or concerts? netflix and spotify are more "convenient". why bother making art? asking an AI to generate it for you is more "convenient".
well, i say nuts to that. from now on, i'm going to make my life as inconvenient as possible. i'm going to go to the store and buy stuff in person. i'm going to make my own food with my own hands. i'm going to socialize with people face-to-face. i'm going to use a true camera instead of my phone's camera. i'm going to buy blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs instead of streaming. i'm going to take my time when creating, watching, playing, and reading a work of art.
i don't want to sound high-and-mighty with this. you're not a bad person for using streaming services. but not only are these "convenient" systems costing more money, they're costing humans' social lives and life skills, the most important things that make us human. so, in the interest of keeping my humanity, i'm going to live my life the inconvenient way.
and if you can, i invite you to join me in rejecting convenience.
2026-04-30 02:54:00
E-readers are something of a niche technology. Hardly anybody has an e-reader in public, especially compared to the number of people with a smartphone in hand. Despite that, I took the plunge last year and got an Android e-reader — the Meebook M6.
It’s been nothing short of awesome. I wanted to yap about my reading setup, because cool tech is cool, plus a bit about how I approach reading as a hobby.
I read primarily for fun and enjoyment. If I bought a physical copy of every book I wanted to read, my apartment would overflow with books. Libraries perform an absolutely vital service, but not every library book is in as good a condition as I’d like. Some books are way too bulky to carry on the go. Others are printed in teeny tiny font sizes (what is this, a book for ants?).
For several years, I read e-books on my phone, alongside the occasional library book. To this day, I only purchase physical copies for books with sentimental value (or, rarely, can’t find online). Reading on my phone was… alright. Good enough for me to assume that e-readers were largely redundant. After all, many of us read (or skim?) colossal volumes of text on screens every day. Hell, you’re most likely doing it right now.
That changed when I was walking around a bougie bookstore that happened to have an e-reader section. I wasn’t (and still am not) convinced that the displays looked anything like real paper, but I was blown away by how comfortable they were to read on. I hadn’t even known I'd been settling for less. That same day, I was back home looking for reviews on budget options to try out myself.
I eventually settled on the Meebook M6 for a few reasons. I wanted something that would fit in my pocket, so a screen larger than 7 inches wouldn’t do. At the same time, I wasn’t a fan of the phone-shaped form factor, like that of the Hisense Hi Reader and Boox Palma. I knew from experience that I disliked reading with a bigger font on a narrow screen.
So that left the 6 inch, regular Kindle-shaped options, though I didn’t exactly want a Kindle because of the bullshit Amazon had been pulling. Luckily for me, the Meebook M6 just so happened to be on sale on Taobao for under 100 USD — it had decent reviews, so I gave it a shot.
It is a lovely little Android device. Its royal blue bottom bezel and flush screen are immediately pleasing to the eye. It is basic hardware-wise, but there are a couple of neat features.
It has warm and cool front lights that can be adjusted independently with sliders. The warm light is particularly nice for reading in bed. There are three presets: “Day”, “Night”, and “Bed”. I use “Day” most often, which is most suited to reading in weird indoor lighting (rather than daylight).
The refresh rate is also adjustable with four presets: from the regular “regal mode” with a slow refresh rate and no ghosting, to the “A2 topspeed mode” with the fastest refresh rate but heavy ghosting. The former is most suited for reading, and is what I use 95% of the time. The latter option is much appreciated when I’m using apps not optimized for the display, especially when scrolling.
I was not as enthused with the default software experience. I disliked the default launcher and the default reader app was off when rendering English text. The great thing about Android is that it took me about five seconds to ditch them for a new launcher and a new reader.
I’m a bit anal about customizing my reading experience; KOReader has every feature I could ever wish for. It was a match made in heaven. The vast style tweaks options really satisfy that urge to have everything look exactly as I want it. I keep a handful of these enabled all the time — shoutout to spacing between paragraphs.
I was also impressed at how great KOReader is for reading PDFs. The reflow feature works amazingly for many, but not all, PDFs. If it doesn’t, KOReader can automatically scroll to different parts of the screen depending on the reading direction. For example, for a two-column PDF, it can automatically start at the top left, go down until you hit the bottom left, then go up to the top right. Much, much easier than manually zooming in and scrolling.
All the features can be overwhelming, to be fair. Fortunately, the documentation is pretty robust. And things look good out of the box, even if you don’t mess with anything!
The English fonts that I rotate between are mostly from this GitHub repo containing fonts tweaked for e-reading. Here’s a live showcase for how each font would look in action. Pretty cool!
My current default is their version of Charter. For informational non-fiction, I sometimes switch to a sans-serif font like Atkinson Hyperlegible Next or Jost. For (Traditional) Chinese, I use Chiron Sung HK, an aesthetically pleasing serif font.
This is how I've gotten things to look:
I sideload most of my books as EPUBs, and occasionally PDFs. This means I need my books DRM-free — which most e-books being sold are not. Apart from the obvious solution1, here are a few (100% legit!) suggestions for where to get e-books you actually own:
Sometimes, I get comments when I’m reading in public. People have told me, with a touch of regret, that they could never get through a whole book, or that the last time they picked up a book was in sixth grade. It might surprise them that I have struggled with keeping up a reading habit, too.
I don’t know how common this is, but I will confess that I got this device with the expectation that I would annihilate my entire backlog. A misguided approach, of course. The more pressure I put on myself to read, the less appealing and more overwhelming it felt. This was despite the fact that picking up a book was more easy and effort-free than ever. The sole barrier was my mind.
If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to hype something up in your head — even highly enjoyable and rewarding things — and end up demotivating yourself. I still find myself having to adjust my mindset to get over these hurdles. Some of this includes:
Much of the above applies to other hobbies as well. While it’s easier said than done, maintaining intrinsic motivation is essential for hobbies, which are so vital to a meaningful life. Most importantly, have fun!
It surprised me that depending on the jurisdiction, removing DRM from e-books you have purchased for personal use might be in a legal gray area. Personally, I find it difficult to argue against on moral grounds (compared to piracy).↩
2026-04-29 21:42:00
When I'm working on a passion project (or anything, really), I tend to be obsessively serious in ways that stress me out. Something I initially wanted to do becomes a thing I have to do. I've subconsciously cultivated this behavior, as I only ever notice it late: tired, tense, wondering why something I chose to do feels like something I owe, in a sense.
I'm not always caught up on social media jargon, but I'm interested in the —maxxing suffix I've seen circulating online. I liked the shamelessness of it, the idea you can just decide to maximize something (good), as aggressively and deliberately as you want. Joymaxxing, specifically: making happiness non-negotiable, not a reward for finishing a task but a condition maintained throughout the process. It's why my current goal, when working on something, is prioritizing fun.
The older I get, the more I feel permission to play. In practice, this looks different for everyone: working from a cafe instead of my desk, reading something adjacent to the project just for the pleasure of it, and following interesting tangents. All of these things alters the texture of the work in unexpectedly nice ways, because it reminds me that I'm a human being doing the thing, not a machine producing it.
The shift isn't from serious to unserious. I still passionately care about my projects as I always do. However, I stopped treating "enjoyment" as a threat to "quality," like if I was having too much fun, I'll generate something mediocre or straight up horrendous. Looking back at it, perhaps the work I'm most proud of, is the work I've enjoyed doing the most.
2026-04-29 20:15:00
I struggle with how humiliating it feels to talk about and point out misogyny; how the general regression into conservative values makes addressing misogyny come across as a last resort card you can pull out to make yourself look like a victim or get brownie points, while vilifying someone else. Like a thing you only do if you have no better arguments and want to shut discussion down, as the only people coming to challenge you further are seen (or even are) misogynists who don’t believe you. It feels like it’s sucking all the air out of the room, and people begin to tiptoe.
So much about identifying and calling out covert misogyny is about prior experience and gut feelings and hypotheticals, which makes it so hard; because overt, obvious misogyny is rarely worth a discussion and is a lot less controversial to name.
It’s exactly those edge cases of
that are worth calling out, but are impossible to prove. You cannot snap your fingers and enter the alternate reality of being a man and seeing if it happened or not.
Even if you find a comparable action or writing from a man about the same topic where he was praised for what you were criticized for, it’s very easy to dismiss that. ”He’s just more charming. It’s not that comparable. You were just unlucky with who read it. Does it even matter?”
And there’s really nothing you can do about that; there’s always some plausible deniability.
The following are just my personal feelings and experiences; if you’ve made the opposite experiences or think these are cherry-picked, that’s okay.
In my experience online…
Men get credited (“taken from (name)”, “made by (name)”), women often get nothing or “is inspired by” even when it’s an exact copy. That even happens with theme code on here (and happened to me before).1
Men calling each other out online is accepted, even if harsh; criticizing some guy online as a woman is seen as extra humiliating and it gets treated like you’re ruining his life or reputation on the platform. I’ve seen some harsh callouts and fights on the indie web, even downright discussing if someone is spewing Nazi rhetoric or not, and it didn’t seemingly devolve into whether any of them are a big meanie bullying people off of platforms. This only seems to happen when women call out some stuff.
Seeing bullshit online from random guys is normal and we are desensitized (open any inflammatory comment section; most are men or are read as men), so a woman talking some shit gets extraordinarily more replies and attention. I feel like even on things like the Bearblog Discovery, people rather hide and silently report a man for despicable views, but are less inclined to move on silently for women bloggers who have awful takes. Don’t get me wrong: Call out stuff openly, I’m just focusing on who seemingly gets a pass and who doesn’t.
People easily get sick of seeing the same woman in their feed than they do with men, and I’ve had the feeling that the most complaints about Trending posts come in when the same women are on there multiple times. You can see this even in pop culture: There was a time when everyone was sick of seeing Anne Hathaway, and during the Barbie press tour, I remember Margot Robbie saying she’s gonna lie low now so people don’t get sick of her, and since then, I have seen other successful women in such visible positions say the same. I have never seen anyone fault a male actor for showing up in a lot of media or him saying he needs to disappear for a while to give people a break. Usually it’s celebrated like “lmao there he is again”.
People expect women online to be more neutral, more caring, motherly; sharing less opinion pieces and instead, more art and pictures. Women’s opinion pieces feel more like nagging to people, and are easily somehow read as “too aggressive”, especially when it’s guides. Makes you wonder if some select few men just can’t handle guides written by women because that’s a woman telling them what to do or how to behave. That’s why they take it upon themselves to just rewrite your post saying the original was too aggressive, and link other male authors on the same topic. Happened to me!
When a man writes confidently like an expert about something, it matters less to people when he doesn’t have (or doesn’t immediately offer up) official credentials (like certificates, degrees, work, etc.) about it. As a woman, you are asked more for these and even have to offer up this information upfront to be believed. Even then, this is not enough for some people.
Closely related, I am reminded of the recent news when actress Milla Jovovich released MemPalace on GitHub. Almost unanimously, comments everywhere were agreeing that a) this is just someone using her name, or, after it was confirmed to be her, b) she lent her name to this project to give it more visibility, or c) just paid someone to do it for her. This was more than just an understandable, normal "Wow, an actress has this other interest? Did not expect that, cool." It was deeply driven by the fact that people cannot imagine a pretty woman to do anything technical. People even questioned her motivation to do so - man, why not? AI has been in the public spotlight for 5 years. Why could she not deeply immerse herself in that topic during that time because it interests her? Meanwhile, people accept and admire that James Cameron, who is a successful and well-known filmmaker, is also a deepsea expert who was able to give valuable insight into the OpenSea submersible failure.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: Before I wrote about data protection law on this blog, I tried it on another blog that made no mention of my name or gender was was designed in a way that would be read as masculine, to avoid biases due to my gender. But I quickly got tired of missing out on having my actual name and official presence attached to my work and field, so I’d rather live with the bias, I guess.
Thanks to everyone who has always treated me with respect, gives credit where it's due, and properly acknowledges women's skills and expertise.
Feel free to let me know your own experiences and observations around misogyny, both in general and in the personal web. Even with a public reply, if you feel comfortable.
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Slightly related: Someone also stole some of my posts, slightly changed a sentence here and there, and when caught, said they just used the texts to test how their website’s CSS looks with it. Since then, friends and I are joking that my best posts are good Lorem Ipsums.↩
2026-04-29 15:00:00
经常能听到一种声音，说在当下的互联网环境里，坚持写独立博客是一件极难的事情。这种「难」往往被指向几个维度：技术维护的琐碎、内容的持续产出、流量的匮乏以及社交反馈的缺失。
但在我看来，如果一个人觉得独立博客难，很大程度上是因为他还没有实现真正的「独立」。
我们得承认，在这个世界上并没有什么事情是绝对简单的。但「难」与「难」之间存在本质的区别。如果你依附于某家公司，或者身处某个自媒体矩阵之中，那种「难」是具体的、有压迫感的。
你需要考虑更新频次，需要维持内容的垂直度，需要精准地捕捉算法的喜好，因为那是你的 KPI，是你获取生存资源的筹码。在那样的语境下，「难」是常态，因为你的意志必须服从于某种商业逻辑或平台规则。
可是，当你选择「独立博客」这个载体时，你已经从上述的所有枷锁中抽身而出了。既然已经「独立」了，这种「难」的感触究竟是从哪里来的？
很多时候，这种压力是自己强加给自己的。
独立博客不应该仅仅是技术手段上的自主，即拥有一台服务器、一个域名和一套自己挑选的主题。它更应该是一个人独立意志的具现化。如果你的博客内容、更新节奏甚至遣词造句的风格，依然在随着他人的意志或外界的评价而不断摇摆，那么这依然称不上是独立博客。它只是一个被你搬到了私人领地上的「朋友圈」或者「营销号」。
有些人觉得难，是因为他们太看重「读者」了。他们预设了一个庞大的观众群体，总觉得自己写出来的东西必须得给别人带去点什么，或者必须得到某种肯定和回馈。其实这未免有些太高看自己了。在信息过载的今天，并没有多少人会时刻盯着你的思考。
我们要看清一件事情的主次。独立博客首先是用来记录和呈现自我的工具。它是一个树洞，也是一座实验室，它是为了满足我们自身表达和梳理思维的欲望。如果我们能把「记录自己」放在「谋求肯定」之前，那些所谓的坚持不下去的「难」瞬间就会消散。
因为为你自己做事是不需要「坚持」的，只有为别人做事才需要。
从这个角度出发，独立博客难不难，其实取决于一个人人格内核的完整度。凡事如果能做到向内求，事情就会变得顺理成章。独立博客这种极其私人的产物，理应完全为自己考量。它不应该为了凑够某个字数而堆砌文字，也不应该为了迎合某种流行话题而强行发声。
当一个人不再向外寻求认同，不再被那种「必须产出精品」的虚荣心所绑架时，博客就不再是一项任务，而是一种生活方式。
所以，如果你依然在为如何运营好一个独立博客而感到痛苦，或许可以停下来审视一下：你是在为谁而写？你所追求的独立，究竟是代码层面的独立，还是精神层面的独立？
当你真正做到精神上的独立，不再为他人的独立意志而改变自己的表达时，你会发现，在这个自由的自留地里，根本不存在「难」这种说法。剩下的只有表达的快感，和与自己对话的宁静。