当天就开始考虑买块新的屏，最后刚好看到 LG 27UP850N ，感觉价位和需求都很符合，于是就买了，中意它的还有一点是因为它算是这个价位能买到的支持 type-c 直连 mac 输入的屏吧，再贵点的就 Dell 和 Samsung 啥的了。不出所料旧屏修不好了，果然有些钱确实是该花的。
虽然一开始组装好后发现我的桌子太窄了（50 宽），而 LG 的支架直接就占据了我大半张桌子，很有压迫感，桌子剩下的地方差点都放不下我的笔电，不过后来买了支撑臂夹在桌边固定，并将桌子拉开墙十几公分后发现可以完美适应了，刚开始看还觉得很大，但到现在看习惯后甚至还觉得不够看，还想再来一块(?)。这大概就是幸福感的提升吧。
it looks like i spent almost the entire year at home again, and it was also a year in which i barely kept any record of daily life, so a lot of it i simply can’t recall, and what i can recover is incomplete. i’ll write whatever comes to mind.
1. life
this year’s life happened almost entirely at home — more precisely, in my small room. i really have become a professional hikikomori, haven’t i.
1.1 consumer electronics, and raising the floor
the first half of the year was lived on a 「save where you can」 basis, but from the second half — july or august, to be specific — the portable monitor i’d bought on the cheap at the end of last year broke. i meant to get it fixed and keep using it, but after a careful look online at what a one- or two-hundred-yuan thing costs to repair, i went to the computer mall without much hope and told the shop owner to forget it if it couldn’t be fixed. that also became the occasion to ask myself whether it was time to raise my quality of life a bit — these are, after all, the things i spend the most hours of every day touching; there’s no real sense in which money on them is wasted or not worth it.
that same day i started looking at new monitors, and the lg 27UP850N happened to come up — the price and what i needed lined up, so i bought it. part of the appeal was that it’s about the only monitor at that price that takes a usb-c connection straight from a mac; anything pricier is dell, samsung, that tier. as expected the old one couldn’t be repaired. some money really is meant to be spent.
after setting it up i did find my desk was too narrow (50cm), and the lg’s stand took over most of it, looming; what was left of the desk barely had room for my laptop. but i later bought a monitor arm that clamps to the edge, pulled the desk a dozen centimetres off the wall, and found it fits perfectly. at first it looked huge; now that i’m used to it it even feels like not enough, and i want another(?). this, i suppose, is what an increase in happiness feels like.
1.2 from 「good enough」 to 「fitted to need」
since the rule was always replace-whatever-breaks, and the screen was hard or impossible to repair, i only needed to replace the screen. but this time, while buying the arm, i also picked up a monitor light bar, which solved the desk’s lack of a lamp and of anywhere to put one.
on top of that, within the same month i bought logitech’s mx keys mini keyboard and master 3s mouse. the plan was to use the macbook and the external screen together, as before with the portable monitor, but this screen is simply too big, and switching between a big screen and a small one took some getting used to, so i just went with the big one — which meant spending a little more on a keyboard and mouse to go with it, and which also set up the mini pc i’d add later; they were bought around the same time, though not together.
the mx keys mini is a scissor-switch keyboard like the macbook’s, though the feel falls a little short, and losing the bottom-left key for switching input methods took some adjusting at first — i’ve more or less adapted now; it really is a lot quieter than a mechanical one. anyway i can’t afford anything else x.
the master 3s has no real flaws, except it seems to drain its battery fast. it’s an old classic; customise a few buttons and the experience is nearly on par with the trackpad.
1.3 cloud services, back home
for the past few years i’d kept renewing cloud servers, switching providers a few times, but that couldn’t go on; besides, the original reason was hosting the typecho blog, which has since gone static, though a few other services were still running on it. mid-year, the little-known provider i’d bought a two-year promotional plan from suddenly announced it couldn’t keep operating, then announced it was selling handing part of its business to another little-known vendor. the server was shut down before the notice even went out, and the email only ambled in afterwards. after the migration, stability did improve, but the specs and renewal price were a real stab in the back.
for that reason, plus the occasion mentioned above, plus the fact that after switching to macos last year running visual novels meant starting a virtual machine every time — with only 16g of ram and the arm translation overhead it ran, but nowhere near smoothly; there’s a desktop too, but it’s in another room, inconvenient — i chose to buy an extra mini pc, an amd r7 8745h with 32g + 1t ssd. it’s only for running galgames anyway, and even if i don’t play it can sit there as a server, so it won’t gather dust either way; utilisation is high (it really is: on 7×24, running win11 iot — should have installed win10 iot, in hindsight — fan basically never spins, apart from microsoft’s forced updates rebooting it in the middle of the night).
1.4 small patches that meant something to me
remember how the blahaj was thrown out last year — in march i bought it back. turns out i can’t do without it after all
over these years i’ve been through all three big carriers’ networks, and this year i finally ported my phone number to china unicom and moved the broadband over from china telecom too. the experience barely dropped but the cost did, by a lot, and unicom here seems a good deal more generous: a sales rep botched my plan without understanding it, and when i complained with the recording i’d kept, they compensated me a year of fees
2. study and state
hikikomori or not, i can’t slack for too long, or daily life becomes very boring and hollow. there were bad stretches too, of course — weeks lying around doing nothing, bored of games, without the energy even to watch anime or shows. to put it non-utilitarianly, a continuous intake of knowledge is something i need.
2.1 the first half
in the first half of the year there were still people fussing over my schooling on my behalf. the same old problems: information asymmetry of every kind, grasping at any doctor in a panic, wanting shortcuts without enough money for them. it went round and round for months and came to nothing. i won’t go into it — same plot as last year, just a different direction.
long maladaptation has pushed my signal-to-noise ratio fairly high, but even so there was a steady stream of noise battering at my state. for someone as highly sensitive as me, these don’t even need writing down to be recalled:
「just count the half year as wasted」
「follow the requirements, do as you’re told, and you’ll get it this time」
pulled between every kind of uncertainty, information muddled, expectations shifting back and forth, i was left hanging the whole time, and more and more i feel what really wears a person down isn’t the matter itself but being 「unsettled」 for so long.
2.2 the second half
after july things began to improve, and september was the best — same as last year, so i’d guess it has something to do with the season. autumn, rare enough in the south as it is: the weather, the routine, the space, the mood all suit settling into a rhythm of steady output.
this half-year was strangely productive too, and somehow, even without outside pressure, i could keep a rhythm going. from september or so i fell into a very regular routine: a bit of python on weekdays (following cs 61a), weekends kept for galgames. on that 「push through the week, let go at the weekend」 rhythm, plus crisp autumn air and plenty of energy, i got through the course in about a month — one of the few genuinely full stretches.
afterwards i slacked off into shows, but overall the second half was the most concentrated learning since becoming a hikikomori.
2.3 in short
i said above that 「a continuous intake of knowledge is something i need」; having looked back and written down these scattered memories, i think learning these things may not lead straight to any clear result, but it at least gives me a sense of order, of moving forward; when so much is left hanging, learning turns out to be one of the few things i can push along myself, and it did different things for dispelling bad moods and keeping my spirits in one piece.
3. entertainment and taste
alone with nothing i have to do, catching up on the games i’d wanted to play and the anime i’d wanted to watch, past or present, was naturally essential too.
as i said, i put them on weekends, where they form a zero-pressure and very comfortable complement to the weekday studying; if i can be absorbed in them i suppose it doesn’t count as just killing time. the stats on bangumi showed that the stretch when i had the energy to play was exactly the stretch when i had the most energy to study — both concentrated in september. so earlier i’d been in that willing-but-unable state the whole time: with no energy at all, even these things the world considers entertainment can’t serve as a way to pass the time.
3.1 visual novels
i don’t remember whether i played any in the first half — too much going on to remember; i really should keep better notes orz.
the name struck me as very odd at first, but i was curious what it was about; having read it, the first part really does feel like a galgame 「the shawshank redemption」, and the later true end is excellent and complete enough. i gave it 9/10 on bangumi at the time.
this one seems to have been quite popular online, so i played it too; the story is fairly short, i don’t remember the specifics, but there’s a lot of fan work and memes spun off it.
seems to fall apart a bit toward the end, but the earlier part is good; a lot of people apparently can’t accept the later forgiveness plotline, hence the lowish scores(?).
3.2 reading
i remember not reading much last year — didn’t even have the mood to look for books — and this year too it wasn’t until near the end, november, that i started looking. the counted total is 3: 「新世界より」「ハーモニー」「L’Étranger」.
clear, vast world-building; the further i read the more interested i got, and then i tore through it. some things seem not quite explained, but piecing them together they more or less connect; the entirely unforeseen developments are refreshing.
i think i read it on a similar-books recommendation after the one above; shorter by comparison, but being pure text it still has a certain world-building and depth — a future world, the question of what rights an individual has under absolute ethics, spinning out from there.
i don’t remember why i picked it up, but thinking back now it is truly, truly something. in the hands of camus, the representative of absurdism, the experience of the social outsider he creates sets the mind wandering.
3.3 british tv
i’d never touched british series before; what i’d watched was mostly american, and every time i noticed a very strong american flavour — diversity, big structures (with a certain grand narrative built in), or exuberance, or little distance between people. british series, or films by british directors, are different. my first contact was probably a film i saw a few years ago, 「Detachment」 — an american film by a british director; i fell for that detached style on the spot, though i only learned the director was british later, after getting into british tv and chatting with gpt about it.
beyond the detachment, the dark humour and satire, the coolness, realism, philosophising all get me. so i finished a few series:
「Black Mirror」 asks whether, under present or not-so-distant technology, our lives get more convenient, or whether some terrifying technology — not a paranoid fear — gets born. the early seasons were channel 4, well chosen in feel and premise; after it became netflix the quality dropped a bit, but there really is nothing comparable in the genre
「Yes Minister」 — the whole series, likewise peerless as political satire
my listening hit a new high again this year. last.fm logged 31,475 scrobbles, up 83% on 2024, an all-time peak. youtube music’s year in review (as of early december) shows 82,818 minutes for the year, about 1,380 hours.
youtube music was still the main player this year; only premium fell through near the end of the year, and i’m on a third-party client now.
the algorithm keeps getting better the longer i use it — google, after all; the ultimate treat for tin ears like mine. stack on that the most complete catalogue in the world: whether mainstream producers or things so niche they’re only posted on niconico and youtube (or only the latter), vocaloid and instrumental tracks with a few hundred or a few thousand plays get recommended to me accurately. i tried searching bilibili, netease cloud music and the like back home and couldn’t find them at all — and these aren’t even new releases.
the biggest discovery of the year was an ambient producer called my head is empty. 「i was only temporary」 has an mv cut from 「The End of the F***ing World」, which is why i chose to watch that show. in the very calm state i was in at the time, this track gave me goosebumps all over — not fear exactly, more an indescribable creepiness, chilling yet impossible to put down; i looped it for ages. i’d almost never had that experience before.
later i learned this producer has a chronic illness, an autoimmune disease called 「multiple sclerosis」 — in short, the immune system mistakenly destroys the 「insulation」 on the nerves, and the 「communications network」 between brain and body breaks down. their sight and mobility are both deteriorating; not much time left.
more than that, they reply to almost every youtube comment, sincerely, fairly anonymously and without affectation. they’ve openly shared their family history, their diagnosis and the story of losing a kindred spirit. even after all that, someone who always felt they had nothing to lose has, in a state of extreme self-abasement, been harassed to this day by a psychopathic predator. looking back now, their music really does carry an unbroken stream of tragedy and despair — no wonder i was struck by that feeling before i knew any of it.
4. socialising
do i really still have this thing? or, put another way, do i still need it?
i didn’t actively develop any new social life this year, though that’s not a complete severing of connections with other people — and there wasn’t much of that to begin with. but i can say that since leaving the social networks that had nothing to do with my daily life, i’ve been more and more able to face myself squarely, with more time and energy to explore all sorts of things, so the answer is obviously already given.
4.1 socialising that counts
what counts as effective and what doesn’t — i still haven’t worked out where the line is. in daily life it often happens that something starts out ineffective (like looking for something to say) and, talking on, becomes effective (a problem solved, something learned); and that something starts out effective (asking a question) and develops into awkward small talk (nobody willing to end the conversation, or not knowing how to end it / not wanting to, and so on).
and what is the definition of socialising, anyway? i may have talked with family more this year; that’s a kind of socialising too — so was it effective? from experience i’d answer half and half. but judged by 「i’d lose nothing without this exchange」, most of it was ineffective — at most it kept things from looking so estranged on the surface.
4.2 the two kinds that remain
setting aside the necessary socialising that exists only to solve or discuss something that needs solving, i currently still have these two kinds:
「light, low-burden contact」
this produced the most this year; a great deal of this post was recalled by scrolling back through it. of course, if you ask whether, chatting so happily, every sentence was time well spent — it’s the opposite of what you’d think: the content is random and scattered and doesn’t go deep. yet i really enjoy this feeling of passing the boredom, rather than loneliness, even though for most of the year i was home alone.
this kind of socialising — no need to maintain it deliberately, anything can be said, both sides with their guard down, no pressure when a message goes unanswered — is really wonderful. not especially close, and nothing to lose, so all the more at ease.
「low-frequency but steady presence」
this is someone more long-term, more delicate, someone who never becomes a stranger; though we didn’t talk more than a few times all year, and almost every time it was them reaching out to me, i don’t think it’s a relationship that breaks easily — we show up for each other when needed.
to me an important friend too — not a lively relationship, but when i reply to them i’m very careful, checking for typos, reading it over a few times before sending.
a tolerant friend, who from the day we met has given me a lot of emotional value; even now, when i don’t need it at all and have become completely different from before, they can still understand me.
4.3 what i make of socialising
though i no longer actively seek it out — including the two above, who in most cases reach out to me — and haven’t built any new stable relationships, and don’t treat socialising as an emotional pillar, the few people who still remain do keep life from being nothing but closure and repetition.
5. interference, and loosening
5.1 the interference never stops
this year looks as if a lot could be recorded, but there were always outside factors breaking my rhythm — the family environment, a social life i had neither the energy nor the mood to maintain, uncertainties of every kind; not all of them deserve expanding on, but they really did make up the noise part of my year.
5.2 loosening under pressure
the real improvement probably started around september, and the outside environment hadn’t actually changed for the better; it’s that my own centre of gravity shifted without my noticing around then. once attention came back to things i could operate on — study, devices, reading, entertainment — life finally began to have 「a part of my own」, and i had these memories of still being alive; metaphysically speaking, i had a 「self」 in the 「existentialist」 sense too, rather than falling straight through into nothing.
6. mood log
this year i kept logging my mood in the app, morning and night, and at year’s end pulled the 2024 and 2025 data for a comparison.
drawn with gemini 3 pro preview
overall, the sharper negative emotions are clearly fewer: sad and depressed both dropped a lot, and anxious went straight to zero. at the same time the duller, more chronic states increased: fatigued nearly doubled, meh roughly doubled too, and pessimistic went from single digits to several times that.
month by month, june and july were the year’s peak of negative mood, close to 90% — matching the messy stretch in the first half exactly. from september it fell steadily, down to just over 30% by december, the year’s low.
in short: less pain this year, but more tired. the end of the year was the best i’d been all year.
7. closing
complete freedom really does test a person. with no outside framework telling you what to do, every choice feels like it needs a 「why」 of its own. looking back, i spent a fair amount of this year on that anxiety, as if every everyday decision bore on the meaning of existence.
but looking at what actually stayed with me from this year, none of it was a grand choice. changing a screen, taking a course, reading a few books, hearing a track that gave me goosebumps — small things that carry no ultimate meaning, yet they make up the part of this year that was mine. maybe choosing isn’t so frightening; whether i like it, whether there was anything in it, are things known only afterwards, and the future me will always be better than the present one at digesting the results.
no need to have all the answers today. let tomorrow be a new day.
