Overall, the trend isn't going well, writing-wise. It's not like the writing is particularly bad, but the effort put in is not timely rewarded, and that hurts the motivation. But I think a significant part of the high cost is due to my refusing to follow a more frictionless and fluent way of writing. It is not wrong, writing is hard, it takes the hard mode to improve and grow, but also the easy mode to enjoy and sustain. And a monthly schedule isn't helping. It is good for reading, one piece to capture the whole month is handy (but I'm not doing the reading lately), but it is kind of bad for writing in terms of habit-forming. I did split each piece into about 3 sessions, but I felt it was still too intense - I'm actually quite satisfied with the result, but the psychological effect afterwards makes it harder to stay productive on a regular basis. After all, this is mostly an endeavor without an external audience, the only way to keep it alive is having fun, plus a sense of responsibility.
So this will be an easy piece, fluency is the point, the "quality" will be subpar, but hopefully, after finishing it, I'll regain the optimistic sense that keeping this journal is a low-cost way of self-management, introspection, self-expression, and entertainment.
Photo Portfolio
It's been a long time since I last updated the photo site, back in October, 2020. So I thought it'd be nice to pick it back up. The backlog was huge of course, esp. since I took a lot of casual phone pics nowadays while taking walks. Ideally I should do the selection work, which is the harder work compared to actually shooting the photos, in a timely manner. But I got to start somewhere, right? Plus, most photos are not meant to stay (maybe merely as records, but definitely not as works of art). And even if you travel to a heavenly place where you see skies of stars and aurora, or magnificent mountains, lakes, or rain forests, and take thousands of such beautiful pictures, you will still end up having to pick maybe a dozen best shots to represent each scenery. Again, selection is always the hardest part of photography, in fact, the more good photos you take, the harder it gets.
Processing/developing them is actually fine. I stick to simple old software (ACDSee Pro 9) in most cases; used to do quick enhancements on phone with the original version of Snapseed (those were the days I regularly uploaded to Google Maps), and occasionally VSCO filters for more dramatic effects. Overall, my principle on processing has always been about restoration in accordance with the human vision. But lately, advancement in night scene photography enables phones (e.g. the Night mode on Mi CC9 Pro) to produce super-human HDR image in very dark lighting; the effect can be dramatic, but quite pleasantly so. In particular, you see a drastic difference between shooting in Night mode (with prolonged exposure) and regular flash - besides HDR and color vibrancy, the most important factor is superbly enhanced contrast in the former, which gives the artist element to the result, while the latter tends to be bland.
I didn't end up adding a lot, but what I did add were those scenes that had all stayed in my mind long after the trip. The two sets were taken in the same wetland forest park but one in winter, the other in summer. The correspondence between the contrasting scenes was salient but not boring (they weren't from identical locations). There was another night scene set in a fine commercial park (one of the Bicester Village Collection) in town. And finally, an oddball still life shot in a flower shop that I found surprisingly pleasant, it wasn't carefully framed at the time (the one that was turned out to be much inferior), perhaps more intuitive shots can be more "ergonomic" for the aesthetic mind?
Sidenote: Vignette, when used properly, can be a powerful, yet subtle way to reduce distraction (in terms of both objects and lighting) and boost the "heros" in the scene. This is perhaps the one new lesson I learned from doing the batch of photo processing this month.
What's left undone is the vast body of photos taken in Illinois. It might be a more emotional process (blast from the past) when I eventually get to it one day.
YouTubers of Taiwan
We all go through "phases" of entertainment. Growing up I had plenty of fun watching Hong Kong entertainment, movies and TV shows, but that phase has clearly ended. You grow out of it. Back in the US days, I enjoyed watching some talk shows, Jimmy Kimmel and John Oliver were my favorite (Oliver is way too serious, but you know, in a good way). I still watch US movies and TV shows now, of course, but with a much more detached mentality (after all, talk shows and reality TV are the most socially engaging forms in the entertainment industry). Growing up I also enjoyed Taiwan TV (so called variety shows), not as extensively as Hong Kong's, but lasted much longer, even up till my college days in the US. Not that many shows I watched, in fact, the only one memorable and I watched semi-regularly (thanks to YouTube) was Kang Xi Lai Le. For the record, our mainlanders used to joke about their funny accent, laughing at their inability (or unwillingness) to nail the proper mandarin, and many considered their warped style rather overly soft or even sissy. If I have to guess, it started likely as a Chinese southerner accent (I'm a considered a southerner as well), but over time it naturally evolved into a new norm, consciously and even intentionally, in a way I believe quite similar to how the Americans wanted their own way of speaking and writing English. However, as I grew, I started to see the advantages of speaking with their particular accent - uniformity, confidence, and fluency, an interconnected trio. If everyone speaks in roughly the same style, then no one will be overly conscious about having an oddball accent, and thus pronunciation-related technicalities are out of the way, that frees the speakers to focus on what they say. Content is always more important than form, perhaps with the exception of the show biz (that's why it's much easier to understand a professor giving a lecture than an actor playing some eccentric role). In formal, or ceremonial occasions, the Taiwan-style mandarin seldom impresses me, and nowadays they're not overly concerned with such technical details, and I appreciate that. In the end, what you say matters to people so much more than how refined the speech delivery is. And when people get the chance to just speak their mind without constantly worrying about the form, their confidence in verbal expression grows vastly, which further encourages them to express more, developing their superior fluency, for practice makes perfect.
I believe our mainlanders have been focusing on the wrong thing for too long. People with heavy dialect-based accent when speaking mandarin are still considered terrible speakers, and they tend to be ashamed of their accent themselves, causing them to lean back on their native dialect in daily conversations (they do speak super fluently in the dialect).
Now I'm not saying Taiwan-based mandarin already matches the status of American English, for the official system of pronouncing Chinese characters is still mostly identical to that of our mainlanders. The big difference is that their education system, as well as the mass media, are not overly obsessed with enforcing the accuracy of such pronunciations, for the sake of, I suppose, encouraging the vast majority of people to use mandarin as their true daily driver.
Of course, there're mainlanders who are super fluent and well-spoken, but these tend to be the ones who have fortunately gained extensive experience in that department growing up, and that proportion is never as large as it needs to be. I mean, should fluently speaking mandarin be a privilege of the elites? Interestingly, Taiwan is having kind of a symmetrical crisis in the written counterpart of the language. Being conservative about the evolution of Chinese characters, they chose to refuse the more natural and progressive approach of systematically simplifying the characters, a policy taken not only by the mainland, but even foreign countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. And the consequence is that, among the educated people in Taiwan, a greater proportion of them find it difficult to correctly write the characters that they can fluently speak. And without doubt, the increasing use of computers and mobile devices as the efficient proxy to output Chinese characters vastly exacerbates the issue. Although it is true that for the same technical reason, we will be required less and less to hand write Chinese in our everyday activities, it is still an issue analogous to the speaking counterpart in the mainland, in that they are both caused by focusing on the wrong thing: either speaking super accurately, or writing in exactly the same way ancient Chinese have been doing over many centuries. Language is foremost a practical tool, and for historical and artistic motivations, we can and should preserve every evolutionary snapshot throughout time and space, but forcing the current users to stick to the old state in practice, and forbid them to make sensible and systematic simplifications and optimizations, is only going to backfire in the form of mass illiteracy.
But again, the issue of speaking is much more severe, because verbal communication is critical and will stay that way for the foreseeable future, whereas nowadays we mostly write Chinese by typing anyway.
Wow, another total digression here. Anyway, I'm glad no one is grading my essay. So back to YouTubers. Unlike our mainlanders, Taiwan have general access to YouTube and all the social media platforms in the world (well, mostly from the US). And in less than a decade (perhaps much shorter), even the traditional TV entertainment industry of Taiwan has completed the big migration to the web platform. I know, the colleagues of the mainland are making similar moves, but because of refusing to embrace the internet, they're bound to lose the great momentum from being part of a truly world-wide "expo" for showcasing what they have to offer to the global audience.
But traditional TV aside, I think indie YouTubers constitute the main force that is going to revolutionize mass media, at least in the entertainment department, and even play important roles in journalism. One key factor is that they put their ass on the line, so to speak. No big corp PR and legal special ops to shield them when things go wrong. And because of a much more direct and realtime feedback mechanism, they tend to not only capture people's attention more effectively, but also act and speak in a more responsible way (unless they have gathered a brainwashed fan base).
And for the audience, there's a much greater chance for them to see something that is not just staged and scripted show, but rather, some genuine home-video style content that they truly resonate with. It is much closer to the patronage model.
Of course, we still appreciate the big budget, professionally made masterpieces that get created once in a while, but such great works are rare, and that leaves a huge market for the more down-to-earth flavor of entertainment. And because such grassroots or indies have full access to the all-encompassing media platform, they learn from the Western pioneers in the space, and in turn offered back their own productions. And as a Chinese speaking netizen, I can feel what they feel, and thus my heart grows closer to them. As I said, I grew out of quite a few things over the years, but quite surprisingly, it has been almost 4 years since I started watching their productions, and not only have I developed no boredom, but I'm actually discovering more richness, depth, and humanity out of this world largely considered as a space for trivial, fast-food kind of amusement. And I believe this is due to, again, the fact that a lot of such creators are pretty much "naked", without an industrial-strength show biz machinery to hide from. That's largely the power of indie.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying they're all true reality, of course not, in fact, most full-time YouTubers need to write scripts and direct the acting for a production based on some idea, often real-life inspired, but what's more precious is the behind-the-scenes content that offers the audience a way into their inner thinking, and even real life (of course to the extent they're willing to share). But I mean, it's pretty raw, even if they do want to redact things that are too private, they cannot hide the emotions completely, and that's the power of true reality shows. Although it's not exactly the "fishbowl" experience (as discussed in the movie The Free Guy), it's I believe the closest thing so far throughout history. (Again, they are not literally presenting their life on camera, I mean, you can see through their work and feel some of that, and I think that's quite a distinctive experience.)
Disclaimer: YouTube is a very diverse platform, the topics range from mindless jokes and stunts, to serious journalism and education. And people are flawed (to varied degrees). Even if you like certain videos by a content creator, it doesn't necessarily mean the person, or the rest content in the channel, will match your expectation. And people change. Some for better, some worse.
Indeed, one of the more interesting characteristics of YouTubers is that their content tend to change more rapidly than conventional media programs, again, because for large organizations, the "inertia" of a certain plan is much greater, and perhaps more importantly, when there are a lot more people behind a project, the less personal it becomes, that is, it's more like a machine. And for good programs, having a machine at work is a plus, but on the flip side, stagnation tends to occur over time and the machine will not be able to make agile moves nearly as well to break the status quo. And we will see that things get repetitive and boring pretty quickly. Small teams often change more readily, in response to the feedback, and typically they have complete artistic freedom when doing so. This low-inertia setup is a double-edged sword, of course, as we might see rapid growth in some channels, and rapid deterioration in others. But overall, I think this is a good trait, in a sense this is a selection process where the pressure is pretty high. Despite the failures of certain individual creators, the whole community benefit from this model due to the boosted rate at which good content can be created.
It's also worth noting that whatever kind of content that turns out to be successful is actually a reflection of the overall mind of the audience, again because of the tight feedback mechanism. In a sense, a channel can become extremely successful without producing any meaningful content, if the vast majority of the audience doesn't want meaning in the first place. So we see that in order for this system to work properly, it is necessary that the audience seek more than pleasure.
I thought of listing the channels that I currently subscribe to, just for the record; but then I suppose it's not that important, because we all have different tastes when it comes to "comfort food". But one channel I would like to mention, 好棒Bump, for the precise reason of its incredible evolution, and I think the story behind the creator is one worth telling. Bump deleted the entirety of his old channel created by he and his partner and best friend. And I still wish I could see the boxing match. But that was the past. One day, he realized that all that past wasn't for him, because he wanted to tell his future kid a better story about his life, and he didn't want his fans to be ridiculed because of what his old channel presented. And then, we saw the heroic act of rescuing scam victims in Cambodia, as well as the entire anti-scam series of great educational value.
Again, this is the kind of rapid change of content that we never expect to see on conventional media. People get to actually follow their heart, and ultimately, this is the essential power of democracy (the true mobilization of the grass roots).
Speaking of YouTube channels, one that I truly trust is Fang Zhouzi, and I have been reading the author Fang for a long time. My lighthouse, a touchstone of humanity, a believer in the eventual justice of the history, and a true patriot who has made tremendous contributions and sacrifices for the Chinese people. He's been making his predictions about serious matters in China, such as the pandemic and the zero-covid policy, in a way such that he probably wants to be proven wrong, but never has. Over the decades, he has built an outstanding credibility, and therefore, he's made himself very vulnerable when it comes to making more predictions, in the sense that any significant mis-prediction can cost his credibility. Yet he keeps making such predictions. Such depressing predictions. But the very fact that he's still making all the efforts to communicate the facts and ideas to us means he's not given up. So neither should the rest Chinese people. Thank you, Fang, for everything.