Take note of how you feel as the beautiful New Year holiday season passes by.
Customize the New Year
A few years ago, I seldom pay New Year’s greetings online, feel not sincere. This year, I learned a new way from The planet of Teacher MAO: first, I talked about the most impressive moment with him in this year, and then I briefly described all the feelings and subsequent changes brought to me by this moment, and finally I said a few heartfelt wishes. Not only will you wake up fond memories of the past year, but you’ll also make your partner feel genuine and surprised. So I found some friends that I contacted more last year, tried to recall the part that connected with each person, and customized their own New Year greetings for each person. The biggest takeaway from this process was realizing how much help and influence my friends had on me. Occasionally, I am surprised to find that I have brought a lot of positive changes to my friends. Giving value to others is, for me, an important source of self-meaning and happiness. Next year, I hope to send blessings in this way on a larger scale, hoping to open up more good feelings. Let the good things pass through us and make those who like you like you more.
Optimize your life with games
I’ve been reading a book called Games Change the World. Here are some excerpts from the book.
All games have four defining characteristics: goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation.
This is the basic ingredient of all games. A goal is a specific result that the player needs to work towards, rules mean that there are limits to achieving the goal, feedback systems tell the player how close they are to achieving the goal, and voluntary participation means that the player knows and is willing to accept the goal, rules and feedback. We can see that games are similar to work, but why are we willing to put so much effort, time and money, into games? Maybe it’s because goals are often unclear, rules are vague, it’s hard to get immediate feedback on what you’re achieving, and it’s not even the job you want to do. But on the other hand, if we can optimize from these dimensions, can we make work more interesting?
Satisfying work always begins with two things: a clear goal and practical steps to achieve that goal. Clear goals motivate us to take action: we know what we need to do, and actionable steps ensure that we move towards our goals right away.
This is my own way of overcoming procrastination. In the face of complex and difficult tasks, we usually have a clear goal, but how to achieve the goal, and think of solving the problems in the process of achieving the goal, we will unconsciously fear. So we’re going to make a transition, take the hard work, and turn it into something that can be landed. Any task can be broken down into small enough manageable tasks if we can keep breaking it down. After each task is completed, we grow and gradually become able to tackle higher-level tasks. Like Lego, you start with a block small enough to build your castle piece by piece.
Try livestreaming and making videos
Before the holiday, I wanted to record the process of playing games and share them out. So overnight in jingdong placed an entry level acquisition card, jingdong logistics as always reliable, the next day arrived. The use of the acquisition card is very simple. The HDMI output terminal connected to the display is used as the input of the acquisition card, and then connected to the computer through the USB interface. The video signal can be obtained through OBS and other software. Since I’m using the Switch myself, I bought an additional HDMI cable that connects to the TV through the loop out capability of the acquisition card. The experience is the same as before, but with the transfer of the acquisition card, it has the ability to record video and push stream. During the Spring Festival, I live broadcast for several hours in B station without any publicity. The natural flow is really poor. What was interesting was that on the first day of the killing Spires, a guy saw that I was a novice and talked to me for more than an hour in the live stream, which also successfully attracted (fooled) a attention. After the live broadcast, I tried to cut out the more exciting parts of the video recorded during the live broadcast and posted them on B website. In addition, I also recorded the process of playing Mario Odyssey with my wife to update a live compilation of the main line. It was fun to hear my reaction on video. In this process, I still have to feel that video creation is much more difficult than text, which requires not only acquisition card, microphone and other hardware equipment, but also the consideration of video, editing, dubbing, music and many other aspects, and even the cover of the video needs careful consideration. However, this experiment has brought me new inspirations for the output of our work and life “by-products” may bring us good raw materials. For example, as a programmer, I use my professional skills to produce technical articles and courses. As a game player, I take the wonderful moments in the live broadcast as material and produce videos. When we are suffering from lack of content output, we tend to ignore the most common things closest to us.
Writing or video about my life and thoughts suddenly made me feel like I was opening myself up. Every “like” is my recognition, every comment is an issue that pushes me to change, and every connection and communication is pr added for me to make me better.
This is probably the most interesting open source work of the year.