Four random talks – current situation, games, self-media, New York

Current situation

During the May Day holiday in China these two days, I also asked the company for two days of unpaid service. Firstly, the company is not very busy, and secondly, I want to take some rest. I have been so busy for four consecutive years without the adjustment of winter and summer vacations. I am still very uncomfortable. I feel like a walking zombie. I can’t get up in the morning and drag my exhausted body to work. I am so tired after get off work in the evening that I take a nap. I am so busy that I go to bed late.

I originally wanted to take advantage of these two days of rest to play the newly arrived persona 5, but seeing that these two days are over, I haven’t even been to the living room, let alone opened PS. On the first day, I sorted out all the things I wanted to do before. On the second day, I met a friend and chatted all afternoon. It was not as good as usual. At least I could have some fun after get off work. Although I have not fully recovered, I can feel that a kind of power has returned, the kind of power that I used to want to change the world. After a good rest, my mind has obviously opened up, and my passion and creativity have returned.

In the past two days, I suddenly feel that we humans are a little sad. Why do you say that? When we were young, we had parents who didn't have to worry about food and drink, and we could enjoy our leisure time in the afternoon during winter and summer vacations. But why doesn’t it work after graduation? It's because the world we enjoyed before was not real. After working, we become a money printing machine. Every time we stop working, we will cause losses. For example, I have a total of ten days of vacation time every year. I don’t want to use it, so I reserve it for returning to my country or traveling. It feels very luxurious to use it on daily basis. For other things like unpaid leave, I am lucky to be able to take it out, let alone use it. Every day I use it will save me a day’s money. Once we think about this, we find that we are completely trapped by this society. Isn't it a bit sad?

However, my attitude towards work is relatively light, and I just need to do my job well. It’s not that I don’t have ambitions, but my dream is to create my own world, a world that can serve everyone. So my focus has always been on spending a few hours after get off work, whether discussing ideas with friends or reading books and studying. This is what really drives me to survive. But once I am tired and unable to carry out these things, I will be frustrated. If possible, I will find a balance between work and vacation. Half-work, half-rest or more free working time will make me happier and more efficient. It’s okay to make less money, it allows me to get more rest, and stimulating my creativity and passion will be more valuable.

I used to like blogging very much. I would write almost as soon as I had an idea. I wrote a lot. When I changed the system, I deleted them all. Now I have more than 300 articles left. Deleted because of low quality. I have said before that the blog I write is not to please others, nor is it for other utilitarian purposes, it is just to record life. As long as the meaning can be expressed, I don't care about the quality, grammatical errors, or typos. After typing what I thought of, I posted it directly. I don’t know why I feel this is wrong now. Firstly, I feel uncomfortable every time I see many obvious language errors in what I write, and I want to correct them. Secondly, it will cause people to misunderstand that my Chinese is not good. So now I read the articles myself before publishing them. I don’t know if this change is good or bad.

In addition, I changed the previous "Event Comments" column to "Opinion", which I think is more relevant to the topic. I originally wanted to change "daily life" to "North American life", but then I thought about the life I had for several years before coming to the United States. I couldn't let it be eaten away, and I might not be in the United States in the future, so I decided not to change it.

persona 5

The reason I want to mention this is because he touched me so much. I came into contact with Persona very late, on p4g in 2013. It is a very typical Japanese RPG game, which combines RPG, Yggdrasil Labyrinth and galgame. It is like a movie and real life, living day by day. The reason why he inspired me is that he classified each personality into a persona. When you come into contact with different personas, you will get different feelings. The more you are exposed to, the deeper your understanding of a certain type will be. This is a kind of tolerance that I don’t have.

I am always so disgusted with certain people or behaviors that I don’t want to look them in the face or have contact with them. However, I respect my own values ​​very much, which makes me unwilling to contact people who don’t conform to my values, making my world smaller and smaller. Since playing p4g, I am more willing to go out. Every contact with people will deepen my understanding of that genre. Compared with disgust, understanding and increasing one's own strength makes people have the urge to contact.

Another reason is that I like psychology and his music is really great.

Although the characters and addresses of the game persona 5 have been changed, the connotation remains the same, which strengthens my sense of tolerance. Moreover, this time the scene was set in Tokyo, which is much bigger. It would be nice to come back and experience high school life. Thinking back to the time when I played Heartbeat Memories, it was such a wonderful memory.

New York & old classmates

Last weekend, we went to New York again. Although I can’t remember how long it was since the last time. However, frequent visits to Yanran have made me a seasoned driver, and I am familiar with how to get to various places and where to eat. Perhaps because I haven’t experienced the “prosperity” of New York for a long time, my impression of him has deepened.

The destination this time is Flushing. I have never lived here before. This time I stayed here for special reasons. It was definitely dirty and messy, but I was also disappointed with the hotel's service. I was very careful when booking the hotel and specifically chose a hotel with three stars or above. However, I never expected that a hotel marked with three stars would not be as good as a one-star hotel. If I had known better, I would not have saved the to stay at the Excelle. At least a standardized hotel would be more reliable.

There’s no such thing as eating in Flushing or shaving your head. I do these two things every time I come here. But other things... I really can’t compliment you. All the domestic ones are back. They bump into each other and are not polite. They don’t use credit cards. The service is extremely poor. They open their mouths and just give tips. Don’t you know that tipping is my appreciation for your service. Whether you give it or not depends entirely on whether I enjoy the service. Everyone should understand what appreciate it is? Make yourself like a beggar begging for food.

Another experience was very uncomfortable. You had to pay a deposit to eat at a Xiao Long Bar. It was the first time I felt a distrustful society.

Manhattan hasn't changed much. It's still full of high-rise buildings and crowded with people. No doubt like China, there's nowhere to put your feet or park your car. To be honest, after staying in a city like this in China for more than 20 years, I didn’t feel much like coming back. However, I watched the opera Cats this time and it felt great. I had been taken to see it by a music teacher before, but this time I saw it live on Broadway and it felt completely different. But I don’t know why, from the beginning to the end of the show, I kept calculating their profits and the actors’ wages. Is this an occupational disease?

There is an important purpose for coming to New York this time, which is to attend the wedding of our former chairman. After all, we have worked together for many years and are close collaborators. I should have attended many weddings at this age, but I have few true friends abroad, and children at home will not invite overseas legions like us, so I feel completely isolated. But things have changed this year, and I estimate that I will have to attend at least two weddings.

I really haven’t seen this classmate for several years. Although we are both in the United States and we often communicate with him via WeChat, we really don’t see him that often. Although we have fought together for two years before, we still feel strange. Once we graduate, we all go our separate ways. The world is so big, there are so many paths, and our dreams are all different. It’s really hard to come together again.

Impetuous reality

I don’t know if you have noticed that there are fewer and fewer people around you who are doing things down-to-earth. As an Internet practitioner, my experience may be deeper. Everyone is more willing to get results than to enjoy the process, and they pay less attention to intrinsic value. For example, people are more willing to pay money to get good equipment than practice skills on their own; people are more willing to spend money to buy traffic than to make content in a down-to-earth manner; people are more willing to use ready-made things and no longer want to study it all over again. For example, I conducted an experiment and if someone responded to a red envelope and left a message, I would immediately send out the red envelope. I guess not many people have the patience to read such a long article.

After thinking about it, this is a characteristic of society given by the times, and it also means that we are really rich. Only when people are wealthy will they not pay attention to details, because they have the capital to solve it. If you encounter a serious problem, it is better to spend more money than to worry yourself.

But this is not a good thing. This kind of vanity ultimately brings endless emptiness. Many things can blind most people's eyes and create the illusion of prosperity, but they will eventually be seen through, and will cause those who know themselves to feel extremely painful.

Self-media & public accounts

I want to focus on this topic. I recently read an article, "The Self-Media Bubble Emerges: Plagiarism is Frequent and It’s Difficult to Protect Rights, and Hype to Attract Eyes without a Bottom Line." It talks about the current chaos in self-media. I am one of the earliest practitioners in this industry, and I have a lot to say.

I was a user when the first batch of WeChat public accounts came out. At that time, the subscription account was like a friend like the current service account. At that time, there were no restrictions on registered names, and Weibo could authenticate it at that time. At that time, I thought he was a very promising person, so I registered a "George Washington University" certified account for our HelloGWU. Don't even think about it now.

After playing for a while, the rules gradually changed, and its meaning also changed. Due to WeChat's strong user group and extremely low entry threshold, although the public account has been dwarfed, more and more people began to use it, and the current concept of self-media has emerged. I want to make a digression here. No matter how good something is, it takes time for the market to accept it. The official account has been used for more than 2 years. Recently, I saw that Werewolf was very popular. This is a board game that I like very much. That was 4 years ago. A single spark can start a prairie fire, but there is a huge time gap in between, which can also starve people to death.

Coming back to the topic, after bragging, I want to seriously share with you my views on the current self-media. People who are familiar with me must know that I have always been negative about WeChat public accounts. I have written an article before to discuss my point of view "America in recent years". I do not deny its advantages as an export, but everyone uses it wrongly.

I have seen many people create a WeChat public account before and start claiming that they are starting a business and how great they are. How powerful can it be? The user is not yours, and the core content does not exist in its own library. When you want to do something, you find you can't do it because it's too difficult to reach users. Want to go out? The conversion rate is pitiful. In the past few years, when there were few self-media, it was quite easy to do, but what about now?

The proliferation of self-media is like an article inserting countless straws into the ocean, and everyone wants to suck up. But the difficulty is getting bigger and bigger, and users are becoming at a loss. Should I pay attention to it? Who should I pay attention to?

We need to go back to the origin of user needs. Users have demand for information, and the demand is: 1. Information around me, 2. Information related to me, 3. Information within the industry, 4. Policy information, 5. Information about my favorite columns, 6. World events.

You will find that except for 3 and 6, which can be used for vertical media, the others are basically decided by the user, which means that the user decides whether your public account will be viewed. Let’s talk about 3 and 6 first. They are more like traditional media, which require timeliness and depth of news. As long as traditional media are willing to do this, they can do it very well. Moreover, many people are now focusing on vertical information. This market is very easy to saturate. Once saturated, small fish will only die. Just imagine that I want to watch global events. In front of several accounts with similar content, how many accounts will I subscribe to now? Dozens? Or just 1 or 2.

Talking about the latter, some people will say that the argument that "users determine whether your official account is viewed by others" is wrong, because it is the quality of the content that determines whether users want to view it. These two arguments are not in conflict. Content is the foundation of self-media. But how much difference will the role of content make when it can only be posted once a day? Now as long as you are a good self-media person, you will post every day and write a few good articles every day. There are thousands of authors, but only one thing. In the end, it’s not up to the user to decide which account writes in a way that matches their own values?

The current self-media has entered the Red Ocean era. It is not that there is no content, but that there is too much content and it is too complicated. The emergence of clickbait and plagiarism parties is because this industry has found it difficult to attract users. At this time, the disadvantages I mentioned will appear. What should entrepreneurs who completely rely on official accounts do?

Come out? Look at the self-media that want to step out. How many of them have succeeded?

Here I would like to share my views on the use of official accounts. First, let me define official accounts as an outlet and a channel. This is a cheap channel that can connect the media and users. There are many channels, including Weibo, Facebook, and Twitter, but WeChat has a large user base, so its value is high. If you understand this concept, it is easy to think of the next point, which is, since it is a channel, where should our products be placed? The answer is obvious, in your own database. Both user and content data should be kept here, and all channels should only be a process of copying and spreading.

After the rise of self-media, everyone started so-called entrepreneurship because of the low threshold. But is self-media really a entrepreneurship? It is just a form of disseminating content. Everyone may have forgotten SEO. It is likely that he will ultimately decide the outcome, but SEO does not exist in self-media.

To raise another point of view, starting content from scratch is a big progress, but making it valuable is another matter. The value of content lies in organization and summary. Users are lazy and do not want to summarize by themselves. As time goes by, whoever can organize the content of self-media and feed it to users according to their needs will win this battle.

Let me advertise, I am already doing this, if you are interested in joining us, please contact me.

postscript

Due to length reasons (actually laziness), I originally wanted to talk about life in Japan, education issues, and the new project Washington Neighborhood. Let’s find another opportunity next time.

It's two o'clock in the middle of the night. This article has not been verified. I will verify it again when I have time. Please bear with me.