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Monthly Log: 2025-04

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Original language: Chinese . AI translations: English , Japanese .

Spring anime season is here, which means a quarter of 2025 is already gone (

Post Structure

  1. Input
    Learning: books/novels/good articles, videos/podcasts, any format, anything that feels rewarding after finishing
    Anime: new shows / old shows, TV season / movies, notes on what I watched
    Others: movies, TV series, etc., put here

  2. Random Thoughts
    Maybe I will write down whatever I’m thinking

  3. Output
    Maybe a blog, but I’m not good enough, so maybe I have no output for a whole month (lol)

  4. Travel
    If I went somewhere, I’ll jot it down. If not, then whatever

  5. Misc
    Small things that don’t fit in the categories above

Input

Learning

SICP

The legendary SICP. This month I finished the first two chapters: Building Abstractions with Functions and Building Abstractions with Data.

Chapter 1 starts with functional programming, written entirely in recursion.
And it doesn’t use JavaScript’s built-in data types. Instead you hand-roll the classic trio: pair(), head(), tail().

function pair(x, y) {
  function dispatch(m) {
    return m === 0 ? x : m === 1 ? y : error(m, 'argument not 0 or 1 - pair');
  }
  return dispatch;
}
function head(z) {
  return z(0);
}
function tail(z) {
  return z(1);
}

SICP is basically built on this “function inside a function” style.

I’m reading the JavaScript edition of SICP. Using pair everywhere is probably to stay close to the original Scheme (or Lisp-family) style?

With pair you build linked lists, then reimplement common operations like foreach, map, reduce, and filter, and then you go on to higher-level data structures like unordered list, ordered list, set, tree, etc.

The data abstractions section starts from an example of rational numbers, explaining how to build data-abstraction barriers to get good abstraction and isolation. That way changes in one layer won’t affect the others, making refactors and new features much easier.

After these two chapters, it feels like I learned a lot. But since I didn’t do the exercises, my actual impression isn’t that deep (for example, when writing this part, I had to flip back to the book to recall details).
When I have time, I really should do the exercises.

Anime

The April anime season is here, which means 2025 is already one quarter gone.
Still, this season feels healthier than the last one. There are noticeably more shows I actually want to keep watching.

Watching

  • Post-Apocalyptic Hotel (末日后酒店)
    My biggest surprise of April. It’s a high-quality original anime, and from the opening episodes alone you can already feel that the staff know exactly what they’re doing.
    The overall vibe reminds me a little of Girls’ Last Tour and Train to the End of the World. If I were being rude, I’d call it the deluxe version of that train anime.
    The OP animation is excellent, probably second only to Witch Watch this season. The song still hasn’t clicked for me yet.

  • Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX
    I’ve already watched the theatrical version, so the first few TV episodes didn’t have much to offer.
    The OP is very half-hearted. The visuals are polished, but there are basically no highlights.
    Overall: decent. I’ll keep watching, but I’m not that excited.

  • mono 旅
    Same author as Yuru Camp. The photography club setting is pretty fun.
    It makes me want to buy a 360 camera.

  • Summer Pocket
    Surprisingly decent for a GalGame adaptation. The chuuni male lead adds some charm.

  • 忍着与杀手二人组
    Made by Shaft. Cute character designs, stable visuals, and occasional flexing.

  • Witch Watch
    Best OP of April. Great music and show-off animation.
    The main episodes are fine too. The comedy works.

  • ざつ旅
    Slightly underfunded. The heroine’s hair looks kind of weird.

  • 时光流逝，饭菜依旧美味
    P.A. Works is back.

  • 记忆缝线
    Apparently a “small pp”? Haven’t watched yet.

Dropped

  • 摇滚乃淑女的爱好
    The era of big-girl bands. Too noisy, and I’m not that into band themes. Dropped after 1 episode.

  • 男女之间存在友情吗
    Cheap production, and the story wasn’t that interesting either. Dropped after 2 episodes.

  • ある魔女が死ぬまで
    The setup is “collect 100 people’s worth of touching tears”, which makes the whole thing look like one of those heavily pre-packaged episodic stories where each episode has to resolve a problem at high speed. The last time I got this kind of feeling was To Your Eternity.
    Emotional stories are fine, but they need patient setup and enough atmosphere to earn the tears. That’s very demanding on the script. If you miss, it just turns into forced sentimentality and feels embarrassing.
    Episode 1 didn’t convince me. Dropped.

  • Lazarus (拉撒路)
    One look and it’s over. Watching a MAD compilation is enough for the animation.
    Shinichiro Watanabe falls off the pedestal again (last time was Carole & Tuesday.

  • 300 年史莱姆
    The production is worse than season 1. Obviously half-hearted.

  • 完美圣女
    A bunch of stale characters stuffed with stereotypes. Boring.

  • 乡下剑圣
    An isekai with some budget. The plot is boring.

  • 星际国家的恶德领主
    Also pretty boring.

Others

Recent TV/movies. I try not to spoil.

No movies I wanted to watch in April. Skipped

Random Thoughts

Watching that six-year boomerang come back around was fascinating. In the newer video, the uploader openly admitted that the old “Why I don’t like Revue Starlight” video had come partly from jealousy, because Revue Starlight’s BGM ranking had placed above Mawaru Penguindrum.
Six years later, whether because of time or because of what he went through in between, he no longer hides how much he loves the series. Instead he talks about it with a level of sincerity and openness that is hard not to respect.
The video is long, almost forty minutes. I’ve replayed it several times. What impresses me every time is how honest it feels: he isn’t lying to himself, and he isn’t lying to the audience either.
And beyond the honesty, there is also a kind of courage there, in admitting your own pettiness and limitations in public instead of hiding behind a cleaner story.

I personally really like this kind of material where someone shares their own mental journey. Especially when it’s the same topic with a non-trivial time gap (six years), you can clearly see how a person changed.
That’s also why I write a blog: to record and “freeze” my current thoughts. When I look back years later, I can clearly feel what changed (and what didn’t).
In early 2023, when cleaning up my stuff, I found weekly journal assignments from high school Chinese class. Reading those words I’d completely forgotten felt like reading a stranger: “So that’s what I was thinking back then”, “So I already had that tendency at the time”.
Anyway, it’s really interesting.

Back to the video itself. The main topic is Revue Starlight, but along the way the uploader weaves in parts of his own life that seem unrelated at first glance. Two of those parts hit me especially hard.

  • Video 17:27
    Moving 3.5 times in a short period. He can’t make plans more than a week ahead, and he doesn’t dare to buy physical books.
    “I’m struggling because I don’t want to struggle.” “I don’t know what I want to keep, but I want to keep everything.”

    It reminded me of the line “a life drifting up and down like duckweed beaten by rain.” It’s nowhere near that tragic, of course, but there is still that same feeling of being rootless: living somewhere every day without really belonging to it.
    In China there are phrases like 北漂 and 北上广深; in Japan there’s 上京. Now that I live in a salaryman-standard pigeonhole apartment, I also rarely buy physical books. Moving is annoying, and before buying anything I instinctively calculate whether it will fit in the apartment, and whether I can still haul it with me next time I move.
    So I hesitate, and then buy. That’s probably why the room still looks fairly tidy.

    But I know I will definitely move.
    Someday I will pack everything up and go somewhere else.
    Where will the next place be? I don’t know.
    Will there be a place after the next place? I don’t know either.
    Everything is uncertain. Everything is unknown. So I just keep drifting in this current with no visible direction, sometimes willingly, sometimes not~~~

  • Video 25:50
    A player who stands outside the game and can rewind and rewrite the plot at will, and an ending that cannot be changed no matter how many times you rewind.
    Even though you know it’s just a story designed by the game, you still feel guilty toward the characters.

    Pouring in too much emotion all by yourself, and then hurting all by yourself too.
    Maybe it is precisely because something is fictional that it can become so pure…

Output

Nothing this month.

Travel

つつじ祭


Nezu Shrine’s Tsutsuji Festival. I went a bit late. Looks nice from afar (up close, they’re already wilting).


Torii corridor (why does it feel like every place has one of these…)


I also went to Kameido Tenjin Shrine to see wisteria, but the season was completely over.


A perfectly round tree.

Misc

Daiso Mold Remover Spray

The bathroom wasn’t ventilating well enough, so mold spots started showing up everywhere. Regular toilet paper couldn’t wipe them off at all, so I tried Daiso’s mold remover spray, and it worked shockingly well.
It’s literally called カビとり スプレー. It comes out as foam. Spray it on the moldy area, leave it for a few minutes, then rinse with water, and the bathroom suddenly looks almost brand new.

Don’t let it touch your skin, and the smell is pretty intense. Wear gloves and keep the room ventilated while using it.

Closing

Rushing out April’s Monthly Log on May 31.
This series keeps getting later, and it’s starting to feel more and more like task clearing than actual writing.
That’s not great. But I still don’t know how I want to change it, so for now the only answer is to keep going and figure it out on the way.

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