Passed the HSK 5!!!! Besides feeling good about this, I’m still preparing for the interview, listening to some podcasts about China, and back to Chess.

China Podcasts

I’ve been listening to a slew of podcasts about China from different perspectives. Most are from the Sinica/SupChina adjacent network but all are pretty good:

• Sinica Podcast: General podcast about China by some pretty veteran china china-watchers. They’ll have some very talented guests on like diplomats, scholars, businessmen, politicians, and activists. This is the premier podcast and has the most quality guests.
• Caixin-Sinica Business Brief: Weekly business podcast that begins with a summary of recent events in business related to China, and then goes into closer looks at some of the more important stories.
• China Tech Buzz: About China tech, past and present.
• China Africa Podcast: Anything China-Africa related. I’ve never known much about Africa, so this sort of podcast is a good way to understand the country better through a different country that I’m studying.

What I’m liking most about these is threefold: First that the guests know a lot about what they talk about and have experience in the field, second that they mention source material that I can look into later (and generate my own insights rather than taking their word for it), and finally that they will bring up stories or topics that I’ve never heard of or had a chance to hear about – discovery!

Chess

Played two 15+15 games. The first one was a pin between my queen and king only a few moves in. Resigned. The second was more interesting and I got a pin between the king and queen, winning the queen and resulting in a win.

Journaling

Some guy I’ve never heard of named Derek Sivers wrote an article on personal journaling. This differs from what I do in that’s taxonomy is a private directory of text files about each topic, while mine is a public directory of text files corresponding to days with topics within each file.

I’ve written about it before, but I think I can accomplish this functionality of organized topics by maintaining consistent headers and writing something to parse the markdown and scrape all the text beneath the headers so I could have something like:

<h1>Chess</h1>
<ul>
    <li><a href="/journal/20190101/#chess">2019-01-01</a>: Today I lost many games and...</li>
    <li><a href="/journal/20190103/#chess">2019-01-03</a>: Doing better today!</li>
</ul>

The problem I’ll have with this is if there’s overlap (like how this entry is about journaling and website) and also how to hook this all into hugo. It should be possible in a template with the some of the functions in the long list of hugo functions.

1. Iterate through all posts in the journal section as markdown (.Site.RegularPages where .Section eq "Journal" or something like this)
2. Use regular expressions to see if the page has any lines starting with ### and the given tag. (on .Page.RawContent). More regular expressions to take all the text until the end of page or next ### .
3. Do all the template work. Manage anchor links with anchorize. Manage Dates with the Page.Date and dateformat
4. Iterate through these.

This seems easy enough with some research into the documentation. I’ll give it a shot tonight.

On another note about journaling, there’s been some things I want to note down that are possibly illegal, possibly politically incorrect, or personal. So I think I’ll adopt the author’s method of a git repo with text files for each topic for more personal things.

Things I’m Liking

• Waterdeep - Dungeon of the Mad Mage: Reading through this campaign to satisfy my trpg craving. This one takes characters from level 5 to 20 an features a sprawling 23 levels. Each level could be a campaign of its own. This is the sort of adventure I might not run myself, but it is a good practice in understanding good adventures.
• Derek Silvers’ Blog: There’s always something to learn from someone’s recorded personal thoughts. I like this article on “being local.”
• Mamahuhu - We Rented A Fake Chinese Dad: Shanghai expat comedy troupe Mamahuhu hires a Shanghai dad for a member who is adopted. It’s really cute, well filmed, and his “dad” bleeds personality and good advice.

Misc

At the cafe again, and Selena Gomez’ It Ain’t Me has now played 3 times in the last hour.

Yesterday I was standing outside on the intersection of 宁海路 and 南阴阳营 at 2am after getting some food and realized it’s the quietest it’s ever been in Nanjing. The lack of ambient city noise reminded me of sitting on my porch in Milwaukee.