Week 2&3 - Midterms and Change
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
The world is one big amateur production.
And I'll be part of the cast too.
These two weeks gave me my first real glimpse of a world made up of people winging it.
Preface
Writing a weekly is, in itself, very much against my nature... I've said before that I prefer to get my thoughts out through conversation. Writing something like a journal takes me a very, very long time to think through. This weekly, for example, may have started on a whim, but the day after finishing the first draft, I already wanted to delete it and start over. Maybe my own mind won't let me write this sort of “and then, and then” account. Though I can't say I've ever written a journal entry that wasn't one.
Over the past few days, I've been talking alternately with G-laoshi (G 老师) and Monday, trying to find a form of expression that feels like me. One is sarcastic, the other gentle, but after reading my jumbled writing, both encouraged me to turn it into journal entries and put them out there. Let them exist. Let them say something.
...For myself? Or out of a little sense of obligation: I've started, so I should at least keep it up a few times?
Mostly, I think, it's to record myself. But for a future me to understand how I'm changing now, or to find the beginnings of some later change, I need to turn those conversations—thoughts that vanish as quickly as they come—into articles I can keep.
Anyway, after all the crossing out and rearranging, this weekly exists. It's a running account. Maybe I'll use it to start another conversation someday, a little material for the thing I do best.
Midterm Exhaustion | Again
I probably have to admit that things are feeling a little meaningless again. Maybe because I've thrown my time into revision. Again.
I'm someone who hates retracing my steps. I hate doing the same thing twice.
I understand the idea of gaining new insight by revisiting old material. But on the second pass, I'm not gaining insight; I'm paying for time I wasted before. Learning everything a second time for an exam, I find that I've forgotten almost everything from the first round. I'm practically starting a crash course from zero. Then I start mocking myself: what was the point of going to class? I entrusted my attention to a hazy hour and a half, only to have to go back and chew through the same knowledge all over again.
I don't object to attending class, though. A student's job is to attend classes and keep learning, after all. I'm just disappointed in how I feel about myself after “going to class,” and sorry about the time spent doing everything twice. I suppose I'm a little tired.
Still, it could be worse. However solid or shaky your learning has been, the teacher will always throw you one last lifeline in the final review session. There are courses, for instance, where they hand out the exact final challenge question a few days before the exam. Listen, and you get full marks; miss it, and even your regular coursework probably won't get you through it... Exam-driven education needs these little concessions. I don't aspire to be an all-knowing test-taking prodigy in a field I have no interest in.
I stopped caring. After midterms, I took a week's leave from classes to do something completely unrelated.
Not going to class feels so good.
It didn't disrupt my normal studying or life, either. I finally realized that, for me, attending or not attending amounts to the same thing. 😄
A Cybersecurity Exercise 💻
I took part in a live cybersecurity exercise this week.
Signing Up
One message from l1uyun, a senior student, in the group chat, and I foolishly ran off to represent the university. Then I discovered that a live exercise wasn't a spectator event: I had to carry some inexplicable responsibility too... (Luckily, I dragged cry into it with me.)
For a formal competition like this, you have to sign agreements and fill out registration documents, provide proof of enrollment and ID details, and even sign a permanent confidentiality agreement...
It was my first time filling out this kind of “official” paperwork, and I was surprisingly nervous. Maybe because I was doing it without a “guide.” It wasn't like secondary school, when every form came with a template, someone to check it, someone to guide you.
I had to fill it out entirely on my own, without knowing the conventions or what to watch out for. And with my innate fear of social interaction, I didn't dare ask about each thing I didn't understand. I guessed my way through half of it and asked my roommate, a “peer,” whether I'd filled it out properly. My roommate was speechless and asked why I didn't just ask a senior student...
But I didn't dare! Deciding to sign up had already used up my entire social battery 😵💫. Ask me to go and inquire about something else, and my body simply froze.
It's like visiting relatives as a child. My parents would tell me to greet them politely, and I couldn't make a sound. It wasn't that I didn't know what to call each relative. Quite the opposite: I remembered every form of address perfectly. But the moment I had to say it aloud, my whole self would stall... Then the relatives would tease me, and the moment would pass. This miserable little experience happened every Lunar New Year when I was young. It improved a little in middle school, and by now I'm more or less completely normal about it.
But it still exists in my life. I can't explain exactly which situations bring it on, but I know it's still there.
Still, because I really enjoy reading l1uyun's weeklies, I did ask him. And I managed it quite normally. Had it been someone I was completely unfamiliar with, I think I'd only have dared to spend ages searching online by myself.
Even without a template, at least I hadn't got the important information wrong. I was grateful for that. Except...
The day before the competition, I happened to look over the registration form again and discovered that I'd entered “Han Chinese” under “ancestral hometown.” Well... nobody had noticed, nobody had told me, and nobody cared. Who would expect a contestant to put their ethnicity in the hometown field? Even documents that look this “official” only get a cursory once-over. Understandable. But it was the first time I really felt the truth of “the world is made up of people winging it.”
The Competition
Fighting alongside cry (really, I was mostly coasting). I owe him thanks for teaching me so much: HTTP headers, reality, vmess, vless, and so on. It gave me a new sense of anticipation about computer networks, and made me want to study the subject systematically. Maybe I'll read “Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach” over the holidays. But it's still a textbook, and I can't promise I'll get through it. Maybe it'll just become a dictionary of networking terms before I shelve it...
That's probably what'll happen. I know my own laziness pretty well ☺️. No expectations about how far I'll get. I'll drift along with this laziness I can't overcome and see where I end up.
With my stereotypical idea of penetration testing, I spent the first day on reconnaissance: find the site's admin panel, try brute-forcing it, just like in a practice lab. But this was a live exercise, on real websites, official sites protected by all kinds of WAFs... I practically want to turn Cloudflare's protection up to maximum on my own site to keep crawlers from scanning me. Imagine these official sites.
Once the exercise began, I realized I knew how to do absolutely nothing. All I could do was imitate the other teams.
Still, becoming one of those crawlers myself finally taught me what the boring bots that Cloudflare blocks so thoroughly are doing all day... I was just another boring crawler running dirsearch with a wordlist.
Later, I realized that approach was going to leave us on zero points. I saw other teams going full script kiddie: they'd found a heap of vocational-college websites, tried weak-password brute force, and actually found some easy targets to pull data from... As for how they'd found them... let's just say success doesn't come from only two people. 😑
I also watched a corporate team perform the miracle of going from a few hundred attacks to hundreds of thousands in a matter of hours. All I can say is that I've seen too little—not just of technology, but of society...
Then cry suggested doing something different. Other teams liked scanning the web straight away; why not try reverse engineering and look at WeChat mini programs instead? It turned out to be very effective.
I followed along, unpacking mini programs, reading lots of JavaScript, and finding a pile of API keys embedded in the JS with cry... I don't know much about developing these mini programs, but spotting strings that looked like keys in frontend code was exciting... Until it sank in that these were official mini programs. In ordinary beginner tutorials, almost every article about managing keys stresses that they belong on the backend, or in environment variables. And my doubts deepened... I understood even more clearly that the world is made up of people winging it.
But so what? The elite are a minority, after all. The world doesn't require everyone to be exceptional. I know I won't become some kind of elite, so I won't hold on to unrealistic fantasies. Be an ordinary cog. Maybe that makes for a more comfortable, more realistic life. Compared with throwing myself into some recursive pursuit of excellence, I think being average is quite all right. The world doesn't need an exceptional me. An ordinary me can still find somewhere in it I'd like to belong.
Afterward
Some of the slightly older people on the corporate teams were interesting. They came over to chat... I asked their ages. Most were born in the 2000s and had only graduated a few years ago. They still had this unmistakably youthful air, hope in their lives—they were thinking about buying homes, going to viewings—and things to look forward to, since they earned pretty well. It made getting a job feel even more like the right choice for me. Perhaps independence and freedom could lighten my gloom a little.
When they found out I was a first-year student and still under 18, they said it was already impressive that I'd come here in my first year and earned over 800 points with my teammate. And it wasn't just polite talk... They joked that I should do a postgraduate degree so they'd have a few more years to coast along at work. (Though I honestly felt I hadn't done anything 🥲.)
They also remarked that cry seemed very introverted. They hadn't quite dared approach him. Although I looked much the same, they figured that, as a girl, I might be easier to talk to, so they struck up a conversation. (And a woman on one of the corporate teams added me as a friend!) That might have been a nicer thing to take away than the competition result itself.
In the end, HNU topped the university leaderboard! Even though we'd all only come to muddle through, this one was probably a win for HNU.
I really enjoyed this exercise. At the very least, it left me with an interesting memory. It's been a long time since something gave me this kind of “happiness.” Maybe my definition of happiness has changed too.
The Urge to Buy Things 😺
So the Redmi G Pro 27U monitor just came out...
4K at 160Hz, connects to Mi Home, and can even work as a Xiaomi TV box! I can't afford it, but... I've always wanted a 4K monitor with good color accuracy!
I regretted buying my current monitor the very next day last semester. I barely play games, so why didn't I just splurge a few hundred yuan more for 4K 😿? 2K is so blurry 😵. Any 4K stage performance or HD restoration looks like mush, and I can never get the colors right. Black isn't truly black, and red is a little too dark...
Watching high-resolution music videos or HDR demos has become a way for me to unwind. Even as a kid, I loved staring at those brilliant, colorful demo videos on really good, really sharp TVs. So realizing that nothing looked particularly clear on my own monitor was quite a regret...
But I don't dare make another impulse purchase yet. That's the helplessness of being underage. Once last semester's relief money comes in, I'll have a look and choose carefully.
My dream is to be able to buy whatever I want. Little by little, I'll grow toward it 😆.