Miscellaneous

🎼 Music

I have a passion for music as much as AI. I play the acoustic guitar, electric guitar and drum kit. I used to play in a rock band in my high school. Oddly enough, I was the drummer even though I didn’t know how to drum when we started. Nevertheless, it was an incredible period of my life. I enjoyed every minute of playing on the stage. Nowadays, I play more fingerstyles because it isn’t as fun strumming chords to myself as playing them with the folks. I have been gaining interest in neo-soul guitar for the past couple of months. I might give it a try this year. I own a Yamaha FS-TA TransAcoustic guitar. The all-in-one reverb and chorus are brilliant!

My go-to music genre is still Rock and Roll, but I have also been exploring other types of music. Recently, I’ve been pretty into J-pop, Britpop and Mandarin rock. Below is a partial listing of bands/individuals I love to listen to by genre.

• J-pop: King Gnu, X Japan (RIP Heath), One Ok Rock, Yorushika, Yoasobi, Radwimps, MAISONdes, Kenshi Yonezu, Vaundy, Minami 373, …
• Britpop: The Beatles, Oasis, Blur, Suede, Radiohead, The Verve, …
• Mandarin rock: Cui Jian, Dou Wei, He Yong, Zhang Chu, Tang Dynasty, GALA, Omnipotent Youth Society, No Party For Cao Dong, …
• Progressive Rock: Pink Floyd, Polyphia, …
• Electric: Yellow Magic Orchestra, …
• Fingerstyle: Masaaki Kishibe, Kotaro Oshio, Kim Youngso, Sungha Jung…

🍳 Cooking

Cooking gives me peace and satisfaction. Not only do I cook dishes from my cultural background, but I also love to learn and experiment with cuisine from other parts of the world. Below are some of the dishes I cook that are decent presentation-wise (and tasty, of course).

Air-fried Tonkatsu

Chinese Dumpling (Jiaozi) Stuffed with Minced Garlic Chives and Scrambled Eggs

Braised Beef and Potato with Tomato Base

Japanese Chicken Curry

🏀 Sports

I play a couple of recreational sports, such as basketball and badminton. I used to play intramural basketball in my undergraduate and master’s. We had a lot of fun. I wish to learn table tennis in 2024.

👻 Other Random Stuff

• The best movie I watched in 2023 was An Elephant Sitting Still (大象席地而坐).
• I am learning JAX and implementing some (deep) reinforcement learning algorithms with it. I am sporadically updating a repo of my code.
• My favourite game(s) is the Persona series. I play them on my Nintendo Switch.
• I am semi-seriously learning French and Japanese. Feel free to reach me if you need a language partner. I am a native (Mandarin) Chinese speaker and speak English reasonably well.
• My MBTI is INFJ-T.