alex cao

alex cao

Welcome to my website. Here you’ll find my photos, links, and personal blog (scroll down!). I started this website because I wanted a place to document snippets of my life, interests, or simple thoughts. The idea originally came to me after viewing Adam Parkzer’s website, who has been adding posts to his blog since early 2009, when he was only 17. Along with the fact that I also wanted a place to practice my writing, I just thought it’d be a great opportunity.

I use Instagram for talking with friends, if you’d like to reach out to me casually, just DM me on there. I don’t have a secret “spam” account. Please don’t send money to people on Instagram claiming to be me (surprisingly, it’s happened before). For professional inquiries, contact [email protected].

  • of mice and men

    I recently finished Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and felt just about obligated to blog about it. I won’t go in depth on any major spoilers in this post, but if you do plan on reading this book in the future, I’d stop reading right about now.

    For a book that’s only about 100 or so pages, you get a surprising lot out of it. It’s about the unlikely duo of George Milton and Lennie Small. George is portrayed as being small and intelligent, while Lennie is large and strong, but intellectually disabled. The story follows the journey of these two through the times of the Great Depression, and follows many themes of companionship, loneliness, and false hope.

    Throughout the book, it becomes more and more evident how unlikely the duo of George and Lennie truly are, as many ranch men during that era survived alone, making loneliness extremely common. Lennie and George become practically inseparable, as Lennie is pretty much unable to survive without George due to his unspecified intellectual disability. Despite being incredibly strong, Lennie often doesn’t realize his strength due to his disability, resulting in many minor and major mishaps throughout the novella.

    Something that the book often deals with is the concept that some people just cannot be destined to live their dream life, simply due to the circumstances they were born with. Many characters in the story have their own “American Dream,” one that they’ll never be able to achieve, despite all the struggle and work they might put in. The inherent limitations that are implanted into one’s existence can prevent them from living the utopia that they wish to live. I was incredibly intrigued when I first read about this interpretation of the novel, as human nature can often be a very interesting topic, especially when it ties into such an tragic story like this one.

    Without revealing anything, I want to say that this book contains an incredibly emotional, and deeply upsetting ending. It’s not something I’m not used to, but it was certainly unexpected. Midway through the book I was asking myself “where could this possibly be going?” But now after reading, I realize that these segments were very purposeful in creating the themes that the book portrays, as we learn a lot about the backstories of certain characters, and how their life was impacted by the depression happening at that time.

    For a book to get into reading, I don’t regret choosing Of Mice and Men at all. It had the perfect blend of storytelling and themes for me, and I hope I enjoy my next book just as much as this one. I’m hoping to get my hands on Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro soon…

  • ipad for notes

    Last summer when I went to see my family in China, my uncle insisted that he would get me a gift. He originally wanted to get me a drone, but I’m not really interested in those things, nor is it super legal to fly those in Ontario. So he got me an iPad Air instead. Originally I didn’t really know what I’d use it for, but it’d obviously be pretty rude to decline a gift.

    So that iPad went pretty much unused for 6 months. During that period I really had no idea how useful an iPad could be for school, since I didn’t exactly have a pencil for it yet. Once I finally got a “like-new” Apple pencil from Amazon, I finally discovered how much better an iPad was compared to carrying actual lined paper in your binder. You get all the upsides of handwriting—better memory retention and being able to write different notation—with the upsides of having a digital device, like clean erasing and copy paste, along with a lot more. When you can immediately condense hundreds of note papers into one singular device, it seems almost bizarre I didn’t invest in iPad note-taking earlier.

    Take my organic chemistry notes from earlier this summer for example:

    Something about digital notes just has that feel that paper doesn’t. You can highlight in whatever colour you want, without needing 50 highlighters. You can choose to have lined or grid paper, without taking a trip to Staples. Now obviously not everyone can afford to have an iPad or tablet, but I just wanted to show how much of an upgrade it can be, and why I recommend getting one if you’re ever on the fence about it.

    I’ve pretty been much using my iPad nonstop for my self-studying this summer, and it’s really been amazing. One of the things that keep me studying is just the feeling of writing on an iPad, it’s much smoother than any sensation you could get on paper, and a hell of a lot more satisfying.

    That being said, I still have a lot of calculus to get through, so best of luck to me I guess.

  • top of my school

    I wanted to blog about this gem of a video I found today.

    I’ve probably watched a handful of short films and musicals in my life, and I’ve never had any strong opinions about any of them, but I think this one might be up there with one of the best videos I’ve found on the internet. Before reading this post, I highly recommend you to watch the film first. I don’t think you’ll come by a video like this very often, and this post will definitely contain spoilers.

    I want you to understand that I grew up in a pretty stereotypical Asian household. My parents have always been rather strict about grades when I was growing up, especially my mom. I remember her signing me up for Kumon back in elementary school, which is pretty much the signature nightmare for any Asian kid. I did tutoring at a couple other places throughout middle school, and I was almost always yelled at for any mark lower than an 80%. That’s just how it was in the house, and I’m obviously not the only person this has happened to. Inevitably, my mom has gotten a lot less strict ever since I started caring more about my grades in high school, but it sure was a traumatizing childhood at times.

    I mention this because Top of My School is about a girl, Bree, who strives for perfection in school due to the pressure from her parents, and does whatever it takes to be on top. It might not be a new concept, but the way it’s presented is genuinely incredible, and I’m not even getting into the themes and the plot twist. The film is filled with incredible songwriting and cinematography, specifically the first section, which I want to talk about.

    The song that plays first in the film is “Top of My School,” which was released way back in 2021, five years before the release of this film. It’s definitely my favourite song of the bunch, and also the most popular song written by Katherine Lynn-Rose, the producer of the film. The first couple lyrics really do resonate with me, and they are that follows:

    Some people live the life that was given
    Some people just get by
    Some people never learned how to be driven
    Some people don’t even try

    But some people know what their heart desires
    Some people lead with a passionate fire
    And some people know that they’re destined
    To fly

    As you can probably see, these lyrics describe someone who is heavily driven by success and their accomplishments, someone who considers themselves “destined” to achieve something truly great, even at the price of burnout and overworking themselves. In the context of Bree, this is all done to please her parents, who continuously pressure her to focus on her studies. In the film, Bree’s father tells her the Chinese myth of the Dragon Gate, which is a legend that states while many carp swim upstream against the river’s current, very little are brave enough or capable of making it through the final leap of the waterfall. Those who do, are transformed into dragons. This was used as an analogy for Bree’s effort to do well in school, and I believe the lyric “to fly” was a subtle nod to this.

    The pressure that Bree’s parents put on her is what made her try to do anything to succeed in school, which is what made her be so determined to win the position of council president. But when another girl, Avery, joins the race, Bree knew that she had to do something about it. She began to get to know Avery through an English project, and eventually found out that Avery had harboured an affection for her.

    This is when Bree thought of the idea to manipulate Avery, and kill her by taking advantage of her peanut allergy. Sure, it’s an incredibly dark ending, but it shows the true lengths Bree would take just to please her parents and show them that she wouldn’t remain just an ordinary carp. The film has many parallels with another one of my favourite films, Whiplash, which shows the absolute destruction that perfectionism can have on an individual. After all, when you live your entire life up to someone else’s expectations, is it really your life?

    In some ways, I admire the character traits of Bree. When it comes to academics, I’ve always tried my hardest to become this hardworking individual, someone who truly dedicates their time to achieving something that they believe, is great. But when this dedication consumes your entire everyday life and overworks you, when does it become a problem? At what point does this obsession with success truly take over you? I’m obviously not at that level of insanity, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

    I’ve yet to watch other productions made by Katherine Lynn-Rose, and I do intend on watching her other musical short film, Class Crush, sometime soon. I never thought I would discover someone so ridiculously talented on a random Sunday afternoon, but here we are. It’s always a nice thing when you relate to others who grew up in an immigrant household, as you tend to discover that your experiences have been felt by many others before.

  • emotional stories

    It’s 9:43 PM, just finished my tutoring homework for the day and I remembered that I still have a website. Might as well post something.

    When I was first searching for a book to read, I was considering things that I enjoy in other media. To be frank, I’m not much of a movie or TV show person, but I’m always a big fan of any video game with an incredible story. Something I feel that always makes a story better is a deep, emotional ending. I wanna talk about that.

    I remember when I finished the story of NieR:Automata for the first time. The game itself deals with themes of existentialism, and contains one of the best written tales in gaming in my opinion. Without spoiling anything, it’s an incredibly sad and tragic game with a rather cathartic ending. It takes you on an emotional roller coaster, and ends by making you feel an immense emotional void—exactly what the game is about.

    It’s been over 2 years since I last played NieR:Automata, yet I still remember how I felt after finishing it. This, to me, is a story done right. It’s why I enjoy sad storytelling so much; the plot takes you on a journey that’s hard to forget.

    Over the years I’ve played many tragic or depressing video games, and something they all have in common is the emotional “high” that they deliver at the end of them. This is similar to why people enjoy horror—sometimes it’s just fun to have a physical high if it doesn’t impose any real danger. I feel the same way about heavily emotional stories. Sometimes it can just be enjoyable to elicit a strong or painful reaction when you know you’re in a safe environment.

    One time, when I recommended a particularly tragic video game to my friend, they asked me, “Why would I want to feel sad?” I realize now that this simple question is a lot more complicated than I thought. Many people play video games or watch TV to enjoy themselves, not feel an emotional bullet. This made me grasp the fact that I don’t consume media in order to feel good; I consume media to feel, and I think I’ll leave it at that.

    Had no idea what to write after that so I’ll just end it here. Here’s a great song from NieR that I wanted to share.

  • quick casual post

    i wish i could blog and write more but i dont have TIME. i’ve been doing physics and math the entire summer and this is surprisingly the first time i’ve actually felt drained

    anyway this is a casual post i just wanted to log how i’m feeling, we’ll be back with the epic blog posts in like a day or two. and maybe the library will get me my book soon.

    here’s a song ive been listening to

  • reading

    Books are boring.

    That’s the mindset I’ve had for about the past 6 years of my life. I still remember the last time I read a book that wasn’t for English class. It was a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Big Shot to be exact. That book series (and maybe Dog Man) was realistically the only time in my life I’ve ever enjoyed reading. Not because the stories had much depth, but because they were funny and relatable.

    Now that I’ve grown past my preteen years, I’ve inevitably gotten a lot more conscious of my health and well being. Unfortunately, reading just so happens to be incredibly good for you, so I thought I might as well start now and pick up a book. The problem is, where should I even start?

    That was a trickier issue than I expected. I asked my only reading friend, Jack, for a book recommendation. He tells me that all the books he’s read are boring and probably wouldn’t interest me, but still gives me a couple titles. Us Conductors was one of them, which really didn’t seem interesting to me when I looked it up. The other titles didn’t seem very intriguing either, so maybe he was right about me not liking them.

    This led me to my second option of just finding books people recommend on Reddit. This is where I’d always go for a human answer when I didn’t want to read the AI overview at the top of the search results. Unsurprisingly, I was suddenly drowning in book recommendations on the appropriately named r/booksuggestions subreddit. I really didn’t want to look up every suggestion to see if it’d interest me or not, so I more or less grabbed the first title I saw and went with it.

    That’s how I chose Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck as the first book I’ll be reading. It’s not a long novel by any means—just about 110 pages—but I’m really not trying to overwhelm myself here. I’ll turn to reading longer titles once I finish this one. It’s also meant to be an extremely emotional book, which I do enjoy in media, but I guess there’s no way to know until I get my hands on it.

  • alex-cao.com is now live!

    After a few chats with Gemini, I finally have the website up and working. I originally bought the domain on July 27 from Cloudflare for a price of about $10 USD. Not bad. Especially for a .com domain.

    If it wasn’t already obvious, I know absolutely nothing about hosting or creating a website. In hindsight, it would’ve been a better idea to ask any of my more tech-savvy friends, but I digress. When I was first looking for a domain to buy, I looked through loads of websites—GoDaddy, NameCheap, Porkbun—all the big ones. I eventually landed on Cloudflare because it had about the cheapest yearly renewal rate.

    I had all sorts of ideas when it came to the actual domain too. I first had a brilliant thought: alexc.ao. Unfortunately Angola was gatekeeping that one. Eritrea wasn’t letting “caoalexand.er” slide, either. This left me with no choice but to choose a more boring domain ending. “alexcao.net”, “alexcao.ca”, and “alexcao.blog” were all solid options. However, when I first saw that alex-cao.com was miraculously available, I knew the choice was obvious. Sure, the hyphen was kind of annoying, but it still has a great ring to it.

    After another hour of trying to figure out what an SSL certificate is, the website is finally up. Sure, I still have some fixing to do, but this’ll be good enough for now.

  • video games recently

    I tried picking up Persona 4 Golden at the beginning of this summer. I played it for a couple hours, getting through the beginning of the story. I absolutely loved it. I’ve always loved the Persona franchise, as I previously played and finished Persona 5 Royal a few years back in grade 9.

    But there’s a problem here. I used the word “tried.” I tried picking the game up. It’s been sitting in my Steam library with 5.1 hours for about the past 3 weeks now. What happened? I ask myself that question too. This is just something that happens to me whenever I try to pick up a story-driven game longer than 10 hours.

    Surprisingly, this hasn’t just happened to one or two games. Yakuza 0, Horizon Zero Dawn, Cyberpunk 2077, Disco Elysium. These are all games that I tried to commit to playing, but I guess I just didn’t feel immersed enough in them.

    One might think “What if you just didn’t enjoy them?” Well… maybe. I played Yakuza 0 as my first beat-em-up game. Wasn’t really used to any of the controls yet, nor was I super interested in the gameplay. But I was pretty excited to play the other three games, and even enjoyed the first few hours of gameplay.

    Yet, over time I began to stop playing these games and eventually abandoned them. Surely this wasn’t an issue with time. I had as much time as I could’ve ever wanted, as I hadn’t even entered grade 11 yet.

    Nowadays I realize that I certainly wasn’t the same person I was back in grade 9. I mentioned earlier that I previously finished Persona 5 Royal, which happens to be an 100 hour game, the longest mainstream title out there. Back then I also had enough commitment to play Red Dead Redemption 2, which is also quite a long title to beat, taking roughly 50 hours. It still remains my favourite video game.

    I recognize now that the main problem I have is commitment. I find it so ridiculously difficult to commit myself to something fun or entertaining now. When I was big into video games in grade 9, I’d often be itching to play a specific game, just because I was into it so much. I could spend weeks or even months on just one game. I find it hard to even fathom that happening anymore.

    I like to think that it’s all simply a consequence of my goals as a person. When I was 13-15, all I really wanted to do was have fun. I’ve gradually become more self-conscious over the years, subconsciously creating new goals, which are really just to take care of myself and to get a good career. This comes at a price—it becomes harder to go back to that life of fun you had before. This relatively satisfying answer reveals an unfortunate truth: Maybe I’ve just grown up.

  • sph4u: field theory

    This summer I’ve been doing tutoring for physics (SPH4U) and it’s been great. Until we got to the third unit, appropriately named Gravitational, Electric, and Magnetic Fields. This is the first unit that has served as an actual roadblock.

    The previous units, Dynamics and Energy & Momentum, honestly weren’t a problem at all. These units focus on the physics you can see in everyday life. Like how a moving car has momentum (p = mv) or how you get thrown the opposite direction when that car turns (centrifugal force). However, once you get to the fields unit, you start to realize that you’re about to leave the realm of everyday life. You can’t visualize an electric field the same way you can visualize a block sliding on an incline due to the force of mgsinθ.

    Part of the reason why I believe physics is so much harder to study for compared to math is because there are two components to it: the math, and the physical concepts. There is no science behind learning how radians work, or graphing the vertical asymptotes of a rational function. You simply learn how the math works, and you apply that knowledge to specific problems that your teacher may give you.

    For physics, you need to understand the physical concepts before you’re ever able to apply the mathematics. For example, before you’re ever able to touch a problem regarding a two block pulley system, you need to understand Newton’s third law of action-reaction forces. I feel that this is especially true for the fields unit, as not only do you need to know a lot of new concepts, they are completely unfamiliar to your everyday intuition.

    This doesn’t mean I don’t find the unit interesting, it’s cool to learn about the physics you can’t see. It’s just much harder. And I’m sure I’ll have this experience over and over again when the physics gets more complicated in university.

  • podcasts

    I’ve always felt podcasts have become this type of niche piece of media slowly dying out. Yet, Google tells me that they’re actually reaching an all time high in popularity. This is surprising to me because I’ve never met anyone else who would ever admit to listening to podcasts.

    Either way, I wanted a place to talk about my favourite podcasts, and it might as well be on my website. These are my top three, saving the best for last.

    Reply All

    Reply All was one of the first podcasts that I ever listened to, and it’s still one of my favourites for short episodes I can listen to on the go. The podcast itself tells stories about the internet, internet culture, and how people have shaped the internet over time.

    One of my favourite episodes (that I can think of off the top of my head) is one of the very first ones, named We Know What You Did. The episode begins with the host introducing the hypothetical scenario: What would you do if someone knocked your door and told you, “I think we both know I’m here. We know what you did. Let’s go.”

    I love this hypothetical scenario. Anyone who answers that door would confess to something, and I think everyone has that one thing they’ve gotten away with in life. The episode goes on to tell the story of Ethan Zuckerman, and the consequences he’s faced due to his creation of the pop-up ad in the late 90s.

    I won’t go into the specifics of the episode, but it’s a prime example of how the internet has evolved over time. This is exactly what the podcast aims to convey every episode, and it’s why I enjoy it so much.

    Heavyweight

    This is another one that I love, and it’s definitely up there with Reply All. It’s created and hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, who helps people resolve past conflicts and regrets. This is exactly where the title of the podcast comes from—the heavy emotional burdens that some individuals hold their entire lives.

    I honestly don’t know why I enjoy this podcast so much, but the blend of good storytelling, narration, and humour from Jonathan Goldstein make every episode worth listening to.

    It’s also worth saying that everyone has a regret in their life, something from the past that you just wish you could change. For some people, these regrets can snowball into bigger burdens that shape them into who they are. Jonathan Goldstein’s handling of these peoples’ past conflicts is what really draws you in. He acts like both a detective and therapist, and always manages to bring closure to these problems from the past.

    Casefile True Crime

    This my favourite podcast of all time, and the funny part is that I never even knew I was a fan of true crime before I discovered it. Casefile manages to portray each case like a story, which is really what pulls you in.

    My favourite episode from this podcast is the episode detailing the case of Jennifer Pan. This story is incredibly heartbreaking, and what made it even more tragic was the fact it happened in GTA, where I’ve lived my entire life. The episode begins with a frantic 911 call, where you can hear a young girl panicking and screaming for help when three armed intruders break into her house. After demanding money, the three men took the girl’s parents to the basement, and shot them several times.

    Throughout the episode you learn about the life of 25-year old Jennifer Pan, who had lived her past lying and deceiving her oppressive parents about her grades. She was the one who initially called 911, and throughout the episode you learn the horrible truth of the case: Jennifer had paid people to kill her own parents.

    This of course, is a merely a short summary of the case. The case in itself is an extremely interesting one, and goes much deeper than my explanation. You can research online for more information, but it really does show the toll that bad parenting can have on people.

    Many episodes from this podcast make me very interested in the psychology of the perpetrator. Human nature is an interesting subject, and true crime often takes a deep dive into it. When you listen to the stories and doings of disgusting, awful people, you’ve ought to wonder, “what could possibly drive someone to do this?”