Why I Start Blogging

A person experiences three deaths.

• The First Death: When your heart stops and your breath fades away, you are declared biologically dead.
• The Second Death: When you are buried and people attend your funeral wearing black, you cease to exist socially; you vanish from the network of human relationships.
• The Third Death: Is when the last person on Earth who remembers you forgets you. Then, you are truly dead, and the entire universe will no longer be connected to you.

American neuroscientist David Eagleman mentioned this in his book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

I prefer to describe it this way: Apart from your DNA sequence and social relationships, it is your distinct experiences and memories that differentiate you from others. Therefore, by this definition, a person like Alan Turing only died twice. I also wish to achieve the third form of immortality. However, I don’t have the ability to crack Nazi codes; I probably only have the ability to castrate myself and commit suicide by poison. ¹

So, I am trying to achieve this goal by leaving behind some written records.

Practical Significance

Let’s put the grand narrative aside for now. Here are some more practical implications:

To release the urge to express If I don’t give my sharp opinions for a day, every cell in my body feels itchy.

To practice writing: Whether it’s my native language or English, I believe my writing will improve if I keep at it. At the very least, I can accumulate experience in writing prompts. At the very least, I can accumulate experience in writing prompts.

To stop being a “Mr. Almost Good Enough”: The entire blog is a product that requires long-term commitment. Each blog post is like a feature of that product, which can be polished and refined repeatedly. By building this product, I want to force myself to consistently do one thing well and maintain it over the long term.

To meet interesting people: Maybe someone will notice me.

How to Blog in the AI Era

Be subjective, not factual: Absolutely avoid writing content that AI can generate a thousand words of in a second. Instead, you should focus on sharing your own thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences.

Actively embrace the tools: Make full use of AI to research, translate, and polish your text to improve writing quality. In fact, with Gemini’s help, I quickly found the source of the opening quote for this article.

Why Not Serialize on Content Platforms

I choose not to write on content platforms primarily for the following reasons:

De-commercialization and Freedom: Internet platforms often have a strong tendency toward commercialization and monetization. If the initial motivation for writing isn’t to generate traffic or make money, then continuously publishing on these platforms feels like doing free work for those internet companies.

High Control and Portability: Platform rule changes or even shutdowns are unpredictable. If that happens, it can be very difficult to move your written work off the platform. In contrast, GitHub’s reputation is far superior to theirs. That’s why I write in Markdown and upload it to GitHub Pages. Even if they block all Chinese users someday, I still have a local backup.

Linus said that he just puts his stuff online, and if it’s valuable, many people will help him save it.² I can only rely on myself.

Plans

The current update frequency I have set is to produce at least one article per quarter, on average.

• I will definitely have an “Annual Anime Review” every year. After all, given the current state of the animation industry, one year is barely enough to squeeze out a single quality review.
• I will also record some major events that I believe are worth documenting, whether they are in the technology sector or the public sphere.
• And, anything I can publish that won’t cause me any trouble.