Peter Cai's Blog

The hardest part of blogging is maintaining the habit of writing. I have clearly failed this in the past. Multiple times. Last time when I migrated this blog to Listed.to, I swore I would try to write more. It may have lasted a couple of months before everything ground to a halt again.

Obviously, this blog existed way before the last migration — it had been migrated and restarted a few times. Not every single incarnation inherited all the posts from before (which is something I have some slight regret for — maybe one day I will recover my lost articles!). Every single migration resulted in a temporary bout of activity, then prolonged nothing, until the next time I decided to migrate and/or restart my blog again.

My blog had been neglected for at least a year since the last post this time. To be honest, I had almost forgotten that I actually had a blog, save for this domain still existing as my mailbox. The same mailbox received an email the other day notifying the deprecation of Listed.to. It is kind of sad, because I somewhat liked the experience of publishing straight out of my Standard Notes notebook. Without Listed.to, I have one less reason to continue using Standard Notes, too.

In any case, that necessitated another migration. This time I've decided to use Writefreely, the same(-ish) software behind Write.as. I have set up my own multi-user Writefreely instance before — that eventually got terminated — but I remember loving the simplistic editor and UI from back then. A big upside of its UI, in my mind, is the use of large fonts in serif: I do not know how anybody can comfortably sustain long writing or reading sessions with sans-serif fonts. Especially not if you also read or write in CJK languages. I considered using a plain static site generator, but I could not find a standalone Markdown editor on Linux that has the same level of comfort as Writefreely's editor. I know, it is weird, its editor doesn't even have that many features, it doesn't even do Markdown highlighting, but it is unreasonably comforting to my eyes and brain. I might write something about this in the future. I might also try to add small improvements like Markdown highlighting to this editor if I find some time.

The world has changed a lot since my last post. Everything on the Internet are bots now. We have machines that are extremely capable of producing walls of text that make even the most adamant tech bros roll their eyes. Whatever your opinions are on the clankers, I think we can agree that the act of writing is still fundamentally human. To express genuine human thought, you must firstly write yourself as a human. To delegate writing entirely to a robot is also to delegate thinking to a robot, because unlike tasks like coding, writing is effectively a process of introspection, a necessary part of thinking. Robots are capable of expanding the amount of text, not the amount of real thought — the thoughts that communicate you to others. This is why I believe that not only does it make sense to restart blogging now, it is in fact more important than ever to contribute, if only by a tiny amount, real, human thought, back on the Internet, however hopeless does it feel in the sea of slop.

I have also changed a lot as a person since the last time I wrote any non-tech article on this blog. For good or for worse is up to the reader, you. What I will do is to get back to things I wanted to write, and try to finally form them into complete articles. I don't know how long I will be able to sustain blogging this time — I certainly hope it is indefinitely — but only time will tell. Heck, maybe these semi-forced blog migrations are the reason this blog gets to have any new content at all.