φoreword
Here lie chatter directed to why I decided to start this blog...
I just wanted to write something ngl... you can totally ignore this post lol
Your mind goes numb...
For the past half a year or so, I've been pushing myself to write a blog. Every once in a while, I get an ephemeral blast of motivation (or call it inspiration?) toward writing long-form content on an ad hoc-ish topic that I take an interest in.
However, I tend not to exposit something without side chatter and an abundancy of potentially unremarkable remarks. As a math student required to write proofs, I sincerely apologize to my graders with regard to any verbosity. In short: I suck at explaining, if that wasn't already obvious here.
While younger, I found it comforting to write about anything on a Google Doc. Perhaps nobody would read what I yapped about, but it felt nice to "create" something. Since secondary school, I've been adamant about long-form writing, and it seems the activation energy in easing me into a writing flow has unforgivingly raised itself over four years...
Perhaps it was through taking formal writing courses that I became too pedantic on even my own writing... Whether it be through emails or Discord conversations, I found it hard to speak casually, had I wanted to appear formal. It's been a bit, and I think I've totally forgotten both how to write casually and "proper."
I'm leaning toward mathematics and computer sciences for my studies, and most of my writing outside of classwork has been scarily short-form. It's a degrading feeling to know that writing in short-form keeps me locked into writing more short-form--it's simply too easy to shrug off writing long-form content as being unnecessary. Like, sure, I don't need to know how to write news articles to pass a class that has a completely multiple-choice final (real), but it worries me that I haven't practiced writing anything longer than a couple sentences before hitting ↵.
A goal I have for writing a blog is to get more accustomed with writing as if I were speaking through text.. if that makes any sense at all. Another goal is to motivate myself to be able to explore topics deeper in order to explain the answers I once sought for.
Impending doom approaches...
Term finals are coming up for me. If you got the reference, you should get me to play modded Terraria.. perhaps after my exams
To align with writing as if I were speaking, I want to write with the intent to misuse standard language rules. I think it's best that I do this to better convey my emphases. Also, it's my blog. I'm not sure if calling this an act of a "linguistic libertine" is the proper phrasing, but whatever, I guess
More importantly, I choose to write like this as an attempt to push my creative boundaries, and convey things that (the ever-improving) LLMs of today might not be able to :)
Spawn point set!
I'm sure that AI in text generation will improve to rid of the motifs commonly attributed to AI-generated text:
- 🔥 excessive 👎 use of emojis 🥹 ✅,
- sometimes often misused—em dashes,
- and more that I don't care about.
... Which is precisely why I find it an intriguing concept for me to "AI-proof" myself through writing multimodal blog modules like this one.
I'm honestly inspired by the works that make readable things look pretty (and readable, of course). In contrast to how much prose I vomit in a sentence, I'm a minimalist when it comes to design, so I don't think I'll ever be able to have as many bells and whistles as Josh W. Comeau's site, though I am inspired by the creativity of many of the site's components! As for creating my personal website, I am inspired a bunch by the constrained use of color in Keita Yamada's portfolio. Oh, and, you might see a bunch of references to games, math, computing, and whatever worm I am cogitating over tempore scribendi...
When playing around with typesetting math for assignments in high school, I, like many others, was inspired by the elegant typesetting marvel of late Gilles Castel's notes. I've sorta moved out of using for most of my (hobbyist) mathematical writing, though I used it for a good chunk of my high school years. Check out some Beamer slides I made as a TA for a calculus course, and a final project paper I wrote!
More recently, I've found to be a much more intuitive and flexible typesetting system for myself. Being able to whip out a quick Typst file locally and being able to see it render almost instantly using tools like Myriad-Dreamin's Tinymist extension is a game-changer for a lazy last-minute student procrastinator typesetter (me). I recently found that typst.ts exists.. And thus, I've configured Typst to be the sole math renderer for all things math-related on this site!