Today is Saturday, January 18, 2020. It is the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month. It is a normal and boring day during the winter vacation when Wonder Space was born.
Why write a blog?
Blogs are cool#
I remember the first time I came across a blog was when I was in elementary school and I was searching online for the translation of the Thousand Character Classic. I remember that in the search results, the results from Sina Blog often had higher content quality. The content was organized by enthusiastic netizens in their own blogs, which was my earliest impression of "high-quality content on the Internet". Later, my mother told me that a friend of hers had a son who was only a few years older than me and was writing novels online. This was really shocking to me at the time, as I was still struggling with reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Later, my mother helped me find the place where the little boy wrote his novels. I visited the address that my mother copied in her daily planner, which was also a Sina Blog. It neatly organized the little boy's novels, as well as many of his essays and travelogues. Later, Fang Zhouzi also posted articles on his blog (I don't know if it was called Xin Yusi at the time), creating various topics on the Chinese Internet. In short, at that time, I formed a feeling that "people who write blogs are cool" (here, "cool" is used as a neutral word). Later, when I entered boarding school, the time I could spend on the Internet was greatly reduced. Google left China, and during the rare times I had access to the Internet, most of the pages I found through Baidu were Baidu Zhidao (Baidu Knows) and Baidu Jingyan (Baidu Experience). I saw fewer and fewer blog pages. It wasn't until I was able to freely access the international Internet and continue using Google that the number of blog pages in the search results increased again. Following countless blogs, I solved numerous problems I encountered during my endeavors. Perhaps this is the power of the Internet, where predecessors plant trees and the next generation enjoys the shade. I am for everyone, and everyone is for me. It is precisely these bloggers who record the process of solving their own problems, allowing those who encounter the same problems to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and avoid many detours. I am fascinated by this pattern of building greatness through subtleties. Perhaps in my circle, writing a blog is really a niche thing, but since it is something I think is cool, why not do it?
Focusing on writing#
I have always wanted to have a place where I can write freely. My writing skills have always been poor, and writing compositions has always been a headache for me. But whether it's looking at the flashing cursor on the computer screen or touching the neat horizontal lines on paper, I have an impulse to write something. Perhaps this blog can become a place where I can enjoy writing without prompts or constraints. After entering university, I became particularly restless. Not to mention writing articles, I couldn't even persist in daily records that I used to do diligently in high school. Countless trivial matters disrupted my time schedule, and in the gaps between trivial matters, I became addicted to various fragmented news and entertainment readings. It was only when I had to write a thesis that I realized my basic language expression was problematic, let alone pursuing good writing. I once thought about applying for my own WeChat public account, but in my opinion, the WeChat subscription account platform is no longer suitable as a corner for serious writing. Its social attributes are too strong. On the other hand, blogs are relatively independent, but not completely isolated. It seems to be an ideal place for writing. I hope that writing a blog can help improve my focus and expression skills, and I also hope that my blog can become a corner of my life where I can find peace of mind.
Learning feedback loop#
In my senior year of high school, I saw a learning method called the Feynman Technique on Zhihu. In short, the best way to learn something is to teach it. I have deep experience with this. When a friend asks me about a knowledge that I think I have mastered and I need to explain it to them, I realize that there are still many gaps in my understanding of that knowledge. I am not clear about many details. On the other hand, the content that I have explained to my friends tends to leave a deep impression on me, and I have a relatively comprehensive grasp of it. Therefore, I started pretending to explain the content I was reviewing to an imaginary friend during the process of memorization. It was effective at first, but soon there were problems. People are always lazy, so the thought process of teaching content that is limited to my own brain unconsciously turns into reading it out. Later, I started forcing myself to transfer this process to paper, organizing my "lesson preparation" thoughts in a notebook, and listing the logical chains of knowledge content and some points that are easy to confuse or need to be emphasized. In my opinion, outputting knowledge is also part of learning. Therefore, I use writing blog posts as a way to output the knowledge I have newly acquired or the problems I have solved, which can be considered as completing the learning feedback loop.
I don't know if it's been too long since I last wrote a long article, but writing this less than two thousand word piece is difficult for me. The thoughts are confused and incoherent, and I always feel that the previous sentences are not beautiful enough, so I keep rewriting them. It seems that I really need to practice writing and expression!
(I hope there are no grammar errors in Wonder Space)